but even there, planters were unable to force them to labor without recompense to maintain levees. Planters along the lower Mississippi River Valley had no choice but to pressure the Corps of Engineers to erect levees to protect them from flooding. As always, the South’s leaders were only too willing to demand federal intervention when it suited their own needs. They also used state statutes and local government to drain backwater swamps.
Even as these environmental issues intensified in the late nineteenth century, small farmers suffered under the crop lien system, which required them to pledge to grow certain marketable crops in return for advances to finance planting. While planters found themselves locked into growing certain staple crops for a global market, yeoman farmers were increasingly growing corn and wheat for a regional or national market. Some yeomen grew cotton or tobacco, but they typically farmed less fertile land than did planters and both those crops were hard on the thin soils of the backcountry or mountain areas. Given the falling price of agricultural commodities, many small farmers who had become indebted to merchants faced bankruptcy, lost their farms, and some became tenants, a status similar to sharecropping. Tenant farmers typically brought more to the bargaining table as they had mules and implements. Thus, they secured a higher share of the crop, up to half of the annual crop as opposed to the third sharecroppers received. Whether black sharecropper or white tenant farmers, they dreamed of climbing the agricultural ladder, but few of them were successful.
As discontent grew among southern farmers in the late nineteenth century, they voiced concerns about a range of issues. Chief among their grievances were the practices of railroad corporations then building various lines into the South to take advantage of the expanding market in crops, livestock, timber, and mining (Hahn 1983). Yeomen concerns about railroads were many, but most important was the practice of charging higher rates in the South and the West in order, so they argued, to meet the cost of the expansion of the railroads into new areas. In fact, railroads charged farmers more because they could get away with it. Farmers and planters also objected to the fact that railroads continued to hold land that had been awarded to them in exchange for extending rail lines across the South. Even after construction was complete, millions of acres of land remained in the hands of railroad promoters and other speculators. Given the ongoing problem with soil exhaustion and declining prices for agricultural products, southern farmers and planters demanded the seizure of such lands and the opportunity to purchase or homestead them.
The Farmers’ Alliance, founded in Texas in 1875, proved adept at articulating farmer grievances in the South. Within a decade of its founding, it boasted approximately five million members, including one million black southerners, two million white southerners, and two million midwesterners. White Alliance members in the South tended to be smaller farmers in the non-plantation areas rather than planters, and the membership included many nonlandowners. African American members were also drawn from the ranks of farm owners but included a greater percentage of sharecroppers. Initially, the Alliance avoided politics and attempted to address their economic concerns by establishing cooperative warehouses to provide a place where farmers could deposit their crops for up to 80 percent of the fair market value. Once the market corrected after the harvest, they could theoretically secure the remaining 20 percent. But the cooperatives were underfunded and thus largely unable to front the 80 percent (Woodward 1951; McMath 1992; Lester 2006).
In the mid-1880s, the Alliance began to step tentatively into politics. Alliance candidates in the South ran for local and state offices on the Democratic Party ticket, but too few of them secured election. The decision to create its own party in 1889 –the Populist Party (aka People’s Party)—seemed for a time to offer real promise as it appealed to farmers across the South and West. Included in the party platform was the subtreasury plan, an idea modeled on the cooperative warehouses. It called for the creation of government warehouses where farmers could deposit crops until the market corrected and, of course, included an 80 percent advance on the fair market value. In the 1896 election in which William Jennings Bryan ran on both the Populist and the Democratic Party tickets, the issue that consumed the populists, however, was the desire to inflate the money supply by monetizing silver. Better prices on western and farm products and dissension within the ranks of southern populists doomed Bryan’s run for the presidency. While southern farmers voted for Bryan—as a Democrat—a hard money Republican from Ohio won the election.
Populism remained alive after 1896, but by that time the southern branch of the Democratic Party had embraced a strategy designed to eliminate the threat of a white yeomen farmer/black sharecropper alliance. Beginning in the early 1890s, the rhetoric of racism appealed to many southern white yeomen, and the passage of disfranchisement and segregation statutes in the southern states in the 1890s shored up the Democratic party’s control and further increased planter power over African American farm labor. Disfranchised, segregated, and burdened by debt peonage, black sharecroppers faced severe constraints.
By the end of the century, farmers across the nation faced declining production levels, but these problems were particularly acute in the South. The promise of help to southern white farmers and planters in the late nineteenth century came from an unlikely, and largely unwelcome, source: the federal government. The Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed during the Civil War, granted federal lands to states to found agricultural, engineering, and mechanical colleges. The opportunity was not immediately embraced by southerners and even after the colleges were created in the early 1870s, southern legislatures were often hostile to them and starved them of funds. Nevertheless, augmented by the 1887 Hatch Act that funded the creation of experiment stations to work directly with farmers, the land-grant institutions slowly developed a following among some southern farmers and planters (Scott 1970).
Black farmers—whether sharecroppers or farm owners—were not served by the original land-grant institutions, even though they represented the largest number of farm laborers in the South. Although the overwhelming number of black farmers were sharecroppers, the number of black farm owners had increased in the late nineteenth century. They held small parcels on typically poorer land, and they struggled to survive in an uneven playing field. By 1890, it had become clear that the 1862 land-grant institutions were not serving black farmers and a second Morrill Act was passed. The second Morrill Act provided funds—rather than a land-grant—to create black agricultural and mechanical institutions. Unlike the grant of land awarded to states in the 1862 act, which, if used wisely, provided for continued funding, the meager funds allotted to the black schools were quickly exhausted. To add insult to injury, southern state governments were hostile and unwilling to provide sufficient ongoing funding for the black colleges. Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881, became Alabama’s 1890 Morrill Act institution and was able to secure donors to augment its operations under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. Washington emphasized the practical application of farming principles and launched extension work with black farmers in 1892 at a conference in Tuskegee attended by approximately 500 black farmers. The gathering of farmers at Tuskegee became an annual affair and included satellite conferences, all of which offered advice on production of farm products and animal husbandry and provided opportunities for farmers to present “products from their own farms” (Crosby 1977, 1983, 1986).
Washington organized a Department of Agriculture at Tuskegee in the mid-1890s and hired George Washington Carver away from Iowa State College to run it. Carver’s scientific accomplishments are well known, but he also proved to be an excellent educator and convinced talented young men, like his protégé, Thomas Monroe Campbell, to become promoters of agricultural education. Campbell and his cohort took the movable school to farmers in Alabama, meeting black farmers on their own ground. Once the Cooperative Extension Service’s program was created in 1914, Campbell supervised extension activities directed at African Americans in several southern states. Carver himself traveled the South, promoting self-sufficiency through the cultivation of crops like peanuts and potatoes. In 1906, he launched the Jessup Agricultural Wagon which traveled Alabama with information, tools, and seeds. Carver, Campbell, and their cohort struggled to reach sharecroppers on southern plantations, however, because of the reluctance of planters to allow any outside influence on their labor force. This began to change with the appearance of the most devastating agricultural pest to ever face southern cotton farmers (Crosby 1977).
