|
The term "populist" is associated with political
movements that are considered on the fringe of politics by the mainstream press.
People as diverse in outlook as Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan
have had the label applied to them. The term "Black Populist" is never
or rarely heard. In conventional political and academic circles it is something
that does not or did not exist. The opposite is true.
The articles in this section come from the Web site Black
Populism in the South 1886- 1896. Omar Ali is the site's publisher. The
articles are reprinted here with his permission.
History of the South: The Southern Revolt
by Adrienne Petty
Lecture notes from December 1998, Columbia University
Ms. Petty is a doctoral candidate in United States history at
Columbia University. She is currently doing research on North Carolina.
On Tuesday, we discussed what was new about the New South. We focused on
several changes that marked the New South as a decisive break from the
past, including the South's vastly weakened stature in national
politics, a shift in power at the state and local level from planters to
those with ties to business interests and the system of disfranchisement
and legal segregation that emerged during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century.(1)
My discussion of the southern revolt today will provide further evidence
of just how different the New South was from the old. I would argue that
the emergence of the Southern Farmers' Alliance and later, the People's
Party, offer one of the strongest cases that the New South was, indeed,
new. We must see the radical movements that yeoman farmers and former
slaves led from the 1870s through the 1890s as a protest against being
involuntarily forced to participate in a new social and economic order
that they neither had a hand in creating nor recognized as the way they
thought society should work. Before I discuss the southern revolt, I
will remind you of several points that we covered last time. Then I will
discuss the factors that further contributed to the suffering of the
former slaves and yeomanry. After discussing the grievances of southern
farmers and the radical solutions they proposed, I will end with an
overview of how historians have assessed the southern revolt.
Following the Civil War, life for yeoman farmers and former slaves ended
as they knew it. After generations of being insulated from capitalist
relations, yeoman farmers were forcibly absorbed into the market.
Growing numbers of them were drawn into the cotton economy out of
necessity. Impoverished by the war and lacking resources to rebuild
their farms, yeoman farmers had to turn to merchants to advance them
credit. Under the crop lien system, most merchants required that farmers
devote almost all of their productive acreage exclusively to cotton. As
one historian put it, "...merchant[s] demanded that cotton, more
cotton, and almost cotton alone should be grown, because this was
something he could always market and the growers could neither eat up
behind his back nor slip out for surreptitious sale."(2)
The story of Luke Wadkins illustrates how the world of yeoman farmers
unraveled in less than a generation. The size of Mr. Wadkins's farm fell
from 190 acres in 1860 to 90 in 1880. Whereas he had raised only one
bale of cotton in 1860, he was devoting one-third of his cropland to
cotton by 1880, raising a total of nine bales. In 1860, he also raised
enough grain so that even after he used part of it for seed, livestock
feed and household consumption, he still had a small surplus to store,
trade for cash or barter for necessary goods. By 1880, however, his
grain output no longer was enough to feed his family. After spending
$131 of his $369 income from the farm to buy fertilizer, the rest of his
money went to buying food and provisions for his family.(3)
Thus Mr. Wadkins and many other yeoman farmers became consumers. In
addition to losing their ability to produce most of their food
themselves, yeoman farm families increasingly were losing their property
and their common access to unenclosed land for hunting, fishing and
grazing their animals. The repealing of the homestead exemption, which
had protected farmers from losing their homes to their creditors, posed
a further threat to yeoman farmers' ability to secure economic
independence. In losing their command of production, yeoman farmers also
lost whatever political clout they had enjoyed at the state and local
level.
The former slaves and their children gained their freedom, but were
largely unable to gain land, which they thought was the necessary
ingredient to make their freedom meaningful. Even when they were able to
realize their aspiration of landownership, they barely scraped by. A
newspaper correspondent in Goldsboro, North Carolina regarded Willie
Best as "probably one of the wealthiest colored men in [Wayne]
county." Like Mr. Wadkins, it was virtually a given that Mr. Best
would produce cotton. He raised 30 acres in 1870, along with tobacco. If
one of the wealthiest among them made no more than $96 a year profit on
cotton, life was obviously difficult for the majority of
African-American farmers who did not own land.(4)
Most former slaves fell under a new system of labor organization, as
their former owners sought to reclaim the fruits of their labor. The
relationship between the freedmen and their former owners changed
dramatically under the new systems of share wages and sharecropping, as
Professor Fields argued Tuesday. During the antebellum years, owners had
a vested interest in taking care of the daily needs of their property,
which included feeding and clothing them. However, the landlord of the
New South did not feel such an obligation toward his new laborer. We can
see this new relationship clearly in the following account of a
landowner in North Carolina checking up on a sharecropper who works his
land: "He gives the said Negro four pounds of bacon, one quarter
bushel of meal, and tells him to go on plowing. Cuffy knows who has him
and he goes, and next Monday he comes again. If he has three or four
acres plowed he gets some rations, if not, nothing but a cussing."(5)
Yeoman farmers, former slaves and former slaveholders became part of a
capitalist system that itself was undergoing a significant
transformation. A revolution in technology opened up a worldwide market
for agricultural products. The railway and the steamship, coupled with
telegraph and telephone lines, tied the world together like never
before, and made possible the consolidation of a global capitalist
economy. The improvement in access to lands made it possible for people
in South America, Australia, Canada and the area west of the Mississippi
in the United States to bring greater swaths of land under cultivation.
