Much of the capital that was used in Southern agriculture came from the North through the manufacturers and wholesalers who supplied the retail merchants of the South. These merchants advanced credit to their customers, measuring it by the estimated value of the next crop. Once the bargain had been struck, the farmer bought all his supplies from his banker-merchant, paying such prices as the latter saw fit to charge. There could be little competition among merchants under this system, since the burden of his debt kept the planter from seeking the cheapest market. The double weight of extortionate prices and heavy interest impressed a large section of the South with the scarcity of cash and the evils of existing finance. In agricultural method as well as in finance the South was oppressed by its system. The merchant wanted cotton, for cotton was marketable, and could not be consumed by a tricky debtor. Single cropping was thus unduly encouraged; diversified agriculture and rotation of crops made little progress. The use of commercial fertilizers was greatly stimulated, but agriculture as a whole could not advance. Tied fast to a system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money and more of it. The Farmers' Alliance, with its demands for railroad control, trust regulation, banking reform, and free silver, was the logical vehicle for the expression of Southern discontent. The white population of the South, undivided since the Civil War, was confronted in 1890 by an issue that bore no relation to race and that divided society into debtor and creditor classes. For twenty years, by common agreement in which the North had tacitly concurred, the negro had been suppressed outside the law. Occasional negroes had got into office and even to Congress in reconstruction days. One, who described himself as "a bright mulatto," sat in the Fifty-first and Fifty-second Congresses, but in most regions of the South the negro had not been allowed to vote or had been "counted out" at the polls, while only in sporadic cases, mostly in the mountain sections, was the Republican party able to get enough votes to elect its candidates. The Farmers' Alliance split the white vote and gave to the negro an unusual power. From being suppressed by all to being courted by many involved a change that raised his hopes only to destroy them. The South no sooner saw the possibility that the negro vote might hold a balance of power between two equal white factions than it took steps to remove itself from temptation and to disfranchise the undesired class.