- 1 This thesis, that market demand from the towns supplied the motive force for rural development, or (...)
1How did a centuries-old system of community-based farming for local use in New England and the Middle Atlantic, a system with little impetus toward economic development, transform into a productive system of capitalist agriculture, which spread across the northern United States in the nineteenth century? Currently, the dominant school of thought among economic historians holds that market opportunities, resulting from transport links to the growing demand from the new urban population of industrial workers, created incentives for farmers to increase productivity. Market demand provided the stimulus for rural development. 1
2The argument advanced in what follows runs counter to this generally accepted theory. Market opportunities resulting from economic demand from the towns may have stimulated intermittent improvements, but not the continuous development that transformed the North of the United States in the nineteenth century. Applying Robert Brenner’s thesis, I make a case that such a transformation could only have resulted from capitalist social property relations. These relations are not latent in human societies, awaiting solely that the incentive of gain be aroused into activity. Rather, they arise out of the things that individuals, groups, and classes did to one another in the past. In particular, social conflict is necessary to undermine rural households’ possession of the land. Once the farming population is deprived of direct non-market access to subsistence, it has no choice but to respond to the market by competing, cost-cutting, and thus specializing, innovating, and accumulating surpluses. Hence this capitalist rationale is not omnipresent in human civilizations. Rather, it emerges only out of historically specific and contingent social conflicts [Brenner 1985: 214, 301, 311].
3In the case of North America, the traditional view, defended by historians to this day, is that the mentality of the independent entrepreneur arrived with the first European settlers. Northern farmers were profit maximizers who enthusiastically engaged in market production when presented with opportunities [Rothenberg 1981; 1985; 1988; Breen 1986; 1988]. Since the late 1970s, social historians, whose work forms the basis of this essay, have challenged the view that the European settlers of North America focused on profit maximization from the outset. Charles Post, in particular, has used Brenner’s thesis to synthesize the findings of social historians about community-based subsistence farming in colonial New England and the Middle Atlantic and its transformation into capitalist agriculture across the North of the United States in the nineteenth century [Post 1982].
4Using the latest research to elaborate on Post’s account, I argue that the American War of Independence constituted the turning point, the decisive social conflict paving the way for a transition to capitalism in the United States. Unlike its French counterpart in 1789, the American Revolution undermined rural inhabitants’ control over the land. Older and wealthier residents, often involved in long-distance trade and the colonial administrations and legislatures, took control of the federal and state governments so as to wage the war, and were then able to transform farming in two critical ways. First, fulfilling war requisitions during the American Revolution meant that the inhabitants of New England and the Middle Atlantic went into debt. The newly autonomous authorities in North America enforced creditors’ claims to the income from farmers’ land. Second, in the years after the war, these authorities forged the capacity to regulate access to land on the frontier and to protect the property rights of real-estate investors. Henceforth, settlers had to take out loans to obtain farmland. To put it another way, in one fell swoop the leaders of the American Revolution both undermined community-based subsistence farming in New England and the Middle Atlantic and prevented it from reproducing itself on lands to further west.
5By the 1800s farmers thus had to accumulate money to cover their financial obligations. They had to specialize their output by producing what would bring in cash from the market. Farmers had to reduce costs relative to income to match the market prices of peers facing the same imperatives. This novel type of economic behavior led to rising output relative to the labor expended and to rapid rates of growth in the nineteenth century in both New England and the Middle Atlantic, as well as in lands west of the Appalachians.
6The foregoing capitalist requirement—the need to obtain cash by producing for the market in competition with other farmers—generated ever larger volumes of staples at declining prices. As the farmers focused on cash crops, they produced fewer household wares and agricultural implements within their communities, and thus became a broad consumer market for manufacturers. Mounting output at relatively low prices enhanced discretionary income, beyond food expenditure, for both themselves and townspeople. The obligation to cut costs so as to meet financial obligations led farmers to produce increasing supplies of crops and livestock for food-processing industries at decreasing prices. In these ways, capitalist agriculture paved the way for the industrialization of the North in the 1850s. In a nutshell, rural development, rather than resulting from market demand in towns, in fact thrust a series of urban industrial centers into existence.
