RECONSTRUCTING THE SOUTHERN POPULISTS:
ALABAMA FARMERS BEFORE POLITICAL REVOLT, 1874-1889
By
JOSHUA S. HODGE
BRIAN D. STEELE, COMMITTEE CHAIR
HARRIET E. AMOS DOSS
ROBERT CORLEY
A THESIS
Submitted to the graduate faculty at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
2011
RECONSTRUCTING THE SOUTHERN POPULISTS:
ALABAMA FARMERS BEFORE POLITICAL REVOLT, 1874-1889
JOSHUA S. HODGE
UAB GRADUATE HISTORY PROGRAM
ABSTRACT
The traditional story of the Populist movement begins in 1887 where by the leadership of
the Farmers’ Alliance, agricultural organizations combined to initiate formal political
action on behalf of farmers and laborers alike. But proper understanding of the Populists,
this study suggests, must begin earlier, in the fluid era of Reconstruction when farmers
first began to articulate their concerns and grapple with possible solutions. This study
explores earlier manifestations of farmer solidarity, describing the community of likeminded farmers that organized into agricultural groups in the immediate post-Civil War
period. Well before the political revolt of the 1890s, southern farmers participated in a
regional conversation about the economic and social developments pervading the South
following the Civil War. Farmers felt hopeless due to their political, economic, and social
ailments: the Reconstruction era disillusioned them about the efficacy of political
involvement, the crop lien system shackled the cash strapped countryside, and industrial
progress threatened agricultural supremacy. Farmers attempted to reform the public
sphere by conversing in newspapers, farm periodicals, annual conventions, and scientific
experiments while avoiding the formal political arena. It was in these agricultural papers
that farmers with common concerns and goals realized the larger community to which
they belonged. Encouraging rural inhabitants to organize for the common good of the
ii
countryside, farm advocates promoted farm efficiency, farm beautification, and
faithfulness to the agrarian values that had shaped the nation rather than modern industry
which they described as alien to the national purpose. In effect, these early farmers
insisted on cultural solidarity rather than engagement in the formal political process to
preserve the agrarian lifestyle. But they also appealed less to Lost Cause Southern
partisanship that has so dominated discussions of the postwar South than to national
values threatened by modern industry. Because farmers’ organizations rooted their local
concerns in the larger story of national meaning and purpose recently shaken by Civil
War, their story is as much an episode in American nationalism as in insular regionalism.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Southern Farmer’s Plight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Newspapers and the Development of Southern Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Early Organizational Efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Political Antipathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Toward Political Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
iv
1
INTRODUCTION
In 1889, Leonidas E. Polk, the North Carolinian President of the Southern InterState Farmers’ Convention and the first Vice President, and later President, of the
National Farmers Alliance and Cooperative Union of America, addressed a group of
southern farmers in Montgomery, Alabama. He described the movement of American
history, declared agriculture the foundation of American society, and offered one
immediate solution for the Gilded Age ills troubling American farmers. Polk beseeched
southerners to meet the great questions and problems of the hour by turning their
organizational efforts to politics by electing more farmers to fight for the “free
institutions on trial.”1
Polk described the waning fortunes of farmers’ position in American society,
noting a decline from 1860, when farmers made up half the nation’s population and
owned half its wealth. Within twenty years, while the overall wealth of the country
increased 170 percent in the wake of “industrial progress,” farmers had seen their wealth
dwindle down to half the previous amount despite hard work and harder living.2
Acknowledging the wonders of steam power, electricity, and railroads, Polk
nevertheless insisted that the onset of industrial prowess that surpassed and dominated
agriculture begot an unbalanced society. With the middle class “consumed in the furnace
1
“The Annual Address,” Weekly Toiler, September 4, 1889, Vol. 4, No. 16, p. 3; “Officers Present,”
National Economist, March 14, 1889, Vol. 1, No. 1.
2
“The Annual Address,” Weekly Toiler, September 4, 1889, Vol. 4, No. 16, p. 3.
2
of greed and avarice,” Polk sharply differentiated the two classes that remained; one, a
small, well off group of money driven boosters, and the other, the cash-strapped laboring
masses.3
Industry, to Polk, was not of the people; Agriculture was. Therefore, only farmers
and laborers held status as “the people” and this agrarian force would facilitate the
“harmonious blending of all the essential elements of our civilization.” For Polk, the
centralization of wealth produced greedy politicians, threatened free institutions, and
endangered liberty. The only remedy that could thwart oncoming ills was an awakened
American people. “The people” needed to unify themselves politically in order to resist
what they considered a foreign threat to American freedom.4
But the economic duress that burdened southern farmers did not begin with the
rise of industry or its plutocratic proponents. The social and economic consequences of
the Civil War and the political wrangling during Reconstruction marked the beginning of
southern farmers’ economic tribulations and their distress with politics. During this
period Alabama’s farmers began to organize and coordinate their efforts to eradicate
agricultural woes. Farmers initially attempted to reform the public sphere by conversing
in newspapers, at agricultural meetings, and through scientific experiments while
avoiding the political arena.
The traditional story of the Populist Movement generally begins in 1887, where
by the leadership of the Farmers’ Alliance, agricultural organizations combined to initiate
formal political action on behalf of farmers and laborers alike. The story ends with the
3
4
Ibid.
Ibid.
3
failure of William Jennings Bryan to win the presidential election of 1896. The original
network of southern farmers that emerged after the Civil War prompted an agricultural
conversation that formulated many of the agricultural concerns embraced by the People’s
Party, while avoiding the very political action that Polk suggested in 1889.5
Polk had witnessed the minor organizational successes of farmers and the
extraordinary developments of the Gilded Age. He remained convinced that only by
political action would agriculture survive as the basis of society. Farmers in Alabama
experienced the same whirlwind of economic changes and struggled to make sense of
their changing surroundings. They sought solutions to their immediate problems
exhausting non-political measures as they organized local clubs, improved farm
efficiency through scientific experimentation, and cooperated in the market. Through trial
and error, farmers in the post war period forged the more unified and coherent approach
to agricultural survival that Populists employed in the 1890s.
Even though farmers slowly awakened to political action, their original efforts
should propel the historian to initiate an expansion of the Populist Movement to include
the years prior to 1889. For one thing, entry into politics actually diluted the message of
social change many of these farm advocates preached early on. One prominent historian
notes how the first Farmers’ Alliance in Lampasas, Texas failed utterly when it aligned
itself with the Greenback Party in 1880.6 The social organization these early farmers
5
For the traditional, and authoritative, depiction of the Populist Movement in American history see C.
Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951);
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, 1955);
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978); John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance
and the People’s Party (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1931).
6
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 25-26.
4
promoted as necessary to the improvement of their lot, then, was neither completely
naïve at the time nor irrelevant to the story of what historians generally describe as the
“Populist Movement.” Not until 1889, after a semi-successful jute-bag boycott, did
farmers from Alabama embrace direct political action.7
It has been over a century since Polk spoke to Alabama’s farmers and the
pamphlets, official minutes, and documented speeches of agricultural organizations
available today bear the marks of old age, if they can even be recovered. Although
numerous local, county, and state agricultural chapters formed in the decades following
the Civil War, much of the literature documenting their proceedings is missing altogether,
a fact that goes some distance toward explaining the lack of extensive historical work
done on early farm organization. Nevertheless, what documentation we do have is
suggestive and can broaden our understanding of the Populist Movement by expanding
its timeline to include the embryonic phase of the movement.
This thesis documents the emergence of early groups like the Alabama State
Grange that formed in 1873. The organization represented 320 subordinate chapters
statewide, most of which sent representatives to attend the first annual meeting in 1874.
Within three years the number of chapters doubled to 678 Granges, supporting 14,440
members.8 The State Agricultural Society emerged in 1884 for the “collection and
diffusion of industrial information about the state, the advancement of agriculture, and
the promotion of farm organizations.”9 These groups and other agriculturally based
7
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 198; Connie Lester Up From the Mudsills of Hell (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2006), 110.
8
William Warren Rogers, The One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-1896 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1970), 66.
9
Ibid., 102.
5
groups, for example, the Agricultural Wheel and the State Horticultural Society, represent
a litany of smaller, local circles of like-minded farmers across the state of Alabama.
Most agricultural groups devised newspaper “organs,” where editors could
publish meeting minutes, speeches, and the general conversation exchanged at farm
gatherings and in regional agricultural newspapers. Although illiteracy remained typical
of rural areas in Alabama, local agricultural groups, composed of socially affiliated
members of tight knit communities, fostered the dissemination, and nurtured the
understanding, of agricultural ideas written in newspapers and projected by orators. Some
historians have described their efforts as “not really going anywhere,” but farmers
engaged this agricultural conversation, debating various solutions to curtail economic
imbalances.10 Therefore the true character of the early, non-political stages of the agrarian
revolt, immediately following the Civil War, remains concealed. This study attempts to
peel back the cover in Alabama, revealing a glimpse of Populist beginnings.
In the historical literature, Populism anticipates Progressivism, but examining the
first farm organizations in the postwar period reorients Populism with the Civil War and
Reconstruction, allowing us to look forward to the Populist Movement, as opposed to
backward to it from the Progressive Era. This study assumes that the Populists’
explanations of the economic strains of the late nineteenth century, as well as their
proposed solutions, are worth taking seriously as a rational and sincere response to
economic and cultural threats.11
10
Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, viii.
For an excellent summary of the historical literature on the Populist Movement see Samuel Webb,
“Southern Politics in the Age of Populism and Progressivism: A Historiographical Essay,” in A Companion
11
6
Polk’s address must have seemed peculiar to the southern audience gathered in
Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy. Polk did not engage in an emotional
call to the Lost Cause. He did not evoke Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, but asserted
the harmony of “North, South, East and West.” A southerner himself, his dynamic
prescription of American unity to restore the health of the nation revealed a love for the
country blind to sectional differences.12 Farmers’ persistent identification with the
agrarian ideals of Thomas Jefferson is significant in light of the simultaneous explosion
of the Lost Cause movement driven by ex-planters, irreconcilables, and New South
industrialists.
