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A New System: Sharecropping and Tenant Farming

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Percentage of farms sharecropped in a Southern county
 



















Former Slaves:

- After slavery was abolished in 1863, freed slaves had nowhere to go. There was no more land to be had; the land was the part of the plantations.
     - In 1876, there was about one black family in 20 that owned their own land, in the Southern states.
- Plantation owners needed workers to work the fields that the former slaves worked. 
 - In the years after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction period, there were many different arrangements between the plantation owners and the freedmen    

Sharecropping:
- A new system emerged where the plantation owner allowed a freedman and his family to live on a plot of land and farm it. 
     - In return for working the fields, the freedman would recieve a portion of the crop that they produced. 
          - One third if they could not supply their own tools or seeds
          - One half if they could supply their own tools and seeds

Tenant Farming
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This was also a new system that emerged after the Civil War.
- Tenants would live on a plot of land and farm it, recieving cash wages either monthly or at the end of each year.
    

A Compromise That No One Liked

- Plantation owners did not like that sharecropping made the tenant partly an owner of the crop. They could no longer control the working conditions of the tenant, such as the hours worked.
 - Blacks did not like this system either. In an effort to keep the tenants under their control, plantation owners established a credit system that made it hard for the tenants to keep out of debt.
     - Because there were not many stores in the rural South, rural merchants could set up stores. These stores had up to fifty percent interest on items bought on credit. As many tenants could not pay their debts at the end of the year, they caried these debts to the new year. 
          - As reported by a resident of Mississippi, "The credit system has been pushed to such an extent that crops have been mortgaged for supplies before they have been planted."
 

Conclusion

The invention of the cotton gin came at a time when slavery was going to be gradually abolished. However, the cotton gin allowed planters to plant more cotton than they could before, leading to the need of more slaves to work in the fields. Because slaves were now necessary to the Southern economy, the laws that said that slavery would gradually be abolished were no longer in effect. Even though the North depended on the cotton from the South, there was still some controversy over slaves. As tensions between the two sides rose, a war became inevitable. After the war was over and the slaves had been emancipated, a new system of labor was needed in the South. Emerging from the chaos came the system of sharecropping, allowing freedmen to earn something for their labor and giving the plantation owners a way to keep their fields planted and producing. This reform, however, was not exactly what anybody wanted.
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This picture is of sharecroppers
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