ect control. In theory the laborer was
furnishing capital, but in the majority of cases he was borrowing at
least a part of this capital from some merchant.

The retail merchant in this way entered on the scene as middle man between
landlord and laborer. He guaranteed the landowner his rent and relieved
him of details by taking over the furnishing of supplies to the laborer.
He tempted the laborer by a larger stock of more attractive goods, made a
direct contract with him, and took a mortgage on the growing crop. Thus he
soon became the middle man to whom the profit of the transaction largely
flowed, and he began to get rich.

If the new system benefited the merchant and the landlord, it also brought
some benefits to the black laborers. Numbers of these were still held in
peonage, and the mass were laborers working for scant board and clothes;
but above these began to rise a large number of independent tenants and
farm owners.

In 1890, therefore, the South was faced by this question: Are we willing
to allow the Negro to advance as a free worker, peasant farmer, metayer,
and small capitalist, with only such handicaps as naturally impede the
poor and ignorant, or is it necessary to erect further artificial barriers
to restrain the advance of the Negroes? The answer was clear and
unmistakable. The advance of the freedmen had been too rapid and the South
feared it; every effort must be made to "keep the Negro in his place" as a
servile caste.

To this end the South strove to make the disfranchisement of the Negroes
effective and final. Up to this time disfranchisement was illegal and
based on intimidation. The new laws passed between 1890 and 1910 sought on
their face to base the right to vote on property and education in such a
way as to exclude poor and illiterate Negroes and admit all whites. In
fact they could be administered so as to exclude nearly all Negroes. To
this was added a series of laws designed publicly to humiliate and
stigmatize Negro blood: as, for example, separate railway cars; separate
seats in street cars, and the like; these things were added to the
separation in schools and churches, and the denial of redress to seduced
colored women, which had long been the custom in the South. All these new
enactments meant not simply separation, but subordination, caste,
humiliation, and flagrant injustice.

To all this was added a series of labor laws making the exploitation of
Negro labor more secure. All