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Footnotes 1235
it was only In the first year or two after the end of the War. In so far as it did appear
during this period of general disorganization, it was just plain human. The institution
of slavery to a great extent had debased ordinary work in the appreciation of black and
white alike. It was psychologically Inescapable that slavery should backfire in this way,
particularly during the initial period of freedom.
® Rupert B. Vance gives this concentrated account of how the system of share tenancy
came into being and how it became fixed upon the region:
‘‘A stricken upper class possessing nothing but lands met a servile population possessed
of nought except the labor of their hands. In what must have been an era of primitive
barter, a system was arrived at whereby labor was secured without money wages and land
without money rent. Up and down the Cotton Belt southern states after 1865 vied with
one another in passing crop lien laws. Accepted as the temporary salvation of a wrecked
economic structure, the system has increasingly set the mode for southern agriculture.
Under the crop lien system the unpropertied farmer mortgages his ungrown crop for the
supplies necessary to grow it. He also pledges a portion, third, fourth, or half of his
crop, for use of the land. The most outstanding commentary one can make on the South
is to point out the fact that from that day to this the percentage of those who must
secure their year’s livelihood by crop liens has steadily increased. Many of the enfeebled
aristocracy saw their once proud acres go on the block for ridiculously low prices; but
the hopes for the rise of a vigorous yeomanry to take their places never materialized.
The crop lien system was developed to readjust the Negro to cotton production on terms
more fitting a modern economy than slavery. Its success was so great as to be disastrous.
Congregated on its original fringes the unpropertied poor white farmers poured into
the new scheme and helped to make temporary expediency a permanent arrangement.” “
And so the stage was set for human tragedy. From the Negro angle Du Bois explains:
“Now it happens that both master and men have just enough argument on their
respective sides to make it difficult for them to understand each other. The Negro dimly
personifies in the white man all his ills and misfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the
white man seizes the fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant. It is because the white man gives
him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any misfortune happens to
him, it is because of some hidden machinations of ‘white folks.’ On the other hand, the
masters and the masters’ sons have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of
settling down to be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected with a silly desire
to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and careless, where their
fathers were happy and dumb and faithful, ‘Why, you niggers have an easier time than
I do,’ said a puzzled Albany merchant to his black customer. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘and so
docs yo’ hogs.’
® Du Bois, Black Recmistruction^ p. 368. Others who saw the need for basic economic
reform were Carl Schurz, congressman from Wisconsin (The Condition of the Souths
Refort to the President [1865] and “For the Great Empire of Liberty, Forward.”
Speech delivered at Concert Hall, Philadelphia [September 16, 1864]), and Hinton
Helper (The Imfending Crisis of the South [i860], especially Chapters i and 2 and
pp. 1 80-1 86.)
^®Paul S. Peirce, The Freedmen^s Bureau (1904), pp. 44, 74 and iio.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction p. 602.
•Vance, of, cit,y p. 187.
•W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), pp. 155-155.
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