Definition
Sharecropping is the post-Civil War labor arrangement in which a landowner supplied land, housing, seed, and tools; a tenant family supplied the labor of working the crop, usually cotton; and the harvest was, in theory, divided at year-end — typically half to the landlord, half to the cropper, less expenses.
In practice, the bookkeeping was controlled by the landlord, supplies were sold to the cropper on credit at marked-up prices from the plantation commissary, and the year-end "settlement" almost always left the cropper in debt. Sharecropping was the dominant labor system across the U.S. cotton South from the 1870s until tractor mechanization and the Great Migration broke it in the 1940s and 1950s.
Why it matters
How it works
A sharecropping contract was, on its face, simple. At the start of the year, a landowner and a tenant family agreed: the family would work a specified parcel for the season; the landlord would furnish land, mule, plow, seed, and a basic credit line at the commissary for groceries, clothes, kerosene, and incidentals. At "settlement" — usually late in the year, after the cotton was ginned and sold — the landlord would total the year's advances, deduct them from the cropper's share of the proceeds, and pay out the balance. In a fair accounting, a good crop year would leave the family with cash to live on through the winter.
The accounting was rarely fair. The landlord wrote in the ledger; the cropper, who often could not read, did not check. Prices at the commissary ran 25–100% higher than at independent stores, but croppers were prohibited (by contract or by intimidation) from shopping elsewhere. The cotton sale price was set by the landlord, not the market. Interest on advances was steep. The result, repeated for hundreds of thousands of families across the South, was the same: at settlement the family was told it had come out behind. The unpaid balance carried into next year's contract, and the family was bound to the same land to work it off.
A cropper who tried to leave was committing, in many Southern states, a crime — vagrancy, breach of contract, or "false pretenses" for having taken the advance. Sheriffs would retrieve the runaway family and return them. A cropper who challenged the landlord's bookkeeping risked retaliation ranging from immediate eviction to lethal violence. The whole arrangement was secured by Jim Crow's enforcement apparatus, not negotiated as a labor market.
Sharecropping's collapse, when it came, was driven by three forces: the mechanical cotton picker (commercial after WWII), which eliminated the demand for stoop labor; the New Deal Agricultural Adjustment Acts of the 1930s, which paid landlords to take land out of production and gave landlords every incentive to evict their tenants; and the Great Migration itself, as the workers who would have been tomorrow's croppers boarded trains for Chicago and Detroit. By 1970, sharecropping in the U.S. South was essentially extinct.