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Sharecropping In Reconstruction

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The time after the Civil War is known as Reconstruction, a time period where America was trying to rebuild the country after the harsh ending of the war. Thousands of slaves had been released, searching for jobs and new opportunities, and many southerners were against the changes being made. The goal of Reconstruction was to have the country rebuilt and to establish unity, however that was not the case. Reconstruction did not provide freedom for African Americans due to the amount of racism prevailing in the country, political tensions, and the inability to work for themselves. Racism had been an ongoing issue within the south, even though it had only a small contribution to the Civil War. There were still many white southerners who were still angry over their …show more content…

Sharecropping is a cycle in which the former slave would have to use a landowner's land to grow crops, which leads to a continuous cycle of debt. In a diagram displaying the process of sharecropping, it is shown that the sharecropper was taken advantage of by the landowner, as they had to buy tools and clothing from the landowner, and after their harvest they were wonky guaranteed half of the earnings, minus the debt the sharecropper has for the year. It also shows how the sharecropper would have to pay more than what they profited from, forcing the sharecropper to attempt to increase the share of the following year's crop (Document B). This cycle lead to an extreme amount of debt that would be carried down into future generations, dooming their entire family. It provided no benefit for the sharecroppers, as they rarely were able to pay off their debt. This endless cycle of debt dismissed African American freedom, as the former slaves could not leave the land and had their future children doomed into sharecropping as

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The idea of sharecropping, where former slaves took out a loan and a land from their former masters, required that the masters would still receive some of the profits of their farm until they paid their debt. Abbot had a story about his time sharecropping; their families entire stock was burned, so, as Abbot puts it, his former master “had to take our land back and sell it to make up for the four or five hundred bales of cotton that got burned up” (Abbot). He continues by commenting that “we stayed on and sharecropped with him” (Abbot). Silas Abbot’s story is one that many families can relate to. As it has done here, sharecropping is generally an endless cycle of debt, all leading to a massive profit for the former master.

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The American civil war led to the reunion of the South and the North. But, its consequences led the Republicans to take the lead of reconstructing what the war had destroyed especially in the South because it contained larger numbers of newly freed slaves. Just after the civil war, America entered into what was called as the reconstruction era. Reconstruction refers to when “the federal government established the terms on which rebellious Southern states would be integrated back into the Union” (Watts 246). As a further matter, it also meant “the process of helping the 4 million freed slaves after the civil war [to] make the transition to freedom” (DeFord and Schwarz 96).

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