The Highland Clearances were a particularly unpleasant period in history when crofters (tenant farmers) living in the Scottish Highlands were forcibly evicted by the landowners. Primarily because they wanted to use the land to raise sheep. It lead to large scale depopulation of the Scottish Highlands and a lot of Scottish immigration to the North American colonies.
I’ve wondered if anything similar happened with sharecroppers in America? The large Southern plantations were farmed by sharecroppers after the civil war. I’ve wondered if there was a period when the sharecroppers were displaced similar to the Highland Clearances? Perhaps for cattle or other uses of the land? Anything on a large scale?
I know there was a very large southern black migration to Detroit, Chicago and other areas.
I’m just not sure if the black migration to Chicago and Detroit was due to land owners evicting sharecroppers. Or if other factors were in play.
There were many white sharecroppers too that were possibly displaced. AFAIK sharecropping is no longer practiced. A lot of farmers lease land but it’s not the same as sharecropping.
Obviously the South was never depopulated to that extent. But anyone familiar with the Arkansas and Mississippi delta regions will tell you theres not many people there. I’ve driven through it many times and it’s just huge cotton and soybean fields.
The Southern landowners were pretty happy with the sharecroppers as they were. They were held in place by loans bearing up to 90% interest, and if they tried to flee were arrested for defrauding their creditors, or even if free and clear for vagrancy, and then leased as convict labor back to the landowners. They were a lot easier to shear than sheep.
The grazing lands were farther out west. The sharecroppers mostly worked in the Deep South–those who left (and many did) went looking for a better life.
Yes…the sharecroppers were evicted. When mechanized farming came in (in a big way) in the 1940’s, the sharecroppers were told to leave. They went north (to industrial cities like Detroit, Cleveland, etc.). That was most unfortunate for them, for they arrived when high wage industrial jobs were moving AWAY from these places.
I read that the big landowners in the Deep South were only too happy to evict these people, because, having them around would have been inconvenient.
Here is the wiki on sharecroppers all over the world–scroll down for some general info on the USA.
The article say what I remembered from school…sharecropping was a sad story, not much better than slavery, although many of the sharecroppers were white. It was a life of dire poverty, and faded away in a natural process as times changed, and other options became available.
I remember a relevant scene from a movie set in the Depression (I think it was a version of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath) :
There is a scene where a rich banker drives up to a shack, and tells the sharecropping family that his corporation has bought up all the surrounding lands from the small-time farmers on whose fields the croppers eked out their living, so they will have to leave.
So yes, that is basically an eviction. But it seems to be different than the Highland Clearances of Scotland. It was not a governmental policy, and not an intentional social upheaval…it was just the result of changing economics.
It is not noted in American history books as a large-scale, singlular event,or given a formal name (such as The Clearances), and it not considered a traumatic episode, especially since most of the sharecroppers eventually found themselves better off after leaving their farmland.
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…and it is not considered a traumatic* episode in American history, especially since most of the sharecroppers eventually found themselves better off after leaving their farmland.
(It may have been traumatic to the invididuals evicted, of course. But they were very poor, and often illiterate. And History is written by the winners .)
The Warmth of Other Suns is the book that exhaustively details the migration of African Americans from the South to the North. Although it describes many hardships and difficult circumstances that lead to the migration, most African Americans were escaping from their lives in the South (sometimes sneaking out at night with nothing but their clothes), rather than being forced out. It is well worth reading for an insight into this pivotal piece of American history.
Technology displacing manual jobs has been constant since the start of the industrial revolution. Luddites, remember? (That page also references the far less known agricultural equivalent, the Swing Riots.)
Farm laborers had been leaving farms in large numbers for better-paying urban industrial jobs since the 19th century. Farm workers went from about 90% of the population to 18% in 1940 to under 3% today. Hired laborers today number a mere million. Southern black sharecroppers were about the last large group to do leave.
It’s somewhere beyond ludicrous to claim that mechanized farming evicted sharecroppers. If you use that term you have to talk about automobiles evicting blacksmiths. It’s a misuse of history and language.
You could draw analogies between the Highland Clearances and some of the various “range wars” in the late 19th century. Generally the conflict was between the small-time farmers and ranchers who had settled in the area earlier in the century and the big time cattle operators who wanted to get rid of the small homesteads in favor of more productive huge open ranges.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 payed farmers money to not raise crops on certain portions of land. This was supposed to drive prices for food up and benefit the farmers. This caused many sharecroppers to have to leave the land, since they could not raise crops on the idle lands so they could not make a living. It is hard to say how many left but the research I saw estimated 11% of sharecroppers left sharecropping in the two years after AAA was passed.
Keep in mind the highland clearances happened because of an accident of feudal evolution. In highland Scotland unlike in other locations, the peons were always tenants on their Lord’s land, rather than owning it.
Around the mid to late 1700’s the demands of British mills and the evolution of domestic sheep got to the point where they could be raised on what used to be marginal lands. The Lords, in the tradition of rich people everywhere, decided it was more profitable to raise sheep that to allow their kinsmen to continue to make a living, so they simply told their fellow clansmen to bugger off. It took very very few people to manage a huge flock of sheep. The name Glengary, for example, can be found all over the world, but the actual Glen Gary from what I recall was pretty much uninhabited.
I suppose there would be no similar development in the post-war south of the USA. In fact the opposite, IIRC - cotton plantations required a lot of labour to run, and mechanized low-labour farming probably did not happen until the 1920’s, with an interruption due to the dust bowl and depression. There was no major economic or agricultural revolution at the time encouraged eviction of sharecroppers in preference for a better, low-maintenance cash crop.
More likely any major migrations were at the initiative of the migrators from the southern USA (or due to climate conditions in the west). The crappiest factory jobs and even menial labour probably paid better and gave a better lifestyle than subsistence dsharecropping.
Thank you for the replies. Tenant farming is a tough way to make a living. My dad’s family were sharecroppers for several generations. My granddad was in his fifties before he managed to buy farmland.
My father was born in 1932, the youngest of 8 children. His parents where dirt farmers (as in ‘dirt poor’), living in the Tennessee Valley. One sister died in infancy, one married a local boy before my father was even born, and the other six moved North looking for jobs. My dad was the only one who stayed in the TN Valley, since by the time he was grown there were more jobs available. One brother did eventually move back—not because he had any good job praspects, but because he just missed home so much.