ABSTRACT
The plight into which farmer had fallen was graphically summed up in the phrase "ten-cent corn and ten per cent interest"—a phrase that was to become a spark to all the tinder that was gathering from frontier hardships and disappointments. Due to his own political slackness, the farmer had allowed himself to become the common drudge of society. One may make an assertion what one will, but it is clear that John Sherman thought ill of the greenbacks, and wanted substituted for them a system of banknotes. The greenbacks were reckoned political money, the control of issues of which lay wholly with Congress. The opposition to the program and methods of the rising plutocracy was not confined to the farmers of the Middle Border. The Jeffersonianism of Peter Cooper, like the Jeffersonianism of the Middle Border, had taken a bias from the confident nationalism that during the fifties so deeply colored American thought.
