Literature Review: American Sharecropping
March 2013
Cotton sharecroppers weeding their cotton crop in Greene County Georgia, 1937.
The abolition of illiberal commercial relations in the American South gave rise to an arrangement in which labor was not quite free, nor entirely unfree. Due to its seemingly anachronistic features, American sharecropping drew comparisons to feudal arrangements in Western Europe. This analysis however, sparked significant debate about the nature of agricultural production in the American South as embedded within the context of the global expansion of industry during the nineteenth century, i.e., a time in which Southern landowners hired sharecroppers in order to produce for the market. These considerations as well as the specific historical conditions present in post-emancipation America make the study of sharecropping a peculiar, and potentially fruitful, standpoint from which to investigate the transformation of agriculture under capitalism.
Historians of postbellum America disagree on whether sharecropping marked a significant departure from the economy of the slave South or if, instead, this peculiar institution was more akin to an extension of unfree conditions of labor.[1] These divisions within the historiography of sharecropping highlight some of the difficulties in defining the nature of capitalist production. The following review will investigate some key points present in this body of work; it will primarily focus on the characterizations of (1) the sharecropping contract (2) payment under sharecropping.
First, a couple of words about method and the concerns shaping this review. The now classic debate between Paul Brenner and Immanuel Wallerstein serves as a succinct way to highlight important points of disagreement in the field over the historical nature of capitalism. [2] Unfortunately, the defining differences between the two sides are all too commonly reduced to a “free labor” vs. “market” centered explanation for the emergence of capitalism. Presented in this way, Brenner is responsible for giving causal primacy to the rise of free labor, while Wallerstein underlines the primacy of the ever-increasing division of labor on a world scale, thus giving priority to the expansion of market relations over time. This pithy summary is useful at defining the broad outlines of the debate, but it leaves out the presence, and transformation, of apparent pre-capitalist arrangements within a thoroughly capitalist world, e.g., the nineteenth-century American institution of black slavery, and Southern labor relations borne out its abolition, viz., the sharecropping arrangement.
The debate however, does leave guideposts for further investigation: Key to Wallerstein's conception of market expansion is the reach of commercial relations (i.e., its transformative breadth); Challenging the centrality of the market, Brenner emphasizes the historical emergence of free labor (i.e., its transformative depth), mainly by focusing on the emergence and generalization of a contractual relationship to work by those devoid of the means of production. Lastly, although to some extent both authors present a capitalist class as key to the maintenance and reconstitution of capital relations, Wallerstein highlights the role of the state as key to the expansive dynamic of capital, whereas Brenner focuses on the constitutive historical dynamic propelled by class struggle. Throughout this review, the highlighted concepts will serve as entryways into the different dimensions the sharecropping arrangement in the U.S., i.e., economic (e.g., the presence of commodity production and financial support), legal (e.g., assertion of bourgeois right and the form of contractual agreements), and political (e.g., class consolidation across the US and class rule).
I. A Summary Overview of the Classic Debates
In 1983 The Journal of Peasant Studies published a special issue on “Sharecropping and Sharecroppers.” The first article, written T.J. Byres, “Historical perspectives on sharecropping” lays out a comprehensive account of the changes and similarities of the sharecropping arrangements through history and geographical space. From Ancient Greece, China, Italy, France, Spain, to the United States, the sharecropping arrangement has appeared in many forms through the development of agriculture. Along with these accounts, Byres provides a survey of commentary made by political theorists; Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx figure prominently in the debates.[3]
Following the Physiocrats, Adam Smith famously attacked the French system of métayage.[4] Smith was in full accord with J.S. Mill's characterization of sharecropping as an inherently negative incentive system for landlord and laborer, but insisted that the arrangement was superior than slavery. Mill considered sharecropping inferior to a fixed money rent tenancy, and was extremely critical of the system of métayage. He had much greater tolerance for the Italian mezzaderia, specially in the Tuscany region. Here, unlike other regions in Italy, Mill found secure tenure, reasonably sized farms, and landlords willing to invest in capital improvements. Under these conditions, wrote Mill, sharecroppers would gain from the arrangement. His informant, sharecropper landlord and political theorist Simonde de Sismondi noted the unique conditions of Tuscany in contrast to Naples, Lucca, and the Riviera of Genoa where “inferior condition of the métayers” were widespread.[5]
