market focus infringe on their ability to feed themselves? Studies on the question have found the answer to vary depending on region. The deep dives pursued by agricultural historians Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman represent the sort of inquiry historians have employed to understand the implications of greater commercialization in antebellum farming. They found that in many areas of the northeast, because the farming population declined, operations did not always produce much food surplus. For example, corn and grain surpluses were much higher in the west than east. The largest northern surpluses of corn came from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas while the northeast often experienced a deficit. On the other hand, the Midwest generated a smaller surplus of dairy. While most northern farms produced dairy products, northeastern farmers in particular increased their production of butter, cheese, and milk in the antebellum years. All in all, while some parts of the North produced surpluses in one food product, that could come with the deficit of another (Bateman 1978; Atack and Bateman 1984).
To return to Clark’s study of Western Massachusetts, a whopping 70–80 percent of the Connecticut Valley’s workforce remained in agriculture in 1860. This was in stark contrast to many areas of the eastern North. While the bulk of farmers in the area purchased flour as wheat production declined, their efforts overall remained fairly diversified. This was in part a lesson learned from the Panic of 1837, a devastating economic slump that had prompted caution among Western Massachusetts’ farmers. Due to their continued production of corn, potatoes, wheat, rye, butter, cheese, and livestock, Connecticut Valley farmers continued to feed themselves in the antebellum period (Clark 1990).
The South was another story. While the most notable historian of southern foodstuffs, Sam Bowers Hilliard, explained that the South managed to provide enough food for the region overall, this was largely due to the Upper South feeding the Lower South. The huge swaths of the South that focused on cash crops relied on the food surplus production of Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Old Northwest. The crops that captured the bulk of plantation agriculture’s commercial focus—tobacco, sugar, and cotton—could not be relied upon as a food store in a pinch (rice being the exception). Southerners grew corn, potatoes (a higher production of sweet potatoes in the lower regions and domination of white potatoes in the upper region), and other garden crops, and boasted sizable pork production. Yet, in Hilliard’s reckoning, the interior market for food remained underdeveloped. Thus, the Upper South as a food source proved essential. Overall, Hilliard concluded that the antebellum South managed to feed itself (Hilliard 1972).
Lacy K. Ford’s in-depth comparison of two areas of the South Carolina upcountry provides a closer look. In the upper piedmont, 86 percent of farmers could be classified as yeomen and nearly 70 percent of them participated in the cotton economy by growing a bale or two of cotton. The majority of the yeomen were also self-sufficient in grain as the familiar safety-first pattern of production dominated the upper piedmont. In the lower piedmont, however, yeomen produced much more cotton. In turn, they grew less corn, resulting in only about half of yeomen there boasting self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. A commercial expansion in the 1850s affected the whole area, bringing railroads and banks, and encouraging an increase in cotton production. The expansion of cotton in the upper piedmont reduced self-sufficiency. Nonslaveholders and smaller slaveholders alike in that zone cut back on their corn production by 25–30 percent. The dramatic result was that now 40 percent of nonslaveholders failed at self-sufficiency as did more than 34 percent of small slaveholders there. The lower piedmont experienced a similar pattern, but with less drastic results because farmers there had already placed less emphasis on corn and foodstuffs. Importantly, Ford argues that diminishing self-sufficiency did not mean that South Carolina upcountry yeomen gave up their independent mindset, just that they adjusted their calculations (Ford 1986).
As antebellum American farming changed, who benefited most? Who was left behind (or out) as commercialization grew? We can begin with a group that scholarship only belatedly turned to—women. Historians of farm women found that women’s work made up an essential part of the farm economy, child-rearing included. Households were domestic and productive units. In the antebellum period’s increasing connection to the market, the most dramatic shift that women underwent related to directing less of their energy toward fiber for home use in favor of dairy and poultry production. The rising demand and prices fetched by butter and milk in particular drew women’s participation in the market. The work took a toll on their bodies. While antebellum reformers in cities idealized rural life as healthier, populated by energetic, rosy-cheeked young women milking cows, others knew better. Contemporaries described farm mothers as bent and prematurely aged. Domestic work included heavy labor, while dairy work was taxing. Women not only performed the task of milking, which could strain muscles anyway, they prepared scald pans, skimmed, churned, and kept dairy facilities clean. According to Clark’s research on the Connecticut River Valley, from 90 to 98 percent of farms kept milk cows, where butter and cheese made up between 1/10 and 1/5 of farm earnings. The farm self-sufficiency we have discussed doubtless owed a great deal to women’s labor (Borish 1990; Clark 1990; McMurry 1995).
But what was the balance sheet in terms of power? Joan Jensen’s pioneering research in the 1980s concluded that while white women in Chester, Pennsylvania and African American women in New Castle, Delaware remained restricted by a legal code that denied them control over property and the fruits of their labor, they made some other gains. Beginning in the 1830s, household production by women took on more importance, especially when it brought in cash. They asserted themselves as consumers and with their cash-generating work scaffolded their family’s economic security. These women knew what they wanted from the market economy. They increased production in order to improve their home amenities and purchase goods like cloth. Women also bore fewer children in the Northeast and Midwest as commercial agriculture intensified, while southern women’s birthrates did not drop. Kulikoff estimates that children born to women in Midwestern states declined from an average of 7–8 to 3–4. Women in this era also achieved an increasingly public presence, although scholars debate whether or not women always thought of their work in those terms (Jensen 1986b; Osterud 1991; Kulikoff 1992).
However the bonds may have loosened, the primacy of cash had its drawbacks. As cash became more desirable the noncash contributions of farm women garnered less respect. Men thought of themselves as making the truly consequential contributions because they were bringing in more cash. Women had traditionally bartered and traded butter, eggs, and chickens for items like coffee, tea, sugar, and even shoes. Over time women came to prefer selling their products for cash then applying that cash to purchases of items, especially cotton cloth. Historians have interpreted this shift as a signal of greater dependence on the marketplace. Regardless of the nature of her exchange, in a given household a woman more likely sold her farm products locally while the crops marketed by her husband headed off to distant markets to supply faraway industries. Thus, the broadening market society viewed men’s contributions as more important (Clark 1990; Nation 2005).
Grey Osterud argued that rural farm women in the Nanticoke Valley in New York did not conceive of the world strictly in terms of public or private because rural men and women inhabited the same spheres. Dairying, for example, was often shared by men and women. Women did not seek to or succeed in creating a more public role for themselves but instead worked to get more out of the roles they played. Martin Bruegel agreed that the lines between gendered spheres blurred, emphasizing shifts in agricultural production as the cause. Rather than ideas about gender dictating farm work in the Hudson Valley, the needs of the farm dictated the roles of men and women—and these were not neatly divided between house and field. Any farm task performed close to the house (except for maintenance and construction) involved both men and women. For example, because competing farms grew to the west, Hudson Valley producers put more of their energy into grass cultures rather than mixed agriculture. They grazed animals and supplied outside markets with hay, increasing their production of rye, oats, and corn, but not wheat, which they imported. This change required farm women to spend more time in the fields, not as a supplement but as essential labor (Osterud 1991; Bruegel 2002b).
Scholars have less directly investigated the lives of southern farm women’s relationships to increased commercialization, as such. This is in part because historical inquiry has
