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 this legislation had to be accomplished in the face of the labor movement throughout the world, and particularly in the South, where it was beginning to enter among the white workers.  This was accomplished easily, however, by an appeal to race prejudice.  No method of inflaming the darkest passions of men was unused.  The lynching mob was given its glut of blood and egged on by purposely exaggerated and often wholly invented tales of crime on the part of perhaps the most peaceful and sweet-tempered race the world has ever known.  Under the flame of this outward noise went the more subtle and dangerous work.  The election laws passed in the states