When the Civil War ended, the big question concerned the state of the freed slaves of the South. Recovery of the southern economy depended on getting the freedmen back into the cotton fields. During the period of Reconstruction the Radical Republicans in Congress tried to convert the freedmen into small free-holding farmers, but the former slaves were simply not ready to manage their own farms. What emerged out of necessity was southern farm tenancy, a system of near slavery without legal sanctions.
Instead of working in gangs as they had on antebellum plantations, the freedmen became tenants. The planter or landowner assigned each family a small tract of land to farm and provided food, shelter, clothing, and the necessary seeds and farm equipment. When the crop was harvested, the planter or landowner took the cotton to market and after deducting for the "furnish" (the cost of the items the tenant had been furnished during the year), gave half of the proceeds to the tenant. This arrangement became known as sharecropping.
In the decades after Reconstruction tenancy and sharecropping became the way of life in the Cotton Belt. By 1930 there were 1,831,470 tenant farmers in the South. What began as a device to get former slaves back to work became a pernicious system that entrapped white as well as black farmers. After 1900 the number of white tenant farmers grew alarmingly. By 1935 nearly half of white farmers and 77 percent of black farmers in the country were landless.
As farm tenancy grew, a tenancy ladder evolved. From the bottom rung, the hapless sharecropper could climb to share tenant if he could accumulate enough of his own equipment and money. Share tenants kept two-thirds or three-fourths of the crop, depending on how much they could furnish. If a share tenant progressed to a point of needing nothing but the land, he could become a cash tenant by paying a fixed rental. Cash tenants kept all of the proceeds from the crop.
Unfortunately, tens of thousands of farmers fell down the tenancy ladder rather than moving up it. Some farmers lost their farms or their status as cash or share tenants because of crop failures, low cotton prices, laziness, ill health, poor management, exhaustion of the soil, excessive interest rates, or inability to compete with tenant labor. Many tricks of nature (drought, flood, insects, frost, hail, high winds, and plant diseases) could ruin a crop.
