Читать книгу A Companion to American Agricultural History - Группа авторов - Страница 33

Kelly Houston Jones

An observation of agriculture leads directly to essential questions of power and progress in antebellum America. What access and opportunities did this period offer? Who won and who lost as the market expanded? How did exploitation contribute to agricultural production? By the antebellum period, several transformations in America’s economy and society were underway. Immigration, urbanization, technological changes, and commercialization reworked American society. Farmers from Massachusetts to Louisiana experienced these developments in differing and often uneven ways. Ultimately, antebellum Americans’ concepts and practices of agriculture and how it related to freedom and opportunity reaped civil war.

There was nothing static about antebellum agriculture. The story of farmers in this era—North, South, black, white, proprietors, tenants, men, women, free, and enslaved—is a story of transformation. The most obvious shifts that affected and were affected by farmers were market expansion (explored in more detail later in this chapter) and westward migration (which cannot be disentangled from market expansion). Shifting cultivation and the lure of cheap land were among the factors that drew farmers west. Indian removals created “emptiness,” at least legally, that allowed for settler colonialist agriculture to march west. Although white Americans had already enforced numerous removals, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 set in motion a cluster of treaties forcing native people west of the Mississippi River and, as whites defined it, out of the way of agricultural progress. Southern agriculturalists perpetrated an added level of displacement by forcing the migration of more than one million enslaved people to the cotton interior via the second Middle Passage—a disorienting separation from the lives, loved ones, and sometimes crop cultures that they knew in the eastern South (Wright 1986; Berlin 2003).

Antebellum farmers’ cultivation and innovation of corn bears out some of these movements and connections. Corn’s adaptability and usefulness as a commercial or subsistence crop contributed to its wide cultivation across the US. In the northeast, farmers grew flint corn, a yellow, slender, quickly maturing variety. In more southerly zones, farmers cultivated dent corn, a paler, white corn with a squatty shape that took longer to mature. Hybridization of the two types occurred as populations moved, for example as New Englanders moved southwest to places like Kentucky. People actively hybridized the crop to create several flint–dent varieties by the 1850s. Corn farmers also worked in western Native American corns as settlers spread farther west. Not as labor intensive as some crops, corn did require tending. Farmers battled several types of weeds that invaded their fields and threatened to strangle the plants, like the so-called Canada thistle (not from the Americas), by chopping them out with their hoes or crowding them out with other cover crops. Southerners often planted peas among their corn rows. A versatile crop, corn could be converted to stock. Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman estimated that farmers fed antebellum cattle three bushels of corn per year and hogs ten bushels per year. While corn was grown widely, Ohio and Illinois corn farmers were incredibly productive. Samuel Bowers Hilliard has estimated that yields there were probably more than double the yields found in the South in the same era (Hilliard 1972; Atack and Bateman 1987; Hudson 1994; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

Like corn, and in direct relation to it, pork was ubiquitous in antebellum agriculture, being the most reliable form of meat to be raised anywhere. By 1840, swine populations in the North were much improved by the importation of stock from Europe and Asia, holding desirable traits like an efficient conversion of corn into weight. Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana herds also benefited from some improvement by the time major pork-packing houses were established in the Ohio River Valley in the 1840s. Hogs in the South and lesser settled parts of the western north mostly ran free, subsisting on nuts and mast from the brush and forests. Farmers rounded them up when they deemed it time to fatten them for fall slaughter. Although some talked of improved boars elevating southern swine herds in the South in the 1850s, Ohio River Valley swine were heavier than southern hogs and northeastern hogs. They averaged about 200 pounds in 1840, while some areas produced hogs weighing more than 500 pounds. In the South, however, where leggy swine still roamed free most of the time, their weights averaged about 130 to 150 pounds. The number of hogs per capita in the United States overall in 1860 was 1.07. In the South, that number was 1.82 while in the Old Northwest it was 1.24 (Hilliard 1972; Nation 2005; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

Corn and hogs represented an easier proposition for the humbler sort of farmers, while beef cattle required more care, investment, and risk when raised commercially. Many cattle were slaughtered locally, but as the nineteenth century wore on, smaller farmers had trouble competing—they needed credit and meat packers often offered low prices to farmers. While northeastern cattle in places like the Connecticut River Valley enjoyed success, expanses of land used for grazing in the hill country of Kentucky, several sections of Ohio, East-central Illinois, and the prairies of Indiana saw the most growth in the 1820s through the 1840s. In order to supply farmers with profits and urbanites with beef, these herds had to be transported to eastern butchers in places like Philadelphia, New York, and, later, St. Louis and Chicago. This task was often performed by professional drovers who might buy the stock or enter into another sort of brokerage arrangement. After spending months fattening their stock to 1000 to 1400 pounds, northern farmers often entrusted them to these middlemen who could either earn trust and lasting market relationships or exploit farmers. The epic drives of this period were reduced almost completely by the extension of railroads westward. Many farmers preferred to ship their cattle on stock cars instead, especially after rates dropped. Cattle in the South rarely traveled so far. Most southern farmers did not raise stock exclusively and most southern beef was marketed closer to home. Southern farmers allowed cattle to roam and graze on what they would, providing salt, corn fodder, oats, or peas from time to time. Their lower weights reflected the difference in breed and in husbandry, averaging 500 to 700 pounds. This is not to say that antebellum southern cattle raising was without commercial importance. In fact, geographer Terry G. Jordan locates the origins of the open-range cattle ranching system that would become familiar in the West to the antebellum South; by 1820 South Carolina farmers’ methods had made their way as far as Texas (Helen 1954; Hilliard 1972; Jordan 1981; Garrison 1987).

