The practice of sharecropping emerged after the Civil War, so the first Federal census in which you can identify many of these agricultural workers will be the Ninth Census of the United States for 1870.

For planters, the usual rule of thumb for antebellum studies has been ownership of twenty or more slaves. Don't use the profession listed on the 1860 census, or many planters will be missed. Planters often described themselves as attorneys, merchants, ministers or something else besides farmers. They routinely employed overseers to manage farm operations and spent their time in other professional activities.

Allow me to use a modern-day illustration. Major contruction projects are directed by two or more men. One is the superintendent, who directs field operations every day on the work site; the other is the project manager. The superintendent answers to the project manager about day-to-day progress. The PM provides the supplies, equipment and labor force necessary for the superintendent to get the job done. Since the PM also balances the books, pays bills and other takes care of other 'overhead' items, he probably won't be on-site everyday unless work isn't progressing as planned.

Think of the PM as a planter, and the superintendent as an overseer, and you have a reasonable idea of what each one did. Labor typically thinks management does little or no work. Then as now, however, managers who spent too much time in leisure soon found themselves looking for another source of income. For that matter, as any farmer knows, a spell of bad weather (such as that which prevailed in the summer of 1860) could ruin a man not matter how hard he worked.

Planters having little or no involvement in agricultural operations were usually the wealthiest citizens. These men often lived or worked away from the planation. Scarcity of such persons means that many parishes had no one on the census who could be registered in this category.

You'll also see large numbers of men listed as farm laborers. Let me know if you have any interest in them.