but only in some areas did they do so intensively. Most wheat production was located in the east, thinning dramatically west of Ohio and south of Virginia. Wheat growers sought hardier varieties with shorter ripening periods as the crop moved west. By the 1840s and 1850s, European types, generally known as “Mediterranean wheat” were widely grown in antebellum wheat fields. Wheat crops suffered, however, from Hessian flies, grain midges, and cinch bugs, devastating crops from New York and Pennsylvania to North Carolina and Virginia. By the 1840s, these pests were wreaking havoc on crops as far west as Iowa. This is not what kept so many southerners from growing enough wheat to supply their own region, though. Most of the South was not well suited to the crop, and where it appeared in the South it was usually sown in winter to be harvested in summer. Southern agriculture focused more heavily on corn and cotton, but substantial wheat crops could be found in the Georgia and North Carolina piedmonts and in middle and East Tennessee. Madison County, Tennessee, in particular, ramped up wheat production in the mid-1850s, doubling its harvest to 64,000 bushels in 1860. This increase was due to planters’ commercial activity, however; the poorest 40 percent of farmers in the county did not grow it (Hilliard 1972; Edwards 1999; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).
Tobacco culture has often been viewed as played out, doomed, and destructive in the antebellum period, while stubborn planters ignored reform measures and continued to exhaust the soil. Drew Swanson’s work in recent years, however, has refreshed the story. Tobacco in the antebellum period spread from its classic zones in Virginia and Maryland. Notorious for exhausting the soil, tobacco culture was not necessarily bereft of reform. William Galt, Jr. was just one farmer who sought to diversify for the sake of the market and the soil. Farmers like Galt grew tobacco by clearing new land and rotating crops, while experimenting with new varieties. It was the success in the 1840s of brightleaf tobacco that resurrected the crop and gained in popularity both in traditional tobacco-growing zones as well as west to Kentucky and north to the Connecticut River Valley. Although their efforts did not stave off all negative consequences of tobacco culture, planters did reform their methods, incorporating new technology, employing changes in land maintenance, and innovating curing methods, for example, by employing charcoal by the 1850s (Craven 2006 [1926]; Herndon 1978; Clark 1990; Olmstead and Rhode 2008; Swanson 2014).
Having surveyed a few of the common agricultural pursuits across North and South, let us turn to a question that has motivated many agricultural historians who have studied this period—how much market intensification did antebellum farmers undertake? And considering that there was at least some commercial expansion in various regions, to what extent did reliance on the market undercut farmers’ independence? Were they self-sufficient or dependent? Did the very character of American farming change?
In the North, the earliest and most extensive commercial production arose in garden crops, wheat, and dairy. Demand for food steadily increased in developing urban areas, making surplus production a better bet for farmers. By the 1850s, competition had become steep in some zones. For example, many wheat farmers purchased newly developed reapers, while those who could not afford the upgrade fell behind. Atack and Bateman characterized antebellum northern farmers as willingly drawing closer toward market participation. And while they argued that farmers remained in tune with the market, producers sometimes failed to maximize their opportunities. After 1830, as the market intensified, farmers who traditionally had engaged in reciprocal obligations or trade in kind in their dealings with one another gradually relied more on cash exchange among themselves. Local exchange between farmers that did not involve cash remained significant in rural communities, but its importance diminished. Farmers also shifted to a cycle in which they desired more cash in order to purchase goods, but needed more credit to make the improvements necessary to increase planting in order to acquire more cash (Atack and Bateman 1984; Clark 1990; Kulikoff 1992).
The story, however, is not one in which helpless farmers became wholly captive to an unwelcome, mysterious market. In investigating the Connecticut River Valley, Christopher Clark argues that northern farms become capitalist by the time of the Civil War due to their own agency. Farmers developed ideas about commercial agriculture and worked to realize them. Farmers’ choices facilitated the development of agricultural capitalism; in turn, urban market changes transformed agriculture. Connecticut Valley farmers lay down their sickles and picked up grain cradles. They employed seed drills, horse rakes, and mowing machines by the 1850s. They changed their routine to systematically gather, store, and spread manure. Overall, they intensified and specialized their production. As competition increased, farmers adapted. For example, in the 1850s Connecticut Valley broom corn declined as broom production had picked up in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. Some farmers responded by emphasizing food production for the growing towns to their east. Clark explains the economic shift for farmers in this era not as a loss of independence. In fact, commercialization meant a shift from dependence on one thing to dependence on something else. Connecticut Valley farmers had been dependent on obligations and connections within community. They now depended on more distant forces (Clark 1990).
Panning to the southwest, Richard Nation found that southern Indiana farmers similarly conceived of the agricultural transformation in terms of dependence on their local community being exchanged for a dependence on a broader network. But they preferred the local one, and proceeded cautiously. Southern Indiana farmers did not seek to amass wealth. Their most immediate goal was to provide for their families, after which they sought to profit enough to be able to support the next generation’s acquisition of land. Hoosiers practiced “safety-first” farming and sold surplus produce. Like many other areas of antebellum America, it was fiber and textiles that first drew southern Indiana farmers into the marketplace. When they produced their own material for cloth, they had relied on flax and wool. Over time, southern Indiana farm families preferred to purchase cloth, especially cotton. As a result, flax declined. Wool remained in significant production but farmers’ relationship to it changed. They were more likely to take their wool to someone else to spin, weave, and dye before making their clothing at home. In Hoosiers’ reckoning, distant markets proved useful but not essential. In fact, they represented a danger—farmers could dabble in them, but not trust them. Nation argues that when southern Indiana farmers produced larger surpluses for the market it did not so much indicate that they were capitalists but that they were careful (Nation 2005).
In the North Carolina piedmont, the lack of transportation other than protracted and expensive wagon trips discouraged farmers from marketing grain surpluses until the arrival of railroad networks in the 1850s. Even with that development, farmers there lived by the safety-first pattern. For example, farmers of the North Carolina piedmont proved less willing to take risks on new crops like the brightleaf tobacco. In Tennessee, subsistence farmers raised a bale or two of cotton for market but remained focused on self-sufficiency. Tennessee “plain folk” entered the market willingly but with caution. Corn was essential to their strategy because it could either go to market or supply the family with food (Escott 1989; Edwards 1999).
Indeed, it has become less convincing to describe southerners as disconnected from or resistant to the market in the antebellum period. In his classic Roots of Southern Populism, Steven Hahn argued that yeomen farmers of the Georgia upcountry were independent and self-sufficient, practicing, like so many of their counterparts in other zones, safety-first agriculture. They resisted commercialization even as cotton picked up after the 1850s. Their production protected them from many of the ups and downs of commercial agriculture. In fact, in this era, when yeomen managed to hold off commercial agriculture, they enjoyed more equality than they would come to know after the Civil War. As the nineteenth century wore on, yeomen in the Georgia upcountry endured the strengthened crosscurrent of large landholders and financiers pushing for market intensification. While much of Hahn’s characterization has stood the test of time, historian Allan Kulikoff contends that upcountry Georgia’s yeomen engaged in more commercial exchange in the antebellum period than Hahn’s telling allows. Finally, while historians have often characterized Appalachian farmers as disconnected from market forces until the latter part of the nineteenth century, historian Wilma Dunaway has proven that Appalachian farmers had always been subject to the commercial realities, offering land speculation as one major example (Hahn 1983; Kulikoff 1992; Dunaway 1996).
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