What system allowed land usage in exchange for a percentage of the crop, primarily in the South?

The system that allowed land usage in exchange for a percentage of the crop, primarily in the South, is sharecropping. This economic arrangement emerged after the Civil War, particularly during the Reconstruction era, as a way for freedmen and poor white farmers to gain access to land without the means to purchase it outright.

In sharecropping, landowners divided their land into smaller plots and rented these plots to tenants, typically in exchange for a portion of the crops produced. This system kept many African American families and poor white farmers in a cycle of debt and dependency, as they often faced high costs for supplies and loans from landowners or local stores, which made it difficult to achieve economic independence.

In contrast, tenant farming involved renting land for a fixed cash payment rather than sharing the crop, which provided a slightly different dynamic but was less common in the immediate post-Civil War South. The Freedmen’s Bureau was an agency created to help former slaves transition to freedom, offering services like education and assistance but not a land usage system. Homesteading refers to the process of acquiring land under the Homestead Act, which encouraged westward expansion, but it does not relate to the crop-sharing context in the South post-Civil War. Therefore