{"id":6321,"date":"2021-01-08T08:57:15","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T08:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=147577"},"modified":"2021-01-08T08:57:15","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T08:57:15","slug":"the-black-patch-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/08\/the-black-patch-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The Black Patch War"},"content":{"rendered":"
On a cold December night in 1907, some 300 to 500 men, armed and mounted in columns of twos, all wearing masks and white sashes, rode into the small Kentucky city of Hopkinsville. They disarmed the local police, occupied the telegraph and telephone offices, and dynamited two warehouses filled with tobacco belonging to James Duke\u2019s American Tobacco Company.<\/p>\n
Then while the flames roared, they destroyed the local newspaper, and at the mournful sound of a hunter\u2019s horn, they formed up in the center of town, holstered their weapons, and rode off into the night.<\/p>\n
It was, The New York Times<\/em> reported with alarm, the first military occupation of an American city since the end of the Civil War, some forty years before. It brought to national attention what was to become known as the Black Patch War.<\/p>\n Tobacco is a versatile plant with many varieties that can grow even in northern and tropical climes. But it is especially adapted to the humid subtropical American South. Shipped in hogsheads from Virginia to England, it was the primary source of wealth for the Southern colonies. Both Washington and Jefferson were tobacco planters. After independence climate and tradition established it as the main cash crop in the Upper South\u2014Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and later, west of the Blue Ridge, in Kentucky and Tennessee.<\/p>\n A particularly valuable strain of fire-cured leaf, mainly used for \u201cplug\u201d or chewing tobacco, was established in a broad area of western Kentucky and north-central Tennessee, about the size of Delaware.<\/p>\n This area, called the Black Patch, centered around Hopkinsville and Clarksville, Tennessee, was plantation country. Tobacco requires little land but much labor, and slave labor made the Black Patch almost as rich as the cotton country to the south. During the Civil War, the area was heavily pro-Confederate, though Kentucky never successfully seceded.<\/p>\n Confederate President Jefferson Davis was from the Black Patch.<\/p>\n During the Civil War, western Kentucky was under Union occupation, but its sympathies never altered. After the war, little changed, as the planters retained their land and wealth, and many of the freed slaves remained as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.<\/p>\n The prosperity after the Civil War made the dark fire-cured leaf of the Black Patch even more valuable. The growers settled back into their traditional Southern way of life. Tobacco processing and manufacturing was centered in North Carolina, where James Buchanan Duke made a fortune selling \u201cDuke\u2019s Mixture,\u201d then leveraged that capital into one of the great Robber Baron \u201ctrusts,\u201d the American Tobacco Company.<\/p>\n It was Duke who changed the game. By the early twentieth century all the Black Patch tobacco buyers, formerly independent<\/span> speculators, were under Duke\u2019s control, and the prices dropped from eight and ten cents to four, three and even two cents a pound<\/span><\/p>\n The same process of capitalist monopoly consolidation was squeezing farmers across the country as prices for wheat, corn, hogs, and cattle all fell under the pressure of the railroads and the hated trusts. Agrarian and populist movements sprang up in the Midwest and the West, as farmers resisted by organizing together as Grangers, the Farmers\u2019 Alliance, and the Populist Party.<\/p>\n This agrarian revolt took on a somewhat different character in the South, and particularly in the Black Patch, where the fight was organized and led from the top-down, by the ex-Confederate local gentry. Modern monopoly capitalism was destroying their prosperity and what they regarded as their God-given status and authority.<\/p>\n They were even in danger of losing their laborers. The Nashville Banner warned of a \u201cblack exodus\u201d as tenants and sharecroppers were lured away to the more profitable cotton country to the south, or the relative freedom of the northern cities.<\/p>\n It was time to strike back.<\/p>\n It was a Tennessee planter, Felix Grundy Ewing, \u201cThe Moses of the Black Patch,\u201d who saw the need for organization. In the Fall of 1904 (when the tobacco crop was in the barn) Ewing and a few other big planters put out the call for a gathering in Guthrie, Kentucky, right on the Kentucky-Tennessee line.<\/p>\n Ten thousand showed up in the tiny town of less than a thousand. Not just the planters, but their tenants and \u2018croppers whose tobacco \u201con shares\u201d was their only source of cash. Many of the smaller hill country farmers showed up as well. Merchants, doctors, lawyers, and craftsmen also rallied, sensing (correctly) that the prosperity of the entire region rested on tobacco prices.<\/p>\n Buggies, mules and horses filled the Guthrie fairgrounds. Barbecue and burgoo, moonshine and fiery speeches were eagerly consumed as thousands lined up to join the new Planters Protective Association (PPA). Growers agreed to deliver their dark-fire only to the PPA, which would hold it off the market until they got a fair price\u2014which they defined at the time as eight cents a pound.<\/p>\n In the months following Guthrie, PPA organizers were dispatched throughout the Black Patch. Meetings were held in churches, stores and school houses in every county, denouncing the crimes of Duke\u2019s trust, until even many of the fiercely independent small farmers came on board. But the control and direction of the PPA always remained with the old elite, the planters and the local gentry.<\/p>\n And it was successful. The PPA spoke for the Black Patch. It was a regional struggle to preserve a traditional way of life that many loved and most at least tolerated. But Duke still held a trump card. Small farmers relying on tobacco for cash couldn\u2019t afford to stash their crop in PPA warehouses when Duke\u2019s ATC buyers would buy it \u201cin the barn\u201d before it went to market. Duke was delighted to pay eight cents a pound to growers willing to sidestep the PPA.<\/p>\n Ewing and the PPA leadership intensified their social pressure. A merchant who spoke against the PPA or tolerated the \u201chillbillies\u201d (as the independents came to be called) found his customers dropping away. Dissenting preachers watched their pews empty out. Families were torn asunder, brother against brother, just as during the hated war.<\/p>\n David Amoss, MD, of tiny Cobb, Kentucky, was the very template of the Southern gentleman. The son of a Confederate officer, he was not a planter but he knew tobacco and its importance to the area; he knew the planters and he knew the local way of life.<\/p>\n As a youth, Amoss had attended The Ferrell Military Institute in Hopkinsville, where he had thrilled to the exploits of Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest. He learned Southern history, military tactics\u2014and a schoolboy\u2019s trick of blowing across the muzzle of a pistol to make a sound like a hunter\u2019s horn that could be heard a quarter mile away.<\/p>\n Amoss loved military lore, but he was destined to be a doctor like his father. After medical school in Ohio, Amoss returned to the Black Patch to serve his local community. Respected by both black and<\/p>\n