While corn, hogs, and cattle stretched widely across antebellum America’s farmland, wheat did slightly less so. Farmers grew it in many places, but only in some areas did they do so intensively. Most wheat production was located in the east, thinning dramatically west of Ohio and south of Virginia. Wheat growers sought hardier varieties with shorter ripening periods as the crop moved west. By the 1840s and 1850s, European types, generally known as “Mediterranean wheat” were widely grown in antebellum wheat fields. Wheat crops suffered, however, from Hessian flies, grain midges, and cinch bugs, devastating crops from New York and Pennsylvania to North Carolina and Virginia. By the 1840s, these pests were wreaking havoc on crops as far west as Iowa. This is not what kept so many southerners from growing enough wheat to supply their own region, though. Most of the South was not well suited to the crop, and where it appeared in the South it was usually sown in winter to be harvested in summer. Southern agriculture focused more heavily on corn and cotton, but substantial wheat crops could be found in the Georgia and North Carolina piedmonts and in middle and East Tennessee. Madison County, Tennessee, in particular, ramped up wheat production in the mid-1850s, doubling its harvest to 64,000 bushels in 1860. This increase was due to planters’ commercial activity, however; the poorest 40 percent of farmers in the county did not grow it (Hilliard 1972; Edwards 1999; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

Tobacco culture has often been viewed as played out, doomed, and destructive in the antebellum period, while stubborn planters ignored reform measures and continued to exhaust the soil. Drew Swanson’s work in recent years, however, has refreshed the story. Tobacco in the antebellum period spread from its classic zones in Virginia and Maryland. Notorious for exhausting the soil, tobacco culture was not necessarily bereft of reform. William Galt, Jr. was just one farmer who sought to diversify for the sake of the market and the soil. Farmers like Galt grew tobacco by clearing new land and rotating crops, while experimenting with new varieties. It was the success in the 1840s of brightleaf tobacco that resurrected the crop and gained in popularity both in traditional tobacco-growing zones as well as west to Kentucky and north to the Connecticut River Valley. Although their efforts did not stave off all negative consequences of tobacco culture, planters did reform their methods, incorporating new technology, employing changes in land maintenance, and innovating curing methods, for example, by employing charcoal by the 1850s (Craven 2006 [1926]; Herndon 1978; Clark 1990; Olmstead and Rhode 2008; Swanson 2014).

Having surveyed a few of the common agricultural pursuits across North and South, let us turn to a question that has motivated many agricultural historians who have studied this period—how much market intensification did antebellum farmers undertake? And considering that there was at least some commercial expansion in various regions, to what extent did reliance on the market undercut farmers’ independence? Were they self-sufficient or dependent? Did the very character of American farming change?

In the North, the earliest and most extensive commercial production arose in garden crops, wheat, and dairy. Demand for food steadily increased in developing urban areas, making surplus production a better bet for farmers. By the 1850s, competition had become steep in some zones. For example, many wheat farmers purchased newly developed reapers, while those who could not afford the upgrade fell behind. Atack and Bateman characterized antebellum northern farmers as willingly drawing closer toward market participation. And while they argued that farmers remained in tune with the market, producers sometimes failed to maximize their opportunities. After 1830, as the market intensified, farmers who traditionally had engaged in reciprocal obligations or trade in kind in their dealings with one another gradually relied more on cash exchange among themselves. Local exchange between farmers that did not involve cash remained significant in rural communities, but its importance diminished. Farmers also shifted to a cycle in which they desired more cash in order to purchase goods, but needed more credit to make the improvements necessary to increase planting in order to acquire more cash (Atack and Bateman 1984; Clark 1990; Kulikoff 1992).

The story, however, is not one in which helpless farmers became wholly captive to an unwelcome, mysterious market. In investigating the Connecticut River Valley, Christopher Clark argues that northern farms become capitalist by the time of the Civil War due to their own agency. Farmers developed ideas about commercial agriculture and worked to realize them. Farmers’ choices facilitated the development of agricultural capitalism; in turn, urban market changes transformed agriculture. Connecticut Valley farmers lay down their sickles and picked up grain cradles. They employed seed drills, horse rakes, and mowing machines by the 1850s. They changed their routine to systematically gather, store, and spread manure. Overall, they intensified and specialized their production. As competition increased, farmers adapted. For example, in the 1850s Connecticut Valley broom corn declined as broom production had picked up in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. Some farmers responded by emphasizing food production for the growing towns to their east. Clark explains the economic shift for farmers in this era not as a loss of independence. In fact, commercialization meant a shift from dependence on one thing to dependence on something else. Connecticut Valley farmers had been dependent on obligations and connections within community. They now depended on more distant forces (Clark 1990).

