420 Chapter 15 Reconstruction and the South
Sharecropping and the Crop-Lien System
Before the passage of the Reconstruction acts, plan-
tation owners tried to farm their land with gang
labor, the same system as before, only now paying
wages to the former slaves. But blacks did not like
working for wages because it kept them under the
direction of whites and thus reminded them of slav-
ery. They wanted to be independent, to manage not
merely their free time but their entire lives for them-
selves. “The colored people of this vicinity are so
proud,” a white Virginian noted, “that they think it
is somewhat a second slavery to hire by the month
or year.” Since the voluntary withdrawal of so much
black labor from the workforce had produced a
shortage, the blacks had their way. “I had to yield,”
another white planter admitted, “or lose my labor.”
Quite swiftly, a new agricultural system known as
sharecropping emerged. Instead of cultivating the
land by gang labor as in antebellum times, planters
broke up their estates into small units and established
on each a black family. The planter provided housing,
agricultural implements, draft animals, seed, and other
supplies, and the family provided
labor. The crop was divided
between them, usually on a fifty-
fifty basis. If the landlord supplied
only land and housing, the laborer
got a larger share. This was called
share tenancy.
Sharecropping gave blacks the
day-to-day control of their lives that
they craved and the hope of earning
enough to buy a small farm. Many
former slaves succeeded, as evi-
denced by the accounts narrated at
the outset of this chapter. Oprah
Winfrey’s great-great-grandfather
bought several plots of land and
eventually moved a schoolhouse to
his property so that black children
in Sanford, Mississippi, could get an
education. But not all managed to
climb the first rungs into the middle
class. As late as 1880 blacks owned
less than 10 percent of the agricul-
tural land in the South, although
they made up more than half of the
region’s farm population.
Many white farmers in the South
were also trapped by the sharecrop-
ping system and by white efforts to
keep blacks in a subordinate position.
New fencing laws kept them from grazing livestock on
undeveloped land, a practice common before the Civil
War. But the main cause of southern rural poverty for
whites as well as for blacks was the lack of enough capital
to finance the sharecropping system. Like their colonial
ancestors, the landowners had to borrow against
October’s harvest to pay for April’s seed. Thus the crop-
lien systemdeveloped.
Under the crop-lien system, both landowner and
sharecropper depended on credit supplied by local
bankers, merchants, and storekeepers for everything
from seed, tools, and fertilizer to overalls, coffee, and
salt. Crossroads stores proliferated, and a new class of
small merchants appeared. The prices of goods sold
on credit were high, adding to the burden borne by
the rural population. The small southern merchants
were almost equally victimized by the system, for they
also lacked capital, bought goods on credit, and had
to pay high interest rates.
Seen in broad perspective, the situation is not dif-
ficult to understand. The South, drained of every
resource by the war, was competing for funds with
the North and West, both vigorous and expanding
and therefore voracious consumers of capital.Sharecroppers pick cotton in the late 1800s.