Viewing the Populists through the lens of Reconstruction repositions the farm
movement, which identified with the larger story of national meaning and purpose,
revealing a dynamic agrarian nationalism in the midst of sectional discord. This study
suggests that the farm conversation that existed in Alabama challenged the cultural
unanimity of white supremacy and the Lost Cause that began with the reemergence of the
Democratic Party in 1877. White southerners have long been lumped together, associated
with nostalgic longing for a Confederate past. But, while middle and upper class
Alabamians rallied around the “ghosts” of their recent past, dirt farmers appealed to older
American ideals.13 Because farmers’ organizations rooted their local concerns in the
to the American South, ed. John B. Boles (Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
2002), 321-335.
12
“The Annual Address,” Weekly Toiler, Vol. 4, No. 16, September 4, 1889, p. 3.
13
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the
Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987). In the second footnote of his introduction, Foster delineates what he means when employing
the term “southerner(s)” throughout his authoritative study of the Lost Cause. Interestingly, he defines this
term to mean southern whites, and employs the adjective white throughout the book to remind the reader of
the distinction. This tendency in Southern history to emphasize the overly generalized term “southerners”
promotes the identification of a solid, as opposed to diverse, South.
7
larger national narrative, their story is as much an episode in American nationalism as in
insular regionalism.14
Proper understanding of the Populists, this study suggests, must begin in the fluid
era of Reconstruction when farmers first began to articulate their concerns and grapple
with possible solutions. Well before the political revolt of the 1890s, southern farmers
participated in a regional conversation about the economic and social developments
pervading the South following the Civil War. Farmers felt hopeless due to their political,
economic, and social ailments: The Reconstruction era disillusioned them about the
efficacy of political involvement, the crop lien system shackled the cash strapped
countryside, and industrial progress threatened agricultural supremacy. In agricultural
papers farmers, with common concerns and goals, realized the larger community to
which they belonged. Encouraging rural inhabitants to organize for the common good of
the countryside, farm advocates promoted farm efficiency, farm beautification, and
faithfulness to the agrarian values that had shaped the nation rather than modern industry
which they described as alien to the national purpose.
THE SOUTHERN FARMER’S PLIGHT
We must first orient ourselves to the southern countryside. In the antebellum
period, Black Belt cotton counties of flat land and rich soil remained distinctly different
from more mountainous counties not only in geography, but also in culture. Planters on
14
For a more extensive look at nationalism in American history and its use by historians see David Potter,
“The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 67, No. 4
(Jul. 1962): 924-950; Edward L. Ayers, et al, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
8
large sprawling lands owned slaves and focused on the single staple-crop, cotton; while
upcountry yeoman held small plots of land in the foothills of the Appalachians with
diversified crops and few slaves. Politically, the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth
century empowered planters, especially in state politics; even though non-planters
dominated their local government positions, respectively. Therefore, the planter class
constituted the major political power in state and federal affairs whereas the politically
outmaneuvered yeomanry became intrinsically linked with the planters’ destiny.15
This peculiar relationship would become directly strained after the war, as explanters ignored the needs of yeoman, inclining the small-timers to organize and
amalgamate their interests and power. One historian has documented what he calls the
“persistence” of the planter class after the war in the western counties of Alabama.
Although historians have argued that the Civil War dismantled the planter class, Jonathan
Wiener finds that many planters did not experience an economic skid and continued to
garner control over land and labor, even if the number of planters had decreased.
Although the Civil War sought to destroy planter influence, planters still possessed the
power and wealth derived from land ownership. Postwar yeomen, on the other hand,
could only dream of such strength. The distinction between planter and yeomen reveals
cracks in white unity that would only widen as economic, social, and political changes
engulfed the South.16
How had the Civil War era disturbed southern society? Ultimately, the changes
that followed after the Civil War deeply affected the farmers. Steven Hahn’s book The
15
Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia
Upcountry, 1850-1890, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 4, 16.
16
Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 4-10.
9
Roots of Southern Populism focuses on “the nature and extent of exchange and its social
and cultural ramifications” before and after the war for Georgia’s upcountry farmers.17
One could assert that the yeoman experienced the most change in their economic
interaction (and thus their culture), but the planters, wholly dependent on slave labor,
faced the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment which released their labor force from
bondage. The economic consequences of the war affected every southerner. Hahn notes:
“the common denominator was the process and repercussions of moving into the cotton
economy and its attendant social relationships between 1865 and 1890.”18
The small time farm economy looked much different from the plantation system
before the war. Economic exchange had been limited to yeomen’s immediate
surroundings due to their isolation from the market characterized by bartering and
borrowing between families. Not until railroads began to connect rural places did
merchants, consumer products, and the outside world breach the isolated countryside.
The plantation system on the other hand, had remained connected to the outside world,
especially considering the global cotton trade that opened decades before the war.19
Significantly, yeoman farmers derived their concept of freedom from their market
position, a position they had known long before the war. Therefore, the small farmers
throughout pre-industrial America shared a republican ideology based on independent
land ownership, political liberty, and economic freedom, where everyday farmers lived
outside the effects of market forces. New economic forces threatened the yeoman’s
17
Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, 33.
Steven Hahn, “Common Right and Commonwealth: The Stock-Law Struggle and the Roots of Southern
Populism,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan
Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 53.
19
Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 58.
18
10
economic liberty and therefore their republican ideal. Thus their traditional experience of
liberty and freedom changed as industrialization continued.20
The onset of unsettling industrialization, mounting debt, incoming merchants, and
newly constructed railroads put an end to the insulated economy yeoman once knew. As
Connie Lester, historian of the Tennessee farmers’ movement, explains, the agricultural
sector of the South became sucked “into a cash-based market economy that depended less
on local exchanges of goods and services and tied the value of farm products to distant
markets.”21 From there on out, farmers could no longer depend on each other to barter or
borrow, as they were forced to seek the merchant for any needs they no longer produced
at home.
While upcountry farmers attempted to survive by self-sufficiency after the war,
the depressed economic conditions, particularly the Panic of 1873, and the low prices
received for cotton after the war revealed a desperate situation. Along with the penury
that remained following 1865, razed barns, ruined cities, and “absolute destitution”
prevailed across the South.22 The general lack of cash, product, and capital exposed the
need for the extension of credit to farmers. Ultimately, the only accessible credit came
from merchants as farmers sought needed provisions by promising the profits of
unplanted crops.
The crop lien system that emerged out of the post-bellum South arguably proved
to be as destructive as slavery itself. Farmers sought loans from merchants who required
20
Ibid., 50, 107.
Connie Lester, Up from the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers’ Alliance, Populism, and Progressive
Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870-1915, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 17.
22
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Perennial Library,
1988), 124.
21
11
one particular form of collateral in order to secure the loan, a lien on the farmer’s
upcoming cotton crop. State legislatures across the South passed “lien laws” legalizing
the process and extending the crop lien system’s coverage to include existing accounts in
country stores and with landlords. Farmers could not bargain for a better price from
another merchant once the first had placed a lien on one’s prospective crops. Credit rates
fluctuated as did crop prices; so even if merchants held crops to sell for higher prices, if
those higher rates never came the farmer could still be stuck with an undervalued crop
and subsequent debt.23
Why did farmers not grow subsistence crops and remain isolated from the credit
opportunities extended by merchants? Gilded Age Americans echoed this sentiment as
well, as one Georgian proclaimed: “Instead of cotton fields and patches of grain, let us
have fields of grain and patches of cotton.”24 Merchants insisted that farmers plant a
majority of their land in cotton in order to secure a loan creating an inevitable
circumstance for most southern farmers. This forced increase of cotton production
slashed the amount of homemade products and brought farmers to dependence on
purchased supplies. Therefore farmers could and did run out of food supplies and secured
loans on future crops at exorbitant interest rates. The merchant’s monopoly on accessible
credit remained the only readily available remedy to prevent food shortage.25
This credit arrangement isolated poor farmers across the South establishing a
system of peonage to the merchant and planter classes, inevitably drawing the two
23
Woodward, Origins of the New South, 180; Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 20-25; Hicks, The Populist
Revolt, 41-45.
24
Southern Cultivator quoted in Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The
Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 158.
25
Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 160-164.
12
strongest sectors together to squeeze the lower class. Farmers’ yields often fell short of a
lien’s demand which also led merchants, or those acting as such, to scrutinize the
purchases indebted farmers made on credit and regulate the prices of the products as the
lender saw fit. There often existed two prices for a merchant’s products; one for general
purchasers, and another, higher rate for credit purchases.26
After these experiences the farmer would need more credit extended in order to
plant for the next season and pay off the debt incurred from the previous season. This led
to the invasion and concentration of cotton farming where it had not been predominant
before. Merchants accepted cotton as the only substitute for cash. In order to in effect
“grow” money, yeoman farmers increased cotton production, which meant a reduction in
food stuffs and subsistence provisions. Subsequently farmers exhibited a higher demand
of products from the merchant since fewer necessities came from the farm, creating a
cyclical series of debt accumulation for farmer families.27
Merchants and lenders did not discriminate based upon race; black and white dirt
farmers both experienced the pangs of indebtedness in the postwar world. Though
agricultural critics generalized the economic environment constraining farmers’ choices
by proposing that farmers spent generous amounts on provisions, farmers who budgeted
ten to fifty dollars a year on food begged to differ. One historian points to the exemplary
fact that the southern cotton crop of eight and one half million bales in 1890 sold for
26
Woodward, Origins of the New South, 180-181; Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 22-23; Hicks, The
Populist Revolt, 41-43.
27
Ibid., 182.
13
429.7 million dollars; nine million bales a year later only received 391.5 million, a nearby
forty million dollar loss on half a million more bales of cotton.28
Though the crop lien system had become a major problem in the South, other
events propelled farmers to cooperate as well. The growth of combining corporations and
trusts became a major complaint of Gilded Age farmers. The railroads, which shipped
people and products alike, directly affected farmers as they physically witnessed railroad
intrusion into the countryside. With new railroads, merchants, and crop liens, the new
developments in the South surely became an important topic in social settings, private
conversations and in the newspapers and periodicals available to farmers.
NEWSPAPERS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTHERN SOLUTIONS
Southerners participated in agricultural meetings, but they also cultivated a rich
dialogue in print throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The newspaper and periodical editors
of the nineteenth century supported a sort of theatrical stage with an audience bound to
one another due to their simultaneous, horizontal relationship. W. Scott Morgan, who
authored History of the Wheel and Alliance and the Impending Revolution (1889),
noticed this:
It was not until the art of printing was discovered, and education of the masses
had gained considerable headway, that a general desire for more freedom of
28
Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 24. Many in the post bellum South, especially those outside the
agricultural ranks, underestimated how severe the southern farmers’ economic situation was and especially
the compelling nature of the crop lien system.
