Farmers living far from the railroads carried their crops in wagons across the muddy and rut-filled roads called “loblollies” to grain elevators along the railroad tracks. There buyers paid as little as possible for the grain; often they downgraded the quality of the wheat to avoid paying the higher price for “number one” wheat that was “sound, plump, and well cleaned.” Elevator companies, many of which were owned by the railroads, were notorious for discriminating against their smaller customers. And farmers who shipped directly found that the railroads charged them exorbitant rates—while giving rebates to their biggest customers—and regardless of the distance forced them to pay through rates to the train’s last stop. For the ordinary farmer, shipping grain from the Dakota Territory to Minneapolis was more expensive than sending the same grain from Chicago to Liverpool.
Life was a perpetual struggle on the prairie frontier, but for the first two decades after the Civil War enough good years canceled out the bad for most farm families to eke out a subsistence living. Then a series of dry years starting in 1886 precipitated a radical change in the farmer’s condition. Crops failed year after year, debts skyrocketed, loans went unpaid, eastern capital dried up, and credit tightened like a noose. Banks and mortgage companies foreclosed upon more and more farms, and more and more farm families became tenants on their own land, or gave up farming and moved back east. The percentage of tenant farmers in Kansas doubled between 1880 and 1890 to more than a third of all farmers, and tenancy in Kansas increased in the next two decades even more than in the South. Between 1888 and 1892, half the farm families of scorched western Kansas headed east, some of their covered wagons emblazoned with slogans like “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.” In 1891 alone, 18,000 “prairie schooners” crossed the Missouri River from Nebraska back to Iowa.
But most farm families, particularly in the central and eastern parts of the Plains, stayed put and survived these hard times the best they could, with whatever ingenuity and resourcefulness they could muster. Susan Orcutt of western Kansas typified the plight of the worst-off. In 1894 she appealed for help from her Populist governor, Lorenzo Lewelling:
“I take my Pen In hand to let you know that we are Starving to death It is Pretty hard to do without any thing to Eat hear in this God for saken country we would of had Plenty to Eat if the hail hadent cut our rye down and ruined our corn and Potatoes I had the Prettiest Garden that you Ever seen and the hail ruined It and I have nothing to look at My Husband went a way to find work and came home last night and told me that we would have to Starve he has bin in ten countys and did not Get no work It is Pretty hard for a woman to do with out any thing to Eat when she dosent no what minute She will be confined to bed If I was In Iowa I would be all right I was born there and raised there I havent had nothing to Eat to day and It is three oclock.”
If misery loved company, western farmers could look south. With farms and markets often devastated by the war, most southern farmers, black or white, were unable to achieve anything close to prosperity. The malaise was deep-seated and multifaceted: wartime pillage and destruction of farms, fences, crops, and livestock; antiquated farming that produced low yields and rapid soil exhaustion; a racism that removed incentives and crushed aspirations of black farmers and sharecroppers; overproduction and the sharply declining price of cotton; and probably most important, the constant pressure from rural furnishing merchants and northern capital to cling to the one-crop economy of cotton rather than diversifying. Southern farmers were not even able to remain self-sufficient in food production, which fell by nearly half after the war, and the South became an increasing net importer of corn and other foodstuffs from the North and West.
“Cotton planting has been a mania,” one observer remarked. “The neglected corn field with all its consequences is a part of Southern history.” “A planter reported that ‘want and gaunt, haggard despair have prevailed everywhere in the Black Belt’ of Alabama,” according to C. Vann Woodward; “in Louisiana a farmer pointed to ‘old fields abandoned in every direction’ that he had seen cleared as a boy on the frontier as rich new land; in Mississippi, there was a poverty-driven exodus from the farm ‘so strong and wide as to threaten whole sections of our country with desolation’.…” Politician Benjamin Tillman spoke bitterly in 1886 of a “fatal lethargy” among the farmers of South Carolina: “our minds become benumbed, deadened.” Agrarian leader Tom Watson described Georgia farmers falling into peonage “like victims of some horrid nightmare … powerless—oppressed—shackled.’’
