Christopher Newman Midwest Political Science Association 2004
Elgin Community College Dark Tobacco Patch War—Revolution Analysis
4
Leaf Tobacco as had the Dark Patch growers
16
, the Burley Growers’ Association
similarly had widespread voluntary membership expressed by a pledge on the part of
growers to sell only to the Burley Association, which would then hold the crop and sell at
an acceptable price and then use the proceeds of sale to pay the producers.
17
The result
was initial success, followed by a steady decline in prices received by the Association
and its members.
18
Thereafter, adopting resolutions in a mass meeting held at Stainback School
House
19
some members of the Association agreed to become “Possum Hunters” (so-
called because their work—like hunting possums—was done at night). Possum Hunters
agreed to visit nonmembers to “counsel and instruct” them in groups of “not less than
five nor more than 2,000.”
20
From the implied menace of the night time visits of
(potentially) large groups of Possum Hunters, it was a short step to the outright violence
of the masked Silent Brigade (as the Night Riders called themselves.)
21
The Night Riders
acted by attacking individual farms and their crops
22
and occupying entire towns so as to
destroy Trust warehouses and machinery and menace and whip Trust supporters.
23
Where
persuasion, even en masse, was unsuccessful, “…the night rider has been the most
efficient association missionary—a virulent one, it is true, yet he has brought people
in.”
24
The high point of the Association control was 1908, when the group had near total
16
Henry A. Barth, “Co-operation in the Blue-Grass,” The Journal of Political Economy
33, No.4, (Aug. 1925) [hereinafter “Blue-Grass Co-operation”] 455-56.
17
Blue-Grass Co-operation 457-58.
18
Blue-Grass Co-operation 462.
19
On Bended Knees 54.
20
Tobacco Night Riders 45.
21
Black Patch War 22.
22
Tobacco Night Riders 50.
23
Kentucky Tobacco War 170.
24
Kentucky Tobacco War 169.
Convention