654 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and AbroadThe Populist Coalition
In some southern states, the Populists made remarkable efforts to unite black
and white small farmers on a common political and economic program. The
obstacles to such an alliance were immense— not merely the heritage of racism
and the political legacy of the Civil War, but the fact that many white Popu-
lists were landowning farmers while most blacks were tenants and agricultural
laborers. Unwelcome in the southern branches of the Farmers’ Alliance, black
farmers formed their own organization, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. In 1891,
it tried to organize a strike of cotton pickers on plantations in South Carolina,
Arkansas, and Texas. The action was violently suppressed by local authorities
and landowners, some of them sympathetic to the white Alliance but unwill-
ing to pay higher wages to their own laborers.
In general, southern white Populists’ racial attitudes did not differ signifi-
cantly from those of their non- Populist neighbors. Nonetheless, recognizing
the need for allies to break the Democratic Party’s stranglehold on power in
the South, some white Populists insisted that black and white farmers shared
common grievances and could unite for common goals. Tom Watson, Georgia’s
leading Populist, worked the hardest to
forge a black- white alliance. “You are
kept apart,” he told interracial audi-
ences, “that you may be separately
fleeced of your earnings.... This race
antagonism perpetuates a monetary
system which beggars both.” While
many blacks refused to abandon the
party of Lincoln, others were attracted
by the Populist appeal. In 1894, a coa-
lition of white Populists and black
Republicans won control of North
Carolina, bringing to the state a “sec-
ond Reconstruction” complete with
increased spending on public educa-
tion and a revival of black officehold-
ing. In most of the South, however,
Democrats fended off the Populist
challenge by resorting to the tactics
they had used to retain power since the
1870 s— mobilizing whites with warn-
ings about “Negro supremacy,” intimi-
dating black voters, and stuffing ballot
boxes on election day.In an 1891 cartoon from a Texas Populist news-
paper, northern and southern Civil War veterans
clasp hands across the “bloody chasm” (a phrase
first used by the New York editor Horace Gree-
ley during his campaign for president in 1872).
Beneath each figure is an explanation of why
voting alignments have previously been based
on sectionalism— the North fears “rebel” rule, the
white South “Negro supremacy.”