From Slavery to Sharecropping

Emancipation changed the South. During the several years following the end of the war, landholders discovered that they could no longer maintain a system of forced gang labor, closely supervised by overseers and drivers. Decentralized agriculture emerged by 1867 and 1868, as smaller squads replaced gang labor. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, squads typically evolved into family units. The communal slave quarter was replaced by dispersed homes, and black families became the economic foundation of the postwar order. Slaves had become sharecroppers.

How was this transition effected? One of the most widely accepted contributions of econometric historians Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch is their calculation that the aggregate amount of labor performed in the immediate postwar South fell significantly below prewar levels. They note that “emancipation gave the ex-slave the freedom to lighten his burden and, for the first time, reserve a portion of his time for himself.” ¹ His wife and children reduced their amount of agricultural labor even more sharply. What resulted was a labor shortage in which landowners found themselves obliged to make concessions in order to attract or retain their labor forces.

The freedpeople aspired to acquire their own land. Unable to do so, they contracted with those landowners who allowed them to escape from gang labor and achieve greater autonomy. Soon the new system became the norm. Laborers worked for a half share of the crop that they cultivated and harvested; landlords, who provided laborers with housing, stock, implements, and seed, received the other half. ²

Unfortunately, these new arrangements did not function fairly or harmoniously. Black sharecroppers suffered a devastating one-two punch in the 1870s, as cotton prices skidded and Redeemer governments dismantled legal protections that blacks had gained from the Reconstruction regimes. The only collateral that a poor cropper could use to obtain credit was the crop that he intended to plant. He thereby obliged himself to plant whatever his creditor wanted him to plant, and the one crop in the cotton South that could most readily be converted into cash was cotton. Crossroads stores emerged across the rural South to provide croppers with food, clothing, and other merchandise. In exchange, merchants and landlords (who were often the same person) received first legal claim to the growing cotton crop. A vicious cycle resulted. Thanks to the crop-lien system, the South increasingly produced too little food and too much cotton. Falling cotton prices and long-term labor indebtedness resulted. As Eric Foner has noted, “the credit system that grew up alongside sharecropping quickly undermined its promise of autonomy.” ³ Concurrently, short-term postwar labor shortages gave way to labor surpluses. Landlords squeezed tenants onto ever-smaller plots.

Sociologist Edward Royce has contributed a thoughtful assessment of the struggle between landowners and laborers in the immediate postwar years. The Origins of Southern Sharecropping argues that planters considered gang labor the best way to maintain discipline over ex-slaves. The latter, however, had very different preconceptions: the freedpeople hoped to achieve peasant proprietorship on land of their own, no longer subject to the arbitrary authority of white landowners. These aspirations were doomed to disappointment. Planters would neither sell nor rent land to ex-slaves, hoping instead to subject them to slavelike supervision. Following Ransom and Sutch, Royce contends that freed blacks decisively influenced the situation by refusing to work as long or as hard as they had as slaves. Planters tried unsuccessfully to cope with diminished amounts of black labor by seeking European or Chinese replacements. A few planters even departed for Mexico and Brazil rather than continue dealing with freed blacks. Most former masters and most former slaves remained in the South, forced by circumstances to hammer out mutually unsatisfactory compromise arrangements.

The planters preferred gang labor, but if that could not be maintained, they...