There are many factors that contribute to an understanding of economic growth during the postbellum period. Two of the factors that can shed some light on the situation at the time are sharecropping and economic inequality. Conventional views of sharecropping tend to consider the practice as inefficient. Sharecropping did increase, however. Between 1880 and 1910 in the United States, owner-operated farms, as a proportion of all farms, decreased from 64 to 50% in the South and from 74 to 63% in the nation. In 1880, 12% of farms in the South were rented and 24% were sharecropped; the corresponding percentages were 8% rented and 18% sharecropped for the entire United States. [1] The economic situation and institutional arrangement of the postbellum period contributed to the expansion of sharecropping. Southern farmers faced a major problem in trying to acquire capital after the Civil War. Since banks and lending institutions had mostly not existed in the agricultural South, money was sca