Sinopsis

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 foren 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 Ju...