14
speech, thought and action began to make itself felt among the potentates of the
old and new worlds.29
The mere existence of available print media allowed for self-education and the circulation
of ideas. Farmer media publications, in the wake of economic distress and
Reconstruction, gave their critiques and solutions to society allowing those who read to
contest, deny, or agree with editorial suggestions. Agriculturally based newspapers in the
South measured the pulse of agrarian thought.
Therefore the pages of the agriculturally-minded newspapers and periodicals that
articulated farmers’ concerns provides the surest way to view the farmers’ perspective on
the emerging New South world and the forces which propelled farmers to organize. But
first, the importance of the emergence of print media in the larger history of the
nineteenth century must be understood along with the nature of southern print in
particular.
The advent of the novel and the newspaper created an unconscious concept that
Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities calls “simultaneity.”30 In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time when the American and French Revolutions
thwarted the concept of divine rule, the dissemination of print media exposed readers to
new information and a rich, new life experience. Although this seems simple, the
combination of revolutionary human freedom and the new perspective that novels and
newspapers allowed, gave the reader a sense of omniscience. Literature collapsed time
29
W. Scott Morgan, History of the Wheel and Alliance and the Impending Revolution (Fort Scott, KS: J.H.
Rice & Sons, Printers and Publishers, 1889), 14.
30
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev.
Ed. (New York and London: Verso, 2006), 24.
15
and space whereas to the reader, characters in a story become linked together, identified
as a part of a community or society.
In a subliminal way newspapers also linked readers together. The date, the most
binding element on the page, combined with the non-fictional quality of newspapers
linked readers into an imagined community, an identifiable society, a vehicle for respect
and indifference, love and hatred, national support and sectional strife. Add to this the
effective printing of nineteenth century presses and the mass production of newspapers
and these everyday accessible, non-fiction novels function as a facilitator in the
development of a like-minded community. 31
Not all Americans read the same newspapers and novels though and a number of
communities bound by print, emerged within the nation. Historian Carl Osthaus suggests
that for the first sixty years of the Union, weekly and daily publications remained
uniform between the sections, where the most “influential journalists were political
editors,” drawing from the political battles of politicians’ platforms. Readers paid five to
ten dollars a year in advance and editors circulated 1,500 to 3,000 papers regionally.
According to Osthaus, the South exhibited a multitude of publications tied to locally
influential editors with “as many papers in the community as there were parties,”
implying the political patronage also dear to editors. Editors relied on exchange with
regional newspapers, saving the good stuff for potent editorial columns.32
31
Ibid., 24-36. For more on the effect of mass print media on Western society see Lynn Hunt, Inventing
Human Rights: A History (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007).
32
Carl R. Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press: Editorial Spokesmen of the Nineteenth Century
(Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 3-5.
16
After the Civil War, less than two hundred weeklies existed in the South as many
presses, and editors themselves, fell to the brutal consequence of war. Within three years
the number of papers had increased to almost five hundred, by 1885, 1,827 publications
in twelve states.33 But the mainstream press that emerged in the postwar South resembled
a “closed press,” where most successful papers acquiesced to southern elites and the
Democratic Party line. The majority of southern editors remained supportive of
agriculture but derided the crop lien system enacted by state legislation and interest rates
that hindered farm vitality. In contrast to agriculturally based publications, the actuality
of postwar economic consequences at the farmer’s doorstep occupied an ancillary
position to the everyday presses, decreasing the severity of the farmers’ grievances.
Mainstream southern editors failed to lead the agricultural sector as farmers remained
suspicious of those without an agricultural background, not to mention most editors’
support of the modernizing leaders, supportive of the industrialization that farmers found
threatening.34
Alternatives existed to the dominant majority of newspapers prevalent in the New
South, although the alternative press remains tough to quantify accurately. Osthaus finds
that “slaves, freedmen, poor whites, and other underclass Southerners did not buy
33
Thomas D. Clark, The Southern Country Editor (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Publishers, 1948), 20.
34
Osthaus describes southern print in the nineteenth century in three phases. The first era from 1790-1850,
exhibited uniformity with the North as both were inundated with political ideologies and latent events.
After the Civil War, the North modernized their print industry behind the powerful New York City presses
that produced three eight page dailies, while southern presses persisted in an “agrarian rhythm.”
Competition in the North produced the second period, where journalists’ “most important function” became
“timely news gatherings.” Southern editors in this period, 1850-1880, utilized reports coming from larger
urban papers in order to provide news as soon as it could be printed. Southern papers based in urban centers
supported a “rural symbiosis,” supporting agrarian interests from the urban center. The third period, 18801900, witnessed the emergence of heavy-hitting New South editors like Henry Grady, Henry Watterson,
and Francis Dawson. New South boosters placed modernization via industrialization as the primary cause
of the region. See Carl R. Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press, 1-11.
17
newspapers, and advertisers hardly would pay to solicit their patronage.” He concedes
that this may be a “chicken before the egg” puzzle due to the fact that newspapers were
seldom delivered to the addresses of the southern underclass. Southern editors appealed
to mass readerships by supporting sectional orthodoxy and catering to upwardly mobile
whites. His concession allows that poor farmers could have accessed newspapers,
especially through the help of social interaction through organization, but they did not
compose the majority of actual subscribers.35
One obvious alternative to the solid South’s newspapers spoke largely to the black
community, while also attempting to garner white support. Republican newspapers
attempted to establish a Party in the South where it had never thrived before. One study
found that 430 Republican presses existed in southern states from 1857 to 1877. While
supporting racial equality, free press, and free labor, the presses “strove to create a sense
of group solidarity and community among Republicans that would help them to cope
with ostracism and violence.”36 A step short of successfully creating a tight-knit, southern
Republican community, the differing factions of Republican editorship helped fracture
the Party’s foundation in the South as they split their allegiance between a poor
constituency (blacks and whites) and the modernizing efforts of elite southerners.
Although Republican papers included improvements in agricultural methods, the lack of
definitive support for the agricultural sector, particularly the whites therein, left farmers
wanting practical agricultural discussion.
35
Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press, 10-11.
Richard H. Abbott, The Free Press and Equal Rights: Republican Newspapers in the Reconstruction
South, edited by John W. Quist (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2004), 5.
36
18
Farmers became engaged in the agrarian conversation as they realized the larger
community of regional farmers directed by agricultural groups’ newspapers and editors
strewn across the South, especially since mainstream papers, and the Republican press,
failed to fully comprehend southern farmers’ condition.37 Two prime examples of
regional agricultural publications, the Southern Cultivator (GA), or the Weekly Toiler
(TN), on the other hand, consciously fostered an agricultural conversation between
farmers to exchange scientific methods and also social commentary. They printed articles
and reports from agricultural speeches, meetings, and other newspapers extending the
scope of the publication beyond their regional boundaries and in effect tying farmers
together across the South. While the actual number of agriculturally based presses in the
countryside evades historians, these regional papers prove to be significant sources,
exposing only the tip of the iceberg of agricultural conversation.
As small local gatherings persisted and statewide organizations continued to hold
meetings, newspapers informed leaders and small scale organizers of the purpose,
growth, and resolutions of the broader agricultural community. Bonded by similar issues,
these papers, alongside participation in recurring meetings, provide a context for the
agricultural conversation circulating in the Deep South. In these papers, and others,
37
Clark, The Southern Country Editor, 268; Abbott, For Free Press and Equal Rights, 115-117; Osthaus,
Partisans of the Southern Press, 139, 208. Since the South remained an agriculturally based economic
system, most newspaper editors exhibited some, if not much, affinity for the plight of farmers. But as these
same proponents supported the expansion of railroads, factories, or mining, for example, farmers perceived
this as support for industrialization and at least a step away from agricultural promotion. The Republican
press’s choosing between the southern underclass and southern elite, entailed consequences ranging from
land confiscation and planter disenfranchisement (to provide land for poor whites and blacks) to more
“centrist” and conservative leanings, like bonding with the emerging “landed, business, and professional
classes.” Osthaus points to the controversial John Forsyth’s Mobile Daily Register and the persistent call
for farmers to “eat at home,” which allows for the conclusion that elitist newspapers found farmers to be
perpetuating the crop lien system instead of being hopelessly caught up in it. Interestingly, Thomas Clark
claims that postwar southern printing remained lucrative because merchants needed forms in which to draw
up liens and advertise the sale of repossessed property, giving printers steady work.
19
editors and writers honored American beginnings and agricultural superiority as they
directed a vibrant conversation among southern farmers.
The Southern Cultivator focused heavily on farm process and technique, much
like early agricultural organizations. It covered everything from “artichokes” to “cabbage
worms;” “mucky soil” to “The natural history of bacteria.”38 But particular segments of
the Cultivator, like “The Fireside,” lectured on broader conditions in agriculture. With
the perceived assault on agriculture from big business and industry, agriculturalists spent
most of their time attempting to convince farmers, and the rest of the country it seems,
that country life produced the sweetest fruits for one’s existence and buoyed the best
form of civilization.
W.L. Jones, “editor and proprietor” of the Southern Cultivator, and similar
proponents, tackled several problems all within the framework of considering agricultural
civilization as superior to any other. Whether referring to Jefferson or solving “the labor
question,” little fell outside Jones’ agricultural frame.39 The crux of the labor problem for
Southern farmers extended directly from “the stroke of the emancipation pen.” He
answered the labor question by reminding the audience that the problems began with “the
late war . . . in which we were absolutely deprived of all control over those who had
before been as obedient, faithful and efficient as could be desired.”40 Since that time,
according to Jones, the freed population had become half as productive, whether as hired
labor or as tenants. Jones coupled this with the inefficiency of the farm system where
farmers remained unable to pay even miniscule wages. As a solution the editors proposed
38
Index to Southern Cultivator, Vol. XXXIX, p. i-v.
“The Labor Question,” Southern Cultivator, December 1882. Vol XL, No 12, p10.
40
Ibid.
