CHAPTER I. THE INCEPTION OF THE GRANGE

When President Johnson authorized the Commissioner of
Agriculture, in 1866, to send a clerk in his bureau on a trip
through the Southern States to procure "statistical and other
information from those States," he could scarcely have foreseen
that this trip would lead to a movement among the farmers, which,
in varying forms, would affect the political and economic life of
the nation for half a century. The clerk selected for this
mission, one Oliver Hudson Kelley, was something more than a mere
collector of data and compiler of statistics: he was a keen
observer and a thinker. Kelley was born in Boston of a good
Yankee family that could boast kinship with Oliver Wendell Holmes
and Judge Samuel Sewall. At the age of twenty-three
he journeyed to Iowa, where he married. Then with his wife he
went on to Minnesota, settled in Elk River Township, and acquired
some first-hand familiarity with agriculture. At the time of
Kelley's service in the agricultural bureau he was forty years
old, a man of dignified presence, with a full beard already
turning white, the high broad forehead of a philosopher, and the
eager eyes of an enthusiast. "An engine with too much steam on
all the time"--so one of his friends characterized him; and the
abnormal energy which he displayed on the trip through the South
justifies the figure.

Kelley had had enough practical experience in agriculture to be
sympathetically aware of the difficulties of farm life in the
period immediately following the Civil War. Looking at the
Southern farmers not as a hostile Northerner would but as a
fellow agriculturist, he was struck with the distressing