LS 1417 Free Pigs and Free Men

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Free Men and Free Pigs:

Closing the Southern Range and

the American Property Tradition

R. Ben Brown

Protecting property has always been a primary purpose of U.S. law. Nineteenth-century Americans agreed on this point, but they disagreed violently over the exact

denition of property rights. Voting citizens rejected attempts to impose a unitary

denition of property rights and instead opted for local control over land use. The

battle over closing the open range in the late nineteenth-century South reected

this local political control over the meaning of property rights. Southern landowners,

who had beneted from the range before the Civil War, now found that their inter-

ests lay in asserting their dominion over the land and all its uses. Closing the range

also gave landowners control over freedpersons by limiting African American eco-

nomic options and forcing blacks into various forms of tenancy and sharecropping.

African American voters successfully resisted these attempts to limit their access to

range resources until the so-called Redeemer state legislatures took away their vote

in the late 1870s or 1880s. In examining this political history, this essay argues that

participating in dening property rights constituted a crucial prerogative of full citi-

zenship. In the context of closing the Southern range in the late nineteenth century

in the aftermath of emancipation and Reconstruction, the conict over allowing pigs

to run free morphed into a conict over what it meant to be a free citizen.

Whites who were landless or who owned small freeholds did not object to

Radical History Review

Issue 108 (Fall 2010) doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-006

2010 by MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc.

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118 Radical History Review

the owners of larger estates ending the range in the cotton-producing regions, both

because of shared racism and because of the tradition of local control over land use.

When the attack on the range moved into areas in which these white voters pre-

dominated, they usually protected the range but generally acquiesced in whateverdecision local voters made. On many occasions, however, landowners who could not

overcome the majority votes of these Southern plain folk resorted to undemocratic

means to close the range. This violation of the tradition of local control escalated the

battle over the range into political restorms as voters punished politicians who did

not respect local political rights.

The Southern states in the antebellum period followed this U.S. trend of

using politics to determine the meaning of property rights. Southern courts rec-

ognized the right of local citizens to dene the meaning of property either by cus-

tom or by regulation. As the North Carolina court said in a case involving a pigwhose free-ranging violated a city ordinance, If a majority of the citizens of the

town deem the ordinance impolitic or injurious to the people of the corporation,

they have the power in their own hands to remedy the evil. 1 This Southern judge

rejected the notion that the English common law requirement that animal owners

must fence in their animals controlled the land-use decisions of republican citizens.

Instead, citizens, through the ballot, had the right to determine whether pigs could

run free or not.

The open range was an essential component of the antebellum Southern

economy. While cotton produced most of the marketable wealth of the Old South,animal herds fed the people. Livestock was cheaply produced, since the open range

allowed most animals to feed themselves for most of the year by grazing on unfenced

land. As late as 1850, 87 percent of the Souths land remained unimproved.2 In 1860

Southern livestock holdings were worth twice that years cotton crop. The South

had half the nations cattle, 60 percent of its swine, and over half its poultry. 3 In

1860 in the states of the old Northwest Territory, only Indiana had over 1.5 pigs

per capita. Yet North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi all

had 1.8 pigs per capita or more.4 The Southern range, unfenced forests and mead-

ows, whether theoretically owned or unowned, met the needs of antebellum white

Southern citizens of all classes. The Southern woods could maintain huge herds of

free-ranging pigs, whose meat fed Southerners, black and white. Nonslaveholding

Southern whites could use the resources of the range to supplement their farming.

Planter acquiescence in the open range is perhaps best illustrated by the

failure of large landowners to launch a political attack on the open range before the

Civil War. Such an attack would have failed in the decades of intense democratic

participation that marked the years between 1820 and 1860. Ordinary white vot-

ers, who admittedly beneted the most from the range, would have defeated any

attempts to close it. In particular, when Southern landowners complained of the

practice of allowing livestock to wander and graze on all unfenced land, Southern


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Brown | Closing the Southern Range 119

legislators passed laws validating the practice.5 Likewise, when some landowners

occasionally sued to recover for crops lost to trespassing animals, Southern courts

uniformly protected the range based on custom and statutes. Even at the height of

their popular enthusiasm for building railroads, the railroads also had to accom-modate range rights.6

Southern planters made the best they could of the political invulnerability

of range rights before the Civil War. Planter status was based on owning labor, not

land, so the size of the labor force, not the total size of a plantation, was the crucial

measure of social worth. Because fencing was so expensive, planters generally only

fenced land under cultivation and left any other land they owned open for com-

mon use. Planters would designate slaves to run animals on the range.7 Planters

would often allow trusted slaves to harvest the bounty of the forest and reduce the

demands on their masters larders.8

Furthermore, landowning planters may wellhave felt that conceding poor whites access to range resources was a cheap price to

pay for cross-class support of slavery.9

While the Southern range met the material needs of antebellum Southern

society, the calculus of the range changed with the end of the Civil War. Before the

war, planter power had been based on owning labor; now the only basis for eco-

nomic, social, and political power was land. Before the war, a slave using the range

or roasting a straying pig merely reduced the demands on the planters resources.

After the war, freedmen could use the resources of the range to resist providing

their labor to the landowners, or at least to bargain for a better deal. When the mostimportant political and economic project of the post-Reconstruction era became

recapturing the labor of African Americans to produce staple crops, restricting Afri-

can American access to open range resources became a priority.

Historians have told the story of the closing of the open range from two

opposing perspectives.10 Steven Hahn argued, based on a microstudy of three coun-

ties, that closing the range was a tactic in the landowners attempts to regain con-

trol over Southern society. By denying poorer Southerners, both black and white,

the resources of the range, landowners could force poorer farmers into sharecrop-

ping. Once the farmers were entangled in the market system of raising crops for

sale rather than for sustenance, the landowners could expropriate their revenues

in myriad ways: usurious loans, the exploitive pricing of supplies, excessive fees for

ginning the cotton, and even fraudulent bookkeeping. Closing the range constituted

part of the movement toward exploitive capitalism and led to the agrarian revolt of

the late 1880s.11

Shawn Kantor, examining the same three counties and limiting his study to

the 1880s, has characterized the closing of the range as a commonsense move to

increase economic efciency. The postbellum South inherited an inefcient land-

use system from the plantation era. Closing the range reduced this inefciency by

allowing a more economical farming of the land, particularly by relieving Southern