Panning to the southwest, Richard Nation found that southern Indiana farmers similarly conceived of the agricultural transformation in terms of dependence on their local community being exchanged for a dependence on a broader network. But they preferred the local one, and proceeded cautiously. Southern Indiana farmers did not seek to amass wealth. Their most immediate goal was to provide for their families, after which they sought to profit enough to be able to support the next generation’s acquisition of land. Hoosiers practiced “safety-first” farming and sold surplus produce. Like many other areas of antebellum America, it was fiber and textiles that first drew southern Indiana farmers into the marketplace. When they produced their own material for cloth, they had relied on flax and wool. Over time, southern Indiana farm families preferred to purchase cloth, especially cotton. As a result, flax declined. Wool remained in significant production but farmers’ relationship to it changed. They were more likely to take their wool to someone else to spin, weave, and dye before making their clothing at home. In Hoosiers’ reckoning, distant markets proved useful but not essential. In fact, they represented a danger—farmers could dabble in them, but not trust them. Nation argues that when southern Indiana farmers produced larger surpluses for the market it did not so much indicate that they were capitalists but that they were careful (Nation 2005).

In the North Carolina piedmont, the lack of transportation other than protracted and expensive wagon trips discouraged farmers from marketing grain surpluses until the arrival of railroad networks in the 1850s. Even with that development, farmers there lived by the safety-first pattern. For example, farmers of the North Carolina piedmont proved less willing to take risks on new crops like the brightleaf tobacco. In Tennessee, subsistence farmers raised a bale or two of cotton for market but remained focused on self-sufficiency. Tennessee “plain folk” entered the market willingly but with caution. Corn was essential to their strategy because it could either go to market or supply the family with food (Escott 1989; Edwards 1999).

Indeed, it has become less convincing to describe southerners as disconnected from or resistant to the market in the antebellum period. In his classic Roots of Southern Populism, Steven Hahn argued that yeomen farmers of the Georgia upcountry were independent and self-sufficient, practicing, like so many of their counterparts in other zones, safety-first agriculture. They resisted commercialization even as cotton picked up after the 1850s. Their production protected them from many of the ups and downs of commercial agriculture. In fact, in this era, when yeomen managed to hold off commercial agriculture, they enjoyed more equality than they would come to know after the Civil War. As the nineteenth century wore on, yeomen in the Georgia upcountry endured the strengthened crosscurrent of large landholders and financiers pushing for market intensification. While much of Hahn’s characterization has stood the test of time, historian Allan Kulikoff contends that upcountry Georgia’s yeomen engaged in more commercial exchange in the antebellum period than Hahn’s telling allows. Finally, while historians have often characterized Appalachian farmers as disconnected from market forces until the latter part of the nineteenth century, historian Wilma Dunaway has proven that Appalachian farmers had always been subject to the commercial realities, offering land speculation as one major example (Hahn 1983; Kulikoff 1992; Dunaway 1996).

Did antebellum farmers’ growing market focus infringe on their ability to feed themselves? Studies on the question have found the answer to vary depending on region. The deep dives pursued by agricultural historians Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman represent the sort of inquiry historians have employed to understand the implications of greater commercialization in antebellum farming. They found that in many areas of the northeast, because the farming population declined, operations did not always produce much food surplus. For example, corn and grain surpluses were much higher in the west than east. The largest northern surpluses of corn came from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas while the northeast often experienced a deficit. On the other hand, the Midwest generated a smaller surplus of dairy. While most northern farms produced dairy products, northeastern farmers in particular increased their production of butter, cheese, and milk in the antebellum years. All in all, while some parts of the North produced surpluses in one food product, that could come with the deficit of another (Bateman 1978; Atack and Bateman 1984).

To return to Clark’s study of Western Massachusetts, a whopping 70–80 percent of the Connecticut Valley’s workforce remained in agriculture in 1860. This was in stark contrast to many areas of the eastern North. While the bulk of farmers in the area purchased flour as wheat production declined, their efforts overall remained fairly diversified. This was in part a lesson learned from the Panic of 1837, a devastating economic slump that had prompted caution among Western Massachusetts’ farmers. Due to their continued production of corn, potatoes, wheat, rye, butter, cheese, and livestock, Connecticut Valley farmers continued to feed themselves in the antebellum period (Clark 1990).

