Farmers' Alliance

The Farmers' Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement among American farmers that developed and flourished in 1875. The movement included several parallel but independent political organizations — the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union among the white farmers of the South, the National Farmers' Alliance among the white and black farmers of the Midwest and High Plains, where the Granger movement had been strong, and the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, consisting of the African American farmers of the South.

One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers in the period following the American Civil War. 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. The Farmers' Alliance moved into politics in the early 1890s under the banner of the People's Party, commonly known as the "Populists."

The quest to achieve a First Transcontinental Railroad across the U.S. was delayed somewhat by the American Civil War before being finally completed in May 1869. 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. Rather than directly undertaking railroad construction as a public works project of the federal government, Congress granted cash loans and grants of public land to subsidize construction. Some 129 million acres (52.2 million hectares) of public land was ultimately transferred from public ownership to the privately owned railways as part of this process.

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