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farmers of the considerable expense of keeping up fences. Farming land formerly

used for grazing increased productivity. Closing the range allowed agriculture to

ourish and rationalized Southern farming practices.12

When the tradition of local control over land use is added to these narratives,the contrast between their explanations becomes more understandable. Kantor did

not examine the history of the range-closing elections in the 1870s and so missed

the strong African American resistance to closing the range. Hahn looked at this

issue within a longer time frame. He saw the drastic change that closing the range

caused in poor farmers lives. However, he overestimated the meaning of range clos-

ing when it took place according to elections that white voters viewed as fair. Only

when the range-closing tactics violated the tradition of local control did this issue

lead to agrarian radicalism. Range closing was much more about local concerns than

the type of systemic reform that the Farmers Alliance and later the Populist Partyadvocated.13

The attempts to close the range took place in two phases. The rst saw attacks

on the range in areas with a large African American population, and the primary

issue was controlling the labor of the freedpeople. During this phase, evidence sup-

ports the theory that the motives of the antirange forces were to exploit laborers by

denying their access to range resources. Black Southerners vigorously opposed the

range until the planter-dominated Redeemer state legislatures, named so because

they supposedly redeemed the Southern states from African American rule, denied

them the vote in the late 1870s and early 1880s.14

Moreover, as planters succeededin taking control of the economic lives of African Americans through the cropper

system, the planters were able to control the votes of many of those freedpeople who

retained the vote.15 Politics, not indifference, led to the neutrality of African Ameri-

cans on the range issue in the 1880s.

The second phase saw the attack on the range move into areas dominated

by white farmers. White Southern voters listened to a wide variety of arguments

and generally accepted the local political result with equanimity as long as they

considered the process fair. When range-closing procedures denied local voters

control over the issue, however, voters fought back. Political backlash was intense

when Southern politicians violated the tradition of local control over the denition

of property rights. When this tradition was respected, there is little evidence that

closing the range led to agrarian radicalism.

Landowners rst began their attack on range rights by limiting legal access

to hunting and shing in black belt counties. In the 1870s Southern legislatures

began passing general sh and game laws. The game laws limited the dates during

which the most popular game animals and birds could be hunted. They also usu-

ally restricted hunting on Sunday, the religious overtones hiding the fact that Sun-

day was the only day agricultural laborers were free to supplement their larders.16

In addition, these new laws limited some destructive practices, such as poisoning


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and dynamiting sh,17 robbing birds nests,18 or rehunting.19 Fishing laws placed

restrictions on the means by which sh could be taken from rivers, often allowing

only a line and hook.20 Probably few people objected to outlawing the use of poisons

and explosives to kill sh.21 To modern eyes these laws may seem to have a soundenvironmentalist logic, but at the time, denying laborers these resources was more

important than protecting the environment. A North Carolina paper reported an

objection to stocking Virginia rivers with sh since it would encourage idleness

among the people, who being thus furnished with free food, would neglect agri-

culture.22 Other eccentricities of these laws contradict the claim that the laws had

environmental motives.23 For one thing, the legislation tended only to apply to areas

of dense African American population. The Alabama legislature in 1876 enacted a

game law but limited its application to fourteen black belt counties, the black belt

being the rich agricultural land that was at the heart of cotton culture and over-whelmingly populated by freedpeople.24 One law even distinguished between hunt-

ing for subsistence and hunting for sport. The act prohibited the hunting of birds on

the Currituck River but was later amended to exempt nonresidents who hunt for

sports purposes from the prohibition.25 Tourists should be encouraged, but locals

were denied access to subsistence resources.

While landowners had success in chipping away at the use of the range for

hunting and shing, the rst direct attempts to close the range failed because of

the political power of African American voters, who well understood the benets

the range provided them. The 1872 Georgia legislature passed a law allowing anycounty to hold an election to end the open range. These elections required voters

to cast ballots for either fence, meaning that farmers had to fence animals out of

their elds and thus allow free-grazing to continue, or no fence, meaning that

farmers did not need to build fences and the burden fell to stock owners to keep

their animals fenced in. Over time, the ballots were claried by identifying the issue

as a yes or no vote on the stock law, a law requiring stock owners to keep their

animals fenced up.26 As a means of ending the open range during this decade, these

elections proved an abysmal failure. Time and again the combination of landless

and small landholders upheld the range by overwhelming majorities. The arguments

used during this rst phase of election contests show that claims about the range

hindering agriculture went hand in glove with the need to control labor.

The requirement of specic language in these elections reects a general

desire by Southern legislatures to make sure that elections over closing the range

were seen as fair contests. Voting in the late nineteenth-century South often became

corrupted. Tactics that were originally designed to take away the votes of African

Americans became endemic. However, legislators seemed to go out of their way

to protect elections over the range. Voting was not by secret ballot; instead, voters

wrote fence or no fence on a piece of paper and deposited it in a ballot box, mak-

ing the vote fairly anonymous. Later legislation authorizing range-closing elections


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had even more safeguards attached. One statute required that the ballots be sealed

and then counted in public on the following Saturday, when the citizens could come

and verify the count.27 Another law required the ballots to be held until the next

term of the county commission and then be counted in open session.28 Many lawsrequired the appointment of election managers, one from each side of the issue.29

The laws specied the exact wording on the ballot, often using abundantly clear lan-

guage, stock law, yes or stock law, no, and required that marks be made only on

the front of the ballot.30 However, elections were not always without chicanery. One

African American reported to the local paper that the railroads were giving free

rides for an excursion to Atlanta on the day of a range-closing election in an attempt

to divert them from voting.31

The question of the fence law was disputed in the summer of 1873 in Hous-

ton County, Georgia. Houston was a black belt county where African Americans out-numbered whites 15,335 to 5,871 according to the 1880 census.32 In 1879 Houston

County had the second largest number of acres in cotton production in the state.33 A

legislator from Houston County had authored the law that allowed counties to vote

on the issue of closing the range. An ensuing debate in the Houston press reects

well the concerns that were aired in the early battles over closing the range. Starting

at the end of May, six weeks before the election, letters began appearing in news-

papers urging the adoption of the stock law that would close the range. The rst

writer, J. Dickson Smith, noted that the stock law affected not only our social rela-

tions, but greatly more our material interests.34

Expressing an apparent fear that anemphasis on controlling freedpeople would overshadow the materialist goals of the

law, Smith claimed that the range unjustly compelled farmers to fence out their

neighbors livestock. He argued that the stock law would save the farmers expense

and energy, since they would only have to fence pastures. Smith doubted the value

of range animals, calling them scrubby and proclaiming that they were not worth

the ammunition it would take to kill them.35

On June 21, Smith argued in a subsequent letter to the paper that labor

[meaning African Americans] is scarce and dissatised and not at all inclined to

split rails and repair fences.36 He worried about vagabonds stealing animals from

the range, a common complaint alluding to African American lawlessness and the

need for the social control of this group. Smith tried to allay laborers fears that

they would have no place to graze their stock; laborers employers, he wrote, will

cheerfully provide [grazing land] for them. Furthermore, the laborers will share in

the owners increased prosperity, so everyone should vote no fence and close the

range (ibid.).

