Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  As the war against the woods ended, a new front in the struggle with nature was beginning to open. Thoreau lamented many aspects of what agriculture had done to New England but saved his greatest ire for the factories and railroads that soon intruded on the landscape. And yet, how ironic that this critic of progress should have earned a living as a surveyor, measuring the land into discrete parcels so it could be bought and sold. Indeed, he had surveyed Walden Woods so extensively that he once wrote, “I now see it mapped in my mind’s eye … as so many men’s wood lots.”29 When he lugged his surveying equipment out to mark off the land, he participated in what became a major preoccupation for nineteenth-century Americans: the transformation of the earth—its soil, trees, and even water—into a set of commodities. Next we explore that shift in detail.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Although little known outside of a small circle of philosopher colleagues during his life, in the twentieth century Thoreau emerged as the very personification of the wilderness ethic. (Library of Congress)

  PART TWO

  RATIONALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  4

  A WORLD OF COMMODITIES

  Henry David Thoreau, despite his work as a surveyor, never believed that landownership conferred any true claim to nature. Indeed, he remained, in his writing at least, dead set against the worlds of both property and exchange. In one of his journal entries, he wrote of an encounter with a townsman where he condemned the idea of putting a price tag on nature: “Remarking to old Mr. B————the other day on the abundance of apples, ‘Yes,’ says he, ‘and fair as dollars too.’ That’s the kind of beauty they see in apples.”1 Thoreau, for his part, saw in apples, not dollar signs, but the wondrous glories of life on earth. The bard of Walden, however, was out of step with one of the ruling passions of his time.

  The most striking thing about the century following 1790 was the way that new technologies and social innovations helped to redistribute natural wealth—water, soil, trees, and animals—among regions. This recycling of natural capital, more than anything else, sets apart the industrial age. The single most powerful tool for parceling out resources was the concept of a commodity. By conceiving of such things as water and trees as commodities, rather than as the face of nature, and putting a price on them, it became possible to efficiently manage and reallocate what had now become resources. Reduced to economic units, elements of nature were moved about the country like pieces on a chessboard, redressing resource deficiencies wherever they arose and contributing to one of the greatest economic booms in the nation’s history.

  FACTORY WATERS

  In 1790, the United States was a reasonably prosperous nation of four million people—mainly farmers—packed into a narrow strip of land stretching from Maine to Georgia. Seventy years later, the country had become one of the world’s leading economic powers, with a population of 31 million. It led all nations in the amount of wheat it exported and ranked third in manufacturing behind only Britain and France. Average per capita wealth boomed in the first half of the nineteenth century; goods once available only to the wealthiest Americans became ordinary, everyday items. Economic development, in turn, led to the expansion of cities. Between 1790 and 1860, the urban population increased more than 30-fold from 202,000 to 6,217,000. An industrial revolution swept across the North, transforming the nation into an economic powerhouse.

  Factories, machines, railroads—these are the images that typically come to mind when we think about this new economic order. But industrial capitalism was not simply a techno-economic system; it was also an ecological regime based on the streamlining of nature. One of the earliest efforts at rationalization involved a shift in the use of rivers.

  Long before water became a commodity for powering New England’s factories, before the dams and canals produced energy, farmers relied on rivers and streams to provide food for the family economy. In the spring, when winter stores ran low, the colonists went fishing for shad, alewives, and salmon, species of fish that return from the ocean to freshwater streams to reproduce. Salmon were so plentiful during the colonial period that as late as 1700 they sold for only one cent a pound. Shad were even more copious, so much so that some felt embarrassed to be caught eating them. As one observer recalled, “it was discreditable for those who had a competency to eat shad.” One New Hampshire farmer visited a fishing place on the Merrimack River for six straight days in June 1772 and returned with a remarkable 551 shad for his efforts. The spring profusion of fish brought farmers descending on the region’s rivers, turning the most productive fishing spots into veritable carnivals, replete with drinking and card playing. Securing an important supply of dietary protein at precisely the point in the seasonal cycle when they needed it most, farmers may have also turned to fishing to relieve feelings of loneliness brought on by a long, hard winter.2

  In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Malthusian strains surfaced in New England, fish took on even more importance in the family economy. By this time, inhabitants had lost their embarrassment over eating shad, and the fish sold for a penny apiece in the Connecticut River valley. It is quite likely that the intensification of fishing led to a decline in the stock of migrating fish even before industrialization and the damming of rivers delivered the finishing blow to such species.

  With farmers more dependent than ever on fish, economic change and the rise of a new group of river users set the stage for a bitter and protracted conflict over the handling of New England’s waters. By the late eighteenth century, the owners of blast furnaces and textile mills forged their way onto rivers, erecting dams to supply factories with power for production. The move, combined with the harmful effects of farming on spawning grounds (as soil from plowed fields ran off into rivers), led to the eventual decimation of the spring fish runs.

