Their Confederate dollars were useless, the banking industry was in shambles and not lending, and they had never had to provide for the expense of wages before. They had the land, but no one to farm it. So, a contract of crop sharing tentatively arose. The landowner would provide the land, the animals and the seeds, and African Americans would provide the labor.
During the season, the White owner or a merchant store would loan the African Americans food, shelter, medicine, etc. African Americans were in effect putting up their future harvest as collateral to finance the necessary equipment and land rental costs. Unfortunately, at the same time as sharecropping was emerging, the price of cotton — which was the main crop in much of the South — plunged. Besides the low-priced crops, other factors caused the harvest payments to vary wildly, for instance, high-interest rates on their loans, unpredictable harvests, and dishonest owners.
The debt to the landowners compounded year after year until there was no way to ever repay it, which tied sharecroppers to the plantation land without an option to leave. This vicious cycle essentially turned sharecropping into another form of servitude and generations of families were impoverished with no other way to earn a living. By three-fourths of all tenant farmers in Oklahoma were white.
Some of these early arrivals acquired ownership by purchase, connivance, or intermarriage, but a deadly combination of economic and natural forces kept most from climbing the agricultural ladder. Between and the numbers of white tenants doubled. When the laws changed after statehood and non-Indians were allowed to buy land, tenancy slightly declined.
However, in the adverse years of the s, when agriculture suffered from low prices and overproduction, white tenancy rose again to nearly 70 percent. By , with , white tenants, Oklahoma had the highest rate of white tenancy in the United States. In the usual arrangement with share tenants in Oklahoma, the landlord received one-third of the grain crop and one-fourth of the cotton produced.
The tenant had to provide most of the equipment, animals, and furnish. Realistically, farming forty or fifty acres on this basis was a prescription for poverty, especially when cotton prices plunged. Tenancy did not necessarily equate with poverty, but in the southern tier of counties and in the triangle of Southeastern Oklahoma, tenancy devolved into much the same poverty-ridden system that existed in the Deep South and Texas.
Landlords made tenancy arrangements by oral contracts for one year only. At the end of the year most tenants moved on in search of a better place. Landlords encouraged moving because it prevented the development of an established tenantry. Because of a constant surplus of tenants, or renters as they were called, at the end of the crop year landlords easily recruited new renters, often on terms even more favorable to the landlord.
In fully two-thirds of all tenants moved from one farm to another. Because this system of land tenure was so transitory, the landlord was required to provide nothing but the land. While this yielded a thin profit on very little investment, it was the road to disaster. Neither the one-year tenant nor the landlord had a reason to make improvements on the land or to practice conservation.
Essentially, they mined the soil. Carried to its logical conclusion, soil mining would leave the land eroded and exhausted. Production would cease, and the landlords, the tenants, and the land would all be ruined.
Black tenancy in Indian Territory has a similar story. All of the Five Tribes had black slaves. When the tribesmen were removed to Indian Territory, they brought their slaves with them. By many cotton plantations existed in the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations, mostly in the fertile river bottoms of the Arkansas and Red rivers. Most plantations had several hundred acres in cotton and dozens of slaves to do the work.
The Civil War disrupted the plantation system in Indian Territory, and after the war most planters lacked money and manpower to resume operation. Post-war treaties between the U. Despite a delayed process, eventually most freedmen received land allotments of at least forty acres. The se farmers required all sharecroppers farming on their land to use th eir store for farming equipment and personal shopping. Prices in these stores w ere highly inflated. Since many sharecroppers did not have enough disposable income to purchase items during the year, many used this credit extensively.
Because of these high interest rates, many did not have disposable income after they paid off their credit line. If the harvest was poor, some sharecroppers remained in debt to the store until the next year. With mounting debts, farmers prioritized cash crops and could not spend time planting personal gardens for daily food consumption.
Because of poor harvests, farmers could not make enough income to buy their own land or start a savings account. This term w as used in future labor protests throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century protests. Sharecropping began to wean as a labor-system in the s. Once large-scale automation was introduced to farming, farmers could plant and harvest larger patches of land for less money in less time.
Buying machines became a more profitable venture than paying sharecroppers to farm smaller plots of land by hand. In addition, decades of poor labor practices left thousands of acres of land inhospitable to farming. These practices led natural disasters, such as the Dust Bowl, that scattered dust throughout the Great Plains, destroyed plant and animal life, and made the area uninhabitable.
Some sharecroppers did benefit from this labor system. Farmers were able to dictate their own hours, what to plant and where to plant their crops. Women were able to play a more active role in the home since they were able to devout time away from fields and crop cultivation.
Schools and communities were established near dense clusters of sharecroppers for educational and social enrichment. Ideally, sharecropping was a beneficial labor system that could create upward mobility for newly freed African Americans.
In reality, the sharecropping system was the site of exploitation and economic stagnation that only benefited few. Breadcrumb Home Learn Articles Sharecroppers.
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