Sharecropping: A Similarity to Slavery The Civil War marked a monumental period in United States History. President Lincoln found himself attempting to preserve the union, while the Confederalists from the south were fighting to create their own separate country. This war was primarily caused by one issue: slavery. The northerners did not expect the power of the South; it was not the quick war that they had expected. Both sides had their fair share of victories and losses. From the beginning of the war the Confederacy had a strong advantage of military leadership. After turning points in the war such as the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam the power shifted to the Union, eventually leading to the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox …show more content…
Blacks were once again almost completely economically dependent on whites. Originally, southerners had wanted to restore they system of gang labor (Digital History 1). In gang labor, the slaves were divided into groups who had different roles, and worked all day. It was a very brutal form of slavery. The freed blacks did not want to return to a system such as this; they were free and therefore wanted more freedom. When sharecropping became popular, many blacks stayed on the plantations on which they had been slaves. In a way, they remained “chained to the soil” where they had spent their lives as slaves (Zinn 197). They lived in small cabins around the edge of plantations. Some were even still treated as slaves would have been (Horton 215). The sharecropping contract was signed for one year, but families were forced to stay for longer if they had any sort of debt (Berlin 324). Because of this, the sharecropping system became a trap for many families. Their debt became similar to the chains of slavery (Horton 214). They were almost always in debt to the farmer, as they were forced to pay for seeds, tools, food, and rent but only received a very small portion of the profit from their crop. The white landowners put high interest rates on these items, and the crop yield was unpredictable (PBS 1). This insured that the sharecroppers always owed more than they could pay (History 1). The landowners had almost complete …show more content…
They were not permanently trapped in this system. While the majority found themselves in debt, some were able to escape and start their own free lives with some money (History 1). Sharecroppers had much more freedom than they did as slaves. Many were able to choose their own work hours, and could relax if they happened to become injured. Families could decide who worked in the fields and how the work was divided. Because of this, many women were able to become more involved in domestic family matters: cooking, cleaning, and caring for children (Digital History 1). They were able to spend as much time in the field as they wanted and work as hard as they felt necessary without fearing punishment (McPherson 104). Their only punishment in this situation would be crops not succeeding as much as possible. This would lead to the family not receiving as much money from the landowner. This system was also beneficial to blacks because it did allow them to make money, even if it was not really enough (Macy 32). Having some money was a start for these freed slaves, who had never been able to own anything prior to being freed.This system was able to bring southern blacks more independence than they had ever had
Not stating that they were completely free from harsh conditions, but they were free from slavery, allowing Southern African Americans to join tenant and sharecropping. “The sharecropping system arose in the years immediately following the civil war, apparently as a compromise between freedmen who wanted land and cash-starved planters who found it difficult to pay wages” (Whayne 50). African Americans did not like this idea because these actions would remind them of their past of being slaves, they had just gained their freedom and wanted complete power and control to own their own land. Even though many African Americans did not agree with the sharecropping system, this tend to be the only choice that allowed the men in the south that had to support their families to continue working. By surprise Lee Wilson joined in the tenant and sharecropping union, but he treated his men a lot better than majority of the tenants did.
Following the ending of the Civil War in 1865, America was in an era known as the Reconstruction. The Reconstruction lasted until 1877. Citizens were attempting to rebuild our nation following one of the deadliest war in American History. In this time, the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution were ratified. Although slaves were freed, African Americans still faced intense racial prejudice and discrimination.
During the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery did not lead to many positive changes for former slaves. This was due the fact that a majority of newly freed slaves did not achieve anything close to political equality. An example can be seen in the period of “radical reconstruction” in the southern of United States, where freed blacks were able to gain full political rights and power but it came with the harsh price of segregation laws, virulent racism, denial of voting rights along with a wave of lynching that continued into the twentieth century. The economic lives of slaves also did not improve dramatically either. With the rise of the highly dependent labor like sharecropping, it had soon replace slavery and the reluctance
First off is the differences in social structure between the North and South. During the 1800’s, from about 1830 to 1870, the abolitionist movement North was to abolish slavery and put an end to racial inequity. This ties in with the sole cause of civil war because the opposition to slavery in the North and South created an uprising or conflicts between the North and South. The reason why slavery is considered the sole cause because everything ties back to slavery as seen here. Southern slaveholders decided to fight the Northern union as they believed in black emancipation.