Another antirange writer argued in favor of the stock law by suggesting its

benet to the African American community. He argued that whether the county

voted fence (open range) or no fence (closing the range), what rails there are to be

split, Sambo will have that very same thing to do as sure as he is a thick-skulled nig-


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ger, and so the freedmen should vote for no fence, because once it passed, fewer

fences would be needed. The writer pessimistically conceded that African Ameri-

cans and poor whites would probably not recognize that the stock law was in their

self-interest, since people are so old fogyish in their views (ibid.). The racism andintolerance of this letter stands in stark contrast to Smiths rationalism, but the two

appeals have an identical meaning. Both writers were trying to persuade their infe-

riors that they knew what was best for the lower classes of both races.

The pro-range side raised fears that closing the range was a tactic to allow

the exploitation of the poor. One writer appealed directly to the class interests of

poorer Southerners: Poor man, without a farm of your own; what must become of

that cow that gives milk for your prattling babes? (ibid.). He decried the impact

of this law on his societys most marginalized members: What is to become of the

poor widow who is homeless? Freedmen, what is to become of you? (ibid.). Hequestioned the benevolence of the planters plans to provide pasturage and warned

African Americans, Do not be deceived (ibid.). This writer did not attempt to

rebut the rationale of the antirange writers who argued on the basis of the efciency

of the stock laws. Instead, he made a direct appeal to the poor to understand their

class interests. It did not matter that it might cost a landowner more to fence than

the stock was worth. The important point was that closing the range would deny the

poor their sustenance.

The 1873 election result shows that African Americans did not need to be

warned against the deception of the planters. Of the 1,726 votes cast, only 98 votedto close the range.37 The victory for those in favor of the open range is even more

overwhelming when one realizes that 130 landowners signed the petition calling for

the election. Some petitioners must have either abstained or changed their minds

during the election contest. Of the 1,628 pro-range votes, the local editor estimated

that African Americans cast 1,200. The editor refused to believe that these men

really understood their own interests. Negroes, he noted, owned neither land nor

stock and voted merely because they desired to exercise the electoral franchise,

even though African American voters had been voting for at least six years and

were surely not voting for noveltys sake.38 In a time when exercising the franchise

often meant long trips by foot to polling places and the need to pay a poll tax, which

postbellum Georgia had inherited as a suffrage requirement from the antebellum

period, the editors dismissal of African Americans ability to understand their own

interests seems disingenuous. Most black families probably had some livestock, even

if only chickens or pigs. The unanimity of the protection of the range reects their

understanding that they could not trust planters cheerfully to provide pasturage

and their doubts that they would share in the landowners increased prosperity.

Labor control was also the dominant theme in Spalding County, Georgia,

which held a stock law election in 1873. A letter from that debate illustrates the

connection between controlling black labor and the range, a connection that Kantor


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did not nd in his microstudy of three counties. In the following letter, a pro-range

writer, Fence, used racist ideology to support the range. Fence understood that

the real issue was how to control labor and so argued that keeping the range was the

most effective means of social control. If you do away with fences (close the range)any nigger can get as much land as he wants to tend without fencing and you cant

hire him to work your ground, he proclaimed.39 Turning the ideas of Smith, the

Houston County stock law proponent, on their head, Fence argued that the range

would keep African Americans under control. Landowners should not let freedmen

have land unless the laborers would make good fences on it. If landowners passed

a stock law, then they must provide pasture for the freedmen, who would then do

nothing. If you do away with fences, the niggers wont have to work half of their

time and will get half of all that is made.40 The real problem with the stock law,

according to Fence, was that it would encourage freedmens laziness. Men who sup-port the stock law are just after upholding niggers in their laziness, just to be popu-

lar with the niggers.41 Not only would requiring fences make the freedmen work

but it would also deal with other social ills. I go for fences and I go for making the

niggers make them, and I go for making niggers work, and keep out of devilment

and riots on Sunday nights.42 This letter reects the overriding concern with con-

trolling African Americans, no matter the white voters position on the range.

While African Americans could hardly feel reassured by Fences support for

the range, they understood their self-interest. The local newspaper reported that on

election day the town was full of freedmen, who took the most interest in this issue.The results of the freedmen of Spalding Countys political engagement were appar-

ent in the large majority who voted in favor of the range. Out of 727 votes cast in the

town of Grifn, 669 were for fence and the range, while only 68 voted to close the

range. This ten-to-one ratio held over the entire county, with the nal result being

928 to 90.43

Six counties in North Carolina voted on the fence law in 1873, and all rejected

it. In Orange County the vote stood at 1,931 for the range to 184 against it.44 The edi-

tor of the Southern Home noted the racial division of the vote: The negroes voted

almost as a unit against the law.45 The editor claimed that the freedmen thought

that voting for the stock law would put them back into slavery.46 This rumor, in fact,

accurately reected white intentions, which avowedly were to increase greatly Afri-

can Americans dependence on landowners.

The debates and the voting returns from the rst stock law campaigns all

suggest that white elites desired to introduce the stock law in an attempt to limit

African American subsistence options and to force them to work the land. An Afri-

can American voting bloc that had not yet lost its right to the ballot frustrated these

efforts. After a defeat in Rockdale County in 1879, the Houston Home Journal

reported that the result was the same as we suppose it will be wherever indiscrimi-

nate voting on the question is allowed.47


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Since local citizens controlled the denition of property rights, the way to

change the meaning of property was to change who could vote on the issue.48 Start-

ing in the late 1870s, Southern politicians developed a variety of means for control-

ling or taking away the votes of African Americans. For instance, the 1876 Georgiaconstitutional convention turned the poll tax into an effective disfranchising tool.

