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AGRARIANISM

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The word "agrarianism" comes from the Latin lex agraria, an ancient Roman law that called for the equal division of public lands. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, the word identified any land reform movement that sought to redistribute cultivated lands equally. Such agitation was a response in part to the eighteenth-century English Enclosure Acts, which disrupted traditional agricultural practices. In the twentieth century the word shed this radical reform definition. In the early twenty-first century agrarianism points to a collection of political, philosophical, and literary ideas that together tend to describe farm life in ideal terms.

Agrarianism finds expression in the literary pastoral tradition, which stretches back to ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Theocritus and Virgil. The pastoral envisions the natural world as an escape from the complexities of urban life. In a rural landscape the character is restored by his interaction with nature, which then enables him to return to the city. In many accounts the pastoral also represents the human hope for the return of a golden age, the simple, happy life of long ago.

Borrowing from the French Physiocrats the idea that farming is the only truly productive enterprise, agrarianism claims that agriculture is the foundation of all other professions and is the only source of wealth. Philosophically agrarianism reflects the ideas of John Locke, who declared in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) that those who work land are its rightful owners. His labor theory of value influenced the thinking of Thomas Jefferson, who in turn shaped the way many nineteenth-century American homesteaders understood ownership of their farms.

In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, agrarianism felt the influence of the European Romantic movement. The British Romantic William Wordsworth, for example, chose to describe rural life in his poems because in country living the "essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity" (p. 596). Romantics focused attention on the individual and described nature as a spiritual force. As someone in constant contact with nature, the farmer was positioned to experience moments that transcend the mundane material world.

AGRARIANISM IN THE UNITED STATES

Central to agrarianism is private property. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asks, "What is an American?" His answer is a freeholder, a farmer who owns his own land and enjoys an agrarian utopia. Providing for his family using what he has available to him from nature and from his own abilities, this farmer draws his social and political identity from laboring in the earth. "This formerly rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm, and in return, it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of such a district" (p. 54). Crèvecoeur's independent freeholder represented an economic and social alternative to Europe's feudal relationships, crowded cities, and emerging factory systems.

Following the American Revolution, the availability of land and a relatively small U.S. population convinced Thomas Jefferson—and many others—that an enduring republic of family farms was a real possibility. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Jefferson defines the yeoman as a self-sufficient man free from "the casualties and caprice of customers" and the machinations of manufacturers and land speculators (p. 217). Jefferson's farmer owns a small piece of land that he and his family work to provide for themselves food, clothing, and shelter. In exchange for manufactured items, he sells any surplus goods to the "mobs of great cities" in Europe (p. 217). A defender of the Republic, this ideal farmer seeks to preserve his family's presence on the land through several generations. He embodies the bedrock virtues of the new nation: frugality, hard work, charity toward others, and love of God. Though Jefferson later modified his agrarian stance ("Letter to Benjamin Austin," p. 549), his original vision was in play in nineteenth-century American politics as a contrast to Alexander Hamilton's plan for a primarily commercial, manufacturing economy.

Agrarianism is woven into the fabric of much U.S. culture and literature in the period 1820–1870. American writers of the time came of age in a predominantly agricultural nation. Roughly 80 percent of people lived on farms in 1820, major cities were mainly confined to the East Coast, and the nation's industrialization had yet to take hold. By 1870, however, just over half of the people lived on farms, cities had sprouted across the West, railroads linked both coasts, and U.S. industrial production was rapidly expanding.

With the Industrial Revolution transforming social and economic relationships, Americans turned nostalgically to representations of simple rural life. For example, the popular songs "Home Sweet Home" (1823) and "The Old Oaken Bucket" (1826) romanticized country living. In the visual arts, the work of Jasper Cropsey and Asher Durand, who played major roles in the Hudson River school, were attracted to pastoral landscapes. The idealized rural scenes of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives dominated the mid-nineteenth-century popular art market. Jerome Thompson's The Haymakers (1859) is typical of idyllic farm scenes painted in the antebellum period. George Inness, perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century landscape painter, depicted in Peace and Plenty (1865) a tranquil harvest scene that offers a sense of healing for a nation wounded by civil war.

