The first condition that allowed for the surfacing of the economic power of the family farm was a rising urban population on the northern Atlantic coast. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing fast and required foodstuffs for their populations. This circumstance was not replicated in the Atlantic seaboard South which did not in these years exhibit any notable urbanization. Moreover, the northern coastal Atlantic states were generally poor agricultural areas and the region began to register a food deficit (Meyer 2003). Thus the northern farmers who migrated west would have the opportunity to send crops east, but only if transportation systems were built that enabled them to do so. The two transportation advances that occurred between 1815 and 1830 were the steamboat and the Erie Canal.
For westerners, the great artery of commerce was the Ohio–Mississippi River system, by which goods from western Pennsylvania and the Northwest could reach New Orleans. This was accomplished prior to 1815 by rafts, flatboats, and keelboats. Going down the river was easy enough, but the return journey, accomplished by walking, might take 4 months. In 1807, Robert Fulton invented the steamboat on New York’s Hudson River. Steamboats, however, came to be primarily employed on the Ohio–Mississippi River system and by 1830 dominated travel of people and goods (Gudmestad 2011).
The second great transportation enterprise that changed the northern economy was the Erie Canal. New York Governor DeWitt Clinton argued for it, the legislature approved it, and the “great ditch” started construction in 1817 near Albany and ran 363 miles to Buffalo. Finished in 1825, the Erie Canal was an economic miracle. It opened in sections, and as it did so commerce flourished as farmers took their produce for shipment to Albany and then down the Hudson River to New York City. The impact of the Canal upon farmers was immediate and stimulated other states to copy New York, unfortunately in unwise speculative ventures that were to explode in bankruptcy in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837 (Sheriff 1996; Alasdir Roberts 2012).
One only begins to see the changes in northern agriculture by 1830. Nonetheless, by 1830 two major agricultural booms had occurred. One was in the Gulf states, the rise of the cotton kingdom. The other began 1815–1830 and consisted of the spread of the family farm in the north and the resulting prosperity and growth it portended. These two booms, however, had fundamental differences, and the antagonisms between them would become apparent in the 1850s.
Bibliographical Essay
A common framework that guided much research between 1970 and 2010 about early nineteenth-century agriculture was determining when American farmers entered “modernity,” that is, when the average farmer and farm family exhibited competitive market behavior. This question was inspired by a group of historians who called for a “new rural history,” and part of this search was to locate when the United States’ economy became capitalist. Probably the opening shot in this venture was Michael Merrill (1995 ), who found most small farmers locked into local markets and sought only family subsistence, not monetary growth. James A. Henretta (1991) argued that farmers in the north started to be absorbed into capitalism after 1815 when their markets expanded due to transportation improvements. Allan Kulikoff (1992) argued instead that southern yeomen remained true to subsistence (i.e. non-market behavior) while northern farmers sought monetary gain after the Revolution and generally adopted market behavior. The idea of “transition” from some precapitalist condition to capitalism was further developed by Christopher Clark, but he located the change in the 1830s and after, when farmers had to rely on manufacturing jobs to obtain an adequate material existence (Clark 1990 ). Distinctly affirming that Massachusetts farmers were capitalist in the years after the Revolution was Winifred Rothenberg (1992) who found farm workers and farmers responding to price signals. Thus over the last 50 years, historians presented the interpretation that the northern American farmer was becoming enmeshed in market relations and seeking profit maximization, a process to be completed by the time of the Civil War, while the southern yeomen lagged behind him. However, this particular question has settled into quiescence as a new group of American historians, calling their quest a “new history of American capitalism,” determined that the United States was capitalist from its inception. For examples, see Edward E. Baptist (2014), and Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (2016).
For most historians of American agriculture in this period, the essential research question is when farmers fully embraced market economics instead of practicing family-first agriculture, the latter meaning taking care of the family and maintaining possession of the farm instead of seeking profit maximization via commercial exchange. Most now reject the claims of geographer James T. Lemon (1972) that agriculturalists embraced capitalism and the market very early. Certainly there were regions in which commercial agriculture emerged early in colonial history, but most historians see a mixture of commercial desires versus safety-of-farm-ownership motives. Christopher Clark (1990, 2006) argued that northern farmers underwent some changes after the Revolution but had not become dominated by an extensive market, while the idea of “competency”—earning enough to enable the family to survive with a little prosperity—suffused the farming community; so have concluded Charles E. Brooks (1996), Martin Bruegel (2002a), Thomas S. Wermuth (2001), and Donald H. Parkerson (1995). The latest entrant into this historiographical question, Richard L. Bushman (2018) has decided that for the eighteenth century, and continuing into the nineteenth, the American farmer engaged in commercial activity but always with a mind of preserving the family unit.
Economic historians have been almost exclusively focused on the question of economic growth and whether farmers achieved productivity advances. Their answers have invariably been negative. They arrive at a consensus that annual per capita economic growth was well under 1.0 percent (Peter C. Mancall and Thomas Weiss 1999). Economists’ handling of agriculture in the early republic can be obtained in the essays in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (2000).
General textbooks on agriculture by historians for the period 1790 to 1830 are few. The best surveys of agriculture in this period are older works (Curtis P. Nettels 1962 and Paul Wallace Gates 1973). A useful broad survey is James A. Henretta (1973); the recent work of Paul E. Johnson (2007) also focuses very much on agriculture.
Unique among the circumstances coinciding with the birth of the Republic was agrarian unrest after the Revolution. See the excellent discussion in Alan Taylor (1993). On the Whiskey Rebellion, the standard is Thomas P. Slaughter (1986). This unrest disappeared shortly after 1794 and, except for the New York rent riots in the 1840s, would not appear again until the Populist crusade in the 1890s.
The role of the federal government in agricultural development can be found in works dealing with specific topics. The battles between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over national policy can be found in any standard US history textbook. The subject of disposition of the public domain was at the heart of an older agricultural history, such as Roy M. Robbins (1976). The latest examination is John R. Van Atta (2014) who, by including the Native American perspective, offers a different interpretation of land law creation and execution. The particular topics of how land got distributed to individuals and land companies due to the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 are dealt with in William D. Pattison (1957), Malcolm J. Rohrbough (1968), and Kenneth C. Martis (2001). The role of land companies is given in most state histories but for a broader view see the older work of Shaw Livermore (1939 ) and the more recent treatment in Wilma A. Dunaway (1996). European desire for western land becomes a narrative of greed in the work of Daniel M. Friedenberg (1992). For the most flagrant example of speculative frenzy and corruption, the Yazoo land scandals, consult Charles F. Hobson (2016)