LEAD US NOT INTO
T EM P TAT I O N : R AC E ,
R H E T O R I C , A N D R E A LI T Y
S O U T H E R N P O P U LI S M
I RV I N D. S. W I N S B O R O
AND
IN
MOSES MUSOKE
IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the Populists emerged as an unconventional
force of hard-pressed agrarians who found common ground on the issue of rural
economic hardship in the face of America’s rising industrial abundance. Unable
to find support for their reform agenda within the two established parties, the
upstart Populists assumed a new political role in the early 1890s. From 1892 to
1896, this third-party movement strained the political equilibrium in the South,
only to falter in the national election year of 1896 on the issues of economic
panaceas and “fusion,” or merging, with the prevailing political parties. Whether
or not the Populist rhetoric had a transformative impact on the black vote in the
mid-1890s has been an ongoing debate in historical writing, the resolution of
which depends on a critical understanding of why, how, and with what success
white southern Populists wooed the black swing vote. The factors that shaped
Populist rhetoric and the voting behavior of the black communities shed much
light on the impact of this third-party movement and on the priorities of both
the black and white races in the late nineteenth-century South.
This debate perhaps started when noted historian C. Van Woodward, writing
in the 1930s, found southern Populism to be an unprecedented biracial movement. The question of whether the Populists had a transformative effect on the
black vote and biracial discord has been, however, a central issue for scholars since
Woodward presented his now famous, and equally controversial, thesis. Recent
inquiries have tended to focus intensely on the Populists’ underlying racial agenda
Irvin D. S. Winsboro is a professor of history at Florida Gulf Coast University. Moses S. Musoke
is a faculty chair and mentor-associate professor at Empire State College, State University of
New York, Hudson Center. The authors are grateful to the following for their advice on and
support for this long-term project: Ronald L. Lewis, Joe Knetch, Wayne Flynt, Gordon Patterson, Harvey H. Jackson, III, Samuel L. Webb, Jay Clavett Clarke, Lewis N. Wynne, Betsy L.
Winsboro, Don Routh, Abel Bartley, David B. Mock, and Hal Rothman. Even though the
authors’ interpretations of state and county data sometimes differed from these scholars, the
authors remain most grateful for their input.
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and whether it could have truly allowed for Woodward’s theorized racial harmony
in a region permeated by white supremacy beliefs and practices. A logical extension of these explorations might focus on the Populists’ rhetoric and its response
in the black, grassroots communities of the South and whether that response grew,
in fact, from the Populists’ “unprecedented” biracial appeal or from the black
communities’ own internal realities. Although such inquiries into the Populist
impact on southern black communities are problematic because of the dearth of
primary sources relating to this issue, the Populists’ rhetorical attempts to lure
blacks and the response in the black-belt counties of the South do find voice in
the popular literature of the era, particularly newspapers and political tracts. An
examination of Populist outreach and black reaction adds, therefore, to both the
historiography on the subject and to a general understanding of the vital forces
that shaped voting patterns and racial attitudes in the Populist era.1
In an effort to court the vote in the southern Black Belt districts, where African
Americans retained the franchise into the 1890s, white Populists promoted a
rhetoric espousing a united front that would advance the interest of both races.
The notion of a southern biracial political alliance can be traced to Reconstruction-era Republican coalitions and the Knights of Labor union movement up to
the early 1890s, when the two-million-member white Farmers’ Alliance movement sought cooperative exchanges with the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and
Cooperative, which claimed over a million members in twelve states. By 1892,
the economic distress sweeping the South drove the now highly politicized
Alliances to break tradition by rejecting the Democratic Party in favor of the new
People’s (Populist) party. Populist leaders presumed early in the party’s evolution
that black agrarian debtors, like white Alliance farmers, would join them in a
new “marriage of necessity.”2
1. C. Van Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, 1938), 222, and Van Woodward “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” American Scholar 29 (1959–60): 55–72.
See, among the voluminous literature on the subject, Gregg Cantrell and D. Scott Barton,
“Texas Populists and the Failure of Biracial Politics,” Journal of Southern History 55 (1989):
660; Gerald H. Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt: Ballots and Bigotry in the “New
South” (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1977), especially xi–xviii; and Robert M. Saunders, “Southern Populists and the Negro, 1893–1895,” Journal of Negro History 54 (1969): 240–61.
2. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Movement: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in
America (New York, 1978), 4–124; Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History
of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), 110–57; Floyd J. Miller, “Black
Protest and White Leadership: A Note on the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” Phylon 33 (1972):
169–74; Jack Abramowitz, “The Negro in the Populist Movement,” Journal of Negro History
(1953): 257–64; Moses S. Musoke, “The Economic Dimension of Black Participation in the
Populist Movement” (master’s thesis: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1970),
7–107.
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Tom Watson of Georgia, the prophet of Populism following the death of
national Alliance leader Leonidas L. Polk in June 1892, clarified his party’s outreach to blacks. He emerged as perhaps the best indicator of racial rhetoric and
Populist reality. According to Watson’s manifesto, “The Negro Question in the
South,” the root economic problems of black and white farmers rested on their
failure to realize that the reactionary, or “Bourbon,” politicians of the two established parties exploited the lower classes to advance a self-serving lust for money,
what he labeled “Golden Calfism.”3 Watson warned the black community: “As
long as there [is] no choice, except as between the Democrats and Republicans,
the situation of the two races [is] bound to be one of antagonism.” He then amplified in typical Watsonian fashion:
The two races can never act together permanently . . . till each race
demonstrates to the other a readiness to leave old party affiliations and to
form new ones, based upon the profound conviction that, in acting together,
both races are seeking new laws which will benefit both. On no other basis
under heaven can the “Negro Question” be solved.4
Watson further opined that the party’s political program ensured, if not social
equality, then at least the Jeffersonian ideal of “equal and exact justice to all
men.”5 In addressing the new racial rhetoric, the Savannah Tribune, the major
black weekly in Georgia, struck directly to the heart of the issue for the black
community: “Colored men should seriously consider this matter and act to the
best interest of themselves. You control the balance of power . . .”6
Watson’s words evinced his long-time recognition that blacks, while presumed
social inferiors, held the balance of power in many local elections. He thereafter
encouraged the party leaders to attract black voters away from their traditional
coalitions with the Republican Party. In his ongoing quest for rank-and-file black
votes, Watson made more promises regarding the color line. He told the black
voters of his district:
I want you colored citizens to draw near that you may hear what I have
got to say for I have something to say to you especially. . . . I pledge you
3. Thomas E. Watson, “The Creed of Jefferson, the Founder of Democracy,” in The Life and
Speeches of Thos. E. Watson (Nashville, Tenn., 1908), 139–44.