Until J.S. Mill, British writers had unanimously condemned all forms of sharecropping. Their critique focused on its existence under the Ancien Régime, in which the noble landowner was entirely exempt from taxation while the métayer paid direct taxes in full.6 The métayage arrangement stipulated that the worker stay on the land for a fixed duration of tenure. In part, this helped secure the minimum time required for the completion of the agricultural production cycle. The arrangement however, was devastatingly precarious. Indeed, the French métayers, in the late eighteenth century, were "removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform to the will of their landlords in all matters." [7]
In the case of the Italian mezzaderia, Byres demonstrates how the sharecropping arrangement functioned as a means of introducing advanced production technology, e.g., the use of oxen, the substitution of the plough for the hoe, etc. However, whether this presented any advantage to the mezzadaro is questionable. Byres writes that, “this was a mode of surplus appropriation introduced by the lords to 'compensate...for the decline of the of the older type of due.'”[8]
Though Byres fails to mention Mill's perspective on the American situation at the end of the Civil War, it is worth highlighting here, especially in light of the downward trajectory of American Reconstruction. In 1865, Mill wrote to his American friends and argued that slavery was not to be resurrected by “an aristocracy of ex-slaveholders” regaining control “of the state legislatures.” It would thus be “absolutely necessary to break altogether the power of the slaveholding caste.” Mills warned that, “Unless this is done the abolition of slavery will be merely nominal.” His strategy—one that Republican radicals would later carry into Congress— involved blocking the Southern vote. “The slaveholders,” wrote Mill, “and their dependents must be effectually outnumbered at the polling places; [this] can only be effected by the concession of full equality of political rights to negroes and by a large immigration of settlers from the North; both of them being made independent by the ownership of land.”[9]
Not many took their cue from Mill, although he was hardly alone in his sentiment. At the end of the War, radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens proposed to confiscate the land of the 70, 000 largest landowners in the South; that land would be parceled out and given to adult freedmen, while the remaining estimated 354 acres were to be divided into farms and sold in pieces to the highest bidder. According to radicals, this initiative would create a class of independent farmers, i.e., petty-bourgeois producers, who might look to the Republican Party for leadership. The plan would have required an attack against the private property rights of Southern landholders—and as such it would have required coordinated efforts outside the Republican Party members. Leaders in the Party had fought for the eradication of Southern slavery by maintaining that there could be no property in man. In so doing however, the Party was able to stand firmly on the rights of property while attacking the form it took in slaves. But the confiscation of private land holdings was an entirely different matter.
Secretary of State William Seward spoke with the confidence of the Republican Party majority when in 1872 he declared that "there is in confiscation, unless when directed against the criminal authors of the rebellion, a harshness inconsistent with that mercy which it is always a sacred duty to cultivate.”[10] Later in life, Seward did note the gargantuan economic difficulties of emancipation as well as revealed serious doubts about his previous position on confiscation. Even then however, he did little to guarantee land plots to freedmen.[11] Stevens’s proposal failed to pass in congress, and the right of private property remained untouched.
Unlike Seward, Marx had no qualms with speaking out against the rights of private property. In an article for the New York Tribune, Marx had marked the year 1865 as the end of the “first act of the Civil War,” which had consisted in “the constitutional waging of war.” However, it was the second act, wrote Marx, one he characterized as “the revolutionary waging of war,” which presented the greatest challenges yet.
Like Smith and Mill, Marx held great contempt for the institution of slavery and supported all efforts to eradicate this form of labor by the Republican Party. Alas, in the aftermath of the war, and when the hopes of a revolutionary transformation were thwarted, sharecropping gained dominance as the primary system of labor in the American South. Marx regarded the emergence of share contracts on the largely post-feudal estates of Western Europe as a consequence of a desire to increase labor productivity. Sharecropping for Marx was therefore a transitional form of rent, a method of surplus appropriation intermediate between feudalism and capitalism. The emergence of sharecropping, according to Marx, depended on conditions laid out by more complete forms of labor control, e.g., the slavery of the southern US, or villeinage of Western Europe.