The South was another story. While the most notable historian of southern foodstuffs, Sam Bowers Hilliard, explained that the South managed to provide enough food for the region overall, this was largely due to the Upper South feeding the Lower South. The huge swaths of the South that focused on cash crops relied on the food surplus production of Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Old Northwest. The crops that captured the bulk of plantation agriculture’s commercial focus—tobacco, sugar, and cotton—could not be relied upon as a food store in a pinch (rice being the exception). Southerners grew corn, potatoes (a higher production of sweet potatoes in the lower regions and domination of white potatoes in the upper region), and other garden crops, and boasted sizable pork production. Yet, in Hilliard’s reckoning, the interior market for food remained underdeveloped. Thus, the Upper South as a food source proved essential. Overall, Hilliard concluded that the antebellum South managed to feed itself (Hilliard 1972).

Lacy K. Ford’s in-depth comparison of two areas of the South Carolina upcountry provides a closer look. In the upper piedmont, 86 percent of farmers could be classified as yeomen and nearly 70 percent of them participated in the cotton economy by growing a bale or two of cotton. The majority of the yeomen were also self-sufficient in grain as the familiar safety-first pattern of production dominated the upper piedmont. In the lower piedmont, however, yeomen produced much more cotton. In turn, they grew less corn, resulting in only about half of yeomen there boasting self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. A commercial expansion in the 1850s affected the whole area, bringing railroads and banks, and encouraging an increase in cotton production. The expansion of cotton in the upper piedmont reduced self-sufficiency. Nonslaveholders and smaller slaveholders alike in that zone cut back on their corn production by 25–30 percent. The dramatic result was that now 40 percent of nonslaveholders failed at self-sufficiency as did more than 34 percent of small slaveholders there. The lower piedmont experienced a similar pattern, but with less drastic results because farmers there had already placed less emphasis on corn and foodstuffs. Importantly, Ford argues that diminishing self-sufficiency did not mean that South Carolina upcountry yeomen gave up their independent mindset, just that they adjusted their calculations (Ford 1986).

As antebellum American farming changed, who benefited most? Who was left behind (or out) as commercialization grew? We can begin with a group that scholarship only belatedly turned to—women. Historians of farm women found that women’s work made up an essential part of the farm economy, child-rearing included. Households were domestic and productive units. In the antebellum period’s increasing connection to the market, the most dramatic shift that women underwent related to directing less of their energy toward fiber for home use in favor of dairy and poultry production. The rising demand and prices fetched by butter and milk in particular drew women’s participation in the market. The work took a toll on their bodies. While antebellum reformers in cities idealized rural life as healthier, populated by energetic, rosy-cheeked young women milking cows, others knew better. Contemporaries described farm mothers as bent and prematurely aged. Domestic work included heavy labor, while dairy work was taxing. Women not only performed the task of milking, which could strain muscles anyway, they prepared scald pans, skimmed, churned, and kept dairy facilities clean. According to Clark’s research on the Connecticut River Valley, from 90 to 98 percent of farms kept milk cows, where butter and cheese made up between 1/10 and 1/5 of farm earnings. The farm self-sufficiency we have discussed doubtless owed a great deal to women’s labor (Borish 1990; Clark 1990; McMurry 1995).

But what was the balance sheet in terms of power? Joan Jensen’s pioneering research in the 1980s concluded that while white women in Chester, Pennsylvania and African American women in New Castle, Delaware remained restricted by a legal code that denied them control over property and the fruits of their labor, they made some other gains. Beginning in the 1830s, household production by women took on more importance, especially when it brought in cash. They asserted themselves as consumers and with their cash-generating work scaffolded their family’s economic security. These women knew what they wanted from the market economy. They increased production in order to improve their home amenities and purchase goods like cloth. Women also bore fewer children in the Northeast and Midwest as commercial agriculture intensified, while southern women’s birthrates did not drop. Kulikoff estimates that children born to women in Midwestern states declined from an average of 7–8 to 3–4. Women in this era also achieved an increasingly public presence, although scholars debate whether or not women always thought of their work in those terms (Jensen 1986b; Osterud 1991; Kulikoff 1992).

However the bonds may have loosened, the primacy of cash had its drawbacks. As cash became more desirable the noncash contributions of farm women garnered less respect. Men thought of themselves as making the truly consequential contributions because they were bringing in more cash. Women had traditionally bartered and traded butter, eggs, and chickens for items like coffee, tea, sugar, and even shoes. Over time women came to prefer selling their products for cash then applying that cash to purchases of items, especially cotton cloth. Historians have interpreted this shift as a signal of greater dependence on the marketplace. Regardless of the nature of her exchange, in a given household a woman more likely sold her farm products locally while the crops marketed by her husband headed off to distant markets to supply faraway industries. Thus, the broadening market society viewed men’s contributions as more important (Clark 1990; Nation 2005).