4. Thomas E. Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” Arena 6 (October 1892): 545–46.
5. Watson, “Debate at Sandersville,” in The Life and Speeches of Thos. E. Watson, 111.
6. Savannah Tribune, 30 April 1892.
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my word and honor that if you stand up for your rights and for your
manhood, if you stand shoulder to shoulder with us in this fight, you shall
have fair play and fair treatment as men and as citizens, irrespective of color.
. . . My friends, this campaign will decide whether or not your people and
ours can . . . wipe out the color line . . .7
Although many grassroots Populists rejected Watson’s suggestion that hardscrabble white and black farmers should bond over shared economic distress, his
appeal resonated among certain Populist factions and some politicized black
leaders.
In an effort to win reelection to Congress, Watson staged a novel campaign in
1892, based on his pursuit of black support against the Democrats. His rhetoric
won him the endorsement of H. S. Doyle, a black “preacher of intelligence and
courage,” as Watson noted.8 Though Doyle repeatedly faced danger, he made
sixty-three speeches touting Watson’s attributes. When faced with a lynching by
masked men, Doyle fled to Watson’s estate for protection. Watson called upon
his supporters for assistance to protect this “good darky,” and reportedly
two-thousand Populists showed up, remaining on guard for two days.9 Such a
spectacle, while it helped to dramatize the party’s alleged commitment to protect
its black recruits (and led scholars like Woodward to speculate that “[N]ever
before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they
did during the Populist struggles”), must have nevertheless shaken the racial
nerves of white-supremacist Democrats and convinced them, as recorded in the
Atlanta Constitution, of Watson’s “mysterious, ghastly [and] woeful straits.”10 In
ideological battles between war-horses such as Watson and die-hard white
supremists, the black voter would inevitably be the loser.
The bitterness of the campaign and the Democratic propensity to violence
ended in the murder of over a dozen African Americans and the defeat of
7. Woodward, Tom Watson, 99; “Watson’s Welcome Home,” National Economist 7 (10
September 1892): 409–12.
8. Atlanta Constitution, 25–26 October 1892; Augusta Chronicle, 26 October, 4, 8, 10 November 1892; Columbus Sun, 27 October 1892; Savanna Morning News, 2 November 1892;
see Woodward, Tom Watson, 239–41.
9. Atlanta Constitution, 25–26 October 1892; People’s Party Paper (Atlanta), 28 October
1892; Woodward, Tom Watson, 239–40; Barton C. Shaw, The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia’s
Populist Party (Baton Rouge, La., 1984), 89 for “good” quote.
10. Woodward, Tom Watson, 222; Augusta Chronicle, 24 October 1892; Macon Telegraph, 26
October 1892; Atlanta Journal, 4 August 1906, for Watson’s version of the Doyle episode.
See also the article, “Hold, Tom Watson!,” Atlanta Constitution, 27 October 1892.
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Watson.11 But Watson forged on. He marshaled his intellectual vigor and
defended Populist principles while editing the influential People’s Party Paper,
described even by his rivals as a “very good paper of its kind,” and he fought on
with new vigor in the congressional election of 1894.12 The Populists did not,
however, fare any better in that contest than they had two years earlier. Watson
lost again, but this time Democrats perpetrated such blatant fraud that a special
election resulted the following year. Still, Watson went down to defeat. In later
life, Watson’s bitterness over his election losses unmasked his true feelings on race
relations during the campaigns: “Whenever we have been beaten, we have been
beaten by the negro who sold his vote.”13
Even in sinking to defeat, Watson had set a Populist precedent by seeking to
project a biracial program and by placing selected blacks in visible positions on
Populist state councils. He had supported Doyle and other blacks for positions
in the Populist party organization of Georgia, and at a state convention in 1894,
he had seconded the nomination of an African American, Ephram White, as a
“man worthy to be on the executive committee of this or any other party from
the State at large.” But in the face of these actions, Watson clung to his concepts
of southern folkways and norms. The burden of Watson’s southern “Squirearchy”
heritage and his deep beliefs on inequality proved problematic in the black community, as such black voices as Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the AME Church
and the Negro Press Association of Georgia publically endorsed Watson’s and the
People’s Party’s rivals.14
Though black participation in the party’s councils in Georgia remained unsubstantial, in other states the party bid for votes by admitting blacks into membership. As a result, blacks at the state level sometimes saw the Populist
11. Francis M. Wilhoit, “An Interpretation of Populism’s Impact on the Georgia Negro,”
Journal of Negro History 52 (1967): 119; Woodward, Tom Watson, 237.
12. Savannah Morning News, 7 December 1892; Woodward, Tom Watson, 181–84.
13. Atlanta Constitution, 8 November 1894; Columbus Sun, 10, 14 November 1894; Atlanta
Constitution, 12 November 1894. See comptroller-general’s report on fraud in 1894 in the
Atlanta Journal, 19 September 1894; Alex Mathews Arnett, The Populist Movement in
Georgia: A View of the “Agrarian Crusade” in Light of Solid-South Politics (New York,
1967 [1922]), 183–85; Wilhoit, “An Interpretation of Populism’s Impact on the Georgia
Negro,” 116–27; Abramowitz, “The Negro in the Populist Movement,” 264–67; quote in
“Just Campaign Lies,” Tom Watson’s Magazine 4 (May 1906): 337.
14. Quote, People’s Party Paper, 25 May 1894; Savannah Tribune, 1 July 1893; Atlanta Journal,
23 December 1893; see C. Vann Woodward, “Tom Watson and the Negro in Agrarian Politics,” Journal of Southern History 4 (1938): 19, and on Watson’s southern Squirearchy
belief that blacks were socially inferior, Tom Watson, 3, 221; Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt, 71.
