THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE 



CHAPTER I 



THE INCEPTION OF THE GRANGE 



WHEN President Johnson authorized the Commis- 

 sioner of Agriculture, in 1866, to send a clerk in his 

 bureau on a trip through the Southern States to 

 procure "statistical and other information from 

 those States, " he could scarcely have foreseen that 

 this trip would lead to a movement among the 

 farmers, which, in varying forms, would affect the 

 political and economic life of the nation for half a 

 century. The clerk selected for this mission, one 

 Oliver Hudson Kelley, was something more than a 

 mere collector of data and compiler of statistics : he 

 was a keen observer and a thinker. Kelley was 

 born in Boston of a good Yankee family that could 

 boast kinship with Oliver Wendell Holmes and 



Judge Samuel Sewall. At the age of twenty-three 



I 



