Economic Causes of Late-Nineteenth Century Agrarian Unrest:New Evidence

Several economic historians have suggested that economic instability in American agriculture was a primary cause of agrarian discontent during the late nineteenth century. This paper, in providing a rigorous analysis of the issue, presents estimates of economic instability in agriculture and evidence on the location and intensity of agrarian unrest for 14 northern states from 1866 to 1909. I statistically test for a relationship between the two. The results strongly suggest that late-nineteenth century agrarian unrest was directly related to a state's degree ofeconomic instability. This conclusion holds for the entire last third of the century and for several subperiods.