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insurgency as an opportunity for their people to become the linchpin in the political struggle, forcing a politically expedient answer to a racially anchored question. Moreover, the black press sensed that the Populist upsurge might well work
to mitigate the “Democratic yoke” on state politics. As one paper proclaimed:
“The political differences among the whites of this state is re-acting [sic] greatly
in favor of the colored people. They are more sought after and better of [sic] than
ever before, this plainly shows they are a [balancing] power . . .”15 Despite this
optimism and the Populist rhetoric of camaraderie, the 1890s would produce no
discernable solidarity between whites and blacks in the agrarian South.
As the Populist propaganda campaign grew, the southern black population
wrestled with the contrast between rhetoric and reality. For instance, Watson had
announced in 1893, a year after a dozen blacks had perished in Georgia during
state election campaigns, that the People’s Party hoped to give all blacks new
rights through race-conscious political measures.16 Yet it was not until 1896 that
the party platform actually carried a plank denouncing disfranchisement, Ku
Kluxism, terrorism, the convict lease system, and lynching.17 Lynchings in Georgia
alone numbered 241 during the years of the agrarian insurgency, with another
1,217 reported national lynchings from 1890 to 1900.18 Although Watson cast a
towering shadow over the People’s Party, blacks faced the prospect that he stood
solidly for the Bourbon ideals of white supremacy and race control and that his
black-outreach policy, as advocated in the People’s Party Paper and in his pronouncements, now resonated but faintly among kindred leaders in Georgia and
other Populist states. What actually seemed to attract blacks to the Populist arguments, when and where that occurred, rested more on self-preservation than on
the Populist vision of class brotherhood.
Contests in key Populist battlegrounds illustrate this point. In many states
Populists relied heavily on token black participation at the top of the party
machinery to attract grassroots votes. By way of comparison, Kansas, an early
victim of the agrarian depression that swept up similar “race issue” states of the
South, led the way in incorporating blacks into the local party organization and
15. Huntsville Gazette, 6 June 1891; Savannah Tribune, 16 April 1892.
16. People’s Party Paper, 3 November 1893.
17. For a review of the platform, see William J. Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896 (Chicago, Ill., 1896), especially 276; and the New York Herald, 25 July 1896.
18. Clarence A. Bacote, “Negro Proscriptions, Protests, and Proposed Solutions in Georgia,
1880–1908,” in African Americans and Southern Politics from Redemption to Disfranchisement, ed. Donald G. Nieman (New York, 1994), 34; Robert L. Zangrando, The
NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1980), 6.
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in nominating blacks for elective office. In their state convention in 1890, Kansas
Populists named Rev. Benjamin F. Foster, a black Topekan, as their candidate for
state auditor. This move seemed to have succeeded in attracting a number of black
Kansas Republicans into coalition politics, or what later became known at some
state levels as “fusion” movements. Although Foster lost, the Republican majority dropped appreciably from the previous election, persuading Populist stalwarts
that their party might successfully court blacks at the state level.19
As the state political machines embraced new strategies in response to the
Populist tide, the critical intersection between race and reality in the South became
more apparent. Populists in Texas, birthplace of the earlier southern and Colored
Alliances, quickly detected the benefits of the Kansas state model. The first thirdparty movement convention in Dallas in August 1891 appointed two blacks, who
had argued that their race held the “balancing vote,” to a seventeen-person executive committee. Yet only one black, John B. Raynor, served on that body thereafter. A black delegate to the Populist convention in Dallas in 1892 probably
mirrored the views and future voting sensibilities of blacks throughout the state
when he proclaimed: “You look over this large assembly and find very few of my
people represented . . .”20
Similarly, in Louisiana the People’s Party held its convention in Alexandria
in February 1892, and numbered among its delegates twenty-four African
Americans. Conventioneers nominated the leaders of the black delegation, C. A.
Roxborough (or Rouchborough) and L. D. Laurent, for state office, but the black
nominees declined to run on the ticket. Just prior to the convention, Roxborough
had accused both the Republicans and Democrats in Louisiana of practicing
“white supremacy” above all else; certainly, the composition and deportment of
the white Populists at the convention must have seemed eerily familiar to black
politicos. In Alabama the Populists made a similar effort to secure black votes,
but, as was the pattern in most states, they eschewed meaningful and permanent
19. The Topeka Daily Capitol, 14 August 1890; The Advocate (Topeka), 27 August 1890; D.
Scott Barton, “Party Switching and Kansas Populism,” The Historian 52 (1990): 461–67;
William H. Chafe, “The Negro and Populism: A Kansas Case Study,” Journal of Southern
History 34 (1968): 408–10, 418; Scott G. McNall, The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865–1900 (Chicago, Ill., 1988), 273–77. Some accounts speak
of Blanche Foster rather than Benjamin Foster in Kansas.
20. Dallas Morning News, 17, 18 August 1891; quoted in Southern Mercury (Dallas), 30 June
1892; see Lawrence C. Goodwyn, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case
Study,” in African Americans and Southern Politics, 127–48; Roscoe C. Martin, The
People’s Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics (Austin, Tex., 1933), 89–112; Greg
Cantrell, “ ‘Dark Tactics’: Black Politics in the 1887 Texas Prohibition Campaign,” Journal
of American Studies 25 (1991): 92.
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black participation in the party’s councils.21 These experiences may well have persuaded blacks that they had limited practical reasons to either view or accept the
Populists as apostles of change. Ensuing elections in the South would validate this
assessment.
In Virginia, Populist efforts to attract the fifteen-county black majority vote led
to a novel experiment with the role of blacks in the party. In the summer of 1892,
the nascent Populist council issued directives to organize precincts with at least
one black man as a member of each local committee. There is no evidence,
however, that these plans materialized on a large scale. In fact, by the fall of 1892
Virginia Populists had shifted their strategy to organizing separate black clubs
because of white opposition to “Africanization” (what black papers like the
Richmond Planet termed “Negrophobia”) at the local level. Eventually, the
Virginia party, to avoid the standard Bourbon characterization as “the party of
Negro domination,” jettisoned its effort to recruit blacks altogether.22 In some
states, on the other hand, whites aggressively resisted even the suggestion of
wooing black votes for political expediency.
