A Study On The Postbellum Origins And Development Of Southern Agricultural Sharecropping System In The United States

The sharecropping system was a form of labor organization based on the original plantations in the South after the disintegration of the American slave economy,in which the family was the work unit and the crop share was the reward for labor.After the outbreak of the American Civil War,the sharecropping system took over from the plantation economy’s collective labor model and became the new main form of labor organization in the post-war South.The emergence and development of the sharecropping system had a profound impact on the post-war reconstruction of the South,and the study of this issue is of great academic value in understanding the economic and social transformation of the South during this period.Although there are many academic achievements on the division system,there is no systematic study on the history of the division system in China.This paper uses some of the primary sources collected and attempts to carefully review the origins and development of the agricultural division system on the basis of domestic and international scholarship,in order to reconceptualize the importance of the division system in the development of American history.The outbreak of the Civil War affected the way agricultural labor was previously organized in the American South.As the process of slave emancipation continued,the original slave plantation economy of the South was destroyed.Faced with the unknowns of the development of agricultural production at the time,former slaves and former slave owners did what they could to shape the new order to their advantage.Most of the former slaves were emancipated without land or other means of production and had no ability to support themselves and their families other than through labor.At the same time,former slaveholders fought to regain the control of labor they once had,some of them trying to return to the old order,but others determined to remake the South in the image of the North.In waging war and administering the occupied lands,the federal authorities attempted to build a new structure on the ruins of the old ways of organizing labor.In the Radical Reconstruction,the sharecropping system,in which the family is the main unit of labor,gradually dominated the labor organization method under the constant competition between various forces.In the post-reconstruction period,more than ten years after the end of the reconstruction,the development of the sharecropping system fell into difficulties and the social status of the sharecroppers declined because of factors such as crop liens.The first part of this paper examines how the agricultural labor was organized before the widespread implementation of the sharecropping system.As the military occupation progressed,the Northern army experimented with some ways of organizing labor in the South,including some attempts at sharing crops.After the Civil War,the emancipation of black slaves gave them the freedom to leave the plantation and work for themselves,who were working tirelessly to get a share of the land to themselves.The emancipation of slaves forced plantation owners to adapt to new ways of organizing labor,and with the coordination of the government,especially the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau,they signed labor contracts with freedmen,set pay scales,and a wage contract system emerged.It is worth noting that at this time,the wage contract system has appeared in the crop share as a way of paying for the labor.However,the freedmen was still working under supervision,and the form of labor retained the collective labor component of the slave plantation period,and did not belong to the sharecropping system based on family-based labor.The second part of this paper examines the rise and implementation of the sharecropping system in the South and briefly discusses the nature of the sharecropping system.The failure of the previous wage-based contracts,coupled with a change in the political environment,led to a significant change in the form of labor,which set the stage for the widespread implementation of the sharecropping system in the South.With the implementation of radical reconstruction,the sharecropping system also took shape.In addition,the successful implementation of the sharecropping system benefited from its own irreplaceable superiority,in partially satisfying the different needs of plantation owners and freedmen.In light of the sharecropping system emerging after the transformation of slave status,a new perspective on the nature of the sharecropping system is presented,taking into account the particularities of the period and the characteristics of the sharecropping system.This paper argues that in addition to economic exploitation due to the lack of means of production,black sharecroppers suffer some degree of super-economic exploitation due to the political resource advantage of whites and racist factors under the sharecropping system.The third part of this paper examines the implementation of the sharecropping system in the post-reconstruction period.At a time when cash was scarce and agricultural production was not functioning properly,the lending industry emerged,and by the 1880 s and 1890 s,the development of the sharecropping system had fallen into a debt trap.The outbreak of war had a huge impact on the financial sector in the South,and as the large banks struggled to rebuild and refused to lend to planters and sharecroppers,small lending institutions emerged in the form of credit stores.The supplying business of the stores was based on crop liens and required the cultivation of the cash crop cotton as a prerequisite for lending,and the economic status of sharecroppers declined,which eventually led to the perverse development of agriculture in the South.The sharecropping system arose out of a conflict between planters and freedmen,each working to maximize their own interests within the legal framework set by the federal government.As a result of the stalemate,both planters and freedmen found themselves at a disadvantage: the freedmen remained dependent on the planters,who had a monopoly on land,and the planters remained dependent on their former slaves,who had a monopoly on the labor market.Therefore,the evolution from a wage system to a sharecropping system was largely the result of a compromise between the planters and the freedmen.Its existence played a positive role in returning the laborers to the land in the South after the war.In the subsequent development,the disadvantages overshadowed the advantages due to excessive borrowing and reliance on planting cotton,the cash crop,creating a dilemma in the development of agriculture in the South,thus becoming one of the root causes of persistent poverty in the South.