by Steven Stoll
And yet, we should not overestimate access to a functional commons. In some places, tenants and wage laborers faced tighter control and greater dependency. We tend to think of manufacturing as organizing work in eastern cities, not in the backcountry. But that’s a false distinction. In the 1780s, a saltworks in Kentucky at Bullitt’s Lick employed landless white men, African-American slaves, and children who spent their days boiling the water of a saline pond. Their situation reveals that household autonomy could be elusive. The tensions within the spectrum of access and ownership added an essential stressor that made the Whiskey Tax intolerable. Still, we should keep these categories open and flexible, as highlanders themselves did. Labor for others formed a limb on the tree of the makeshift economy. No matter who owned the woods, if use-rights prevailed in the shadow of absentee neglect, then everyone from titled yeomen to laborers could feed their children on bear meat, let their pigs fend for roots and acorns, and plant rye for whiskey in fugitive clearings.24
George Washington had no interest in occupying land but in holding it and turning it over as real estate. The common folk looked at land differently. They shifted their fields and gardens around in it. They roved and hunted over it. They used all the resources they could gather into their households, from the trickling water lapped up by a cow to the mushrooms that grew in spring. To them, the landscape composed a breathing, mossy, muddy lattice. And though they surely speculated when they could and did not always treat the woods in their possession especially well—running too many head or cutting too much timber—their dependence on it made them environmental managers by default.
The homestead consisted of a tripartite ecological structure: wood, tillage, and garden. But it was never a static thing. Agrarian economy in the eighteenth century differed from that of the nineteenth century. The extent of woods, the degree of labor intensity on a given piece of land, the frequency of burning, the area of pasture, the supply of wild game—all these changed in time, forcing adaptation. One thing never changed, however. The agrarian economy of the mountains depended on the forest.
The backwoods culture was not founded on farming, but hunting. This single subsistence activity formed the core of a land-extensive, open-range materialism. Hunting yielded spectacular quantities of food for little exertion. But it also posed a problem. Nothing provided like the hunt, and yet nothing was as fragile. Animals migrated and their numbers fluctuated for ecological and other reasons. Too many hunters in the woods resulted in smaller and fewer creatures. Disruption in the supply of game prompted families to move on. But when moving on was not an option, a scarcity of game compelled households to fall back on farming. As a combined subsistence strategy, hunting, herding, and farming spread risk in the backwoods. But these practices, it should be clear, required an extensive landscape, unencumbered by private property.
The strategy of seeking the high elevations had its pull and push. Hunting pulled; slavery pushed. The members of makeshift households fled in advance of slavery, not because they loathed the idea of it or had any empathy for African-Americans. They escaped the economic pressure exerted by the cotton economy, especially the transformation of land into a commodity. Full-scale tobacco and cotton production spread along with the money invested in human chattel. Another reason might have had to do with diminished opportunity to earn wages. Planters had no reason to hire when they had a captive labor force. “Far more whites moved from slave to free states than from free to slave states,” writes Allan Kulikoff. “Because cotton production so thoroughly focused the migration paths of slaves, whites who moved west from the old South often found themselves in virtually free societies.”25
Like agrarians everywhere, the first backwoods settlers used swidden, burning and planting in spatial rotation through the ecological base. The method is known by many other names, like forest fallow, burnbeating, and shifting cultivation. Agriculture transfers fertile nutrients from soils to plants to people. There is a constant limiting factor of production, whether nitrogen or phosphorus, below which production is inefficient or plants won’t grow. The purpose of forest fallow is to use forest dynamics to replace nutrients by allowing trees to regenerate before again releasing their stored-up elements with fire. The American practice might have come from Delaware Indians. But the anthropologists Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups believe that Finns and Swedes brought their burnbeating method and that American swiddens (clearings) probably looked like those of northern Europe. Settlers burned in two stages: first the understory and small trees, then the larger ones after they fell. After planting for a number of years, they cleared another area while the old one grew up in bramble and young trees.26
The author of a popular handbook for settlement described turning trees into grass. The farmer begins by removing brush under the size of an arm—the laurel, sumac, and sassafras—and then throws hay on the ground in the fall and winter so the cattle will scatter the hayseed. “In early spring all the timber not wanted for fencing and other purposes, is cut down for browse, and permitted to lie as it falls for a few years, until the limbs are rotten or tramped down by the grazing stock, when fire is set to the trunks in seasons of leisure, and the last snag is reduced to ashes.” Another method was to girdle the trees by cutting a band around the trunk. After the canopies died, the trees could be burned or planting could begin amid the standing skeletons, as long as sunlight reached the forest floor. Forest and farm formed a whole, a revolving, shifting landscape of uses. Remove the forest from the seasonal cycle and the agrarian economy no longer makes sense. It turns into something else.27
