Tenant quarters at Oakland Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

There are two houses remaining on the property of Cane River Creole National Historical Park’s Oakland Plantation that were used by sharecroppers and tenant farmers after the Civil War. The houses are believed to have been built in 1859 and used as slave quarters for a few years, though it is possible that they were built after the war, as Prud’homme records show that many of the old slave cabins were torn down and replaced with new houses. When the plantation was in operation, there would have been many more such houses in this area.

Tenant house at Oakland Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

One of the two tenant houses is open to the public. It is furnished as it might have been in the 1950s by a sharecropper or tenant farmer. The building has been modified from what it would have looked like if it had indeed been used as a slave quarters. When built, the original house was a one-room building with a front and back porch. After the Civil War it was expanded by enclosing one of the porches to create two rooms. In this case, the enclosed porch was turned into the kitchen and laundry room. The main room was used for sleeping and eating. Each house had a fenced yard where the family kept chickens and cultivated a vegetable garden.

Main room of the Tenant House at Oakland Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

Main room of the Tenant House at Oakland Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

Kitchen and laundry room in the Tenant House at Oakland Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

There are also exhibits inside the house that focus on the transition from slave labor to sharecropping and tenant farming. Along with some information are items used by former slaves such as games and musical instruments.

Exhibit inside the Tenant House at Oakland Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

Exhibit inside the Tenant House at Oakland Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

We think of sharecropping and tenant farming as labor systems that developed after the Civil War when the slave-labor system came to an end, but both systems have always existed. With the slave-labor system, the large Southern landowners had no need for the other two systems, and thus sharecropping and tenant farming tended to be options for small land owners who could not afford slaves or pay day laborers.

The end of slave labor hit the Southern plantation owners hard financially, and not just because they lost a source of somewhat free labor. Slaves were considered property, and property was wealth. You could borrow money using a slave as collateral. On some plantations, the slaves were worth more than the land itself. Thus, when the Civil War ended and the slaves were finally freed, Southern plantation owners such as the Prud’hommes lost much of their fortune. They now had to figure out a way to get people to work without paying them in cash. Thus the profit-sharing systems of sharecropping and tenant farming gained momentum by 1870.

While similar, there are significant differences between the two systems. Sharecroppers were typically people who had nothing—no money, no equipment, no draft animals. With the sharecropping system, the landowner provided the land, seed, supplies, and equipment to raise a crop and the sharecropper provided the labor. The typical split was 60-40 (60 percent to the landowner) if the landowner provided all supplies and seed and 50-50 if the sharecropper paid for supplies. Thus, if the year’s crop brought in $1000, the sharecropper might have $500 in his pocket and was on his way to becoming a landowner himself.

Unfortunately, things rarely worked out financially for the sharecropper. He had no money to purchase food, clothing, and other goods needed to support his family, and certainly no merchant in town was going to give him credit. He would have to buy on credit from the plantation store at prices jacked up as much as 50 percent and pay back the landowner with his share of the profits, if there were any. Furthermore, the sharecropper had no say in what crops to grow or what price to sell at. He couldn’t even sell the crops. That was done by the landowner, and who knows if when he came back claiming to have sold everything for $1,000 that he really didn’t sell it for $2,000. After all, the guy was a former slave owner, so morality certainly wasn’t one of his virtues.

At the end of the year many sharecroppers ended up owing money and thus were stuck working another season to pay off their debt. The landowners had essentially figured out a way to keep former slaves as slaves, and better yet, they added poor whites into the mix. By 1889, an estimated 75 percent of white sharecroppers and nearly 100 percent of black sharecroppers were in debt to their landlords. In defense of the Prud’hommes, nearly all of their sharecroppers made some money at the end of each year (according to the Prud’hommes’ financial records).

A tenant farmer, on the other hand, had some money, equipment, seed, and draft animals, he just didn’t have the money to buy land. The landowner would rent land to him, either for a set rental price or for a share of the crops. The tenant farmer could choose what crop to grow and sold the harvest at market himself. He was, however, still renting a house on the property, and if money and credit were short, purchasing supplies at the plantation store. While in theory, the tenant farmer stood a better chance of saving some money and purchasing his own land, most fared no better and ended up as perpetual renters.

At Oakland Plantation, most of the sharecroppers were the former slaves, as many stayed on to work after the Civil War. The tenant cabin that is open to the public was home to the Helaire Family, all of whom were former slaves at the plantation. They continued to work at Oakland, as did their descendants, until 1957.

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