North Carolina offers a felicitous example of this phenomenon. In that state,
which reflected many of the parameters of the Populist crusade throughout the
region (i.e., significant Alliance presence, sizable black population, agrarian
malaise, and white fealty to supremacist practices), the Democrats based their
appeal to white voters on race-baiting rhetoric and on the threat of political
fragmentation resulting in “Negro domination.” It appears that most white Tar
Heelers lined up solidly behind the Raleigh News and Observer, which was fond
of stating that, “the white people of the state must stand close together.” Active
Farmers’ Alliance organizer and now Populist spokesperson Marion Butler stated
in 1892, in the widely circulated Clinton, Goldsboro, and Raleigh Caucasian,
21. Lucia Elizabeth Daniel, “The Louisiana People’s Party,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 26
(1943): 28; William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics,
1877–1900 (Baton Rouge, La., 1969), 222–23; Huntsville Gazette, 2 January, 6 February
1892; Leah R. Atkins, “Populism in Alabama: Reubin F. Kolb and the Appeal to Minority
Groups,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 32 (fall/winter 1970): 169–74; Sheldon Hackney,
From Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, N.J., 1969), 18, 34–40; Samuel L.
Webb, Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South: Alabama’s Hill Country, 1874–1920
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1997): 105–06, 112, 128–29, 135, 147.
22. Richmond Planet, 3, 10 September, 22 October 1892; Virginia Sun, 27 April, 11 May, 8
June, and 20 July 1892; Richmond Dispatch, 28 September 1892; Richmond Dispatch, 25
August, 28 September 1892; Saunders, “Southern Populists and the Negro,” 240–41;
Charles E. Wynes, Race Relations in Virginia, 1870–1902 (Totowa, N.J., 1971), 47–50;
William DuBose Sheldon, Populism in the Old Dominion: Virginia Farm Politics,
1885–1900 (Princeton, N.J., 1935), 2, 89, 92. Frequently, the black press eschewed the term
“Populist Party” in favor of “Third Party” or “third party.”
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that he favored “white supremacy” and that there should be no political “division . . . where Anglo-Saxon rule . . . is the paramount issue.” Even Populist icon
Leonidas L. Polk stated before his death that, “we cannot afford to risk negro
supremacy here,” as the agrarian upsurge signaled a possible fracture in the state’s
white political alignment.23
This commitment to white supremacy grew from the specter of Radical Reconstruction and the white realization that North Carolina, like other southern states,
retained black majorities in many of its counties (e.g., sixteen counties in North
Carolina). These majorities accounted for the elections of most of the sixty-one
blacks who served in the state legislature from 1876 to 1892, all of whom registered as Republicans. The Republicans, sensing an impending split in the traditional white vote, openly played the race card by castigating the Democrats as
the “white man’s party.” In North Carolina, as in many former Confederate
states, the Republican Party before 1892 had been the party of displaced blacks
and the Democratic party that of supremacist whites, including many whites from
poor cotton and tobacco counties who represented the potential constituency of
the third party. As North Carolina’s white political leaders struggled through the
Populist insurgency, the Wilmington Messenger poignantly captured the overarching theme that the “next fight [will] be on the line of a White Man’s Government.”24 In North Carolina, as in the South at large, the die had been cast
regarding racial folkways long before the Populists appeared on the scene with
their promises of transfiguration.25
The ambivalence of the Populists’ pronouncements on the collective economic
benefits of their program in the Tar Heel state befuddled blacks. An example can
be seen in Marion Butler’s trumpeting of the virtues of Populism to economically
depressed blacks. He made direct overtures to blacks, stating, for example, that
23. News and Observer (Raleigh), 10 July 1890; The Gazette (Raleigh), 19 May 1894;
Clinton, Goldsboro, and Raleigh Caucasian, 14 July, 21 July, and 25 August 1892; see
Progressive Farmer (Raleigh), 3 May 1892; James L. Hunt, “Marion Butler and the
Populist Ideal, 1863–1938” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990), 1:
160–264, especially 171, 186, 215; Theron Paul Jones, “The Gubernatorial Election of 1892
in North Carolina” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1949), 15, 24.
24. Wilmington Messenger, 7 November 1894; see Joseph W. Creech, “Righteous Indignation:
Religion and Populism in North Carolina, 1886–1906,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre
Dame, 2000), 515.
25. Alan Bruce Bromberg, “‘Pure Democracy and White Supremacy’: The Redeemer Period in
North Carolina, 1876–1894” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1977), 228–67, 504–08;
Frenise A. Logan, The Negro in North Carolina, 1876–1894 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964),
68–69; Joseph H. Steelman, “Republican Party Strategists and the Issue of Fusion with Populists in North Carolina, 1893–1894,” North Carolina Historical Review 47 (1970): 245–49.
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the Populist Party was “the only party that recognizes the colored man and proposes to give him recognition and representation.”26 But his words fell largely on
suspicious or deaf ears as one North Carolina newspaper reported that there were
“few” black delegates actually attending his gatherings.27 Still, Butler managed
to attract a handful of hopeful black leaders to the movement. Conversely, the
Democratic Party’s concerted push in North Carolina under leaders like former
governor and avowed white supremacist Thomas Jarvis, who, shrewdly promoting the Democrats as race custodians, moderated his position on the caste system
of the South in order to woo black swing votes. This actually resulted in more
blacks voting for the victorious Democratic Party than for the Republicans in
1892. Seemingly, the voting behavior of North Carolina blacks signaled in 1892
that the Populists’ rhetoric on the race question hailed no profound change for
either the state’s white patricians or its black underclass.28 Change, if it were to
occur, would be outside the Populist parameters.
The Populist pattern of offering a racially tempered alternative to oppressed
blacks did, however, result in some guarded optimism among the black community that race permutations might occur. Even though southern Populist pronouncements inspired new optimism among some black observers, the hard
reality of underlying white supremacy always echoed through to the masses of
blacks. Accordingly, disquieted blacks came to regard the Populists with both
hope and suspicion. As the pivotal election year of 1894 approached, black agrarians faced the difficult task of deciding whether the activities of Populists on the
state level were harbingers of a brighter future or merely precursory bids for political power. The exploding question of fusion exacerbated this dilemma.
