$24.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4882-4

Published: Fall 2000

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Copyright (c) 2000 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction.

"Those who labour in the earth," Thomas Jefferson wrote in a famous passage in his Notes on the State of Virginia, "are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." These men--who looked "to their own soil and industry . . . for their subsistance"--had achieved independence, unlike those who "depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." Jefferson knew that a majority of white Americans belonged to families of these virtuous small farmers. But everyone realized that most families in Britain and Europe, the ancestral (or recent) homeland of nearly all free Americans, suffered the greatest privation, debasement, and subservience.[1]

Who were the small farmers Jefferson so praised? Their farms varied in size but generally ranged from 25 to 200 acres, large by British standards. Unlike their counterparts in Britain or Germany, they owned or expected to own their land. Landownership buttressed their economic independence. Farm owners and their families grew much of their own food, took small surpluses to market, exchanged goods with neighbors, and nurtured future generations in the soil. Small farms like theirs had disappeared from Britain and Germany, yet from the early seventeenth century a substantial majority of colonists lived on them.

This book tells how British and German peasants became small American farmers. Our story takes place on two continents over more than two centuries. It has a vast cast of characters: English landlords, peasants, and merchants; American Indians and settlers bent on taking their land; colonial small farmers and their gentleman-farmer patrons or protagonists; immigrant labor recruiters and land speculators; the children of colonial farmers and newly arrived British and German peasants and laborers; and farmers--with the critical help of wives, children, hired hands, and the occasional servant or slave--struggling to build farms for themselves and their children.

We begin in England, where peasants had enjoyed secure land tenure for centuries. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, landlords and improving farmers (agrarian capitalists) threw peasants off the land, leaving them and their descendants with a great yearning for land. The same men who evicted peasants financed colonial ventures that promised land to former peasants. Persuaded by labor recruiters, family, or friends, hundreds of thousands of English, Scot, Irish, and German immigrants came to America. Most had to work in temporary bondage to pay their passage, but all expected to get land after completing their terms. Two-thirds of the emigrants (and an equal portion of their descendants) did acquire land.

Capitalist transformation, then, stands at the center of our story. In popular language, the words "capitalist" and "capitalism" evoke the power of captains of industry and finance, or a set of entrepreneurial and market ideals most Americans shared. But "capitalism," as used in this work, refers to a society dominated by two classes: capitalists who own the means of production (banks, factories, tools, and productive land) and workers who have only their labor to sell. By this definition, capitalism had not yet reached our shores as late as the American Revolution. But because Britain had turned capitalist, colonists swam in a capitalist sea, selling goods to English capitalists, buying goods made by wage workers, and seeking the aid of capitalists in financing colonies.

Capitalist transformation began in England a century before colonization and by the mid-eighteenth century had spread to Scotland, Ulster, and (to a lesser degree) German states. Capitalists stole peasant land, consolidated the land they took, and leased land to improving tenants. With their profits, they financed commerce, manufacturing, banks, and colonial ventures. The old relation between lord and peasant, which had guaranteed peasant use of land, crumbled, and an army of surplus people tramped the countryside, looking for work. Displaced peasants harvested crops, spun thread and wove cloth, mined coal, and moved to cities. When capitalists--eager to import corn, tobacco, and sugar--founded colonies, former peasants were eager to move to get land. Living on the periphery of the capitalist world, emigrants and their descendants made farms and got the land capitalists had denied them at home.[2]

During early modern times, hundreds of thousands of Britains and Europeans sold their possessions, left farm cottages or city hovels, and moved hundreds or thousands of miles to Ireland, Prussia, eastern Europe, and the Americas. Fleeing persecution or seeking opportunities, they settled thousands of square miles, setting off violent conflicts with native peoples. Far more seventeenth-century Britons moved to Ireland and the West Indies than the mainland; more eighteenth-century Europeans moved east than west. Seventeenth-century English immigrants nonetheless secured a foothold on the coast of the New World and gradually forced Indians to leave; eighteenth-century Europeans repeopled a vast backcountry, stretching through the foothills and across the mountains, making new farms wherever they went. When land became scarce, their descendants moved inland. A constant churning thus engulfed the colonies, as youths and families formed new neighborhoods from northern New England to Georgia.[3]

