ued in 1868, we do not mean … slavery such as that which has been recently abolished, but some form of subordination of the inferior race that shall compel them to labor, whilst it protects their rights and provides for their wants.Debt Peonage. To achieve this end, planters signed former slaves to labor contracts. Under the terms of these contracts, planters advanced money to laborers in return for signed promises from the workers that they all pay debts before they moved on. Planters then found ways to increase workers’ debts while keeping them ignorant of any escape. Year after year, laborers remained bound to work off debts that always got larger. Though slavery was dead, in debt peonage, as this system of forced labor came to be called, the South brought some aspects of the slave system back to life.Sharecropping. Many freed people wanted no part of contract agreements for their labor. In order to make money from their fields, white landowners began to rent their land to African Americans and poor whites. In one common system, farmers called sharecroppers grew a crop on land owned by someone else. In return for the use of the land and supplies such as seed and fertilizer, the farmer gave one third to one half of the annual crop to the landowner. Others, called tenant farmers, paid cash for the rentalof land. They typically agreed to sell their crop to a local merchant, who gave them use of tools and supplies in advance of harvest. By 1880 one third of the white farmers in the south were sharecroppers or tenant farmers. When African Americans had grown 90 percent of the cotton before the Civil War, now cultivated 30-40 percent. African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers enjoyed more practical freedom than they had possessed as enslaved people. They controlled their own schedules, determined where they lived, and worked without white supervision. Yet the sharecropping and tenancy systems had serious drawbacks. Low...
