(1995) provided a reassessment of the role of capitalism in sectionalism. For a few additional perspectives on the sectional crisis, see William J. Cooper, Jr.’s The South and the Politics of Slavery (1978), William Freehling, Prelude to Civil War (1994), and Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? (2005).
Chapter 5 MAKING THE RURAL MIDWEST: COMMODITIES AND COMMUNITIES
J. L. Anderson
The story of the rural American Midwest is one of commodities and the farms and communities that produced them. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Euro-American settlers moved west for their main chance for land seized or ceded from Native Americans. They developed farms, mills, mines, and inns, and engaged in the provisioning trade for townspeople, new arrivals, and travelers as well as more distant markets. Those who enjoyed a degree of financial success consolidated their holdings, expanded farming and processing operations, and extended credit to friends and kin as they and their children married other established families. Families that arrived soon after public lands were open for settlement took advantage of new market opportunities for growing, processing, and shipping western commodities. The Midwest was—and remains—a dynamic region, characterized by rapid population and infrastructure growth via river, road, and rail as well as widespread landownership, family farming, and market production.
Settlers built institutions such as churches and social organizations, and served in both elected and appointed offices. Geographic mobility was common in the nineteenth century, with comparatively few people persisting in place from one census to the next. Many of those who arrived early and remained consolidated social and political capital as well as land. Regardless of whether the formative Midwest of the nineteenth century was a place of unfettered opportunity, as suggested by Merle Curti in his Turnerian classic Making of an American Community, or one where growth and opportunity were carefully managed by elites, as shown by Kenneth Winkle in The Politics of Community, settlers labored for economic and social security (Curti 1959; Winkle 1988).
Those settlers arrived with prodigious cultural baggage that shaped the communities they built as well as farm production. While they adapted to local conditions, in many ways they attempted to recreate the economic and social traditions that they left behind. The Midwest, then, was not only a frontier in the traditional sense of incursion, dispossession of Native American land, and settler expansion, but it was also a meeting of several settler cultures. This chapter describes the meeting of rural cultures that emerged and how the communities that arose in the midcontinent shaped successive waves of commodity production.
Several themes run throughout the chapter. The first is the continued importance of commodity production from the origins of settlement. Economically, the region was a colony of the new nation, playing an important part in the provisioning of the eastern and southern provinces, but also for much of Europe. That emphasis on profitable commodities facilitated technological and social change. The second theme is the importance of the region’s farm production as a blending of cultures. From the development of corn varieties ideally suited to the midcontinent to the ways in which immigrants adjusted to local conditions, the region that emerged was neither North nor South, nor was it dominated by any particular ethnic group. The third theme is the diversity of production in the region. Today, observers see vast tracts of corn and soybeans, but the region was long characterized by diverse food and fiber production and, to an extent, remains a place of diverse production. The final theme is the importance of family farms in both subsistence and commodity production. While the region experienced both slavery and corporate farming, for most of its history the Midwest has been dominated by free people making a living on farms run by families. The social and economic stratification of the region, most notably seen in the division between farm owners and tenants, was profound, but its effects were muted by the shared status as family-run farms. Even today’s corporate farms are most often family corporations, organized to minimize financial and legal risk to the family.
Historians have offered various definitions of the Midwest, but for the purpose of this chapter it is defined as the twelve states of the North Central US Census region: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. This chapter only addresses developments in the eastern third of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, with the western two thirds considered part of the Great Plains. Even truncated, this sprawling region was characterized by remarkable geophysical, political, and social diversity, the product of First Nations and settlers, northerners and southerners, and American-born and immigrant.
Of all the commodities in the region, perhaps the most important for the settlers was the land. It was the foundation upon which farm prosperity and family survival were built. There were numerous land booms before the settlement of the midcontinent, but few were more momentous for the future of the United States. It was the tension over the trans-Appalachian west, the Ohio Country, that sparked the conflict that became known as the French and Indian War. Wealthy Virginians organized the Ohio Company to speculate in western land. Their ambitions, however, collided with the conflicting land claims of France and Native Americans in the region. The Northwest Territory, organized by the newly created United States of America and which later became states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was designed to facilitate orderly settlement of the West. Congress expected that proceeds from land sales combined with tariff revenue could fund government operations without having to engage in the kind of taxation that precipitated the American Revolution. While revenue from land sales was low in the first few years, the Government Land Office became so profitable that the expression to “do a land-office business” entered the lexicon as a synonym for brisk trade and profitability (Rohrbough 1968).
The value of the land for farming varied widely across the public domain, but for the purposes of transferring government land into private hands, Congress set a minimum price of $1.25 per acre in 1800. Congress granted significant exceptions for speculators to purchase large tracts at deeply discounted prices. This was intended to generate much-needed revenue and to encourage speculators to take on the work of managing all the smaller transactions with those who would farm the land. The $1.25 minimum price became the real price for most of this land because settlers would not pay more for a tract when there was so much land available at the minimum price. Speculators formed combinations to protect each other and prevent inflation of land prices by reducing competition ahead of the public auction. Starting in the 1820s, settlers did the same thing, forming claim associations or claim clubs to protect their claims from competition from speculators or outsiders. When the Land Office auctions proceeded, settlers were present not only to bid on their claims but also to protect the claims of club members through intimidation (Gates 1968).
Contemporary critics sometimes decried speculators as profiteers and parasites, a position echoed by many historians. While this was likely true in some cases, with speculators holding out for unreasonably high prices and rushing to foreclose on vulnerable farmers, it was not the whole story. Following the panic of 1819, which resulted in significant default by land purchasers, the government set the minimum price per acre at $1.25 in 1820, but extended no credit. Even at this rate a farm was beyond the reach of many land-hungry settlers. Speculators, though, extended credit, actually easing the path to ownership for many working farm families, even if the price per acre was higher than that of government land. Furthermore, rather than pressing the farmers who faced hardship from low prices or crop failures, most of the creditors were careful to press not too hard for repayment, preferring flexibility over a hard line (Bogue 1955; Swierenga 1968).
The farmers who obtained access to land, either by renting or owning, brought their culture with them that shaped commodity production in the region. Many scholars have emphasized that the most important cultural contact was that of North and South. Southerners of the mid-eighteenth century desired access to western lands across the Appalachians, with influential Virginians organizing the Ohio Company of Virginia to block French expansionism through trade with Native Americans and settlement along the tributaries of the Ohio River.