Slaves took away jobs from the working white class. The masters were teaching slaves how to do the jobs of the working white class so instead of paying them to get a job done, they can now get it done for free. “Their financial opportunity is eliminated” (Pettengill 9-17-2014).They also were subject to ridicule from slave owners because they had no slaves. They were trying to make something of themselves in these colonies and the only way to do that was to work and save enough money to buy slaves. With no jobs, it was difficult to do such a thing.
However, this would not become a reality due to the lack of land redistribution. Furthermore, in 1872, the Freedmen’s Bureau were forced to evict thousands of African American families that had settled and created homes on the land that was confiscated from the Confederates. Many former slaves went back to working on farms with a system called sharecropping. Unfortunately, this system was
The Civil War is a central event in America's historical background. Though the Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861-1865 determined how the nation would pursue its future. The war resolved two questions left unresolved by the Revolution: whether the United States was to be a confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government, and whether this nation would have the agreement that all men were created with an equal right to liberty, or would the nation continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world. The Civil War consisted of many different battles that impacted both the north and south, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, Battle of Antietam,
The wealthy were in need of cheap labor, and with the amount of blacks being sentenced, most jails still functioning were overflowing with them. Leasing was designed for black convicts, and laws passed allowed towns and independent men to lease them for a price. They black convicts were put to work building railroads, levees or doing work for private owners. The convicts did work that free labor could not. Conditions were horrible and they were forced to work knee deep in muck, in malaria-ridden swamps, and to dynamite tunnels.
The process of black slavery taking route in colonial Virginia was slow. Black slavery mostly became dominant in the 1680s. Slaves became the main labor system on plantations. The amount of white indentured servants declined so the demand for black slaves became necessary in the mid-1660s. The number of white indentured servants that Virginia had up until the mid 1660s, was enough to meet white peoples labor needs.
The sharecropper system excluded poor blacks and poor whites from the political system and public life. Thousands left Mississippi making their way to the North to work in factories and other businesses. If you ask the regular citizen you would think that Mississippi is a great place to work and live. Employment is still high but the working people are making fair wages and pay their bills on time. Mississippi still has a long way to go in producing high paying jobs.
Sharecropping emerged because slaves that did not move away from plantations. IT was a product of the struggles of the Reconstruction and was in part was a good fit for cotton agriculture. Cotton unlike sugarcane, could be raised efficiently by small farmers. Sharecroppers’ freedom meant not only their individuals lots and cabins but also the school and churches. They could work on their own terms and establish rights to marry, read and write as they pleased, and travel in search of a better life.
This meant that workers had to buy seeds and equipment to farm on the owner’s land on credit, which was then subtracted from the profit made off of the crop. Workers using the sharecropping system almost never made enough money to buy their own land or become debt free from the land owner. During the 19th century American had achieved the goals of proper taxation and becoming an economically independent country, but I believe that Americans were far from the economy they had been promised by the
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South takes a profound look into slavery in America from the beginning. The author, Kenneth Stampp, tells the story after doing a lot of research of how the entire South operated with slavery and in the individual states. The author uses many examples from actual plantations and uses a lot of statistics to tell the story of the south. The author’s examples in his work explains what slavery was like, why it existed and what it done to the American people.
The American Civil War changed Americans and their ideals about freedom in many ways. Northern and Southern United states began to have simmering tensions for the states’ rights versus federal authority, plus westward expansion, and slavery had huge effects on the states. An election which made anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln the president of the United States of America in 1860, caused seven of the southern states to concede from the Union to make The Confederate States Of America soon after four more joined afterwards. It changed Americans in many ways as neighbors fought each other through the 4 gruesome years of the war. Conflict between the sides were like fights between brother and brother instead with many deaths.
The slaves were brought over initially to help the production and meet the demands for cash crops such as tobacco and cotton. African slavery in the U.S started as a tool for agriculture production and developed into a huge racial divide between caucasians and African American that is still prevalent today, years after slaves were emancipated in the U.S in 1863. In the book “Capitalism and Slavery,” author Eric Williams claims that "Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of