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When the calendars show the 9th of April 965, and seven months later on when the 3th Amendment ratified by congress, Henry Blake and his family was finally free. He was a son of farmer family and as his family did, he farmed for most of his life. The conditions didnt change much after their freedom, slavery replaced by a new labor system called sharecropping; ‘After freedom, we worked on shares a while. Then we rented. When we worked on shares, we couldnt make nothingjust overalls and something to eat. Half went to the other man and you would destroy your half if you weren’t careful. A man that didn’t know how to count would always lose. He might lose anyhow. They didn’t give no itemized statement. No, you just had to take their word. They never give you no details. They just say you owe so much. No matter how good account you kept, you had to go by their account and now, Brother, I’m tellin’ you the truth about this. It’s been that way for a long time. You had to take the white man’s work on notes and everything. Anything you wanted, you could git if you were a good hand. You could git anything you wanted as long as you worked. If you didn’t make no money, that’s all right; they would advance you more. But you better not leave himyou better not try to leave and get caught. They’d keep you in debt. They were sharp. Christmas come, you could take up twenty dollars in somethin’ to eat and much as you wanted in whiskey. You could buy a gallon of whiskey. Anything that kept you a slave because he was always right

and you were always wrong if there was difference. If there was an argument, he would get mad and there would be a shooting take place. From the memoires of Henry Blake we see that although slavery ended, slavery-alike conditions survived after the emancipation. Is sharecropping, labor system which Henry Blake and many freedmen worked with the white planters, a continuum of the slavery? Is sharecropping slavery by another name? To answer this question, we need to check the consequences of the sharecropping which they will be presented in this paper. In summary, sharecropping brought massive economic dependence of black men to the white planters due to its nature and economic conditions of the black men. With the support of black codes which were emerged from the local governments, independence and free labor of freedmen restricted greatly. Twenty years after the emancipation, labor of black men who imprisoned by the ridiculous black codes, sold to the factories by the counties which arrested them. Freedmen had to work under dictated conditions of the factories as slaves, for a time which they had sentenced to be imprisoned. Until a hundred years from the emancipation, black people racially segregated by the law in all aspects of life from schools to public transportations. Although sharecropping is basically a market response labor system, it created a peonage environment for the freedmen which legally lasted hundred years, but it`s social and economic consequences are still a huge negative factor in black people`s lives.