Sharecropping

History

Immediately after the Civil War, slavery ended in the former Confederate states in the south. However, as plantations continued to be the main agricultural unit in the south, landowners persisted in treating freed formerly enslaved people in much the same manner as they had treated these people during slavery. Gang labor and harsh working and living conditions were maintained. The key differences were that white overseers of freed formerly enslaved people were prohibited from using corporal punishment on the workers, workers and planters negotiated labor contracts, and the workers were paid, albeit poorly.

By 1868, sharecropping emerged as a rival of the plantation system throughout the south, and within two years, sharecropping had become the norm. Typically, sharecropping is thought to be unique for the payment arrangements involved, in which sharecroppers work on a farm and are paid with a share of the crops at harvest time. However, this payment method predated sharecropping and was used by plantation owners with poor white laborers hired seasonally to supplement the labor of enslaved people in the antebellum era and also with black gang labor in the immediate post–Civil War years; some historians refer to this form of payment as the share-wage system. (Plantation owners used this payment arrangement to compensate for the lack of capital, credit, and currency available in the aftermath of the war.) Sharecroppers typically were paid one-third of the year's crop if the landowner had provided the essentials (seed, animals, tools) and one-half if the sharecropper had used his own.

Rather than unique payment arrangements, then, the significance of sharecropping was the consequent demise of the plantation system. Sharecropping entailed breaking a large plantation up into small farms, to be worked by individual families rather than gang labor. The rise of [Page 1928]sharecropping resulted in the decentralization of agricultural production in the south.

Labor Shortages and the Need for Technological Innovations

Historians disagree on why sharecropping replaced the plantation system. One explanation rests on the idea that certain conditions existed in the south that predisposed the south to turn to sharecropping; according to this theory, a labor shortage, an elite that owned large parcels of land, and a lack of technological innovation rendered the south ripe for sharecropping to take hold, with its concomitant repression of workers so as to ensure an adequate workforce. A similar explanation incorporates the lack of demand for black labor in the north as an essential precondition to the rise of sharecropping, leaving the south's elite free to devise whatever system of labor they wished with minimal protest from outside the region. Still another theory emphasizes the necessity of the state's support of the elite landowning class, leading to tacit acceptance of repressive measures to keep workers on the land, to limit workers’ access to owning land, and to hamper workers’ mobility to seek opportunities elsewhere.

A sharecropping family clearing weeds from a cotton field in White Plains, Georgia, in 1941. Although the sharecropping system was primarily a post–Civil War development, it had previously existed in Mississippi and Tennessee. Sharecroppers working on portioned-out farms became the norm in the south from the 1870s to the 1950s.

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