The emancipated black sharecroppers and tenants were by far the worst off of all Southerners—the most powerless, most oppressed, and still, though in new and different ways, most shackled. The defeated but still powerful planter class made a concerted effort to revive the plantation system immediately after the Civil War, signing contracts with blacks remaining on and near their lands to work much as they had before, except now for meager wages. After an initial burst of success—cotton prices were quite high for a couple of years after wartime shortages—the experiment of wage slavery collapsed. Save in Louisiana and a few pockets elsewhere in the Deep South, the old-style plantation was virtually dead by 1870.
Another experiment, sharecropping, was longer-lasting. Accepted by blacks who aspired to greater autonomy and even future landownership, or pushed by large planters who wanted to retain certain features of the plantation system and gain more control over black labor and labor costs than the wage contracts permitted, sharecropping often turned out a fraud for those blacks who perceived it as the next and higher rung on the ladder to liberation. Out of a variety of sharecropping arrangements, one form became nearly universal: the white landlord divided his holding into shares of up to fifty acres, each share usually to be farmed by one black family. The landlord supplied everything except food and clothing: housing, fuel, one or two mules or horses, feed, tools, seed, and fertilizer. Landlord and sharecropper split the crop fifty-fifty; “working on halves,” it was called. Annual renewal of the contract strengthened the landlord’s control over the labor of his “croppers.” Black sharecroppers thus achieved greater autonomy in form but not in substance. Landlords generally supervised them closely, in some cases even working them in gangs to cultivate the soil. The sharecropper was a landless laborer, perhaps even less autonomous than European serfs in the Middle Ages. It was “slavery under a new name.”
Ned Cobb grew up in a black sharecropping family in Alabama in the 1880s and 1890s. He learned the sharecropper’s trade at a very young age: “My daddy put me to plowin the first time at nine years old, right after my mother died.... And that country where we was livin was rough and rocky. And he—my poor old daddy is dead and gone but I don’t tell no lies on him—he put me to plowin a regular shift at twelve, thirteen years old. And I had to plow barefooted on that rocky country….”
As a boy, Cobb saw his father “cleaned up” twice, first by a white landlord who forced him to live and work on his land and then refused to share the crop with him; later by a furnishing merchant who seized all of his mortgaged belongings, including his horse, his new iron-axle wagon, and his “fattenin hog,” because the drought ruined his crop of corn and cotton that year. Booker T. Washington, eating and sleeping with sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama, in1881, noted that in the plantation districts,
as a rule the whole family slept in one room, and that in addition to the immediate family there sometimes were relatives, or others not related to the family, who slept in the same room….
The common diet of the people was fat pork and corn bread. At times I have eaten in cabins where they had only corn bread and “black-eye peas” cooked in plain water. The people seemed to have no other idea than to live on this fat meat and corn bread,—the meat, and the meal of which the bread was made, having been bought at a high price at a store in town, notwithstanding the fact that the land all about the cabin homes could easily have been made to produce nearly every kind of garden vegetable that is raised an
ywhere in the country. Their one object seemed to be to plant nothing but cotton; and in many cases cotton was planted up to the very door of the cabin The breakfast over, and with practically no attention given to the house, the whole family would, as a general thing, proceed to the cotton-field. Every child that was large enough to carry a hoe was put to work, and the baby—for usually there was at least one baby—would be laid down at the end of the cotton row, so that its mother could give it a certain amount of attention when she had finished chopping her row….
All the days of the family would be spent after much this same routine, except Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday the whole family would spend at least half a day, and often a whole day, in town. The idea in going to town was, I suppose, to do shopping, but all the shopping that the whole family had money for could have been attended to in ten minutes by one person. Still, the whole family remained in town for most of the day, spending the greater part of the time in standing on the streets, the women, too often, sitting about somewhere smoking or dipping snuff. Sunday was usually spent in going to some big meeting....
