my (possibly somewhat cartoonish) notion of cotton raising in the South in 19th century is that before slavery was abolished cotton was raised on both large plantations (worked by slaves) and small farms (worked by poor whites sometimes aided by a few slaves) and after emancipation many large farms were subdivided into sharecropper lots and so effectively became small.
Well, so I was wondering, what were the economic implications of this? Did the small farms run by sharecroppers prove more efficient than large farms run by teams of slaves before emancipation or teams of hired workers after? What was the rationale behind widespread adoption of sharecropping instead of continuation of the old plantation economy using hired labor of the freedmen?
Jimmy Carter’s book An Hour Before Daylight : Memories of a Rural Boyhood describes life on a Georgia farm in the 1930’s.
I’m pretty sure his dad had sharecroppers. Carter’s dad made money selling a lot of items in local stores, ketchup, pickles etc. from produce grown on the farm. Carter’s dad ran a farm store where the workers could buy supplies on credit (from their future earnings).
Owning farm land is very important to Southerners. You don’t sell it. That’s another reason share cropping came about.
Sharecropping works well when the landlord has lots of land but little cash to pay hired help, and the tenants can provide labor but don’t have the wherewithal to buy their own land and equipment.
You’re wrong that the large farms “effectively became small.” True, they were subdivided for the tenants, but the landlords not only kept title to the land, they also took a portion of each tenant’s output. The sharecropper grew what the landlord told him to, sold it through the landlord and relied on the landlord for equipment and seed.
That’s a pretty good question.
The first thing you have to understand is how labor works in relation to cotton in the days of yore. Cotton was an especially labor intensive crop and when it was being planted and especially when it was being harvested you needed a large labor pool to get the job done. When the planting and harvesting was done you just didn’t need the labor pool at all. So the planters after the Civil War have a problem. How do they ensure they have the necessary labor at the necessary time and how do they get that labor for as cheap a price as possible?
The answer was the share crop system. Landowners would rent out property to tenants, perhaps give them a little seed money, and buy up the cotton when harvest time came. Most of the tenant farmers were illiterate and all of them were pretty much uneducated. This made it easy for the landowners to control the price of the cotton and to determine just how much money the tenants owed them at the end of the year. “Sorry, Mr. Johnson, but it looks like even though you had a bumper crop that you still owe me $25 at the end of the season.”
Whether sharecropping was more efficient than the antebellum plantations is hard to say. To begin with it’s rather difficult at times to figure out whether an antebellum plantation was making a profit in any given year because they didn’t all keep efficient financial records like a corporation would. I’ve run across notes from a plantation with an I.O.U. written down for 1853 but I’ll be damned if I ever ran across an documentation that the loan was ever paid back. Nor do I typically run across a useful ledger detailing income and expenses like I would for a rail road or a shipping company.
From a social standpoint it was also a good way for the elite to maintain control over labor, particularly black labor. One of the biggest race riots in Arkansas occurred in 1919 when members of the various farmer’s unions attempted to get better prices for their cotton. Whites seemed to think that this was insurrection.
I won’t say that mine is the definitive answer to your question but I think it’s a good start.
In a way, share cropping is a modified version of the old Feudal system in Europe.
The Lord of the Manor obviously had much more power. He was the local ruler. But, the concept of letting people live on the land and use it for a share of the crops is the same.
I’m sure you’re aware of this, but other readers may not be - sharecropping was not by any means limited to black people. Lots and lots and lots of poor whites were sharecroppers, including my dad. Many of the local black families were actually wealthier than his, and as an adult he realized that when he played with their kids and they went out of their way to feed him lunch they were giving him charity. Which is weird and ironic, because his mother would never have allowed any of them in her house and his black childhood friends had to eat their poor lunches on her steps.
ok, so the lack of capital/cash in the hands of planters immediately after the war makes sense.
But sharecropping persisted for many decades after that. Suppose the year is 1890 and you are a big landowner who uses sharecroppers. Suppose you would figure out that transitioning to hired labor (possibly with the lots of pickers hired only during season from the cities or from amongst the local rural poor) would make better economic sense. Couldn’t you then raise capital to implement this solution? Equivalently, if sharecropping was truly a superior mode of organization, couldn’t the owners of big antebellum plantations transition their slaves to sharecropping?
Was there a big debate in contemporary economic/business thought about these issues? Was there overly strong cultural inertia preventing experimentation? Or did these methods actually extensively coexist depending on local conditions?
That’s a really big supposition. As a landowner how am I going to control the price of labor? If I want to draw from urban labor pools I’m going to have to offer competitive wages which will certainly make my operation less profitable or may remove any profit at all. I imagine landowners could have raised the capital to pay laborers but there doesn’t seem to have been an incentive to do so. Tenant farming also helps mitigate some of the risks of farming for the landlord. If the weather destroys crops then the landlord isn’t out the cost of labor to plant the seeds and the tenant farmer is still indebted to me for the starter money I gave him.
That’s a big if you’ve got there. How do we even measure whether or not sharecropping was economically superior to the slave system of the antebellum south? Transitioning from slavery to tenant farming represents a lessening of control over the labor. Don’t think the plantation owners would have been keen on that idea. Especially when the ownership of slaves could be counted as assets. Most people aren’t keen to just surrender their assets.
Yeah, other methods of cotton farming existed. My father was hired as a teenager to pick cotton in Texas. My mother-in-law’s parent’s owned a farm that grew cotton and hired a few laborers during harvest time.
I am not suggesting that slaveowners could have freed their slaves and used them as free tenants. I mean that they could have simply changed the management structure and made them sharecroppers while keeping them slaves. For instance in Russia there were two ways of owners’ taxation of serfs - using agricultural corvee tax (the equivalent of plantation slave work) and sharecropping type arrangement. In various circumstances one or the other were preferred, but the serfs stayed effectively chattel slaves regardless of the way they were taxed.
I’m not quite sure it would have been possible to have a share cropping management system while maintaining slavery. At any rate, what would be the incentive to do so?
Sharecropping also transferred much of the risk from the landowner to the sharecropper.
A typical sharecropping agreement had both a percentage of the crop and a minimum crop amount. Thus in a good year, the landowner gets his 40% of the crop. But in a poor year, he still get his minimum of 6 pounds of cotton per acre. That might be most of the crop for that year, maybe even more than the entire crop – in which case, the sharecropper will owe landowner that amount from next year’s crop (plus interest, probably).
As well, there were often ‘company store’ provisions in the contract: the tenant had to buy his seed from the landowner (at his prices), could not raise any seed of his own, had to have all his cotton ginned at the landowners gin (at his prices), had to get his supplies, materials, & livestock from the landowner (at his prices), etc.