Essay On Sharecropping After The Civil War

The second phase of the Civil War was a victory for the south, for their political ideas of former slave owners stayed far after the war. The south was dependent on slave labor and with the slave population now free they had to forcibly change tactics to control this population. Southern whites used legal, political, and violent means to whip the black population into submission. Laws like the black codes were in the south to restrict the black population from becoming a strong community. Common practices like sharecropping crippled the black community’s only field in which they had experience in. Violence from southern whites increased the fear stricken society and crippled their potential for any civil liberties. After the 13th amendment

Former slave owners needed a way to get cheap labor, and the black population needed farmable land, labor, and money. This conflict resulted in a practice called sharecropping, sharecropping is a system where black laborers would rent farm land from former owners in exchange for a certain amount of crops at the end of the year: a swindling process that would be detrimental to the black farming community. Sharecropping increased the black community’s reliance on their former owner’s farm land, and this harmed the southern economy greatly: sharecropping made the south rely more on cotton and agriculture just as the price of these goods was decreasing further harming the economy. While the black community gained individual freedom from their owners in their daily lives they still had to repay at the end of the year, this was hard to do considering the cost of seeds, tools, and food for yourself. Sharecropping increased dependency in all the wrong places on all the wrong things, free slaves needed new land and independence from their former owners and sharecropping did the exact opposite. Although the south’s black community suffered greatly with heavy debt the southern whites relied on the free labor that came with slavery before the Civil War

The Klan seemed to want to govern over the blacks and control them through ways of fear and violent attacks on their community this was ever present in the south and Elias Hill makes his record of one night he was terrorized. The Klan members targeted black men who were highly thought about in the black community, Elias Hill was not only a Baptist preacher, but also an intellectual among the community, a teacher after for young black children, and a mediator for business in his neighborhood. Hill was a noble man in his community, but he was also a crippled man which I believe made him the perfect target. He was immobile, for his arms and legs were crippled and shriveled up, he could not walk or take care of himself at all, and this made him the perfect target for the assault by the Klan