American Agriculture, 1800–1862

After 1800, the primary market for agricultural products shifted from overseas ports to cities in the United States. Growing urban populations created an ever-increasing demand, not only for standard products like breadstuffs and meat, but for new ones like pears and brooms. To take advantage of this opportunity, farmers increased their efficiency by employing machinery and cropping their fields continuously rather than letting them go to long fallow. This created a need for fertilizers to restore the soil and permanent fences for fields that remained in use. Under the influence of city values, farmers spent the returns from their heightened sales on refinements such as carpets and curtains to counter the charge of being rural rubes. Despite the adoption of improved methods to increase market production, farmers still practiced self-provisioning as far as possible. They made and grew everything they could for themselves even while their needs for urban goods increased. Not until World War II did farmers give up the practice of living off their farms. Since then, the number of small farms has steadily diminished and the farm population has shrunk to less than 2% of the population. Still farmers value the integrity of the farm life and want their children to participate.

Learning Slavery

Plantation agriculture created a culture in which commanding a slave became a mark of distinction. Large owners left a slave to each of their children as one of the accoutrements of a respectable lady or gentleman. White children of necessity had to learn to be masters and their black companions to be slaves. Much of this learning occurred through the stories of black-white relationships which slaves told each other. The stories formed a body of black literature which was passed along with other skills like singing and playing. White masters had to learn to provide supplies for their workforce—food, clothing, housing. Management of a large plantation called for the skills of a quartermaster. Whites, furthermore, even white women, had to learn to demand and to punish. As they grew, black children had to decide if they were to seek to be trusted by their masters or take a chance on resistance. Resistance could involve little more than slacking off work when not under the master’s gaze. Or it could mean running away. During the Revolution, black families that were seemingly quiescent took the chance on joining the British forces and ran away. Blacks concealed their true feelings in hiding places in their minds.

Sons and Daughters

Out of lands that were once Indian, Hempstead provided for his six sons and four daughters. He accumulated the resources required by expanding his holdings when his children arrived at the age when they were useful workers. He opened a sheep operation in Stonington and brought in new pasture. With bequests from him, all of his children established themselves without moving to a frontier or taking up lands that were in dispute. Hempstead also passed along the subtle skills it took to be a successful farmer and citizen. The Hempsteads flourished on the lands once possessed by the Indians, benefiting from the privileges of imperial families in the European conquest of America. No record exists of Hempstead’s wife passing along skills to her daughters—Abigail Hempstead died in 1716. But the diary of Mary Cooper just across the Sound on Long Island depicts the skills daughters had to master and just as important the endurance required to keep working when fatigued, ill, or discouraged. Indian families had a culture to transmit to the rising generation that was fully as intricate as Hempstead’s, but transmission was hindered by general social decay in Native American society. Against all expectations, Mohegan culture survived and persists to this day.

The Nature of the South

Plantation agriculture in the western hemisphere extended from Brazil northward through the Caribbean to the northern boundary of Maryland. This geography created a line in North America noted by seventeenth-century imperial economists. The southern colonies produced crops needed in the home land making the South far more valuable to the empire than the North. Plantation agriculture stopped at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border because the climate made slavery impractical north of that line. Only farmers who produced valuable exports could afford the price of slaves. Tobacco, though it could be grown in the North, was not commercially feasible there. The growing season had to be long enough to get a crop in the ground while also planting corn for subsistence, allow the tobacco to mature, and harvest it before the first frost. Tobacco was practical within the zone of the 180-day growing season whose isotherm outlines the areas where slavery flourished. Within this zone, the ground could be worked all but a month or two in winter, giving slaves plenty to do. Cattle could also forage for themselves, reducing the need for hay. Southern farmers could devote themselves to provisions and market crops, increasing their wealth substantially compared to the North where haying occupied much of the summer. Differing agro-systems developed along a temperature gradient running from North to South with contrasting crops and labor systems attached to each.

Uncas and Joshua

Uncas, the chief of the Mohegans, initially cooperated with the Connecticut government to gain advantage over his native rivals. Uncas assisted in the conquest of the Pequots and agreed to seek Connecticut’s assistance in settling disputes with his Indian enemies in return for English support in intra-Indian disputes. He also granted land to English settlers in New London County where the Hempstead family arrived in 1645. In the following century, the Hempsteads flourished in New London while Mohegan lands continuously shrank and Indian lives were degraded. Because he was unfamiliar with the Connecticut legal system and ways of dealing, Uncas put land sales in the hands of a guardian, Captain John Mason. With the Indian economy crippled, Uncas was forced to sell land as a form of income. After his death, his son Oweneco sold land irresponsibly often under the influence of alcohol. By the time the diary of Joshua Hempstead takes up in 1711, the Mohegans were reduced to one small patch of land in Norwich. Joshua’s diary records the farming economy that effectively took control of the Connecticut landscape, forever excluding the Indians from their once extensive possessions.

