During the late antebellum years the U.S. Mint at New Orleans produced millions of silver coins. Many transactions were paid by bank notes or personal notes, but Southerners usually paid in coin for household items and consumables such as bread. One reason farmers in the Midwest wanted the Mississippi open for trade concerned access to the Southern market. Until the war came, our ancestors raised relatively little wheat or oats, preferring to purchase midwestern grain and focus their efforts on cotton. They sold cotton for income and paid in coin for grain.
The description "farm laborer" on the census applies to two kinds of males. First, those who worked for their parents and second, those hired to work for someone else. We automatically think of payment on the barter system or share-cropping, but few people lived that way during antebellum times.
We tend to think of our Southern ancestors as being poor up until our own lifetimes. Truth is, typical residents in the Southern states lived well in 1860. Fifty percent or more of all households report land ownership. In Alabama two of every five households owned at least one slave, a typical slave-holding family claiming six.
Schedule VI of the 1860 census includes the county sheriff's best estimate for daily rates paid to unskilled labor, with and without board. In my home county (Jefferson AL), figures are $1.00 and 1.25, respectively. Studies made in Southern states show the average for day labor to be a bit less than that.
When speaking about life in 1860, I ask students how much they would expect to be paid for a day's work on a farm. Whoever guesses closest to a dollar I will walk over and hand them two silver half dollars minted in New Orleans during the 1850s. Then I ask if they intend to stay overnight and if they needed lunch. If the answer is no, they get an antebellum quarter. It makes an impression - there's just something about holding an actual historical artifact in your hand.
Once they have a dollar a day in mind for labor, we can discuss the cost of land, the price of cotton and how much money it would take to buy one slave, even a small child. Students quickly understand that tremendous amounts of cash were involved in just one slave family of five to seven people. We always make the point that families almost always inherited slaves rather than purchasing them. Few people had access to that kind of money.
After the war rates for day labor fell to five to ten cents a day. Families sent small children to cotton factories twelve and fourteen hours a day for a nickel. Hopefully this illustrates some of the impact the war had on our ancestors.