ance, and brokerage fees. Thus began a vast reorganization of most plan-
tations, plus the beginning of decades of struggle between labor and busi-
ness. Some planters were doubtlessly relieved to turn over production to a
collection of hard-working men and women on their separate plots. Most,
we suspect, were ever scheming to recentralize their estates and rational-
ize operations to suit themselves.
In the meantime, though, the initial deal was incomplete. How were
croppers to subsist for a year before crops were sold? Here entered the third
element: ‘‘furnishing’’ merchants who established country stores through-
out the broad region. With credit of their own, they stocked the cheap
clothes, tobacco, kerosene, coal, whiskey, and bibles required by ordinary
people, and they extended to each cropper household a line of credit based
on guesses at cotton and corn futures and local knowledge of workers and
soils. Clerks kept accounts of each debit, which included an interest charge.
Interest rates charged croppers were secret, actually, but are calculable
from many surviving merchants’ ledgers. They were high, as risky long-term
agricultural private banking has always demanded. Late in the nineteenth
century, a young white editor of a North Carolina farm journal summarized:
interest rates, he wrote, ‘‘ranged from twenty-five percent to grand larceny.’’
No wonder that planter-landlords could not resist entering the business
themselves, and they often established ‘‘commissaries’’ on their own prop-
erties. At the end of each calendar year came settlement time. Planters sold
crops and presented croppers’ shares. Croppers went to merchants to pay
their bills. Often they knew their store totals no better than their crop share
values, since both planters and merchants preferred to keep records pri-
vate. Because of their color and lack of civic power, often compounded by
illiteracy, croppers were usually too powerless to demand transparency.
In the long run, then, high interest charges, new international compe-
tition in the cotton trade, the long downward trend of cotton prices, and
simple larceny undermined croppers’ initial hopes for private initiative,
decent earnings, accumulation, and finally proprietorship for themselves.
Instead, tenancy of all sorts, especially sharecropping (which merely re-
sembles tenancy) grew with the postbellum era’s enlarged cotton kingdom.
A vast (even international) chain of exploitation had taken shape: Metro-
politan bankers charged usurious rates to regional and local banks, which
passed their costs to merchants and lending planters, who robbed share-
croppers, who themselves had nothing to rob but the earth. No wonder
that croppers were mobile workers, moving and deserting or avoiding land-
lords with mean and greedy reputations, but especially looking for better