LITMIR.BIZ

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black mobility by making it illegal to leave the employment of a planter to whom a sharecropper owed money (Daniel 1972; Mandle 1978; Woodman 1995). A system of debt peonage developed and by the early twentieth century the federal government—albeit briefly—pursued prosecutions of some planters for violation of an 1867 law against debt peonage. That law implicitly recognized the insufficiency of the 13th Amendment in New Mexico where debt peonage involving Native Americans and Hispanics continued to exist (Kiser 2016). It is ironic, then, that a law passed in 1867 to free Native Americans and Hispanics of peonage in the territory of New Mexico was not used on behalf of African Americans until the early twentieth century.

      Although debt peonage was a significant problem, African Americans were not fully immobilized by various strategies used by planters to keep them in place (Wright 1986). Despite legislative statutes and extralegal attempts to limit the options of African Americans, certain factors mitigated against fully immobilizing black farm labor: the size of the farm or plantation and the environmental health of the operation. Large operators with a strict managerial system could better dominate their workers than smaller farmers. And planters and farmers on lands that were exhausted by overuse might take lands out of production and lessen their labor needs. In the Georgia piedmont, for example, as land gave way to gullies, plantations and farms reduced cultivated acreage, and sharecroppers there were enticed by agents to the newly opened cotton areas along the Mississippi River Valley. Some found success there, but they were increasingly faced with the same constraints they faced in the southeastern cotton growing areas (Whayne 1996, 2011; Woodruff 2003; Sutter 2015). Some moved further west to Kansas in the hope of homesteading and others “back to Africa” in the late nineteenth century (Barnes 2004).

      Aside from creating another kind of slavery on southern plantations, the survival of the plantation insured that planters would continue to intensively cultivate tobacco, rice, and cotton. Cotton in particular was highly profitable in the late antebellum period and one of the primary reasons plantations spread westward, but new international competitors arose during the war and prices never fully recovered their prewar levels. Lacking 20-20 foresight, planters became locked into the cotton market not only by their belief that better days would return but also by the way they financed the crop. Usually operating on a thin margin of profit—though one that did not inhibit the purchase of luxuries—cotton planters became indebted to cotton factors who, of course, required they grow cotton. Everything worked together to encourage the continuation of this labor-intensive and environmentally destructive practice: federal policy, state legislation, the financial system, and an abundance of black labor.

Falling soil fertility rates and other environmental issues made life for southern farmers and planters difficult in the late nineteenth century. Southern agriculture had long been plagued by over-intensive cultivation, particularly in tobacco and cotton areas. Wartime destruction exacerbated the damage caused by certain unsustainable practices engaged in by those growing staple crops for a global market. Although a small number of antebellum southern agriculturalists promoted crop rotation and careful stewardship of plantation lands, few planters followed their advice, particularly in years when the price of cotton was high. Many planters kept up to a third of their land in reserve with the intention of moving into it once their agricultural acreage was depleted by intensive cultivation. They counted on putting their enslaved laborers to work cutting forests, removing stumps, and breaking new ground when necessary (Mauldin 2018). As Mart Stewart has argued, the abolition of slavery demonstrated the vulnerability of the system of southern plantation agriculture (Stewart 1996; Mauldin 2018).

      Although planters were able to use both violence and legislation to ensure the emergence of another kind of unfree labor system, they found it impossible to coerce sharecroppers into the additional labor necessary to maintain levees in the rice areas or to engage in the laborious and often dangerous work of clearing forested lands elsewhere. Rice fields fell into disuse as levees went unrepaired. The Georgia Piedmont became pockmarked with gullies, a telltale sign of erosion and overfarming (Sutter 2015). In the Old South cotton belt, declining soil fertility led to a mass exodus of freed-people to new lands opening in the Mississippi River Valley 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

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