Sharecropping appeared in the Southeastern United States, including Appalachia, after the Civil War as a way to continue post-slavery white supremacy over African Americans, but it ultimately included poor whites as well. It was a way to avoid the now illegal possession of slaves while at the same time keeping workers for labor in a subordinate manner. Although former slaves and their descendants composed the majority of sharecroppers, the poor whites joined the blacks in their struggles against the landowners by the end of the sharecropping era.
Sharecropping by definition is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion, usually half, of the crops or the revenue that they bring in for the landowner. In return for the work on the land, the landowners supply the tenants and their families with living accommodations, seeds and fertilizer, tools, and food that can be bought in a commissary, charging fairly high interest rates to the tenants. These rates create an environment of debt and poverty that the sharecroppers have trouble escaping from. When they receive their portion of the money from the crops, the debts that they have procured comes out of their half of the money. Often this leaves the sharecropper with virtually nothing. Between the debt and the hard working conditions, a second form of slavery is created. It was not slavery with a person literally being owned but one of holding a person because they have no choice to go elsewhere. The landowners were the dominant persons in society while the workers were still on the lowest rung of the social ladder.
Although it may initially seem that the idea of sharecropping was a good one because it gave jobs to the former slaves, there were too many abuses in the system for it to have created a steady or fair environment for all the people involved. There were downfalls and abuses in the system of sharecropping. The white landowners treated the workers minimally better than they were treated as slaves. People watched them with rigid supervision and drove them to their limit. Along with the physical poor treatment, the sharecroppers were cheated out of their money in multiple ways. Since the owners had control of the accounts of all of the sharecroppers, the books could be fixed in order to make the fifty percent that the workers earned, less than what it should be. The bookkeeping was tampered with to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The previously mentioned interest rates were also very effective in keeping the sharecroppers in their place as subordinates. The debts would get to be so large that the workers would eventually be working just to pay off the debt. They ended up in a perpetual race to climb out of poverty and high interest debt. The final abuse of the system came because of the insistence on having a single cash crop. This did not allow for the possibility for the demand of other crops, and this practice led to the eventual demise of the sharecropping system.
The system collapsed with the coming of farm mechanization and reduced need for cotton. Both the mechanization and the reduced need for cotton resulted in the need for less people working on the farms. These lessening demands led to the complete collapse of the system. There was no reason to employ so many workers any longer. Although the unemployment rates skyrocketed, the people were finally free of being slaves to the farms.
They have not gained their freedom everywhere throughout the world though. There are some places in Latin America where sharecropping can still be found but it is not as common as it once was. Until recent times, sharecropping could still be experienced and observed in the Appalachian region, specifically in Alabama. Walker Evans and James Agee exposed the poverty-stricken ways of life for a sharecropping home during the aftermath of the Depression. Agee's quasi-fictional work, combined with Evan's photography of real life situations on the tenant farm, resulted in the work Let is Now praise Famous Men. When Agee's study was finally published in 1941, the country had a war on its hands and not enough time to concentrate on sharecropping and its downfalls. It was soon to disappear from Appalachia, the South, and America. With sharecropping gone it can now be said that slavery on the farms is truly abolished.
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