sified 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 e