The question of Populist alignment with the Republicans reached a new pitch
following the Panic of 1893 and the concurrent plummeting of crop prices, especially cotton, which farmers blamed on President Grover Cleveland and the
Democrats.29 By this time, the Populists had abandoned their hope for economic
redress from Bourbon politicians who, the Populists thought, centered their concerns on corporate and urban interests. Thereafter, fusion gained momentum, as
26. The Morning Star (Wilmington, N.C.), 17 August 1892.
27. Ibid.
28. R. D. W. Connor, A Manual of North Carolina Issued by the North Carolina Historical
Commission for the Use of Members of the General Assembly, Session 1913 (Raleigh,
N.C., 1913), 1005–06; see Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt, 67–68, 87–94; Creech,
“Righteous Indignation,” 413–635.
29. Jack Abramowitz, “The Negro in the Agrarian Revolt,” Agricultural History 24 (1950): 89.
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the southern Populists and Republicans discussed terms by which to cooperate
to dethrone the Bourbon Democrats. These discussions also brought renewed,
albeit short-lived, Populist efforts to recruit a black voting bloc.
In 1894, the year that a fusion ticket of Populists and frayed Republicans seized
control of the North Carolina legislature, the farthest the party went to attract
black votes was to include a plank in its platform promising to operate the state’s
public schools for four months every year for the children of both races. In the
heated campaign debates raging in every corner of the state, Populist speakers
impulsively eschewed reference to race issues in public, choosing rather to emphasize the traditional stumping topics of finance, corruption, and the decadence of
the other two parties. Accordingly, Populists did not gain appreciable numbers
of black votes in 1894. Illuminating the sense of political expediency expressed
by the black community, the black press noted that “Democrats are anxious to
have the colored man vote with them.” A black church leader stated about the
political currents of 1894: “The best thing for colored people to do is to unite
with the governing class of white people . . . which are Democrats whom we have
to depend upon in every emergency.”30
While the Populists fused with the Republicans in 1894 and 1896, black candidates on the fusion ticket were Republicans, and the Populists rejected any
specific endorsement of the black candidates for offices in the state. In their
attempt to break the Democratic hold on the South, fusionists evaded the issue
of black rights, even going as far as removing black nominees from some tickets.
The record is clear that in states like North Carolina whites shared no vision of
blacks returning to prominence under the Populist or any other banner. For
white Populists, as for most white Carolinians, the color line trumped the
politics of racial accord. Perhaps the vintage motto “Pure Democracy and
White Supremacy” of the Clinton, Goldsboro, and Raleigh Caucasian best
captured the sentiment of the white Populists.31
Even so, the Populist Party’s appeal for black support was not, as Tom Watson
often pointed out, based on questions of “mere sentiment” but rather on eco30. Savannah Tribune, 14 June 1894; quoted in Logan, The Negro in North Carolina, 22; see
Robert Wayne Smith, “A Rhetorical Analysis of the Populist Movement in North Carolina,
1892–1896” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1957), 49–111, 134–55.
31. Clinton, Goldsboro, and Raleigh, Caucasian 6 December 1894; Connor, North Carolina
Manual, 1005–06; Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina,
1894–1901 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1951), 37, 38; Bromberg, “ ‘Pure Democracy and White
Supremacy,’ ” 236–67; see James Matthew Beeby, “Revolt of Tar Heelers: A Socio-Political
History of the North Carolina Populist Party, 1892–1901” (Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State
University, 1999); Creech, “Righteous Indignation,” 578–635.
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nomic realism. “Gratitude,” he said, “may fail; so may sympathy and friendship
and generosity and patriotism; but in the long run self-interest always controls.
Let it once appear plainly that it is to the [economic] interest of a colored man
to vote with the white man, and he will do it.”32 As with the biracial class interest argument of the Populist, the efficacy of the economic tactic had a dubious
impact on black debtors.
For black Americans, the Populist calls for economic cooperation represented
more than just pecuniary redress; they represented also a challenge to the political status quo with coincidental social effects. It therefore seemed possible by the
election year of 1894 that the party might enter into a tenuous political alliance
with African Americans based on priorities actually originating within the black
community. At this juncture the People’s Party stepped up its rhetoric of economic
fear and black/white coalition benefits, as well as political survival, but the question of social empathy for the plight of black agrarians remained absent from the
People’s Party commitments. Like the marriage of necessity tact, the Populists’
appeal to economic collective action met with skepticism in the black communities of the South, as political acts continued to be interpreted in private ways.
The economic-based program that Watson and certain party platforms proposed
for blacks underscores this point.
According to the National Economist, the official organ of the National Office
of the Alliance, the People’s Party platform in 1892 had “but three parts, finance,
transportation and land.” The National Economist later abbreviated the platform:
“more money and less taxes.”33 This platform reiterated the Alliances’ historic
demands made at Ocala, Florida in December 1890. These demands—government
ownership of the means of transportation and communication, abolition of
national banks, implementation of the sub-treasury plan for a “better system,”
increase of the currency supply to at least fifty dollars per capita, and unlimited
coinage of silver—constituted the heart of the Populist program throughout the
party’s life. The emphasis varied over time, but finance remained the defining
plank. By 1896 the unlimited coinage of silver demand, seen by debtor agrarians
as the panacea for currency contraction, dwarfed all other planks. Based on these
arguments, the Populist Party might well have served as a beacon to an economically depressed constituency of both races. The record belies any such outcome.
While the Democratic Party had greater resources than the Populist Party, the
latter realized quickly that inflammatory economic rhetoric sometimes won votes.
32. Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” 546.
33. “The Conference,” National Economist 6 (5 March 1892): 385–99.
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Consequently, grassroots Populist leaders made numerous speeches on economic
hope and well-being in black counties while also financing picnics and barbeques
for blacks in the smug belief that black votes were purchasable. Some clubs even
went to the extent of offering up to $1 “voter subsidies” and rewards of whisky
and beer to those who would vote Populist.34 The effect of such tactics and
rhetoric must be taken into account in explaining the black Populist vote,
although the Populists proved no match for their Democratic adversaries in conferring voting “awards.” Consequently, the black community focused intermittently on the economic rhetoric of Populism, even though the intended message
sent by the white Populist leaders was not necessarily the practical message
received by the black voters.
