People's Party meeting in Norfolk, Va.
The People's Party, also known as the People's Party of the Southern Confederation, was a political party founded in Norfolk, Virginia, the capital of the Southern Confederation, in 1869.
The formation of the People's Party had its roots in the growing industrialization of both the S.C. and the Confederation of North America as a whole. With the Liberal Party identified with the wealthy cotton planters, and the Conservative Party seeking the votes of the industrial workers and business owners of the Tennessee Valley, small farmers, both white and Negro, felt that their own interests were being ignored.
Representatives of the small farmers, as well as some impoverished cotton planters, met in Norfolk to form a third party local to the Southern Confederation. The program of the new People's Party of the Southern Confederation, known as the Norfolk Resolves, were:
- Taxes would be raised on businesses and used to revive agriculture.
- Government banks would be established to offer farmers low interest loans.
- The government would guarantee the price of cotton.
- Railroads, turnpikes, and canals would be placed under the control of a government agency which would determine rates.
As word of the formation of the People's Party and the Norfolk Resolves spread to the rest of the C.N.A., disaffected groups in other confederations formed their own People's Parties, which soon combined to form the People's Coalition. Sobel notes that an earlier group called the People's Party had been founded in Fort Rasmusson, Quebec in 1856, but that organization had no connection with the one founded in Norfolk. At least fifteen groups claimed to have founded the Coalition, but most historians agree that the Norfolk group was its true origin, though the ideals on which it was based spread independently of the organization.
Sobel's source for the drafting of the Norfolk Resolves is Max Finnigan's "The Origins of the People's Party, and the Writing of the Norfolk Resolves", from The Journal of Politics, 4 December 1958.