1. Life for African Americans after the Civil War
Part 1: Overview video
____ in 5 southerners who fought in the war never came back.
Reconstruction was a time of upheaval, uncertainty, and ___________..
Many slaves were free but had no ____________.
General Sherman offered land along the ________ _______________ along the coast of Georgia. Most slaves ________________ receive land.
White land owners took their land back when they received __________________ from president Johnson.
Many freedmen became ____________________________, which meant they had no land, no tools, no seeds.
More than half of sharecropping families ended their year in ______________.
At the start of Reconstruction, Georgia had lost __________ of its wealth due to the destruction.
Part 2:Sharecropper’s cycle of poverty
Why were sharecroppers unable to earn enough to stop sharecropping and buy their own land? ___________________________
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2. Part 3: tenant farming vs. sharecropping
In theory, sharecropping and tenant farming should have been mutually beneficial to both sides. Newly poor land owners provided land and other resources to the laborer in return for the laborers’ work on the farm. However, landowners soon found ways to keep their employees indebted (owing money) to them in hopes of preventing them (mostly black laborers) from gaining the ability to purchase their own land. This also hurt freedmen’s ability to take leadership roles in the cultural, economic, and political areas of the South.
There were many similarities between a sharecropper and tenant farmer. Both usually consisted of poor and illiterate blacks and whites. Both agreed to exchange their labor and a portion of their crops to a land owner in return for land to work. Finally, both groups had to buy certain necessities from the landowner’s store which caused many to find themselves deeply indebted to the landowner and decreased their chances of getting out of the system.
However, the major difference between the two groups was that tenant farmers usually owned their own tools, animals, and other equipment, while the sharecropper brought nothing but their labor into the agreement.
Sharecroppers
Tenant farmers
“Slavery by another name”
Sharecropping has been called “slavery by another name.” Based on what you learned from the video, the cycle of poverty diagram, and description above, do you think sharecropping is another form of slavery? EXPLAIN and SUPPORT your answer with specific details from today’s lesson.
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