By the time John Lorain encountered mountain farmers, around 1820, he saw them removing deadened branches and logs and burning them in a pile. This method kept the fire under control, so it was better adapted to closer neighbors and snake-rail fences. Lorain saw them shifting, too. Right after they had finished clearing one stand, they girdled and cut the next. He saw their land overworked and hard-run, “so much exhausted that cockle, cheat, and other weeds form by far the principal part of his crops.” But Lorain wrote thirty years after the Whiskey Rebellion. Swidden had already become a questionable strategy where a larger population made land to shift in more scarce.28
Burning created spaces for planting. We know little about how much land households claimed as their own or used in extensive and intensive systems. A range of two to four hundred acres seems to have been common on the border bracing western Pennsylvania and western Virginia, in the Monongahela Valley. Joseph Doddridge, whose family lived in that region, recalled that no one could claim more than four hundred acres. “Many of our first settlers seemed to regard this amount of the surface of the earth as the allotment of divine providence for one family, and believed that any attempt to get more would be sinful.” This begins to point to the agroecological problem at the core of the Whiskey Tax.29
The largest and most labor-intensive spaces in the tripartite system were clearings for fields. A mountain farm did not consist mainly of fields. Someone who used, claimed, or owned an area of two hundred acres usually improved no more than around twenty. About half of all landowners maintained between one and ten cleared acres at any given time. And because the classification of improved land included pasture, the number of acres dedicated to corn and rye would have been substantially lower. Ninety percent of a typical farm in Springhill Township, Westmoreland County, remained in forest in 1783. But here is the crux of the numbers and the agroecological window they open. The extent of tillage a household could maintain was “expensive” in terms of the labor and time it demanded. We can only guess at how they organized the work of fields, but evidence from other places suggests that a group of five to seven people could have sown, weeded, and harvested eight to ten acres of grain. In other words, whatever they planted represented a significant investment, resulting in a commodity they would have prized and protected.30
Corn was the preeminent crop of the backcountry. The food it generates for the labor it demands is unlike that of
any other plant. But highlanders also planted another domesticated grass, one known for its hardiness and versatility. They loved rye. Archaeological evidence for a domesticated cultivar of Secale cereale links it to Anatolia and Iran, where its wild relatives can still be found. By the Bronze Age, it had arrived in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic. It showed up on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, along the Rhine and the Danube, but rye was never given much respect. It seems to have been more of a tolerated weed than a major food crop. To the untutored rambler, it looks like wheat. Rye is the only other bread grain, though it does not work up to the same light texture as its close cousin. Settlers in hardscrabble places embraced it for the way it thrives in environments too cold, dry, acidic, sandy, or worn out for wheat. It can be planted later in the season and at higher altitudes. As a winter cover crop, it returns nitrogen to the soil when it is folded under in the spring. It requires less time and attention than wheat or corn and doesn’t attract the same plethora of diseases. Rye survives in the crevices of the agrarian world, which made it ideal for the southern mountains.31
Highlanders in Pennsylvania did more than plant rye. They conducted it. They put it down for pasture, threw it to pigs as feed, and ate it themselves as porridge. Some planted a mixture of rye and wheat, producing flour known as meslin, which makes a heavy, dark bread. Others used it as a rough form of coffee. And just about everyone turned it into something else entirely. “All the back country of America is very favourable to the growth of rye,” wrote the English traveler William Strickland. “This grain is entirely consumed in the distillation of whiskey, chiefly for the consumption of the Irish frontier-man.” Converted into spirits, rye became nonperishable, densely valuable, and transportable.
Whiskey accelerated trade and exchange. A horse carried three or four bushels of grain, but it carried the equivalent of twenty bushels converted into liquor. In a world where most production fulfilled subsistence needs, whiskey connected agrarians to that second transactional realm, where distant commerce offered profit as the reward for entrepreneurial risk. Locally, it could be used to acquire every item of necessity and luxury. It paid the wages of workers and bought consumer goods. Anything that siphoned off its value threatened the entire economy of the backwoods. In effect, Washington, Hamilton, and Congress did not attach a duty to whiskey but to the ecological base. It was a hard enough policy that they attempted to remove some of the scarce value that came from the nexus of labor and the land. Even worse, they insisted that this scarce value take the form of something else that was scarce in the backcountry: money.32
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NATION-STATES EXACT TAXES in the form of money, either coin or paper currency. Anything can serve as money as long as users agree that it makes the value of different commodities commensurable. Americans favored notes issued against gold or silver reserves, or they used metal itself. Yet little of either circulated in the southern mountains. “The situation in this Country at present is very alarming for the want of Money,” complained a Pittsburgh merchant. “Very few in this Town can procure Money to go to market. And as to pay … a Debt it is out of the question.” In 1798, a Kentucky congressman estimated the total circulating currency in the state at less than ten thousand dollars. The distance from banks was one reason, but another was that money wasn’t necessary for most transactions. Regardless of the supply of money, however, the Whiskey Tax demanded that distillers lay their hands on it. The bluntness of this requirement is central to any materialist interpretation of the rebellion. It ignored the way people bought and sold things. Placing additional stress on money-earning commodities brought their production into question. The tax reverberated through stills and into the landscape.