The constitution made the poll tax cumulative, so if a voter skipped voting for a

year, he had to pay the previous years tax as well as the current years to vote.49

The effect of this law was that by 1884 participation in Georgia elections had fallen

to 40 percent.50 Also, as African Americans became more entangled in the share-

cropping and tenancy agricultural system, they had less ability to resist the power

of their landlords. Landlords would sometimes pay their tenants poll tax and then

accompany them to the polls to make sure the tenants voted according to the land-

lords wishes.As black political power waned in the years following Reconstruction, state

legislators succeeded in passing laws that gave local landowners the power to close

the range in black belt counties without elections. Since these laws mainly denied

black laborers access to the range, white voters acquiesced. For instance, in 1876

Mississippi passed the rst major post-Reconstruction stock law. The law applied to

ve eastern counties, lying adjacent to the Alabama black belt, all with a majority of

African American residents. This law placed control of the range rmly in the hands

of landowners by silencing the landless and allowing the majority of landowners to

petition the board of supervisors for a stock law.51

Once control of the range passedinto the hands of landowners and the board of supervisors, the landless no longer

had a role in the decision about whether to pass local stock laws. In 1878 this act

was extended to ve more counties and allowed two-thirds of the resident freehold-

ers of townships to petition for the law.52 Similarly, Alabama passed a law that gave

the county commissioners of twelve black belt counties the power to establish or

abolish stock law districts, dened as areas within the county where livestock had

to be fenced in. This act, passed in 1881, allowed any ten land owners to petition

the county commissioners to create a stock law district. Although the act required

notice and a hearing, the act vested the power to close the range with the county

commissioners, who would implement whichever policy landowners desired, with-

out concern for the desires of landless African Americans.

The second phase of the attacks on the range occurred when the political

ght moved out of the black belt and into counties with a majority of white farmers.

In these counties, attempts to end the range sparked heated debate between white

Southerners over the benet of the law. As Hahn has argued, the range debates

reect a major cultural divide, but little evidence supports the conclusion that end-

ing the range by itself led to agrarian radicalism.53 When the pro-range majorities

tempted legislators to impose a stock law and to violate the tradition of local control

over property rights, however, political wildres erupted and farmers mobilized.


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Petitions from Yazoo County, Mississippi, in 1880 on range closing illustrate

this cultural divide. A pro-stock law petitioner, a Mr. Abory, wrote to his lawmaker,

noting that almost everyone favored closing the range. He wanted to assure his rep-

resentative that it was a mistake to assume that the colored tenants on the planta-tions opposed the stock law. In fact, they were the most harmed by free-ranging

stock and lost much of their corn and cotton every year to livestock. Abory then

contradicted himself by asserting that if the subject were correctly explained to

them, most African Americans would support the petition.54

One group of (presumably white) voters in the eastern part of the county

would object to the stock law, Abory continued. These people lived where little

land was cultivated, and they supported themselves mainly from their stock. Abory

assured the legislator that their numbers were small, one-seventh of the population,

and that they could easily accommodate themselves to the stock law after a while.Abory had no qualms about using the law to impose his will on these pro- range

herders.

A subsequent petition complained that many of the countys plantations were

struggling because they could not keep up the fences. Since they did not have the

resources to fence in new land, the county was making no agricultural progress.

Without crops the Yazoo River would wash good soil away during its annual oods.

The petition predicted that if the range continued to impoverish the farmers, they

would lose large quantities of land to the state for failure to pay taxes. The petition

anticipated the complaint that the renters and tenants would be injured by the lawby assuring the lawmakers that all landlords would, due to the necessity of obtain-

ing and retaining labor, be compelled to furnish ample and sufcient commons for

pasture. The petition ended with the proud claim that merchants, mechanics, physi-

cians, and lawyers had all signed the petition, in addition to the farmers.55

Petitions in opposition also owed into the legislature. One petition drew a

contrast between landowners and the people: We the undersigned citizens of Yazoo

County, would respectfully state that we are entirely opposed to . . . the enactment

of a stock law being satised that such a law would be ruinous to the mutual interest

of property holders and people of the county.56 It then informed the lawmakers that

by opposing the stock law they would be representing an overwhelming majority of

the voters of the county. A second pro-range law petition argued that all the land

capable of cultivation was already fenced and that the small farmers had no open

land to spare for pasturage, so they must run their animals in the woods. In con-

tradiction to the stock law petition, these petitioners claimed that fencing the elds

was much less burdensome than fencing the woodlands. The petition ended with a

prayer either to reject the stock law or at least to allow a local vote on the issue, a

request notably absent from the stock law petition. This writer also contradicted the

assumptions that black laborers supported the law, as he predicted that black farm-

ers would abandon the county if the stock law were imposed. 57


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The Yazoo County petitions on either side of this issue seem to be describing

different geographical regions rather than the same county. To the stock law petition-

ers, the land was barren, timber-scarce, with its fences crumbling and its farmers

on the verge of abandoning the county. The stock law petitioners, and their moreurban doctor, lawyer, and mechanic allies, envisioned a progressive region with

ever expanding staple crop production. They weighed the value of the livestock as

nil; they got no percentage from free-ranging hogs. Only if the tenants were to turn

the range into cotton elds would the value of their rents and their land increase. In

other words, the range created an intolerable hindrance to progress. The stock

law would remove this hindrance with no damage to the tenants, because the land-

owners would, of course, provide adequate pasturage. The range petitioners, to the

contrary, looked at the current usage and saw a working system. The land was fully

cultivated, leaving plentiful woodlands in which they could pursue their subsistenceactivities, even at the expense of a few more acres of cotton. Conditions were stable.

These differences in perspective show that the battle over the stock law was

not just a question of which decision would best meet the voters self-interest, with

all parties sharing a compatible conception of the good society. Instead, adherents

of the two positions saw Southern reality quite differently. Landowners looked at

unimproved land and saw a barren waste from which they could prot if only they

could get the laborers to bring these lands into staple crop production. For the range

proponents, conversion of woodlands and barrens into elds would only push them

farther from the traditional farming practices that prioritized self-sufciency overmarket value. For the moment, the numerical superiority of the range forces stopped

the progressive visionaries.

