Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy describes the post-emancipation lives of freed slaves in the South. As such, there is a need to focus on the change in the way labor was handled in the South, since emancipation brought about a major change in the way planters would be able to man their plantations. Foner describes many different methods by which white planters attempted to employ former slaves so as to save their plantations during reconstruction, but one that seems to rise above the rest was sharecropping. In his numerous examples, Foner seems to suggest that freedpeople preferred sharecropping to working for wages or under any other system; sharecropping allowed them to be autonomous to an extent, as opposed to working for wages and, therefore, under the thumbs of their former masters still.
Foner first describes the low country slaves’ way of life as one where slaves had “control over their own time and the pace of work”, since these plantations were organized on the task system and therefore set the slaves to work on preordained tasks per day, giving them a chance at free time or supplementary work when finished. (78) Given that this was in the antebellum South, this system of labor seemed about as forgiving as slavery could be to begin with. But even these slaves sought freedom, and “The Civil War shattered the golden age of the antebellum rice kingdom.” (79)
After the war, these newly freed slaves “assumed that emancipation would not mean a loss of privileges enjoyed under slavery.” (86) Therefore, sharecropping was appealing; former slaves in South Carolina would “positively refuse to make any contracts unless they have the control of the crops themselves; the planters to have little or nothing to say in the matter, but to receive a portion of the crop raised.” (87) Even as planters sought to introduce wage systems in order to regain control of their plantations, freedmen refused to sign such contracts, forcing planters’ hands as time ran out in a season to accept crop-sharing.
Meanwhile, plantations that did not employ a system of sharecropping had more issues with workers. Wage laborers would strike for higher wages and cash payments, as opposed to the check system which required workers to exchange them for cash at plantation stores. It was obvious to these freedmen that the planters were trying to gain as much control over their laborers as possible, but given how necessary their work was to the crop, laborers realized that they could easily strike and bring about change in their favor.
Therefore, it seems that, given how former slaves actually sought out and preferred a system that allowed them as much autonomy as possible and the strikes that formed out of plantations that employed wage systems, some freedpeople did view sharecropping as a preferable system. And, given that planters actively tried to avoid sharecropping because it did not allow them much control, it is not surprising that the system was popular with former slaves.