39
20
“intensive farming” of smaller amounts of land with high manuring, in effect
concentrating the farmers’ efforts to produce.41
Farmers’ efforts remained incompatible with a new trend of city living and city
work, a continuous complaint of rural inhabitants. The rise of urban areas in the South
drew many from the fields to clerk in general stores, or try their hand in industrial labor.42
Jones described the problem in urban living and work as too many attempting to live by
their “wits instead of their muscles” (his emphasis).43 Although these men lived by their
wits, city life only nurtured part of the man. According to Jones, a man exercised his wits
in the city but denied nutrition to his “more robust parts.” The most fulfilling lifestyle,
regardless of pay, emanated from the countryside.44
Even so, at least one farmer challenged this representation and thought farmers
themselves had misrepresented the countryside. An article from The Alabama State
Wheel declared the economic and political problems “Our Own Fault.” In America,
“working men [were] in the majority,” and could change the laws as they please but
evidently had failed to do so. The author of the article, who remained unnamed but for his
origin of “Fort Worth South West,” found the remedy for personal failure in education,
intelligence, and thinking.45 A sort of self-help theme begins to recur in the newspapers
even though farmers fought a losing battle economically, compiling more debts through
41
Ibid.
Urban clerking jobs were unattainable for blacks up through the first half of the twentieth century. On the
other hand, industrialists regularly employed black labor paying wages as low as possible. For more on
cheap black labor and the industrial south, see David Lewis, The Rise of the Birmingham District: An
Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994).
43
“Thoughts for the Month,” Southern Cultivator, January 1876, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, p. 1
44
“Country Against Town Civilization,” Southern Cultivator, February 1877, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, p. 82.
45
“Our Own Fault,” Alabama State Wheel, January 11, 1888, Vol. 1, No. 45, p. 4.
42
21
crop liens season after season. How could they personally rejuvenate country living and
keep it attractive?
One direct action farmers could take to support country living was to inject
“culture” into their homes. Jones railed against dilapidated homes. Although the whole of
farmers’ lives needed to be dedicated to farming, educating oneself in new methods and
scientific farming could drive down one’s hours of labor. This would lead to more free
time where farmers could improve their social position by “individual improvement and
home improvement.”46
Another farm advocate, George I. Motz, echoed these sentiments at an Alabama
State Agricultural Society meeting denouncing the “ruined” and “dilapidated” buildings
that had once been the highest form of art in the Confederacy. He discouraged rural
inhabitants from already overcrowded cities and called for a concentration of efforts on
agricultural methods in order to restore the agrarian legacy. He even called for a picture
at the state meeting in order to create a model for future generations, only calling for “the
good looking members,” to gather for a photograph.47
Jones advocated introducing literature to one’s family allowing a connection with
the outside world all from the comfort of one’s home. If farm families wished to leave a
legacy, an inheritance, and a life for their children, planning and provision for social life
in the countryside remained pertinent to their success.48 Accordingly, farmers could keep
46
“The Social Position of Country People,” Southern Cultivator, December 1876, Vol. XXXIV, No. 12, p.
497.
47
Thomas J. Key, Secretary, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the Alabama State Agricultural
Society, (Montgomery, Ala.: Southern Agriculturalist, Print, 1888), 35, 49.
48
“Farmer’s Children,” Southern Cultivator, December 1876, Vol. XXXV, No. 12, p. 498.
22
their children from migrating to the city by educating them at home. After all, “the farm
ha[d] fostered our best statesmen, orators and poets.”49
But times had changed and industrial progress represented something new; and to
remedy this adversity, they looked to their past successes as the best indicator of what
would bring future triumph. Jones directly recognized that “the civilization of the United
States is rapidly changing from a country to a city civilization,” and fully expected
agriculture not only to survive but also to conquer its new foe.50 In other words, the
assault on agriculture by industry only fostered farmers’ forefather-venerating, agrarian
nationalism; it simultaneously forced agriculturalists to cultivate a new social model for
the future, one out of which they came. Farmers used the total American experience to
carve out their place in the new nation, and fulfill their present and future with the
honorable past.
The Weekly Toiler, a Nashville Agricultural Wheel publication, remained a
prominent sounding board for farm rhetoric and ideals, similar to Jones’ newspaper. The
Toiler’s main editor J.H. McDowell started his agricultural ascent when he joined the
Grange in Tennessee in 1871. Years later he became the second President of the
Tennessee Farmers’ Alliance. His career illuminates the permeable and interactive nature
of different agricultural groups when considering their interaction with one another.
McDowell feuded with T.B. Ruff’s State Wheel publication, to solidify the authority of
the Toiler in the region, effectively eliminating the former. Competition between regional
49
50
“Country Homes – Culture In,” Southern Cultivator, May 1880, Vol XXXVIII, No. 5, p. 196.
“Country Against Town Civilization,” Southern Cultivator, p. 83.
23
papers often resulted in the failure of one and success of the other, with the latter
accumulating the attention of the readership.51
On a national level, the new nation forged from the Civil War did not favor
agriculture economically like it did corporate business. In the Weekly Toiler, McDowell
told readers that the federal government had “fostered monopoly both by high protective
tariff and the national banking system.”52 With money hoarded away in the treasury,
McDowell argued, there was not enough cash in circulation to kindle agricultural growth
in production and commerce. This predicament, according to McDowell, caused a lack of
confidence and a preponderance of corruption that the country had never seen, causing
farmers to organize. Protective policies, like the tariff, guarded other industries and
agriculturalists wanted the same protection.53 Moreover, the farm contingent concluded
that they upheld the truest ideals of American society and noted that the “common people
– the producers, and they alone must save [the nation] or anarchy will follow.”54
Under these circumstances, in the 1870s and 80s local divisions of the Grange, the
Agricultural Wheel, and state supported agricultural societies, among others, emerged to
resuscitate the countryside and bring an ethical presence to the crumbling postwar
society. The official “organs” of these groups, and the editors behind them, helped to
51
Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell, 56-57.
This notion of a “national banking system” deserves clarification. John Hicks describes this system,
perceived by farmers, as banks favoring one side, capital, over another, labor. Accordingly, national banks
bought U.S. bonds and then issued notes up to ninety percent of their value, but these banks realized that
they could make more money by selling their bonds and not issuing the notes. Farmers proposed that the
federal government print money in order to provide a flexible currency; see “The Farmers’ Grievances,”
included in Ed. Raymond J. Cunningham’s The Populists in Historical Perspective (Lexington,
Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1968), 17. Also everyday farmers remained concerned with their
immediate surroundings and spent much less time pontificating on, or even understanding, the schemes of
large banks, fact or fiction.
53
Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell, 58.
54
“Why so Many Trusts are Organized,” Weekly Toiler, Vol. 3, No. 11, August 8, 1888, p. 1.
52
24
bond farmers’ grievances into a larger ideology, catechized by recurring organizational
meetings. The exact activities and origins of all early agricultural groups remain a
mystery as official proceedings of local meetings, for example, may have never even
been recorded. If only small slivers of their stories can be pieced together it can help us to
understand the character of early Populists which may add to our comprehension of the
overall movement.
EARLY ORGANIZATIONAL EFFORTS
Initially after the Civil War, local agricultural clubs like the Agricultural
Association of Monroe County (1865) and the Macon County Agricultural Association
(1867) sprouted around the state of Alabama.55 These early agricultural organizations did
not recruit to form a broader constituency or campaign for reform. Whether a social
function, or an economic stratagem, it remains clear that these early groups formed no
vigorous political faction. Each individual group’s respective goals remain unclear, but
one could safely say that generally, they convened to discuss farm practice and farm
culture. Probably the most success came with actions like Charles A. Peabody of Russell
County and his first postwar fair with the East Alabama Agricultural Society.56
Regardless, the rough terrain of the 1870s, including the Panic of 1873, “cotton rust,”
“cotton caterpillars,” and drought decimated these adolescent groups and their
agricultural surroundings.57
55
William Warren Rogers, The One-Gallused Rebellion, 61.
Ibid., 63.
57
Wayne Flynt, Poor But Proud (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 64.
56
25
According to William Warren Rogers, due to the economic turmoil of the decade
Oliver H. Kelly of the Federal Department of Agriculture found himself “distressed by
the general demoralization” of the farm economy and “planned a social and educational
organization for farmers.”58 Kelly established the National Grange of the Patrons of
Husbandry, which represented one of the first agricultural groups with longevity in the
proto-Populist movement. This secretive group, with “cautious methods and limited
claims,” set an early example for farm organizations but lost national prominence in the
later years of the movement.59 Initially conceived by Kelly, the Grange, under the charge
of social organization, had no troubles attracting farmers in agricultural regions
throughout the country.
This reserved and secretive group focused on cooperation and communication
blessed with religious ties. The Grange played an integral role in establishing cultural ties
that farmers knew and related to, like religion and community interaction, therefore
creating neighbors and significant bonds across the countryside. They shared farm
practices, exchanged data from rudimentary personal experiments, and probably more
abundant, contributed to local gossip.60 The Grange did not encourage black farmers to
join, while other groups banned them altogether. Regardless, early farm leaders seldom
extended the olive branch across racial lines in contrast to the later movement where
58
Rogers, The One-Gallused Rebellion, 63-64.
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 32.
60
Proceedings of the State Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry of Alabama: Second Session, December
1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, 1874, (Montgomery, AL: Southern Plantation Printing and Binding, 1875), 3.
59
26
black farmers established their own Farmers’ Alliances under the direction of white
leaders.61
The Grange remained politically indifferent throughout its existence, even after
the turn to political action in 1889; hence the unprecedented growth of the politically
motivated Farmers’ Alliance thereafter. Nonetheless, the organization provided a broad
social connection for southern farmers and fostered the development of a larger
movement of farmers. Their leadership held uniform titles familiar with the southern past
like “Worthy Master” and “Worthy Overseer” although the Union army had thoroughly
extinguished the slave system. Nonetheless, by November 1873, enough sub-chapters of
the Grange had formed in Alabama to justify a convention of the Alabama State
Grange.62
The events, speeches, and reports given at the Alabama State Grange meetings63
in the 1870s remained largely preoccupied with the logistical relationship between local,
county and state Granges. But leaders did allow time for opinionated orators interested in
61
William F. Holmes, “The Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance.” The Journal of Southern History
Vol. XLI, No. 2 (May 1975): 191. Holmes suggests that the formation of the Colored Farmers Alliance
corresponded directly to the lack of encouragement or acceptance of black members in the Grange and
Southern Alliance, respectively. The Agricultural Wheel originally out of Arkansas, on the other hand,
enjoyed half a million members in the South with groups separate groups for each race, though some
chapters allowed both.