Grey Osterud argued that rural farm women in the Nanticoke Valley in New York did not conceive of the world strictly in terms of public or private because rural men and women inhabited the same spheres. Dairying, for example, was often shared by men and women. Women did not seek to or succeed in creating a more public role for themselves but instead worked to get more out of the roles they played. Martin Bruegel agreed that the lines between gendered spheres blurred, emphasizing shifts in agricultural production as the cause. Rather than ideas about gender dictating farm work in the Hudson Valley, the needs of the farm dictated the roles of men and women—and these were not neatly divided between house and field. Any farm task performed close to the house (except for maintenance and construction) involved both men and women. For example, because competing farms grew to the west, Hudson Valley producers put more of their energy into grass cultures rather than mixed agriculture. They grazed animals and supplied outside markets with hay, increasing their production of rye, oats, and corn, but not wheat, which they imported. This change required farm women to spend more time in the fields, not as a supplement but as essential labor (Osterud 1991; Bruegel 2002b).

Scholars have less directly investigated the lives of southern farm women’s relationships to increased commercialization, as such. This is in part because historical inquiry has been more interested in southern women as either slaveholders or enslaved. But neither role precludes an inquiry into their relationship to the expansion of market agriculture. Most free farming women in the South, like elsewhere, focused their energies on sustaining the household first before engaging in market activity. For all they had in common with women in other regions, women in yeomen and small slaveholding families in the South were held in a particular system in which white men sat at the top of a pyramid of dependence. White women’s roles had always been to bolster the system of slavery, and in turn they gained some sense of power from their status as superior to enslaved people. This was especially true for women in slaveholding families, however small, because they enjoyed at least some potential to relieve themselves of work they viewed as too strenuous or degrading. In her classic work, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese suggested that the plantation mistress occupied a position in a household that was the very embodiment of capitalism, relying as it did on the commercial staple crop, while the women themselves lived out a social existence not deeply touched by market relations. Their world was far from as public as their northern counterparts, due to the slaveholding South’s particular system of paternalism; on balance the market seemed to have a neutral effect on white women’s status. Joan Cashin, however, painted a bleak picture of women in wealthy white families who moved to the cotton frontier. They were used to relying on the utility of kinship ties to double as economic networks plugging them into capital and exchange. Their relocation to the cotton frontier, at their husbands’ behest, disrupted sustained kinship contact, reducing planter women’s access to economic autonomy. Both angles can be contrasted with Stephanie Jones-Rogers’ recent work in which white women are shown to be shrewd participants in the commercial economy as capitalistic slaveholders (McCurry 1997 ; Fox-Genovese 1988; Cashin 1991; Burke 2010; Jones-Rogers 2019).

In the course of investigating economic mobility in the intensifying agricultural market, scholars used to discuss an “agricultural ladder”—an economic scale of free white farmers at the top of which sat landowners, then tenants, and finally landless farm laborers. Scholars debated the extent to which America’s farmers could ascend the rungs—for example, if a tenant farmer could easily rise to the rank of yeoman or if, as in Paul W. Gates’ reckoning, farmers faced bleaker prospects. An essential aspect of the question has always involved access to land. Only acquisition of acreage could transform a farm laborer into a yeoman. How much opportunity did Americans have to achieve this? By 1860, in the northeast, not even 2/5 of heads of households fell into the category of owners or renters of farmland. Northerners and southerners alike often affixed their hoped for land ownership on points west. Some tried squatting, banking on access to preemption claims. Speculators, who often clashed with squatters, bought up the majority of military land grants. Richard Nation found some persistence in Washington County, southern Indiana, where by 1840, 36 percent of people who had purchased land in the county in the 31 years previous still resided there. In antebellum Appalachia, 40 percent of free households did not farm land under their control and only 10 percent of farmers could be called “subsistence” farmers. Many endured life as tenants, laborers, or slaves of the farmers who did own land (Ellis 1944; Gates 1960; Bode and Ginter 1987; Atack 1989; Kulikoff 1992; Dunaway 1996; Nation 2005).

Indeed, landowners who expanded their market activity often did so by exploiting landless and enslaved labor. In fact, scholars understand that it was the ready labor pool that helped make much of the increased northern production of the 1850s possible. Many farmers engaged in new pursuits that required more labor than their previous crop cultures, such as tobacco in Massachusetts. Traditionally, when farmers hired labor they did so intermittently and for the short term. Increasingly, however, farm workers signed contracts to labor for the whole spring and summer. The new economy placed some farm laborers in the predicament where they came to rely on such contracts to make ends meet (Clark 1990; Dunaway 1996).