Like the farms in these paintings, most antebellum farms appeared to be noncapitalist and to operate on a subsistence basis. Neighborhood work exchanges and homemade goods were common, and farmers who raised their own food had little need to enter a cash market. Farm communities knew few class distinctions, and many men at least had the opportunity to move from farm laborer to farm owner. But as the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville writes in Democracy in America (1840), "Americans carry their businesslike qualities into agriculture, and their trading passions are displayed in that as in their other pursuits" (p. 157). In fact, throughout the period 1820–1870 farmers were evolving into small capitalists. Caught up in regional and national markets, they turned more and more to labor-saving machinery to cut costs, adopting, for example, Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper (1834) and John Deere's steel moldboard plow (1846). As time wore on, farm realities looked less and less like the static world of Jefferson's agrarian ideal.

NEW ENGLAND

Agriculture in New England grew increasingly commercial between 1820 and 1840. As internal improvements brought increased competition from western farmers, many New England farmers moved west to new lands or left farming altogether. Those who remained specialized in milk, cheese, fruits, and vegetables for cities such as Boston, which grew rapidly in the 1830s and 1840s due to the Industrial Revolution's demand for wage laborers.

New England's transcendentalists often had mixed feelings about farmers and farming. Advocating self-reliance and understanding nature as symbolic of the spiritual realm, transcendentalists saw the farmer in a unique place to perfect himself. But as much as it is an occupation that offers the individual access to the divine, farming is also a material activity that can lead to a sole focus on financial gain, something Tocqueville notes: "Equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor, but raises the notion of labor as a source of profit" (p. 152).

The arc of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking illustrates the transcendentalists' ambivalence. Early in his career Emerson drew on Jeffersonian agrarianism. In his essay Nature (1836), for example, he notes that farm life puts one in constant touch with the natural world and, by extension, spirit: "What is a farm but a mute gospel?" (p. 42). In 1837, in his poem "Concord Hymn," he immortalizes farmers as defenders of the nation:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

(P. 158)

In his 1844 lecture "The Young American," Emerson calls the farmer self-sufficient and notes that the land possesses "tranquillizing, sanative influences" that "repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education" (p. 366). In this essay he even touches the city-country divide: "Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities and infuse into them the passion for country life and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent" (p. 369). Pointing out that the West is "intruding a new and continental element into the national mind," Emerson asserts, "How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise" (p. 370).

In his 1858 address "Farming," however, Emerson wrestles with an agriculture that he knows is becoming ever more complex. At the outset he praises farmers in the conventional way, describing them as creators who possess "tranquility and innocence" (p. 137), but he soon defines them as akin to factory workers, as minders of a great machine (p. 142). Rather than communing with nature, farmers now manipulate it with advances in science and technology.

In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau describes his experiment in independence, self-sufficiency, and communion with the natural world. Critiquing commercial progress, Thoreau points to his farmer-neighbors, whose lives seldom embody the agrarian ideal, and asks: "Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt?" (p. 5). In his "Bean-Field" chapter, in which he outlines his own agricultural labors, Thoreau condemns farmers for attending only to material wants. He notes that husbandry was once a "sacred art" that is now "pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely" (pp. 182–183). But then again, Thoreau acknowledges that his farmwork is primarily a literary labor, admitting that he "must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day" (p. 179).

Nineteenth-century communitarian experiments such as Brook Farm also felt the influence of the agrarian ideal. Attempting to marry manual labor and intellectual work in an egalitarian setting, Brook Farm's founder, George Ripley, sought to "prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions" (quoted in Delano, p. 47). Emerson and Thoreau, however, distanced themselves from communitarian experiments such as Brook Farm, which sought reform by changing society, and asserted the individual's necessary task of reforming himself. Brook Farm attracted several important New England figures including, for a time, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In his The Blithedale Romance (1852), which alludes to Brook Farm, Hawthorne contrasts Silas Foster, the practical farmer, with the Blithedale idealists, who, in returning to the land, seek to show "mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles on which human society has all along been based" (p. 449). Unfortunately class issues doom the Blithedale idyll before it truly begins. Hawthorne's narrator, Coverdale, reminds readers near the beginning of his narrative that several people participate in the farm's experiment "not by necessity, but choice" (p. 452). He soon realizes that the dream of marrying heavy labor and intellectual activity does not work in practice: "The yeoman and the scholar . . . are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance" (p. 477). Blithedale's "beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life" collapses under the weight of sex and death, a fall into history that ends many gardens of bliss (p. 584).

