Why did southern white yeomen also become sharecroppers in the years following the Civil War?

Sharecropping is a type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year. Different types of sharecropping have been practiced worldwide for centuries, but with the southern economy in disarray after the abolition of slavery and the devastation of the Civil War, sharecropping enabled landowners to reestablish a labor force, while giving poor whites and freed Black people a means of subsistence. About two-thirds of sharecroppers were white, and one-third were Black. The system severely restricted the economic mobility of the laborers, leading to conflicts during the Reconstruction era.

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Forty Acres and a Mule

During the final months of the Civil War, tens of thousands of freed enslaved people left their plantations to follow the victorious Union Army troops of General William T. Sherman across Georgia and the Carolinas.

In January 1865, in an effort to address the issues caused by this growing number of refugees, Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15, a temporary plan granting each freed family 40 acres of land on the islands and coastal region of Georgia. The Union Army also donated some of its mules, unneeded for battle purposes, to the former enslaved people.

Did you know? In 1870, only around 30,000 African Americans in the South owned land (usually small plots), compared with 4 million others who did not.

When the war ended three months later, many freed Blacks saw the “40 acres and a mule” policy as proof that they would finally be able to work their own land after years of servitude. Owning land was the key to economic independence and autonomy.

Instead, as one of the first acts of Reconstruction, President Andrew Johnson ordered all land under federal control to be returned to its previous owners in the summer of 1865.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, created to aid millions of former enslaved people in the postwar era, had to inform the newly free men and women that they could either sign labor contracts with planters or be evicted from the land they had occupied. Those who refused or resisted were eventually forced out by U.S. Army troops.

Black Codes

In the early years of Reconstruction, most Black people living in rural areas of the South were left without land and forced to work as laborers on large white-owned farms and plantations in order to earn a living. Many clashed with former owners bent on reestablishing a gang-labor system similar to the one that prevailed under slavery.

In an effort to regulate the labor force and reassert white supremacy in the South, legislatures in former Confederate states soon passed restrictive laws denying Black people legal equality or political rights, and created Black codes that forced the formerly enslaved to sign yearly labor contracts or be arrested and jailed for vagrancy.

These Black codes provoked a fierce resistance among the freedmen and undermined support in the North for President Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. A Republican victory in the Congressional elections of 1866 led to the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in 1867, beginning a new phase of Reconstruction.

During this period, the passage of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment granted Black Americans the right to vote, equality before the law and other rights of citizenship—although those rights would continue to be denied by a number of legal and economic devices in the era of Jim Crow laws and segregation.

WATCH: Yohuru Williams on Reconstruction 

Despite giving Black Americans the rights of citizens, the federal government (and the Republican-controlled state governments formed during this phase of Reconstruction) took little concrete action to help freed Black people in their quest to own their own land.

Instead of receiving wages for working an owner’s land—and having to submit to supervision and harsh discipline—most poor farm laborers preferred to rent land for a fixed payment.

By the early 1870s, the system known as sharecropping had come to dominate agriculture across the South. Under this system, families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves; in return, they would give a portion of their crop to the landowner at the end of the harvest season.

The system was used by white families as well as Blacks: The majority of U.S. sharecroppers (about two-thirds) were white, and in many areas of the rural South, only about one-quarter of white people owned land.

‘King Cotton’ Dethroned

The sharecropping system also locked much of the South into a reliance on cotton—just at a time when the price for cotton was plunging.

In addition, while sharecropping gave poor farm laborers some autonomy in their daily work and social lives, and freed them from the gang-labor system that had dominated during the slavery era, it often resulted in sharecroppers owing more to the landowner (for the use of tools and other supplies, for example) than they were able to repay.

Some sharecroppers managed to acquire enough money to move from sharecropping to renting or owning land by the end of the 1860s, but many more went into debt or were forced by poverty or the threat of violence to sign unfair and exploitative sharecropping or labor contracts that left them little hope of improving their situation.

Although both poor whites and Blacks lacked much social or economic mobility, sharecroppers started to organize for better pay and working conditions, and the racially integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union, formed in the 1930s during the Great Depression, began to exercise some bargaining power.

But by the 1940s—with increased mechanization and better-paying jobs in urban areas—sharecropping began to disappear in the United States, though some form of it still exists in a handful of areas. Sharecropping is routinely practiced today in a few countries such as Bangladesh, Ghana, Zimbabwe, India and Pakistan.

READ MORE: How Slavery Became the Economic Engine of the South

Sources

Sharecropping. PBS.
Sharecropping. New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Sharecropping, Black Land Acquisition, and White Supremacy (1868-1900). Sanford School of Public Policy: Duke University. 

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success for many White Mississippians, a number of White people could always be found at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with Black Mississippians in the century after the American Civil War.

Before examining the history of Mississippi’s White tenant farmers and sharecroppers, some definition of these terms might be helpful. Both tenant farmers and sharecroppers were farmers without farms. A tenant farmer typically paid a landowner for the right to grow crops on a certain piece of property. Tenant farmers, in addition to having some cash to pay rent, also generally owned some livestock and tools needed for successful farming.