This conict over the vision of a good society and contrasting views of self-

interest created the dynamic tension that divided pro-range and pro stock law

forces. The numerical superiority of the plain folk enticed the antirange forces to

violate the sanctity of local control over land use, which further escalated the con-

ict. One of the ways to end the range was to allow voters who already lived under

the stock law to vote in later elections. These voters received no benet from the

range, but they often had to pay to build and maintain border fences in order to

restrain stock from wandering into their fenceless districts. For example, in Augusta,

Georgia, an 1884 letter in the newspaper reminded the city voters that less than two

years ago, the rural districts had rejected the stock law by more than a thousand-

vote majority. The question was vital to the farmers, not the city, so the writer urged

the city voters to let the farmers decide this for themselves.58 But the city voters,

living under a city stock law ordinance, forced the stock law on the rural areas of the

county. In the 1884 election, voters outside Augusta rejected the stock law by a more

than eight-to-one margin, or 517 to 71. In Augusta, however, the vote was 1,332 to

388 for the stock law, and the city put the county under the act, by an almost ve

hundred vote majority.59


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The resistance of lower-class white voters often forced politicians to proceed

by means other than electoral contests to close the range. However, unlike disfran-

chised or tightly controlled African-American voters, local white voters punished

politicians for violating local control over land use. The stock law controversy inDavie County, North Carolina, illustrates well this move from substance to proce-

dure and the political backlash generated by removing control over land use from

local voters. In 1881, after almost a decade of mainly futile attempts to close the

range through local elections, the pro-stock law forces in North Carolina vigor-

ously chastised local politicians as cowardly. The problem, according to a least one

newspaper editorial, was that politicians feared for their ambitions. The Fence

law, which allowed the open range, was one of the great evils of the state. But this

evil had not been corrected because legislators feared the effect of the issue on

their future political careers. The writer then postulated what everybody knowsabout the issue: that fencing is a heavy and expensive burden. Fences, the journal-

ist argued, cost more than the livestock they kept out. Although the fence law once

suited local socioeconomic conditions, it no longer did. The last census had shown

that the current population was now too large to allow a range. However, contradict-

ing his prior claims, he then called for a politician to sacrice his ambition for the

sake of the state. Is there no member of the Legislature who has no hope of return-

ing or becoming a candidate for Congress or Governor that will devote himself to

this question?60 Everybody seemed to know that the stock law was preferable to the

range, except the voters to whom the politicians had to answer.Politicians refused to dismiss their ambitions to appease a newspaper editor.

They agonized over the political dilemma posed by the stock law issue. The state

senator for Davie County, J. A. Williamson, confronted this problem in 1881 when

he sent an open letter to the Davie newspaper reporting on current activities in the

legislature. The Stock Law question, I am frank to say, has given me more unenvi-

able concern than any other measure with which we have had to deal.61 Williamson

had received a petition signed by 946 inuential, intelligent and worthy people

urging the passage of a stock law.62 Such an outpouring of sentiment he could not

ignore. On the other hand, to enforce the wishes of the petitioners by arbitrary

legislative enactment might not be treating the opponents of the measure with that

degree of respectful consideration to which they are, in our opinion, entitled.63

Adding to his discomture, but not mentioned in the letter, was the result of a stock

law election in 1879, in which pro-range voters had handily defeated the stock law.

That was why the stock law proponents now petitioned for a different procedure for

closing the range. At the peril of his political future, the senator had to attempt to

gauge whether enough voters had changed their position. His soul-searching man-

ifests his certainty that the issue was important enough to many voters to prove

decisive in his reelection. What to do under such circumstances, I do declare, has

taxed, over taxed the best energies of my mind.64


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In the end, he consulted with the Davie County representative and passed a

bill of considerable machinery. His description was apt. The bill required the county

board of commissioners to declare the stock law in the county or in any township if

the majority of the number of voters who had voted in the previous presidential elec-tion, not a majority of registered voters, petitioned the board.65 In his letter, the sena-

tor admitted that the bill was a compromise measure between friends and opponents

of the stock law. To attempt a settlement of this vexed local question, has indeed

proved a duty by no means pleasant to perform. I am aware that no man could hope

to perform such duty with satisfaction to all . . . and must trust to the good sense of

an honest and generous constituency for necessary allowances.66

The measure that Williamson and his colleagues had secured would in fact

bypass the voters will, start lawsuits, elect a new senator and representative, and

spark further legislative debates. While the petition process might seem an adequatesafeguard to protect the democratic process, on further analysis one can understand

why the stock law proponents might have preferred petitions to elections. This issue

was, as we have seen, one where progressive public opinion and private beliefs often

diverged. In Georgia we saw the case of the stock law election in which the signers

of the petition to hold the election exceeded the number of voters who voted in favor

of the stock law. Upstanding members of a community might have difculty confess-

ing their delity to an old fogeyish law when a local landowner confronted them.

The same voter could either abstain or hope a vote would go unnoticed. Similarly,

powerful local leaders could coerce tenants into signing, while illiterate poor folkwould have difculty organizing a counterpetition drive. All these considerations

made the petition process a reasonable compromise for the stock law proponents

that preserved democratic forms while facilitating the closing of the range.

Toward the end of February 1881, the Davie County Board of Commission-

ers met to consider the stock law petitions, as required by the statute. The board

found that a majority of voters, as computed by the vote of the previous presidential

election, had signed the petitions. Therefore it declared the stock law in effect. The

newspaper called on opponents of the stock law to acquiesce to this solution, but the

stock law did not go unopposed.67 On April 30, 1881, the day before the stock law

would take effect, P. H. Cain and a group of pro-range activists led two lawsuits

requesting that courts enjoin enforcement of the stock law. Both failed.68 Although

Cain lost in the courtroom, he won in another forum. He was elected Davie Countys

representative to the 1883 North Carolina legislature. The Thirtieth Senatorial Dis-

trict, which included Davie County, also had new representation. The Republican

J. G. Ramsay defeated Williamson, who had so agonized over the 1881 bill.69 Just as

the newspaper editor had predicted, politicians who used undemocratic means to

end the range had to sacrice their ofces and, likely, their future political careers.

Both newly elected lawmakers attempted to return control over the range to the

local voters by requiring an election to reconsider the issue.