Agrarianism often holds in high esteem physical labor rather than intellectual work. The virtuous farmer does real work, unlike greedy speculators and factory owners who sport in the city, a site of vice and venality. This tension over definitions of work reflects a political contrast between aristocratic Europe and the democratic United States, where everyone labors for his bread. The dignity of work finds expression in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) but is often imagined sentimentally, as in John Greenleaf Whittier's "The Huskers":

Swung o'er the heaped-up harvest, from pitchforks in the mow,

Shone dimly down the lanterns on the pleasant scene below;

The growing pile of husks behind, the golden ears before,

And laughing eyes and busy hands and brown cheeks glimmering o'er.

(P. 311)

Arguments over labor and land tend to dominate this period of American history. The political crises surrounding the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Compromise of 1850 pitted North and South over the extension of slavery. Should farming based on slavery be allowed in new states and territories? Should all labor be free? The South sought slavery's extension; the North sought its confinement if not end. The resulting compromises maintained a balance of power between the regions, but a final resolution of the conflict was only postponed. As the Civil War approached, slavery became a serious threat to the North's free-labor ideology.

But no matter their location, farmers in the agrarian ideal were always white men. Women, blacks, and Native Americans were excluded. For example, after Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act (1830), Cherokees fought displacement from Georgia using the agrarian ideal. Asserting that they were not hunter-gatherers living on unimproved land, they pointed to their cultivated fields as evidence that they had rights to the land they occupied. Though Cherokee memorials to Congress, as Timothy Sweet notes, "appeal[ed] directly to white culture's idealization of the Jeffersonian middle landscape," their appeals were ineffective (p. 126). In 1838 the U.S. Army removed Cherokees from their homelands and forced them west along the infamous Trail of Tears. White farmers quickly appropriated Cherokee land.

THE SOUTH

Agrarianism as described above was not universally embraced across the United States. The South's plantation system challenged the Jeffersonian vision of a nation populated by small farmers. Defenders of slavery knew that the yeoman ideal was a menace to the South's economy. For example, the radical proslavery writer George Fitzhugh, in Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (1857), defended an agriculture based on slavery and rejected capitalism as a destroyer of civilization.

Revising the agrarian ideal, southern writers replaced agrarianism's small family farm with an aristocratic plantation worked by docile slaves overseen by paternalistic masters. From the perspective of John Taylor, a Virginia planter and slaveholder, agriculture "secures health and vigor to both [mind and body]; and by combining a thorough knowledge of the real affairs of life, with a necessity for investigating the areana [sic] of nature, and the strongest invitations to the practice of morality, it becomes the best architect of a complete man" (p. 243). Unlike his neighbor Thomas Jefferson, however, Taylor felt few qualms about slavery. He asserts in his Arator essays (1814) that "liberality to slaves and working animals, is the fountain of [farmers'] profit" (p. 237).

The South's plantation system spawned its own literature, beginning notably with John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832). In The Hireling and the Slave (1854) the poet and politician William John Grayson defends slavery, claiming, for example, that a slave sale is simply "a transfer of labor from one employer to another. . . . The sale of the slave is the form in which the laws secure the slave from this misery of the hireling—secure to him a certainty of employment and a certainty of subsistence" (p. viii). In Woodcraft (1854) the novelist William Gilmore Simms answers Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by depicting harmonious relationships between a master and his slave. For example, near the close of the novel, when his master, Captain Porgy, attempts to free him, the slave, Tom, refuses: "Ef I doesn't b'long to you, you b'long to me. . . . You b'longs to me Tom, jes' as much as me Tom b'long to you; and you nebber guine git you free paper from me long as you lib" (p. 528).

But thousands of antebellum slave narratives challenged these conceptions of southern farm life, reminding readers of the brutality and dehumanization of slavery. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) depicts the slave breaker Covey as a farmer who sees no contradiction between his Sunday churchgoing and his whipping and breeding of slaves. Douglass describes farms not as places of repose and virtue but as sites of violence and moral degeneracy. Similarly the national and international best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin attacks the southern plantation ideal in its portrayal of violence and slave sales.

