America's Feudal System Thesis

America’s Feudal System
Thesis: Sharecropping provided former slaves, and poor whites, limited opportunity, unstable communities, and another means to control the newly created population. ¬ The end of slavery provided African Americans with a new start at life. Congressional support through Reconstruction hindered their success with the introduction of President Andrew Johnson. Johnson was not a champion of black people’s rights, moreover, his intent was to reduce the racial problems in each individual state. Racial tensions soared throughout the South with the new-found freedom of African Americans. Sharecropping provided former slaves, and poor whites, limited opportunity, unstable communities, and another means to control the newly created population. ¬ Abolishing slavery did not abolish hardened hearts of southern whites against former black slaves. Freedmen gained rights to marry, live …show more content…
The South made their own desired outcome of the Civil War. Sharecropping provided a hidden agenda for landowning whites to again control a population of people deemed inferior. Contracts signed benefitted the landowners, often placing black people in crippling conditions, if the terms of the contract were not met. Many contracts signed did not correlate to the terms, however, it did if the sharecropper was illiterate. Some educated blacks could negotiate their labor contracts; however, it did not ease the atmosphere of their environment. On paper, sharecropping looks like a beneficial partnership for both parties. By limiting the crops sharecroppers could plant, landowners controlled their production and limited the sharecropper’s surplus. Landowners also kept a steady cycle of crops, limiting the time the soil was nourished to produce reasonable crops. In all actuality, landowners devised a scheme to provide laborers for land they could not reasonably work themselves, at a formable