of it brutally. The powerful but bifurcated American economy took shape: a southern region devoted to raising staples by plantation slavery that were destined for foreign lands, and a northern region based on the small family farm raising mixed crops to sell in a domestic urban market. In agricultural practices, the inheritance of the colonial period continued. Except for cotton and rice cultivation, most of the country’s farmers did not innovate, they remained locked in a local market arrangement, they exhibited no increase in productivity, and they neglected care of their animals.
The major agents of agricultural change 1789–1830 were political. The creation of a stronger national government under the Constitution in 1789 not only solved the Revolution’s debt problems, but it restored overseas markets for agricultural products, created a distribution system for the public domain, and gave land-ravenous settlers and speculators the power to defeat the Native American tribes and to confiscate their lands. Then the transportation improvements after 1810 increased the market activity of all farmers even if by no means eliminating subsistence agriculture.
The Role of the Federal Government
The new federal government under the Constitution removed some of the sorrowful conditions inherited from the Revolution. Alexander Hamilton’s financial program lifted the debt burden states had placed on farmers that produced Shays’s Rebellion, although his increase in excise taxes stirred a 1794 revolt in Western Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion (Slaughter 1986). The new national government also had some success in resolving trade problems produced by the Revolution. After 1783, the British blocked Americans from trading with their empire, but then the situation reversed itself because of European wars following the French Revolution. These conflicts affected American agriculture in one important area: the restoration of trade relations between the United States and the British Empire. British restrictions against US trade fell in Jay’s Treaty of 1795, conditions then worsened under the British Orders in Council and became more restrictive when the countries went to war in 1812, and then became regularized at the war’s conclusion. Although friction between Britain and the United States continued, trade between them resumed (Dykstra 1999).
The new republic also expanded the nation’s boundaries. Beyond the borders established by the Treaty of Paris in 1783 (some 889,000 square miles), the federal government obtained in 1803 the 827,000 square miles that formed the Louisiana Purchase area. Then, in 1819, the United States acquired Florida from Spain and a strip of land along the Gulf coast, equaling 72,000 square miles. The beneficiaries of this expansion were the country’s farmers (Hughes and Cain 1998).
The land acquired, however, belonged to others. From the beginning of European settlement, strife between Native Americans and Europeans flared into warfare. The source of the conflict was land. Although national US political leaders debated how to treat the tribes, settlers simply wanted them exterminated or pushed to the West, and between 1790 and 1815 the US military drove the tribes into submission and confiscated the bulk of their landholdings (Van Atta 2014; Weeks 2016). Military conquest set the stage for the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (Rothman 2005; Weeks 2016). It needs to be stressed that the agrarian republic that was going to grow and prosper after 1815 had its foundation in bloodshed and the forcible seizure of Native American land.
Congress’s ownership of lands obtained through military conquest and purchase from foreign nations became known as the public domain and distribution of it to citizens became the responsibility of the federal government. Guiding the creators of US public land policy was the sordid example of Kentucky in the 1780s and 1790s, which became a mess because of imprecise land surveys. Only wealthy plantation lords and land speculators profited; small farmers lost everything, and Kentucky ended up in 1792, when entering statehood, of having two-thirds of its white population landless (Aron 1996). Continental Congress tried to avoid the Kentucky debacle in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. For farming, the ordinances demanded that before land sales could take place, land surveys had to be conducted so exact boundaries for land titles could be established. They also required that land be sold at public auctions. These ordinances had numerous deficiencies when put in practice, but overlapping boundary lines were not one of them (Pattison 1957).
Congress soon passed new laws concerning disposition of western lands. Congressmen, for national financial reasons, crafted laws demanding purchase in large acreages, high prices per acre, and specie payment. This design ran into the persistent problems of “squatters”—people who moved onto public lands before they were surveyed. Congress passed major land laws in 1796, 1800, 1804, and 1820, plus many smaller ones; they all moved toward reducing the minimum amount of land a person needed to purchase and its price per acre, allowing for time payments, and finally establishing a means to enable squatters to obtain land legally. The laws presaged the Preemption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862 (Robbins 1976).
Disposition of the public domain has been a convoluted history because of the actions of speculators and land companies. These individuals desired to purchase western land at low prices and then sell it later to settlers at an enhanced price, thereby financially injuring small farmers. Speculators and land companies became visible after 1750; some early examples of land companies are the Ohio Company of Associates, the Transylvania Company, and the Phelps-Gorham tract in New York that became the Holland Land Company (Friedenberg 1992; Aron 1996; Dunaway 1996). Land speculators included some of the most famous early American leaders, like George Washington, Patrick Henry, John Sevier, William Blount, Andrew Jackson, James Bowdoin, and Henry Knox (Alan Taylor 1990; Aron 1996; Ray 2007). The greatest example of greed and corruption occurred in Georgia in the case known as the Yazoo land fraud (Hobson 2016).
The survey system aided land companies and speculators because the surveyors knew the best land, and they often were in contact with eastern investors. Moreover, the land laws did not put an upper limit on the number of acres that could be purchased. Thus when the government announced a land sale, wealthy speculators, knowing the best land to acquire, could outbid others and take vast acreages (Rohrbough 1968; Gates 1973; Friend 2010).
But the outcome of this speculative land frenzy was surprising. Above the Ohio River, the family farm of 100–200 acres came to dominate. Northern farmers lacked an exotic crop that Europeans desired; without such a crop, farmers could not earn enough to sustain financially large estates. Second, the North lacked the cheap labor the English system employed. Third, western states placed taxes on all land and thereby forced speculators and land companies to sell land as quickly as possible to avoid mounting tax costs. Hence the best strategy for speculators and land companies was to sell land in small parcels (Alan Taylor 1995; Davis 1998).
In the southern states, however, the large farm—the plantation—came to predominate. Southern states had crops, especially cotton, in exuberant demand in Europe; they obtained a cheap labor source by enslaving Africans; and, because slaveholders ran state governments, they kept taxes low. Those interested in securing good cotton lands got the information from surveyors, showed up at the public auctions, and bought immense tracts (Dupre 1997; Rothman 2005). Thus the land system of the federal government fostered the large farm in the south but had the opposite result in the north.
Farming Practices and Regional Development, 1789–1830
A national economy did not exist in 1789 or 1830; the nation had a multitude of local economies. Agriculture constituted the primary activity of the people; in 1800, farming constituted 83 percent of the working population; in 1830, 72 percent (Lebergott 1984). Total population grew from 3,929,000 in 1790 to 12,901,000 in 1830, fueled by the high American birthrate (Clark 2006; Johnson 2007). But this increase did not change farming practices. Most farmers lived in isolated communities with few connections to large markets. There was little change in agricultural productivity and little change in national economic growth (Weiss 1993; Johnson 2007). The great alteration in American agriculture was the rise of world demand for cotton.
The