Sharecropping appeared as a viable labor arrangement only when social relations underlying these forms of bondage “prove[d] unable either to accommodate demographic growth, or to secure the expansion output necessary to meet a growing urban demand characteristic of incipient capitalism.”[12] Sharecropping, according to Marx, as form of “labor arrangement,” met the needs for labor-power only under specific historical conditions facing similar difficulties. This quote should give historians of the United States some pause: Does Marx's description of a form of “incipient capitalism” adequately describe the conditions in the nineteenth century American South? At the center of significant debate, this formulation of the “transitional character” of sharecropping raises important questions to consider in the treatment of this period in American history: (1) What about the sharecropping arrangement was presumably capitalist? What is the definition employed in order to characterize it as part of capitalist relations? (2) Does this period mark the emergence of capitalist laboring practices in the American South or the extension of slave relations by a different name? (3) Finally, if sharecropping did mark a qualitative departure from slave relations, what is the nature of this “transition”? The following sections will take up these questions by unravelling the the make up of the sharecropping arrangement.
For Smith, Mill, and Marx, sharecropping was a temporary arrangement predicated on specific historical conditions. For all three thinkers, sharecropping marked a departure from slavery and a qualitative transformation toward capitalist relations. Marx, who had lived through the period of industrial capitalism, had already characterized the American slave South as intimately bound up with capitalism. By the mid nineteenth century, the connection between the American South and the expansion of British textile manufacturing made it critical to the growth of industrial relations at a global scale. Despite the prevalence of slavery in the South therefore, and the superficial similarities to European feudal relations, neither American slave labor nor sharecropping could be divorced from the expansion free labor.
In the aftermath of the the Civil War, amidst the South after the abolition of slavery, the question posed itself once more: What was the American South, now without slaves but also, importantly, without free laborers?
II. The Sharecropping Contract
Unlike the Southern black slave, the nineteenth century free-wage laborer, was not identical to his social position. Instead, the free worker entered into a contractual relationship and reconstituted himself through selling his labor-power on the market, i.e., as owner of his labor- power, a granted bourgeois right (the “right to work”).[13] The worker could then, potentially, make demands and chose to withhold his labor. Slave and free labor were thus different in kind and not merely different in degree. Espousing a similar sentiment during the American Civil War, Marx emphasized laborers around the world had a stake in that great conflict across the Atlantic, after all, in a society in which both slave labor and free labor were available, the capacity for the self-organization of the working class was undermined by the presence of a permanent laboring force. Thus, labour could not emancipate itself in the white skin, “when in the black it is branded,” i.e., laborers would be powerless if capitalists could replace them with members of a permanent laboring class.[14]
The contractual arrangement for an American sharecropper in this period was similar in form to the free laborer, but the differences between these agreements can help us understand the precarious status of the sharecropper. In entering in a contractual relationship with the landowner for the purposes of selling his labor-power, the sharecropper is limited by the unusual terms of the legal agreement. For although–it is worth underlining—in both free-labor and sharecropping arrangements, the presumed “equal ground” for the contractual relationship masks the unequal structural conditions shaping the very nature of the exchange, the peculiar limitations present in the sharecropping contract are definitively shaped by the immensity of the historical goal it is summoned to accomplish, i.e., jumpstarting a productive economy under the war-ravaged conditions of the American South. In order to support production at a rate that could satisfy the international dependence on American cotton, tighter controls over labor held the key to the American mission. This, however, proved to be a particularly difficult problem in light of the absence of both cash and credit for capital investment, including wages.
