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Someone else owned the land, you go out and plant and raise the crops on that land.
Sharecropping was set up so that the freedmen can have an ownership in the crop. They wouldn’t just be paid laborers. The idea is that the crop would be shared, so the slaves would get the land back, but the whites would be the landowners, but sharecropping has a bad historical meaning. It wasn’t meant that way it was “to share the crop,” which meant that the people would share the profit. The blacks wouldn’t be just wage owners.
It really wasn’t a partnership, it was a form of exploitation. A lot of sharecroppers were signing contracts that couldn’t read, and if they were literate, then they couldn’t understand. And the contracts were written in a way that gave all the advantage to the landowner.