2020/04/28 by Allan Kulikoff · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Business, Management and Accounting · #American Environmental and Regional History #American History and Culture #Capitalism #Subsistence agriculture #Ideology #Probate #Rural history #Economic history #Politics #Agriculture #Sociology #History #Economy #Political science #Rural area #Economics #Law #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-8114806
published in Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 17(2), 105-107 (Duke University Press)
openalex publication_date 2020/04/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Over the past half century, Richard Lyman Bushman has made major contributions to early New England social and political history, the history of material culture, and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. An interest in rural life flows through his work. The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century, his most recent book, places farmers and farming at the center of the early American experience. Bushman builds on a large, contentious literature on agriculture, farmer ideology, rural uprisings, and rural capitalist development and imaginatively uses farm diaries, farm account books, tax lists, and probate records to paint the daily lives of people who farmed the mainland British colonies.Bushman devises a familial model of farming, eliding debates about the nature of rural society. Historians disagree about farmers’ place in the Atlantic economy. They agree that farmers wanted subsistence, traded with neighbors, and vended goods at market, but using models devised in neoclassical economics, neo-Marxian theory, or the new social history, they have imputed farmers with capitalist, precapitalist, or anticapitalist ideas, all while debating the meaning of capitalism. Bushman does not engage these sometimes sterile debates but argues that, because early American farmers were uninterested in determining profit and loss on capital, their familial system did not encompass capitalist agriculture.Bushman distinguishes farming in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, places broadly representative of their regions. Distinctions, he contends, developed out of climatic differences: in places with 180 or more frost-free days, farmers, their families, servants, and slaves could work the entire year. In New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies, save small areas along the coast, farmers had fewer than the 180 frost-free days. Thus, New England farmers never found a staple export, and those in the mid-Atlantic, who exported wheat, rarely used labor full-time.Farmers, Bushman argues, ran family enterprises. All members of the house-hold—wives, children, servants, slaves—labored to sustain the farm, striving for food security. Fathers and children had an implicit bargain: children began working on the farm as soon as they were able and worked, under their father’s (or mother’s) guidance, through their teens until marriage. At marriage they received a marriage portion—land, household goods, or slaves. When their father died, his assets, after paying debts, went to his wife and children. Bushman gives examples of this training in each region and, separately, for white children, Indians, and slaves.“Self-provisioning” farmers wished to make as much food, cloth, and implements on their own farms as they could. They traded surpluses with neighbors and sold exportable goods to merchants. Bushman earlier called such farms “composite farms” because of their mixture of subsistence and commodity production. Poorer planters in the Chesapeake region, even those with a slave or two, could not compete with richer tobacco planters; instead, they directed their families and slaves to the lumbering and craft work (carpentry, in particular) great planters needed.Farmers needed access, and preferably ownership, of land to perpetuate their family lines. To achieve food security, they required more land than most English farmers had. Unimproved land had to be cleared before cultivation. Then, farmers cropped the land until it lost fertility, kept it fallow for two decades, moved on to another piece of land, and repeated the process. To fulfill the bargain to supply their sons with land, they regularly purchased land, accumulating five hundred to one thousand acres depending on how many children reached adulthood. Bushman suggests most American farmers bought sufficient land to perpetuate their lineages, even if they failed to acquire many hundreds of acres.Bushman’s model works best with the detailed examples he gleaned from diaries and other farmer accounts. His analysis of New London, Connecticut, farmer Joshua Hempstead, based on Hempstead’s nearly half-century diary, is the most informative of these sketches. Digging imaginatively into this text, Bushman sketches Hempstead’s farm activities and by-industries (particularly shipbuilding), his land acquisitions, training of his children, the division of labor on his properties, and bequests to his children.Bushman admits that farmers faced pressures in their search for security. Early marriage and high fertility caused the colonial population to double every quarter century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, land scarcity appeared in areas first