Why did southern blacks enter into tenant contracts with large landowners to become sharecroppers from the late 1860s onward?

Question: How did Southerners create a public school system during the years of congressional Reconstruction?A. They appealed to the federal government. Reconstruction state governments did not ask the federal government to create a public school system.B. They based the school system on church organizations. Although churches were central in black community life, the school systems were not basedon them.*C. They formed interracial political coalitions. Southerners created a public school system during the years of congressional Reconstruction by forminginterracial coalitions of freedmen and sympathetic whites.D. They organized private sponsors and donations. Southerners did not draw on private sponsors to build their public school systems.Question: Why did southern blacks enter into tenant contracts with large landowners to become sharecroppers from the late 1860sonward?*A. They lacked the capital to buy farms on their own. As much as free blacks wanted to own their own land, they lacked the capital to make this areality.B. They were comfortable working with their old masters. Southern blacks had many reasons not to want to work with their old masters.C. They did not want the responsibility of owning a farm. Southern blacks wanted to own their own land very badly.D. They did not have the right to purchase land outright. African Americans had the right to purchase property but not the means.Question: What did sharecropping represent for many African Americans in the Reconstruction South?A. A status similar to wage labor in the North Sharecroppers were exploited more fully than northern wage earners.*B. A state of virtual slavery As sharecroppers found themselves caught up in a perpetual cycle of indebtedness, their obligations to their landlordincreasingly resembled the conditions of slavery.C. An opportunity for learning farming techniques from mentors White southern landowners never acted as mentors for sharecroppers, and southernblacks had plenty of experience farming.D. A stepping stone to success. Only a fraction of African American sharecroppers rose from tenancy to success.Question: What percentage of black farmers in the South managed to buy their own land after 1865?A. 5 percent The share of black farmers who were able to buy their farm was higher.B. 10 percent The share of African Americans who could own their own land was higher.*C. 20 percent About a fifth of black farmers in the South managed to buy their own land after 1865.D. 50 percent The share of African Americans able to own their own land was much lower.Question: Why did southern white yeomen also become sharecroppers in the years following the Civil War?*A. The war's devastation pushed many small farmers into sharecropping. The loss of harvests and destruction of the region pushed many smallfarmers into bankruptcy and forced them to accept rental contracts.

Immediately after the Civil War, many former slaves established subsistence farms on land that had been abandoned by fleeing white Southerners. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and a former slaveholder, soon restored this land to its white owners, reducing many freed slaves to economic dependency on the South’s old planter class.

The freedmen, who wanted autonomy and independence, refused to sign contracts that required gang labor, and sharecropping emerged as a compromise. Landowners divided plantations into 20- to 50-acre plots suitable for farming by a single family. In exchange for the use of land, a cabin, and supplies, sharecroppers agreed to raise a cash crop and give a portion, usually 50 percent, of the crop to their landlord. Landowners extended credit to sharecroppers to buy goods and charged high interest rates, sometimes as high as 70 percent a year, creating a system of economic dependence and poverty.

This 1867 contract between landowner Isham G. Bailey in Marshall County, Mississippi, and two freedmen stipulates different arrangements for each man’s family. Both Charles Roberts and Cooper Hughs were to raise cotton and corn and give more than half of the cotton and two-thirds of the corn they raised to Bailey, but the Roberts family was to receive 487 pounds of meat to the Hughs family’s 550 pounds. Additionally, Charles Roberts and his wife agreed to do housework for an additional $50 a year, while the Hughs family agreed to tend the livestock for no additional compensation.

As a symbol of their newly won independence, freedmen had teams of mules drag their former slave cabins away from the slave quarters into their own fields. Wives and daughters sharply reduced their labor in the fields and instead devoted more time to home and childcare. But the exploitative sharecropping system also helped ensure that the South’s economy became almost entirely dependent on a single crop—cotton—and an increasing number of Southerners, white and black, were reduced to tenant farming, working as laborers on land they did not own.

A full transcript is available.

Excerpt

. . . the said Cooper Hughs Freedman with his wife and one other woman, and the said Charles Roberts with his wife Hannah and one boy are to work on said farm and to cultivate forty acres in corn and twenty acres in cotton, to assist in putting the fences on said farm in good order and to keep them so and to do all other work on said farm necessary to be done to keep the same in good order and to raise a good crop and to be under the control and directions of said IG Bailey and to receive for their said services one half of the cotton and one third of the corn and fodder raised by them on said farm in said year 1867 and the said Charles Roberts Freedman with his wife Hannah further agrees and binds themselves to do the washing and Ironing, and all other necessary house work for said IG Bailey and his family during said year 1867 and to receive for their said services fifty dollars in money at the expiration of said year 1867 and the said Cooper Hughs Freedman further agrees and binds himself to give the necessary attention of feeding the Stock of cattle and milking the cows twice daily belong to said IG Bailey, and do the churning when ever necessary during the said year . . .

Read the document introduction and the transcript and apply your knowledge of American history in order to answer the questions that follow.

In what ways did African Americans in the South demonstrate an understanding of their newly gained rights?
Critics of sharecropping claimed it was “slavery with a paycheck.” To what extent do you agree or disagree with this evaluation? Explain your answer.
In what ways did sharecropping perpetuate (continue) the dependence of African Americans on white landowners?