Historians have appropriated Mark Twain's name "the Gilded
Age" to describe this era of corporate capitalism. Twain chose this
title to ridicule the ugliness, crass materialism, and sham of a time
when glitter on the outside masked what lay underneath. While we would
assume that the transportation and communication revolution worked
wonders, it actually contributed directly to a worldwide agricultural
depression. As more and more land was brought under cultivation around
the world, southern farmers were forced to compete with other
cotton-producing areas. Southern farmers witnessed a precipitous decline
in the prices that their cotton fetched because of overproduction. Like
western wheat farmers, southern cotton farmers depended on world markets
to a far greater extent than farmers in other sections of the country.
Of the 10 million bales of cotton picked in 1897, seven tenths went to
foreign countries.(6)
Chronic overproduction also sent prices spiraling downward. Cotton
averaged about 15.1 cents a pound between 1870 and 1873. By 1898, it
only brought an average of 5.8 cents per pound. When you factor in the 7
cents per pound that it cost southern farmers to produce cotton, you
quickly realize that they were falling deeper and deeper into debt. As
the gap between income and expenses widened, yeoman farmers were
increasingly forced to give up their land in order to make up the
difference.
In the space of less than ten years, yeoman farmers, former slaves and
their children were abruptly integrated into a capitalist system and
immediately experiencing the harshest consequences of it. But from their
farms in North Carolina, Georgia and other southern states, it would
have been extremely difficult for Willie Best, Luke Wadkins and other
southern farmers to see that they were caught up in an international
depression that afflicted agriculture across the world. Instead they
blamed their suffering on the merchants, railroads, banks and other
monopolies that seemed to be wrecking havoc on their lives.
Merchants grew in number and power during the 1870s and 1880s as they
came to operate as middlemen between distant financial centers where
commodity prices were determined and southern farmers who were
involuntarily thrown into what Hahn called "the vortex of the
cotton economy."(7)
Under the crop lien system, merchants advanced yeoman farmers and
sharecroppers supplies, food, fertilizer and other necessities using
their prospective crop as collateral. The falling price of cotton on the
international agricultural markets, along with the high rates of
interest that merchants charged, pushed farmers deeper into debt. It is
no surprise that the Farmers' Alliance specifically prohibited from
membership "any person who keeps a store, who buys or sells for
gain."(8)
The larger landholding planters also experienced the depression,
although it did not hurt them nearly as much as it hurt sharecroppers
and yeoman farmers. At a Senate committee in 1893, several planters
testified that under the lien system they also were bound to merchants
to raise too much cotton and were not permitted to grow necessities for
their own use. A poem written during this period captures southern
farmers' increasing dependence on merchants:
Our father which art in Troy
Wiley and Murphy by thy names,
Thy kingdom of provisions come
They will be done
On my farm as it is at your store
Give us this day our daily bread
Forgive us our trespass on your barn
As we forgive those who trespass upon ours,
Lend us not into temptation, but deliver us from hungriness
For thine shall be the crop, the mules and the land forever and
ever If we don't pay(9)
Steven Hahn documented the yeomanry's longstanding opposition to the
building of railroads through their communities. Early on, they
perceived railroads as a threat to their way of life. What happened once
railroads encroached on their areas confirmed their suspicion. The
railroads charged people in the countryside higher rates to ship their
products than they charged people in urban localities such as Chicago
and New York. Railroads also favored large shippers over small ones and
paid off legislatures and local governments to ensure that government
policies did not obstruct their efforts.