  Located on the banks of streams at the point where the water descended most steeply, mills for grinding grain and sawing logs had existed since the early colonial period. Noisy and cumbersome wooden wheels captured the energy of the water as it rushed downstream and put it to work. The sounds of progress, however, could only be heard on a seasonal basis. The grinding of grain took place mainly in the fall, so it was hardly a problem for mill owners to open the dam gates in the spring when the fish runs began. But the new breed of factories required a continuous supply of water. Blast furnaces relied on a large leather bellows, powered by a waterwheel, to stoke the fire needed to remove the impurities from iron ore. Such furnaces for producing pig iron ran all day. With winters too cold for working out-of-doors and summers too hot and with fall a time of low river water, spring proved the ideal season to put a furnace in blast. Fishing suffered as a result.

  Textile factories were another story altogether. They raised high dams to create enough energy to power large numbers of machines and presented an even greater barrier for fish. The Englishman Samuel Slater, builder of what is reputed to be the first textile factory in America, constructed a dam in the early 1790s in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, that blocked the passage of fish upstream. In 1792, back-country farmers petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly to force Slater to remove the dam. But one of Slater’s partners used his political muscle with the legislature to head off the opposition.3

  In its scale, even the Slater mill was nothing compared with the factories that followed along New England’s more powerful Merrimack and Connecticut rivers. These enterprises had vast energy needs and, in the quest for greater production and profit, eventually transformed water itself into a commodity. The construction of mills at Lowell, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River helped lead to this new conception of water. In 1821, a group of New England capitalists known as the Boston Associates purchased land and water rights at Pawtucket Falls. Over the course of the next 15 years, they built an elaborate waterpower labyrinth consisting of seven power canals and a supporting network of locks and dams for providing the energy to make cotton cloth. The Boston Associates formed highly capitalized corporations wi
th the money to build impressive waterpower systems. This new generation of business enterprises outstripped all earlier attempts to control water. But as impressive as the physical infrastructure was, the corporations showed even more creativity and drive when it came to selling the water itself.

  In early America, the English common law (a body of legal principles based on court decisions and customs, as opposed to law created by legislative enactments) guided the colonists in their relationship with water. Landowners along a river had rights (not outright ownership) to use the water for fishing or other purposes as long as they did not impede the natural flow to the detriment of others along the stream. When mill owners sold their property, they rarely, if ever, provided precise figures on the amount of water that flowed through it. They simply sold the land with the understanding that the new owner would have whatever rights that the law allowed.4

  The corporation responsible for distributing water at Lowell, however, disposed of the resource in a completely different manner. One of its chief innovations was the “mill-power” concept. A mill-power equaled the amount of water necessary to drive 3,584 spindles for spinning cotton yarn—the capacity of one of the Boston Associates’ earliest factories—plus all the other machinery necessary for transforming the yarn into cloth. The concept enabled the company to easily package water and put it up for sale. By the 1830s, companies at Lowell were even able to purchase water without buying any land, breaking with past tradition. Water itself had become a commodity.

  This trend went hand in hand with increasing ecological change, especially in the 1840s as plans accelerated to build a new textile city downstream from Lowell in Lawrence, Massachusetts. With only a five-foot drop in elevation at the river site—compared with a 30-foot fall at Lowell—a dam some 32 feet high had to be built to supply enough energy to the Lawrence factories. The completion of this monumental structure sealed off the Merrimack River, providing the finishing blow to the already severely compromised spring fish runs. What had once been a free-flowing body of water open to salmon, shad, and alewives had been transformed into one long power canal.

  With Lawrence rising along the lower Merrimack and the mills at Lowell already running more machinery than ever before, waterpower became an increasingly precious commodity. The unpredictability of rainfall and the increased demand for waterpower eventually spurred the corporations along the lower Merrimack to seek control over the entire river itself, from its headwaters in New Hampshire down to the sea. By 1859, the factories at Lowell and Lawrence had, by virtue of an elaborate series of land purchases, secured the rights to New Hampshire’s largest lakes, an empire amounting to 103 square miles of water.

  Using a set of dams placed at the outlets of the lakes, agents employed by the Massachusetts factories stored water in the winter and spring for use between July and October when a lack of rain often made water scarce. In the past, the mills were at the mercy of the seasons, with dry conditions dragging down production. The New Hampshire acquisitions, however, liberated the factories from nature’s calendar and allowed them to hum all year round.

  This grand scheme for controlling the entire river amounted to a massive redistribution of water wealth from New Hampshire to Massachusetts. Some considered what the Boston Associates had done to be tantamount to theft, and they rose up to defy them. In 1859, a group protested by trying to destroy a dam in Lake Village, New Hampshire, a key structure in the Boston Associates’ designs for water. The mob was led by a man named James Worster, who in the decade or so leading up to the attack either threatened or destroyed no fewer than three different dams owned by the Boston businessmen. In 1847, Worster ripped off an abutment and chopped down planking belonging to a dam managed by the Great Falls Manufacturing Company in Somersworth, New Hampshire. He believed, probably correctly, that the structure was flooding his property. In 1859, Worster and his compatriots arrived at the dam in Lake Village and proceeded to try to level it using axes and iron bars, but evidently they caused no serious harm.

