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Sharecropping
6 articles on Sharecropping
Sharecropping
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1005 Includes: BibliographyAfter the Civil War the economy of the South was severely disrupted, with its lifeblood, agriculture, nearly run dry and its commercial and banking systems in disarray. “King Cotton” remained the cash crop of the region. Cotton production diminished during the war but regained its prewar level by the mid-1870s. Formerly self-sufficient whites working small farms switched to cotton as a cash crop, but more often former slaves worked for a share of the crop. Planters had land after the war, but they lacked labor. They also lacked credit, and because the Confederate currency was worthless, they could pay little in the way of wages. The available pool of labor comprised former slaves, who were generally uneducated and desperately poor, free but without resources. The solution was sharecropping, whereby the planters could use the former slaves' labor in return for providing “furnish”—land, equipment, ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1299 Includes: BibliographyNext to slavery, sharecropping may be considered the most insidious, nefarious institution devised in the United States of America. The practice of forcing blacks to remain on white-owned farms by malicious landlords evolved out of the Reconstructed South and continued unabated until World War II. This demeaning southern policy instituted by callous white southerners crushed hopes for emancipated slaves and their progeny through several generations and restricted scores of African Americans to a life of continuous penury.To some extent, sharecropping appeared more heartless than slavery. Slave owners maintained a vested interest in the economic value of their human property. Since slaves were treated as chattel and represented a capital investment, owners invariably maintained a profound interest in the health and welfare of a bondservant. After Emancipation, however, the devastated, embittered, former ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1190Agriculturally based economic system in which farmers receive a share in the profits from the crops they produce in exchange for working an owner's land. The African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote that “[t]he slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” Indeed, in the century between emancipation and such Civil Rights Movement victories as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of 1965, several factors conspired to keep former slaves in an inferior position in American society. Disfranchisement, discriminatory Jim Crow laws, segregated schools, and Lynchingreinforced the political, legal, educational, and social inequality that African Americans faced. But the picture of racial injustice would not be complete without including economic factors—ranging from official and unofficial job discrimination ...
Read full articleSharecropping and Tenantry
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 519once common forms of farming throughout the United States. The tenant paid the landowner rent; the landowner paid the sharecropper wages. After the Civil War, landowners, former slaves, and yeomen in southern states often disputed rights of land tenure, ownership of crops, and the legal priority of their respective claims. The complex arrangements negotiated by landlord and tenant resulted in frequent litigation.Sharecroppers brought only their labor to the bargaining table; landowners customarily supervised farming operations, marketed crops, and paid sharecroppers an agreed-upon sum. Legally, sharecroppers were wage laborers. A sharecropper's claim for wages might conflict with the economic interests of a landowner or a credit merchant. Some states gave the sharecropper's claim priority in such cases, but after ...
Read full articleSharecropping Contract (1882)
Word Count: 1645The Civil War and the emancipation of several million slaves devastated a southern economic engine based almost entirely on the unwilling labor of enslaved human beings. Crops were not planted, countless acres of arable land lay fallow, and white landowners—their pockets full only of suddenly-worthless Confederate scrip—had few resources to alleviate their poor circumstances. Faced with such a situation, farmers turned again to African Americans as a source of labor, this time in the form of the sharecropping system, whereby freemen and women would work the fields and harvest the cotton in return for a portion of the crop's value at the end of the season. What unfolded, however, was a shadow-play of the slavery system: former slaves worked the fields while white overseers (hired by the landowner) kept an eye on them. Some sharecroppers even took up residence in their old slave quarters. ...
Read full articleSharecropping 1880
Source: Atlas of the Civil War
Word Count: 138