Sharecroppers, on the other hand, were even more impoverished than tenant farmers. With few resources and little or no cash, sharecroppers agreed to farm a certain plot of land in exchange for a share of the crops they raised. The exact amount of crops the sharecropper gave over to the landowner depended on the agreement with the landowner.

The tenant/sharecropping system

Although the tenant/sharecropping system is usually thought of as a development that occurred after the Civil War, this type of farming existed in antebellum Mississippi, especially in the areas of the state with few enslaved people or plantations, such as northeast Mississippi.

Not all White people who emigrated to even the poorest parts of Mississippi in the years before the Civil War had the funds to purchase a farm. As a result, most of the men who headed these households worked as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Many rented land from or farmed on shares with family members and typically received favorable arrangements, but some antebellum tenants or sharecroppers had to deal with landlords who were primarily concerned with making profits rather than helping struggling farmers move toward landownership.

Consider the sharecropping arrangement that Richard Bridges of Marshall County worked out with his landlord, T. L. Treadwell, in the 1850s. Treadwell provided Bridges with land, livestock, and tools; the landlord also advanced Bridges some food. Bridges grew corn and cotton, and at the end of the year, he had to give Treadwell one-sixth of the corn he grew and five-sixths of the cotton raised. From his share of the crop, Bridges also had to pay Treadwell for the use of the livestock and tools and for the food advanced. Obviously, Bridges worked the entire year primarily for the food he needed to live. He had no opportunity to make any money from this arrangement and accumulate the capital that would allow him to purchase his own farm.

The postbellum farmer

After the Civil War, tenant farming and sharecropping became a way of life for the vast majority of Mississippi farmers. Newly freed African-Americans generally had no resources or access to credit to purchase land, and most of Mississippi’s Black population that worked in agriculture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries became sharecroppers. With Mississippi’s devastated economy in the years following the Civil War, increasing numbers of White landowning farmers were also reduced to the status of landless farmer.

Many of Mississippi’s small White landowning farmers, also known as yeoman farmers, had not been heavily involved in the cotton economy before the Civil War; however, after the war, a number of factors led the White yeoman farmers to turn increasingly to cotton cultivation. They needed cash to pay off debts acquired during four years of war and the increased taxes levied during Reconstruction and beyond. In addition, new railroad lines built after the war improved access to distant markets and encouraged the development of commercial agriculture among formerly subsistence farmers (subsistence farmers are those who grow crops primarily to feed themselves, their families, and their livestock, rather than to make a profit).

Unfortunately, the price of cotton began a long period of decline in the late 1860s, and many of those White yeomen who had staked their future on cotton production lost their farms. When they did, they frequently became tenant farmers or sharecroppers. By 1900, 36 percent of all White farmers in Mississippi were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers (by comparison, 85 percent of all Black farmers in 1900 did not own the land they farmed).

The crop-lien system

For the postbellum tenant farmer or sharecropper, life became an endless cycle of landlessness, debt, and poverty. Sharecroppers faced the most hopeless situation, as most became enmeshed in what was known as the crop-lien system. An 1867 Mississippi law provided that landlords could claim a lien on the crops of their workers for any debts incurred during the growing season.

Almost all farmers who worked as sharecroppers did have to acquire debt. Most sharecroppers began the crop year needing to buy supplies, not only to help raise their crop, but also to keep themselves and their families alive until harvest time. The only thing they had to offer for collateral was the crop they were going to try to raise. So, the sharecropper would turn to a “furnishing merchant,” who might be the landowner or perhaps a neighborhood merchant, who would exchange food and supplies for a lien on next year’s crop. Some landowners who provided a “furnish” (supplies and food) might merely require a greater share of the crop as payment at year’s end. For instance, Elizabeth Brown, whose family oversaw Black and White sharecropper families in Perry County in the early 20th century, remembered that the typical share paid by sharecroppers was one-fourth of the crop they raised, but “when we furnished them, we got half of the crop.”

Other furnishing merchants kept accounts during the year of the debts incurred by their sharecroppers, and at the end of the year, at “settlement time,” the merchant would deduct these charges from the sharecropper’s share of the crop. Oftentimes, the debt exceeded the amount the sharecropper made from his share of the crop, and his only alternatives were to sign on for another year with the same landowner/merchant or move on to another farm. In both cases, the cycle of debt and landlessness remained unbroken.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act

While tenant farmers were perhaps somewhat better off than sharecroppers, most tenant farmers were only one bad crop away from slipping into the cycle of debt common among sharecroppers. Both tenant farmers and sharecroppers were significantly poorer than their landed neighbors. Struggling from year to year to acquire the basic necessities of life, tenants and sharecroppers rarely acquired the consumer goods that were increasingly available in the 20th century. A 1942 study by the state of Mississippi found that only 10 percent of White sharecroppers had refrigerators, while only 14 percent owned radios. Landowners in the state were three times as likely to own these same items.

The tenant/sharecropping system in Mississippi, and throughout the South, began to die out during the 1940s and 1950s. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 led many landowners in the state to take part of their lands out of cultivation in exchange for funds offered by the federal government. Thus, landowners eliminated their tenant and sharecropper plots. The AAA program was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures designed to end the Great Depression. This program was designed to reduce farm output in order to raise farm prices. An unintended consequence of the program, however, was the displacement of tenant farmers and sharecroppers.