![]() 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. sharecroppers (about two-thirds) were white, and in many areas of the rural South, only about one-quarter of white people owned land. The system was used by white families as well as Blacks: The majority of U.S. 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. ![]() Many clashed with former owners bent on reestablishing a gang-labor system similar to the one that prevailed under slavery.īy the early 1870s, the system known as sharecropping had come to dominate agriculture across the South. 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. Those who refused or resisted were eventually forced out by U.S. 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. 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. Owning land was the key to economic independence and autonomy. 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. Sherman across Georgia and the Carolinas. WATCH: Black History Documentaries on HISTORY Vault Forty Acres and a Muleĭuring 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. The system severely restricted the economic mobility of the laborers, leading to conflicts during the Reconstruction era. About two-thirds of sharecroppers were white, and one-third were Black. 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. 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.
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