452 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[October, 
The Negro Share Farmer. 
The changes wrought by the civil war in the 
South have produced one character whom we found 
one of the most interesting studies of a recent trip 
through the South. We allude to the Negro Share 
Farmer. At home, in his ramshackle cabin, among 
his lean pigs, his bony cattle and his always numer¬ 
ous family, or in the market place, with his spike 
team, often composed of a mule and a cow, which 
he has driven a long day’s journey to sell a dollar’s 
worth of wood or a couple of bushels of potatoes, 
he presents a grotesque and interesting type. It 
would be difficult, probably, to get down to poorer 
and less profitable agriculture than the share farmer 
practices. But he manages to scrape a living out 
of the ground, exactly how he would perhaps 
sometimes find it difficult to explain himself. 
You come upon his cabin among the pine woods, 
with a patch of scraggy com behind it, and the 
ground around strewn with faggots, among which 
pick a straggling crew of rusty fowls. A couple of 
curs bark furiously at you, and a couple of pigs, 
which look like dogs, they are so bony and long 
legged, trot grunting away into the brush. The 
mossy roof is sagging on its yielding beams ; there 
are great fissures in the mud-plastered chimney, 
and the wind finds ingress through the cracks be¬ 
tween the slabs and logs of the walls, from which 
the mud has fallen. The commotion your ap¬ 
proach has aroused brings a troop of children 
tumbling over one another out into the road, to 
watch you with wide open mouths and eyes, and 
shrinking back when you look at them. A sturdy 
negress, with a cob pipe, gives you a curtsey in the 
doorway ; behind her you see a figure like the witch 
of a fairy tale cowering in the big fireplace : the 
figure of some old grandmother or grandfather, 
carrying the weight of nearly a century on a bent 
back. As you ride on, you perhaps come upon the 
farmer, sturdy and uncouth, hoeing in his potato 
patch, or wandering among his corn or cotton. 
The 6hare farmer obtains his title from the ten¬ 
ure by which he holds his land. He rents it at the 
simple price of half its yield. It is commonly a 
portion of some large plantation, often of the same 
one on which he once labored. 
The real crop of a share farmer in this section is 
cotton. The farmer raises corn and sweet pota¬ 
toes for himself and his brutes, and only enough for 
them. The rest of his land he puts in cotton. 
Half the product goes to the landlord, and often 
enough it is a very poor rental indeed. The year’s 
crop of many a share farmer never rises above two 
bales. The landlords, as far as we could discover, 
are easy-going and indulgent. They levy no tax on 
the food crop of the tenant, and not rarely get the 
smaller bale when division day comes around. The 
farmer’s share of the cotton is commonly bought 
up by traveling agents, who scour the country in 
search of just such bargains. The farmer gets as 
little for it as the agent can persuade him to take. 
The share farmer sends his cotton to the nearest 
gin, which generally belongs to his landlord, and 
there the division of the crop is made, and a toll 
levied on it for the cleaning. The very poorest 
qualities of the fiber produced are probably those 
which come from these wretched settlements. But 
the price of his cotton crop is about all the ready 
money the share farmer ever sees, and it suffices to 
supply his home with those meagre necessaries he 
cannot grow or make himself. Formerly the 
women on some of these share farms used to spin 
and weave a portion of the cotton for their own 
use, but the introduction of factories has made 
cloth cheap enough to he bought by them, in 
small quantities as it is needed. 
The system of share farming has given existence 
to another type besides the farmer himself. This 
is the banker, as he calls himself; the usurious 
money lender as he really is. This worthy, like 
the class he thrives off of, is a negro. He is in a 
small way a capitalist, and his business is simply 
lending money on the security of the share farmer’s 
crop. Few of the thriftless blacks can resist the 
temptation of anticipating their gains, and the 
banker is an obliging friend, when he considers it 
safe to be so. In business he is, by all accounts, 
desperately hard and grinding, otherwise he is emi¬ 
nently respectable, and not infrequently a preacher 
of no little local fame. Between the money he 
owes this creditor and his store account for mo¬ 
lasses, tobacco, etc., also secured by his crop, the 
share farmer is often saved the trouble of handling 
any money at all for it, when it has been gathered. 
Such as it is, the existence of the negro share 
farmer is not devoid of elements of picturesqueness. 
His labor is hard and his fare coarse, but he is a 
tough, rude man, and has no craving for unknown 
luxuries. Among the fogs of early day he is at 
work, when night falls he fiddles or croons his 
simple melodies before the yawning fireplace of 
his cabin. He generally has an old gun and wages 
war upon such game as the woods around him shel¬ 
ter. What little leisure he enjoys he spends in sleep. 
In the scale of education he ranks very low. He 
cannot read or write. His ideas are frequently 
clouded by superstition, though quite often he ex¬ 
hibits a peculiarly keen native wit and cunning, 
which make him a great bargainer, and stand him 
in good stead in his dealings with men of better 
knowledge. His dress is a mass of patches and 
of rags. But he is as well dressed as his neighbors, 
and has no ambition to outdo them. His children 
wear a single garment, a shirt of coarse cotton, 
apparently never washed. The women folks own 
a dress of calico each, and a showy cotton handker¬ 
chief and shoes for state occasions. If the farmer 
has any money he ties it up in old rags and hides it 
in holes in his fireplace or under the hearth. Rak¬ 
ing out his money at night and counting it by the 
firelight is his greatest, perhaps his only luxury. 
But we have forgotten to mention the circus ! 
Fig. 2.— the TEAR’S CROP. — Drawn and Engraved for the American Agriculturist. 