The national banks also favored the city over the countryside, and the
rest of the nation over the South. The National Banking Act of 1863 was
enacted during the Civil War, so it was not framed with the South in
mind. While there was one bank to every 16,600 people in the whole
country in 1895, there was only one to every 58,130 people in South,
excluding Texas. In 1894, 123 counties in Georgia lacked state, national
and any other kind of incorporated bank. In the few southern communities
that had banks, the banks' rules prohibited them from lending money on
real estate and farm property.(10)
Southern farmers suspected the banks of manipulating the national
currency to meet the needs of a few capitalists.
So southern farmers had several legitimate grievances against the
economic institutions and conditions they faced. Unrest and rebellion
flamed not only in the United States but in Italy, Spain, Russia, China,
and Latin America as farmers sought to hold someone accountable for
their suffering and demand what they thought were reasonable measures to
change their predicament. However, the southern revolt was not simply
motivated by the severe economic consequences of capitalism. Those who
waged the southern revolt acted in opposition to the capitalist system
because it disrupted social relationships that they prized and
conflicted with their notion of a proper society. Yeoman farmers sought
to preserve a cherished way of life that rested on relationships of
reciprocity and valued self sufficiency. Former slaves, who had never
enjoyed the Jeffersonian vision of independence, sought to shape a new
future that secured them equal political rights, economic independence
and dignity.
The earliest reservoir of agrarian discontent was the Patrons of
Husbandry, better known as the Grange, which was founded in 1867. It
grew slowly until its membership took off with the first signs of
depression. By 1874, its estimated membership was about 1.5 million,
which included members in the Midwest and the South. African American
farmers also established several Granges, but they, too, were short
lived. One of the most important accomplishments of the Grange was its
establishment of cooperatives for buying supplies, and for selling and
storing crops. These cooperatives failed for the most part, and closed
down as the Grange declined by the late 1870s. However the Grange both
inspired and served as a model for several new farm movements.
The most important outgrowth of the Grange were the Farmer's Alliances,
one in the Midwest and one in the South. As the farmers' situation grew
more desperate, farmers from Texas to Louisiana, from Kansas through the
Dakotas organized into alliances during the 1880s. The first group of
farmers gathered at Lampasas County farm in Texas and banded together to
fight what they called "landsharks and horse thieves." In
frontier farmhouses in Texas, in log cabins in backwoods Arkansas, in
the rural parishes of Louisiana, separate groups formed similar
alliances for self help. The Alliance allowed anyone "not obnoxious
to the Constitution," which excluded railroad officials, bankers,
cotton buyers, real estate brokers and shopkeepers. The southern
Farmers' Alliance was not simply a protest organization. It was a
religious crusade. Members of the Alliance were on a mission to revive
their farms and communities, and fight against what they perceived as an
assault on their sense of what constituted a righteous and decent
society. Some historians have doubted that the farmers meant what they
said. One has suggested that farmers "used a Christian vocabulary
because it was the only way they knew to speak with great emotion about
ultimate social concerns."(11)
However, if we consider the overwhelming importance of Protestant
Christianity to southerners during both the antebellum and postbellum
period, and assume that the farmers meant what they said, then it
becomes clear that the southern revolt was, indeed, a southern crusade.
The Alliance made religious and moral values a requirement for
admission. Prospective members had to declare their belief in the
existence of a Supreme Being and be of "good moral character."
A North Carolina man who made and sold whiskey could not join the
Alliance because the state president ruled that he "willfully and
persistently" violated state laws. One man from Tennessee was ruled
ineligible because he allegedly mistreated his wife.(12)
Women played an important role in making the Alliance a spiritual
crusade. A woman lecturing at a Louisiana lodge admonished women to
attend meetings faithfully, educate their children about the work they
were doing and pray for the Alliance: "God has promised to hear the
cry of the oppressed," she said. "Petitions from every family
alter should arise to Him who is ever ready to hear. If He be with us
none can withstand us."(13)
Of course, men dominated the leadership of the Alliance, and they also
conceived of the movement primarily as a spiritual crusade. Many
Alliance leaders were ministers, who could not only lend their speaking
and administrative skills to the movement, but also contribute various
organizing techniques from evangelical Protestantism.
