In the year 1860, the United States, had about 4 million enslaved peoples, of which, there were six States of the Union that had a slave population which was at least 40% of the persons living within their States, and of which, two of those States, South Carolina and Mississippi were actually majority enslaved. Upon the election of Lincoln, and despite the fact that Lincoln did not believe that he, as President, had the Constitutional right to interfere with slavery, in those States which had slavery; the Southern Aristocracy, decided that their reading of the tea leaves, indicated to them, that their way of life, could only still continue to exist into the future, if they seceded from that Union, which they subsequently did so, through the violent means of war in which the first shot of that war, was fired by the South. The end result for the South, would be their defeat by the North, and the death thereby of hundreds of thousands of people, along with an incredible amount of destruction and the burning of materials along with infrastructure, as well as homes from that war, in order for the South to finally capitulate, which they so did, through an unconditional surrender.
The end of the war, meant that those that were formerly enslaved, were freed, and were, in theory, subject to the same Constitutional rights, including its newest Amendments, as everyone else within this nation. Regrettably, that which is written on paper is never the same thing, as its application in the real world, of which, while the Southern Aristocracy had been defeated, they had little or no interest in seeing that the valuable land that they so own, which was the integral basis for their wealth, that they had so created through the valued help of enslaved labor, would somehow ever be sacrificed to anyone else or any other institution. This thus meant that the Southern Aristocracy had to come up with some sort of format and therefore the means that thus would enable them to not only regain the wealth so lost to this Civil War, but also would permit them to make even more wealth, going forward.
The answer for the Southern Aristocracy was to replace those that formerly had been enslaved, with what appeared to be a win-win format, of sharecropping, which thus did not appear to violate the human rights of those that were partners to such. The main issue that those that were previously enslaved had, was that they essentially owned nothing, and without access to capital, were thus faced with a situation in which their newfound freedom was endangered by their lack of capacity to earn a living. The answer to this problem, seemed to be sharecropping, in which, in theory, those tenants and harvesters of the crops would do so under the basis of receiving a fair share of the benefits of the crop work so being performed, at the end of the harvest, which thus would pay for their seed, fertilizer, tools, room and board, and provide them with a proceeds of the profit, so of. Not too surprisingly, this structure worked out very well for the owner/planter and not very well for the tenant/laborer. So then, in short, the Southern Aristocracy successfully made the transition from working almost exclusively with slave labor, to basically working with “freed” people that they cheated, tricked, or hoodwinked, so that they could thus continue to make their profit and create wealth upon the exploited backs of those that had little or no alternatives, to such.