insight in free soil ideology. Of course, as the historiography of the Civil War era shows, not all northerners took to this ideology. To provide an example from the farm communities discussed above, while Clark found that the Republican Party offered political unity to Connecticut Valley farmers, Nation’s study of southern Indiana farmers revealed a localism that prevented the Republican Party from resonating (Foner 1970; Clark 1990; Wright 2003; Nation 2005).
Recent work by James L. Huston can provide a touchstone for the discussion. Huston contends that the sectional crisis was essentially grounded in two competing models of agriculture. Northern family farmers desired land in manageable chunks, around 80–120 acres, while southern planters pressed for consolidation of acreage. Slavery figured in because it supported the plantation complex. Americans clashed over which model would be pressed westward. Interestingly, Huston’s contention that northern farmers did not seek to accumulate, combined with the new histories of slavery’s capitalism, represents the exact opposite of the earliest mainstream academic arguments about the coming of the war. Now southerners were the aggressive capitalists and northerners resisted it, at least in terms of agriculture. Adam W. Dean makes similar conclusions to Huston’s by locating difference in how Americans in the North and South believed land should be used. But where Huston roots this divergence in English culture, Dean emphasizes environmentalism. The “civilizing mission” of family farming was the only hope of a free republic expanding westward (Dean 2015; Huston 2015).
But what role was played by the yeoman farmers who have taken up so much time of agricultural historians over the years? If, as Kulikoff argued, all yeomen agreed on a sense of independence and democracy, how did southern yeomen come to ally with their competitors, the planter class? Were southern yeomen duped into a war by their wealthier neighbors? Historians have produced a wealth of evidence that perceptions about the growing market economy contributed to the crisis. Even as farmers intensified their commercial production, well documented by the scholars discussed in this chapter, they wrestled with their role in it and what implications the market had for freedom and opportunity. Kulikoff contended that, however else they may have clashed, both southern yeomen and planters worried about the dangers of “wage slavery.” J. Mills Thornton found that while smaller Alabama farmers hated the concentration of wealth represented in railroads and banks, they did not apply the same level of distrust to planters’ consolidation of land and power; the sectional crisis actually smoothed over any simmering class divisions. Lacy K. Ford agreed that upcountry South Carolina yeomen’s fears about the growing power of the market and the interests of capital led them to draw on a belief in independence that they shared with planters, and therefore to support secession (Thornton 1981; Ford 1988; Kulikoff 1992).
Ultimately, many yeomen farmers in the South supported secession and knew what they were getting into. Eugene Genovese argued that they went in with both eyes open. They held substantial rights in the southern agricultural system, and understood clearly what their status was in southern society and what choices would benefit them. Nonslaveholders had social and family ties with slaveholders, and plantation belt yeomen aspired to be planters; they did not view the plantation system as a barrier to their own economic success. While Genovese deemphasized the role of race, Lacy K. Ford has explained that while some anxiety existed among smaller farmers, secessionists managed to assuage it by showing how the existence of black slavery prevented the creation of white bondage. Concepts of economic opportunity and race merged with gender among small farmers. Stephanie McCurry argued that yeomen felt in common cause with planters to defend mastery but always understood the power wielded by planters. As men and masters, however, they shared common cause. Merritt’s work contends that the lowliest southerners understood the conflict to be against their best interests. Meanwhile, enslaved farmers formed their own understanding of the contest not only as a connection between power and agricultural production but as power over self—which for captive farmers were one and the same (Genovese 1975; McCurry 1997; Ford 1986; Smith 2007; Merritt 2017).
Bibliographical Essay
Immigration, especially in the North, contributed to dynamic rural societies. Scholars early on insisted on cultural differences and nationality determining crop choices and land use, among other considerations, but later access to land had most sway in immigrants’ decisions about where to locate; by and large they responded to the economic reality. For a discussion of the historiography of immigrants and agriculture see Brian Q. Cannon, “Immigrants in American Agriculture” (1991).
A spirit of reform and improvement took hold of many northern and southern agriculturalists alike. See William M. Mathew’s work on one of the more famous southern reformers, Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South (1988). Steven Stoll’s Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (2002) provides a more recent reassessment of northern and southern agricultural reformers, but also exhibits the growing use of environmental history in studies of agriculture.
Many additional worthy studies of antebellum rural life include Lee A. Craig, To Sow One Acre More: Childbearing and Farm Productivity in the Antebellum North (1993) and Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (2002).
Whether they agree that a full transition to capitalism occurred or upon which types and classes of farmers embraced commercialism (and which rejected it), agricultural historians have been keenly interested in how this era changed society’s concept of farmers. Many historians and contemporaries would agree with Christopher Clark’s explanation that “Farmers and their households … were no longer the sole symbols of a republican social order” (1990 ). For the classic discussion of the “agrarian myth,” see Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform (1955).
In addition to Schermerhorn’s recent overview, there are several good general histories of American slavery, including David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage (2006) and Ira Berlin’s volumes Many Thousands Gone (1998) and Generations of Captivity (2003). Fox-Genovese’s work is essential to the historiography of plantation households and inspired a number of investigations of planter women, but Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage (2008) is a good representation of the style of inquiry that has characterized the more recent scholarship.
While a complete bibliography of bottom-up studies of slavery is impossible to provide here, along with those cited in the chapter, the following works provide the student of American slavery with a sampling of how the literature has evolved: Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (1956), Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1976), John Blassingame, The Slave Community (1979), Marie Schwartz, Born in Bondage (2000), Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005), Jeff Forret, Slave Against Slave (2015).
U.B. Phillips’s American Negro Slavery (1918) is the most well-known example of early historians’ denial of the profitability of slavery. Phillips admitted that slavery tended to be capitalistic and concentrate wealth into the hands of the most enterprising, but contended that slavery did not profit slaveholders as much as free labor enriched modern industrial nations. Eugene Genovese argued that the system of plantation of slavery was “precapitalist,” representing a sort of feudal system that did not necessarily behave rationally or efficiently secure profit even as it produced a staple crop for a global market. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman painstakingly demonstrated the profitability and capitalism of slavery in Time on the Cross (1989). Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999), by Walter Johnson presented the slave trade as capitalist. Sven Beckert’s Cotton: A Global History (2015) argues that cotton is linked to the development of “war capitalism.”
Recent treatments of Americans’ conceptions between land, labor, and freedom include Mark Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (2005) and Max Grivno’s Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line (2011). John Ashworth’s Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum
