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1865–1877
A Social Revolution
Lacking the means to own land, most freedpeople were forced into tenancy. They 331
rented and worked land that belonged to white landowners under terms that favored
the owners. Black male heads of household entered into contracts with landowners
that spelled out the wage or paid labor, as opposed to slave or unfree labor relation-
ship. For their part, freedpeople sought fair compensation for their labor, work orga-
nized along family lines, and an end to physical punishment and gang-style labor with
overseers. They also wanted guaranteed leisure time and the right to hunt, fish, gather
wild food plants, raise farm animals, and cultivate designated plots for their own
use. For white landowners, the aim of these contracts was to ensure a steady supply
of farm labor so that their landholdings, planted in cash crops, would make a profit.
That meant limiting wages, forbidding worker mobility, and suppressing competition.
Labor contracts were difficult to break, and because most freedmen could neither read
nor write, many relied on Freedmen’s Bureau officials to look out for their best inter-
ests. The labor contract battles between freedpeople and landowners were at times
bitter and divisive, but in the end, the landowners were far more powerful, and labor
contracts generally favored their interests.
Despite their landholdings, whites operated within cash-strapped southern
economies after the war. Instead of paying farmworkers in cash, most negotiated
sharecropping arrangements under which farmers worked the land for a “share” of
the crop, typically one-third or one-half. Often the landowner supplied the cabin or
house in which the family lived, as well as seed, work animals, and tools. If a “crop-
per” had his own mule and plow, he might warrant a larger share of the crop. This
share he would “sell” to the plantation owner or a local merchant — often the same
person — following the harvest. But instead of cash changing hands, the sharecropper
would get credit to use for buying food and clothing — or whatever his family might
need — from the merchant. At the end of the year, when accounts were settled on
“countin’ day,” the sharecropper usually got no more than a bill showing how much he
still owed the landowner or merchant.
All too often, owners and merchants cheated workers, forcing them into a pattern
of cyclical debt. Even many black farmers who owned their own land were forced
into debt. For example, in a system known as crop lien, they had to borrow against
anticipated harvests for seed and supplies. Most black households were thus reduced
to a form of coerced labor, a kind of partial slavery, tied to the land they farmed as
the only means they had to work off their debt, which every year grew larger instead
of smaller. Debtors were also subject to imprisonment, and prisoners were subject to
another form of coerced labor, as states contracted out their labor to landowners or
businesses in need of a labor force. This convict lease system generated income for
southern states, but it forced prisoners to work under slave-like conditions that bla-
tantly disregarded their human rights.
Immediately after the war, the main goal for white southerners was to reassert con-
trol over blacks. State legislatures passed black codes that enforced the labor contracts
that once again bound freedpeople, who had few other options, to the land. The codes

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