62
The Alabama Department of Archives and History: LPR136, Box 8, Folder 4-5. The Alabama
Department of Archives and History only has the first four sessions of the Alabama State Grange (1874-77)
and the sessions in (1888-91). Only two years before the first convention, Col. R.W. Powell of Mississippi
had formed eight subordinate Granges in Pickens and Sanford counties in Alabama. Evander McIver Law
of South Carolina developed a Grange in Tuskegee, Rogers, The One Gallused-Rebellion, 65-66.
63
The annual Alabama State Grange meetings resemble the schedule of the conventions of modern day.
Each year they gathered in a different Alabama locale, like Auburn, Eufala, Huntsville, Montgomery,
Talladega, or Troy, and met around the beginning of December, after harvest time. The meetings lasted
three days, each divided into three sections. The first two sessions occupied the morning and afternoon with
speeches from State and local Grange leaders. Interestingly, the night session, after dinner, was generally
reserved for question and answer sessions between the audience and a panel of prominent agriculturalists;
See Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), Alabama Associations Collection, LPR 136,
Box 8, Folder 4, Alabama State Grange, 1874-77 and Folder 5, Alabama State Grange, 1888-91.
27
larger issues. W. H. Chambers, “Worthy Master,” of the State Grange, spent his speaking
minutes convincing others of the importance of representation and support from the
National Grange.64 In his opening speech Chambers told of an increase of five hundred
subordinate Granges, good news for the overall purpose of organizing but problematic for
large gatherings that incorporated more than one representative from each group. The
important issue of representation, both in the state and national group, according to
Chambers, “. . . involve[d] a more fundamental change in our economy, in that it
introduce[d] the idea of representation based upon numbers . . .” Whether this was a body
blow to the usual procedures of stuffed ballots and partisan control of government, or
simply a declaration of the strength in numbers which farmers thought they possessed,
remains unclear. National support and loyalty shortly after a bloody Civil War though,
exposes a difference between the agricultural leaders and the white elite.
Therefore leaders garnered support for representation in the National Grange. The
national council would give more weight to a heavier population of Grange
representatives of a state, than to an inactive Grange representation from another state, so
Chambers sought to regulate the numbers in order to solidify a voice for Alabama in the
national Grange conversation.65 This preoccupation with representation also anticipated
the fact that the majority of Americans in the postwar period remained employed in
agriculture, particularly in the South.66 Therefore the potential to cast a majority vote at
64
Proceedings of the State Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry of Alabama: First Session, (Montgomery,
AL: Barrett & Brown, Book and Job Printers and Binders, 1874), 5-6.
65
Ibid., 6.
66
See Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, pp. x, xi, 401, 674. In addition to the statistics on
employment, the 1870 Census provides Alabama’s population, 996,992 (521,384 whites, and 475,510
blacks), how many attended school, 77,139, and the 383,012 and 349,771 who could not write or read,
respectively; Department of the Secretary of the Interior, Ninth Census – Volume I: The Statistics of the
28
the polls existed, which would fulfill their politically collective role as “the people.” In
contrast to this capacity, early farm proponents veered away from political involvement.
Grange proponents like Chambers respected the health of a nation and saw all
national fortune linked directly with agriculture. True to form, Chambers closed his
speech bellowing the “true design of the order, which is to reform and elevate our
agriculture.” He continued declaring that, “[The Order’s] prosperity is at the bottom of all
true national prosperity. Its health is the foundation of all true national health, so that not
only we who till the soil, but all trades and professions are interested in its
development.”67
The confidence exuded by these agricultural leaders is palpable. Farm leaders of
the day did not, for the most part, see themselves as descending into nostalgia or
forestalling inevitable transformation but envisioned their continued leadership of the
nation in the future, just as agriculturalists had done in the past. Their conversation
worked through various approaches to promoting and securing what they never doubted
was the superior mode of civilization.
Although agricultural prosperity remained directly tied with national well-being,
Reconstruction policy exacerbated the hardships of resuscitating the war torn country.
Emancipation forced Southern farmers to grapple with the reorganization of agricultural
labor. Tackling this major problem, especially one of this size and scope frustrated
southern agriculturalists as land owners attempted to construct a labor system, and
renters, laborers, and sharecroppers competed for an equal contract. Regardless of the
Population of the United States, embracing the Tables of Race, Nationality, Sex, Selected Ages, and
Occupations (June 1, 1872) by Francis A. Walker (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872).
67
Proceedings of the State Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry of Alabama: First Session, 11.
29
lack of political involvement, they still grappled with two pillars of the agricultural
system: race and labor relations.
The Southern Plantation, the official “organ” of the Alabama State Grange began
in 1874, in Montgomery, Alabama and facilitated the agricultural conversation.68 No
shortage of Reconstruction angst existed in an article from January 21, 1875 entitled “A
Word With Farmers.” Adolphe Dreyspring expressed his revulsion at the spectacle of
African Americans not only participating in government but actually believing that the
care of every evil in society lies within reach of the law,” and that the “enforcement of
laws . . . will restrain and correct all human failings.”69 Dreyspring’s represented
concerns about black leadership that was all too common among whites in the
Reconstruction period.
Accordingly when it came to white and black, Dreyspring saw “all that makes life
endurable with one” and “the caprice and ignorance of the other.” To Dreyspring a lack
of unity and purpose represented the basis of the labor problem, as if to say that black
laborers possessed a character flaw incompatible with progress. Only white supervision
and paternalism, he asserted, could lead to progress. Interracial solidarity would come
only later in the movement when the Populists did embrace some civic equality for black
farmers within the broader organization and accepted a large number of blacks into the
national movement through industrial labor unions.
To control labor Dreyspring proposed an immigration society, organized by the
state, to function as “colonization companies” who would function as “trustees, umpires
68
Footnote the decision to choose the Southern Plantation from the 2nd proceedings of the Grange and/or
the paper itself, front page.
69
“A Word With Farmers” The Southern Plantation, January 21, 1875, Vol 1, No. 12, 18-19.
30
and intermediaries.” They would accept immigrants, those with proper backbone:
laborers, artisans, farmers and manufacturers. Although he did not directly address the
issue, one can be sure that he considered the ex-slave unwelcome, but surely not absent,
in this labor system composed of supposedly willing immigrants.
Worthy Master Chambers agreed with Dreyspring. As he talked of immigration,
this “acknowledged want of the South,” Chambers disparaged the “pauper population of
hireling laborers,” which he “already had enough of.” But he welcomed “a hardy, thrifty,
industrious class of small proprietors,” showing a fresh sense of openness to new arrivals
in the South.70 Ultimately, he searched for a replacement set of labor, as if to export
slave labor and import another arrangement.
Essentially, Chambers proposed “labor nurseries,” where a “hardy white race,”
could foster and care for the less useful citizens; “the colonization of a law-revering and
law-biding [sic] peasantry.”71 The immigration policy of these soon-to-be Populists
remains in contrast with the generally loosened racial policy of the later movement. The
superior, paternal position of whites in society seems to be a primary goal that
agriculturalists needed to conserve, yet Populists entertained the rather radical, for the
South, idea of remaining open to new arrivals. These proponents searched for a design in
which to create a peasantry, that blissful contingent, and control labor through the
paternalistic example set by righteous whites. This need to retain the social hierarchy of
the past denotes a southern obsession with conserving to a certain degree the social
arrangements of antebellum America.
70
Proceedings of the State Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry of Alabama: Second Session, December
1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, 1874, (Montgomery, AL: Southern Plantation Printing and Binding, 1875), 7.
71
“A Word With Farmers,” The Southern Plantation, January 21, 1875; Vol 1, No. 12, 19.
31
Dreyspring later pressed readers to “not hope too much from politics,” to remind
his farm brothers of their common ground.72 The rage and heatedness of Reconstruction
nation-mending deeply affected these southerners. Reestablishing race and labor
relations, the major issues of the Reconstruction period, largely challenged the farmers’
frame of mind and way of thinking causing them to pursue agricultural preservation as its
very foundations came under coercion.
Early farm organizations struggled with solving the labor and race issues of the
Reconstruction era. Unlike the later movement, these farmers exhibited resentment
against the freed population and welcomed immigration of laborers from an acceptable
background. They wished to retain what they could of antebellum life and at the same
time, the Alabama State Grange in particular, worked to gain national representation and
promoted ideas of national, not sectional, prosperity. These findings acknowledge the
complexity of the early movement and the problems of renewing the disunited country.
Farm leaders cultivated a rich conversation in the countryside but the issues that
dominated the overall southern discussion prevented them from attracting every
southerner to the agricultural discussion. With their dictations ignored by non-farmers,
agriculturalists focused on solutions immediately applicable to farmers, conceding
authority of the remaining discussions to industrialists, urban-dwellers, and the southern
elite.
72
Ibid., 19.
32
POLITICAL ANTIPATHY
The political wrangling of the Reconstruction era represents one possible reason
that farmers avoided political action for so long. For many Southerners, the Republican
Party, burdened with the charge of enforcing reconciliation of the South with the nation,
harbored freedmen, scalawags, and carpetbaggers.73 Thus, a wide range of Southerners
resented Reconstruction politicians and their policies. Yet as Republicans dealt with the
intricate details of mending the broken nation Democrats merely reinstituted white
supremacy and rule by southern elite. Many small-time farmers saw the political options
set before them as depressingly narrow.
If one focuses on the political changes that started during and proceeded after the
war, a few marked changes rise to the top. The first has to do with emancipation of
African American slaves who demanded equality before the law, enfranchisement, and an
escape from white authority.74 Immediately upon emancipation, led by black ministers,
soldiers and intellectuals, freedmen organized for political participation. Many served in
their state legislatures and local governments for a decade after the war providing
tangible evidence of the war’s upheaval to southern whites. The freedmen’s exercise of
political rights ostracized the white population, both rich and poor, from wanting to
participate in the political arena.