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Cain lost no time in introducing a bill to submit a repeal of the Davie County

stock law to the voters, although the stock law had been in effect for two years by

this time. Cain argued that in the 1879 election the voters had rejected the stock

law. In 1881 the legislature had passed a law that voters did not want. Cains billraised concerns throughout the legislature even though it was a private act affect-

ing only Davie County. Representative L. S. Overman claimed the bill should be

renamed, An act to bankrupt the county of Davie, since requiring the farmers to

rebuild fences would have just such an effect.70

Other representatives then joined the fray. Representative A. Leazar claimed

that there were many questions besides this question of the stock law that combined

to send the gentlemen from Davie here, implying that Cains election had not been

a referendum on the stock law.71 Another representative chimed in that, although he

voted against bills that did not submit the stock law to the people, it would be unjustto make farmers build fences again after they had taken them down. A third repre-

sentative tried to dampen the political strife between landowners and laborers that

this issue aroused. He claimed that the issue need not engender any strife between

classes or parties; it was not a party question.72 In response to a question from the

oor, he responded that he did not believe property holders were any better than

non-property holders, but if lawmakers did not protect property, there would soon

be none to tax. However, he did admit that if the stock law were not already in force,

he would support local voting on the issue.73 Cains bill did not pass, but his intro-

duction of the bill and the ensuing debate highlight the political volatility of impos-ing the stock law without a local vote.

The senator elected with support of the disenchanted Davie County voters,

Ramsay, also attempted to return control over the land to local voters. Ramsey intro-

duced a general bill to allow voters to repeal stock laws if the appropriate number of

voters petitioned. An opponent of the measure wanted to know if the bill included

a provision for building the farmers fences for him. Ramsay said no, but he rebut-

ted this attack by raising the crucial point of local control. Do not the same people

who made a law have the power to unmake it? Senator S. J. Pemberton of Cabarrus

replied that property needed to be protected as well as voters, and so representing

the property of the people as well as themselves, he was compelled to oppose the

bill.74 A pro-range politician chided the stock law supporters with the popular sup-

port for the range. Senator Strayhorn asked why, if the stock law became popular so

fast, was there any objection to this bill? One lawmaker answered that the people

were not enamored so soon; they had to be trained to like the stock law.75

Senator M. H. Pinnix of Davie County raised the specter of African Ameri-

can support of the range. He claimed that if the general bill passed, there were

enough Hairston and Carter negroes in Davie to overturn the law. These voters

were not substantial citizens; they were negroes who had no other interest outside

of peoples smoke houses.76 While this bill was tabled by a vote of ninety-seven


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to ten, the debate further conrms suspicions that the legislature passed the 1881

Davie law against the will of the majority of voters and stirred their resentment over

loss of local power.

Events in Davie County strikingly illustrate how the tactics used by stocklaw proponents moved the focus of the range controversy from substance to proce-

dure. Those in favor of the stock law nessed the 1879 election result by changing

the process from election to petition. The combination of closing the range and the

thwarting of electoral will motivated the plain folk of Davie to boot out both their

representative and their senator. In the next legislative session, both of the two newly

elected lawmakers attempted to reverse the process, not the result, of the 1881 act.

Voters were infuriated by the tactics of the stock law supporters that had thwarted

local control. The escalating nature of the range controversy the initial attack, the

electoral rebuff, the adoption of nondemocratic procedures, the electoral reaction tothese tactics, and nally the legislative rejection of the remedial law illustrates the

furious reaction voters had to the loss of local control over the land.

In 1885 in North Carolina, Granville Countys legislators passed a county-

wide stock law without holding an election. The local Democratic paper lauded this

move toward progress, claiming as usual that the stock law beneted all classes.

However, as the 1886 elections approached, the papers editor began to understand

that the stock law constituted the partys biggest liability in the upcoming contest.

The paper warned voters that the poorest possible way to get the stock law repealed

is to join the radical (Republican) party and instead advised that they should stickto the Democrats and petition their friends for relief.77 The Republicans won the

1886 county elections, and as late as 1890, opponents of the legislator who had

passed the stock law thwarted his renewed bid to take a legislative seat by reminding

voters of his role in passing the stock law.78

The Davie County and Granville County episodes show that procedures

undermining local control over the range overshadowed the substance of the stock

law. The tactics that the pro stock law adherents had adopted to impose the stock

law revealed the elites contempt for democratic processes. These tactics led to

defenses of the substance of the stock law, but to even more stirring defenses of the

plain folks rights to control their own laws. In Davie County, the two new legisla-

tors introduced bills to allow voting on this issue; they did not seek to return to the

range by at. Similarly, Kantor has argued that increased agrarian voting in Jackson

County, Georgia, was caused by the legislatures imposition of the stock law by pri-

vate act, rather than by the substance of the law itself. Where voters were allowed to

decide the issue, he found no evidence of increased agrarian discontent.79

The other lesson we can learn from these episodes is that, contrary to Hahns

claims, agrarian radicalism arose from unfair procedures, not from fair elections

on this issue. Further evidence that the closing of the range by itself did not lead

to agrarian radicalism is the failure of the political parties to align themselves on


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different sides of the range issue. Instead, both parties contained substantial num-

bers of pro-range and pro stock law voters. North Carolina petition drives during

the Populist era evidence this cross-party division over the value of the range. A

Wake County petition submitted to the legislature in 1889 from the citizens of Mid-dle Creek township asked for relief from the present and to us odious Stock

Law.80 The petitioners requestedeither a repeal of the stock law or a townshipvote on the issue. Yet the signers on this petition were Democrats in a ratio of three

to one. Of the twenty-seven petitioners, eighteen identied themselves as Demo-

crats, six as Republicans, and three did not list a party. On another petition from

that same campaign, of those who listed their party afliation, thirty-eight signers

identied themselves as Democrats, twenty-one as Republicans. A third petition

from the same drive had twenty Republican signers and sixty-nine Democrats out

of ninety-six names.81

These petitions reect a cross-party support for the range, notparty unity on the issue.

