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The most difficult task confronting many Southerners during Reconstruction was devising a new system of labor to replace the shattered world of slavery. The economic lives of planters, former slaves, and nonslaveholding whites, were transformed after the Civil War.

Planters found it hard to adjust to the end of slavery. Accustomed to absolute control over their labor force, many sought to restore the old discipline, only to meet determined opposition from the freedpeople, who equated freedom with economic autonomy. Many former slaves believed that their years of unrequited labor gave them a claim to land; "forty acres and a mule" became their rallying cry. White reluctance to sell to blacks, and the federal government's decision not to redistribute land in the South, meant that only a small percentage of the freedpeople became landowners. Most rented land or worked for wages on white-owned plantations.

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During Reconstruction, many small white farmers, thrown into poverty by the war, entered into cotton production, a major change from prewar days when they concentrated on growing food for their own families.

Out of the conflicts on the plantations, new systems of labor slowly emerged to take the place of slavery. Sharecropping dominated the cotton and tobacco South, while wage labor was the rule on sugar plantations. Increasingly, both white and black farmers came to depend on local merchants for credit. A cycle of debt often ensued, and year by year the promise of economic independence faded.

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Subsection Label: Free Labor

The postwar South remained overwhelmingly agricultural. The implements of work were the same as before the war, but relations between planters, laborers, and merchants had changed forever.

As under slavery, most rural blacks worked on land owned by whites. But they now exercised control over their personal lives, could come and go as they pleased, and determined which members of the family worked in the fields. In early Reconstruction, many black women, seeking to devote more time to their families, sought to withdraw from field labor, a decision strongly resisted by plantation owners. Children, whose labor had been dictated by the owner under slavery, now attended school. As a result, landowners complained of a persistent "labor shortage" throughout Reconstruction, another way of saying that free labor could not be controlled as rigidly as slave.

Some urban growth occurred during Reconstruction, both in cities like Richmond and smaller market centers scattered across the cotton belt. Cities offered more diverse work opportunities for both black and white laborers.

Object Labels

1 Cotton Pickers near Savannah, Georgia 1867. (New-York Historical Society)
Under the scharecropping system, which emerged as the dominant labor system in the rural South, black families rented individual plots of land. The system placed a premium on utilizing the labor of all members of the family.

2 Cotton gin in use, DeBow's Review, October 1867. (Library of Congress)
3 Labor Contract, 1866. (University of South Carolina) [2 pages]
During Reconstruction, cotton remained the South's most important crop with the tools and methods of production essentially the same as before the war. Most former slaves now worked as sharecroppers, who kept one-third to one-half of the crop for themselves with the remainder going to the landowner. Although the system afforded workers some degree of autonomy, it kept most in a state of poverty and impeded the South's economic development. The contract is between Mary R. Desaussere of Kershaw District, South Carolina, and 32 laborers, all of whom were unable to write their names and instead made a "mark."
65- NEED Lithograph: The Levee, New Orleans, c. 1868. (Yale University)
Cotton was produced for export to textile manufacturers in the North and Europe. During Reconstruction, New Orleans remained the South's largest city and cotton port.

4"Rice Culture on the Ogeechee," Harper's Weekly, January 5, 1867.
5 Rice mortar and pestle, mid-19th century (South Carolina State Museum)
6* Rice fanner, mid 19th century. (Charleston Museum)

After the war, rice production continued along the southeast coast. Rice workers used traditional tools and methods developed in West Africa. Most worked on the task system, performed individual tasks after which they hunted, fished, or grew crops on their own time.

7"The Sugar Harvest in Louisiana," Harper's Weekly, October 30, 1875.
Sugar workers continued to labor in closely supervised gangs after the Civil War. An influx of Northern capital allowed sugar planters to pay their workers in cash, but conflicts between owners and workers arose over wages and discipline.

8 A nursemaid and her charge, from a daguerreotype, c. 1865. (The Valentine Museum)
9 Black Street Workers in Savannah (Schomburg Center)
10 White Workers in Tobacco Factory, The Land Owner, February 1874, (Chicago Historical Society)
Southern cities offered a variety of employment opportunities for blacks and whites. Many black women worked as domestic servants.

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Subsection Label: The Planter's Domain

The system of sharecropping, in which individual families rented portions of a plantation, arose in large measure as a compromise between planters' desire for a disciplined labor force, and blacks' insistence on controlling their own day-to-day labor.

Many planters were devastated economically by the Civil War. The loss of capital invested in slaves, and life savings that had been patriotically invested in Confederate bonds, reduced many to poverty. Some were compelled, for the first time in their lives, to do physical labor.

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Those who managed to resume production believed it would be next to impossible to prosper using free black labor. It was widely believed that African-Americans, naturally lazy, would work only when coerced. Charges of "indolence" were directed not against blacks unwilling to work at all, but at those who preferred to work for themselves rather than signing contracts with planters.

