In the United States, the economic system of sharecropping surged in the Southern states once the Civil War ended n 1865 and the Reconstruction era began. Under this form of agriculture, landowners (mostly white Southerners) gave a small plot of land to a newly freed family or individual so they can work on it and, in return, share the crops produced to the owner.
As expected, the contracts between these two parties were rarely equal, as the contracts often favored landowners by setting that the sharecroppers had to give a vast quantity of their crops to the landowners, which sometimes they could not pay and left them heavily in debt.
