In Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy, historian Eric Foner works to show the complex social, political and economic relationships that developed between former slaves and their former masters during Reconstruction in the United States. It is no surprise that Foner dedicates a fair amount of his book to the discussion of sharecropping, the social and economic institution that developed after the Civil War. Under sharecropping, freed African-Americans continued to work on plantations, but they were renting the land where they worked, growing both cash and sustenance crops and giving a certain percentage of their cash crops to the owners of their plantations, as a way of paying “rent.” Sharecropping eventually developed into a system in which African-Americans were forced to take credit from plantation owners and shop at plantation “stores” where planters charged exorbitant fees for supplies that African-Americans had no choice but to buy (45). Alex notes in his blog post that as Radical Reconstruction gave way to Redemption governments in the South, most benefits of sharecropping for African-Americans were removed and the institution became largely exploitative. However, Foner notes that
“this later development should not obscure the fact that, in a comparative perspective, sharecropping afforded agricultural laborers more control over their own time, labor, and family arrangements, and more hope of economic advancement, than many other modes of labor organization” (45).
It is true then, that sharecropping seemed a better alternative to other systems of labor, particularly because it afforded former slaves a fair amount of freedom from the rules and regulations of white plantation owners, but I would argue that from its inception sharecropping only minimally met the desires of former slaves.
In our past few classes, we have discussed that former slaves’ main goals post-emancipation were to live alone—away from whites and to be allowed to own their own land where they could subsistence farm. Indeed “The negro here [in America] seems like his brother in Jamaica, to object labor for hire, and to desire to become proprietor of his own patch of land.” (44). Former slaves wanted complete independence from their former slave owners, and they saw economic systems where they were laboring for their former masters as oppressive. They wanted to break away from the plantation system and its dependence on cash crops and they additionally believed that they had “a certain right to the property of their former masters,” since “the property which they hold was nearly all earned by the sweat of our brows,” (56). Yet sharecropping only partially met those goals.
First and foremost, former slaves wanted to own, or at the very least rent, their own land (44). Although sharecropping provided a mechanism for “renting” land, that land was not available for a freed slave to do as they pleased—that land was being rented out so that former slaves would continue to grow cash crops on it. Subsistence farming was not the goal of the land—cash crops were. To make that abundantly clear and “to ensure that no economic opportunities apart from plantation labor remained for the freedmen, they were forbidden to rent land in rural areas,” (49). This meant that former slaves were forced to “rent” the very land they actually believed they had a right to own (since their labor had lead to white Southern landownership), and on that land, they had to devote a fair amount of their farming efforts to raising cash crops to pay their “rent” and help maintain the Southern plantation economy.
With all of that being said, sharecropping did provide slaves with some degree of autonomy, and it was in fact developed “to oppose efforts to put them [freed slaves] back to work in conditions, especially gang labor, reminiscent of slaver,” (45). However, it was never the ideal system for former slaves, as even from its beginnings, it continued to keep them bound to plantations and working for former slave-owners.