Even Watson, in his frequently quoted polemic “The Negro Question in the
South,” proffered more vague promises than concrete benefits to prospective
black Populists. The two planks of the People’s Party platform that Watson
thought would most benefit blacks actually betrayed their hollowness: “pledging
a free ballot under the Australian system and a distribution of currency to the
people upon pledges of land, cotton, etc.”35 The economic value of the first plank
escaped most agrarians. The second plank also seemed useless to the majority of
landless black farmers and laborers. In the decade of the 1890s, nearly all black
agrarians worked the land tenure system in Watson’s home state of Georgia,
laboring under race-exploitative systems known as “cropping,” “quasi-tenancy,”
and the “share and lien” systems. Even if cotton were acceptable as security, most
tenants and sharecroppers would be excluded from this benefit. Often indebted
to “the Man” (the landowners and merchants), tenants and sharecroppers simply
had little or no cotton to pledge for loans. The failure of the Populists’ crusade
to benefit blacks economically in this battleground state is demonstrated by the
rise of black tenancy in its expanding forms, from just over 50 percent to 90.8
percent during the Populist decade.36
In reality, black tenants and sharecroppers had more grievances against landlords than against all the railroads, trusts, and banks whose alleged misdeeds preoccupied the Populists. The Populists could not, in contrast, launch an attack on
34. Martin, The People’s Party in Texas, 96; Hackney, From Populism to Progressivism in
Alabama, 36–38; Arnett, The Populist Movement in Georgia, 154, 183; Gaither, Blacks and
the Populist Revolt, 106.
35. Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” 547.
36. “Farms and Homes,” Eleventh Census of the United States, 286; Robert Preston Brooks,
The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912 (Westport, Conn., 1970), 18–36, 74, 76,
87, 122.
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landlords because the propertied class frequently constituted an influential
element within the various state organizations. In other words, the Populist
leaders could not assail their own interests. As for the elite propertied class in
Georgia, Watson himself ranked in the top of landowners and supervised more
share and lien tenants than his forebears had possessed bondsmen.37 Having
pointed out how the tenant suffered from “high rent for gullied and impoverished land,” he steadfastly blamed the tenant’s miseries on “a monetary system
which beggars both [whites and blacks].”38 In this regard, Watson, reflecting the
Populists’ rhetoric of the era, exhibited either a disregard for the realities of black
farmers or offered a prevarication to proselytize black voters. In either case,
Watson and the People’s Party offered no realistic solutions to the imperatives of
black life in a white-dominated region. That the Populists’ economic program
actually had little to offer the average agrarian is supported by a comment in a
contemporary newspaper that the party was “feeling in the dark for some scheme
to benefit the masses.”39
The Populists, who continued to believe that ambiguous promises of agrarian
solidarity and political economy would tempt blacks, ultimately sought to elevate
the economic issue as a keystone for political alignment. Perhaps the Populists
could have papered over the supremacy issue solely on the basis of economic
attractions; however, as in the North Carolina example, most poor whites saw
race and subservience as immutable factors of southern life. As had been the case
with earlier Populist machinations, the party’s economic program simply revealed
once again its underlying agenda of subordinating ideological issues to supremacist commitments.
If the Populist economic program and hollow rhetoric on brotherhood did not
offer immediate gratification to would-be black Populists, what then attracted
some to join the party? To answer this question one must consider those aspects
of the Populist movement that were subordinated to the economic program,
as well as other factors that were rooted more directly in the policies of the
Republican and Democratic parties. The Populists, attempting to overcome
past tradition, harped on their willingness to secure blacks their civil rights,
although, as already suggested, in most states they practically stood on the same
ground with the Democrats when it came to perpetuating the color divide.40
37. Woodward, Tom Watson, 217, 218.
38. Watson, “The Negro Question,” 548.
39. Cited in Sheldon, Populism in the Old Dominion, 81.
40. Hackney, From Populism to Progressivism in Alabama, 32–47.
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Even as late as 1896, Watson made the black community suspicious of his motives
by punctuating his speeches with the standard racist “appeal to southern pride.”41
The Populists’ promises of political and economic reform reflected a sharp contrast with the Democrats, whom the Populists accused of seeking to manipulate
the black vote in the interest of a white caste system.42 Perhaps in the black communities of the South and border states the Populists’ racial rhetoric appeared to
be contrived; even so, the black members of those same communities surely recognized that the Populists’ pronouncements on economic and political salvation
worked at the very least to temper harsh racial realities. William H. Chafe, in his
perceptive study on the agrarian battleground state of Kansas, disclosed in microcosm a pattern of regional actions by determining that African Americans joined
the Populist Party not as a result of economic enticements, but rather out of a
pragmatic desire for protection and security.43
The Populist call and its impact in the black community were characterized,
therefore, by dissonance rather than concord; the ever-present theme of white rule
made this reality inevitable. Arguably, the Populists’ insistence on black political
and economic rights was a clever ruse. What the Populists actually sought was
immediate electoral benefit for white politicians. Their signals to the black community may also have been negated by the black realization that the Populists
did not exercise concurrent power while the Democrats, the self-anointed
guardians of white supremacy, steadfastly wielded power at many levels. Even as
this occurred, the Republican Party of the 1890s, to which blacks had looked for
protection throughout Reconstruction and Redemption, now demonstrated a
growing lack of interest in securing and protecting black rights. As one major
black weekly tersely noted: “There are a lot of Dr. Jekel [sic] and Mr. Hyde kind
of Republicans now-a-days.”44
Disenchantment with the party of Lincoln, which had repeatedly “deceived”
the race, weighed heavily with some potential black Populists. Because the Democratic Party had largely barred grassroots blacks from its organization, black
leaders whose ambitions were frustrated in the Republican Party, or who were
alienated by the leadership in that party for any reason, could easily have
responded to the Populist appeal. One student of the Populist experience in Texas,
focusing directly on blacks’ motives for not joining the movement, has noted that
41. Watson, “The South Supreme,” in Life and Speeches, 197.
42. Watson, “Debate at Sandersville,” 107; People’s Party Paper, 24 August 1894.
43. Chafe, “The Negro and Populism,” 402–19.
44. Savannah Tribune, 24 September 1892.
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“few of the colored citizens interpreted . . . [the] People’s Party as a political
expression . . . for changes and progress. Most Negroes were stimulated to
become identified with the People’s Party by blind leadership and trite rewards.”45
The Texas lessons can be extrapolated throughout the South.
