the first thing you need to know is that slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment in 1865 but this is a picture of a mississippi cotton plantation taken in 1901 to which i say what now here's where i tell you that although the coercive labor system that we call slavery was indeed abolished in 1865 it wasn't long after that that a new labor system called sharecropping which some historians call slavery by a different name rose to take its place so in this video let's compare slavery to sharecropping and try to figure out if slavery was indeed abolished or whether it continued on under another name hey if you're an apush or you're studying for an apush exam i'm going to tell you exactly what you need to know about these two labor systems so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked well then let's get to it first of all you have to understand that the bulk of the southern economy before the civil war depended on agriculture most notably the growth of cotton if a planter was wealthy enough to own a sizeable plantation and an enslaved workforce to keep it productive there was almost no limit to the wealth that such a planter could generate in the antebellum cell now under the system of slavery black men women and children were considered the property of the one who owned them and the word for that is chattel slavery now despite the fact that the southern social code taught that a slave owner was in a sense a father over his enslaved laborers and thus ought to care for them and protect them this theoretical paternalism did not prevent extreme abuses from taking place or maybe that was in fact the cause of such abuses now one of the best descriptions of this brutality that i know of comes from a former slave who escaped and gained his freedom in the north and his name was frederick douglass now when he was a teenager he was sold to a family and upon performing a task incorrectly was whipped severely and here it is in his own words mr covey gave me a very severe whipping cutting my back causing the blood to run and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger now after several months of this kind of brutality douglas reported a result far more devastating than the physical destruction of his body in fact he talks about the destruction of his soul i was broken in body soul and spirit my natural elasticity was crushed my intellect languished the disposition to read departed the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died the dark night of slavery closed in upon me and behold a man transformed into a brute now not only were enslaved workers forced to work long hours in difficult conditions and not only were they brutalized for any deviation from those orders this system had a way as douglas claimed of dehumanizing the slave he said behold a man transformed into a brute additionally under the system of slavery the owner had full authority to sell laborers as he saw fit and this often meant the breaking up of husbands and wives and parents and children enslaved black people had officially no agency over their own lives although they did find ways to protest such a system by slowing down work or in more extreme cases escaping altogether okay so that is the briefest of sketches regarding slavery before the civil war now in the closing year of the civil war a new constitutional amendment was proposed and ratified namely the 13th amendment and this amendment officially banned slavery in the united states in order to gain access back into the union the defeated southern states had to agree to this amendment so legally speaking slavery was a dead relic of a past age but big but massive but i wouldn't be making this video if there wasn't a butt but the question we're considering is this did the system of slavery endure in the south after it was constitutionally abolished and the answer as any good answer in history is is uh complicated so let me tell you a little bit of the story and then we're going to compare this new labor system to slavery and see if we can have some clarity now think of this conundrum with the union victory in the war and with the abolition of slavery being a condition for southern re-entry into the union what was going to practically happen millions of enslaved laborers would all of a sudden become free and how in the world are they going to earn a living for themselves remember a great majority of them had labored on plantations and so farming was the only work that they knew so lincoln understanding this instructed his general william to come to sherman to solve that problem and the result was sherman's field order number 15 which mandated that 400 000 acres of land be distributed to newly freed black citizens of the south and on that land they could establish a home and grow crops for their own survival and for sale on the market but lincoln went ahead and got himself assassinated and his successor the turd andrew johnson put the kibosh on sherman's field order so what option did the freed black population of the south have well they had to work for wages now by 1866 southern black citizens still held out hope that the federal government would grant them land and therefore many of them refused to sign any labor contracts and in that way in the first years after the war black laborers seemed to have the upper hand because of this there was a severe shortage of workers available to plantation owners when a planter did hire a friedman there was no guarantee of keeping him or her because if another planter offered better wages then they could just take up their work elsewhere but heavy rains and drought in 1866 to 1867 led to dangerously pitiful crop yields so whatever upper hand black workers had was lost as a result now because of the low crop yields and because many plantation owners banded together to prevent friedman from purchasing land many former slaves had little choice but to enter into contractual arrangements to work the land of the plantations