In the nineteenth century, the problem of labor in the South presented itself in two-fold way: First, it corresponded to a need for employment of the newly freed men and women; Second, it was the primary means through which to restore the American state to its role as the top cotton-supplier of textile manufacturing. Toward the resolution of both problems, in June of 1864, Charles Sumner delivered his famous speech, “A Bridge from Slavery to Freedom.” At this time he called for the establishment of a Bureau of Freedmen, a body of officials who would oversee the contractual arrangements of Southern workers as they entered into labor contracts with landowners. The Bureau would supervise the treatment of laborers, as well as mediate the needs and interests of landowners with those of the needs and interests of the new class of Southern workers. In the words of Seward, these official would “secure…the opportunity of labor” and assure that freedmen “can be properly bound only by contract.”[15] However, he clarified, they “[do] not assume to provide ways and means for the [economic] support of the freedmen.” The Bureau was responsible, rather, for securing Southern freedmen and women with “opportunities for labor according to well-guarded contracts and under the friendly advice of agents of the Government, who shall take care that they are protected against abuse of all kinds.”[16] The labor contracts that Seward proposed would bind the laborers to maximum of twelve months. [17] This limitation on the length of tenure was implemented, according to Seward, to avoid “slavery under an alias.”[18] After their terms were met, freedmen and women were once against free to find an employer and negotiate their wages through the bureau.
The limited mobility of black laborers in the South undermined their independence on from Souther landowners. Apart from binding laborers to the property of landowners until the end of their one-year cycle, sharecropping contracts also explicitly prohibited the solicitation of freedmen who were already under hire. Sharecroppers were thus bound to their place of work and limited in their capacity to successfully negotiate payment—although that didn't stop some from trying. In spite that regional differences in wages across the South presented some with the opportunity of better wages, most freedmen lacked the access to economic resources to move their entire families across state lines. Thus, in contrast to the free laboring arrangements of the manufacturing North, sharecroppers were much more dependent on their contractors than free wage laborers. [19]
In the wake of the Haitian Revolution, the first successful slave-led revolution, Thomas Carlyle had called for the formation of lifetime contracts” as a solution to production demands on the island. A similar sentiment arose nineteenth century America: "How [will] the negroes be 'regimented,' as Mr. Carlyle calls it”? Asked U.S. Treasure Department employee, Alanson Penfield, for whom the task of channeling freedmen into disciplined “industrial gangs or squadrons” proved daunting. Certainly, the path was not clear. And yet, he added, “That in some way or other they will be so 'regimented'—and either induced to work, or 'persuaded' to work, we entertain little doubt.”[20]
III. “Wages” and Land
In Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862- 1882, historian Gerald Jaynes argues that “The use of the term ‘wages’ for the method of payment practiced by most planters is one of the true misnomers of the period.”[21] Sharecroppers in the American South worked for a share of the crop, over which they had no direct control. Contrary to previous scholarship, Jaynes gives ample evidence showing how in the South as a whole, “no general attempt to perpetuate the centralized plantation system on the basis of money wages was ever made!”[22] Instead, farmers after the Civil War in the South commonly depended on the system of “long pay” to support the production of commodity goods. Under this method, payments to rural workers were distributed after the harvest, thus providing the landowner with some flexibility and, most importantly, time to sell his product on the market before having to compensate his workers.
The long pay method employed by landowners was one of the ways to mitigate the plummeting land values, absence of financial institutions and lack of capital across the war- ravaged South. To make matters worse, the disastrous seasons of 1866 and 1867 had devastated crops across the South and had a critical impact on the rural economy. [23] Freedmen were certainly in need of jobs, but it is worth noting how the landowners also desperately needed laborers.
In his study of the Natchez District from 1860 to 1890, historian Ronald Davis presents strong evidence that the move to sharecropping was a concession to freedmen. Davis argues that freedmen and women preferred share payments to wage payments in opposition to the landowners. [24] This suggests that freedmen might have perceived a greater degree of independence in the sharecropping arrangement than what their contractual agreements later specified, perhaps more akin to previous landlord-tenant relations established in the law books of the American South in which the tenant did not occupy the status of a laborer, but rather, “under such a contract [acquired] possession, dominion, and control over the premises for the term covered by the agreement, usually paying therefor a fixed amount either in money or specifics, and in making the crop [performed] the labor for himself and not for the landlord.”[25]
The system of “long payment” employed by landowners was a precursor to the sharecropping arrangement, which was exclusively a post-war institution. [26] Both systems shared the tactic of delayed payment by landowners until the end of the crop. Unlike the long payment however, in which money-wages or shares could be used for repayment, the sharecropping arrangement left the worker in a relatively more precarious position: An unsuccessful crop resulted in the loss of payment.
