Description of Sharecropping Tenants on a Georgia Plantation, 1881

From Scribner's Monthly. 21:(1880-1881). 830-836.

A GEORGIA PLANTATION

The enormous increase in the cotton crop of the South alone shows that the colored people, as free laborers, have done well, for it is not to be disputed that they form very nearly the same proportion of the laborers in the cotton fields that they did when they were slaves. . . .

As will be seen by looking at the plot of the plantation, "as it was," all the negro houses were close together, forming "the quarter." The house in which the overseer lived was close to the quarter, lying between the quarter and the stables. This was always distinguished as "the house," and I have so marked it on the plot. It will appear that this arrangement of the buildings was the best that could be made, giving, as it did, the overseer the best opportunity for overlooking the property under his control. . . .

[Click on each thumbnail to see diagrams of the plantation in 1860 and in 1881]

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For several years after the war, the force on the plantation was divided into two squads, the arrangement and method of working of each being about the same as they had always been used to. Each of these squads was under the control of a foreman, who was in the nature of a general of volunteers . . . . Then, too, the laborers were paid a portion of the crop as their wages, which did much toward making them feel interested in it. . . .

This was the first change made, and for several years it produced good results. After a while, however, even the liberal control of the foremen grew irksome, each man feeling the very natural desire to be his own "boss," and to farm to himself. As a consequence of this feeling, the two squads split up into smaller and then still smaller squads . . . .

On the plantation about which I am writing, all of the tenants are colored men, who farm on a small scale, only two of them having more than one mule. Indeed, the first trouble in the way of dividing up the plantation into farms was to provide the new-made tenants with mules. Up to this time their contracts had been such that they plowed with mules belonging to Mr. Barrow, and very few had bought mules of their own. This trouble was met by selling them mules on credit . . . .

Their crops are principally corn and cotton, but they have patches of such things as potatoes, melons, and sorghum-cane, from which they make their syrup. They plant whatever they please, and their landlord interferes only far enough to see that sufficient cotton is made to pay the rent, which is seven hundred and fifty pounds of lint-cotton to each one-horse farm. The usual quantity of land planted is between twenty-five and thirty acres, about half of which is in cotton and the rest in corn and patches. An industrious man will raise three times the amount of his rent-cotton, besides making a full supply of corn, sirup, and other provisions, while really good farming would require about five times the rent to be raised in addition to the supply of provisions. Candor compels the admission that only a few tenants reach this standard of good farming; the others work sufficiently well to pay their rent, and make money enough to buy their clothes and spend at Christmas.