Traveling to America was an expensive undertaking, which the poorest folk, hardest hit by economic change, could rarely afford on their own. Because of high transportation costs and exit fines, for instance, poor eighteenth-century Germans rarely crossed the ocean. Although the market in indentured servants provided some opportunities for poor seventeenth-century Britons, immigrants usually began by selling some land or other productive property. They spent much of the proceeds traveling to a port, and many of them still had to indent themselves for service in the colonies; the rest often arrived with few reserves. Only after accumulating property in older regions could they move to a frontier and procure a farm substantial enough to provide for them and their children.[4]

At first, immigrants merely wanted land, but--seeing unimproved land spread endlessly before them--they came to expect to own it. Land prices, the costs of surveying land, governmental willingness to give land away, and treatment of squatters structured opportunity for landownership. While small farmers wanted cheap or free land, land speculators wanted an unfettered market where supply and demand set land prices. Colonial governments, caught in the middle, vacillated, sometimes giving land to farmers to contain the Indian threat, other times granting thousands of acres to land speculators. Whenever they could, small farmers got title to their land, but if land became too expensive or rich men refused to sell, they squatted and refused to move. Despite these difficulties, an astonishingly high percentage--two thirds of colonial families--owned land.[5]

Once farmers got land, they worked to improve it. They sought a competency, which they defined as the ability to grow (or trade for) most of their food, make most of their own clothing, and cut down most of the firewood needed for winter. Within the constraints of the search for competency and the marketplace, farm husbands and wives negotiated the division of labor and figured out what goods they would trade with neighbors or send to market. While farm men (helped by wives and children) cleared land, farm women worked to feed and clothe the family. Vegetables from women's gardens fed small farmer families; women made the clothes the family wore and sold eggs and butter. Relations between farm women and men were thus central to the formation and preservation of small farm households. Farm men, who legally controlled their wives' property, achieved economic independence by exploiting their labor, but neither state coercion nor cultural norms prevented conflicts between spouses.[6]

No family, no matter how rich, could completely feed or clothe themselves. To pay taxes or buy imported sugar or coffee, farmers took surplus tobacco, rice, or wheat to market. Farm families used most of their cash to pay taxes or buy land. Such trade financed intensive barter between families. When a farm wife needed butter, she borrowed it from a neighbor, eventually giving thread in return; farm men traded corn for pork or cider for lumber. Neighbors helped neighbors build cabins, raise barns, or harvest corn, knowing they could count on the same help. Seeking always to sustain their families and provide for the next generation, these farmers thus made "composite" farms, combining household production, local exchange, and market sales.[7]

I have framed this book around economic development, migration, land acquisition, and the relation farm families forged with the market. I begin by examining how English peasants organized their households; how rich Englishmen got capital to finance colonies; and how others lost their land, tramped the countryside, and became eager to emigrate. Chapter 1 details immigrant recruitment in seventeenth-century England and patterns of migration to the colonies. Once they arrived, Chapter 2 shows, colonists faced hostile Indians, deep forests, and a climate far more extreme than England's. Despite the struggle with Indians, most families did get land and made it their own. As Chapter 3 relates, during the eighteenth century, after coastal lands filled with settlers, colonists moved to new frontiers, chasing Indians away and improving more land. Chapter 4 shows who left eighteenth-century Britain and Europe and explains why so many peasants moved east rather than west. Turning from economic and demographic issues to the process of farm making, Chapter 5 describes the gender division of labor on the farm, exchange between farm families, and the relation between market and household. The American Revolution, Chapter 6 argues, temporarily stopped migration, ended international trade, thrust families into subsistence production, and ignited vicious partisan and Indian warfare; after the war, internal migration and farm making resumed and intensified.

Building such an interpretation has become more difficult in recent years. Historians, who knew little about farm families a quarter-century ago, now swim upstream against an ocean of data--community studies, demographic and immigration histories, economic analysis, works about farm rebellion and rural faith--covering every corner of North America, Britain, and Europe. And newly published primary sources appear every year.

