Post-war Enslaved People Economics - American History, 1493-1945

Sharecropper contract for Cooper Hughes and Charles Roberts

1 January 1867

View the contract between Isham G. Bailey and freedmen Cooper Hughes and Charles Roberts in the resource

At the end of the end of the American Civil War, the millions of enslaved people who had powered the antebellum Southern economy and agriculture found themselves free. Yet they had nowhere to go and the bond of subsistence they had with their former masters had gone. What were they going to do? On the whole, the answer was sharecropping.

Sharecropping was not a new phenomenon to the Reconstruction-era South and was not confined to free African Americans but it did become the dominant labor relationship for freedmen in post-Civil War America. This contract is a typical example of such a relationship. In Marshall County, Mississippi, it binds the freedmen Cooper Hughes and Charles Roberts, along with their families, to the landowner Isham Bailey. Bailey contracts them to look after 40 acres of cotton and 20 acres of corn. In return, Hughes and Roberts get to keep half of the cotton crop and one third of the corn. In addition to this, their wives must do the ironing and housework in Bailey’s home and milk his cows. Bailey will furnish the families with a set amount of meat plus cultivation tools and mules.

At the end of the Civil War, many Whites fled their lands and free African Americans set up subsistence farms on the untended land. Though with Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson sympathetic to the former enslavers, this land was restored. The former enslavers found themselves land rich once again but labor poor and thus the economic dependency as evidenced in this contract became the norm. Sharecroppers, unlike tenant farmers, had no choice over what they grew and had to rent their tools from the landowners. For some, it was slavery in all but name.

This relationship was not unique to freed African Americans and millions of Whites across the south were also bound by such contracts. Attempts to unionize and resist such harsh conditions did occur but the power of landowners to terrorize and intimidate were on the whole too strong.

Sharecropping continued well into the twentieth century when the mechanization of agriculture essentially finished the practice. Landowners no longer had the need of manual labor and former sharecroppers were abandoned to their fate. Many headed north to find work in burgeoning industrial centers.