Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  Farms became increasingly oriented toward money, with some families sending daughters and sons to factories in order to earn it. But here is the point and a reason for why money is so important for understanding agrarian economies and how they change. It allows the value of things to be transmitted to others. We assume that the value of our work is represented by a paycheck. But when value passes from employer to employed or when workers use their incomes to buy necessities, someone else can take value from them by paying them too little or by charging too much. After the Revolution, farmers worried about this. They counted up the implications. When workers received a wage, they might not be paid enough to meet their needs. When land had a price, it could be bought up for speculation and locked away from active use by an owner who did not live in the community. Farms that cost money had to make money, especially if the farmer was in debt to a bank. That changed what farmers planted and how much land they cleared. It changed the countryside. And when a farmer owed a debt he could not service for lack of money, or when the price of gold fluctuated, leaving him with worthless paper but his debts undiminished, his land could be taken away, along with his freedom. When farmers protested and criticized money and greed in order to advocate for themselves as a class, they began to shape a political language that came from their experience—agrarian politics.

  Thomas Jefferson is often thought of as representing agrarianism. But he said little about it and did even less to further it. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Jefferson referred to those who labored in the earth as “the chosen people of God,” in whose incorruptible breasts God had deposited “genuine virtue.” He wrote vaguely, never specifically, about those virtuous laborers because he was not one of them and did not know them. Though he gazed at the Blue Ridge from the windows of Monticello, he remained aloof from the log-cabin dwellers just a county or two away. More pointedly, Jefferson did not limit the expansion of slavery into the lower Mississippi River Valley, near New Orleans. The region had been a backwater to the slave-and-cotton economy. All sorts of displaced people, including the evicted Acadians, had ended up there with small allotments. He could have protected them. Instead, he said nothing as enslavers moved in and planted sugarcane during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Jefferson’s engagement in agrarian politics was more symbolic than substantive. As a planter himself, he represented the very land regime that caused smallholders to flee to the mountains.73

  One of the greatest examples of American agrarian thought consists of a series of letters written by an aristocratic Frenchman, the son of the count and countess of Crèvecoeur, who became a resident of Goshen, New York. After serving with France in the French and Indian War, he settled down as a farmer, raised a family, and changed his name to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In 1779, he learned that his father was ailing and left his farm to make his way back to France. Crossing British lines in New York City, Crèvecoeur was arrested and held as a spy for three months. He published Letters from an American Farmer in London in 1782, during the same sojourn. When he arrived home, he found his farm in ashes, learned that his wife had died, and went in search of his scattered children. Later, he returned to France, where he went into hiding to escape the guillotine. He died in 1813 after returning to his family’s ancestral estate.

  In his letters, Crèvecoeur lends his voice to a fictional farmer who does and does not resemble him. It is an essay on the glory of simple autonomy, in which the author weaves elements of his own life with the generalized condition of any other plain practical farmer of his time and place. Consider this famous reverie from Letter II:

  I owe nothing but a pepper-corn to my country, a small tribute to my king, with loyalty and due respect. I know no other landlord than the lord of all land, to whom I owe the most sincere gratitude. My father left me three hundred and seventy-one acres of land, forty-seven of which are good timothy meadow, an excellent orchard, a good house, and a substantial barn. It is my duty to think how happy I am that he lived to build and to pay for all these improvements. What are the labours which I have to undergo? What are my fatigues when compared to his, who had everything to do, from the first tree he felled to the finishing of his house?… My negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy. By a long series of industry and honest dealings, my father left behind him the name of a good man. I have but to tread his paths to be happy and a good man like him.74

  The farmer says he owes a peppercorn to the colonial government, employing a metaphor that links back to a feudal custom. English peasants who were granted lifelong leases needed to be reminded that the resident of the castle had not given up his right. Lords charged a symbolic annual fee, sometimes an actual peppercorn (later called peppercorn rent), in order to reinforce the social hierarchy. In other words, this is all the farmer owed king and colony—honorific lip service, nothing more.

  Next, Crèvecoeur gives thanks to the settler generation. His actual father lived in France and did not give him his farm. Crèvecoeur uses his fictional father to make an important point. Yeomen did not have much money. Their economy depended on the subordinate role of money. A mortgage on the farmer’s 371 acres would have run him in debt for most or all of his life. Either that, or he would have become the tenant of a rich man. George III might have extracted a peppercorn, but creditors extracted far more. Every would-be yeoman was willing to work a lifetime for a farm free and clear (“He will not be encumbered with debts and mortgages; what he raises will be his own”), even if that was mostly a dream in New York and New England by Crèvecoeur’s time. The farmer’s duty is to do well by his father’s generosity and pay the equity forward to his own children. The paragraph is a poetic ledger that details how much and to whom the farmer owes: nothing to his king, everything to God and his father. More obliquely, it speaks to the destructiveness of debt, the way it threatens the agrarian idyll.