Jaynes compellingly argues that the absence of credit played a critical role in shaping the sharecropping arrangement in the American South. The temporal dislocation of payment, according to Jaynes, amounted to the displacement of risk by landowners onto the workers. The reason is two-fold: (1) The need for financial credit could be greatly reduced if landowners did not have to make a complete settlement with his workers until after the crop had been sold; (2) By entering into a contractual agreement in which the laborer agreed to sell his labor-power for a share of the crop paid only after the market exchange, the sharecropper was in effect extending credit to the landlord for the period of the production cycle. The landlord however, made investment decisions without input from the laborer and would “repay” without interest. To make matters worse, if the crop failed, the the worker had no other choice but to absorb the cost, thus leaving the landowner free to seek funds elsewhere.
The analysis by Jaynes focuses on the absence of capital in the American South. This assessment rests on one critical proposition: the abolition of slavery in the United States resulted in the eradication of the planters' main source of capital. In other words, because Southern slaves were intimately bound up in a system of commodity production at a global scale, for Jaynes, their purchase by Southern planters served as a form of capital investment—akin to the investment by capitalists in tools of production. Once slavery ended, the destruction of capital in the South led to a crisis of production. In the spirit of Smith, Mill and Marx before him, Jaynes highlights the specificities of the historical conditions in the American South as key to the sharecropping arrangement, affirming that “the choice of labor contracts, by employers or employees, cannot be explained independently of the historical development of the postbellum economy.”[27]
Unlike Marx however, Jaynes labels Southern landlords as a “non-capitalist” class on the basis that they are able to successfully deflect risk.[28] Arguably, this is where Jaynes looses track of the bigger picture, i.e., the transitional nature of American sharecropping in the history of American capitalism. In contrast to Jaynes, historian Barbara Fields describes sharecropping in the United States as a transitional period when "hybrid forms of [capitalist social relations] made up of relics of slavery grafted onto developing new labor relations" defined the organization of production.[29] For Fields, it is important to define the status of the laborer in order to understand the nature of social relations in the region. From this perspective, the sharecropping arrangement could be understood as a transitional form to wage labor. The primary foundations of which were established in the bourgeois relations enforced upon the South by the North in the aftermath of the Civil War, viz., the contractual basis for labor.
IV. The Future of Sharecropping Scholarship
The scholarship on American sharecropping brings in a host of questions about the nature of capitalist social relations, especially on issues regarding the bourgeois basis for free labor, and the relationship between free labor's historical emergence and development alongside the persistence of relatively unfree forms of labor. The best examples of scholarship capable of navigating this problem have emphasized the contingent historical conditions shaping the sharecropping arrangement.
Although both the economic and legal dimensions of sharecropping were dealt with at length in this review, the political dimension of this arrangement will only be dealt with here briefly. In reviewing the scholarship, it will become apparent that the issue does carry enough weigh to merit substantive analysis. That said however, the works under review did show a strong tendency by authors to align the sharecropping arrangement to the paternalistic relationship between master and slave. Albeit, the meaning of “paternalism” changed depending on the scholar: Whereas Fields poses the issue in terms of the obstructive paternalism of the planter who stands between the state and citizen (i.e., the sharecropper), Jaynes choses to emphasize the role of the market in guiding the paternalistic relationship between landowner and sharecropper. Historian R. Pearce has a similar response when writes “The sharecropping relationship could be characterized as paternalistic insofar as the sharecroppers were providing the planters with capital, they then did not chose how to invest this capital.”[30] Thus for Pearce, the fact that sharecroppers are unable to participate in the market “freely” points to a paternalistic relationship contractors and workers.
This grappling with the problem of paternalism seems like an attempt to articulate the modern quality—or lack there of—of the relationship between landowner and worker after slavery. This perhaps gets at something that points beyond the scope of this review: how do forms of authority transform under capitalism? And in what way is this change reflected by the move from slave relations to free labor relations? In other words, if the nature of authority in the relationship between the owner of the means of production and a free wage laborer is not the same as the paternalistic relationship between slave and master, what is the nature of this transformation and what does it say about forms of authority in the age of capital? Again, these questions are clearly beyond the scope of sharecropping. However, the formulation of these concerns as they appear within the sharecropping arrangement could use further elaboration in historical accounts of American history.
