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).
Did antebellum farmers’ growing 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