One of these techniques was the camp meeting. The main state that held
these was Texas. During the summer, thousands of farmers pitched tents
at camp sites across the state. They prayed together, sang and listened
to gospel according to Alliance leaders. A reporter who witnessed one of
the largest Alliance gatherings commented that "To one coming
suddenly and unexpectedly upon this encampment just before the opening
morning speaking, the singing of the lively songs to popular sacred
tunes would have much more the general appearance of a good
old-fashioned Methodist camp meeting in full blast than that of a
political gathering."(14)
The Alliance was so effective because it reaffirmed the importance of
the most humane bonds of its members' communities and tapped into their
religious habits to mobilize them. Its membership expanded greatly after
1886 under the leadership of Dr. Charles W. Macune. During the autumn of
1886 alone, the southern Alliance recruited at the amazing rate of
20,000 a month. By 1887, the Alliance had grown to more than 200,000
members, and by 1890 it counted more than three million.(15)
The main goal of the Alliance was to free its members from the crop lien
system and the power of monopolies, such as the railroads and the
jute-bagging trust, through cooperative action. Alliances across the
South established stores, warehouses, mills and other exchanges to
escape the grasp of their creditors. Just the establishment of a
cooperative was enough to generate interest in Alliances. Those that
enjoyed some measure of success attracted even more members. In 1888,
farmers in the South defeated the jute-bagging trust when it tried to
double the price of the bags used to bale cotton. However, the movement
to replace the southern furnishing merchant with cooperative stores
largely failed. Opposition by merchants, bankers, wholesalers, and
manufacturers made it impossible for the cooperatives to get credit, and
led to their demise. The Texas exchange survived only one season.
Farmers soon realized that the alliance cooperatives stood little chance
of working unless fundamental changes were made. Although the experience
convinced many Alliance members to abandon the movement, it influenced
most Alliance members to turn to the strategy of direct political
action.(16)
In 1890, the Alliance adopted a platform that included the following
planks:
1. The subtreasury system. This plan allowed farmers to store
nonperishable commodities such as cotton, wheat, tobacco, and sugar into
government warehouses until the crops would bring in advantageous
prices. After depositing their crops, farmers would receive negotiable
treasury notes for up to 80 percent of the crop's value. With the
commodity credit, farmers were able to buy needed supplies and seed.
They would pay 1 percent interest every month on the notes and a small
storage fee. They also could take their crops out of storage and sell
them at any time. Charles Macune made the subtreasury plan the
Alliance's main political issue.(17)
The second plank was the abolition of national banks 3. currency
inflation, to increase the amount of money in circulation
4. free coinage of silver
5. a federal income tax
6. reduction of the tariff
7. direct popular election of senators
8. rigid control or public ownership of railroad and telegraph companies
Alliance leaders urged farmers to use the platform to determine whether
political candidates would serve their interests. The Southern Alliance
achieved its greatest success in electing candidates who supported the
Ocala platform in 1890. Alliance members or their supporters dominated
the legislatures of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida,
and the Carolinas. Several governors and congressmen also gained office
because of Alliance support. In Georgia, North Carolina and South
Carolina, nineteen out of twenty-seven congressmen had pledged their
support to the Alliance. Nationally, the Alliance elected four
governors, gained control of eight legislatures and elected forty four
congressmen and three senators who promised to support Alliance demands.
But it proved easier to persuade politicians to pledge their support
than to get them to enact reform legislation. With the exception of
Georgia's congressman, Tom Watson, southern Democratic representatives
voted for a conservative Georgia politician who was against the
Alliance.(18)
A separate and parallel movement of black farmers emerged in Houston,
Texas in 1886. The Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative
Union soon spread into every southern state. At its height in 1891, the
group's General Superintendent and chief spokesman, wrote that the
Colored Alliance had 1.2 million members, including 300,000 women,
150,000 men under the age of 21 and 750,000 adult men.(19)
Whatever the exact number of members, it is clear that the Colored
Alliance had an extensive following and constituted the largest African
American organization in the nineteenth century. In its
"Declaration of Purpose" the Colored Alliance announced that
"the object of this corporation shall be to elevate the colored
people of the United States...to labor earnestly for the education of
themselves and their children, especially in agricultural pursuits...to
be more obedient to the civil law, and withdraw their attention from
political partisanship." It turned out to be a more radical
organization than this statement suggests.(20)
Part of the impulse for forming a separate organization was that the
Southern Alliance specifically forbade black members. Even when white
Alliance leaders urged cooperation and inclusion of colored delegates,
they usually did so to advance their own causes. A white leader of the
black Farmers' Union in Louisiana made a case for including black
farmers in the movement this way: "We cannot afford to create
division in the ranks of labor," he said. "And it is certain
that if the colored people are not organized as they wish to be, in
harmony with the Farmers' Alliance and Farmers' Union, they will be used
by our opponents to defeat us."(21)
Later, when the People's Party emerged, white leaders tried to include
black members in order to build a large constituency, but they never
allowed black delegates to assert themselves on equal terms. William
Colby, a black farmer from Fulton County, attended the Georgia Peoples'
party convention in Atlanta as his county's delegate. During this
convention, the Populists made great show of including black people in
their party, even appointing a black man to their executive committee.
