sharecropping

sharecropping, form of tenant farming in which the landowner furnished all the capital and most other inputs and the tenants contributed their labour. Depending on the arrangement, the landowner may have provided the food, clothing, and medical expenses of the tenants and may have also supervised the work. The tenants’ payment to the owner was in the form of a share in the product, or in cash, or in a combination of both.

Following the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, most freed people lacked land or money and had to continue working for white plantation owners. Indeed, many plantations continued to run as large operations that were worked by wage-labourers or sharecroppers, including also poor rural whites, and sharecropping gradually became the accepted labour system in most of the South. Landowners, short of capital, favoured the system because it did not require them to pay cash wages. In addition to the land, the owners usually provided animal power, machinery, and most of the other inputs in the form of an advance. Cabins were commonly rented to the workers. Charges for the land, supplies, and housing were deducted from the sharecroppers’ portion of the harvest, often leaving them with substantial debt to the landowners in bad years. Sharecroppers received what was left if they were able to pay back the owners—generally about half of what had been produced under decent arrangements. A string of poor seasons or periods of low prices, coupled with the proliferation of unfair practices with little legal recourse, meant that many sharecroppers were held under the tacit bondage of economic insecurity (see also debt slavery).

Contracts between landowners and sharecroppers were typically harsh and restrictive. Many contracts forbade sharecroppers from saving cotton seeds from their harvest, forcing them to increase their debt by obtaining seeds from the landowner. Landowners also charged extremely high interest rates. Landowners often weighed harvested crops themselves, which presented further opportunities to deceive or extort sharecroppers. Immediately following the Civil War, financially distressed landowners could rent land to African American sharecroppers, secure their debt and labour, and then drive them away just before it was time to harvest the crops. Southern courts were unlikely to rule in favour of Black sharecroppers against white landowners.

The Great Depression had devastating effects on sharecropping, as did the South’s continued overproduction of and overemphasis on cotton and the ravages of the destructive boll weevil. Cotton prices fell dramatically after the stock market crash of 1929, and the ensuing downturn bankrupted farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 offered farmers money to produce less cotton in order to raise prices. Many white landowners kept the money and allowed the land previously worked by sharecroppers to remain empty. Landowners also often invested the money in mechanization, reducing the need for labour and leaving more sharecropping families, Black and white, underemployed and in poverty. Sharecropping in the United States gradually died out after World War II as the mechanization of farming became widespread. So too, African Americans left the system as they moved to better-paying industrial jobs in the North during the Great Migration. Similar forms of tenant farming are still found in some places around the world.