Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  The crucial point is that agrarians use markets. They have sold rubber, whiskey, quinoa, coffee, and textiles without becoming dependent on money. If we are to understand settlers, peasants, campesinos, and smallholders, we have to reject the falsehoods that they lived in isolation and that a makeshift economy is a bubble that bursts whenever it comes into contact with the “outside world.” We also have to abandon the related fiction that depicts exchange as a stage toward full capitalist social relations. Peasant entrepreneur is not a contradiction in terms. Exchange is integral to subsistence economies.

  The anthropologist Michael Dove spent years living with Indonesian smallholders in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. They plant rice in burned-over mountain openings or swiddens. Spirits and rituals attend the rice and the regeneration of the forest, rendering the final product something more than food. They never sell it. They regard it as a sacred form of sustenance that is identical with the community itself. The same people also tap Hevea rubber trees in forest stands. They have no use for rubber. Instead, they sell it worldwide, a practice that began in the early twentieth century “as just one element in a portfolio of economic activities.” Rubber tapping emerged from their long-standing custom of gathering and trading forest products. Rubber falls under entirely different rules than rice. No spirits get involved with it, and the profits do not need to be distributed. If a household moves from a longhouse, where a number of households live together, rice land remains with the longhouse to be used in common. But rubber gardens go with the household. The villagers recognize the moral dangers of money and try to control them in a variety of ways. Land where rubber grows they call “dead,” in the sense that it does not generate the community.61

  As long as rubber tapping doesn’t compete with rice planting for land or labor, it does not impinge upon the villagers’ subsistence, seasonal patterns, or rituals. Most amazing of all, Kalimantan villagers dominate national production. Eighty percent of the raw rubber sold abroad comes from smallholders. The other 20 percent comes from capitalist plantations. The villagers attain this stunning market share through efficiency and low costs, even though successive governments have favored and promoted the plantations. As Dove puts it, “There is a presumption that forest-dwelling smallholders live outside the market and must be assisted into it. This is a remarkable premise, given that the involvement of the region’s smallholders in production of commodities for global markets is ancient.” Not only does this strange presumption erase two thousand years of history, says Dove, it reverses the real problem smallholders have, “which is not how to get into the market, but how to stay—partly—out of it.”

  It is important to keep in mind that humans existed for 200,000 years without currency stamped in silver or issued by a bank. They exchanged things for money that they themselves created, money that provided a convenient conduit of value. But seashells and barley were mediums of exchange that could not be centralized or monopolized, at least not like Federal Reserve notes. Most of all, life did not depend on accumulating them. So, the question of a tipping point, a movement toward greater dependency after which money ceases to be an option and becomes a compulsion, did not exist before recent times. It has to do with financial institutions and international trade (which proliferated currencies), nation-states and colonial governments (which taxed), and loans against land (which created debt). Valuations in money reached peasant producers, who had to decide how to respond. On one hand, money opened possibilities for comfort and novelty that did not exist before. On the other, it brought into question whether they could exist without the exchanges they desired. One researcher argues that anyone who dedicates significant time to creating commodities really works for money. Even if smallholders keep their subsistence and commercial “accounts” separate, in some sense their work is already subsumed by their expectations for consumer goods. “The enigma of production for use,” writes the anthropologist Stephen Gudeman, “is not whether a surplus is produced but why the surplus which is produced does not accumulate and transform the system.”62

  Leaving aside Gudeman’s enigma, there are two primary ways that money can wreck agrarian systems. The first is debt and its state-sponsored version, taxation. Agrarians have turned themselves into commodity producers in a hurry whenever a creditor or colonial official has given them a choice between paying up in cash or rotting in prison. (I will have more to say about this in chapter 3.) The second is the destruction or enclosure of those common resources that enable production and consumption without money. Remove the ecological base and agrarians have no choice but to sell their labor in order to live. But a rising population can also grind down the viability of shared resources, multiplying users in a limited space. New farms cleared from a dwindling forest will be smaller though they have to support more people. The solution is and has always been for gardeners to exert more effort and innovate, to make two stalks of maize grow where one grew before. The mountaineers of West Virginia struggled to do this. When they felt the limits of the landscape, when their own increase and events out of their control narrowed the commons, they lost the capacity to create commodities. They faced the crisis of replacing the money that the forest no longer provided. Their quandary, to echo Dove, was not how to get into a circuit in which everything, including their labor, could be exchanged for money but how to keep themselves partly out of it.63

  Here are a few summary points.

  Agrarians depend on an ecological base, from which they derive subsistence and commodities. There is no fishing village without a fishery, no culture of hunting and grazing without a functioning forest. Too many people or poor management can erode an ecological base by extracting more from it than it can restore. But a functioning base is primary to agrarian existence. As long as people maintain access to environments unencumbered by private property or its enforcement, they can create commodities on their own terms. They can sell into markets without becoming dependent on markets for everything they need to live.

