<P> About 1880, a renaissance began, particularly in the Middle States and New England; this revival was marked by a recurrence to the original social and educational objects . The national Grange and state Granges (in all, or nearly all, of the states) were still active in 1909, especially in the old cultural movement and in such economic movements, notably the improvement of highways as most directly concern the farmers . The initiative and referendum, and other proposals of reform politics in the direction of a democratic advance, also enter in a measure into their propaganda . </P> <P> The Alliance carried the movement further into economics . The National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, formed in 1889, embraced several originally independent organizations (including The Agricultural Wheel) formed from 1873 onwards; it was largely confined to the South and was secret . The National Farmers Alliance, formed in 1880, went back similarly to 1877, was much smaller, Northern and non-secret . The Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union (formed 1888, merged in the above Southern Alliance in 1890) was the second greatest organization . With these three were associated many others, state and national, including an annual, non-partisan, deliberative and advisory Farmers National Congress . The Alliance movement reached its greatest power about 1890, in which year twelve national farmers organizations were represented in conventions in St Louis, and the six leading ones alone probably had a membership of 5,000,000 . As with the Grange, so in the ends and declarations of the whole later movement, concrete remedial legislation for agricultural or economic ills was mingled with principles of vague radical tendency and with lofty idealism . Thus, the Southern Alliance in 1890 (the chief platforms were the one at Ocala, Florida, and that of 1889 at St Louis, Missouri, in conjunction with the Knights of Labor) declared its principles to be: </P> <P> (1) To labour for the education of the agricultural classes in the science of economical government in a strictly non-partisan way, and to bring about a more perfect union of such classes . (2) To demand equal rights to all, and special privileges to none . (3) To endorse the motto: In things essential, unity; in all things, charity . (4) To develop a better state, mentally, morally, socially and financially - - - (6) To suppress personal, local, sectional and national prejudices . </P> <P> For the Southern farmer a chief concrete evil was the crop - lien system, mortgages on their future crops for furnished supplies by which cotton farmers fell into debt to country merchants . In the North the farmer attacked a wide range of capitalistic legislation that hurt him, he believed, for the benefit of other classes, notably legislation sought by railways . </P>

Where did the farmers start the appike movement