Historians have well documented economic inequality in the antebellum South. While the South was incredibly prosperous as a region—indeed the lower Mississippi Valley was one of the richest places in the country—success was not uniformly enjoyed. Poor farmers were unlikely to become landowners. Charles C. Bolton found that landless whites made up 30–50 percent of the white population, most of whom were farm laborers and tenants. Landless southerners were likely to remain so due to a tight credit market. Landowners frequently paid farm workers for their labor in kind rather than cash wages. Those who sought to achieve landownership via preemption risked being foiled by speculators. Only 10 percent of the persistent residents of Northeast Mississippi from 1850 to 1860 had acquired land. Texas also became concentrated into the hands of larger farmers, especially slaveholders. Not only did the planters hold the most property there but their share of it steadily increased. Slaveholders in Richard Lowe and Randolph Campbell’s classic study of antebellum Texans made up only 1/3 of farmers but owned 2/3 of the real property. They produced most of the region’s cotton. When it comes to the middle group of farmers, which included both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaveholders had the edge in property and production. Yeomen prospered, but the nonslaveholders among them did not realize the same gains. In Madison County, Tennessee, slaveholders increased their already disproportionate share of land from 1850 to 1860; the wealthiest 10 percent of landowners there owned 60 percent of real estate in 1850, increasing that hold to 68 percent by 1860. Thirty-five percent of families in the county owned no land in 1850, a proportion that rose to 40 percent by 1860 (Lowe and Campbell 1987; Bolton 1994; Edwards 1999; Johnson 2013).

It is clear that questions of access, upward mobility, and relative gain or loss in antebellum agriculture cannot be disentangled from slavery. The scholarship on that relationship is rich and much of it focuses on the South’s failure to diversify its economy. Gavin Wright’s preference for framing slavery not as labor relationship but as a set of property rights in labor helps illuminate the problem. Owning captive labor (rather than relying on a pool of free, mobile workers) allowed slaveholders complete control to allocate labor as they saw fit or even pick up and apply that labor in a new region. This only encouraged slaveholders to keep putting money back into expanding their captive labor force. Their major investment, therefore, was not into their community; precious little of the money they spent found its way into other parts of economy. Economic straits, as so many scholars have shown, related to the South’s lack of diversification in industry, because so much wealth was held in enslaved people as property. Their intensification of a staple crop did not alone explain it. While historians, as we have discussed, have investigated the toll this system took on “plain folk,” Keri Leigh Merritt’s recent work reflects a renewed emphasis on how detrimental slavery was to poor white southerners. Merritt argued that slavery was designed not only to exploit African American labor but to subdue poor whites as well. As a result of the economic patterns of planters, the mass of whites suffered not only from inequality and a lack of mobility, but a consistent depressed state. Slavery harmed so many poor whites so seriously, in Merritt’s reckoning, that its end represented a “double emancipation.” Clearly, however, only one group, African Americans, truly needed emancipation from chattel slavery. As historians came to focus more intently on their plight, the utility of applying earlier models like the old “agricultural ladder” fall short. Enslaved people suffered most from the expansion of the commercial agriculture in the South (Brown 1976; Wright 2003; Merritt 2017).

While the historiography of American slavery has exploded since the 1960s into a constellation of studies exploring themes like culture, religion, family, and resistance, the last 20 years or so of scholarship have vastly improved its reckoning with enslaved people as farmers. Bondspeople lived close to the land, albeit in a coerced intimacy. In many ways, enslaved people were the experts. They held and passed down a deep knowledge of the land and crops. In fact, it was often enslaved farmers who actually tested new methods, crop varieties, and technology. The landscape of production heavily influenced enslaved people’s concept of their neighborhoods. The system treated their bodies as commodities. Nearly everything enslaved farmers did held implications for production. Even bondspeople’s social worlds affected and were affected by the crop routine. They made the most of it in order to carve out breathing room despite the brutality of the system. For example, scholars like Daina Ramey Berry have identified the practice of “working socials,” which brought enslaved farmers together as they completed tasks like corn shucking. In these ways, bonded farmers overlay their own meaning onto the crop regime. The newest scholarship on slave-grown rice, sugar, and cotton recognizes the skilled, expert, if coerced, nature of enslaved people’s farm labor (Stewart 1996; Berry 2007; Kaye 2007).

While crops and environment cannot be fairly regarded as deterministic, the natural requirements of intensive rice, sugar, and cotton production were found in abundance in the antebellum South. The coastal Carolinas and Georgia had offered prime rice land since the colonial period. In the antebellum years, rice operations became more concentrated into fewer hands while spreading to new acreage. Some areas saw dramatic increases in production—rice output from the North Carolina low country increased by 124 percent from 1849 to 1859. Enslaved rice farmers intimately understood this crop developed by their ancestors. New overseers often learned the business from their charges. Relying on the task system, rice planters required laborers to construct ditches and canals. Parceling out the labor into tasks based on a set area of 5–7 acres epitomized the intersection of concepts of labor, time, and space for enslaved people. All of the work was done by hand except for the pounding, which was performed by mills that relied on the power of the receding tide. When the mills came to be powered by steam, enslaved people traded ditching work for labor harvesting pine to fuel the fire. Mart Stewart’s groundbreaking study of the Georgia coast showcases how enslaved people’s lives and work both shaped and were shaped by the landscape of rice culture. One important aspect of rice culture was the presence of uncultivated interstices that facilitated bondspeople’s autonomy away from sites of production. The landscape, routine, and management practices of their captors facilitated enslaved people’s claim of the bounty of nature for their own benefit—for example, to supplement their diet (Clifton 1985; Dusinberre 1996; Stewart 1996; Carney 2001).

