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Compare And Contrast Sharecropping And Slavery

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Evaluating Cruelty: Sharecropping and Slavery “After the Civil War, former slaves sought jobs, and planters sought laborers. The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping” (Pollard para. 1). Sharecropping is the action of allowing workers, called sharecroppers, to work on someone else’s farm. This let former slaves find jobs; however, farmers found loopholes to exploit the former slaves. Because of this, the workers were rarely paid the amount they needed for their needs. Sharecropping becomes a minute step up from slavery when the fact that the workers rarely were paid if at all, that due to their debts, workers never owned their own land so they couldn’t support themselves, and that this practice …show more content…

The American historian Nell Painter made several comments regarding the importance of land for the freed slaves. For example: “So they (sharecroppers) saw their own land as a means of having a stake in society” (Painter para. 4). Some more proof of this is the fact that it’s also stated that due to most southerners being rural, owning land was crucial to their way of life (para. 4). The evidence shows that white farmers who formerly owned slaves felt that by allowing the slaves to own land made them independent took away a resource the farmers heavily relied upon: slave labor. To keep this from happening farmers made the sharecroppers indebted to them keeping the sharecroppers from having any money to support themselves.

As stated, sharecropping had drastic effects on the relationship between black people and white people. Examples of this are shown when the article states: “Well, I’ve had so much trouble with these black people, I’m going to employ white people” (Painter para. 13)
Additionally, the overall actions between black and white people rose wages (Painter para. 13). The evidence shows that despite the fact the black people worked hard day and night the farmers still felt that they weren’t good enough and replaced them with white people who acted in the same fashion as the black people who had just been relieved of those positions which served simply to create a rise in

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