The state had not been able to build schoolhouses in the country districts, and, as a rule, the schools were taught in churches or in log cabins. More than once, while on my journeys, I found that there was no provision made in the house used for school purposes for heating the building during the winter.... With few exceptions, I found the teachers in these country schools to be miserably poor in preparation for their work, and poor in moral character. The schools were in session from three to five months.
Sometimes black schools had to close for lack of funds while the white schools stayed open. Most black sharecroppers and their children were illiterate.
Some black farmers managed to break the barriers to renting and owning their own land, and their numbers increased, though unevenly, throughout the South. Unlike sharecroppers, renters, or “real tenants,” had considerable control over their labor, land, and crops, paying rent to the landlord either in cash or cotton at the end of the year. Like sharecropping, though, contracts were renewed annually. Neither renting nor owning by blacks was looked upon favorably by the white power structure, or by poor while tenant farmers and owners who competed with them. If black tenant farmers were always a minority of blacks on the land, black owners were even rarer. In the Black Belts of Georgia and Mississippi, the 1880 census reported, about one in a hundred black farmers owned their land; in other states the figures were a bit higher, especially in Virginia and South Carolina. By the turn of the century, a considerably higher percentage of blacks owned their farms, but they were still a small minority.
The obstacles to ownership were awesome. If blacks could scrape together enough cash to buy the land, tools, and working stock—no easy feat—they faced the active hostility of neighboring whites who often threatened violence against those offering land to blacks, or who engaged in “whitecapping”—terrorizing and forcibly expelling the blacks from their new property. Still, the aspirations of blacks for independence and dignity were powerful enough for some to realize their dream of ownership. Betty Powers, born a slave, recalled how her family felt when they finished building their cabin on land they had just bought: “Was we’uns proud? There t’was, our place to do as we pleases, after bein slaves. Dat sho’ am de good feelin’. We work like beavers puttin’ de crop in, and my folks stays dere till dey dies.”
While the fortunes of some black farmers improved, those of many white farmers in the South often moved in the opposite direction, as they started out as owners of small or medium-sized plots, sank increasingly into debt, losing their land to the furnishing merchant, and ended up as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. From the 1880s on, farmland more and more fell into the hands of merchants, loan agents, and some of the financially stronger farmers, most of whom were absentee landlords. By 1900, most white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, mostly sharecroppers.
The average farm family, according to agricultural historian Fred Shannon, tended only about seventeen acres of cotton. This meant “that a five-or-six-thousand-bale crop was all that could be expected. At the upper limit, and with the price at the rare ten cents, the three-hundred-dollar return allowed the worker’s family a hundred dollars’ credit for the year’s living expenses, and this was spent at the weighted prices charged at the country store. On a cash basis the family, even when fairly large, probably got five dollars a month to spend for food, clothing, and incidental luxuries.”
The most characteristic and most harmful feature of post-Civil War Southern farming was the “crop lien system” with its ubiquitous furnishing merchant—a system that in Woodward’s view “came to be more widespread than slavery had been, for it was no respecter of race or class; and if it be judged objectively, by its economic results alone, the new evil may have worked more permanent injury to the South than the ancient evil.” A contemporary observer, Charles Otken, described it as a “vast credit system whose tremendous evils and exorbitant exactions have brought poverty and bankruptcy to thousands of families, … crushed out all independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery.”
As with sharecropping, the crop lien system was an invention of the postwar South, emerging out of the havoc of the war. Its prime causes were the lack of money and banks in rural areas of the South and the poor transportation facilities, especially the lack of good roads—all of which left farmers tied to purely local markets and suppliers. Originally serving black farmers mainly, particularly sharecroppers, the crop lien system spread throughout the South in tandem with the proliferation of cotton-growing, hooking in as many as 80 to 90 percent of all farmers, black and white, poor and middle class, without much distinction. Sometimes merchants became landlords to fifty or a hundred tenants as they gained title to more and more of their customers’ land to settle debts. Sometimes landlords moved into town, opened stores, and sold goods to their own tenants and croppers.
