82 ECONOMICS OF LAND TENURE IN GEORGIA [82 



title to and right to control and possess the crops grown and 

 raised upon the lands of the landlord by the cropper shall be 

 vested in the landlord until he has received his part of the 

 crops so raised, and is fully paid for all advances made to the 

 cropper in the year said crops were raised to aid in making 

 said crops. 1 



The above recited law and decisions serve to show 

 that the "third and fourth" renter occupies a higher 

 place in the economic scale than does the cropper. The 

 former is, at least in a small way, both manager and 

 capitalist ; the latter is, at least in theory, neither man- 

 ager nor capitalist. The cropping system is a post- 

 bellum product, the " third and fourth " plan of tenancy 

 fc^had its origin in the period before the war. 



In view of what has been said heretofore concerning 

 the abundance of land in Georgia in the early decades of 

 the last century, it is needless to say that no great 

 amount of tenancy had arisen before i860. Inasmuch, 

 however, as most of the lands had come into private 

 ownership at least two decades before the war, it was of 

 course becoming less easy for those without land to find 

 available and desirable tracts. Then too, in some cases, 

 it required energy and daring beyond the amount com- 

 monly possessed, for an individual to betake himself and 

 family to a distant piece of land in a frontier section of 

 the state, where he would have to start afresh even to 

 the extent of clearing the land for cultivation and of 

 building a log cabin for shelter. Therefore, those who 

 possessed less than the required amount of aggressive- 

 ness remained within the circle of old acquaintances and 

 familiar surroundings, becoming in a few cases, tenants on 

 the poorer parts of the large plantations. They usually 

 agreed in such cases to turn over to the planter one- 

 - Acts of the General Assembly of Georgia (1889), p. 113. 



