Since the Civil War, sharecropping and tenant farming took the place of slavery and planting in the South.Sharecropping and tenant farming were schemes in which white landowners (often former slaveholders) entered into contracts with poor farm laborers to work their fields.Those who worked in the fields shared a portion of the crop yield with the landlord as payment for the rent of the land. Under the sharecropping scheme, the landlord normally supplied the money to buy the seed and the machinery required to plant, cultivate and harvest the grain, while the sharecropper supplied the labour. In such lease agreements, the worker, not the landowner, took blame.
