After slavery was abolished, sharecropping took its place. In an attempt to prolong the plantation system, white planters loaned out their land to freedmen in exchange for a portion of their profits. Eric Foner creates a complex portrayal of this system. Although the system was exploitative in the same manner as slavery, there were more opportunities for controlling things like work hours. However, there is little evidence, if any, presented that demonstrates that the freedmen involved in sharecropping recognized those benefits as actually being beneficial to their needs and desires.
Eric Foner demonstrates with ease the different economic ways in which former enslaved gained greater autonomy due to the sharecropping system. Indeed, he shows that planters felt somewhat threatened by the system and that it “did not ensure the requisite degree of control over the labor workers” (45). He is similarly able to point to diaries of white farmers who complain about the laziness of the freedmen sharecroppers because of their desire to be paid and their lack of willingness to work as many hours as the enslaved did (88). Such stories certainly show that the sharecroppers were able to exert control over the situation they were more or less forced into, but they show nothing of the views of the freedmen themselves.
Outside observers discussed the desire of freedmen to own their own land, something that was essentially an impossibility in the South (44). The voices of the freedmen themselves are far more infrequent in Foner’s book, something that no doubt reflects the availability of written sources on the subject. When the voice of the freedman was recorded in Foner’s book it would almost invariably describe the difficulty of their situation rather than extolling the potential benefits of controlling land (71). Therefore, while it is fairly easy to understand that from a historical perspective the situation may have been objectively somewhat better, there is little evidence to show that the freedpeople themselves saw the situation as anything more than a continuation of exploitation. By rebelling against the continued attempts by white planters to keep sharecroppers from obtaining any sort of wealth, freedpeople were able to exert their own form of control, yet this rebellion shows that clearly something was wrong with the system. There were some marginal benefits and improvements in the sharecropping system, but it would be hard to prove that freedpeople viewed it as anything other than another obstacle to their desire to own land of their own.