NARRATOR: In the aftermath of the Civil War, African Americans in the South set out to define their future as free people.
At the heart of that future was one of the great challenges of Reconstruction.
EDWARD AYERS, HISTORIAN: Perhaps the most fundamental thing that had to be decided the day that slavery ended was what form would labor take now. Slavery is fundamentally a form of extracting labor from unwilling people. Now what's going to happen? Well, you can't wait to find out. This is not an abstract question. The day that freedom comes, it's springtime. It's time to be plowing the fields. It's time to be putting in the seed. It's time to be clearing the ditches. So right after slavery, probably when black and white Southerners would have liked nothing more than just to be rid of each other, they're thrown right back in together.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN: Southern whites were completely convinced that slavery was the only way to get African Americans to work. They were genetically or inherently lazy and incapable of living by themselves. They thought that to blacks, freedom meant just lounging around doing nothing. African Americans thought this was ridiculous. One of them said at one of these meetings, "We supported ourselves and our masters when we were slaves. I don't see why we can't just support ourselves now. That seems a lot easier."
NARRATOR: One man eager to help blacks gain more independence was 27 year old Henry Adams, a former slave from Shreveport, Louisiana.
In the early 1870s, Adams decided to form a group to investigate conditions in the South.
READING, HENRY ADAMS: "We worked amongst our people in the fields to see what sort of living they lived. You can't find out anything till you get amongst them. You can talk as much as you please, but you have got to go right into the field and work with them and sleep with them to know all about them."
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN: The people understand that they're going to have to work. And the important question now is the conditions under which they will work. Most of the freed people do not wish to be returned to work regimes that remind them of slavery. They do not want to, for example, work in gangs. They do not want someone riding around on a horse with a whip curled on his shoulder, as the overseer had done under slavery. And they also do not want to work under the conditions that they had worked when they were slaves.
NELL PAINTER, HISTORIAN: There's work that is not work for commodities and not work for other people, that in that sense is not economic work. It's subsistence work. It's the garden you keep to feed your family. It's the crops you grow to take care of your family, not to export to Britain to make the Industrial Revolution.
NARRATOR: But both the South and the North were determined to keep blacks in the cotton fields. Northern industry needed that cotton. It was still the largest export of the United States. Getting the cotton economy going again became a priority in the immediate aftermath of the war.
For the newly freed slaves, though, land and independence were the priorities. When it became clear that the federal government would not support land redistribution, they sought employment in many of the plantations they had known as slaves.
At the beginning, they worked for wages. But there was little cash to be found in the post-war South, so planters and freedmen had to come up with a different arrangement.
By the late 1860s, a new system had taken shape. It would come to be known as sharecropping. The planter agreed to rent plots of land to the freedmen in exchange for a share of the crop. He supplied the land, the mules, the plows and seed; and they supplied the work.
FONER: Well, sharecropping emerges as a compromise between the black desire for land of their own, and the white desire for a very strictly controlled, disciplined labor force. And it's somewhere in the middle. The black families don't have, don't own the land, but they do rent a portion of land which they then work pretty much as they see fit. The white owner of the land has a labor force, but it's not a labor force that they can direct on a day-to-day basis. So it is a compromise. The problem is that it's a compromise in a larger economic context which is very disadvantageous. Cotton prices are falling. World demand for cotton is slowing.
DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN: Interestingly enough, blacks actually embraced sharecropping in its initial forms, because it gave them a sense of independence, and it gives them a piece of land they could see as their own, and half the crop (if they were working on halves, which became the model for doing this). They could see half that crop as their own. It also gave them opportunities in a social sense, for women to leave the fields, for them to control the hours and form of their labor in ways they had not been able to under slavery.
NARRATOR: But the independence they had mustered during the year amounted to little when it came time to settle the accounts with the planter.
AYERS: People who are fortunate could find that sharecropping had actually worked to their benefit. More often, black families work all year long, and they come up to the end of it, and they're ready to go get their share of the crop, their share of the money, and they go to the former master, and he says, "Well, you've all got a good crop in this year, but you know, remember when I loaned you that money for that medicine for your little girl? And I see here that you got a dress back there in December, and you know, I'm afraid that when we add up all that food that I loaned you money for, that you didn't quite cover it, and you still owe me some money. But I tell you what I'm going to do. We'll [make] the same arrangement again this year. Maybe you can work your way out of it." So you're still on the same land that you were on as a slave, and you can't leave until you get yourself out of debt.
NARRATOR: As he traveled through the South, Henry Adams observed the realities of sharecropping firsthand.
READING, HENRY ADAMS: "The white people rob the colored people out of two-thirds of what they make. For instance, the contract is for one-third or one-quarter of the crop. They take every bale and will not divide it at the gins but ship it to the city. Then when the cotton is sold they figure and figure until there is but little left to the colored man."
BLIGHT: But sharecropping of course over time was also a trap. It was a financial, economic trap, in the sense that by paying a share of their crop, they are eventually bound to that land, because they can never accumulate enough of their own cash to buy their way out. Some sharecroppers do manage to do that over time, in some regions of the South. Most do not.
NARRATOR: After years of research and appeals to the federal government, Adams gave up hope. In the late 1870s, he joined the Exoduster movement, leading tens of thousands of black people to Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma in search of land and economic independence.
Sharecropping would shape labor relations in the cotton South for fifty years, until the 1930s and 1940s, when mechanization forced hundreds of thousands of former sharecroppers off the land.