William Colby decided, however, that this was all a sham. The final
straw came when a Populist leader ordered him to the back of the hall
"with the other nigger delegates." Colby left the convention
and told the Atlanta Journal that he completely rejected the Populist
party.(22)
However, the indignities suffered by black people at the hands of white
Alliance members were only a minor part of the story. The major reason
that black farmers needed a separate Alliance was that their interests
were markedly different from those of white farmers. Only a small number
of black people owned land like Willie Best, the black farmer I
mentioned earlier. The vast majority did not own land, and were often at
cross purposes with members of the white alliance, who were usually
their employers. White Alliance members, who were either struggling or
recently dispossessed landowners who sought to reclaim their way of
life, could not see eye to eye with people who not only had never owned
any property, but for whom landed independence seemed a remote
possibility at best. For African-Americans, white Alliance members often
represented the very forces they were trying to escape.
On the several occasions when Colored Farmers' Alliance members tried to
become less dependent, their white bosses retaliated. In the summer of
1889 Oliver Cromwell began organizing members of the Colored Farmers'
Alliance in Leflore County, Mississippi to stop trading with local
merchants and to do business with a Farmers' Alliance cooperative store
instead. This move angered local planters in this Mississippi Delta
community. State troops and other armed white people crushed Cromwell's
efforts in a bloody encounter that ended in the death of twenty-five
Colored Farmers' Alliance leaders and others.(23)
In 1891, large white landowners so vehemently opposed a proposed cotton
pickers strike that it never got off the ground.(24)
The clash between the Colored Farmers' Alliance and the Southern
Alliance over the Lodge Election Bill of 1890, or the Force Bill, offers
another example of their opposing interests. This bill provided for
federal supervision of elections to ensure that black Southerners could
vote freely. The Southern Alliance unanimously opposed the bill, but the
Colored Farmers' Alliance strongly endorsed it. The measure ultimately
died in the Senate, and marked Congress's last attempt to assure black
people their voting rights in the South until the second half of this
century.
The more radical planks that the Colored Farmers' Alliance included in
its platform illustrate even more dramatically that different issues
were at stake for black Alliance members. The Colored Farmers' Alliance
adopted a platform at the same time and place as the Southern Alliance.
While the group called for a few of the same reforms, such as the
abolition of national banks, the expansion of currency and government
ownership of railroads, the Colored Farmers' Alliance departed from the
Southern Alliance in many important ways. The Colored Farmers' Alliance
supported a single tax on land rather than a graduated income tax
because they thought it provided a more effective means of reducing the
power of land speculators. "land is not property; can never be made
property...The land belongs to the sovereign people." They also
argued in favor of creating a third party much earlier than the white
Alliance did.(25)
Once it became clear that they could not count on the Democratic party
to advance their platform, the Southern Alliance joined Midwesterners to
form the "People's party" or what is called the Populist
Party. Two decades of agrarian protest culminated in the formation of
this third party. When the Omaha Platform that the People's Party
drafted in 1892, it reiterated the most of the planks of the Ocala
platform. Southern Populists also continued to emphasize the virtues of
the society they sought to reclaim, even as the movement grew
politically and became more focused on economic issues. In 1892, the
editor of the Virginia Sun wrote that cooperative effort is "the
secret to all true life and progress--the grand emancipating principle
of brotherhood. A man, living to himself alone, can achieve but little.
But once let him free himself from his narrow selfishness, and boldly
throw himself into work for the good of all, and his share of the good
of all shall be returned to him -- a hundredfold more than his puny
effort could ever have yielded.(26)
Populism also continued to preach a religious message, but now used it
to motivate people to vote. "[The American economy] was concocted
in Hades and transplanted to earth, and it has made a pandemonium of a
garden of Eden...The father of lies, the incubator of meanness, it has
damned more souls, committed more perjury, it has made a hell of heaven,
banished God from earth and set up the devil's kingdom. It has brought
the cause of Christ into disrepute and shut the minister's mouth...it
must be uprooted by patriots and sent to Hades to keep company with its
author!" This passage, which appeared in 1892 in a publication
called the Caucasian in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Populists made a respectable showing in its first election. More
than a million voters supported the Populists in the election of 1892.