After the Civil War, African Americans, like the Cherokees before them, sought inclusion in the agrarian ideal. One step in that direction, the Southern Homestead Act (1866), intended to create farms like those in the North by opening to ex-slaves southern federal public lands. But freedmen's hopes for homesteads went largely unrealized, and African Americans were soon absorbed by the sharecropping system that dominated much of southern farm life for the rest of the nineteenth century.

The Southern Homestead Act was based on the 1862 Homestead Act. Important in settling the West, the Homestead Act offered settlers 160 acres of land in return for five years of residence and improvements plus payment of a $10 registration fee. The act was backed by urban activists such as the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, author of What I Know of Farming (1870), who followed Locke and Jefferson in believing that anyone who worked a piece of ground ought to have title to it. Greeley hoped that the act would resettle on western homesteads unemployed urban workers. As Henry Nash Smith asserts, advocates of the act "sincerely believed that the yeoman depicted in the myth of the garden was an accurate representation of the common man" (p. 172).

How farmers defined themselves, however, has been a matter of historical debate, though they likely understood that the ideal world described by writers and politicians was just that, an ideal. And though most farmers saw themselves before the Civil War as self-sufficient freeholders, by 1870 at least many described themselves as businessmen rather than Jeffersonian yeomen. The years following the war witnessed an intensification of U.S. industrialization that drew most existing subsistence-farming communities into capital-intensive farming. Soon agriculture became more and more mechanized, and economic disillusion spread in rural areas, giving rise to the late-nineteenth-century Populist movement.

See also Labor; Nature; Transcendentalism; Urbanization

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. 1782. In Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, edited by Albert E. Stone, pp. 35–227. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. In The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces: The Western Tradition, 7th ed., vol. 2, edited by Sarah Lawall et al., pp. 696–753. New York: Norton, 1999.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Concord Hymn." 1837. In The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9, Poems, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson, pp. 158–159. New York: AMS Press, 1968.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Farming." 1858. In The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, Society and Solitude, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson, pp. 135–154. New York: AMS Press, 1968.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. 1837. In The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature: Addresses and Lectures, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson, pp. 1–77. New York: AMS Press, 1968.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Young American." 1844. In The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature: Addresses and Lectures, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson, pp. 361–395. New York: AMS Press, 1968.

Fitzhugh, George. Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters. 1857. Edited by C. Vann Woodward. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Grayson, William J. The Hireling and the Slave. Charleston, S.C.: J. Russell, 1854.

Greeley, Horace. What I Know of Farming. 1870. New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. 1852. In The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Norman Holmes Pearson, pp. 439–585. New York: Modern Library, 1937.

Jefferson, Thomas. "Letter to Benjamin Austin, 9 January 1816." In The Portable Thomas Jefferson, edited by Merrill D. Peterson, pp. 547–550. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1787. In The Portable Thomas Jefferson, edited by Merrill D. Peterson, pp. 23–232. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion. 1832. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1861.

Locke, John. Of Civil Government: Second Treatise. 1690. Introduction by Russell Kirk, pp. 547–550. South Bend, Ind.: Gateway Editions, 1955.

Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft; or, Hawks about the Dovecote. 1854. Edited by Charles S. Watson. New Haven, Conn.: New College and University Press, 1983.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1852. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Taylor, John. Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political. 1813. Georgetown, Columbia: J. M. Carter, 1814.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. In The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 2. New York: AMS Press, 1968.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1840. Vol. 2. Edited by Phillips Bradley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Edited by Gay Wilson Allen. New York: New American Library, 1980.

Whittier, John Greenleaf. "The Huskers." In The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 3, pp. 308–314. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.

Wordsworth, William. "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." 1802. In Romantic Poetry and Prose, edited by Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, pp. 592–611. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Secondary Works

Burns, Sarah. Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Delano, Sterling F. "Brook Farm." In The American Renaissance in New England, vol. 223 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Wesley T. Mott, pp. 46–51. Detroit: Gale, 2000.

Govan, Thomas P. "Agrarian and Agrarianism: A Study in the Use and Abuse of Words." Journal of Southern History 30, no. 1 (1964): 35–47.

Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Agrarianism in American Literature. New York: Odyssey Press, 1969.

Kulikoff, Allan. The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Montmarquet, James A. The Idea of Agrarianism: From Hunter-Gatherer to Agrarian Radical in Western Culture. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1989.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1950. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Sweet, Timothy. American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

William Conlogue