  Slaves might seem entirely out of place among the farmer’s possessions. Crèvecoeur attempts a fine distinction. In his ninth letter, he condemns the cruelty of planters with the ferocity of an abolitionist. He cringes at the thought of Africans at auction in Charlestown, “whole families swept away, and brought, through storms and tempests, to this rich metropolis! There, arranged like horses at a fair, they are branded like cattle, and then driven to toil, to starve, and to languish.” The farmer says at one point that the contrast between planters and slaves “has often afforded me subjects of the most afflicting meditations … O Nature, where art thou?—Are not these blacks thy children as well as we?” These are searching words, but the farmer does not say that all of God’s children should be free. Planters bidding for black children sicken him but not slavery.75

  Crèvecoeur could not have imagined that African-Americans longed for the same security that he did. In the American South and the Caribbean, slaves carved out a realm of freedom by raising their own food. Some traded poultry and eggs with their masters for consumer goods. After emancipation, freed people from Georgia to Barbados found feral spaces where they established gardens of their own. Writes one observer of the Caribbean, “After the abolition of slavery, the ex-slaves and their descendants continued to refer to their homegrown food as provision and any piece of land over which they had some control or ownership, whether freehold, leasehold, or as squatters, as their piece of ground.” Ground provisions included breadfruit, plantains, yams, eddoes, and dasheen (taro). The fugitive slave William Wells Brown wanted nothing more than “a little farm.” Solomon Northup desired “the possession of some humble habitation, with a few surrounding acres.” Josiah Henson urged free blacks to make a clearing in the woods and “undertake the task … of settling upon wild lands which we could call our own;… where we could secure all the profits of our own labor.” Frederick Douglass exhorted his readers in words that could have come from Crèvecoeur, “To be dependent, is to be degraded … Go to farming. Be tillers of the soil.”76

  Yet provision grounds hidden in the woods and the fugitive existence of so many black
agrarians make this story entirely different from Crèvecoeur’s. Former planters wanted to recapture the labor of former slaves. All over the Atlantic World, white landowners and colonizers set out to eliminate the material foundation of black autonomy and force them to work for money. A critic wrote of the black agrarian in 1875, “If he settles on a small tract of land of his own, as so many thousands do now-a-days, he becomes almost a cumberer of the ground [a burden or detractor], caring for nothing save to get a living, and raising only a bale of cotton or so where with to get ‘supplies.’ For the rest he can fish and hunt.” James Steuart said it no more frankly. In other words, in spite of attempts to obstruct them, such farmers succeeded in maintaining themselves in food and money without wages.77

  White agrarian writers of the 1850s feared the same thing that former slaves did. They believed that slaveholders and industrialists wanted to seize the public lands for themselves, dispossess farmers, and employ them as hirelings. Two writers came to the defense of plain, practical farmers.

  “A Nation will be powerful, prosperous, and happy, in proportion to the number of independent cultivators of its soil,” lectured Representative George Washington Julian of Indiana. In 1851, he addressed the House to urge the passage of a homestead bill. Julian defined landed prosperity as a right, one “as inalienable, as emphatically God-given, as the right to liberty or life.” He dwelled on this. “The gift of life, I repeat, is inseparable from the resources by which alone it can be made a blessing.” Such a right could not mean a mere right to breathe. “The right to life implies what the law books call a ‘right of way’ to its enjoyment. It carries necessarily with it the right to the means of living, including not only the elements of light, air, fire, and water, but land also.” But for all his eloquence, Julian lacked a universal vision. The inalienable right of the common farmer would be cut from the “unpeopled regions of the great West,” Indian country. Of course, no unpeopled regions existed. Julian regarded Indians as expendable, unentitled to their own right of way.

  But Julian worried that the smallholders he championed might be as expendable as he supposed Indians to be. The idea that the United States should give away homesteads to antislavery farmers on the Plains came from Julian’s fear that slaveholders would try to influence the formation of states there. Three years before the Kansas–Nebraska Act, he saw the possibility that a popular sovereignty provision would throw the northern Plains into dispute. He also worried that great combinations of capital would get hold of the Plains and turn it into a wheat factory. “The freedom of the public lands … will weaken the system of chattel slavery, by making war upon its kindred system of wages slavery.” Homesteads would advance a virtuous economy against two immoral ones.78

  The New England naturalist Wilson Flagg echoed Julian’s fears in 1859. Flagg trembled at the thought of the steam engine. He made the crucial distinction between the machine and its social relations, between its “apparent benefits upon mankind” and the “inevitable tendency of this great invention to concentrate all wealth and power into the hands of capitalists.” Joint-stock companies in western New York planned to farm on a new scale. “These corporations, executing almost all their heavy labor by steam power and mammoth implements, would crowd out of the ranks of agriculture all those whose farms were of such small extent, that steam could not be profitably used by them.” He calculated. If steam power cut and threshed the same commodity for ten dollars that the small farmer grew for a hundred, then it wouldn’t be long before agents arrived at every kitchen door offering to buy. Husbandmen would then sell, for any price.