To interpret these materials fully would take a book far longer than this one. I have, therefore, not included here the class identity of small farmers and have played down elements of farmer identity--kinship, community, ethnicity, and faith--central to class formation. I will address these issues in a companion volume, showing how the yeoman class of Jefferson's day--despite its origin deep in the history of medieval England--had made itself a new class, nurtured in a rich and abundant new land. That book will show how small farmers found a voice after revivals that swept through the colonies in the eighteenth century, in the new ethnic communities British and German immigrants made, and in repeated struggles with landlords, merchants, and rulers bent on depriving them of their farms.

Recent historians have turned from master narratives such as this one to study small events intensively. These microhistories put a human face on big events, processes, and social changes; they revel at the contingency of events; and they draw out cultural meaning absent from structural arguments. The drama of Paul Revere's ride, the story of unredeemed captive Eunice Williams (of Deerfield, Massachusetts), or the report of the botched abortion that killed Connecticut teenager Sarah Grosvenor in 1742 reveal much about politics, communal norms, and local culture. But one cannot assume that every farmer (much less farmer's wife, servant, or slave) understood this ride, or captivity, or abortion in the same way. Nor can one easily jump from an abortion or night ride to the dreams of people who saw neither Revere nor Grosvenor, much less use these events to explicate an entire culture.[8]

Stories such as these should be embedded in an analysis of material conditions. The reaction of Grosvenor's village to her abortion, the way Deerfield villagers coped with the loss of children to Indian captivity (and adoption), or the reasons villagers along Revere's route rallied to his cause grew out of the way trade and local exchange, migration and settlement, Indians and climate, and inheritance and class relations had framed choices farmers could make. Long ago Karl Marx captured the ambiguity of human agency in a world of structural determination: "Men make their own history," he wrote, "but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."[9]

Big economic and demographic structures, moreover, tell a story all their own, one as compelling as narratives of Indian captivity, biographies of common folk, or tales built from court cases. What could be more dramatic than the dispossession of thousands of families by English capitalists; the struggles of immigrants with Indians, bad weather, and deep forests; the rhythm of thousands of hoes and plows clearing virgin land; or the struggle for subsistence the violence of the Revolution brought?

With the profusion of specialized studies and new fields--women's history, African American history, Indian history, and rural history--the center of historical understanding has collapsed. American historians have struggled to incorporate the findings of new fields and frame a new "master narrative," replacing older political narratives; but such attempts are inevitably incomplete, whether they focus on society, economy, politics, class, or gender. Each must include some voices but exclude others, emphasize some themes but minimize others. Like horses on a carousel, each surrounded by others but never touching, a carousel of master narratives best interprets colonial history. One horse on that carousel, this volume stands as a master narrative among others. Its focus on small farm families slights slaves, Indians, planters, land speculators, and merchants; its emphasis on population and economics puts religion, ideology, and class formation to one side.[10]

This book is remarkably different from four interpretations--each master narratives--published in the 1980s. Unlike the export-based model of John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard's Economy of British America, it emphasizes farm activity. Beginning in England, as David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed does, it rejects Fischer's insistence on cultural stasis, underscoring instead how changes in England influenced migration and colonial development and how the colonial environment transformed customs migrants brought with them. Less comprehensive than Jack P. Greene's Pursuits of Happiness (ignoring the West Indian colonies he incorporates), it emphasizes similarities among the colonies over Greene's regional interpretation. Spatial organization, the metaphor behind D. W. Meinig's Shaping of America, is less important here than the productive relations that reshaped the environment. The small farmers who serve as the central actors in this volume play a major role in none of the previous studies. Instead, McCusker and Menard emphasize the economy; Fischer, immutable folkways; Greene, regional societies; and Meinig, human geography.

Our story--of immigration and migration, of struggles with nature and Indians, and of farm making and remaking--recovers the experiences of thousands of colonists. It connects the remote past to nineteenth-century immigration (much of it to farms) and settlement of the trans-Appalachian and trans-Mississippi wests. And in this era of corporate farms and agribusinesses, it reminds us of a lost world of small farms, home production, and neighborly exchange.