The Populists’ failed efforts to win the black vote in Alabama suggest that
blacks in this solidly southern state viewed the party’s appeals for class biracial
politics as little more than an electoral gambit. In Alabama, former Alliance president and avowed white supremacist Reuben Francis Kolb emerged as the central
Populist figure after he failed to win the Democratic nomination for governor in
1892. Kolb bolted the conventional Democratic Party and ran on the “simonpure” Jeffersonian Democratic ticket. He won support from the Populists, who
embraced both the candidate and the ticket. Still, Kolb’s appeal for black votes
through “the means of kindness” faltered because of his transparent policy on
black rights.46 The African American Huntsville Gazette struck at the heart of
the matter when it charged that Kolb “exhibited . . . intolerance and hatred to the
black man.”47 Staunch Bourbon Democrat Thomas Goode Jones, no friend of the
African American but nevertheless a known commodity in the black belt counties, defeated Kolb by a narrow margin of 11,435 votes out of 242,483 votes
cast, carrying eleven of the twelve majority black counties by a margin of four
to one, or 27,210 votes over Kolb. When Kolb reacted by alleging the greatest
election fraud since Reconstruction, his inference that blacks sold their votes
further alienated him from the black-belt voters of Alabama, who, as reported in
the black press, told him to “grin and endure it.”48
Kolb ran for governor again as the Jeffersonian and Populist candidate in the
election of 1894, when he faced Democratic Confederate veteran and archetypi45. Quoted in Laurence D. Rice, “The Negro in Texas, 1874–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Texas
Technical College, 1967), 135.
46. Birmingham News, 14, 16, and 18 June 1892; Montgomery Advertiser, 9 June 1892; Union
Springs (Ala.) Herald, 13 July 1892; William Warren Rogers, et al., Alabama: The History
of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1994), 310; Webb, Two-Party Politics in the OneParty South, 104–12, 147.
47. Huntsville Gazette, 2 January 1892.
48. Huntsville Gazette, 13, 27 August, 26 November 1892; Montgomery Advertiser, 18 November 1892; William Warren Rogers, “Reuben F. Kolb: Agricultural Leader of the New South,”
Agricultural History 32 (1958): 109–19; Joe B. Taylor, “Populism and Disfranchisement in
Alabama,” Journal of Negro History 34 (1949): 416; Hackney, From Populism to Progressivism in Alabama, 22, 23; Webb, Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South, 104–12.
There is no consensus on the candidate-specific vote and the total number of votes cast in
the Alabama election of 1892; thus, the figures here represent the authors’ efforts at reflecting the votes as accurately as possible.
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THE HISTORIAN
cal white supremacist William Calvin Oates. The Populists’ appeal to black voters
suffered when Kolb’s candidacy received endorsement from the “Lily-White”
faction of the Republican party, while Republican William J. Stevens, a black
leader of the “Black and Tans,” bolted the convention fearing bodily harm.
Stevens endorsed the Democrat Oates, as did other black politicians, professionals, ministers, editors, and the Alabama Afro-American Democratic League. Kolb
carried thirty-four of the sixty-six counties and ran ahead of Oates by eight thousand votes outside the black-belt counties. But Oates’s majorities in the blackbelt counties carried the state for the Democrats, and thereafter the Populists
joined the other political forces in Alabama by proffering no appeals for
black-white coalitions. As usual, Kolb and the Populists charged electoral fraud.49
As for fraud, Alabama proved no exception to this tendency below the MasonDixon line.
Chicanery may have deluded the Populists into thinking that if the elections
had been honest, they would have been swept into power by black voters. This
assumption appears ill-founded because Populist arguments struck grass-roots
blacks as ambiguous or disingenuous. Kolb, for example, had an abiding white
supremacist reputation and an apparent fondness for lynchings. Even after his
conversion to Populism, his racist sentiments erupted, thus aiding his opponents
by alienating black leaders and other possible supporters.50 Although an economic
chasm sometimes separated the black leaders from the black masses, it is plausible that the majority of black voters followed the paths of their local leaders,
many of whom by 1894 had apparently recognized that any successful Populist
appeals for black votes might actually further the goals of politically marginal
white supremacists.
Although the Populists failed to achieve the governorship in Alabama in 1894,
a number of them won election to the legislature. Populists and their allies secured
thirty-five of one-hundred seats in the House of Representatives and eight seats
in the thirty-three-seat Senate. Three bills, directly in the interests of the classes
whose cause the Populists professed to champion, came before that legislature.
On a measure introduced to ensure timely payouts and fair measurements of production, a bill particularly important to sharecroppers and laborers, the Populists
49. Huntsville Gazette, 31 March, 21 July 1894; Montgomery Advertiser, 8 February, 4 March,
7, 19 April, 2, 24 May, 8, 19 August, 18, 25 October 1894; Age-Herald (Birmingham), 12
August 1894; People’s Party Paper, 17 August 1894; Rogers, “Reuben F. Kolb,” 109–19;
Taylor, “Populism and Disfranchisement in Alabama,” 417, note 16.
50. Saunders, “Southern Populists and the Negro,” 55–56; Webb, Two-Party Politics in the
One-Party South, 104–13, 131–36; Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt, 104–09.
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met their pledge of supporting legislation in the interest of labor. But the
Populists wavered on opposing a pro-Bourbon bill designed to strengthen the lien
power of cotton-ginners over tenants and small-plot farmers. Populist representatives cast the only votes in favor of the producers, though fully half the
Populists actually supported the opposition. By so doing, the Populists once more
telegraphed their oratorical duplicity to black agrarians.51
As in Alabama, the appearance of Populism in states such as Georgia, Texas,
and North Carolina produced new debates over what role it would play in political life. In North Carolina, for example, every tactic, including fraud and “race
baiting,” emerged to prevent Populist victories. Black resentment of the Republicans’ apparent spiritual alignment with the Lily-White Democrats might well
have led to a mass movement to the Populists, but, as in other states, Populist
mendacity worked to dissuade blacks from gravitating wholesale to that party. A
major black newspaper in Georgia summed up the recent experience: “The Pops
can’t fool the colored people . . .” The editor added: “The populist [sic] are an
insidious enemy, whispering kind words in the dark . . . and cutting our throats
in the daylight.”52 Even though the Populists talked of a good economic battle
to deprived black debtors, that in itself did not convince them that the specter of
white bigotry had passed from southern orthodoxy.
