by Steven Stoll
As they crossed the 100th meridian, farmers entered a dangerous environment for wheat—a different planet, in a sense, from the humid longitudes. Emigrants who arrived during the 1880s had no idea that they had stepped onto a roulette wheel of climate risk. Between 1871 and 1873, annual precipitation on the northern Plains averaged just eight inches. It did not reach twenty inches—the threshold for planting wheat with some security—during the next three years. A writer for The Atlantic Monthly visited Kansas in 1879. He found dwellings forlorn. The few gardens he saw “appear generally to have ended in partial or total failure.” Homesteaders had a cow and a few chickens or no livestock at all. The writer met people “fleeing from the country.” One couple had paid the entry fee for land and all expenses, including buildings, fences, and dairy cattle. But the first year left them nearly broke. With their animals dying and no wage work available, they sold for less than they had spent and moved to the state of Washington. They told the writer that everyone they knew would leave the Plains if only they had the means.7
Then the rains returned. In 1882, homesteaders in Dakota planted 720,000 acres of wheat. “They plowed up the rich buffalo grass and planted grain in its stead,” wrote one historian. Two years later, they had plowed up an additional 1.5 million acres, followed by another 2.6 million two years after that. They put out money for tools and machinery at a frantic rate, betting on good weather and high prices. Wheat became a fever, and the fever drove farmers into debt. They lived in shelters built from the brick-like sod they turned over with their steel plows, little more than dugouts that clung to any rise in the landscape for protection against the unceasing wind. The earthen floors turned to mud whenever it rained. They endured this and zero degrees in winter because fifteen bushels per acre promised them something unheard of among the agrarians of previous generations: a cash income they could live on.8
After 1887, everything turned for the worse. The hazards that descended upon them form the lore of the Plains: prairie fire without warning, tornados that carried off barns, locusts by the billions that devoured the labor of months. A drought set in by 1888 that destroyed most of what households had built over the previous decade. One editor described “climate changes or planetary influences … that have roasted our fields, decreased our crops, and killed our meadows.” The winter of 1889–1890 plunged South Dakota into subsistence crisis. In Miner County, when harvests fell to under three bushels an acre, twenty-five hundred people nearly starved to death. The geopolitics of food also killed the boom. Australia, Russia, and Canada sent wheat into world markets. Prices collapsed. The average grade of spring wheat lost forty cents a bushel between 1882 and 1887, regaining twenty cents by 1891. Rural editors urged farmers to diversify, to go into dairy cattle, to plant a garden. Some did. Yet the Great Plains frontier was not where households went to live on their gardens but where they went to make money.9
“We live in the nineteenth century,” wrote the Minnesota commissioner of labor. “We must reckon with its forces and tendencies.” He tried to come to terms with the losses he had seen. But as wheat became integrated into world markets, the array of forces that determined its price became so varied, so obscure, that almost no one could reckon them. Together, these forces almost guaranteed failure for anyone with a quarter section. Tariffs imposed by France and Germany made exports less profitable, causing gluts. A new milling process increased the supply of flour and lowered the price of wheat. Homesteaders confronted rising railroad rates, which sometimes wiped out their profits. Speculators cornered the market, or tried to. Banks charged interest as high as 10 percent on short-term chattel mortgages. When creditors came calling during the Panic of 1893, they sometimes demanded the immediate payment in full after a single monthly default. In 1870, a farmer who owed $1,000 on a mortgage needed to raise 600 bushels to pay it off. Twenty years later, if he still owed half of it, the remaining $500 required almost the same number of bushels (590). “In other words,” lectured the agrarian writer Leonidas L. Polk, “the farmer must pay his debts with the products of his labor, and he must work twice as hard, and give twice as much cotton, corn, or wheat to-day as was required in 1870 to pay the same debt.”10
The point is simple, though it played out in complicated ways. Whenever farmers with a few hundred acres fastened their fate to the price of any global commodity (wheat, corn, or cotton)—whenever they entered into debt and depended on money—their failure was almost certain. Still, believers in the never-ending bonanza demanded more land. The only piece of Dakota Territory yet unplanted was the Sioux Reservation, of which 22 million acres was exposed to sale under the terms of the Dawes Act. In one grotesque spectacle of seizure, legislators engineered a free-for-all and gathered at Pierre to watch it. On February 11, 1890, hundreds of land seekers lined up on the border. A cannon went off as a crush of horses and coaches rolled across the frozen Missouri River into the Sioux homeland and the land seekers took whatever they wanted.11
