In Nothing But Freedom, author Eric Foner discusses the consequences of emancipation in regards to the two parties most affected by it: the freedmen and the planter class. Although there were many widespread social repercussions for those outside the institution of slavery, Foner focuses much of his essay discussing the competing economic, political, and social interests of the freedmen and the planter class. Unlike the relationship of a typical employer and employee, where mutual interests are often linked through interdependent economic objectives, the relationships that developed between the freedmen and their previous owners were much more strained due to the freedmen’s recent memory of slavery and the planter’s desperate need for cheap plantation labor. As Foner explains, freedmen in the Carribean (37), as well as freed blacks in the United States understood that “their aspirations were incompatible with those of their former owners” (71). However, out of a desperate need for a large labor class, many former slave owners recognized the need to reconcile their interests with black aspirations in order to preserve at least some of their antebellum status. This attempt to bring together the interests of blacks and planters resulted in the large scale formation of sharecropping enterprises. As Foner describes, the sharecropping system was advertised as a “way station” between the independent farming interests of the freed blacks and the “wage labor preferences of the planters” (45). In this blog post, I will synthesize the majority interests of the freed blacks and explain how sharecropping was not wholly opposed to those aspirations in its theoretical practice. However, I will also demonstrate how many of the bitter realities of sharecropping did, in fact, contradict the interests of the freedmen.
Although the interests of freed people are unique to their specific location, experience with slavery, and personal needs, there are many definite trends in the aspirations of post-emancipated blacks. In general, the greatest aspirations of freed blacks were to acquire land, become self-sufficient, and “labor under the circumstances of their own choosing” (21). As is evident with the experience of the low-country blacks of United States, as well as the black peasants of the Caribbean, many freed people saw owning land, perhaps only a handful of acres, as a much better alternative to wage labor. As Foner describes, peasants in Haiti “understood that self sufficient agriculture, no matter how impoverished, was preferable to peonage on foreign owned sugar estates” (13). In similar regards, wage earners in British Guiana complained that labor conditions under the new system were worse than slavery because, as freed people, they were not provided any clothes or food rations (19). Although ownership of land, especially with high personal property taxes, lack of available credit, access markets, seed and fertilizer, was not the cure-all for freed blacks’ financial problems (34), blacks certainly saw ownership of land and self sufficiency as in their best interest, given the other alternatives. Although provision farming might not have been the economically rational choice—when compared dollar for dollar to wage labor on plantations, freed blacks and some white planters understood the high psychological cost of returning to slave-like wage labor. As Alexis de Tocqueville recognized, the only way to reconcile black interests, in order to get them back on the plantations, was to “destroy every relation which existed between master and slave” (29). This idea of removing the slave connotation from plantation labor laid the basis for the creation of the sharecropping system.
As Foner explains, the theoretical practice of sharecropping allowed for the productive labor of blacks on white owned plantations, while at the same time giving blacks autonomy over their time, labor, family arrangements, and economic advancement (45). Although this system did not allow blacks complete control over themselves and their actions, Foner points out that, in comparison with other manners of labor structure, the theoretical practice of sharecropping did not wholly contradict the freedmen’s aspirations of personal autonomy and socio-economic advancement (45). In fact, if one views the interests of the former slaves and the planter class on opposite sides of a spectrum, many planters criticized sharecropping as giving too great of a concession to black laborers (45). In order to get more blacks working on the plantations, many white critics of sharecropping would have probably liked to have seen an increase in the detrimental enforcement of small property taxation (68), vagrancy laws (22), hunting and fishing laws (65), and free-grazing laws (63). In all, sharecropping presented a unique opportunity for white planters to reconcile their needs with the interests of blacks black laborers.
However, in many places in the South, the bitter realities of sharecropping hindered the growth of mutualism between blacks and their employers. As radical reconstruction broke down, the distinction between sharecropping, debt peonage, and wage labor became blurred. In 1872, the Georgia court case of Appling v. Odum defined the sharecropper as having “no control over the land during the term of his lease” (61). This, in effect, completely contradicted the freedman’s aspiration to own and control his own land. In addition, landlords in North Carolina were legally allowed to hold on to the sharecroppers’ production until the landlord arbitrarily decided that the tenant had fulfilled his obligation (61). In this instance, alienating the black farmer from his crop goes utterly against the freedmen’s basic interest of, as a group of black ministers put it, living to “reap the fruit of [their] own labor” (55). In conclusion, sharecropping in theory did not wholly infringe upon the interests of the freed people; however, its increasingly constricting practices of debt peonage and black separation from the means of production greatly reduced the blacks’ interest in autonomy and reaping the benefit of their hard-work.