The Origins of Southern SharecroppingTemple University Press, 5. 5. 2010 - 288 strán (strany) Employing both historical and sociological methods, Edward Royce traces the rise of southern sharecropping and confronts the problem of why slavery was ultimately replaced by sharecropping rather than by some other labor arrangement. With vivid primary accounts from planters and freedpeople, he examines the transition from slavery to sharecropping from the perspective of the participants themselves. His detailed analysis of the conflicts that arose between those struggling to preserve the plantation system with gang labor, and those in search of land and autonomy, illuminates relations between labor and capital. Royce critically evaluates two major explanations for the rise of southern sharecropping: one that credits certain favorable conditions (i.e., a class of large landholders, a shortage of labor, no technological incentive to mechanize); the other that views sharecropping as a rational market response, mutually advantageous to white landowners and black laborers. The author offers an alternative perspective, arguing that the rise of southern sharecropping is best conceived as occurring through a "constriction of possibilities." Contending that sharecropping came about more by default than by carefully orchestrated economic reconstruction by either or both classes, Royce presents a case study that highlights the conflict-ridden, contradictory, and contingent nature of the process of social change. His discussion of sharecropping after the, Civil War includes rich descriptions of the postwar plantation system and gang labor, the freed slaves' dreams of forty acres and a mule, the black colonization movement, the Black Codes, the Freedmen's Bureau, the Ku Klux Klan, and racial relations after the war. |
Obsah
1 | |
Gang Labor and the Plantation System | 25 |
Forty Acres and a Mule | 86 |
Economics Reconstruction and Southern Immigration | 119 |
Economic Reconstruction and Black Colonization | 150 |
The Rise of Southern Sharecropping | 181 |
Notes | 223 |
273 | |
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39th Congress abolition of slavery Alabama alternative American Colonization Society Baton Rouge Black Codes black colonization black labor force black landownership Bow's Review Carl Schurz Committee on Reconstruction Confederate confiscation constriction of possibilities Cotton Culture crop Dennett economic emancipation emigration Eric Foner Executive Document Number Foner former slaves forty acres free black labor Free Labor free-labor system Freedmen's Bureau gang labor gang-labor system homesteads ibid idea of constriction independence Joint Committee Klan labor contracts labor control landholders landowners Litwack Loring and Atkinson Louisiana State University Mule Negro in Mississippi northern perspective plantation agriculture plantation labor plantation system planters and freedpeople political postbellum postwar South problem Ransom and Sutch Reid rent land Report of Carl share system social change South Carolina southern agriculture Southern Cultivator 27 southern immigration southern planters southern sharecropping southern whites Storm So Long tenancy tion U.S. Congress Union army University Press white emigration Whitelaw Reid York