The arid phase of an arid climate that caused so many to abandon the Plains turns out to have been the North American visitation of a global drought and recession. A series of El Niño oscillations shifted the location of the monsoons from the western to the eastern Pacific. The redistribution of heat and moisture affected the entire Northern Hemisphere. The droughts of the 1870s and 1880s caused human misery from the Deccan in the peninsular interior of India to the Sertão in northeastern Brazil. But the vanished monsoons account for only part of the cause. As Mike Davis argues, tens of millions died of starvation across the tropical world from their recent incorporation into commodity markets. “They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism,” not because they were isolated from the emerging world-system “but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.” (Frank Norris gives these words to a grain dealer in The Pit [1903]: “Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. They make the price. They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can’t pay the price he simply starves.”) Under British colonial rule, Indian peasants lost long-standing methods of compensating for climate risk, as the British continued to extract from them in a downward spiral of dependency and hunger.12
Farmers on the Great Plains did not starve to death. But their experiences followed a general pattern of adversity tied to smallholder integration into commodities markets. In response to these and other stressors, a social movement among Plains farmers arose during these decades. The members of the Farmers’ Alliance attempted to recapture a modicum of control. Throughout the 1880s, speakers traveled around giving lectures, holding tent meetings, gathering the people into an organized protest against finance capital and commodity exchanges. Alliance economists thought imaginatively about money and credit. Their plan for a series of sub-treasuries would have replaced the predatory loans offered by furnishing merchants with a government-backed system of crop storage. They called for land reform to prevent dispossession by bankruptcy. In the words of Luna Kellie, the thousands of farmers who had lost their homes demanded “that occupancy and use shall be the sole title of land.” This insistence on sweat equity amounted to a producer’s political economy, in which wealth flowed to all those who labored. The People’s Party ran candidates for president in 1892 and 1896. Populists were elected to city boards, state legislatures, and Congress.13
This challenge from the hinterland, this democratic uprising rooted in agrarian moral economy, carried enormous implications. For even though eastern politicians dismissed the radicals, they responded with nothing less than a new version of the state. The political agenda of agrarian radicalism touched all affairs, foreign and domestic. It included trade policy, income taxes, the public control of banking and currency, antitrust law, and the government regulation of railroads. Populists attempted combinations with industrial labor unions and deeply influenced the metropolitan reform movement, known as progressivism.
These events shaped the way working people thought about themselves and the United States into the middle of the twentieth century.14
Though pieces of their legislative agenda reverberated for decades, the People’s Party died when they merged with the Democrats during the election of 1896. Economists stepped over the body. David Wells, perhaps the most influential advocate of the gold standard, yielded nothing to populism. He defined agriculture as a sector of the economy, not a form of social life. Wells narrowed the conditions for its existence to a singularity. “The only possible future for agriculture,” he wrote in Recent Economic Changes (1899), “is to be found in large farms, worked with ample capital, especially in the form of machinery, and with labor organized somewhat after the factory system.” At one moment, the families who took possession of the Plains represented progress and the possibility of modest accumulation. At another, they appeared unfit for that task. In the estimation of economists, they were as obsolete as the mountaineers of West Virginia.15
When the New England naturalist Wilson Flagg imagined a nightmare of steam power in 1859, he fairly described the first vast mechanized grain-growing operations on the Plains. A bonanza farm of ten thousand acres consumed enough binding twine in one season to encircle the coastline of England, Ireland, and Scotland. But binding wasn’t necessary with machines that cut, threshed, cleaned, and sacked the grain without human hands. In 1775, it required two and a half hours of labor-time to harvest and thresh one bushel. In 1896, the same operation required five and a half minutes. A journalist for Harper’s Magazine saw twenty thousand acres under cultivation, part of a fiefdom consisting of seventy-five thousand. Each tract of five thousand acres had its own superintendent, foremen, and harvesters. The journalist called it “the army system applied to agriculture.” A general “marshals his men, arrays his instruments of war, and … moves forward to conquer and extract.” He observed, darkly, “It absorbs great tracts of land, and keeps out smaller farmers. It employs tramps, who vanish when the harvest is over.”