Out of necessity, western people had an all-embracing view of money. A Pittsburgh storekeeper in 1786 accepted flour, whiskey, beef, pork, bacon, wheat, rye, oats, corn, ashes, candlewick, and tallow. Others traded for ginseng, snakeroot, skins and furs, and homespun linen. Everyone accepted gold and silver whenever it came around, regardless of whose head was stamped on it. By one estimate, fifty currencies circulated in and around Pittsburgh, including Spanish, French, English, and American. But notes issued against gold or silver reserves posed a problem. Every transaction began as a negotiation over their value. They traded at a higher discount the farther they traveled from the issuing institution. Did the South Carolina bank that printed its own bills have any gold?33
But just because money was scarce or absent did not mean that it played no part in exchanges. People held it in mind. We tend to misunderstand exchange in kind, also called barter. The monetary version of the theory of stages says that people barter before they adopt a representation of value. After money comes credit, followed by collateralized securities divided into thirty-year amortized bonds. But no anthropologist has yet found evidence for this supposed evolution. They have searched the world and the most ancient cultures but have never discovered “the land of barter.” Writes the British anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”34
To understand why, consider this definition from an English work of arithmetic published in 1789: “Barter, adjusts the exchange of one Commodity for another, so as neither Parties shall sustain Loss. To know how much of one Quantity must be given for another; find how much the given Quantity is Worth; and then, find what Quantity of the other, this Sum will purchase.” A barter exchange does not result in profit because nothing is left over. Each quantity is adjusted to match the value of the other. This is the commodity circuit condensed into a single transaction (C→M→C), in which both parties end up with equal value in commodity form. But the second sentence is the one that matters. In order to barter, each party must first determine the money value of their goods. They come to the table with this worth in mind. Barter is an exchange of things measured in some currency without currency present.35
The reason that no one bartered “pure and simple” is that it isn’t easy to do. My desire for your whiskey is likely far greater than your desire for my woolen sweaters. How much of one equals the other? We could go ahead and make the trade, but one of us is going to walk away feeling ripped off (you). People get angry when that happens, which is why that kind of trading is dangerous. But if each of us first converts our commodities into pounds or crowns or dollars, then we’re not trading incommensurate things. We’re trading the value of our labor as expressed in things and calculated in money.
The myth of barter assumes that people traded for use-value, but that makes no sense at all. The “double coincidence” so often hauled out to make barter seem stupid says that people meeting to trade must happen to need what each happens to have. This so-called problem runs close to depictions of the Savage State, in which isolated individuals roam around a foggy landscape bumping into each other accidentally. It denies the existence of communities of producers and divisions of labor. Most of all, the “double coincidence” says that no one in the murky past had the brains to buy stuff in order to resell it. In reality, anyone who buys one hundred pounds of anything has no personal use for it. He knows of a buyer in the next town. But if a barter exchange is not a comparison of use-values, then it has to be a comparison of exchange-values.
This is exactly what we find in the documents. Nimrod Warden kept an account book for a merchant house and farm in Hardy County, Virginia, in 1806. That January he bought 12 tuns of claret wine. (A tun is an English cask, a unit of liquid volume, not weight, that holds anywhere between 200 and 250 gallons. A hogshead [Hhd] is one-quarter of a tun.) Warden wrote, “Bartered with a north-county merchant 6 Hhds claret at £10 per Hhd for 40 pieces of linen cloth at 30s per piece.” He recorded his cost as sixty pounds, the same sum that the north-county merchant paid him. The north-county merchant did not swap cloth for wine. He paid sixty pounds’ worth of cloth for sixty pounds’ worth of wine.
If one quantity had a higher agreed-upon value than the other, a scratch in the account book rectified the credit or debit to be settled another time or folded into another transaction where the discrepancy would be absorbed. Parties to such an exchange walked away with a profit by tinkering with the ratio of value to quantity. But each had to accept the other’s ratio in order for the trade to be completed.36
The “land of barter” doesn’t exist, but economists won’t let go of it for lack of evidence. By erasing money from exchanges where it has always existed virtually, the myth presents money as a yet-to-be-achieved evolutionary stage. By extension, it posits that people who use little money make fewer exchanges, the sign of an undeveloped division of labor. But the backcountry churned with exchanges. Western communities sponsored expeditions to carry furs, whiskey, and ginseng by flat-bottom boat to Philadelphia, to the Ohio River, to the Mississippi River Valley, and as far south as New Orleans. The sale of these goods purchased others, like iron, glass, salt, and spices. Settlers had tastes and preferences; they valued variety and novelty. A French observer in Kentucky around 1800 saw peddlers canoeing on the Ohio River with haberdashery on board. Merchants imported pewter and porcelain, delicate glassware and books. One woman bought cups and saucers, a pinch box, and a butter boat from a merchant in the Virginia backcountry.37