73
Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865-1881 (Tuscaloosa and London: The
University of Alabama Press, 1977) discusses the different white factions of Republican unionists,
moderates, and radicals, exposing the varied leadership and contention between plans of action within the
party. Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), is also a great resource for nuanced stories of prominent carpetbaggers in most of the southern
states. Both of these revisionist works provide a proper understanding of Republican forces in the South.
74
Foner, Reconstruction, 110.
33
During the war, Union forces had done the work of regeneration, removing the
black eye of slavery from the national landscape. The next step was to reorganize
politically the defeated southern states.75 President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction
(1865-68) “put enormous authority back in the hands of white southerners” (even those
with Unionist sentiment still never believed in black suffrage) while simultaneously
claiming to enforce Lincoln’s plan.76 Unimpressed with Presidential Reconstruction,
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan. The Radical Republicans held out for one major
principle – equality before the law; and they secured this with the passage of the
Fourteenth Amendment. Southern states would indeed ratify the amendment before being
accepted back in to the Union.77
The Republican Party attempted to make inroads into the South in order to secure
the party’s vitality in the decades to come. The same hill country that provided unionists
during southern secession also provided a potential base for the incoming party in certain
geographic regions. Republicans called for public schools, aid to new railroads, and other
social programs that poor whites might find attractive. But the change in taxation, from
taxes on property, slaves and land, to singular taxation on land holdings which increased
the tax burden on whites and simultaneously doubled the lower classes by including freed
slaves. In effect, a yeoman white farmer who owned a tract of land paid more than a free
black laborer did in taxes, because the freed black owned relatively little property, and
the poor white received “little more in services than he had received earlier,” in the
75
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 39.
76
Ibid., 45. Also, Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988).
77
Blight, Race and Reunion, 47.
34
antebellum period. Thus the Republican Party may not have been rejected due to racial
bias alone, but for its larger political incompatibility with white southerners.78
The main battle in the public eye during Reconstruction remained between
Republicans and Democrats. Additionally, the advent of industrial development provided
urban centers with a growing middle class throughout the South which proved to be a key
demographic as Republicans and Democrats competed for New South support, a contest
which the Democrats won. As the overall public conversation followed modernization,
the southern elite effectively rendered small-scale farmers irrelevant to the New South.
The political inflammation that consumed the 1870s decreased the potential for
nationalistic sentiment for many southerners. Not until the reemergence of the
Democratic Party in the South during the political crisis of 1876-77 and in the executive
office with the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884, did a sense of
reconciliation return to the southerner elite, those apathetic to Radical Republican rule
and indignant about African American involvement in government. As the Democrats
reemerged in the South, they drew a clear line in the sand on the race issue. They sought
to oust blacks in politics, and succeeded, which settled the race question, for whites, for
some time.79
78
J. Mills Thornton, “Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South,” in
Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and
James M. McPherson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 349-352; See also Eric
Foner, “Writing About Reconstruction: A Personal Reflection,” in Looking South: Chapters in the Story of
an American Region, eds. Winfred B. Moore, Jr. and Joseph F. Tripp (New York and Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1989), 8-9, which describes the difference of the “activist” state that Republicans
supported versus a more conservative, elusive state. Although, Brian Balogh’s A Government Out of Sight:
The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), suggests that the federal government was not so elusive after all in the 1800s.
79
Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 66.
35
The renewed nation forged from the war ridden with new market influence and
industrial development evoked a white response that remained fractured. From the
farmers came a radical agrarian response, cloaked in nationalist sentiment that later
included a flexible racial policy. They wished to upend industrial supremacy, replacing it
with agriculture. On the other hand, the Lost Cause provided a conservative refuge for
whites in line with the New South. By the late 1880s, farmers allowed blacks into the
movement weakening racial lines. Historian David Blight finds no coincidence that
groups like the United Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy
emerged in force at the peak of the Populists political revolt in the early 1890s.80
The change from the Old South to the new remained apparent in the 1880s and
early 90s, marking the inauguration of a transition in America from an agricultural
society to an industrial society.81 New South advocates, like the well-known Henry Grady
of Atlanta, promoted industry as the wave of the future. The Alexandria Daily noticed a
“boom” in a reprinted an article from the Richmond Whig touting southern progress in
1887 as “truly remarkable, showing that . . . there has been the most wonderful industrial
activity in the south, and that all over that section the people have awakened to the vast
possibilities of the future.” The article pointed to the “rapid growth” of manufacturing
both “in the larger industries of iron and cotton,” but also in furniture, canned fruits and
vegetables, lumber interests, machine shops, and mining, helping a reported one thousand
“new enterprises” get off the ground.82 These booms would eventually give way to new
80
Blight, Race and Reunion, 276, 294.
Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 80.
82
“The Southern Boom,” Alexandria Daily, April 7, 1887. Vol. 2, No. 550.
81
36
middle class employment. Meanwhile, farms remained mortgaged or loaded with liens
easily defining the differences between New South growth and agricultural duress.
As the New South developed, farmers sought the traditional agrarian values that
mirrored the Old South’s basis of agriculture. Small-time farmers never owned a
multitude of slaves, so their commitment to a society based on agriculture rested more
with a self-subsistent culture than a nostalgic yearning for the slave system. In contrast
with certain “irreconcilables,”83 they promoted the agrarian ideal in the midst of southern
renewal and attempted to create a healthily functioning agricultural system devoid of
slavery and based on efficient farm practice. This dynamic campaign supported national
interests by promoting American ideals instead of clinging to the southern tradition.
In the end, the politically powerful southern elite controlled public memory and
identity, while farmers appealed only to farmers. Therefore New South industrialists, who
wanted an upsurge in modernization, needed the public blessing of politically powerful,
wealthy ex-planters. With their interests combined, the two wealthier groups effectively
isolated the farmers’ grievances from overtaking public opinion. This explains the failure
of the farm movement to take hold and lead a larger portion of southern society in the
post-Reconstruction decades. It also coincides with the goals of early Populists in
attempting to fix the countryside and encourage better farm practices in order to secure a
place for agriculture in the country’s future. Farmers felt stranded by the emerging
industrial society. Since neither the nation nor southern society would accept solutions
83
“Irreconcilables” in the South ranged from those spewing hatred of the United States to those refusing to
pray for the President, to one who refused to celebrate Thanksgiving as a “Yankee institution.” Foster
renders the “irreconcilables” unsuccessful in influencing southern opinions as “disgruntled old men,
celebrating the past and damning the present,” Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 74.
37
dictated by farmers, they focused on what they could control: their personal, everyday
actions committed to efficient labor, practice, and business.
Farmers shunned political action not as inherently wrong but as impotent under
current circumstances. The party in power ignored or disparaged the grievances of the
small-scale farmers. Before the appeal to a third party emerged in the 1890s came farmer
participation in identifying ailments and suggesting remedies to put an end to
sectionalism by both sides mutually rallying around agriculture. Tom Watson described
in his People’s Party Campaign Book that as “the movement grew with startling rapidity.
The bosses of the Old Parties [sic] . . . paid little heed to the mutterings of the gathering
storm.” Watson called for a third party, the People’s Party, in the South specifically, as it
was the only remedy to bypass the Republicans and Democrats who ignored farmer
grievances.84
In a rather sarcastic article, W.W. Screws, editor of the Montgomery Advertiser
and Mail, described the farmers’ ailments in this way:
The farmer starting for his work has a shoe put on his horse with the nails taxed
67 per cent [sic], driven with a hammer taxed 54 per cent, cuts a stick with a knife
taxed 50 per cent, hitches his horse to a plow taxed 50 per cent, with chains taxed
67 per cent. He returns to his home at night and lays his wearied limbs on a sheet
taxed 58 per cent, and covers himself with a blanket that has paid a tax of 80 per
cent, his coat taxed 50 per cent, shoes taxed 85 per cent, and hat taxed 70 per cent,
opens family worship with a Bible taxed 35 per cent, and kneels to his God on a
carpet taxed 100 per cent, sits down to his humble meal from a plate taxed 40 per
cent, with a knife and fork taxed 35 per cent, drinks his cup of coffee with sugar
taxed 70 per cent, seasons his food with salt taxed 130 percent, pepper 297 per
cent, and spice 297 per cent, he looks around on his wife and children all taxed in
the same way, takes a chew of tobacco taxed 100 per cent, and leans back in his
84
Thomas E. Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, Author’s Edition. UAB Microfiche:
LAC12365. 349-351.
38
chair and thanks his stars that he lives in the freest and best Government under
Heaven.85
Screws published this article in 1878, a year after the Compromise of 1877 that handed
Rutherford B. Hayes the presidential election and removed federal troops from the
occupied southern states. The farmers’ ailments became visibly manifest by the time of
Reconstruction’s official end.
Southerners, such as Screws, supposed this imbalance in taxation represented
punishment brought about by an extension of sectional strife. On September 30, 1880, the
Montgomery Advertiser supported the idea that the “solid South” provided a demand for
northern products and “exhibited a growth that has astounded the civilized world,”
particularly “since the States were relieved from the grip of thieving carpet-baggers,” and
the “Republican Congress.” The article also downplayed the racially tinged labor
question reporting on whites and blacks working together “without serious jar,” and
endorsing the education of African-American children which would support the
harmonious relationship. Screws assured readers that the South remained open to peace,
to northern visitors, and to economic expansion, but the “sectional strife,” which he
supposed politicians considered “a national blessing,” prevented intersectional
harmony.86
Because farmers wanted to eliminate sectional division by rallying around
agriculture, they equated agrarian interests with American prosperity. Agriculturalists
85
“The Tariff,” Montgomery Advertiser and Mail, New Series Vol. XIII, No. 252, Old Series Vol. XLVIII,
Friday, May 10, 1878, p. 2. It should be noted that the Montgomery Advertiser and Mail, later the
Montgomery Advertiser, was not started as an agricultural paper. Nor was W.W. Screws a farm proponent.
Regardless, the newspaper was a prominent publication in the state and recognized the farmers’ position
after the war.
86
“Conkling and Cotton,” Montgomery Advertiser, New Series Vol. XVI, No. 76, Old Series Vol. I,
October 5, 1880.
39
began to warn against the cultivation of industry to the detriment of a secure agriculture.
