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Publication: Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006
Place of Publication: New York, Abingdon
(c) 2008 MTM Publishing, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Routledge Ltd
Sharecropping and Tenancy
The Sharecropping and Tenancy system arose in the South in the years immediately following the
Civil War and emancipation. At first however planters employed the contract labor system, and
Freedmen's Bureau officials often acted as the brokers in the arrangement. But neither freedmen nor
planters were satisfied with the contract system. Freedmen were unhappy with the fact that they were
required to work under the close supervision of planters or their representatives, often laboring in
gangs just as they had as slaves. Planters preferred to regulate closely their laborers, but the contract
system worked another kind of hardship on them. As cotton prices declined in the years after the Civil
War, planters found it increasingly difficult to pay wages. It was in this context that the sharecropping
and tenancy system arose: as a compromise. Planters no longer had to part with cash, and freedmen
were able to move away from the old slave quarters and on to 25–40 acre slots. In some
circumstances they were even free of the close supervision of the planters for whom they worked.
Many freedmen withdrew their wives from the fields, something that planters resented but were
unable to control, given their need for labor.
Much confusion surrounds the terms sharecropping and tenancy. When linked as two alternative
forms of plantation labor, they both referred to working for shares of the crop. A more appropriate
definition would be sharecropping and share tenancy (although the latter was also sometimes also
known as a share renter), and they differed in important respects from a third category of tenancy,
cash tenancy (sometimes called the fixed renter). Cash tenancy was for good reason considered
separately, for in this circumstance, the farmer made a cash payment to rent land from the owner.
Sharecropping and share tenancy however involved men (and on rare occasions women) of modest or
no means. While sharecroppers typically had no more than their labor to bring to the bargaining table,
share tenant farmers owned mules and implements. Because of these differences in material
conditions, the law came to recognize the share tenant as having some legal standing in court. The
sharecropper was regarded as little more than a wage laborer who was paid a half of the cotton and
corn crops he grew in exchange for his labor. The share tenant farmer however technically owned the
crop he grew and paid a share of it—typically one-fourth of the corn and one-third cotton crops—to
the planter in exchange for the use of the land. Even though the courts recognized the tenant farmer as
owning the crop and thus having some standing in court, few tenant farmers actually took disputes to
court, probably because they understood that planters had greater influence and the likelihood of
winning a court contest with them was remote.
One other important difference existed between sharecropping and share tenant. Many white farmers
in the years after the Civil War lost their farms and turned to tenant farming as an alternative. Because
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they had some means, they were more likely than freedmen to have mules and implements. Freedmen,
who came out of enslavement with little more than the clothes on their backs, found it impossible to
acquire property under the sharecropping arrangement and thus despite the myth of the agricultural
ladder (whereby one was supposed to be able to move from sharecropping to tenancy to landowning),
they remained sharecroppers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming number of
sharecroppers were black. Share tenant farmers on the other hand tended to be white.
Economists Richard Sutch and Roger Ransom suggest in One Kind of Freedom that sharecropping
might have served the purposes of freedmen, might have allowed them to prosper but for the
emergence of the commissary system and the institutionalization of debt peonage. Because returns on
the crop were realized only once a year when they marketed their crop at the end of harvest,
sharecroppers and share tenants both came to depend on advances from the planters for whom they
worked. Planters charged exorbitant interests—sometimes as much as 50%–75%—for all such
advances. When the crop was harvested in the fall and the debts were subtracted, many sharecroppers
and share tenants found themselves barely able—or unable—to pay debts, and thus required yet
another advance in order to make it through the next crop year. Some sharecroppers and tenants found
themselves locked in an almost hopeless cycle of indebtedness. One thing that further complicated the
situation for both tenants and sharecroppers was the emergence of laws that circumscribed the
movement of tenants and sharecroppers who owed a debt to planters. Planters would send local law
enforcement officials after sharecroppers and share tenants who departed owing a debt. Pete Daniel,
in The Shadow of Slavery, calls this just another kind of Slavery.