  Flagg imagined a bleak, machine-driven landscape. State legislatures would order the sale of land under laws of eminent domain, just as the railroads had engrossed for private gain by claiming the public good. Agricultural corporations would consolidate a varied countryside into fields of five hundred, even one thousand acres. He envisioned the gentleness and diversity of the landscape—oaks and maples, hills and ponds—uprooted and swept away “by some giant infernal machine” and graded into “one vast level,” all to make it possible for engines to do their relentless gauging and skimming. He saw farmers falling into the same hellish maw. Their labor had been hard but sweet. Not for much longer. Flagg reported from the near future. “The farmers, their wives and their children, have all been reduced to servitude in this grand manufactory of corn and vegetables.” Flagg fought the times and offered a rearguard policy. “We should refuse to agriculture any aid which is not beneficial to the agriculturist—for the farmer is of more importance than his crops.”

  Most of the factors of what would become industrial agriculture existed by the 1850s. Within a decade, growing wheat on the northern Great Plains and in the San Joaquin Valley of California took on a scale unprecedented in North America. Farmers became hirelings in the service of infernal machines, just as Julian and Flagg feared.

  There are a few ideas to take away from this brief history of the American peasantry and its fate. It is not a tale of freedom leading to abundance. Every movement of transplanted Europeans resulted in the bereavement of Native Americans. The yeoman farm was never a stable institution. It was impinged upon by debt, taxation, commodity prices, war, and a decline in its ecological base. Agrarians resisted technological change. They saw innovations like steam power as threatening everything they required to reproduce themselves as a class—control over a diverse landscape, the terms of work, and the members of their households. It is easy to see them as fuming and thundering on the wrong side of change, but they held a different vision of what the United States should be. Yet all throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, none of the eloquent advocates for the interests and endurance of agrarian economy mentioned another European peasant culture, the people who had climbed into the southern mountains.79

  * * *

  DANIEL BOONE’S CULTURAL ANCESTORS, if not actually his genetic ones, were Swedish woodsmen who arrived in the lower Delaware River Valley, north and south of what would become Philadelphia, in 1638. Swedes do not figure much in the following pages, but they brought the tools, houses, and temperament that eventually covered the southern mountains. In other words, the culture of Appalachia began in practices imported from the hardscrabble northern fringe of Europe. The emigration of the first Swedes was really more of an exile. Even by the standards of other forest dwellers, these kirvesmiehet were considered volatile. They hated permanent farming, preferring to follow the hunt no matter where it led them. The Swedish government didn’t want them roaming around and somehow persuaded them to ship for North America.

  For seventeen years, they colonized along the Delaware River. They planted rye in burned-over clearings and built houses of jointed logs. The Dutch took over in 1655 and the English in 1665. Neither could stop the Swedes. Finns of the Savo-Karelian culture arrived at about this time, bringing many of the same skills. By 1681, a culture group had formed, numbering around one thousand people in scattered enclaves up the tributaries into New Jersey. Over the next century, this hybrid continued to hybridize, absorbing emigrants from Wales, France, and Germany. They lived in the territory of the Lenape, who taught them foodways, herbal cures, and warfare. The Ulster-Scots or Scots-Irish were another people from the hardscrabble, another hybrid. They had been thrown together by the British colonization of Northern Ireland before fleeing to North America around 1715. The Scots-Irish rapidly emerged as the majority ethnicity of the woodland settlement culture.80

  These fire-wielding hunters with their long rifles and log cabins composed one of the most land-extensive and socially explosive agrarian societies the world has ever known. They scattered from their hearth along the Delaware River into Maryland, Pennsylvania, and western Virginia, through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ohio River Valley. Generations linked to the same core group sought unencumbered land in Illinois, the Great Plains of Kansas and Nebraska, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where they finally ran out of continent.
In the midst of this feverish movement, they became soldiers in the British wars for North America and in the expansion of the United States. And they engaged in violence with Indians, in innumerable skirmishes and massacres. They disrupted relationships, as well as landscapes, wherever they went.

  The earliest cabins appeared in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1650s. A group of Delaware sachems complained to a Dutch general that the Swedes settled wherever they wanted. “The Swede builds and plants … on our lands, without buying them or asking us.” The sachems decided to vacate to the Dutch so that when the reckless interlopers “pull down the Dutch houses and drive away the people,” the Delaware wouldn’t be blamed for it. The sachems explained again and again that the land in question had not been gifted or sold but taken. A Dutch report concerning the same borderland between New Sweden and New Netherland said much worse of the Swedes. They had invaded sovereign territory, “disregarding all our protests.” An indignant officer called them arrogant, insolent, and contemptuous.

  Over the next century, the same hunters continued to move westerly, without asking anyone’s permission. After the Quaker William Penn arrived in 1681, he exercised remarkable control over the woods granted him and his family by the king of England, Charles II. One of the first things Penn did was sign a treaty with the Delaware and allied nations that launched seventy years of negotiated coexistence. But backwoods households often complicated the work of Conestoga and English diplomats. In 1731, a group of Conestoga reminded Penn’s descendants that the Indians had “lived in Good Friendship with the Christian Inhabitants” and that Penn himself “had promis’d them they Should Not be Disturbed by any Settlers on the west Side of Sasquehanah.” The government of Pennsylvania took these complaints seriously, but found it increasingly impossible to manage the frontier.