  People who practice the economy of makeshift live within limits imposed by land and labor. Agrarian households have only so many hands, so much land, and so much time, imposing limits on what they can make, sell, and consume. They cannot exceed these limits without turning into full-time commodity producers.

  Subsistence production includes the vigorous pursuit of money and exchange. These are not contradictory. Every smallholder lives within social divisions of labor that include neighbors, nearby villages, and distant cities. Money from exchanges becomes new tools and seeds, candy and kettles. A farmer who distills whiskey from his own rye, harvested by his family and neighbors, and uses the money to improve his fences or buy a new rifle is an entrepreneur. (Just for comparison, a planter who grows sugar with funds advanced by London merchants, using enslaved Africans purchased from Dutch traders, is a capitalist.) Exchange is the core of the commodity circuit, the cycle of production that describes most of the people who have ever lived.

  It would simplify things if we could leave it at that. But we can’t. At some undefined point, money can change in its role from an attribute of a household to its controlling purpose, from freedom to imperative. The question is whether or not a household can reproduce itself independent of its exchanges. The answer often hinges on the size and robustness of the ecological base. In other words, dependency often does not require outright dispossession. The means of production are a package of resources, a lattice of land uses. As we will see, the erosion of the base and the acceptance of wages often occurred at the same time. Mountaineers behaved just like other agrarians in the same situation: they sold their labor for money to make up for the commodities that they could no longer produce themselves.

  The American peasantry composed a multifaceted, highly varied set of agrarian cultures. In the U.S. history we all learned, peasants came to these shores and soon embraced commercial farming or sought the cities for greater opportunity, leaving antiquated practices behind. But that view erases who and what the
y really were and what they wanted. It buries their political struggles as historically irrelevant. A political ethic emerged from the experience of the American peasantry, agrarianism, a position that enshrined subsistence production and vigorous exchange in a social identity: the yeoman. What follows is a brief attempt to portray agrarian peoples and ideas before we find our way back to the southern mountains.

  * * *

  “THERE ARE NO PEASANTS IN AMERICA,” according to Alexis de Tocqueville. Most Americans would probably agree that the pioneers who rolled with Daniel Boone bowed in deference to no one. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner made the same distinction. English peasants arrived on the Atlantic coast, he said, but American farmers went forward, “becoming more and more American” with every westerly footstep. Social identities only exist in the context of actual relationships, actual environments, where they are continually created and reinforced. In this sense, Turner was right. Rather than a pecked-over island and a labyrinth of private property, refugees from enclosure found wild animals for hunting, spaces for grazing and planting, and trees of such astonishing size and number that North America must have looked to them like a new planet. Rather than the nobility seizing their land, they seized the land of others. Abundance, plus ownership, plus interaction and violence with Indians changed them. “He is become a freeholder, from perhaps a German boor,” said J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur of the peasant in possession of a deed; “he is now an American.”64

  But peasant is a perfectly good word to describe a country person. Settlers, peasants, campesinos, and smallholders are all agrarians in differing political worlds, practicing the economy of makeshift, taking full advantage of their environments and opportunities for exchange. Even if Tocqueville meant that there were no serfs in America, he was still wrong. African-American slaves endured similar kinds of control and violence and raised their own food, like Spanish and English medieval serfs. Woodland Indians lived much like free peasants in northern Europe, by gardening and hunting. British North America before about 1790 was a great and vast peasantry, with some living free of any lord and others in chains. What follows is a brief tour of those rural societies, a discussion of what endangered and changed them during the eighteenth century, and a few words about the distinct politics that came out of that time.

  The English-speaking peasantry of North America crossed the Atlantic for all sorts of reasons. The Puritans were Protestants who believed that the English Reformation had failed. They included separating and nonseparating factions of the Anglican Church. They fled rather than be prosecuted for speaking out. But their immigration had just as much to do with the bleakness, lack of opportunity, and hopeless deprivation that covered England in the seventeenth century. The minister Thomas Shepard abandoned the country for offering him no calling, “nor way of subsistence in peace and comfort to me and my family.” Still, only a few took the risk. It required money to finance the journey and family members who could be extricated from obligations or servitude. Poverty was the push. The pull was the thing that wrapped religious fundamentalism in livelihood—land unencumbered by lineage or rent and in quantities of which Englishmen had only dreamt. The pull was so great that young men signed up for seven years under the whip of a Virginia planter expecting a competency if they survived.65

  A young man who survived indenture might have become a yeoman. In England, a yeoman owned and operated a farm with no obligations to a lord. Unlike peasants, yeomen could vote in Parliament, a right that placed them just below the lowest gentry. Americans borrowed the English term for its sense of worthy work, free and clear ownership, and political participation. The term did not apply everywhere or to every farmer. A yeoman produced commodities for subsistence and exchange and embraced civic responsibilities, paid taxes to the county, and might have served in local government. Squatters did not qualify. The term escaped its strict meaning at some point. It figured in the American imagination as an aspiration and political identity because it combined liberty, autonomy, and dignity.

