The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

The agricultural bases of the Southern political disturbance lay in the changes in tenure and finance that had recently appeared. The South was not without a pioneer immigration resembling that of the West. Many of the carpet-baggers had undertaken to develop farms there. There was much opportunity for rural speculation that increased in attractiveness as the area of free Western lands diminished. So far as this went, it produced a debtor class and prepared the way for inflation.

But the development of new areas in the South was less significant than the method of its industry. The disintegration of plantations continued steadily through the seventies and eighties. The figures of the census, showing tenure for the first time in 1880, and color in 1890, exaggerated this, since many of the small holdings there enumerated were to all intents farmed by hired labor and were only matters of bookkeeping. Yet there was a marked diminution in the size of the estates. A class of negro owners was slowly developing to account for a part of the diminution. Frugality and industry appeared in enough of the freedmen to bring into negro ownership in 1900, within the slave area, 149,000 farms, averaging 55 acres. There were at this time 2,700,000 farms in the South, and 5,700,000 in the whole United States. Negro renters and negro croppers, many of whom labored under the direct supervision of the white landlords, increased the number of individual farmers, and like the rest lived upon the proceeds of the cotton crop that was not yet grown.

Much of the capital that was used in Southern agriculture came from the North through the manufacturers and wholesalers who supplied the retail merchants of the South. These merchants advanced credit to their customers, measuring it by the estimated value of the next crop. Once the bargain had been struck, the farmer bought all his supplies from his banker-merchant, paying such prices as the latter saw fit to charge. There could be little competition among merchants under this system, since the burden of his debt kept the planter from seeking the cheapest market. The double weight of extortionate prices and heavy interest impressed a large section of the South with the scarcity of cash and the evils of existing finance.

In agricultural method as well as in finance the South was oppressed by its system. The merchant wanted cotton, for cotton was marketable, and could not be consumed by a tricky debtor. Single cropping was thus unduly encouraged; diversified agriculture and rotation of crops made little progress. The use of commercial fertilizers was greatly stimulated, but agriculture as a whole could not advance.

Tied fast to a system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money and more of it. The Farmers' Alliance, with its demands for railroad control, trust regulation, banking reform, and free silver, was the logical vehicle for the expression of Southern discontent.

The white population of the South, undivided since the Civil War, was confronted in 1890 by an issue that bore no relation to race and that divided society into debtor and creditor classes. For twenty years, by common agreement in which the North had tacitly concurred, the negro had been suppressed outside the law. Occasional negroes had got into office and even to Congress in reconstruction days. One, who described himself as "a bright mulatto," sat in the Fifty-first and Fifty-second Congresses, but in most regions of the South the negro had not been allowed to vote or had been "counted out" at the polls, while only in sporadic cases, mostly in the mountain sections, was the Republican party able to get enough votes to elect its candidates.

The Farmers' Alliance split the white vote and gave to the negro an unusual power. From being suppressed by all to being courted by many involved a change that raised his hopes only to destroy them. The South no sooner saw the possibility that the negro vote might hold a balance of power between two equal white factions than it took steps to remove itself from temptation and to disfranchise the undesired class.

The purpose of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been to raise the freedmen to civil equality and protect them there. Pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress passed, in 1875, a Civil Rights Bill, which forbade discrimination against any citizen in "the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement." It was restrained from imposing coeducation of the races only by Northern philanthropists who were interested in Southern education. Its compulsion was disregarded at the South, where social equality between the races could not be attained. Innkeepers and railroads continued to separate their customers, and in time a few of them were haled into court to answer for violating the law. Their defense was that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade discrimination by the States, but did not touch the private act of any citizen; that it protected the rights of citizens, but that these rights, complete before the law, did not extend to social relations,—that attendance at a theater is not a civil right at all, and may properly be regulated by the police power without conflict with the Constitution. In the Civil Rights Cases, decided in 1883, the Supreme Court released the defendants, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment was too narrow in its intention to justify Congress in the passage of a code of social relations at the South. This part of reconstruction thus broke down, leaving the negro population at the discretion of its white neighbors.

The Fifteenth Amendment, too, had been limited in its protecting force before 1890. It forbade a denial of the right to vote by any State. The Supreme Court easily determined that no violation could occur when a hostile mob excluded negroes from the polls. It had been settled before 1890 that the negro was defenseless against personal discrimination. It remained to be seen whether he could be disfranchised by law and yet have no redress. Not till the South found some of its people appealing for the negro vote in the crisis of the Farmers' Alliance did it take the last steps in the undoing of reconstruction.

The Fifteenth Amendment was not explicit. Instead of asserting the right of the negro to vote, it said, by negation, that the right should not be denied on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The three qualities of race, color, and servitude separated the races, but the South learned that they were separated by other qualities that were not proscribed by the amendment as a basis for the franchise. The negro was generally poor, and any qualification based on property would exclude him. He was shiftless, and often vagrant, and hence could be touched by poll-tax and residence requirements. He was illiterate, and was unable to meet an educational test. Tired of using force or fraud, the South began in 1890 a system of legal evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment.