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Farmers Without Land: The Plight of White Tenant Farmers and Sharecroppers
By Charles C. Bolton
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly
agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success
for many white Mississippians, a number of whites could always be found
at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or
sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with black Mississippians
in the century after the American Civil War.
Before examining the history of Mississippi’s white tenant farmers
and sharecroppers, some definition of these terms might be helpful. Both
tenant farmers and sharecroppers were farmers without farms. A tenant
farmer typically paid a landowner for the right to grow crops on a certain
piece of property. Tenant farmers, in addition to having some cash to
pay rent, also generally owned some livestock and tools needed for successful
farming.
Sharecroppers, on the other hand, were even more impoverished than tenant
farmers. With few resources and little or no cash, sharecroppers agreed
to farm a certain plot of land in exchange for a share of the crops they
raised. The exact amount of crops the sharecropper gave over to the landowner
depended on the agreement with the landowner.
The tenant/sharecropping system
Although the tenant/sharecropping system is usually thought of as a development
that occurred after the Civil War, this type of farming existed in antebellum
Mississippi, especially in the areas of the state with few slaves or plantations,
such as northeast Mississippi.
Not all whites who emigrated to even the poorest parts of Mississippi
in the years before the Civil War had the funds to purchase a farm. As
a result, most of the men who headed these households worked as tenant
farmers or sharecroppers. Many rented land from or farmed on shares with
family members and typically received favorable arrangements, but some
antebellum tenants or sharecroppers had to deal with landlords who were
primarily concerned with making profits rather than helping struggling
farmers move toward landownership.
Consider the sharecropping arrangement that Richard Bridges of Marshall
County worked out with his landlord, T. L. Treadwell, in the 1850s. Treadwell
provided Bridges with land, livestock, and tools; the landlord also advanced
Bridges some food. Bridges grew corn and cotton, and at the end of the
year, he had to give Treadwell one-sixth of the corn he grew and five-sixths
of the cotton raised. From his share of the crop, Bridges also had to
pay Treadwell for the use of the livestock and tools and for the food
advanced. Obviously, Bridges worked the entire year primarily for the
food he needed to live. He had no opportunity to make any money from this
arrangement and accumulate the capital that would allow him to purchase
his own farm.
The postbellum farmer
After the Civil War, tenant farming and sharecropping became a way of
life for the vast majority of Mississippi farmers. Freed African-American
slaves generally had no resources or access to credit to purchase land,
and most of Mississippi’s black population that worked in agriculture
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries became sharecroppers. With Mississippi’s
devastated economy in the years following the Civil War, increasing numbers
of white landowning farmers were also reduced to the status of landless
farmer.
Many of Mississippi’s small white landowning farmers, also known
as yeoman farmers, had not been heavily involved in the cotton economy
before the Civil War; however, after the war, a number of factors led
the white yeoman farmers to turn increasingly to cotton cultivation. They
needed cash to pay off debts acquired during four years of war and the
increased taxes levied during Reconstruction and beyond. In addition,
new railroad lines built after the war improved access to distant markets
and encouraged the development of commercial agriculture among formerly
subsistence farmers (subsistence farmers are those who grow crops primarily
to feed themselves, their families, and their livestock, rather than to
make a profit).
Unfortunately, the price of cotton began a long period of decline in
the late 1860s, and many of those white yeomen who had staked their future
on cotton production lost their farms. When they did, they frequently
became tenant farmers or sharecroppers. By 1900, 36 percent of all white
farmers in Mississippi were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers (by
comparison, 85 percent of all black farmers in 1900 did not own the land
they farmed).
The crop-lien system
For the postbellum tenant farmer or sharecropper, life became an endless
cycle of landlessness, debt, and poverty. Sharecroppers faced the most
hopeless situation, as most became enmeshed in what was known as the crop-lien
system. An 1867 Mississippi law provided that landlords could claim a
lien on the crops of their workers for any debts incurred during the growing
season.
Almost all farmers who worked as sharecroppers did have to acquire debt.
Most sharecroppers began the crop year needing to buy supplies, not only
to help raise their crop, but also to keep themselves and their families
alive until harvest time. The only thing they had to offer for collateral
was the crop they were going to try to raise. So, the sharecropper would
turn to a “furnishing merchant,” who might be the landowner
or perhaps a neighborhood merchant, who would exchange food and supplies
for a lien on next year’s crop. Some landowners who provided a “furnish”
(supplies and food) might merely require a greater share of the crop as
payment at year’s end. For instance, Elizabeth Brown, whose family
oversaw black and white sharecropper families in Perry County in the early
20th century, remembered that the typical share paid by sharecroppers
was one-fourth of the crop they raised, but “when we furnished them,
we got half of the crop.”
Other furnishing merchants kept accounts during the year of the debts
incurred by their sharecroppers, and at the end of the year, at “settlement
time,” the merchant would deduct these charges from the sharecropper’s
share of the crop. Oftentimes, the debt exceeded the amount the sharecropper
made from his share of the crop, and his only alternatives were to sign
on for another year with the same landowner/merchant or move on to another
farm. In both cases, the cycle of debt and landlessness remained unbroken.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act
While tenant farmers were perhaps somewhat better off than sharecroppers,
most tenant farmers were only one bad crop away from slipping into the
cycle of debt common among sharecroppers. Both tenant farmers and sharecroppers
were significantly poorer than their landed neighbors. Struggling from
year to year to acquire the basic necessities of life, tenants and sharecroppers
rarely acquired the consumer goods that were increasingly available in
the 20th century. A 1942 study by the state of Mississippi found that
only 10 percent of white sharecroppers had refrigerators, while only 14
percent owned radios. Landowners in the state were three times as likely
to own these same items.
The tenant/sharecropping system in Mississippi, and throughout the South,
began to die out during the 1940s and 1950s. The Agricultural Adjustment
Act (AAA) of 1933 led many landowners in the state to take part of their
lands out of cultivation in exchange for funds offered by the federal
government. Thus, landowners eliminated their tenant and sharecropper
plots. The AAA program was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal
measures designed to end the Great Depression. This program was designed
to reduce farm output in order to raise farm prices. An unintended consequence
of the program, however, was the displacement of tenant farmers and sharecroppers.
The AAA did provide Mississippi landowners with much-needed cash, and
in the 1940s and 1950s, landowners used these funds to take advantage
of technological advances that improved their ability to raise crops like
cotton. Landowners bought tractors to break the land, bought newly developed
cotton harvesters to pick their crops, and bought pesticides to rid their
fields of weeds (previously “chopped out” by tenants and sharecroppers).
In the process, Mississippi’s system of farm tenancy and sharecropping
quickly came to an end.
Charles C. Bolton, Ph. D., is chair and professor, department of
history, University of Southern Mississippi, and co-director of the university’s
Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. He is the author of Poor
Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North
Carolina and Northeast Mississippi, and co-editor of The Confessions
of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South.
Posted March 2004
Selected bibliography
Bolton, Charles C. Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and
Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1994.
Bond, Bradley G. Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South:
Mississippi, 1830-1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1995.
Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco,
and Rice Cultures Since 1880. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1985.
Ownby, Ted. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and
Culture, 1830-1998. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999.
Woodman, Harold D. New South—New Law: The Legal Foundations
of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.
Mississippi Oral History Program, Vol. 91, University of Southern Mississippi.
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