The Atlantic summarizes an interesting paper by University of Michigan doctoral student Melinda Miller. Based on The Atlantic's summary (not the article which I have not read in its entirety), I have a couple of questions.

First, the summary states:

In a new paper, a University of Michigan economist examines the fortunes of slaves freed after the Civil War by the Cherokee Nation. As Cherokee citizens, these freedmen were granted the right to “claim and improve any unused land in the Nation’s public domain.” Analyzing farm data from 1880, 15 years after emancipation, the paper finds that a black freedman in a Cherokee community was five times as likely to be a landowner as the typical African American in the former Confederacy. The average black Cherokee man owned livestock worth 80 to 90 percent as much as the livestock of a nonblack Cherokee citizen, whereas the typical Southern black’s livestock was worth only 45 to 60 percent as much as the livestock of the average white man.

While these figures do suggest that freedmen did better in Cherokee communities, couldn't the differences be attributable to different denominators rather than different numerators? For example, the 80-90% vs 45-60% bit about livestock holdings in the last sentence could result from differences in livestock holdings of Cherokee citizens compared to white men rather than differences in how freedmen fared in the two environments.

Second, the summary states:

And the data suggest that Cherokee blacks were more likely to make savvy long-term investments: in 1880, 60 percent of Cherokee freedmen farmers had planted peach and apple trees (which take three to seven years to bear fruit), compared with only 5 percent of black landowners in the South. This evidence, the author concludes, vindicates General O. O. Howard, the superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, who claimed that “more might have been done to develop the industry and energy of the colored race if I had been able to furnish each family with a small tract of land to till for themselves.”

There's at least one other interpretation. It might be the institutional environment (security of property rights, equal treatment before the law) rather than land endowment per se that caused freedmen in Cherokee communities to be more likely to plant fruit trees than other blacks. Giving freed slaves free land might not have led to great fruit tree planting if they thought the Jim Crow hostility was such that they would be unlikely to enjoy (ahem) the fruits of their investment.

Two related works come to mind: Co-blogger Art's work on lynching and the rule of law and this paper on land titling in an Argentine squatter community.