Petitions favoring the stock law showed a comparable mix of party aflia-

tions. In 1893 Davidson County voters presented a petition to the North Carolina

legislature asking that their area join an adjacent stock law district. Of the ninety-

ve petitioners, the majority, fty-eight, were Democrats. The other thirty-seven,

however, were split between twenty-one Republicans and sixteen third-party sup-

porters.82 In the same drive two other petitions showed ninety-nine Democrats sup-

porting the stock law, but also forty-nine Republicans and ve third-party voters.83

A cover letter to a petition from Durham County against the repeal of the stock lawalso indicated the laws cross-party appeal. The letter claimed that the names on

[the petition] are both Democrats and Republicans; White and Colored.84

Events in Georgia during the period when the Farmers Alliance controlled

the state legislature also show a lack of agrarian support for the substance of the

range law. By 1890 thirty-seven Georgia counties had adopted the stock law, thirty-

six had adopted the law in portions of the county, three had voted on the law and

rejected it throughout the county, and sixty-one counties had yet to have a vote on

the issue.85 In addition to elections, during the 1880s more than fty local acts put

parts of more than thirty counties under the stock law, either despite of or in the

absence of a vote on the issue. Range proponents launched a legal attack on these pri-

vate laws. Although these range proponents won their lawsuit, a Farmers Alliance

dominated legislature reversed that victory.

Attorneys for livestock owners argued that these private acts violated the

Georgia constitutional provision that no local law could apply where a general law

already did. The stock owners argued that since the general election law prescribed

a procedure for ending the range, the local laws ending it without an election were

unconstitutional. The Georgia Supreme Court accepted this reasoning and struck

down all stock laws passed by local legislation. The court noted that this small case


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would probably affect much existing legislation but felt compelled to follow the plain

language of the constitution.86

The Georgia court ruled on October 3, 1890. In November Georgias leg-

islature began a new session. Thirty-two of 44 senators were pledged to the Farm-ers Alliance, as were 129 of 140 representatives; 126 of these 140 House members

listed their occupation as farmer.87 If the closing of the range had given rise to the

Farmers Alliance, one would expect these legislators to savor and protect this legal

victory. Yet as farmers they understood the grave problem that the Supreme Courts

decision caused those who had taken down their fences relying on the local legisla-

tion. So when W. E. Wooten quickly introduced a bill to reverse the courts decision,

the Alliance legislators ratied the range closings. Wooten candidly admitted on

the House oor that an election bill would not serve the purposes of the stock law

forces, because they would lose a local option election, even though many coun-ties had been under the stock law for years. Wootens law made all boundary lines

legal fences and ratied all existing stock laws, even those enacted in pursuance

of legal or illegal legislative action.88 In range districts this act left the range intact

and ratied the provisions for local voting on the stock law. Wooten introduced his

bill on November 13. A special fence committee recommended it, and both houses

passed the bill within ten days.89 On November 26, 1890, the governor approved

the act. Far from protecting the range, this piece of legislation quickly and decisively

deprived range proponents of their legal victory. If the attacks on the range during

the previous decade had generated the political impetus for forming the Alliance, asHahn has argued, one would have expected some support for protecting the range

victory. Instead, these working farmers understood the need to protect the culti-

vators who had justiably relied on the passage of stock laws, even though these

range closing laws violated the Georgia constitution. Local needs overwhelmed any

romantic attachments to the range.

Developing property systems that allocated rights to use the land were cen-

tral to the nineteenth-century U.S. project of peopling the continent with European

settlers. Americans rejected attempts to impose a unitary denition of property

rights and instead opted for local dominion over the land. The late nineteenth-

century attacks on the Southern range illustrate that tradition well. Even African

Americans were able to inuence land-use issues until they had their vote taken

away or controlled after 1876. Southern whites accepted local decisions on the clos-

ing of the range as long as they felt they were in control. The ultimate solution to

the intense political warfare over the range was not to impose a uniform land-use

system but rather to establish a uniform procedure for ensuring local control. Under

uniform local option laws, Southerners continued to debate the advantages and dis-

advantages of the range into the twentieth century.


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Notes1. Hellen v. Noe, 25 N.C. (3 Ired.) 367 (1843).

2. Sam B. Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840 1860

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 74.

3. Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington,

DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933), 1042.

4. Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake, 93 95.

5. See, e.g., An Act to Amend and Consolidate the Several Stray Laws of this State Approved

Nov. 30, 1801, in Thomas R. R. Cobb,A Digest of the Statute Laws of Georgia (Athens,

GA: Christy, Kelsea & Burke, 1851), 256 60.

6. Vicksburg and Jackson R.R. v. Patton, 31 Miss. 157, 178 (1856).

7. Terry Jordan has documented a vibrant slave herder culture on the South Carolina range;

see his Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1981), 29 34.

8. On the informal economy of slavery, see Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk:African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 46 79.

9. See Cantrell v. Aderholt, 28 Ga. 239 (1859); Polk v. Lane, 12 Tenn. 29 (1833); Dickson

v. Parker, 4 Miss. 219 (1839). Scholars of the antebellum South have differed over the

importance of range resources to Southern life. Contrast Eugene Genovese, The Political

Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1965), 106 23, which argues that range resources were relatively

unimportant, with J. Mills Thornton III, The Ethic of Subsistence and the Origins of

Southern Secession, Tennessee Historical Quarterly 48 (1989): 67 85, arguing that plain

folk used unfenced and unclaimed land to assert their independence from planter culture.

10. For a vigorous dispute airing these two positions, see Shawn Kantor (with J. MorganKousser), Common Sense or Commonwealth? The Fence Law and Institutional Change

in the Postbellum South,Journal of Southern History 59 (1993): 201 42; Steven Hahn,

A Response: Common Sense or Historical Cents?Journal of Southern History 59 (1993):

243 58; Shawn Kantor (with J. Morgan Kousser), Two Visions of History: A Rejoinder,

Journal of Southern History 59 (1993): 259 66. Both historians base their arguments on a

microstudy of the same three Georgia counties.

11. Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of

the Georgia Upcountry, 1850 1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

12. Shawn Kantor, Politics and Property Rights: The Closing of the Open Range in the

Postbellum South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

13. For instance, the Populist Party platform of 1892 called for conscating the unused land

owned by railroads and corporations and for the land to be given to settlers. It made no

mention of allowing common access to these lands. Peoples Party Platform, Omaha

Morning World-Herald, July 5, 1892.

14. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the

Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880 1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1974).

15. The literature on the development of cropper culture in the late 1800s is voluminous. For

one good overview, see Eric Foner,Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).