A Note on Sources

Beyond the basic farm idea, we can catch a glimpse of the farm mentality by looking closely at the documentary sources farming created: court records, tax lists, account books, and so on. Each one formed a particular world in which farmers led part of their lives. The deed created a space formed of artificial lines imposed on the natural world. The purpose of the deed was to move these chunks of space between the largely male owners, the only significant actors in this world. The promissory note created a period of obligation. During the specified time, the borrower was tied to the lender in a relationship of mutual trust. All farmers were festooned with obligations linking him to other lenders and borrowers. The estate auction revealed the farmer amidst his small possession, forever changing his assemblage of tools, furniture, animals, and land. The will exhibits the farmer ordering the future, willing what the small society of his family will look like after he is gone. Tax lists can be interpreted, after Foucault, as the state exercising discipline by naming every person and exacting a tax. They also reveal the eminence of the male head of the household and the obscurity of women, children, and servants. Finally, the lists ranked farmers by their productivity and ownership, a ranking every farmer could see by glancing at his neighbors’ properties compared to his own.

Jefferson’s Neighbors

Save for the elite planters at the top of the social hierarchy, Virginia society blended smoothly from top to bottom. There were no sharp wealth divisions between non-slave owners and those who owned two or three slaves. Nor were slaveholders with more than six slaves much distinguishable from one another until one reached the level where planters owned fifty or more. In this ascending society, lower and middling people provided services such as weaving and carpentry for those above them, linking them economically. Large planters like Jefferson were involved in hundreds of exchanges with lesser farmers each year. The top and bottom of society may not have corresponded with each other but they traded constantly. Because they performed services to make a living, small farmers were the integrating agents in Virginia society. This society came under stress during the Revolution. Farm families resisted the draft because the absence of a father or elder son disrupted the family economy. If drafted they often deserted. After the Revolution, the government’s effort to draw in inflated currency made it difficult for people to pay rent and taxes. They were in danger of losing their property for payment of their debts. Throughout the 1780s, they protested to the legislature, but they never resorted to violence, and the House of Burgesses did not enforce the laws. The familiarity achieved through economic integration made those in power sympathetic to the common plight.

Founding Farmers

The ancestors of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson began their sojourns in America at approximately the same level. The Jeffersons subsequently rose to the heights of wealth and culture while the Lincolns remained in the middle. The reason was that southern planters not only enjoyed the benefits of a slave workforce, they lived under a government that entrusted gentlemen to develop unworked land. Those who gained a place among the gentry received huge grants on the supposition that they would open the land and provide a shelter for smaller planters. Peter Jefferson was one beneficiary of this practice, receiving grants in what became Albemarle County, lands that were inherited by his sons. Jefferson practiced rational agriculture. He corresponded with Arthur Young and read books by English reformers. He fertilized his land and planted clover. And yet Jefferson was bankrupt at his death. He was defeated by the contradictions of the planter class. The necessity of living as a gentleman in order to enjoy the benefits of that standing made it impossible for Jefferson to curtail his standard of living and pay off his debts.

Family Mobility

In many parts of North America in the eighteenth century, as many as 40% of the people in a given area would move over the course of a decade, heading for frontier areas or cities where their prospects were better. Highly mobile farm families though common but are hard to trace because few names were unique. It is hard to know if a name in a new town’s records is the same person as the name in a former town. Lincoln family genealogy is useful in illustrating how moving families fared. Lincoln’s first American ancestors arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637 and by the end of the century began to migrate, first to the Middle Colonies and later to Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. They were motivated by the need for additional land for their offspring. For the most part they succeeded, although President Lincoln’s grandfather Abraham did not. He was killed by Indians, and his son Thomas, Lincoln’s father, never flourished despite multiple moves. President Lincoln gave up on farming and chose to make his living as a postmaster, lawyer, and politician.

Crèvecoeur’s Pennsylvania

Slavery existed in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, just north of the Maryland line, but it was spotty and restricted to a small number of families. The relatively few slaves put a cap on Pennsylvania’s wealth. There were no vast estates like the great southern plantations and wealth per capita was much less. But Pennsylvania was more prosperous than New England. Wealth per capita was substantially higher. It stood in the middle between the South and New England. Wheat with its thriving markets in the West Indies and Europe buoyed all aspects of the Pennsylvania economy. There were far more shops and tradesmen in Lancaster borough, for example, than in comparable towns in New England like Springfield, Massachusetts, or Hartford, Connecticut. It was a prosperous society but rent with conflict. The most telling division in Pennsylvania society was not between rich and poor but between frontier farmers exposed to Indian attacks and more protected areas. Stories of atrocities formed a distinctive mentality. Frontier towns were outraged by the failure of the government to protect them and took affairs into their own hands by slaughtering the Indians. Crèvecouer, who observed both the prosperity of Pennsylvania and its bitter conflicts, marveled that a society with so much promise endured so many miseries.