  The attackers were a varied group. Some were farmers angry that their meadows were flooded to convenience out-of-state factories. Others were upstream mill owners who resented being forced to follow the waterpower schedule of the lower Merrimack corporations. Yet more were loggers who wanted the gates lowered to send timber downstream. Some were simply poor and dispossessed—folks who were angry that the economic transformation pulsing through the region had left them behind.

  Others eschewed axes and iron bars and turned to the law to redress their grievances. What they found was that the law too was changing, evolving in a direction that conceived of water as a tool for bolstering the new industrial order. In deciding disputes over access to water, the courts had long held to a so-called natural-flow rule: Water had to flow as it had customarily flowed. In the nineteenth century, however, as large manufacturing establishments filled in along the rivers of the North, the courts shifted toward the doctrine of reasonable use. Under this new rule, courts weighed the different interests at stake in the use of water, sacrificing the wishes of some for the larger good of a community. “The rule is flexible, and suited to the growing and changing wants of communities,” wrote one New Hampshire judge.5 Because no one could say exactly what was in the best interests of any community, the rule tended to favor those who used the river to generate the greatest economic prosperity. The doctrine rested on an understanding of water as a commodity in the service of economic growth. Such a view meshed nicely with the needs of the Boston Associates, who in the end had their way with the river.

  The industrial revolution meant more than simply the rise of factories, railroads, and new forms of work and social life. It brought about class conflict under the factory roof, to be sure—strikes and walkouts over wages and hours—but it also involved a struggle over nature, over who would control it and for what ends. The mills along the lower Merrimack incorporated the natural wealth available in the countryside into their designs for production and in so doing produced more than just cloth. They generated a chain of ecological and social consequences that spilled out beyond the factories, affecting places and people more than 100 miles away in a completely different state. Nothing better demonstrates the ways in which industrialization led to a major reallocation of natural resources, enriching some at the expense of others.

  GRID AND GRAIN

  Efforts to commodify water paled beside the far more sweeping attempt to package and impose order on the fertile lands of the Midwest and beyond. Beginning in the 1780s and continuing into the next century, the rich soil of the prairie was neatly divided and sold to farmers. They planted grain and then marketed it throughout America (and Europe), in effect spreading the West’s soil wealth throughout the nation.

  More than anyone else, Thomas Jefferson initiated the makeover of the West into a checkerboard. Jefferson believed that small freeholding farmers—yeomen, men who could care for their families on their own without the need for hiring hands—formed the basis of a democratic society. “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” he wrote in 1785. “They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous & they are tied to their country & wedded to liberty & interests by the most lasting bonds.”6 Just the right amount of land was needed to ensure the yeoman’s independence and virtue. Too much land would create a nation of tyrants; too little, a country of paupers. Striking the perfect balance between western soil and the people who would farm it became a major preoccupation for this founding father.

  To execute his plan for democracy, Jefferson proposed something called the U.S. Rectangular Land Survey—familiarly known as the grid. Under the plan, surveyors were first sent to eastern Ohio with instructions to divide the land into boxes that would measure six miles square. Then they were instructed to divide these larger boxes into smaller ones, one-mile square, which were divided, yet again, into quarter sections measuring 160 acres each, considered to be the approximate size for a single farm. In 1785, Congress passe
d the grid into law and from that point on this same checkerboard pattern was etched across the West—one of the most far-reaching attempts at rationalizing a landscape in world history.

  The grid was the outward expression of a culture wedded not simply to democracy, but to markets and exchange as well. It would aid in the rapid settlement of the country, turning millions of Americans into independent landowners, while at the same time transforming the land itself—its varied topography, soil, and water conditions—into a commodity, a uniform set of boxes easily bought and sold. But the grid was only the first step in the prairie’s journey to distant markets.

  THE GRID

  Surveyors finished imposing the geometric logic of the grid on the area east of present-day La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1845. (Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order upon the Land [New York: Oxford University Press, 1976])

  Once farmers purchased land they needed to plow up the existing vegetation. The prairie grasses that thrived on the organically rich, deep soil laid down by the glaciers thousands of years earlier were at first a challenge to cut. Wooden plows with edges made of iron proved virtually useless. Only with the development and spread of the steel plow—invented in 1837 by John Deere, an Illinois blacksmith—did the dense sod succumb. In place of the native vegetation, farmers planted corn and wheat, domesticated species of grass that grow best in a monocultural environment, that is, in fields by themselves. These crops tend to grow quickly, socking away carbohydrates in their seeds. With bread constituting a major component of the American diet, wheat would eventually emerge as the West’s major cash crop; acres and acres of some of the world’s best agricultural land in states such as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas were plowed up and given over to the plant.