settled by Europeans. Land scarcity raised land prices, leading some farmers to become tenants and others to move to frontiers, where gaining secure land tenure proved difficult. Indians controlled much frontier land, and land speculators, colonial governments, and local officials made getting land titles difficult.Desperate farmers rebelled repeatedly against their betters, particularly between the mid-1760s and early 1790s. Such rebellions took place in Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and both Carolinas, involving farmers born in every colony and Britain. The primary purpose of government, rebels insisted, was protection from violence or danger, particularly from Indians. They expected governments to make frontier land available, reduce taxes on their property or persons, and enforce debt and credit laws fairly. When governments failed to fulfill these responsibilities, farmers refused to pay high rents, closed courts, massacred Indians, and tried to form their own governments.Bushman’s depiction of farmer values and behavior is in tension with the family-farmer model he uses to explain them. Farmer success required persistence, industry, and luck, including good weather and child and spouse survival. A substantial, if unknowable, proportion of free colonial farmers (not to mention female Indian farmers) failed. The majority of farmers left few records, save a probate inventory and will—documents Bushman uses well. But the farmers whose lives he details nearly all succeeded, and even those who fell short, such as Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors, owned land. Joshua Hempstead, the Connecticut farmer and shipbuilder, was a local notable; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Bushman’s guide to Pennsylvania farming, son of a French count, became a gentleman-farmer; by the mid-eighteenth century, the Virginia Washington and Jefferson families, Bushman’s Southern examples, were part of the ruling gentry class.Bushman describes the economic differences between rich farmers and planters and poorer farmers but eschews class analysis when dealing with land conflicts. There is not much similarity between George Washington and the small tobacco planters of the Potomac region; the small planters were family farmers, while Washington ran a large-scale agricultural and industrial enterprise, where family labor had little importance. The colonial ruling class, however divided on other issues, sought peaceable and gradual development of border areas, preferably organized by land companies rather than individual farmers. Farmers, in contrast, demanded cheap land with secure titles. When colonies claimed the same acreage, farmers gravitated toward the colony that offered the cheapest land with the lowest taxes, inciting violence between settlers and setting colonial rulers against each other. If government officials refused to control Indian incursions or capture criminals, hiked taxes, or charged high legal fees, farmers and planters rebelled.The farmers who rebelled had different class interests than those of their betters. They devised a class ideology, one that Bushman fails to mention but is consistent with his analy sis. It justified farmers’ demand for cheap, if not free, land. That ideal—found prominently in manifestos of rural rebellions—connected the value of land to the labor put into it rather than to the land’s location, prior ownership, or market price. Familial patriarchs deserved the land they farmed because they had made worthless acreage productive. Since children and wives, crucial to productive processes, worked under the direction of the male household head, their work was subsumed, ideologically, under that of the father-husband. This labor theory of value links protests against landlords in New York and New Jersey, the Paxton Indian massacres in Pennsylvania, venal officials in North Carolina, and irresponsible government in South Carolina. These were all class conflicts—justified by this labor theory of value—between provincial ruling classes and small property-owning (or would-be property-owning) farmers.Bushman writes compellingly about farmers during the American Revolution. He explains that patriots among them did not join the movement until 1774, activated by the Boston Port Act. Farmers ignored the 1765 Stamp Act crisis, Bushman relates, because they rarely used stamped paper. But Bushman argues that farmers opposed the closure of the Boston port because it denied fellow subjects liberty, rather than for any economic reasons. Yet this closing did affect the property, livelihoods, and land security of farmers near Boston. Those expecting to sell goods to shippers lost money for taxes and necessary manufactures, threatening the credit on which they depended. With reason, farmers far from Boston feared loss of their land, and the familial security that Bushman demonstrates was key to their identities.These caveats notwithstanding, The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century is an important book, raising important questions about a majority of inhabitants of colonial British America. It is compellingly written, incorporates all farm workers—slaves and Indians as well as free white farmers and their families—into its narrative, and uses a wide range of sources with verve and imagination.