USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often kept tenant farm families severely indebted, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the next.

Detailed explanation-2: -Sharecropping developed, then, as a system that theoretically benefited both parties. Landowners could have access to the large labor force necessary to grow cotton, but they did not need to pay these laborers money, a major benefit in a post-war Georgia that was cash poor but land rich.

Detailed explanation-3: -Through sharecropping, white landowners hoarded the profits of Black workers’ agricultural labor, trapping them in poverty and debt for generations. Black people who challenged this system of domination faced threats, violence, and even murder.

Detailed explanation-4: -Southern agriculture gradually changed and improved. New methods of farming allowed people in the South to raise larger crops. Northerners invested large sums of money to build railroads and factories in the South. As a result, people began moving from the farms to the cities looking for jobs.