Sharecropping in the Postbellum South

            Sharecropping, in which a tenant applies his labor to another’s land in return for a share of the crop, has persisted as a major organizational form in agriculture, especially in the postbellum South.  The distinct feature of a sharecropping contract is the continuing incentive for both landlord and tenant to maximize the efficiency of agricultural production.  The postbellum South provided a unique opportunity to employ a plentiful human capital base to reconfigure a vast agrarian economic system.  This investigation will emphasize the joining of the tenant’s and the landlord’s interests as the essential cause of sharecropping over owner-operated farms.  Since farming conditions, such as soil, cultivation schedules, and so forth, as well as social perceptions, vary notoriously from place to place, the study will also review the development of sharecropping in the state of Tennessee to the state of Georgia.

Human capital matters to a state’s income level and its growth rate.  This study looked at the importance and effective utilization of human capital in explaining the convergence into a predominantly sharecropping agriculture economy during the postbellum South.  Many assumed that sharecropping was the only choice that existed in a postwar non-slave agriculture economy.  Recognizing the limited inquiry in this area, scholars, Martin A Garret, Jr., Zhenhui Xu, Neil Canaday, and Matthew Jarmeski conducted further research utilizing postbellum census data.  Garret and Xu employed in-depth empirical analysis, while Canaday and Jarmeski used regression models.  Investigating these data sets in conjunction with historical narratives from Georgia and Tennessee would refine a new perspective that sharecropping was not the only alternative but the most efficient form of agricultural production and thus its growth in the postbellum era.

Former historians Alfred Marshall and Adam Smith had inaccurately concurred that sharecropping was only inherently ineffective and wasteful, resulting in an insidious crop lien system producing a tenant system of poor agriculture.  The facts of sharecropping, however, did not support Marshall’s and Smith’s conclusions.  In contradiction, the landowner’s returns from sharecropped land were somewhat higher, not lower, than their returns from rented land; the ratio of labor to land and the average yield was at least as high on sharecropped land; and the ratio of labor to land fell, rather than rose, as the tenants’ share rate increased. 

Canady and Jaremski utilized Sutch and Ransom’s farm dataset produced in 1990 from 1879 information to examine the farm-specific conditions influencing the postbellum crop mix.  The dataset was a representative sample of the 17 cotton-producing economic regions of the South (4,428 farms in 26 counties across eight states).  Ransom and Sutch selected a 5% random sample of farms from the 1880 Census of Agriculture manuscripts from one or more counties in each cotton region.  The sample was then merged with information from the farmer’s entry in the Population Census manuscripts.  The main variables of the database revolved around crop selection and factors of production. The analysis identified that while labor-to-land ratios decreased, crop yields increased for sharecropping than owner-operating farms.

Garret and Xu reminded us that throughout time and across countries, however, sharecropping has been and still is an essential method of agricultural production.  Their hypothesis denoted that sharecropping should be viewed as an incentive to work instead of a tax that produced a disincentive to work.  Their research covering a span from 1880 to 1910 in the United States showed owner-operated farms decreased from 64% to 50% in the south while sharecropping rose to 24% in 1880 and 35% by 1910.  Garret and Xu employed the Cobb-Douglas type production function investigating the variables of output, capital, labor, and land derived from the U. S. Census Bureau (1890) data in 843 counties across eleven states.  Their results found that the output elasticity of the sharecroppers is higher than the output elasticity of the owner-operators on all occasions.

In conclusion, forces molding sharecropping in the postbellum South were, obviously, more varied and more complex than many believe them to have been. The expansion of sharecropping in the postbellum South has been attributed to the economic situation and institutional arrangement of that time.  After the Civil War, southern farmers faced a significant problem in trying to acquire capital.  Money was scarce at the end of the war, and banks and credit institutions had never existed in the vast agrarian interior of the South.  Ownership required a significant amount of capital.  Even if the capital became available, many freedmen from the Civil War might not have the expertise necessary to farm by themselves.  Surveys conducted by historian Robert Preston Brooks in Georgia during the early 1911-1912 and research of primary sources by Donald L. Winters in Tennessee demonstrated a compromise arising in a radical restructuring of plantation agriculture into sharecropping. Initially, being discredited as a form of disenchanted freedom, scholars are now revisiting the data in a new light.  They are discovering that sharecropping was indeed a more effective form of utilizing capital and human resources in the postbellum era.

Resources

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. "A Portrait of Southern Sharecropping: The 1911-1912 Georgia Plantation Survey of Robert Preston Brooks." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (1993): 367-81. Accessed May 18, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40582714.

Canady, Neil, and Matthew Jaremski. "Legacy, location, and labor: Accounting for racial differences in postbellum cotton production." Explorations in Economic History 49 (May 2012), 291-302. https://doi-org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.1016/j.eeh.2012.05.002.

Garrett, Martin A., Jr and Zhenhui Xu. "The Efficiency of Sharecropping: Evidence from the Postbellum South." Southern Economic Journal 69, no. 3 (01, 2003): 578-95, http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/docview/212127134?accountid=12085.

Reid, Joseph D. "Sharecropping in History and Theory." Agricultural History 49, no. 2 (1975): 426-40. Accessed May 18, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/3741281.

Winters, Donald L. "Postbellum Reorganization of Southern Agriculture: The Economics of Sharecropping in Tennessee." Agricultural History 62, no. 4 (1988): 1-19. Accessed May 18, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/3743372.