ABSTRACT
The Civil War itself was far more than a mere struggle between different labor and social systems. The Negro had a reasonable hope for a division of the land after the war, a hope based both on the assurances of Northern soldiers and on the dire prophecies of Southern orators trying to stiffen Confederate resistance to invasion. In the South there was a large class of landlords and merchants, ruling a still larger number of tenants, croppers, and day laborers. The tenant has a lease on the land, can generally have some choice in what he grows, and is a free agent in the commercial world. Landowners, fearful of confiscation, sometimes turned the freedmen off their plantations and dispersed them with violence. The half-bankrupt landlord took it out of the slender income of the hungry share cropper, and both suffered in consequence.
