What happens when you build an entire economy on suppression, subjugation, and strained labor
of an entire race, and one day it is rightfully taken away? Well obviously, the economy tanks!
But was it the end of southern plantations as we know it? Today on Nutty History, let's
explore what happened to the infamous southern plantations after the end-- of the-- civil war.
As ironic as it may sound in the modern context, the Radical Republican Congress of the 1860s was
fighting tooth and nail for equal rights and emancipation of the African American population
of the south. They saw plantations as evil grounds where slavery was conserved and nurtured and they
intended to divide these farming lands among the people who shed their blood, sweat and tears on
them. The Slaves! With the end of the American civil war in 1865 and the victory of The union,
the reconstruction era quickly commenced. This encompassed abolishing slavery with the passage
and ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and FIFTEENTH amendment. This enabled black citizens
of the south to work for wages, own forty acres of land and a mule, vote for their government,
and start their own family. All good and dandy, ain’t it, son? Well…. NO! All of that-- WAS true,
but…only in theory. Because, if it was real then this guy wouldn’t have to live through nightmares
just… ‘to have a dream’. And why? Because this guy happened. Andrew Johnson was one of
the most controversial presidents of America. Yes, even more controversial than this guy.
Johnson succeeded Abraham Lincoln and devoted his presidency to undo all of his predecessor’s work,
and that includes the settlement about who plantations belong to.
The Emancipation Law proposed by Abraham Lincoln proposed to distribute the land of the wealthy
slave owners among their black slaves. A typical French revolution-like idea and also why the law
became famous by the term “Forty Acres and a Mule”. Because that’s exactly the share every
slave was promised to get forty acres of land and a mule from his former owner. But President Andrew
Johnson, a southerner himself, was a fan of the bourgeoisie France. And Lincoln’s assassination
gave him the chance to turn the very regime in favor of southerners and work against all the
rights slaves were fighting for. While Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens were trying
to assimilate and uplift black citizens of the South in the process of reunifying the nation,
‘President-by-a-technicality’ Johnson worked hard to rewrite the terms of reunification in favor
of the slavers of the south and helped them to retain their plantations. That means bye-bye
“Forty Acres and A Mule” and say hello to my little friend called “Sharecropping”. President
Johnson managed to save the plantation owner's land but with no more slaves to work on them,
there was no manpower to grow and pick cotton. The southern economy was stagnant as they were hardly
interested in industrialization and they were just too blindsided by their prejudices to pay a black
farmer his fair pays. That’s why they came up with a conniving plan, but without the sensational
crescendos and an epic pose like Scarlet O’Hara. The plan that was called Sharecropping, enabled
plantation owners to exploit newly freed black farmers by making them work on farms in return
for a very small portion of the crop. On paper, Plantation owners were leasing the land to black
farmers but in reality, the revenue share was so unfair that the system was just a workaround
to deny black farmers fair wages. Sadly, black farmers who were denied any form of education
as slaves had no other skill other than picking cotton. And frankly… the south had no other job
to offer them. So, either they work for plantation owners on their terms or they don’t work at all.
Cornered with two terrible options, they had no other choice but to take the lesser of two evils.
When President Johnson turned his back on President Lincoln’s promises, Republicans in
the Congress called for his blood. Andrew Johnson survived the nightmare of impeachment by just
ONE VOTE. This escape gave him and southern states more confidence to battle reconstruction.
To counter the fourteenth amendment, southern states created Black Codes and Jim Crow laws to
segregate and discriminate against black citizens even further. The vagrancy law created under Black
Codes enabled the police to arrest and try any black citizen under the ‘crime’ of unemployment.
It’s pretty obvious to assume how fair these trials were and they always ended with the
accused being guilty and charged with punishment of hard labor. The
‘criminal’ was then auctioned to plantation owners to work for them with a punishment
sentence that was then extended numerous times “to teach the importance of work”. Plantation
Owners may have not read Shakespeare but they took his quote ‘about calling rose by any other name’
really to their heart. These laws kept the plantations producing cotton upon the backs of
not so free black men until the Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon B Johnson in 1964.
At the height of the slavery, the Antebellum south had forty-six thousand plantations. And
though a significant number of plantations were burned down or destroyed during the civil war,
most descendants of plantation owners rose back to wealth and prosperity within two decades
as the exploitation continued. As time passed, plantations either transitioned into real estate
ventures, tourism resorts, or some other business but the stain of slavery remains hard to miss.
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