<P> Unfortunately for those who chose to attempt to farm new lands in such places as Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Eastern Colorado, the unusually rainy years of the early 1880s which had buoyed land prices gave way to a protracted drought beginning in the summer of 1887, bringing an end to the giddy, speculative boom . With crops failing artificially inflated land prices plummeted; Eastern capital began to withdraw from the region . Banks collapsed and credit dried up . A decade of hard times followed, marked by the abandonment of entire communities . A sense of deep discontent with the current state of affairs was felt by the farmers who remained . </P> <P> The agrarian and plantation - based economy of the Southern United States was virtually destroyed by the American Civil War . Those who had their fortunes invested in Confederate bonds and currency saw them lost, as did those whose wealth was tied up in the ownership of African American slaves . Great landed estates were broken up or rendered unworkable by the lack of a free labor supply and the flood of land sold on the marked depressed prices and reduced the economic possibilities of those who counted their dollars in acres . </P> <P> The region faced enormous costs to replace the buildings destroyed in the war and the factories looted . The capacity of the gutted financial market to make loans was grossly insufficient for the needs of the region, exemplified by the 123 counties in Georgia with no banks whatsoever even in 1895 . Merchants, finding a sellers' market, extracted extraordinary profits through inflated prices and usurious credit terms . </P> <P> A new mode of production replaced the slave - based large - scale agriculture of the pre-war years . Now it would be small - scale agrarian enterprise that would proliferate and the emergence of the so - called "share system" or "cropping system," in which non-landowners paid rent for the use of the land they farmed in the form of a fixed percentage of the output generated . This system in theory served the needs of landowners and poor farmers alike, as the sharecroppers would have the incentive to produce more and benefit from increased output while landowners would be provided with a labor source to produce upon the land they held without the necessity of paying cash wages . </P>

The farmers' alliance movement of the 1880s aimed to help farmers