After the Civil War, during the Reconstruction era, most of the freedmen in the South went back to work in the cotton fields as a way of sustenance. However, since they were already free, the Radical Republicans in Congress thought of a way to make former slaves free-holding farmers. This resulted in the vast majority of freedmen becoming tenant farmers. Thus, <em>tenancy</em> and <em>sharecropping</em> became fundamental in the southern Reconstruction process.