In one speech, B.C. Harrison, Worthy Master of the State Grange of Alabama in 1885,
quantified the money set aside for different sections of the governmental budget. He
illuminated the $60,000,000 in “Pensions” and the millions elsewhere like the Army,
Navy, “Indian Bureau,” and “Improvements of Rivers and Harbors.” He then attested to
the trifling $699,110 allowed to agricultural development.87 In style, Harrison played on
the emotional ties that his audience had with the nation. He reminded the crowd that
“You glory in her institutions of learning,” and “You feel proud of her snow-capped
mountains.” He conjured up a love for the country while simultaneously denouncing the
unreciprocated love for the farmer.
The federal government, according to agricultural leaders, may have been at fault
for supporting industry, but agriculturalists did not call for anarchy or the end of federal
power. Farmers remained committed to the American government but also opposed
government subservience to industrial interests. Sociologists have demonstrated that
farmers considered “investors, bankers, and land speculators,” alien interestsoutside the
movement; whereas “the people” should own land, not those with interests at odds with
the prosperity of agriculture.88
The federal government became questionable only when farmers thought that
trusts, combinations, and business had taken over the driver’s seat. In this way, farmers
87
Proceedings of the Second Annual Session of the Alabama State Agricultural Society held at Auburn,
Ala., August 5th, 6th and 7th, 1885, (Montgomery, Ala: Allred Bros., Book and Job Printers, 1885), 13. B.C.
Harrison was the Grange Worthy Master at an Alabama State Agricultural Society function. The two
organizations must have had an amiable relationship to step across group borders and this speaks to the
possible overlap of constituents, ideas, and leaders.
88
Joseph Gerteis and Alyssa Goolsby, “Nationalism in America: The Case of the Populist Movement,”
Theory and Society, Vol. 34, No. 2 (April 2005): 214.
40
perceived business to be on the side of industry and thus against agriculture. So when
financiers and investors steered the government, southern farmers reached back to
American beginnings to upend the takeover. Farmers appealed to the nation’s history and
the American agrarian tradition to peel back the grip that the industrialists had on
government.
B.C. Harrison, orator at the second annual meeting of the Alabama State
Agricultural society, touched on all the old heroes to inspire his audience in 1885. From
the “immortal trio” of Calhoun, Clay and Webster, to the father of the country, George
Washington; from the “Demosthenese of America,” Patrick Henry, to the creator of the
Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, Harrison identified the farmers’ concerns with this rich
history and assumed his connections would touch the hearts of his listeners.89 Farmers
thought they knew what crippled agriculture and organized to employ old American
ideals in order to reinstate the government that supported agriculture, and subsequently
the farmers themselves.
But the agrarian ideal did not begin at the American Revolution, Harrison argued.
It extended back to the beginnings of civilization. Farm proponents again and again
pointed not only to their Jeffersonian past, but also to their long history, dating back to
Egypt, Rome, and ancient civilization.90 Harrison, who by 1885 had become Worthy
Master of the State Grange of Alabama, traced the importation of animals and vegetables
into Europe from Asia and Egypt and depicted how the apple of Italy, including “the
apricot, the peach, [and] the pomegranate,” led to the growth of the vine. Harrison gave
89
Proceedings of the Second Annual Session of the Alabama State Agricultural Society held at Auburn,
Ala., August 5th, 6th and 7th, 1885, (Montgomery, Ala: Allred Bros., Book and Job Printers, 1885), 16.
90
Ibid., 12-13.
41
the great genealogy of olives, to flax, to grasses, to cover all that agriculture had to offer.
The “history of agriculture” that Harrison designed showed “how the different industries,
fostered by the strong arm of government . . . will redound to the honor of those
governing and to the welfare and prosperity of a country.” The importation of agriculture
into the West single handedly turned “war-like barbarians, who disdained agriculture”91
into God-fearing republicans.
After all, their long history originated in God’s time. The heirloom of agriculture
had been passed down from biblical times. From Cain, “tiller of the soil,” and Abel,
“herder of the flocks,” leaders realized a righteous beginning. From these beginnings the
population multiplied yielding Noah, “a husbandman;” leading to the early societies in
Egypt, Greece, Sparta, and Rome.92 If tillers of the soil abandoned their farms it would in
effect be a perfidious act of parting with their rich past and dooming their civilization to
extinction.
Ultimately, these agriculturalists equated liberty, freedom, and honest government
with agriculture. Farm advocates viewed the United States as the logical product of the
fruits of their long history. Agricultural societies built through history testing modes of
production and governmental experiments which inevitably produced the more perfect
nation. Agricultural leaders of the day assumed that the government’s spurning of
agriculture in favor of urban industry would yield a barren future.
At the fourth annual meeting of the State Agricultural Society in August 1887,
W.J. Boykin, a Russell County organizer, struck at the heart of why the talk of
91
Ibid., 13.
Thomas J. Key, Secretary, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the Alabama State Agricultural
Society, (Montgomery, Ala: Southern Agriculturalist, Print, 1888), 38.
92
42
agricultural tradition appealed to farmers: the success of the producing classes. Boykin
opened his oration asking his peers, “How can we make the most of life?” His answer
urged farmers to be as successful in their profession as possible, including making smart
business decisions and loving one’s “dignified” and “honorable” profession.93 Boykin
confirmed the worthy profession by appreciating Washington at Mount Vernon, Adams
at Quincy, Jefferson at Monticello, and Jackson at the Hermitage. The list did not stop
there, but proceeded through Clay and Webster. This leader would rather “see a president
[farming than] reduced to selling lace and broadcloth.”94 This justification of the
agricultural profession above all others enabled leaders to empower the dirt-poor farmers
by embracing their rightful place at the center of society.
To Boykin, farming produced new wealth, supported enviable American qualities,
and served as the remedy for society’s ills. The tendency for businessmen to pursue selfinterest at the expense of the common good represented one such ill. Boykin pointed to a
satirical jab at American business capital: “Could air be bottled, there would be organized
in twenty-four hours an American Air Bottling Association, and thousands would be left
to suffocate, if they were not able to pay their monthly bills.”95 Evidently farmers could
conduct business and still retain proper morals, the morals of Washington and Jefferson.
Boykin recalled how thoughts of his childhood farm could “fill his heart with
delight.” Clearly old sectional reflection remained prevalent as he recalled the
93
Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Session of the Alabama State Agricultural Society. Held at Troy, on
the 3rd, 4th and 5th of August, 1887, (Montgomery, Ala: W.E. Allred, Printer, 1887), 26.
94
Ibid., 26.
95
Ibid., 27.
43
unsurpassed bravery and untiring perseverance” of “Southern soldiers.”96 Boykin
recounted that it was the collective love from Southerners of men like Robert E. Lee,
Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis that brought this organization and kept them
“from loving Sherman.” It seems that to this orator that Southern organization was
emblematic of the Confederate cause. Agriculture remained a pillar of Americanism and
simultaneously embodied the single economic mode of the South; so Boykin easily saw
the American cause as Southern, and vice versa.
Here the difficulties surrounding Reconstruction met the rise of the problematic
enemy of agricultural, and therefore American, life. On top of the southern farmer’s
frustration with Reconstruction, the new ailments in agriculture corresponded with the
rise of industry. To farmers, industrial prowess represented a newly emerged enemy; and
to remedy this adversity, they looked to their past successes as the best indicator of what
would bring future success. Jones directly recognized that “the civilization of the United
States is rapidly changing from a country to a city civilization,” and fully expected
agriculture not only to survive but also to conquer its new foe.97 In other words, the
assailment of agriculture by industry only reinforced farmers’ longing for the union that
their forefathers had envisioned; a union where the agricultural masses held prominence.
New South developments forced agriculturalists to cultivate a new social model for the
future, to ensure the vitality of the countryside before modernization dismissed farmers’
occupations and livelihood.
96
Ibid., 27. Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy also documents the memorialization of Civil War veterans
in what he considers the “inauguration” of the Lost Cause in the post-Reconstruction decades, 80.
97
“Country Against Town Civilization,” Southern Cultivator, p. 83.
44
Populist disregard to political allegiances was more rational than it might at first
appear. Farmers’ decision to organize and improve themselves, evading the onesidedness of southern politics, represented an attempt to solve the economic, social, and
moral problems of the nation by starting a self-help revolution from within the
countryside. With other legitimate political avenues blocked, farmers employed the long
history of the agrarian ideal to solidify their place in American society.
But organizational efforts fell short of coercing the nation to remain loyal to
agricultural, and therefore American, ideals. Readers and columnists then began to
grapple with the idea of employing political measures even more. One writer to the
Weekly Toiler in 1888, saw politics drawing in the farmers, but instead of attempting to
destroy, or uphold, one party over the other, “Your Uncle, Robbie Ruskins,” looked to
“fill the . . . legislature with good, old farmers, who know our interest, and who will
contend for our rights.” To Ruskins, the partisan skirmishes that prevailed in political
circles represented precisely the political struggle that Americans, but more aptly
farmers, needed to avoid. Filling the legislature with farmers would circumvent this fight
and it retained the potential to actually accomplish something in government. Farmers
alleged that they had the power and authority, as American citizens, to alter the role of
government to serve the needs and improve the position of “the people.”98
98
“The State Wheel Platform and Farmers for the Legislature,” Weekly Toiler, Vol. 3, No. 5, June 27th
1888, p. 2; “Will Look After the Legislature – McCorkle for the Senate, Flatt for Representative,” by
“Wheel Crank,” Weekly Toiler, June 27th, 1888, Vol. 3, No. 5, p. 3.
45
TOWARD POLITICAL ACTION
The momentum of the movement had pushed farmers from anxiety and disgust
toward the realization that they had the political majority of “the people” against capital
and big business. Although farmers had heretofore shunned political action, in contrast to
simple organization, they soon realized that actually enforcing their solutions to national
problems could be nothing but political.
As agrarians preached about recent occurrences toxic to the nation and to the
countryside, they revealed their deepest frustrations with their attempts attempts at
organization and cooperation. In the 1870s, the Alabama State Grange began; it grew and
thrived until the political merger of the national Grange, Wheel, Farmers’ Alliances, and
industrial unions in the late 1889. Alongside this group came the Alabama State Wheel
and the Alabama State Agricultural Society in the early 1880s, holding similar
conventions, answering typical questions, and proposing the naturally agrarian response.