African-Americans meanwhile endured a number of other legal sanctions that grew more onerous as
time went on, and these measures tended to reinforce their economic dependence on planters. In the
years immediately following the Civil War, in the period when planters briefly regained power before
the emergence of congressional Reconstruction, freedmen were required to carry a pass if not on the
plantation. They were discouraged from seeking alternative forms of employment, and vagrancy laws
further inhibited their movement from the plantations to towns and cities. The Ku Klux Klan, at least
in its earliest incarnation, was oriented to the task of forcing freedmen to remain in place, working for
planters. During congressional Reconstruction when blacks gained the ballot, the Klan's focus shifted
to preventing freedmen (and white Republicans) from exercising their right to vote or hold office. In
fact by the end of the century, the implementation of various Disfranchisement measures further
circumscribed the opportunities open to African-Americans and together with segregation, drove a
wedge between black and white plantation laborers. To make matters worse, the racist rhetoric
employed by white Democrats to champion disfranchisement and segregation statutes gave rise to a
virulent racism that led to an increase in lynchings and night-riding activities against AfricanAmericans. In this context it was unwise for black sharecroppers to challenge planters' assessment of
what was owing to them at the end of the crop year. Ironically planters had to defend the right of
African- American sharecroppers to remain on the plantations when landless white men began in the
1890s to try to drive them off so that they could gain a share tenancy. One courageous federal judge in
the eastern district of Arkansas convicted white night riders of violating the Thirteenth Amendment
right of African-Americans to employment, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in Hodges v. U.S. ruled that
there was no such right guaranteed by the amendment. That ruling stood unchallenged until 1968. In
the interim southern states passed night-riding laws, but it is impossible to determine whether they
were enforced. Nevertheless by the beginning of the twentieth century, the options open to AfricanAmericans were severely limited, and those who remained in the South were principally employed as
sharecroppers.
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Historians and economists debate the extent to which mobility was reduced as a result of debt
peonage. There is clear evidence that those working for honest planters tended to remain in place
voluntarily, but those employed by unscrupulous ones who were still able to break even at the end of
the crop year, moved on seeking better opportunities elsewhere. Many African-American and white
farmers moved from the older South (of South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama) to the South on the
western fringe, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, as new lands there were coming into cultivation.
Labor agents, hired by planters opening up new plantations there, enticed landless men with promises
of opportunities on the abundant and fertile land. However most of these migrants found themselves
once again engaged in sharecropping or share tenancy and rarely able to ascend the mythical
agricultural ladder. Thus whenever they could pay out of debt at the end of the year, they continued to
move, ever on the search for a better opportunity.
The sharecropping and share tenancy system persisted until after the mechanization of the cotton crop
and the emergence of a scientific agriculture in the post-World War II period. Scientific agriculture
typically means the use of chemicals to cut down on the need to weed the cotton in the summer
months, one of the two labor-intensive aspects of premechanization cotton farming. In fact the
sharecropping and share tenancy system began to erode in the 1930s when New Deal programs began
to pay farmers to reduce production of certain crops. Cotton was one of the crops that farmers could
elect to reduce acreage on, but they were allowed to put the land that would have grown cotton to
other uses. Planters in the South began to move toward the cultivation of soybeans, a fully
mechanized crop, and thus had little need for excess sharecroppers and share tenants. Many were
evicted from plantations during the 1930s and made their way to southern, northern, or western cities,
looking for work. The post-World War II period merely witnessed an acceleration of a process that
had already begun. By 1960, the printed census of agriculture no longer even listed sharecropper as a
separate category. Share tenancy still exists, but most tenants today pay a cash rent and are not
regarded as agricultural laborers.
Jeannie Whayne
Further reading
Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York and Oxford,
UK: 1992.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana, IL:
1993.
Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional
Identity. New York and Oxford, UK: 1992.
Conrad, David Eugene. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal.
Urbana, IL: 1965.
Daniel, Pete. Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969. Chicago, IL: 1972.
Daniel, Pete. Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Rural Life since 1900. New York: 1986.
Fite, Gilbert. Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980. Lexington, KY: 1984.
Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960. Baton Rouge, LA: 1987.
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Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of
the One-Party South, 1880–1910. New Haven, CT: 1974.
Litwack, Leon F. Been in a Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: 1979.
Mandle, Jay R. The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War.
Durham, NC: 1978.
Mertz, Paul E. New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty. Baton Rouge, LA: 1978.
Powell, Lawrence N. New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction. New
Haven, CT: 1980.
Ransom, Roger, and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of
Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: 1977.
Reidy, Joseph P. From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central
Georgia, 1800–1880. Chapel Hill, NC: 1992.
Roark, James L. Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction. New
York: 1977.
Tolnay, Stewart E., and E. M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882
–1930. Urbana and Chicago, IL: 1994.
Whayne, Jeannie. A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century
Arkansas. Charlottesville, VA: 1996.
White, Walter. Rope and Faggott: A Biography of Judge Lynch. New York: 1929.
Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since
Emancipation. New York: 1984.
Woodman, Harold D. New South—New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations
in the Postbellum Agricultural South. Baton Rouge, LA and London, UK: 1995.
Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War.
New York: 1986.
Cases and Statutes Cited
Hodges v. U.S.
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