Like so many other aspects of American life in the mid-19th century, the plantation network was completely upended by the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, ostensibly freed all slaves in rebellious states, the National Archives reports. Yet, slaves in Union border states and Union-controlled territories were out of luck, and the Smithsonian notes that Black people in Texas weren't aware of their legal emancipation until well into 1865. Ultimately, however, slavery was abolished throughout the U.S. At least, it was in name. In its place, cotton continued to grow and was picked by people working under the exploitative sharecropping system.
According to History, sharecropping was a farming arrangement wherein tenants rented small portions of land from an owner. They were supposed to give the landowner a portion of their crop each year in payment. Sharecropping often replicated the old, decidedly unequal relationship between white landowners and Black workers. Sharecroppers often had to pay their landlords for the use of tools, for example, putting them in persistent debt. The racist attitudes of the Reconstruction South also meant that those who spoke out or tried to break away from sharecropping could face serious violence.
Many sharecroppers, regardless of skin color, found themselves stuck in the arrangement. Even though cotton prices began to drop as the century moved on, sharecropping trapped many Southern communities into producing the crop anyway, per "The Second Great Emancipation."
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