The Sharecropping System
The sharecropping system in the Southern United States grew out labor agreements following emancipation. Sharecropping developed o meet the needs of laborers and planters,. Sharecropping was a simple idea. Landlords and laborers would work together and share the profits at the end of the harvest. Ex-slaves and poor whites without tools, seed, money, or work animals would work the land for a percentage of the profit. The planter would "furnish" the land and supplies. The sharecropper would repay the planter a percentage of the money made by the crop.
Slavery, however, did not end with the Civil War. Bondage just took another form. This was not the intent of the Freedman's Bureau as they tried to guide the sharecropping system during its early development.(1) This was a system, they believed, that would meet the labor needs of the planter and would make the freedman self-supporting. In theory, it was a good idea. Southern ideology, however, enforced the social and economic realities that worked against the ex-slaves and poor whites. Southern tenancy became a vicious, self-perpetuating system in which the workers became little more than serfs who were held to the land by debt, ignorance, poverty, and dependence on the landlord.(2)
Over the years efforts were made to change the system, but it was highly institutionalized and resistant to these attempts. Not until the New Deal of the 1930's, when the federal government intervened, was a serious effort made. These efforts to make changes were met with violence.
Tractors and mechanical cotton pickers did more to end the system than the efforts of the reformers or the federal government. Mechanization of the farm meant that fewer people could do the work of many. This finally killed peonage sharecropping. In isolated spots, shades of the system lasted into the 1960's.
Some landowners had a hard time accepting that slavery had ended with the Civil War. Immediately after the Civil War, the former slave was still considered as chattel property that needed to be controlled and kept in a subservient class of low-paid laborers. Planters tried to achieve this by passing the Black Codes. These local laws made vagrants out of any Negro who was unemployed or tried to hold his labor off the market hoping for higher wages or better working conditions. The ex-slave that did either of these things could subject him to arrest and time on work gangs. The Freedmen's Bureau was able to stop the worse abuses of the Black Codes.(3)
From an early date Southern planters and the Federal government believed that blacks needed close supervision. Northern abolitionists, agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, and Yankee businessmen believed that the ex-slaves should remain controlled persons because they were incapable of being self-directed.(4) Thus a supervised contract system emerged even before the Civil War ended. This was an effort to create a stable labor force. Because the blacks lacked land or capital, they had little choice but to sign yearly contracts.(5)
These early agreements continued some of the slavery practices. The Freedmen's Bureau insisted that contracts contained some provisions for medical care. Before the laborer could leave the plantation, he had to have the planter's permission. Southern state legislators passed laws that reinstated a form of slavery through state vagrancy laws, contracts, and Black Codes. The U.S. Army showed that they approved of these laws by returning runaway black laborers back to their plantations.(6)
Abuses started almost from the beginning of the sharecropping system. In 1867, Congress passed a law that outlawed debt servitude. Debt servitude meant being forced to work at a specific job until a debt was paid.(7)
Over time the sharecropping system broke down more and more into peonage. In the American South peonage existed in three areas of the economy. The cotton growing area from the Carolinas to Texas, including the Mississippi delta, registered most of the complaints of peonage. The second place were where peonage prospered was the turpentine areas of northern Florida, southern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The third area, for a briefer period of time, peonage existed in railroad construction's camp.(8)
The growth of tenancy in the Arkansas delta counties expanded at an amazing rate between 1880 and 1930. In this fifty-year period the percentage of tenant farmers in the State doubled, going from 31 to 63 percent. Some Delta counties saw even more dramatic increases. Chicot County went for 19.2 to 87.7 percent. Poinsett County went from 26.6 to 79.8 percent. By 1930, 13 of the 21 Delta counties had tenancy rates of about 80 percent or better. Crittenden County had the highest rate with 94.8 percent, followed by Mississippi County with 90.3 percent.(9)
The shift from slave to free labor evolved in a cash-poor society. When the victorious North refused to break up the plantation into homesteads for the former slaves, the South's freedmen were left with few resources.(10) Plenty of land was available on plantation. Labor was available with no place to work. The landowners had very little ready cash, but the ex-slaves had none. Using the land for security, the planter could raise money to operate his farm. Most of the labor force did not have this option. They had no work animals or tools. All they had to offer was their labor and the labor of their families. Between 1865 and 1869, the Federal government sponsored the Freedmen's Bureau to assist blacks in the transition from slavery to freedom. Bureau officers appeared in all Arkansas Delta counties. They supervised the making of labor contracts, supplied food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. Some of the freedmen acquired education and property, but the masses remained trapped in poverty and illiteracy. (11) What emerged was an unusual form of farming that did not involve the cash needed for wages between labor and capital, yet provided employment for the freedmen.
