FARMHAND FARMHAND, a term prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the northern United States, referred to farm wageworkers and generally was equivalent to "hired man." Now, however, the more common designation is "agricultural worker," which includes all who labor on the land manually regardless of region, structure of enterprise, or status. Early in colonial America, distinctive patterns among agricultural workers emerged. Landowners who wanted workers to help them paid the passage from the British Isles and western Europe for indentured servants, bound on arrival to serve for several years. Upon conclusion of this apprenticeship, servants "out of their time" ascended the agricultural ladder by settling as farmers on land of their own. Indenture, which brought an estimated half of the whites who came to colonial America, faded out by the 1830s. Waves of free immigrants also seeking land of their own, available until World War I, soon followed. A disadvantage of indentured servitude from the master's viewpoint was the replacement cost of rapid labor turnover. Many grasped at the alternative offered early in the seventeenth century by slavery, which spread mainly southward from Virginia. The imposition of lifelong bondage eliminated workforce turnover and stimulated the spread of plantation agriculture. Prior to the American Revolution, a few Indians became enslaved, but slave laborers were of preponderantly African origin. African Americans numbered 700,000 by 1790 and 4 million by 1860. In the South, masters numbered one-thirtieth of the total population, whereas slaves numbered one-third of it. In 1860 one-quarter of all slaves in the American south were in holdings of less than ten, one-half in holdings between ten and fifty, and one-quarter in holdings of more than fifty. Following emancipation in 1865, sharecropping, a system that remunerated laborers with a share of the crop, largely replaced slavery. At their peak in 1930,...