Sharecroppers
When people didn't own any land, or they lost
their land because of not being able to pay back money they borrowed,
they often became sharecroppers. This means that they would farm land that
belonged to somebody else (usually a rich man, because not very many women
owned land). The sharecropping family (both the parents and the kids) would
do all the work of plowing and planting and weeding and harvesting, but
they would only keep a share of the crop, and the rich man would get the
rest of it. Usually the sharecroppers got half and the rich man who owned
the land got the other half; sometimes the sharecroppers got two-thirds
and the owner got one-third.
People have been working land on shares since ancient
Egypt. We know about sharecroppers from ancient
Rome, and from ancient China
and India. Sharecropping
is better than renting land in some ways, because if the weather
is bad and you don't get much of a harvest, you still keep some of what
you grew. There's less risk of starving. But it's worse than renting because
even if you work very hard, you can't save much money to buy your own land.
After the Civil War
in the United States of America, a lot
of freed people who had been working as slaves began working in the cotton
fields as sharecroppers. They were better off than when they were enslaved.
Nobody could split their family up or beat them. It was better than working
for wages, because then the white people would still have been telling them
what to do. But sharecroppers were still poor, and it was hard for them
to save money to buy their own land. White land-owners liked that, because
they didn't want black people to own their own land.
Also, the white land-owners arranged things so that most
black families could not make enough money
sharecropping to buy their food and clothes.
They ended up having to borrow money from the land-owners, and soon they
were always in debt.
The land-owners said they could not leave the land if they owed money, so
in many places share-cropping ended up being a lot like slavery. After a
while, families that were too much in debt started just packing up in the
middle of the night and leaving town, and the land-owners learned to treat
the sharecroppers a little more fairly.
Here's a video with some more pictures of sharecroppers:
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