[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

At the end of the Civil War, slavery just shifted to a different name and slightly different structure. Rather than outright legal ownership of other human beings who had no rights whatsoever, the southern planters shifted to a system of sharecropping, in which rights were never respected and black labor was kept in line by informal pressure that included "company stores," systemic debt, and lack of education, as well as terror and murder.

The fact is, cotton remained a labor intensive crop throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that meant the planters used any means necessary to keep labor cheap. If the institution of slavery hadn't been destroyed through violence, it would have persisted until the labor was no longer required.

That took place at the end of WWII, with the development by International Harvester of a mechanical cotton harvester that cut labor needs by more than 75 percent. That freed up lots of black labor who, no longer needed or wanted in the rural south, began to migrate in large numbers to northern cities -- especially the feed yards and meat-packing plants of southern Chicago.

So, the key thing is the presence of mechanical harvesting of a labor-intensive, highly valuable, cash crop. If that exists, then the economic incentive for slavery ends -- but until that ends, slavery will exist in some form.

In a way sharecropping achieved some of the goals of the planter class. Before the ACW Southern whites who weren't part of the planter class began to speak about how slavery burdened them. Those Southern whites not in the planter class began to see the planters not as their patrons but their competitors. Planters began to talk about how slavery couldn't remain stable if it was restricted only to black folks. Sharecropping both allowed an extension of slavery to include poor whites and others as well as black folks, while pacifying middle class whites by cutting them in to the profits of oppression in ways slavery never could.