140 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



. . . and now the curtain seems to be dropping upon that 

 pleasant scene and they feel themselves headed back toward 

 the old morass of crop lien farming a kind of slavery to 

 merchants and bankers. 52 



The relation of cotton prices to agrarian unrest in the 

 South is clearly evident and interesting to trace. "The 

 Tillman Movement" in South Carolina, as Francis But- 

 ler Simkins has shown in his book of that name, grew 

 out of the inability of the upland cotton farmers in the 

 coastal areas to make a decent living in the 1890's. Till- 

 man himself failed at cotton farming and came first into 

 the public eye by his vigorous demands for the relief of 

 agriculture. Benjamin B. Kendrick 53 has held that the 

 agrarian discontent in the South grew out of the crop 

 lien system and the low social status of the southern 

 farmer in 1880 as compared with 1860. But his low 

 social status was to a large extent a low economic status 

 owing to the falling prices of cotton since 1870. In North 

 Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and 

 especially in Georgia, the Agrarian Crusade took the 

 form of a revolt against the Democratic party called 

 Populism. Tom Watson came from a Georgia farm and 

 was a country lawyer and farm owner before he became 

 prominent. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Lease had told her 

 western audiences that what the farmers needed was to 

 raise less corn and more hell! Down in Dixie, as some 

 wag has accurately put it, they continued to do both. 

 The black Republicans on the plantations raised the cot- 

 ton, and the Populist Democrats, upland cotton farmers, 

 raised the hell. The story of the cotton farmer at the 



52 In the New York Evening Post, March 8, 1921. 



53 "Agrarian Discontent in the South 1880-90," Report of the 

 American Historical Association, 1920, pp. 267-72. 



