The Origins of Southern Sharecropping.

• Author: Fender, Ann Harper

In his wonderfully readable qualitative examination of the transition of southern agriculture in a few years succeeding the Civil War, Edward Royce attempts to explain why sharecropping arose as the dominant institutional arrangement between freedmen and landowners. His sociological study considering how class conflict between former slaves and former planters was resolved to neither group's total satisfaction adds a useful, though not entirely new, dynamic dimension to an often studied historical situation; by itself, however, it raises as many questions as it answers.

Royce begins by distinguishing his study from those that view sharecropping either as (1) the inevitable result of preconditions, especially the land/labor ratio or (2) the optimal outcome of individual maximizing processes. His examination of sharecropping differs from other approaches based on class struggle, he emphasizes, in that it views neither planters nor freedmen as being victorious; rather, each group found its possibilities constricted so that sharecropping arose from class conflict operating within the changed, constrained environment. Using "constriction of possibilities" as a research metaphor so that he can interpret the process via which sharecropping arose, rather than describe sharecropping as an outcome, Royce devotes the bulk of the book to anecdotes, testimony, newspaper articles, summaries of other research, and similar sources to demonstrate the narrowing range of opportunities open to the two parties. He considers the option preferred by planters, a return to the plantation system utilizing gang labor both to resolve the principal/agent problem and to achieve economies of scale, and argues, as have others, that while this may have been the source of high profits for owners it was despised by the labor force and those workers refused to accept it after the Civil War. Royce turns next to the option preferred by the freedmen: land redistribution. He suggests why the freedmen reasonably expected "forty acres and a mule" at the end of the war and briefly traces the political events which made that outcome unlikely. He next examines other efforts to resolve the "labor" problem in the postbellum South, including restrictions on labor mobility, violence, efforts to encourage immigration, and colonization efforts to relocate the freedmen to Central America or Africa. His strongest conclusion stresses the freedmen's role as active co-determinants of the...