A short time after the end of the Civil War, the military controls became less strict. Labor patterns began to emerge. As the agriculture economy tried to adjust to the new labor situation involving the freedmen, the plantation was reestablished along new lines. Social stratification shifted to fit the new economic reality.(12) Still, at the top was the "planter," or landowner. Generally the owner was the manager. Larger landowners, however, usually hired "farm managers" who were responsible for his list of tenants. The managers were expected to make a profit each year. All too often, the landowner did not seem to care how this profit this was made.(13) Sometimes on larger holdings overseers, or "riding boss," were employed to watch the sharecroppers and command the day laborers.(14)
Basically the system developed three classes of tenants, with variations within each type: the cash-tenant, the share-tenant, and the sharecropper.(15) Each had a separate and different agreement with the landowner. These differences were based on what each brought economically into the relationship. The amount of land allocated to the sharecropper was determined by the number of productive laborers within the family.(16)
On top of the tenancy heap was the cash-tenant, or renter. A high percentage of cash-tenancy in an area reflected the breakdown of the plantation system. He usually paid a fixed dollar amount to the landlord as rent. If any tenant was in a position to move into land ownership, it was usually the cash-tenant. He owned his work animals and implements, furnished his own fertilizer and seeds, and provided for himself and his family throughout the year. The cash-tenants kept any profit over the rent and operating expenses.(17) Renters were not usually found on large farms.(18)
The share-tenant was next in status. In some parts of the South, this was considered as a white institution. This tenant owned most of the necessary work animals, tools, and machinery he needed. He could furnish seed, feed, and two-thirds or three-fourths of the fertilizer. Often he could supply his family's needs during the crop season, but when he was unable, the landlord would extend credit. Along with the use of the land, the share-tenant was furnished a house and the privilege of gathering wood for fuel. For this he would pay the landowner one-fourth or one-third of the return of the crop, depending on how much the landlord had supported his renter with work animals, implements, seed, and fertilizer.(19) Only a few share-tenants were found on larger plantations. In Arkansas tenants usually paid one-fourth of their cotton and one-third on their corn.(20) The fixed rent tenant had more control over his crops.(21)
The "sharecropper," had the least to offer. He was at the bottom of the class system. Cropper farming was a product of the Reconstruction period.(22) The only thing he had to offer was the labor of himself and his family. For half his crop as rent, the sharecropper was "furnished" land to farm, a house, fuel, work animals, implements, and supervision. The necessities of life were provided on credit.(23)
Sharecropping developed in those areas where the plantation mentality was the strongest. Cropping made a greater headway in areas where there was much competition between black and whites. These areas included the Piedmont areas of the Carolinas, the Black Belt of Alabama and Georgia, and the Delta of Mississippi and Arkansas. White sharecropping was not as intense in the Delta, but became more widespread in other parts of the Cotton Belt. In reality the share cropper was little more than a wage hand. Some of the southern states recognized him as a day labor. As such, he needed close supervision by the landlord.(24)
People resisted the harsh condition in which they were forced to live and work. To make the sharecropping system work violence in the form of lynching was frequently used. Between 1889 and 1918 there were 214 known lynching in the Arkansas. In this thirty-year period, 182 of the victims, or 85 percent were black. Five of the 182 were black women. Ninety-three, or 43 percent, of the 214 victims were black residents of the Delta. Of the ten states that had more than 100 lynching, Arkansas ranked sixth after Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. By 1927, the number of lynchings had reached 313. (25)
The impact of the stock market failure had little effect on the Mississippi River Delta. In 1920, cotton prices fell and remained low throughout the 1920's. The number of farm owners decreased during this period and the number of tenant farmers rose. In the delta, the average wage per day for a farm laborer in July of 1929 was $1.65. This was about one-half the average wage of non-southern states.(26)
The sharecropping system was flawed from the start, yet it lasted from emancipation unto the present day, in an altered form. Most of the abuses within the system ended within a decade of World War II. Arkansas tenant farmer numbers had been dropping steadily since 1937, losing about 23 percent every five years. Between 1954 and 1959, 54 percent of the states farm tenants disappeared. Machinery did what compassion, organized unions, and government was unable to do; end peonage sharecropping.(27)
Works Cited
Alexander, Donald Crichton The Arkansas Plantation, 1920-1942 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1942).
Conrad, David Eugene The Forgotten Farmer, The Story of Sharecropping in the New Deal
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965).
Daniel, Pete, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South 1901-1969 (London: Oxford Press,
1972).
Davis, Ronald L. F. Good and Faithful Labor, From Slavery to Sharecropping in the Natchez
District, 1860-1890 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982).
Gatewood, Willard B. "Arkansas Delta: The Deepest of the South," in The Arkansas Delta, Land
of Paradox, ed. by Jeannie Whayne and Willard B. Gatewood (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1993).
Holley, Donald. "The Second Great Emancipation: The Rush Cotton Picker and How it Changed
Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 52 (1993): 58-71.
____________. "The Plantation Heritage," in The Arkansas Delta, Land of Paradox, ed. by
Jeannie Whayne and Willard B. Gatewood (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press,
1993).
McFeely, William S. Yankee Stepfather, General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1968).
Mann, Susan Archer. "Social Change and Sexual Inequality: The Impact of the Transition from
Slavery to Sharecropping on Black Women," a paper presented at the "Southern Women:
Portraits of Diversity" Conference, New Orleans, Tulane University, (September) 1986.
Murray, Gail S. "Forty Years Ago: The Great Depression Comes to Arkansas," Arkansas
Historical Quarterly 39 (1970): 291-312.
Raper, Arthur F. Preface to Peasantry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936).