All too often the result was a local rural monopoly of credit, supplies, and marketing. Typically a farmer would sign a contract with the merchant in January or February, when it was time for the soil to be prepared for cotton planting. The farmer would agree to give the merchant a lien on the entire crop for the coming year as payment for the purchase on credit of all provisions. These contracts were strictly enforced under lien laws that were enacted by most Southern states after the war. Every week or two for the rest of the year, from spring planting until harvesting in the late fall, the farmer would ride into town and “buy” various supplies—food, such as cornmeal, pork, flour, and lard, most of which the farm family could have provided for itself; farm supplies like fertilizer and a plow point; possibly some calico or other clothing material. The credit prices charged by the merchant were generally 40 to 100 percent higher than if the farmer had paid in cash.
The merchant would make a note in the ledger for each transaction; the farmer would leave the store each time a little deeper in debt, not knowing exactly how much since only the merchant kept records. At “settlin’ up” time in November or December, the farmer brought the hard-earned cotton to the gin, where it would be ginned, bagged, tied, weighed, and handed over to the merchant, who would then deliver the verdict. Most often the farmer did not succeed in “paying out,” meaning that he would have to sign a new contract, thus sinking even deeper in hock to the “furnishing man,” one notch further into peonage.
Some Southerners defended the furnishing merchant as a pawn of Northern capital who had to pay exorbitant interest rates himself and took big risks in providing credit to farmers, especially in outlying areas; and though most merchants were moderately well off, few ever got rich. But the crop lien system must shoulder the blame for much of the South’s ills. For the furnishing merchants, who demanded that more and more cotton be grown despite its falling price, were the major force preserving the one-crop economy and preventing diversification into grains and other foodstuffs that clearly would have improved the conditions of Sout
hern farmers. “No cotton, no credit” was law everywhere the crop lien system had dominion, and this led to the depletion and wreckage of both the soil and the men and women who cultivated it. Though blacks were hit hardest by the merchants, who undoubtedly discriminated against them one way or another, the agricultural stagnation afflicted everyone in the South to varying degrees. The more cotton was sown, the more poverty was reaped.
There was always a final way out. Matt Brown, a poor black farmer in Mississippi, contracted for supplies from the Jones store in Black Hawk from 1884 to 1901. His accumulating debt was nearing $500 when a final entry appeared in the ledger—”marking it off” for a coffin and burial costs.
Working Classes: The Conditions of Existence
Another escape was possible, especially for blacks: an overground move to the North and West. Blacks in Chicago numbered about 4,000 in 1870; within twenty years they multiplied over threefold. The newcomers came largely off the nation’s farms, and especially the farms of the South—part of a mighty population movement that would continue for decades and store up social dynamite for the future.
For white or black to migrate from country to city during the 1870s was not always to plunge into dark tenements and crowded streets. For years, over half the families in the coal and iron regions around Pittsburgh had chickens, livestock, or vegetable gardens next to their homes, and pigs and goats could be seen in abundance in Brooklyn and on the streets of Manhattan as far south as the forties.
The relentless tide of industrialism, however, engulfed these little farms and backyards and other green places, leaving blocks of unpainted or grimy brick tenements in their place. Small cities as well as big were transformed. Lynn, an old Massachusetts seafaring and shoe-making town, was changed from a community of gardened cottages to a city of boarding-houses and triple deckers first clustered on Main Street and then spreading throughout the factory area. Living places could never escape the noise or stench of the mill, for workers had to live close enough to hear the shriek of the factory whistle. As early as 1880, according to John Cumbler, Lynn historians were penning “nostalgic works on how the city had changed.”
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