Because the product had to be processed on-site, sugar production in the lower Mississippi Valley had always been capital-intensive, but planters realized returns that encouraged them to expand their operations in the antebellum period. While the gang system prevailed, slaveholders employed the task system when it suited. The methods and routines of raising and processing sugar cane continually advanced. Richard Follett shows how steam technology and the more efficient organization of the production routine imbued enslaved workers’ labor with some industrial character. Planters and underling managers increasingly subdivided and specialized the tasks. Enslaved sugar farmers and processors endured a grinding regime that required adaptability as much as strength. As in rice cultivation, it was not just enslaved people’s manpower but their knowledge and skill that developed the sugar economy. The mean annual output of a Louisiana sugar operation increased from 108 hogsheads in 1830 to 310 hogsheads in what Follett calls the “bumper crop” year of 1853. The rise was the result of expansion and increased productivity. Finally, Richard Follett’s study of Louisiana sugar cultivation found that, because profit-minded planters desired to incentivize their labor force, enslaved farmers enjoyed more opportunities to convert their “extra” time and effort to cash or goods (Follett 2005).

As conducive as sugar and rice production had always been to slave labor, it was cotton that breathed new life into slavery. The improvement in processing technology reenergized the system, which had seemed to many contemporaries as destined to die out. Scholars like Anthony Kaye have aptly labeled the cotton plantation expansion that arose after about 1820 the “second slavery.” This new, harsher, more capitalistic form of chattel slavery may have been unleashed by the new saw gin but was boosted by the availability of capital and fed by Indian removals. The second slavery relied on the expansion of western cotton acreage. It transformed former hinterlands or peripheries into centers of production. As with other antebellum agricultural products, innovation in crop varieties improved yields. Upland cotton, especially Mexican varieties, had become the mainstay by the 1840s (while sea island cotton remained in cultivation in the southeast). Planters experimented in order to find and develop plants with greater disease resistance, more fiber, and the tendency of the lint to cling to the boll, which reduced the risk associated with planting more than could be quickly harvested. Cotton plantation productivity rose in the antebellum period—faster than the productivity of American workers overall—but scholars offer differing explanations as to why. While Olmstead and Rhode attribute the increase to improved cotton varieties, Edward Baptist famously ascribed it to a “pushing system” that required enslaved harvesters to pick ever more cotton each day of the harvest (Gray 1933; Olmstead and Rhode 2008; Kaye 2009; Baptist 2014).

Olmstead and Rhode found that women’s picking was essential to the cotton harvest routine. In rice, women made up 60–80 percent of rice hands. One of the pioneers in the scholarship on free and enslaved black women’s labor, Jacqueline Jones demonstrated that slaveholders and their managers did not shrink from assigning enslaved women to so-called men’s work. Yet when whites directed bondswomen’s labor away from the crop, it was usually put toward a domestic task. Further, whites only trained men in skills like carpentry or blacksmithing, and relied on enslaved men to drive wagon teams, meaning that bondswomen were less likely to engage in farm tasks that took them away from the farm or plantation. At the same time, in bondspeople’s own household relationships they formed gendered ideas about labor. Stephanie Camp has emphasized bondswomen’s “second shift”—the work they did in their family’s cabin after the required work day ended. As mothers, bondswomen reproduced their captors’ investment; all aspects of their lives related to production. Even when they cared for their families, enslaved women added to their captors’ production (Jones 1985; Camp 2004; Berry 2007; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

As chattel, what opportunities did enslaved people have to engage in market activity on their own terms? While scholars have worked for decades now to uncover details concerning what has been termed the “slaves’ economy,” Dylan Penningroth’s Claims of Kinfolk became the standard for using pension files and Southern Claims Commission records to piece together what enslaved people managed to acquire and trade, and what meaning they made of their formal and informal market activity. As we have discussed, Mart Stewart emphasized the ways in which enslaved rice farmers converted their surroundings into food and goods in this micro-economy, while Richard Follett found in the sugar fields of Louisiana a system in which slaveholders extracted profit by utilizing enslaved people’s desire to take part in the market. When opportunity presented itself, enslaved people engaged in both sanctioned and underground exchange. But as property themselves, at the end of the day any “concessions” by whites served overall as input into the staple crop production. Enslaved people’s toil and productivity was never truly their own; they were denied the wealth they created. In fact, that is precisely how the most recent scholarship on slavery has framed the story, in what the field has dubbed the new histories of capitalism. Calvin Schermerhorn’s recent overview of American slavery, Unrequited Toil, emphasizes all of the ways in which chattel slavery robbed African Americans and prevented the creation of generational wealth (McDonald 1993; Stewart 1996; Penningroth 2003; Follett 2005; Schermerhorn 2018).

