The Sharecropping System
US History/Napp
Name: __________________
BACKGROUND:
“After the Civil War, the South faced several economic problems. Many of its large cities,
including Atlanta and Richmond, lay in ruins. Factories and railroad lines had been
damaged or destroyed. The economy of the South still depended on the large-scale farming
of cotton and tobacco, but plantation owners could no longer benefit from the free labor
provided by slavery. A new labor system, sharecropping, replaced slavery…
Sharecropping is a labor-for-land exchange. A piece of land is worked by a tenant in
exchange for a portion of the crop. The landowner provides living accommodations, tools,
seed, and other items needed to plant and tend the crop. The sharecropper receives no
wages for the work done on the farm. Once the crop is sold, the proceeds, or money
received, are divided between the landowner and the sharecropper.
Part of the economy of sharecropping was its credit, or loan, system. In the sharecropping
system:
1- Sharecropper signs contract agreeing to farm in exchange for half of proceeds from
the sale of the crops.
2- Landowner extends credit for food, clothes, and other items needed by the
sharecropper’s family.
3- Sharecropper works the land, planting and tending the crop for no pay.
4- Landowner continues to extend credit, adding interest to the credit already
extended.
5- Crops are harvested and sold.
6- Credit and interest charges are taken out of the proceeds due to the sharecropper.
7- Sharecropper’s debt to landowner is greater than proceeds. New crops need to be
planted to earn money to pay off debt.
8- More credit is extended with interest charges immediately being added to previous
unpaid debt.
9- Sharecropper is deep in debt and now economically dependent on landowner.”
~ The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Questions:
1. What problems did the South face after the Civil War?
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2. Describe the sharecropping system.
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3. How did the sharecropper get paid for working the land?
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4. Describe the contract the sharecropper signs.
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5. Why must the sharecropper borrow money or rely on credit?
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6. What effect does adding interest have on the sharecropper’s debt?
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7. How could sharecroppers still be in debt even after the crop was sold?
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8. How could a sharecropper eventually become economically dependent on the
landowner?
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CRITICAL THINKING
Sharecropping failed in the South because it depended on planting one cash crop. How do
you think its dependence on a single cash crop caused the system to finally fail?
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Reading: Sharecropping in Mississippi
“The Delta [an area between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers in the northwest of the state
of Mississippi; it is very flat and fertile] plantation system started in the nineteenth century
when white farmers went there in search of fertile farmland, escaping declining
productivity in other Southern states. They brought with them slaves to do the
backbreaking work of clearing the wild forest and subduing the Mississippi River with
levees. As a result of the slaves’ labor, the Delta became the richest cotton-farming land in
the country….
The Delta may have been beautiful, but work there was hard. Slavery and cotton
production became synonymous with the Southern economy and Mississippi…
Although blacks outnumbered whites, the sharecropping system that replaced slavery
helped ensure they remained poor and virtually locked out of any opportunity for land
ownership or basic human rights…
Under the system, the sharecropper rented a plot of land and paid for it with a percentage
of the crop – usually 30 to 50%. Sharecroppers would get tools, animals, fertilizer, seeds
and food from the landlord’s store and would have to pay him back at incredibly high
interest rates. The landlord would determine the crop, supervise production, control the
weighing and marketing of cotton, and control the recordkeeping.
‘We’d get $12 per bale and we had to pick hard in order to have money to buy food
during that season,’ said Mississippi State Senator David Jordan, whose parents were
sharecroppers. ‘If we had a rainy week where we couldn’t pick at all, then we would have
no money. We would have to go get food and substances on credit.’
At the end of the year, sharecroppers settled accounts by paying what they owed from any
earnings made in the field. Since the plantation owners kept track of the calculations,
rarely would sharecroppers see a profit.
‘Some came out in the hole five or six times and they never did get out of the hole,"
Jordan said. ‘So what happened, they caught the midnight train or bus and headed to
Chicago and they never found ‘em, ‘cause that was the only way to get out of that
miserable situation.’
Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million blacks went North, leaving the South, the
cotton fields, and sharecropping behind. By the end of World War II, much of cotton
farming had been mechanized, and sharecroppers were thrown off the land. Some five
million blacks left after 1940, creating the second great migration to the North. In Chicago,
which had a direct train route from Mississippi, the black-owned newspaper The Chicago
Defender urged blacks to migrate, and lobbied railroads to offer group rates for travelers.
Black porters working on the trains distributed The Defender onboard.
With African Americans leaving the South en masse and the unstable price of cotton
during wartime, Mississippi planters and white businessmen worried about their economic
stability. Threatened by the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, some whites took
action, forming Citizens Councils to ensure that blacks would be blocked from economic
success. Mississippi was among the last Southern states to integrate the schools and allow
blacks to vote.
Mechanization and migration put an end to the sharecropping system by the 1960s,
though some forms of tenant farming still exist in the 21st century.”
~ pbs.org
Questions:
1- Why did white farmers move to the Mississippi Delta region in the 1800s?
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2- Who did these white farmers rely on to do backbreaking labor on their fields?
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3- What crop was the primary crop of the Mississippi Delta?
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4- What system helped ensure that African Americans remained poor and virtually
locked out of any opportunity for land ownership after the Civil War?
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5- Explain how the sharecropping system worked.
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6- Why were sharecroppers in debt?
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7- What example did Mississippi State Senator David Jordan provide to explain the
indebtedness of sharecroppers?
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8- According to Mississippi State Senator David Jordan, where did some
sharecroppers go to escape their indebtedness?
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9- What happened between 1910 and 1970?
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10- What happened by the end of the Second World War?
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11- What did the black-owned newspaper The Chicago Defender urge African
Americans to do?
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12- Why were Mississippi planters and white businessmen worried about the economic
stability of the South?
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13- What was Brown v. Board of Education?
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14- What were Citizen Councils?
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15- What forces finally put an end to the sharecropping system?
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16- How does this reading passage reveal the failure of Reconstruction?
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17- How was the sharecropping system similar to serfdom in Medieval Europe?
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18- Using the reading, why do you think Mississippi was the last state to integrate its
schools?
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19- How did emancipation without economic compensation led to the sharecropping
system possible? _________________________________________________________
Multiple-Choice Questions:
What effect did the system of sharecropping have on the South after the Civil War?
1. It kept formerly enslaved persons economically dependent.
2. It brought investment capital to the South.
3. It encouraged Northerners to migrate south.
4. It provided for a fairer distribution of farm profits.
In the ten years following the Civil War, a large numbers of former slaves earned a living
by becoming
1. conductors on the Underground Railroad
2. workers in Northern factories
3. sharecroppers on Southern farms
4. gold miners in California
By 1880, most southern blacks had found employment as
1. Sharecroppers
2. Artisans
3. Landowners of small farms
4. Wage Labors
Why did southern white landowners prefer the sharecropping system to wage labor after
the Civil War?
1. Paying wage laborers was too expensive
2. They made more money off the sharecropping system
3. Sharecropping kept blacks bound to servitude as agricultural laborers
4. Sharecropping required less work
What did the Fourteenth Amendment do?
1. Forbade slavery
2. Granted citizenship to black Americans
3. Gave black men the right to vote
4. Forbade racial discrimination in public places
What did the Fifteenth Amendment do?
1. Forbade slavery
2. Granted citizenship to black Americans
3. Gave men the right to vote
4. Forbade racial discrimination in public places
The Thirteenth Amendment
(A) Prohibited slavery
(B) Granted citizenship to all Americans regardless of race
(C) Enfranchised all American men
(D) Prohibited presidents from serving more than two full terms
After the end of the Civil War, limited economic opportunity for freedmen led many to
become sharecroppers working for former slave owners. Although sharecroppers were
technically contracted employees, their contracts were frequently unfair and exploitative.
Explain the meaning of the political cartoon.
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