now why would they do that well southerners feared making land available to friedman who could afford it because they witnessed what happened as a result of abolition in the british caribbean down there freed slaves largely preferred to secure and work their own land instead of returning to the large sugar plantations of their enslaved years and therefore the highly profitable sugar economy nearly collapsed therefore southern plantation owners sought to re-establish their authority over their laborers through contractual arrangements that did look a lot like slavery some contracts involved gang labor from sun up to sun down many mandated complete obedience to the planter a common set of stipulations prohibited blacks from leaving the plantation and gave them no freedom to entertain visitors or hold meetings without first getting permission from their employer however to a workforce that had gained its freedom after generations of slavery many refused to abide by these stifling rules for example when an alabama planter forbade one of his freedmen laborers to marry the laborer just up and left rather than submit to the regulation listen to how historian eric foner says this in his book on reconstruction planter's inability to establish their authority arose from the clash between their determination to preserve the old forms of domination and the friedman's desire to carve out the greatest possible independence for themselves and their families so the planters want to maintain the old system but their black workers want to assert their constitutional independence and that's creating tension on southern plantation so by 1870 a new economic arrangement was coming to replace wage labor on plantations and that was sharecropping by the end of reconstruction in 1877 it was the dominant labor arrangement in the south and the idea was that since poor laborers and you know sharecropping involved both black and white laborers since they couldn't afford to buy land for themselves nor the tools or livestock to farm it plantation owners would allow their tenants to rent the land and how would the farmers pay that rent well with a share of the crop that was produced at harvest time and you know that's why it's called share crop now as i mentioned earlier some historians call sharecropping slavery under another name and you know there is some truth to that black sharecroppers because they were dependent on the planters land often went into debt and they had to purchase their clothing and their plows and their mules on credit and often that credit was offered at enormous interest rates and so if the crop wasn't enough to pay off the debt and it often wasn't it was piled onto the rest of the debt and by this means many black sharecroppers were stuck on their land under the authority of white planters and in a lot of ways this system did look a lot like the old system of slavery the physical brutality included for example henry blake was a sharecropper and he was interviewed in the 1930s and he recounts an experience he had with his landlord who charged a bottle of syrup to blake's account now blake claimed that he never got that syrup and so the two came to blows over it and listened to blake's account as i turned to go down the steps he struck me a powerful blow on the back of my head and i fell from the porch to the ground i was not entirely senseless but i was stiff and could not move hand or foot while i lay before his door he told me that if i died he would pay my wife fifty dollars i hope there will be some loss sometime for us poor oppressed people if we could only get land and have homes we could get along but they won't sell us any land now the blow to the back of his head actually paralyzed blake permanently and by blake's own admission there was nothing that he could do about it since the legal system of the south would in no way defend him so it seems like sharecropping was indeed slavery under another name but it's more complicated than that so let me tell you how sharecropping was different than slavery for example look at these two maps of the same plantation published in a magazine called scribner's monthly on the left you can see the plantation as it was in 1860 and notice how all the buildings are bunched together those living quarters where the enslaved people live were right under the nose of the planter and with that kind of proximity he could keep a watch over his labor force but here on the right you can see the same plantation 21 years later under the sharecropping system notice how the living quarters of the laborers are scattered around the property now just the organization of these buildings alone tells you that there was a significant shift and it indicates that sharecroppers at least had some sense of personal autonomy apart from the watchful eye of the planter and again listen to eric foner while sharecropping did not fulfill black's desire for full economic autonomy the end of the planters coercive authority over the day-to-day lives of their tenants represented a fundamental shift in the balance of power in rural society and afforded blacks a degree of control over their time labor and family arrangements inconceivable under slavery so this means that black laborers even while many of them were going into debt under a coercive system were no longer chattel and they would to a greater extent determine their own destiny you know truthfully it seemed like everyone and everything was working against them but with the foundation laid here they would work for further rights and freedom in the next hundred years now listen if you're wondering how to earn the complexity point on your essays i would encourage you to watch this video again this is how you do it was sharecropping slavery under another name well kind of yes and kind of no anyway click right over here for some more apush videos in this period and if you want more help getting an a in your 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