The debate about the relationship between slavery and capitalism is an old one. Most scholars would agree with John Clegg that “something fundamental changed” in antebellum America. Historians have long employed theories of capitalism as useful ways to try to understand that change. The new histories of capitalism, however, do not simply rehash previous conversations. Rather than establishing specific parameters for what counts as a capitalism (much to the frustration of their critics) and testing to see whether slavery in the American South fit, the new studies emphasize the capitalistic character of slavery. That is to say that these recent studies emphasize efficiency in allocating resources, highly regimented routines, modern financial instruments, and painstaking accounting (Martin 2010; Schermerhorn 2015; Beckert and Rockman 2016; Clegg 2020).

Relatedly, historians have used much ink on the topic of the coming of the Civil War but have not quite agreed upon exactly how the crisis connected to diverging ideas about agriculture. Historians have long since dispensed with the view that the Civil War was caused by a crisis between an agrarian South and an urban manufacturing North. In fact, both societies were made up largely of farmers. Southern income and northern income both grew in close comparison in antebellum years. Of course, the essential issue was slavery, but the question for agricultural historians and historians of the Civil War era has been to understand just how slavery (and its opposition) figured into Americans’ ideals about agriculture, identity, and opportunity. This has led many scholars to the tenets of the Republican Party, finding insight in free soil ideology. Of course, as the historiography of the Civil War era shows, not all northerners took to this ideology. To provide an example from the farm communities discussed above, while Clark found that the Republican Party offered political unity to Connecticut Valley farmers, Nation’s study of southern Indiana farmers revealed a localism that prevented the Republican Party from resonating (Foner 1970; Clark 1990; Wright 2003; Nation 2005).

Recent work by James L. Huston can provide a touchstone for the discussion. Huston contends that the sectional crisis was essentially grounded in two competing models of agriculture. Northern family farmers desired land in manageable chunks, around 80–120 acres, while southern planters pressed for consolidation of acreage. Slavery figured in because it supported the plantation complex. Americans clashed over which model would be pressed westward. Interestingly, Huston’s contention that northern farmers did not seek to accumulate, combined with the new histories of slavery’s capitalism, represents the exact opposite of the earliest mainstream academic arguments about the coming of the war. Now southerners were the aggressive capitalists and northerners resisted it, at least in terms of agriculture. Adam W. Dean makes similar conclusions to Huston’s by locating difference in how Americans in the North and South believed land should be used. But where Huston roots this divergence in English culture, Dean emphasizes environmentalism. The “civilizing mission” of family farming was the only hope of a free republic expanding westward (Dean 2015; Huston 2015).

But what role was played by the yeoman farmers who have taken up so much time of agricultural historians over the years? If, as Kulikoff argued, all yeomen agreed on a sense of independence and democracy, how did southern yeomen come to ally with their competitors, the planter class? Were southern yeomen duped into a war by their wealthier neighbors? Historians have produced a wealth of evidence that perceptions about the growing market economy contributed to the crisis. Even as farmers intensified their commercial production, well documented by the scholars discussed in this chapter, they wrestled with their role in it and what implications the market had for freedom and opportunity. Kulikoff contended that, however else they may have clashed, both southern yeomen and planters worried about the dangers of “wage slavery.” J. Mills Thornton found that while smaller Alabama farmers hated the concentration of wealth represented in railroads and banks, they did not apply the same level of distrust to planters’ consolidation of land and power; the sectional crisis actually smoothed over any simmering class divisions. Lacy K. Ford agreed that upcountry South Carolina yeomen’s fears about the growing power of the market and the interests of capital led them to draw on a belief in independence that they shared with planters, and therefore to support secession (Thornton 1981; Ford 1988; Kulikoff 1992).

Ultimately, many yeomen farmers in the South supported secession and knew what they were getting into. Eugene Genovese argued that they went in with both eyes open. They held substantial rights in the southern agricultural system, and understood clearly what their status was in southern society and what choices would benefit them. Nonslaveholders had social and family ties with slaveholders, and plantation belt yeomen aspired to be planters; they did not view the plantation system as a barrier to their own economic success. While Genovese deemphasized the role of race, Lacy K. Ford has explained that while some anxiety existed among smaller farmers, secessionists managed to assuage it by showing how the existence of black slavery prevented the creation of white bondage. Concepts of economic opportunity and race merged with gender among small farmers. Stephanie McCurry argued that yeomen felt in common cause with planters to defend mastery but always understood the power wielded by planters. As men and masters, however, they shared common cause. Merritt’s work contends that the lowliest southerners understood the conflict to be against their best interests. Meanwhile, enslaved farmers formed their own understanding of the contest not only as a connection between power and agricultural production but as power over self—which for captive farmers were one and the same (Genovese 1975; McCurry 1997; Ford 1986; Smith 2007; Merritt 2017).