6 ChaPter^1
A New Kind of Slavery
While ending slavery and gaining freedom can never be understated, the
refusal to grant Blacks real independence, especially land, was the key failure
of Reconstruction. Without civil and property rights, and land, the newly
freed men and women would remain poor and dependent, often on the very
masters who had owned them just a year or so earlier. As noted, the
Freedmen’s Bureau made attempts to provide small plots of land to Black
men, and Union generals in some cases had allowed African-Americans to
occupy their former plantations, but Johnson, in his pardon, took that land
back from the ex-slaves. In fact, the failure to address the land issue drove
over 75 percent of ex-slaves into the contract labor system, or, more frequently,
sharecropping. Contract labor meant that Blacks returned to fields under the
terms of a contract they signed, but most ex-slaves were illiterate. Nonetheless,
they “legally” agreed to work for a year at fixed pay, normally a tiny fraction
(perhaps ten percent) of the value of the land and crops, and they also were
forced to accept restrictions on their legal rights and civil liberties.FIGuRE 1-1 Sharecroppers in Mississippi