the country, accompanied by
General Field when he was in the South and by Mrs. Lease when he went to
the Pacific coast. Numerous other men and women addressed the thousands
who attended the meetings, great and small, all over the country. One
unique feature of the Populist campaign on the Pacific coast was the
singing of James G. Clark's People's Battle-Hymn, and other songs
expressing the hope and fears of labor in the field and factory.
Everywhere it was the policy of the new party to enlist the assistance
of the weaker of the old parties. In the South, the Populists, as a
rule, arrayed themselves with the Republicans against the old Democracy.
This provoked every device of ridicule, class prejudice, and scorn,
which the dominant party could bring to bear to dissuade former
Democrats from voting the People's ticket. One Louisiana paper uttered
this warning:

"Oily-tongued orators, in many cases the paid agents of the Republican
party, have for months been circulating among the unsophisticated and
more credulous classes, preaching their heresies and teaching the people
that if Weaver is elected president, money may be had for the asking,
transportation on the railroad trains will be practically free, the
laboring man will be transferred from his present position and placed
upon a throne of power, while lakes filled with molasses, whose shores
are fringed with buckwheat cakes, and islands of Jersey butter rising
here and there above the surface, will be a concomitant of every farm.
The 'forty-acres-and-a-mule' promises of the reconstruction era pale
into insignificance beside the glowing pictures of prosperity promised
by the average Populist orator to those who support Weaver."

The Pensacola Address of the Populist nominees on September 17, 1892,
which served as a joint letter of acceptance, was evidently issued at
that place and time partly for the purpose of influencing such voters as
might be won over by emphasizing the unquestioned economic distress of
most Southern farmers. If the new party could substantiate the charges
that both old parties were the tools of monopoly and Wall Street, it
might insert the wedge which would eventually split the "solid South."
Even before the Pensacola Address, the state elections in Alabama and
Arkansas demonstrated that cooperation of Republicans with Populists was
not an idle dream. But, although fusion was effected on state tickets in
several States in the November elections,