1. Post-revisionist scholarship of American Reconstruction emphasizes the continuity of conditions between the slave South before the Civil War and the post-emancipation American South. For a thoughtful and succinct account of Reconstruction historiography, see Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 82-100.
2. See Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" New Left Review, 104 (1977), pp. 25-92; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
3. T. J. Byres, “Historical perspectives on sharecropping,” (1983) The Journal of Peasant Studies, 10:2-3, 7- 40.
4. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) pp 389-91.
5. John Stuart Mill, Principles of political Economy (1848) (People's Edition: London, 1981) 183-93; J. Junction, C. Simonde De Sismondi, “Of Territorial Wealth” in Political Economy (1815) (Princeton N.J.: Scholar's Bookshelf, 1991).
6. The taxes functioned as penalties upon productiveness and were calculated according to the visible produce of the soil. See Cruveilhier, J. Étude sur le métayage (Paris, 1894).
7. Cruveilhier, J. Étude sur le métayage (Paris, 1894).
8. “Historical perspectives,” 19.
9. John Stuart Mill, “To Parke Godwin” (May 15, 1865) in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVI - The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1849-1873 Part III, ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) vol. 16, my emphasis.
10. William H. Seward, “War Powers of Congress, Confiscation and Liberation” (June 27, 1872) in The Works of Charles Sumner v. 7 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1880) p. 146.
11. "Can emancipation be carried out without using the lands of the slave-masters? We must see that the freedmen are established on the soil, and that they may become proprietors. From the beginning I have regarded confiscation only as ancillary to emancipation. The Great plantations, which have been so many nurseries of the rebellion, must be broken up, and the freedmen must have the pieces. It looks as it we were on the eve of another agitation. I insist that the rebel states shall not come back except on the footing of the Declaration of Independence, with all persons equal before the law, and government founded on the consent of the governed. In other words, there shall be no discrimination of account of color. If all whites wore, then must all blacks; but there shall be no limitation of suffrage for one more than for the other. It is sometimes said 'What! let the freedman, yesterday a slave, vote?' I am inclined to think that there is more harm in refusing than in conceding the franchise…." In Seward, letter to John Bright, (March 13, 1865, quoted in W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America: A History of the part which Black Folk played in the attempt to reconstruct Democracy in America 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935) pp. 198-199.
12. Karl Marx, Capital III (New York: Penguin Publishers, 1990) pp. 938-940.
13. Cf. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
14. Karl Marx, “The Working Day” in Capital, v. 1, (New York: Penguin Publishers, 1990), p 414.
15. William H. Seward, “A Bridge from Slavery to Freedom” (1864) Pamphlet Collection (Library of Congress) p 7-8.
16. “A Bridge,” p. 8.
17. Ibid., p. 14.
18. Ibid., p. 7.
19. Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
20. "Communication of Alanson Penfield" (who was at the time employed by the U.S., Treasury Department), p. 60. Economists (London), Nov. 17, 1865, pp. 1396, 1897. Quoted in Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working. Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (New York & Oxford: 1986), 11.
21. Branches, p. 246.
22. Ibid., p. 45.
23. Ibid., 141-142.
24. Ronald L.F. Davis, Good and Faithful Labor: From Slavery to Sharecropping in the Natchez District 1860-1890 (Westport, Connecticut, 1982) pp.104-05.
25. Quoted in Harold Woodman, “Post-Civil War Agriculture and the Law” in Agricultural History 53:1 (1979: January) pp. 324-325.
26. Woodman notes one possible exception, i.e., North Carolina. Ibid, p. 326.
27. Branches, p. 137.
28. “...But in offering a share of the crop, with the consequent risk, landlords relinquished the right to call themselves capitalists. Under capitalism the conservative validation of private ownership and profit has always been based upon the capitalist’s willingness to bear risk while securing for the less enterprising laborers a guaranteed wage.” Ibid, p. 313.
29. Barbara J. Fields, "The Nineteenth-Century American South: History and Theory," Plantation Society in the Americas 2 (April 1983): 7-27.
30. R. Pearce, "Sharecropping: Towards a Marxist View," Journal of Peasant Studies 10, no. 213 (1983): 42-74, p. 54.
