The attempt to replace individual slavery had been frustrated by the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Fifteenth Amendment.  The disfranchisement of 1876 was followed by the widespread rise of “crime” peonage.  Stringent laws on vagrancy, guardianship, and labor contracts were enacted and large discretion given judge and jury in cases of petty crime.  As a result Negroes were systematically arrested on the slightest pretext and the labor of convicts leased to private parties.  This “convict lease system” was almost universal in the South until about 1890, when its outrageous abuses and cruelties aroused the whole country.  It still survives over wide areas, and is not only responsible for the impression that the Negro is a natural criminal, but also for the inability of the Southern courts to perform their normal functions after so long a prostitution to ends far removed from justice.

In more normal economic lines the employers began with the labor contract system.  Before the war they owned labor, land, and subsistence.  After the war they still held the land and subsistence.  The laborer was hired and the subsistence “advanced” to him while the crop was growing.  The fall of the Freedmen’s Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating often in book accounts.

The black laborers became deeply dissatisfied under this system and began to migrate from the country to the cities, where there was an increasing demand for labor.  The employing farmers complained bitterly of the scarcity of labor and of Negro “laziness,” and secured the enactment of harsher vagrancy and labor contract laws, and statutes against the “enticement” of laborers.  So severe were these laws that it was often impossible for a laborer to stop work without committing a felony.  Nevertheless competition compelled the landholders to offer more inducements to the farm hand.  The result was the rise of the black share tenant:  the laborer securing better wages saved a little capital and began to hire land in parcels of forty to eighty acres, furnishing his own tools and seed and practically raising his own subsistence.  In this way the whole face of the labor contract in the South was, in the decade 1880-90, in process of change from a nominal wage contract to a system of tenantry.  The great plantations were apparently broken up into forty and eighty acre farms with black farmers.  To many it seemed that emancipation was accomplished, and the black folk were especially filled with joy and hope.

It soon was evident, however, that the change was only partial.  The landlord still held the land in large parcels.  He rented this in small farms to tenants, but retained direct control.  In theory the laborer was furnishing capital, but in the majority of cases he was borrowing at least a part of this capital from some merchant.