1. Reconstruction and the black experience 1865-1877

7. Before the Civil War, about 135 slaves worked on the plantation, supervised by an overseer and a slave foreman. After the war, the former slaves who remained on the plantation signed labor contracts with owner David Barrow. Freedmen grew cotton for wage, but they disliked the new arrangement. In the late 1860s, Barrow subdivided his land into tenant farms of twenty-five to thirty acres, and freedmen moved their households from the old slave quarters to their own farms. By 1881, 161 tenants lived on the Barrow plantation, at least half of them children. One out of four families was named Barrow. The Barrow plantation, 1860-1881

8. Sharecropping gave African Americans more control over their labor than did labor contracts. But sharecropping also contributed to the south's dependence on one-crop agriculture and helped to perpetuate widespread rural poverty.

9. At plantation stores like this one, photographed in Mississippi in 1868, merchants recorded in their ledger books debts that few sharecroppers were able to repay.

11. Reconstruction statistics: African American members of Congress