They succeeded in electing three governors and ten Congressmen, and they
garnered twenty-two electoral votes. On the local level, they won fifty
state positions and elected more than fifteen hundred county officials
and state legislators. Their strategy in national elections was to tip
the balance in national elections by working with the party out of
power, usually the Democrats in the West. However, this strategy did not
work in the South.
The election of 1896 marked the fall of Populism. Historians have
offered various reasons for why Populism ultimately failed to become a
sturdy and viable third party movement. They attribute their demise to
the inability of the southern and western branches of the party to set
aside sectional conflicts and work together.
Other historians have pointed to the inability of white Populists to
build a lasting alliance with black Populists. They argue that racist
white Southerners prevented such an alliance from developing. This
interpretation is misleading in several ways. First, it assumes that
southern Populists were the sole source or exponent of racist ideas
during the late nineteenth century. Second, it overlooks that fact that
most white Populists wanted the support of black people, but did not
want to relinquish their dominance of the party. Third, and most
importantly, black and white Populists could not build an alliance
because they never shared common interests. In fact, the basis of racism
continued to be a contempt for black people because of their dependent
status, and I would argue that the fear among yeoman farmers of being
dependent themselves heightened their racism. In Georgia, the Populists
admonished white people to vote by playing on their anxiety: "The
hand of God is in our movement and will be until we triumph. We are
slaves now. It used to be only the colored people. Fellow citizens, our
homes and our liberties are at stake, and in the name of the Almighty
God let us pledge ourselves and not give up the fight until we win the
victory."(27)
The internal contradictions and conflicts of Populism were part of the
barrier to the movement's success. However, the most significant reason
for the movement's demise is that the Populists simply did not have the
political power to put their proposals into effect. because corporate
capitalists not only had economic power, but they also commanded
political power far beyond their numbers.
Historians point to several later developments in assessing the legacy
of Populism. They argue that the Populists's calls for a federal income
tax and direct popular election of senators became reforms that
progressives pushed for during the early 20th century, and resulted in
the passing of the 16th and 17th amendments, which were both ratified in
1913. They also point out that elements of the subtreasury plan appeared
in key New Deal farm policies.
However, the most enduring consequence of the southern revolt was that
it contributed to the movement for disfranchisement.
1. I am indebted to Barbara J. Fields, Daryl Scott and Omar Ali
for helping shape my interpretation of the southern revolt.
2. The Farmer's Last Frontier, p. 92
3. Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism
4. Harold G. Suggs, "The Colored Farmers' Alliance,
1888,1892," Master's thesis, Old Dominion University, Spring 1971,
in Harold G. Suggs Papers, East Carolina University Manuscript
Collection. Best was one of the approximately eight percent of African
Americans in the South engaged in agricultural pursuits who managed to
own, in whole or in part, their own farms. There were only about 144,000
of such farmers in the rural South.
5. Michael Schwartz, 31.
6. Farmer's Last Frontier, 111.
7. Hahn, 165-183
8. quoted in C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 193.
9. Thomas D. Clark, Pill, Petticoats and Plows: The Southern Country
Store (Indianapolis, 1944), 155.
10. Woodward, 183
11. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York: 1995), 33.
12. McMath, Populist Vanguard, 65.
13. McMath, Populist Vanguard, 68.
14. McMath, Populist Vanguard, 75.
15. James L. Roark et. al. The American Promise: A History of the
United States From 1865, Volume II, (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998),
768.
16. Roark et. al., 769.
17. McMath, Populist Vanguard, 90-91.
18. McMath, Populist Vanguard, 96; John M. Blum et. al. The
National Experience: A History of the United States since 1865, Part
Two, Fourth Edition (New York, 1977), 479.
19. William F. Holmes, "The Demise of the Colored Farmers'
Alliance," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 1, No. 2, May
1975, 187; Omar Ali, "Preliminary research for writing a history of
the Colored Farmers Alliance in the Populist movement: 1886-1896"
20. quoted in Ali.
21. McMath, Populist Vanguard, 53.
22. John C. Inscoe, ed. Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in
the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950, (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1994), 32.
23. Holmes, 195.
24. Holmes, 199.
25. Woodward, 220.
26. quoted in Bruce Palmer, "The Southern Populist Creed," in
Leon Fink, ed. Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive
Era, 202.
27. The American South, 529.
TOP
comments and letters to comments@ipoaa.com |
