Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom spends some time addressing the practice of sharecropping following the end of the Civil War. After emancipation, sharecropping was a labor system that developed where former slaves rented pieces of land from planters and grew sustenance and cash crops. The rent was paid in the form of freedpeople giving a certain percentage of their cash crops to the landowner. Ideally, most former slaves wanted to own their own land, but white planters had a vested interest in preventing this and many laws were passed to make it difficult or impossible for freedpeople to own land in some areas of the South (45, 49). The reason freedpeople wanted their own land was because they desired control over their lives that they had no had under slavery (44). Sharecropping, although not as good as owning land, was viewed by former slaves as an alternative that was much better than other labor systems that existed. As a result, former slaves did not view sharecropping as wholly opposed to their interests. As Foner says on page 45:
“Yet this later development should not obscure the fact that, in a comparative perspective, sharecropping afforded agricultural laborers more control over their own time, labor, and family arrangements, and more hope of economic advancement, than many other modes of labor organizations. Sharecroppers were not “coolie” laborers, not directly supervised wage workers.”
Ultimately, sharecropping became a system that did not give freedpeople very many benefits or very much autonomy. The Georgia court decision Appling v. Odum in 1872 was the first of several decisions that made sharecroppers into little more than wage workers with no power to make decisions about their rented land (61). And eventually, credit systems created surf-like conditions for tenants (45). Sharecropping was never the top choice for freed slaves. Owning land was always preferable, but that was extremely difficult to achieve, so sharecropping was viewed as a compromise and better than many alternatives. In practice, it provided little in the way of control and autonomy and it kept former slaves on plantations working for their former owners. However, because it appeared better in theory, former slaves did not view it as opposed to their interests.