and fostered such an over production that the prices tumbled and many of the planters were involved in ruin. This tended to break up the big plantations, and many of them were cut up into small farms. It also encouraged the "tenant" system and "on the shares" farming, which in many sections degenerated into peonage—virtually a disguised form of agricultural slavery.
By 1879 the cotton industry had revived and the production of that year exceeded the production of 1860. Also, there was considerable diversification, the small farmers planting part of their land to corn and potatoes, raising gardens, keeping chickens and hogs, and milking a cow or two. This diversification met the bitter opposition of the merchant class of the South, who furnished the farmers with supplies on credit. They wanted a money crop—cotton—for by this means they derived a double profit and kept the agricultural class in economic subjection through the machinery of a vicious credit system.
The noise of this conflict still re-echoes throughout the South, its active manifestation in recent years being the formation of the Farmers' Union, which has acquired a large membership in every Southern state.
The twenty-two years of this period was one of the greatest in American history—a period of rapid growth in population, vast development in industrial enterprise, and enormous expansion of cultivated area. The American people were achieving unity and preparing for the conquest of the markets of the world.
