During the final months of the Civil War, tens of thousands of freed enslaved people left their plantations to follow the victorious Union Army troops of General William T. Sherman across Georgia and the Carolinas.

In January 1865, in an effort to address the issues caused by this growing number of refugees, Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15, a temporary plan granting each freed family 40 acres of land on the islands and coastal region of Georgia. The Union Army also donated some of its mules, unneeded for battle purposes, to the former enslaved people.

When the war ended three months later, many freed Blacks saw the “40 acres and a mule” policy as proof that they would finally be able to work their own land after years of servitude. Owning land was the key to economic independence and autonomy.

Instead, as one of the first acts of Reconstruction, President Andrew Johnson ordered all land under federal control to be returned to its previous owners in the summer of 1865.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, created to aid millions of former enslaved people in the postwar era, had to inform the newly free men and women that they could either sign labor contracts with planters or be evicted from the land they had occupied. Those who refused or resisted were eventually forced out by U.S. Army troops.

In the early years of Reconstruction, most Black people living in rural areas of the South were left without land and forced to work as laborers on large white-owned farms and plantations in order to earn a living. Many clashed with former owners bent on reestablishing a gang-labor system similar to the one that prevailed under slavery.

In an effort to regulate the labor force and reassert white supremacy in the South, legislatures in former Confederate states soon passed restrictive laws denying Black people legal equality or political rights, and created Black codes that forced the formerly enslaved to sign yearly labor contracts or be arrested and jailed for vagrancy.

These Black codes provoked a fierce resistance among the freedmen and undermined support in the North for President Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. A Republican victory in the Congressional elections of 1866 led to the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in 1867, beginning a new phase of Reconstruction.

During this period, the passage of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment granted Black Americans the right to vote, equality before the law and other rights of citizenship—although those rights would continue to be denied by a number of legal and economic devices in the era of Jim Crow laws and segregation.

Despite giving Black Americans the rights of citizens, the federal government (and the Republican-controlled state governments formed during this phase of Reconstruction) took little concrete action to help freed Black people in their quest to own their own land.

Instead of receiving wages for working an owner’s land—and having to submit to supervision and harsh discipline—most poor farm laborers preferred to rent land for a fixed payment.

By the early 1870s, the system known as sharecropping had come to dominate agriculture across the South. Under this system, families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves; in return, they would give a portion of their crop to the landowner at the end of the harvest season.

The system was used by white families as well as Blacks: The majority of U.S. sharecroppers (about two-thirds) were white, and in many areas of the rural South, only about one-quarter of white people owned land.

The sharecropping system also locked much of the South into a reliance on cotton—just at a time when the price for cotton was plunging.

In addition, while sharecropping gave poor farm laborers some autonomy in their daily work and social lives, and freed them from the gang-labor system that had dominated during the slavery era, it often resulted in sharecroppers owing more to the landowner (for the use of tools and other supplies, for example) than they were able to repay.

Some sharecroppers managed to acquire enough money to move from sharecropping to renting or owning land by the end of the 1860s, but many more went into debt or were forced by poverty or the threat of violence to sign unfair and exploitative sharecropping or labor contracts that left them little hope of improving their situation.

Although both poor whites and Blacks lacked much social or economic mobility, sharecroppers started to organize for better pay and working conditions, and the racially integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union, formed in the 1930s during the Great Depression, began to exercise some bargaining power.

But by the 1940s—with increased mechanization and better-paying jobs in urban areas—sharecropping began to disappear in the United States, though some form of it still exists in a handful of areas. Sharecropping is routinely practiced today in a few countries such as Bangladesh, Ghana, Zimbabwe, India and Pakistan.

Sharecropping. PBS.
Sharecropping. New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Sharecropping, Black Land Acquisition, and White Supremacy (1868-1900). Sanford School of Public Policy: Duke University.