The Phenomenon Of American Sharecropping

Reaching greater prominence in the Reconstruction era, the time following the American Civil War when African Americans were more and more integrated into broader society (but far too slowly and never to the fullest extent), sharecropping entails laborers working for a landlord in exchange for a portion of the crops the land and their efforts produce.  This land and other resources are provided by the landlord, whom the tenets work for in exchange for part of the harvest.  Seasons of little yield would leave the sharecroppers in progressively worse debt from year to year, and they would still be charged for supplies like seeds and tools provided by the employer.  However, particularly with the poor and African Americans who had just been emancipated, desperation led them to serve the interests of wealthy landowners, who no longer had legalized chattel slaves to rely on after the combination of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865.

When the slavery most familiar to many Americans was still legally allowed and practiced, idiots had sometimes posited that they were on the side of the Bible's God in spite of their participation in a slavery with many aspects that utterly contradicted the commands of Yahweh, from the way slaves were initially acquired (Exodus 21:16) to the physical abuse they frequently suffered (Exodus 21:26-27) to their enslavement based on skin color (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2, Leviticus 24:22) to the legal freedom to retrieve runaway slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15-16) [1].  While differences do exist between historical American slavery and basic sharecropping, sharecropping as structured in this country provided an excuse for wealthy Southerners to do some of the exact same things under a new, more socially accepted guise.

Sharecropping itself is not Biblically sinful given that it is carried out in very specific ways; it is not inherently racist or exploitative in any way.  Racist applications aside, the American form still had its plentiful and severe Biblical errors.  While the practice as expressed in this period was not strictly about white supremacy, as more than half (supposedly about two-thirds) of the sharecroppers were themselves white, for African Americans, it presented a way to continue certain tenets of America's unbiblical slavery under a different name.  After all, these people were still confined to plantations or other agricultural sites while very likely simultaneously being looked down upon for the amoral matter of their skin color, and perhaps these plantations were those of the exact same people who had formally enslaved them in a highly unbiblical manner just prior.  In fact, the same crops like cotton that were tended to by African American slaves beforehand were cultivated under sharecropping.

In either case, sharecroppers were often exploited by being trapped in perpetuating cycles of debt, without being freed every seven years as the Bible demands of masters/mistresses towards their servants from their own countrypeople, no matter the outstanding debt (Exodus 21:2, Deuteronomy 15:1-3, 12-14, Jeremiah 34:12-16).  The only basis for averting this freedom is if the worker loves their living situation enough to voluntarily become a lifetime servant (Exodus 21:5-6, Deuteronomy 15:16-17).  This only adds to the grave distinctions between American slavery along with subsequent labor practices and the servitude allowed by the Bible.  The point of sharecropping in the Reconstruction context might have been to intentionally entrap someone from one's own country for far longer than seven years, and potentially as a way of evolving mistreatment of African Americans at that.  Since even servitude as a Biblical punishment is only temporarily used to repay an otherwise overwhelming debt (Exodus 22:3), American sharecropping was itself illicit according to the religion its supporters probably identified with.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-fugitive-slave-act.html