y crime. As a result
Negroes were systematically arrested on the slightest pretext and the
labor of convicts leased to private parties. This "convict lease system"
was almost universal in the South until about 1890, when its outrageous
abuses and cruelties aroused the whole country. It still survives over
wide areas, and is not only responsible for the impression that the Negro
is a natural criminal, but also for the inability of the Southern courts
to perform their normal functions after so long a prostitution to ends far
removed from justice.

In more normal economic lines the employers began with the labor contract
system. Before the war they owned labor, land, and subsistence. After the
war they still held the land and subsistence. The laborer was hired and
the subsistence "advanced" to him while the crop was growing. The fall of
the Freedmen's Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a
modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high
interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating often in
book accounts.

The black laborers became deeply dissatisfied under this system and began
to migrate from the country to the cities, where there was an increasing
demand for labor. The employing farmers complained bitterly of the
scarcity of labor and of Negro "laziness," and secured the enactment of
harsher vagrancy and labor contract laws, and statutes against the
"enticement" of laborers. So severe were these laws that it was often
impossible for a laborer to stop work without committing a felony.
Nevertheless competition compelled the landholders to offer more
inducements to the farm hand. The result was the rise of the black share
tenant: the laborer securing better wages saved a little capital and began
to hire land in parcels of forty to eighty acres, furnishing his own tools
and seed and practically raising his own subsistence. In this way the
whole face of the labor contract in the South was, in the decade 1880-90,
in process of change from a nominal wage contract to a system of tenantry.
The great plantations were apparently broken up into forty and eighty acre
farms with black farmers. To many it seemed that emancipation was
accomplished, and the black folk were especially filled with joy and hope.

It soon was evident, however, that the change was only partial. The
landlord still held the land in large parcels. He rented this in small
farms to tenants, but retained dir