Post Civil War Farming in the South

1
Post Civil War Farming in the South

• Sharecropping/Tenant Farming

2
Causes of sharecropping

• Slavery abolished
• Landowners lack labor
• Small farmers lack capital to buy land
• (40 acres a mule) large scale land reform never
  occurs. Proposals to confiscate/redistribute
  land fail in Congress.
• Planters need a work force.

3
Effects of sharecropping

• Farmers caught in a cycle of debt.
• Rural poverty for both blacks and whites.
• Merchants prosper.
• Agricultural focus shifts from food crops to cash
  crops, therefore the South continues to import
  much of its food.

4
Sharecropping vs. Tenant farming

• Tenant farmer rents land, owns tools, is more
  independent, and makes decisions on what crops
  will be grown.
• Higher social status than sharecroppers.

5
Crop-lien economy

• Merchants supplie sharecroppers with supplies on
  credit and sold their crops to wholesalers/textile
  manufacturers. Merchants secured loans with a
  lien (claim on farmers next crop).
• Exorbitant interest charges.
• Many sharecroppers were illiterate and thus
  easily taken advantage of.

6
Postwar changes in southern agriculture

• Prevented crop diversification
• Planters (short on capital) didnt invest in new
  equipment or improve the land by crop rotation,
  contour plowing.
• Soil depletion and land erosion lock the South
  into a cycle of poverty.
• Tenant farmers trapped in a cycle of debt
  peonage.