  Tens of thousands of would-be yeoman families crossed the waters during the seventeenth century. They joined a global settler migration that transformed almost every continent. The cold and scarcity that followed the plague and the onset of the Little Ice Age drove Europeans outward. They went to Tibet and the Nile; Hudson anchored at Manhattan; and La Salle sailed the Mississippi. Colonization and trade outsourced soils, forests, and labor to more fecund regions. Between 1600 and 1800, Britain added 3 million “ghost acres” on other continents to the 17 million acres of arable it had at home.66 World population increased from 400 million to at least 900 million during the same period, and most of those humans wanted land for planting and hunting. During the seventeenth century, the great powers opened their frontiers to avoid political turmoil. They funneled agrarian frustration into state formation. Ax-wielding invaders entered the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the Volga River Valley, and Manchuria, where they brought hundreds of millions of acres into production. Nothing about pioneering is unique to British North America. The practices for taking control of territory and opening soil to the plow are as old as agrarian societies themselves.67

  The agrarian incursion into Massachusetts and Virginia transformed the dispossessed of Britain into dispossessors. English and Scots, replete with cattle, wheat, and an ideology that stressed divine purpose, entered territories occupied by dozens of nations, most of whom practiced a more extensive land use and maintained smaller populations than they did. What followed was a prolonged conflict, the various instances of which are known by many names: the Pequot War (1637–1638), Cleft’s War (1643–1645), Metacom’s War (1675–1676), the French and Iroquois Wars (seventeenth century), King Philip’s War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), the Yamane War (1715–1717), the Chickasaw Wars (1720–1760), the Natchez War (1729–1731), the Cherokee War (1759–1761), Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763–1764), Little Turtle’s War (1790–1795), and the Creek War (1813–1814). A New England militia deported seven thousand French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755. The commanders justified the dispossession in bluntly expansionist terms, calling it “one of the greatest Things that ever the English did in America; for by all Accounts, that Part of the Country they possess, is as good Land as any in the World: In case therefore we could get some good English Farmers in their Room, this Province would abound with all Kinds of Provisions.” This was not an offhand observation. By then, good English farmers were running out of good farmland in New England.68

  Around the time that New Englanders invaded Canada, their households had entered a crisis. By 1771, farmers in Concord, Massachusetts, had plowed every available acre, breaking the town’s record for the largest area cultivated in a year. This was not a so-called Malthusian crisis. Plenty of ground could be found in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and also in New York and Pennsylvania up against Indian country. Some people headed north, but they made a bad bet. That land was not only farther from market, it was rockier and hillier. Land at the margins of profitability would never pay off a mortgage. Many decided to stay where they were, even as generational subdivision left them with smaller fields. They redoubled their labor and managed to feed themselves but with less and less left over for exchange.69

  We are looking for the market revolution in New England, and we will find it in the way rural families adapted to stagnant returns to labor. Country people had always made things at home, like textiles. Mothers and daughters put more time into piecework, because it paid better than what came from fields. Between the 1790s and the 1820s, the merchants who bought woolens from Massachusetts families requested greater output from these households in order to satisfy larger orders. When mothers and daughters strained to meet this demand, they virtually worked for the merchants in a putting-out system.70

  Suddenly, rather than money from woolens supplementing the farm, truncated farms increasingly subsidized incomes from home manufacturing. In the meantime, Boston merchants and their mechan
ics reconfigured the water-powered mill into the first water-powered factories. The price of coarse textiles fell below the price necessary to make the putting-out system viable. In order to hold on to a cash income and save the household, daughters went from piecework at their mothers’ looms to standing twelve hours a day at a clanking spinning frame. They became the first industrial workers in the United States.71

  That’s not the end of the story. There is an ecological component that tells us how Concord came to be planted fence post to fence post. Why did its farms become truncated? At the beginning of the eighteenth century, husbandmen managed their fields as part of a larger ecological base. Recall that a base is a renewable resource that provides spaces for fields, fodder, and gathering without requiring investment in money. Concord’s ecological base was the Great Meadow, the wetland at the heart of the town. It provided a nutrient infusion conveyed from grasses to animals to manure that ended up in damp furrows. The Great Meadow gave without taking, and everyone in Concord thrived.

  The only rule for living on an ecological base is to observe its limits. In the 1770s, the agrarian reformer Jared Eliot noticed a disquieting imbalance. “The necessary stock of the Country hath out-grown the meadows.” Writes the historian Brian Donahue, “That single phrase … foretold the end of the yeoman era in New England.” In order to make money beyond what the meadow would allow, farmers ran too many cattle. The system of mixed husbandry no longer functioned to restore itself from within itself. Fifty years later, the old system of management was gone. Towns all over New England underwent similar changes. Meadows and forests did not disappear, and communities continued to manage common spaces for a century, but they did so as part of a more intensive commercial world. If the ecological base does not provide fertility and space to shift in, then something has to replace what it once provided. That thing is money.72