It appears, though, that the Populist movement in North Carolina at least
forced the Negro Question into the public arena. The pre-Populist days had witnessed a recognized system of informal white rule under the aegis of supremacist
Bourbons. The Populist “revolt” in North Carolina also accepted this premise,
or what the black weekly A.M.E. Star of Zion actually had recognized as a
growing white, cross-class “Negrophobia.” Put directly, the Populist crusade in
North Carolina, as throughout the South, simply did not offer challenges to, nor
in any way diminish, this attitude.
By the end of the decade, black North Carolinians found themselves facing a
new formalized caste system based on widespread disfranchisement and refortified segregation laws. Similar Jim Crow models swept other Populist states. In
each state, black farmers examined pronouncements on agrarian radicalism from
their own vantage point. Often the Populist rhetoric on the race issue sounded
an all-too-familiar ring. In most states the black press reflected disenchantment
51. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Alabama, 1894–95 (Montgomery, Ala.,
1895), 7–8, 944–45, 976–77, 1098–92; Senate Journal, 1894; Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama, 71, n. 69; Webb, Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South, 139–40.
52. Savanna Tribune, 19, 26 September 1896.
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by now condemning Populist outreach and calling for more realistic race uplift
measures.53 Given this premise, it is reasonable to assume that blacks embraced
racial and self-preservation as the most important voting determinates, and that
partisan loyalty for them reflected but the hard reality of choosing between
degrees of political evils.
The year in which the fusion ticket finally triumphed in North Carolina and
in the South, 1896, marked the year in which Populism committed its fatal
mistake at the national level by fusing with the Bryan Democrats, ostensibly in
pursuit of the silver panacea but more pragmatically in seeking political survival.
The general confusion and demoralization that followed the national Democrats’
appropriation of the agrarian and silver cure-alls paved the way for the statelevel Democrats to crush the Populist insurgency, and with the Populists’ marginalization passed their once-novel rhetoric of racial outreach. Indeed, by 1896
many blacks openly criticized the third party and few even attended its denouement at the People’s Party’s divisive St. Louis Convention. As a leading black
newspaper proclaimed shortly after the ill-fated convention, “Colored men must
[now] look after their own interest. . . . [they] can no longer expect any other race
to perform this duty for them.”54
As this new pragmatic milieu swept the black community, some African American leaders started to wonder aloud whether there were other alternatives to the
revitalized white-supremacist politics through which the race might effectuate
self-preservation and improvement measures. W. Calvin Chase, outspoken attorney and editor of the Washington Bee, a prominent and widely disseminated black
newspaper, articulated this mood in a period editorial titled “The Colored Man.”
His thrust significantly departed from past race themes:
It is about time for the negro [sic] to retire from politics and devote his time
to industrial pursuits. When he has money in his pocket, political favors
will come to him unsought.
53. A.M.E. Star of Zion (Charlotte, N.C.), 4 November 1897; Edmund L. Drago, “The Black
Press and Populism, 1890–1896,” San Jose Studies, 1 (1975): 1, 102; The Gazette (Raleigh),
3 October 1896; Robert H. Wooley, “Race and Politics: The Evolution of the White
Supremacy Campaign of 1898 in North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss., University of North
Carolina, 1977), v–x, 4–68, 148–258, 346–52; Bromberg, “Pure Democracy and White
Supremacy,” 506–13.
54. New York Times, 23, 26 July 1896; Washington Post, 23, 25 July 1896; Richmond Planet,
1 August 1896; see Savannah Tribune, 5, 12 September 1896; Abramowitz, “The Negro in
the Populist Movement,” 288; Robert F. Durden, The Climax of Populism: The Election of
1896 (Lexington, Ky., 1965), 23–44; quote, Richmond Planet, 15 August 1896.
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Let the colored man make a showing in property, education and industrial enterprises and then he will command the respect and consideration
of all parties and nationalities.
Money is power and it is that which moves governments as well as the
race [to] succeed.55
Shortly thereafter, the ascending black leader Booker T. Washington promoted a
new concept of racial harmony based on pragmatic cooperation with whites
throughout the South. Reiterated in his oft-cited “Atlanta Compromise” speech
of 1895, Washington’s advice on reality and race mirrored that of the Washington Bee’s editorial, to wit, that blacks should develop the industrial habits and
vocational skills so necessary to the “practical” survival and progress of the race.
This approach now moved to center stage of black life in the grassroots South,
where it remained for much of the twentieth century.
Despite the white Populists’ attempts to forge an electoral brotherhood with
displaced black agrarians based on a “marriage of economic necessity,” their
efforts largely failed at the state level. The limited success of Populists to tempt
grassroots blacks to their cause seems to have stemmed in large measure from
the Populists’ failure to couple their rhetorical appeal to agrarianism and shared
interests with a realistic program of economic and political reforms that would
have repudiated, or at least modified, southern white rule. Simply stated, it is
apparent that white Populists never convinced black farmers that shifting to the
People’s Party insurgency represented a reorientation of white folkways. The difference between rhetoric and reality was, therefore, a two-sided issue for blacks.
On the one hand, the Populist appeal offered a glimmer of hope to those black
farmers determined to erase, or at least ease, the despised color line of the South.
On the other hand, however, savvy black agriculturalists, their leaders, and the
black press recognized the harsh reality that the Populists’ reform agenda
excluded substantive challenges to the code of white supremacy. In the end, what
probably attracted black votes to the Populist ticket, when and where such voting
occurred, was neither rhetorical flourishes nor economic platforms, but rather the
more pragmatic realization that their “balancing vote” might temper the oppressive political climate and racial patterns so endemic to their respective states.
Certainly black agrarians, the majority of whom lacked formal education but
not political acumen, realized that Populism did not offer answers to race-based
55. Washington Bee, 31 March 1894.
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dilemmas—for if whites split on the political issues they nevertheless stood unified
and defiant on the race issue. Given the paradoxes of politics and race, most
southern black farmers grasped early in the Populist crusade that white
spokespersons such as Tom Watson and his cohorts were after little more than
the black ballot. Without the arithmetic of black votes, the Populists were
doomed to be a marginal third party and the reactionary Democrats were destined to be the victors in the name of white knighthood. Southern blacks, once
ostensibly courted by both sides, now became the vanquished; their experiences
and instincts understandably resulted in their seeking other approaches to selfpreservation, most notably in Booker T. Washington’s model of personal and
industrial enterprise.