Twenty years later, a social scientist trekking through western Kansas found “no farming in the usual sense of the word … Not even home life is found here, for the year around the bulk of the work is done by transient laborers.” The author followed hundreds of migrating men, part of an estimated 28,000 farmers without farms, perhaps some of them refugees from the enclosure of Appalachia. Managers promised them wages, beds, and food but sometimes locked them up at night to prevent them from leaving before the end of the harvest. The smallholder’s Arcadia died in the very field where Winslow Homer saw it born.16
* * *
IN 1865, FARMERS HAD REASON for optimism, especially African-Americans. A number of them came to the Plains, having migrated from Mississippi and Louisiana to Kansas. Some of them were former Union soldiers, veterans in their own new fields. But if Homer had looked around for an African-American farmer to depict, he might have chosen one from another recently emancipated community, located on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.
On November 7, 1861, seven months into the Confederate rebellion, the Union Navy sailed into Port Royal Sound. Their cannon assault crushed the town’s modest defenses. The next day, planters set fire to their cotton and packed their valuables into boats just hours ahead of the invading soldiers. The first regiments to reach Beaufort witnessed ten thousand free people dismantling the mansions. Commanders had no idea what to do. In January, William Tecumseh Sherman called on Christian missionaries to offer help and advice. They arrived in March and put into place an innovative policy. The Port Royal Experiment, as it came to be known, carved up the plantations, giving former slaves acres of their own on which to grow food and cotton. They traded within and between communities, some acquiring enough money to buy additional land. In January 1865, Sherman was in Savannah, having just torched crucial pieces of the Confederate infrastructure. Thousands of freedmen followed on foot behind the Military Division of the Mississippi, needing food and asking to serve. Sherman thought back to the black smallholders on the Sea Islands and decided to formalize the Port Royal Experiment into military policy.
In one of the most remarkable gestures of authority in the history of the United States, Sherman issued Special Field Order, No. 15. On Cane Island, Hilton Head, Saint Helena, and at least ten other islands, Sherman seized 195 plantations to create enclaves of autonomy from vengeful whites. He declared, “The sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves.” He offered each household “a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground.” A detachment of the military would protect the settlers until Congress approved their titles. Sherman waved his hand over the mainland like a monarch. The region from Charleston to the Saint Johns River in Florida and thirty miles back from the ocean would be “set apart for the settlement of the negroes.” But in another sense, the Port Royal Experiment was no experiment at all. African-Americans were already skilled farmers, already believed that the land they had cleared and cultivated as slaves belonged to them by usufruct rights, already had a developed sense of the connections between property and citizenship.17
Winslow Homer did not paint African-American farmers, but his contemporary Thomas Anshutz did. In The Way They Live (1879), a mother scrapes the weeds between cabbage heads somewhere in the southern mountains. The corn is high. Her daughter brings her a pitcher of water. The family built a home of planks, with a stone chimney. The proud mother is another veteran in another field. That same year, Anshutz painted The Farmer and His Son at Harvesting (1879), in which a white father sharpens a scythe as his son drinks from a pail. They stand on a hillside, about to cut grass for hay. Their cabin is at the bottom of the hollow.
