It is correct to wonder but if you read my writing here on Medium, I think you will understand me better.

Labor is a valuable resource. In the antebellum south there was a labor shortage. Plenty of land but not enough workers. That is why, slavery. For a landowner a sharecropper was a better deal than a slave but as a sharecropper you lived barely better than a slave. Your life still depended on the landowner the difference was you could maybe just walk away. Maybe you could walk away but if you owed a debt to the landowner, they could use the law to drag you back or put you in debtors' prison.

TEK