Sharecropper Plantations

In 1864, after the Civil War (or War between the States as Southerners call  it), planters no longer had slaves as their guaranteed work force. The freed ex-slaves wanted their independence and many moved away to other plantations. In order to keep blacks on their farms, planters developed tenant farming, of either the sharecropping or cash rent kind. Black farm "hands" provided their labor, while the owners provided the land that they had kept from before the Civil War/War between the States and the necessary inputs, such as mules, tools, and seeds. The black farmers and white owners "shared" in the harvest in varying ratios, frequently 1:3 or 1:4, respectively. Income was frequently inadequate to survive throughout the year so planters would "give" their black families credit at their commissionaires (planter-owned stores on or near the plantation). Poor white farmers also participated in sharecropping, an institution particularly associated with the South although also found in the Midwest. [Sharecropping was and still is used in other parts of the USA as well. For a particularly nasty form associated with strawberry production in California, read Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), pp. 83-88.]

Two examples of changing land holdings:

• In 1920, for example, blacks accounted for 57 percent of South Carolina's farmers, but almost 70 percent of the state's tenants. Over 65 percent of both black and white tenants were sharecroppers. [Source: Charles Kovacik and John Winberry. South Carolina: A Geography. Boulder: Westview Press, 1987.]
• By 1900 estates of absentee owners and overseer management dominated Louisiana's agriculture, although in 1860 it had had more farms than plantations! [Staughton Lynd (ed.). Reconstruction. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967.]

Black families were assigned plots of land, where they built their cabins, and provided with a mule by their respective landlords, who continued to live in the "Big House." This practice of  "40 acres and a mule" resulted in a dispersed rural settlement pattern of

• sharecropper cabins, such as this dogtrot of a black tenant farmer,
• small rural churches and rural cemeteries, and
• simple schools -- the latter two institutions had been forbidden to them by White landowners.
  

In 1995 and 1996, small rural black churches were the target of arsons throughout the South. Source of map: USA Today.

Sharecropping was very distinctive to the South after the Civil War until the 1940s.
As late as 1936, about 60 percent of plantations were organized into sharecropper units.

What has changed on this plantation since the War between the States?

Answers:

• the ex-slaves had scattered across the landscape, building cabins throughout the fields -- about 30-40 acres per house site
• freed blacks constructed churches
• fields had become smaller and crop patterns had become diverse because each black family was now working separate plots of land
• more roads and trails existed to provide access to the scattered settlements

Plantations changed from sharecropping to neo-plantations during the 1940s.