The Alliance also generally supported the government regulation of the transportation industry, establishment of an income tax in order to restrict speculative profits, and the adoption of an inflationary relaxation of the nation's money supply as a means of easing the burden of repayment of loans by debtors.

There followed a rush to complete additional railway lines to open up new frontier areas for economic development, a situation in which the United States government and the great railroad companies of the day maintained a common interest.

[2] A great part of this massive stockpile of land needed to be converted into cash by the railways to finance their building activities, since railroad construction was a costly undertaking.

New settlement had to be attracted to the virgin lands west of the Missouri River, which had been previously regarded by the public as worthless to the needs of agriculture due to insufficiencies of the soil as well as the arid climate.

[5] New counties, villages, and towns sprang up by the hundreds throughout the region and a speculative bubble emerged around the buying and selling of farmland and urban lots.

[12] The capacity of the gutted financial market to make loans was grossly insufficient for the needs of the region, exemplified by the 123 counties in Georgia with no banks whatsoever even in 1895.

[15] In practice, however, a system of virtual slavery emerged, in which poor whites and freed blacks became enmeshed in the usury of merchants and landowners providing essential supplies on credit.

[16] Written contracts made these loans legally enforceable and those so enmeshed frequently found themselves forced to pay inflated prices at high rates of interest.

[17] If the value of the credit exceeded the cash value of the crop, the arrangement was automatically rolled over for another year and a never-ending cycle amounting to a condition of perpetual servitude resulted.

[16] Moreover, this crop-lien system contributed to the establishment of a cotton monoculture, as merchants demanded this easily storable, readily marketable commodity to be produced for the satisfaction of debt.

[19] The group sought to organize in order to fight what they deemed the unfair practices of the railroad transportation mill, for the reform of the tax system, and for the legalization of Grange-sponsored insurance companies.

[19] This first organization proved largely ineffectual but does seem to have provided the inspiration for the first effective Alliance group, which was established on April 15, 1880, by newspaper editor Milton George in Chicago.

[21] Dues were not collected in the earliest phase of Northern Alliance's existence, with editor George financing the group's launch — a fact which spurred growth.

[23] The Northern Alliance made its greatest inroads in areas which were stricken by drought in 1881, including the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota.

[23] The locals did organize themselves at the state level, however, with delegates gathering in founding conventions in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan between January 1881 and the middle of 1882.

[27] In 1885 a new Alliance group was established for the Dakota Territory, where wheat reigned supreme, followed by a state organization for Colorado, as interest spread westward.

[28] The program of the organization became steadily more radical in this interval, including demands for government ownership of one or more of the intercontinental railroad lines as well as for unlimited coinage of silver at its historic ratio to gold.

[31] The Northern Alliance's constitution and its precedent of non-partisan activity were closely followed and in short order a dozen local groups had been established upon that model.

[35] Macune immediately stifled an impending split of the organization threatened by a faction inside the Texas Alliance pushing to launch the group as an independent political party.

Turner, himself the son of a former slave-owner, wrote that in fact the liberated slaves' "worst enemies" had been the Northern carpetbaggers of the Reconstruction era, who "promised each head of family forty acres of land and a mule if only he would vote right.

"[39] Moreover, Turner noted, the liberated slaves of the South had been promised "social equality with the whites, and a great many other things which, since he has found out better, he neither needs nor wants.

"[40] Turner argued that relations between the races were fundamentally benevolent now that black farmers had recognized that "his old master" had "almost invariably" been on hand to provide "the best advice" regarding agricultural problems and had very often been the one to "protect and defend him in his business affairs.

"[41] Such a view of the indebted and impoverished black sharecroppers of the South, also typical of Southern whites of the era, did nothing to reassure African-American farmers that their concerns were shared by their European-American counterparts.

"[42] A declaration of principles was adopted which identified the new organization as a mutual aid society dedicated to education, improvement of agricultural efficiency, and the raising of funds for collective benefits for "sick or disabled members, or their distressed families.

Its program included trade reciprocity, protection of American industries, just pensions for Union veterans and disenfranchisement of those who accepted or offered a bribe for a vote.

The people should organize at once in opposition to this gigantic scheme.As a widespread movement consisting of three independent branches and existing for more than two decades, reduction of the Farmers' Alliance to a few universal objectives is problematic.

[48]Included among these concerns to greater or lesser extent were the question of exploitative terms of credit, insufficient money supply to sustain the economic needs of society, super-profits extracted by merchants, millers, and other middlemen, systemically unfavorable terms of trade levied upon small-scale agricultural shippers by the railroad industry, negative impacts on land prices caused by speculation.

For example, many Alliance chapters all set up their own cooperative stores, which bought directly from wholesalers and sold their goods to farmers at a lower rate, at times 20 to 30 percent below the regular retail price.

From 1890 it also included a demand for a national "Sub-Treasury Plan" calling for the establishment of a network of government-owned warehouses for the storage of non-perishable agricultural commodities, operated at minimal cost to participating farmers.

This solidarity was usually short-lived, however, and could not withstand the retaliation from the commodities brokers and railroads, who responded by boycotting the Alliance and eventually broke the power of the movement.