In 1884, the first annual convention of the Alabama State Agricultural Society
welcomed farmers from all over the state to participate in an agriculture based,
educational session.99 Each year thereafter, the meeting travelled to different
communities like Auburn, Troy, Talladega, and Huntsville. Like the State Grange
sessions that began a decade before, the Alabama State Agricultural Society set about the
“collection and diffusion of industrial information about the state, the advancement of
agriculture and the promotion of farm organizations,” while staying away from politics
which the society’s supporters acclaimed with zeal.100 Though the organization shied
99
Alabama State Agricultural Society, 1885-1889: LPR 136, Container 7, Folder 11; Alabama Department
of Archives and History.
100
Rogers, One-Gallused Rebellion, 102-103.
46
away from politics, the leaders and speakers at the annual events still gave boisterous
speeches that did more than just diffuse information.
This organization stood out above the rest in one sense: financial support from the
state. The State Agricultural Society existed as a part of a three headed device including
the Agricultural and Mechanical College, the State Society, and the State Agricultural
Department. The second annual convention of the society received praise from the
Montgomery Daily Advertiser for its youthful excitement and its basis in “progressive
agriculture.”101 And Professor J.S. Newman, first director of the Agricultural Experiment
Station at Auburn, prominent figure at the newly founded agricultural college there and
thus associated with the State Agricultural Society, ignited the farmers’ support and
spurred the birth of new clubs and excitement all over the state.102
The growth of the Farmers’ Alliance made up the main thrust of agricultural
dissent and produced a major faction of the leadership leading into the 1890s. The
Alliance began when farmers on the Texas frontier organized to protect themselves
against “foreign owned land syndicates” and “cattle kings” as early as 1875, although the
true origination date of the Alliance remains obscure.103 In fact the early years in Texas
and the subsequent groups that spread across the west and south contains an element of
mystery due to the nature of frontier migration. The frontier west, from Texas to the
Pacific, provided land for eastern and southern farmers wishing to start anew as the
frontier expanded in the nineteenth century. Migration lay at the heart of agricultural
101
“The Farmers Convention,” Montgomery Daily Advertiser, New Series Vol. XXI, No. 17, Old Series
Vol. LIV, August 8, 1885.
102
“Agricultural Organization,” Montgomery Daily Advertiser, New Series Vol. XX, No. 289, Old Series
Vol. LIII, June 20, 1885, p. 4.
103
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 189.
47
options; the frontier closed as the best farm land became inhabited. Frontier farmers
returned to the East and South carrying the lessons of early Farmers’ Alliance
organizations to ailing farmers. Many of those in Texas in the 1870-80s originally hailed
from the southeastern states; many returned from their frontier pilgrimage bringing the
gift of farmer organization.104
The Colored Farmers’ Alliance, much like its white step-sibling, originated in
Texas as well, spreading in an eastern direction to those newly free American citizens.
The emergence and large membership of this organization weakened racial biases in the
overall movement. By 1891 the Colored Farmers’ Alliance boasted over one million
members, and the organization developed cooperative ventures, supported improved
education, and conferred new farming techniques. Also by this time, the organization
began to crumble due to competing black organizations, notably the National Colored
Alliance, and a fractured leadership composed of both blacks and whites.105 Some white
organizations, like the Grange, allowed black members; while others out-right denied
them due to their color. Although the Populists have been generally understood as a
racially tolerant group, discrimination based on color still existed and blocked
cooperation across the racial aisle.
The “patchwork of agencies” that formed the People’s Party consisted of groups
like the Wheel, the Grange, the Free Silver party, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor and, of
104
Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 40-41.
105
William F. Holmes, “The Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” The Journal of Southern History,
Vol. 42, No. 2, (May 1975): 187.
48
course, the Farmers Alliance.106 The annual Alliance meeting in August 1889 approved a
new constitution for the Farmers’ and Laborers Union of America. This in turn combined
Alabama’s Wheel and Alliance groups, and merged the Northern, Southern, Colored
Farmers’ Alliances and the Knights of Labor together.107 Spurred by the jute boycott
fight, the amalgamation of the differing groups led to the St. Louis, Ocala, Florida, and
Cincinnati meetings that produced the People’s Party of the 1890s.
The Farmers’ Alliance provided a leader in Charles Macune, who saved the ailing
Texas movement in 1888 and created the National Economist (Washington, D.C.), for the
national movement that enclosed these groups into a sound political force. He
accomplished this by providing farmers, through lecturers and speeches of his own, with
“political education.” He characterized the Alliance as being “founded on education,” and
this political education drew farmers into further political involvement in the
movement.108 This political force equipped with lecturers and national leaders would
ultimately experience the revolt’s crushing end.
With the agricultural groups’ interests combined, farmers created a force for
monopolists to reckon with by cooperatively purchasing farm needs, like fertilizer for
example. Unfortunately for these groups, many cooperatives and economic ventures
106
William A. Peffer, Peter H. Argersinger, ed., Populism, Its Rise and Fall (Lawrence, KS: University
Press of Kansas, 1992.), ch. 1. Originally published, in sections, in several Chicago Tribune issues in 1899,
according to Argersinger’s introduction.
107
Karl Rodabaugh, The Farmers’ Revolt in Alabama: 1890-1896 (Greenville, NC: East Carolina
University, 1977), 18.
108
Theodore Mitchell, Political Education in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, 1887-1900 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 4-5.
49
produced long-term failure due to lack of investment from farmers (symptomatic of the
lack of funds in the South) and resistance from merchants.109
Interestingly, years before in 1876, Chambers, Worthy Master of the State
Grange, anticipated cooperative troubles in a speech articulating his suspicion of farmers
in business. He “doubt[ed] the wisdom of undertaking to turn farmers into merchants,”
and expected the failure of such a venture to reflect badly on the Grange.110 Thoroughly
aghast by the prospect of directing farmer-merchant relations Chambers asked for a leave
of absence from the meeting. While protesting a report from the “Committee on
Agencies and Cooperation,” he described the failure of cooperation “[b]ecause . . . that
system has not been sufficiently tested in America . . . its adaptation to the wants of our
people in America has not been demonstrated by a single successful experiment.”111 The
earlier vision of agrarian leaders had not come to a full understanding of monopolies and
trusts, and future organizers would recognize cooperation’s worth.
Although trusts existed for railroads, cottonseed oil, tobacco, or fertilizer, the
combination of jute-bag producers directly affected the cotton covered south. Farmers
packaged cotton bales in the jute-bag. The firm Warren, Jones, and Gratz of St. Louis,
merged jute manufacturers into a single trust and arbitrarily raised the price of jute-bags
from $.07 to $.11 a bag, which earned two million in profits from the farmers’ pockets.
Trusts affixed prices on goods needed for the farm in accordance with their monopolistic
ties and combinations instead of prices contrived from direct competition between
109
Connie Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell, 100, 103.
Journal of Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Session of the Alabama State Grange, Patrons of
Husbandry, held in Montgomery, Ala. December 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th, 1876, (Montgomery, AL:
Southern Plantation Print, 1877), 11.
111
Ibid., 39.
110
50
companies, which would provide lower prices. This outrage served as the metaphorical
“straw that broke the camel’s back” and prompted the mostly apolitical farmers to
embrace political action.112 Under the leadership of the Farmers’ Alliance, the jutebagging conference held in Birmingham urged farmers across the south to boycott the
jute material. The official meeting in Birmingham, as reported by the National
Economist, in August of 1889, recognized the increase in price, recommended substitutes
like cotton bags, and called for a boycott of jute-bags.113
Ultimately, the farmers combined their interests, using cotton bags to bale the
cotton, decreasing the size of bales, or simply removing their cotton from the market
which held off the jute trusts for two cotton-growing seasons. In the long run, the jute
boycott did not completely disarm the trust but fashioned a new confidence in
organizational and cooperative action at the behest of new agricultural leaders. These
Farmers’ Alliance leaders, under the veil of political education, utilized the emergence of
a region-wide boycott and prepared the southern, and western, masses for the political
battles of the 1890s.114
112
Woodward, Origins of the New South, 187, 198; Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell, 110, Connie
Lester notes that the price for the jute bag was 6.5 cents which was raised to 12.5 cents as opposed to
Woodward’s version of 7 to 11 cents.
113
“The Southern Interstate Farmers Association,” The National Economist, August 31, 1889, Vol. 1, No.
24; “The National Cotton Committee,” The National Economist, September 7, 1889, Vol. 1, No. 25.
114
Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell, 110-114; McMath, Populist Vanguard, 61.
51
CONCLUSION
Despite the wide scope and variety in interpretation, historians tend to agree that
the Populists employed a woefully backward-looking vision. No doubt remains that farm
proponents envisioned a “Jeffersonian dream of an independent yeomanry,” but this
observation can be stretched too far implying that the farmers held an irrational and
rudimentary vision doomed to fail.115 To be sure, the Populist ideal ultimately did fail, its
end marked by the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election of 1896,
and the triumph of industry over agriculture at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the
privilege of our own backward glance, the hindsight advantage of knowing the winner of
an epic battle, dissuades historians from fully engaging both the winners and the losers of
an historical event. The historian’s focus on, and deference to, particular historical events
and actors effectively decides the relevance to American history that some episodes hold
over others.
Farmers’ actions in the post-Civil War era represent the inauguration of rural
activity that culminated with the political efforts of the 1890s. The organizational efforts
of the rural farm community, aided by agricultural print media and migration,
strengthened its identification with a larger, national movement. Propelled by the
economic stagnation of the post-Civil War period, farmers convened in local, regional,
and state-level meetings to discuss different avenues of agricultural survival. This
community helped poor, illiterate farmers understand the rapid emergence of industrial
progress and allowed the agricultural masses to grapple with the potential remedies
established by agricultural editors. Farm leaders initiated the rural conversation and dirt
115
Woodward, Origins of the New South, 175.
52
farmers engaged in it. Together, they established the foundation of the Populist
Movement in the 1890s.
The maturation of the early Populist Movement remains a valuable tool for
historians. Understanding Populist beginnings may not turn the entire study of the era on
its head, but can be useful in understanding the movement as a whole. Therefore, this
study of the modest beginnings of the Populist Movement uncovers certain aspects of the
social, political, and economic contexts that the agricultural community identified with.
The early organization of farmers across the southern countryside attempted to employ
efficient farm practices, conduct proper business, and participate in an ongoing public
conversation in order to better their society, while they countered cultural calls to the late
Confederacy with the purity of American ideals.
53
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