Emancipation changed the South. During the several years following the end of the war, landholders discovered that they could no longer maintain a system of forced gang labor, closely supervised by overseers and drivers. Decentralized agriculture emerged by 1867 and 1868, as smaller squads replaced gang labor. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, squads typically evolved into family units. The communal slave quarter was replaced by dispersed homes, and black families became the economic foundation of the postwar order. Slaves had become sharecroppers. How was this transition effected? One of the most widely accepted contributions of econometric historians Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch is their calculation that the aggregate amount of labor performed in the immediate postwar South fell significantly below prewar levels. They note that emancipation gave the ex-slave the freedom to lighten his burden and, for the first time, reserve a portion of his time for himself.1 His wife and children reduced their amount of agricultural labor even more sharply. What resulted was a labor shortage in which landowners found themselves obliged to make concessions in order to attract or retain their labor forces. The freedpeople aspired to acquire their own land. Unable to do so, they contracted with those landowners who allowed them to escape from gang labor and achieve greater autonomy. Soon the new system became the norm. Laborers worked for a half share of the crop that they cultivated and harvested; landlords, who provided laborers with housing, stock, implements, and seed, received the other half.2 Unfortunately, these new arrangements did not function fairly or harmoniously. Black sharecroppers suffered a devastating one-two punch in the 1870s, as cotton prices skidded and Redeemer governments dismantled legal protec-