Sharecropping In Plantations

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In the years following the Civil War, men from both the North and the South, white and black, needed to find work in order to rebuild their lives and provide for their families. Freed black men sought out land to farm and own, without restrictions or obligations. White farmers sold cotton to merchants, clinging to their land, unwilling to let it go. However, the expectations of both groups of men, turned out to be far different from the reality they faced. Plantation owners in the postwar period held the assumption that in order to gain abundant amounts of profit, the plantations must remain the main source of production. Owners intended to “limit the free market in labor and force freedmen to work on plantation gangs.” (Wiener, 72) This …show more content…
They resented that the land belonged to the planters after all their hard work, they proclaimed “the property that the planters held was nearly all earned by the sweat of our brows, not theirs.” (Wiener, 73) By refusing to work in gangs, freedmen created a shortage in labor, therefore defeating plantation owners. In an effort to save the plantation, planters compromised by using sharecropping. The land was divided into sections, each section being assigned to a different family. One planter admitted “sharecropping was an unwilling concession to the freedmen’s desire to become a proprietor.” (Wiener, …show more content…
One worker stated, “if you worked at the mill they’d just take your wages and put it in the company store and you didn’t get nothing” (Hall, 107) Owners later enforced a new form of labor with the assistance of supervisors. Discipline became harsh and arbitrary, supervisors would threaten and abuse the workers. In 1910 the Federal labor investigators reported that, “when an employee is dissatisfied about mill conditions he may obtain a hearing… and preset his side of the case.” Eventually both the mill owners and workers had to force themselves to work in an atmosphere in which they did not enjoy being in. After WWI, a change in the clothes women began to wear caused a devastating turn in the production of cotton. Mill officials cut back workers’ wages and by 1919 thousands of workers joined labor unions, multiplying as the years went
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