Advantages Of Sharecropping

At the time of the Civil War, land was destroyed in the south due to the war being fought in the area. So, there came the Reconstruction era were the government worked on getting the land back to a working economy. Land was hard to come by in the south around this time, so the newly freed people were left without land to live off of. To provide for themselves, many had to work as laborers on white-owned land to earn a living. In a sense they were basically already doing this, tending to the farm land when they were slaves, though now they are actually collecting an earning for their hard work. While some of them worked for wages, others felt that it was best for them to rent out the land. During the congressional Reconstruction phase, sharecropping became a system to move the economy forward after the war in the south. This system of labor appeared in tobacco and cotton regions where most freed people lived (Of the people, 465). This term of

This labor system reducued their risk when cotton prices were low and encouraged workers to increase production without costly supervision (Of the people, 467). Which ultimately created another advantage for the workers because they were now being rewarded with a share of the land they worked so hard to harvest within a year 's time. Overall I greatly believe that sharecropping was an acceptable way to help achieve economic freedom, especially for the blacks. They no longer had to do indescribable work that in the end did not benefit them, only the owners of the land that they occupied. They were able to acquire a contract that not only benefited them, with the chance to actually have a sense of "owning" land showing independence, but also benefiting the land-owners with them still earning a profit from the portions of land they rented out to the free