The two images fit together, forming a simultaneous moment. The houses and mountains in each are identical. Anshutz mixed the same greens and blues, depicted the figures at the same distance and scale, and gave them the same kinds of tasks. The mother and father each concentrate on the use of a tool. The son and daughter each have water. And when the paintings are placed side by side they match up. The mountain in one connects seamlessly to the mountain in the other, as though Anshutz meant them to be viewed together. The effect presents the families as equals, each doing the best they can, not starving or desperate but sufficient.18
As for the Port Royal Experiment, Sherman’s order did not stand. President Andrew Johnson returned much of the confiscated property to its former owners. Congress never moved to grant title to the black farmers. Johnson wouldn’t have signed the bill into law if they had. When the Freedmen’s Bureau Act came up for renewal in 1866, Johnson vetoed it. He stood shoulder to shoulder with planters who wanted to reconstitute the former labor system to the greatest extent possible. A commonplace conspiracy appeared all over the South. In North Carolina, “It was recommended that no lands be rented to negroes, but that they be hired at good wages,” according to the minutes of the Duplin County Agricultural Society. In South Carolina, “In the upper part of Charleston District the planters are quietly holding meetings at which they pass resolutions not to sell land to negroes … In Beaufort District they not only refuse to sell land to negroes, but also refuse to rent it to them.” White landowners threatened aspiring black farmers with execution if they signed a lease “and undertook to work for themselves.”19
One of the most effective tools of coercion was enclosure. During Reconstruction and well into the 1880s, counties all over Georgia passed statutes requiring that domesticated animals be fenced from grazing in the open woods. Landowners asserted rights over land they rarely visited, not to make use of it but to prevent it from functioning as a commons. A statute for fencing livestock might not seem very manipulative, but it trapped black forest squatters in a double bind. They could neither afford the cost of building fences nor the impoundment of their cattle. In Steven Hahn’s words, planters moved “to circumscribe the freedmen’s mobility and access to the means of production and subsistence. The legal and extrale
gal actions taken by the planting elite to prevent blacks from owning land … were products of such an offensive.” The same legal and extralegal enclosure drove English peasants into wage work and West Virginia smallholders into mills and mines.
Georgia’s General Assembly voted to restrict open-range grazing in Taylor County in 1888, declaring that heretofore, “it shall not be lawful for any horse, mule, cow, or hog, or any other domestic animal used, or fit for either labor or food, to run at large.” The landless saw the trick. “The law would benefit the extensive land owners,” lamented one resident of Gwinnett County, calling it “the greatest curse for the poor laboring men that ever befell them.” Said another, “The stock law will divide the people … into classes similar to the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome.” White yeomen in North Carolina, in addition to local elites, often resisted stock laws because they, too, let their cattle roam free. But the laws gained in county after county by the end of the century.20
Landowners invented other legal tools for coercing blacks and whites into peonage. Among the most effective were vagrancy laws that criminalized poverty and unemployment. The idea that the poor are redeemed from immorality and sloth through value-creating labor goes back to early capitalism. Just as English lords of the seventeenth century believed that taking land away from peasants improved society, white southern landowners of the nineteenth century said that taking freedom from former slaves did the same. It might seem like an injustice impossible to rectify with American rights and principles, but the Constitution said nothing about the practice until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which prohibited servitude “except as a punishment for crime.” Prisons leased their inmates to plantations for harvesting, to state governments for road construction, and to corporations for iron and coal mining. In 1886, there were 64,349 convict laborers in the United States, most of them in the South, all of them once slaves or agrarians. Every one of them had been denied landed autonomy and endured incarceration for a condition forced upon them yet obscured behind the veil of law and civility. After they lost their freedom, many lost their lives. Of the 285 convicts who pounded spikes for the South Carolina Greenwood and Augusta Railroad, 44 percent died.21
