Sharecropping and the Predatory Practices of the South
The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, by Edward Ayers.
Edward Ayers in The Promise of the New South : Life after Reconstruction, Chapter Eight, “Out in the Country,” provides some historical context for understanding Bailey v. Alabama. He emphasizes how sharecropping and tenancy functioned as systems of economic dependence structured around debt. Ayers opens the chapter by emphasizing the loss of independence experienced by Southern farmers in the late nineteenth century. An observer in the 1890s lamented that farmers who had once been “the most independent people in the world” now felt “deeply humiliated at their growing dependence” as market forces, transportation, and specialization narrowed their options.1 This sense of dependence is important to Bailey, because it shows the necessary attachment that a sharecropper has to have with their landowner, hinting at why Bailey left in the first place
Ayers also makes clear that rural self-sufficiency had been steadily eroded. Towns, stores, and merchants increasingly shaped what farmers produced and how they lived. As he puts it, “the towns, the stores, and the law thus worked to erode self-sufficiency, even as town newspapers taunted the farmers for their lack of it”.2 Farmers were pushed toward cotton not because it was ideal, but because it was often the only crop that could be reliably exchanged for credit. Food crops could not pay debts, and merchants could not accept them in lieu of cash or cotton. This mattered enormously for sharecroppers, who relied on advances to survive between planting and harvest.
Sharecropping itself was part of what Ayers calls the “agricultural ladder,” ideally leading from laborer to sharecropper to renter to landowner. This ladder was extremely difficult to climb, and sharecroppers assumed responsibility for cultivating land but depended on landlords or merchants for credit. Once a worker began sharecropping, he would begin “drawing credit at the local store for the crop he put into the ground,” binding his labor to future harvests and prices beyond his control.3 Cotton prices were low and unpredictable, and credit terms were harsh, and so, even hard work and hard saving often did the opposite of the sharecropper's intention: retrench them deeper into the debt and service of the landowner. .
Ayers is explicit that debt was endemic, not exceptional. He notes that in cotton-heavy counties, higher cotton concentration correlated with “more tenancy among both races, fewer livestock, less grain, and fewer farms operated by their owners”.4 The very regions most dependent on cotton were those least able to escape debt. This reality directly undermines Alabama’s claim in Bailey that unpaid advances suggested fraudulent intent. As Ayers’s account shows, failing to pay off an advance was not evidence of deception, but the ordinary outcome of participation in the rural cotton economy.
Mobility, often cited as evidence of freedom, actually deepened dependence. Ayers notes that “more than half of the region’s share tenants lived for a year or less on each farm they worked”.5 Yet this movement was rarely voluntary in a meaningful sense, and to secure credit on anything but “the most exorbitant terms,” a farmer needed a local reputation as “a reliable and hard-working farmer”.6 Leaving an area meant sacrificing that reputation, but staying often meant sinking deeper into debt. Important to context, Ayers notes that “the tenants most likely to leave were those most heavily in debt”.7 This maps directly onto Bailey’s situation: departure was often the last available response to worsening economic conditions.
The chapter also shows how law intersected with these economic pressures. The landowners in sharecropping were no longer interested in how much crop they could sell, as they weren’t the ones selling the crop. Instead, they relied on contracts with tenants, and selling them the tools and the seeds in which to plant.8 This was a lot less risky, as the insurance that the tenant paid them was much higher than the insurance of a good harvest. On top of this, landowners possessed access to legal enforcement that tenants lacked. Ayers talks about how a lawyer would advise a landowner dealing with an unauthorized tenant and that if the man refused to sign a rent note or other binding contracts to the land rather than the crop, the landowners should “have the Sheriff arrest him”.9 This casual invocation of arrest power reveals how criminal law hovered over these labor relations and the power dynamic implicit in this system.
It’s also important because of the amount of land allotted to sharecroppers. In a typical contract, a sharecropper would not have much land or seed and thus could only produce the cash crop: cotton. And so while owners could diversify production and enjoy a varied seasonal rhythm, “sharecroppers…had only the money crop and perhaps a small garden”.10 Their lives were shaped by “the price of cotton, the rates of credit, the availability of land and labor,” forces that affected them with “brutal force”.11
Reading alongside Bailey v. Alabama, Ayers helps to understand why the Court treated Alabama’s evidentiary rule as a form of peonage. When a statute tells jurors that breach of a labor contract plus unpaid debt is sufficient evidence of criminal fraud, it operates within a world where debt is nearly unavoidable and mobility is economically constrained. Leaving work while indebted was common and often rational, but the Alabama statute transformed that reality into criminal suspicion. As the Court recognized, this conversion of economic failure into criminal liability effectively compelled continued labor in many cases
1. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 15th Anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 252. Ayers quotes an observer describing Southern farmers as once “the most independent people in the world,” now feeling “deeply humiliated at their growing dependence.”
2. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 255.
3. Ibid., 261.
4. Ibid., 257.
5. Ibid., 263.
6. Ibid., 263.
7. Ibid., 263.
8. Ibid., 267.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 270.
11. Ibid.
12. Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219 (1911). The Supreme Court held that a state may not use criminal law to compel labor in payment of a debt, as such coercion violates the Thirteenth Amendment and federal anti-peonage principles.