Many landowners wrote into labor contracts detailed provisions requiring freedpeople to labor in gangs as under slavery, and obey their employers' every command. But contracts could not create a submissive labor force; because of the labor shortage, dissatisfied freedpeople could always find employment elsewhere.

Object Labels

11 "The Great Labor Question From a Southern Point of View," Harper's Weekly, July 29, 1865
Winslow Homer's cartoon criticizing the post?war attitudes of many Southern whites toward freedpeople depicts a leisured white planter admonishing his former slave, "My boy, we've toiled and taken care of you long enough??now, you've got to work!"

12 Maps of the Barrow Plantation, Scribner's Monthly, April 1881.

Two maps illustrate the effects of emancipation on plantation life in the South. In 1860, slaves lived in communal quarters near the owner's house, subject to frequent contact and strict control. Twenty years later, former slaves working as sharecroppers lived away from "The House" on separate plots of land and had their own church and school. However, the "Gin house," where sharecroppers had their cotton cleaned, remained in the same location, central to the economic life of the plantation.

13 Richland Cotton Plantation Store, Mississippi, c. 1868. (Wadsworth Athenaeum) [Crop this image to focus on the store - left one-third of photograph]
After the Civil War, country stores offered a variety of goods shipped from the North. Farmers and sharecroppers often could not afford to make a purchase except "on credit" at exorbitant interest rates. Widespread use of credit increased debt and poverty among rural Southerners during the Reconstruction era.

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Biographical Sidebar: Mary J. Jones

Like other members of the planter class, Mary J. Jones (1808-1869) found her life transformed during and after the Civil War. Although the Jones family prided themselves on their paternalistic regard for over 100 slaves, emancipation irrevocably altered relations between whites and blacks on the Jones plantations.

Born to a planter family in Liberty County, Georgia, Jones was educated at local women's academies. In 1830, she married her first cousin, Dr. Charles Colcock Jones, a Presbyterian clergyman who devoted much of his life to the religious education of African-Americans.

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After her husband's death in 1863, Mary Jones, like other Southern white women of the era, found herself with new responsibilities. With her two sons serving in the Confederate army and then living far from home, she struggled on her own to operate the family's three plantations.

In a series of letters written to her children (and published in 1972 in the acclaimed volume The Children of Pride), Jones described the difficulties of operating a plantation in early Reconstruction -- crop failures, black resistance to white supervision, constant disputes over labor contracts. She had considered her former slaves "friends," she wrote, but now they were "only laborers under contract, [with] only the law between us."

At her childrens' urging but with great reluctance, Mary Jones moved to New Orleans to live with her married daughter at the end of 1867, renting her plantations to former slaves. She died there two years later.

14 Mary J. Jones, c. 1865. (Howard-Tilton Memorial Library,Tulane University)
15 African-Americans at Montevideo Plantation, c. 1898. (Howard?Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University)
In 1898, Mary Jones's eldest son, Charles C. Jones, Jr. published "Montevideo?Maybank, or, the Family Life of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, D.D." The book, illustrated with photographs of his family's plantation in Georgia, paid tribute to a way of life destroyed by the Civil War. Blacks living at Montevideo thirty?five years after emancipation descended from slaves once owned by the Jones Family.

16 A Visit from the Old Mistress, by Winslow Homer, oil on canvas, 1876. (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of William T. Evans)

American artist Winslow Homer captured the tensions and ambiguities of Reconstruction's new social order when he depicted an imaginary meeting between a Southern white woman and her former slaves. Homer, an artist correspondent during the Civil War, placed his subjects on an equal footing yet maintained a space of separation between the races. He exhibited the painting to acclaim at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878.

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Subsection Label: The White Farmer

Many white small farmers turned to cotton production during Reconstruction as a way of obtaining needed cash. As cotton prices declined, many lost their land.. By 1880, one third of the white farmers in the cotton states were tenants rather than landowners, and the South as a whole had become even more dependent on cotton than it had been before the war.

Before the Civil War, the majority of the South's white population owned no slaves. Few of these farmers grew much cotton; they preferred to concentrate on food crops for their own families, marketing only a small surplus, and making most of the tools, clothing, and other items they needed at home.

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The widespread destruction of the war plunged many small farmers into debt and poverty, and led many to turn to cotton growing. The increased availability of commercial fertilizer and the spread of railroads into upcountry white areas, hastened the spread of commercial farming.

By the mid-1870s, the South's cotton output reached prewar levels. But now, nearly forty percent was raised by white farmers. Like black sharecroppers, those who wished to borrow money were forced to pledge the year's cotton crop as collateral. Some found economic salvation in cotton farming, but many others fell further and further into debt.

Object Labels

17 Cotton farmers in the courthouse square, Marietta, Georgia, 1880. (Georgia Department of Archives and History)
Market towns like Marietta prospered from the cotton trade, but many white farmers found it difficult to make ends meet.

18 Upland family near Cedar Mountain, Virginia c. 1865. (Library of Congress)
Despite new links to a market economy, many farm families remained geographically isolated and culturally distinct from lowland Southerners.