16. Act of Mar. 31, 1876, chap. 56, 1876 Miss. Laws 49; Act of Jan. 26, 1872, chap. 68, 1871 72N.C. Sess. Laws 68; Act of Dec 7, 1871, chap. 168, 1871 Ala. Acts 170.


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17. Act of Feb. 22, 1874, chap. 379, 1874 Ga. Acts; Act of Mar. 14, 1879, chap. 259, 1879 N.C.

Sess. Laws 425 26.

18. Act of Feb. 13, 1879, chap. 173, 1878 79 Ala. Acts 201; Act of Feb. 2, 1877, chap. 198,

1876 77 Ala. Acts 226.

19. Act of Mar. 20, 1874, chap. 390, 1874 Ga. Acts 406; Act of Mar. 6, 1875, chap. 341, 1874 75

Ala. Acts 506.

20. Act of Mar. 28, 1870, chap. 186, 1869 70 N.C. Sess. Laws 235; Act of Mar. 26, 1870,

chap. 142, 1869 70 N.C. Sess. Laws 186; Act of Dec. 7, 1871, chap. 169, 1871 Ala.

Acts 171.

21. According to Hahn, the poisoning of sh was usually an African American custom with

West African roots, so outlawing that particular form of shing had racial overtones; Hahn,

Roots of Southern Populism, 242.

22. Winston Leader, April 29, 1879.

23. Foner,Nothing But Freedom, 65 68.

24. Act of Feb. 2, 1877, chap. 198, 1876 Ala. Acts 226.25. Act of Feb. 25, 1871, chap. 100, 1871 N.C. Sess. Laws 163.

26. Act of Aug. 26, 1872, chap. 30, 1872 Ga. Acts 34 36.

27. Act of Feb. 17, 1885, chap. 374, 1884 85 Ala. Acts 660.

28. Act of Mar. 2, 1901, chap. 855, 1900 1901 Ala. Acts 2009.

29. See e.g., Act of Feb. 10, 1893, chap. 179, 1892 93 Ala. Acts, 429.

30. See e.g., Act of Feb. 23, 1899, chap. 875, 1898 99 Ala. Acts 1728.

31. Newnan Herald, June 30, 1881.

32. Report on the Statistics of Agriculture in the United States at the Tenth Census: 1880

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofce, 1884), table 5, 386.

33. Ibid., table 13, 218 19.

34. Houston Home Journal, May 31, 1873.35. Ibid.

36. Houston Home Journal, June 21, 1873.

37. Houston Home Journal, July 12, 1873.

38. Ibid.

39. Grifn Daily News, July 2, 1873.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Grifn Daily News, July 8, 1873.

44. Charlotte Democrat, August 19, 1873.

45. Southern Home, August 11, 1873.

46. Ibid.

47. Houston Home Journal, July 17, 1879.

48. Shawn Kantor argued that black voters were neutral on the range-closing issue because

competitive pressures would force landowners to equalize the compensation of laborers

whether in stock law or range districts; Kantor, Politics and Property Rights, 56 57. This

argument does not explain the difference between black voting on this issue in the 1870s

and the 1880s, however. Other explanations include disfranchisement and increased direct

economic control of black voters by landowners.

49. Ga. Const., Art II, 1 (1877).

50. Much has been written on black disfranchisement in the late nineteenth-century South. Onthe Georgia poll tax, see Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 66 67. A good overview


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of suffrage restrictions in general is Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested

History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

51. Act of Apr. 15, 1876, chap. 189, 1876 Miss. Laws 294.

52. Act of Mar. 5, 1878, chap. 165, 1878 Miss. Laws 305.

53. Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism.

54. Letter from Mr. Abory to Mr. H. Crieghton dated Feb. 2, 1880, in Record Group 47,

container 59, 1880 Legislative Records, Mississippi State Archives, Jackson, Mississippi.

55. Petition from Yazoo County, dated January 1880, Record Group 47, container 59, 1880

Legislative Records, Mississippi State Archives.

56. Petition from Yazoo County in opposition to the stock law, undated, Record Group 47,

container 59, 1880 Legislative Records, Mississippi State Archives.

57. Petition from Yazoo County in opposition to the stock law, undated, Record Group 47,

container 59, 1880 Legislative Records, Mississippi State Archives. This petition is not the

same as the one cited in the previous note.

58. Augusta Chronicle, January 6, 1884.59. Augusta Chronicle, January 10, 1884. This episode contradicts Kantors ndings that voters

in stock law districts tended not to vote in later elections in upcountry Georgia; Kantor,

Politics and Property Rights, 67.

60. Raleigh Farmers and Mechanics, January 27, 1881.

61. Davie Times, Feb. 24, 1881.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Act of Mar. 3, 1881, chap. 172, 1881 N.C. Sess. Laws 329.

66. Davie Times, Feb. 24, 1881.

67. Davie Times, March 17, 1881.68. Cain v. Commissioners of Davie County, 86 N.C. 8, 11 12 (1882).

69. 1883 N.C. Sess. Laws vii xiii.

70. Raleigh News and Observer, February 8, 1883.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid.

74. Raleigh News and Observer, February 23, 1883.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid.

77. Torchlight, March 3, 1885, quoted in Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The

Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 226.

78. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 225 26.

79. Kantor, Politics and Property Rights, 136 37.

80. Petition in opposition to the stock law, 1889 Legislative Records, North Carolina State

Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina.

81. Petition in opposition to the stock law, 1889 Legislative Records, North Carolina State

Archives. This petition is not the same as the one cited in the preceding note.

82. Petition in favor of the stock law, 1893 Legislative Records, North Carolina State Archives.

83. Petition in favor of the stock law, 1893 Legislative Records, North Carolina State Archives.

Again, this is not the same petition as the one cited in the preceding note.

84. Cover letter on Petition in favor of the stock law, 1888 Legislative Records, North CarolinaState Archives.


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85. Trouble about Fences,Atlanta Constitution, November 14, 1890. That sixty-one counties

had not voted on closing the range also undermines the idea of the importance of this issue

in generating agrarian radicalism.

86. Mathis v. Jones, 84 Ga 804 (1890); Camp v. Tompkins, 84 Ga. 812 (1890) (companion case

decided by reference to Mathis).

87. Atlanta Constitution, October 5, 1890.

88. Atlanta Constitution, November 14, 1890.

89. Atlanta Constitution, November 14, November 15, and November 23, 1890.


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