Tobacco and the Black Patch Wars

For most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, tobacco was Kentucky's defining crop. The dark-fired and burley varieties grown in the western and central counties fed an industry that had no real equivalent in American agriculture for the grip it held on a region's economy, culture, and politics. A family's fortunes rose and fell with the tobacco auction price, and those prices, by the early nineteen hundreds, were controlled almost entirely by one company.

The American Tobacco Company, organized by James B. Duke of North Carolina in eighteen ninety, used vertical integration and aggressive acquisition to dominate the market. By nineteen oh four, Duke's company was purchasing virtually all dark-fired tobacco grown in the Black Patch, the darkened soil counties of western Kentucky and northern Tennessee.

They paid what they chose. Growers had no leverage. The response was the Planters' Protective Association, formed in nineteen oh four, which asked members to withhold their crops and bargain collectively.

Enough growers refused to join, some out of economic desperation, some out of principle, that the cooperative strategy strained. Armed night riders, organized into units called the Silent Brigade, began burning tobacco warehouses and crop-bed plantings owned by non-cooperating growers. They also targeted the American Tobacco Company's facilities directly.

Between nineteen oh five and nineteen oh nine, the night riders burned warehouses in Princeton, Hopkinsville, and other towns, whipped and threatened individual farmers, and in several incidents killed people. Kentucky's governor called out the state militia. The Supreme Court broke up the American Tobacco Company trust in nineteen eleven under the Sherman Act.

The night rider movement faded, but the violence, the economic desperation underneath it, and the question of who controls a commodity market, none of that resolved cleanly. The tobacco wars anticipated every subsequent fight over agricultural price-fixing in the American economy.