A new map of pPart of the United States of North America, containing those of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, 1821.
Map : John Cary (1755-1835).
- 2 Robert Brenner [1985a: 236] elaborates on these rational reasons why peasants avoided agricultural (...)
- 3 See J. H. St. John de Crèvecœur [1961: 30], J. H. Henretta [1978: 15], J. McCusker and R. Menard (...)
7In the two centuries prior to the 1770s, the inhabitants of New England and the Middle Atlantic produced an array of crops, livestock, and handicrafts which spread the work of family members over the whole year, thus averting the unmanageable seasonal labor demands occasioned by specialization. Concentrating on a single economic line for urban consumers would have entailed risks of inadequate yields, insufficient prices for farm output, or prohibitively high prices for subsistence goods which market-dependent farmers need to purchase. Any one of these three real possibilities could have proved fatal.2 Farmers therefore cultivated a variety of grains for local consumption as well as flax to make their own clothes. They raised a range of animals for meat, milk, cheese, butter, hides, bristles, and tallow for candles. Livestock also served to even out harvests. In good years, farmers used grain surpluses to fatten cattle and pigs for slaughter or for sale in the towns. In bad years, they lacked animal-feed and slaughtered livestock to cover their subsistence or to gain income for food by selling dried meat. Farmers in western Massachusetts also grew broomcorn, which had market as well as local uses. They used broomcorn primarily to make and sell brooms, but could also allow it to run to seed for cattle feed. Farmers shunned products that committed them in advance to a single economic line. The more land they held, the more diverse their array of crops and livestock, and the more secure their existence.3
- 4 See M. Merrill [1977: 55, 57], J. H. Henretta [1978: 5, 15], C. Clark [op. cit.: 66] and C. Post [ (...)
8The rural community formed a crucial component of this husbandry. People did not migrate to New England and the Middle Atlantic for economic reasons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, their purpose was to establish households within linguistic and/or religious communities. They sustained their communities through a system of local exchange of goods in kind and loans of plows and horses. Poorer inhabitants typically traded labor services for the food produced on the farms of better-off landowners. Nearly every household accumulated debts payable over many years in labor, crops, equipment, or cash, all of which were bartered for their use-value. Farmers did not calculate debts and credits as antithetical acts. Farmers saw them rather as one act involving two people in need of each other’s labor or goods.4
- 5 See J. H. St. John de Crèvecœur [op. cit.: 83, 85-86]; J. H. Henretta [1978: 6, 13, 15, 32], C. C (...)
9Much of the trade and landlessness recorded in colonial America reflected the cycle of household reproduction. Richard Bushman argues that the head of a household typically got family members to build up marketable surpluses to enlarge the farm until he reached the age of about sixty, and then began dividing it up among his sons for them to support him when he could no longer work in the fields. To be without land meant simply that one was still young and not yet at the head of an independent household. These households remained the center of the way of life until the appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, or even later, of schools, insurance, banks, industries, and other institutions to provide training and capital for new generations and procure comfort in old age.5
- 6 See M. Merrill [op. cit.: 44-46], J. H. Henretta [1978: 17], J. McCusker and R. Menard [op. cit.: (...)
10The surpluses, produced to create a larger number of household farms for the next generation, never monopolized economic activities. Agriculturalists did not obtain much income on the market. They sold crops to secure the handful of essentials unobtainable in their communities. Whether Quakers or non-puritan new Englanders, whether inhabitants of the countryside of western Massachusetts or the Delaware coast, farmers practiced self-sufficiency, not because of the absence of conditions favorable to commerce, but because of the secure rationale of community-based farming and the consequent resistance to market dependence. Pennsylvania farmers, even in the vicinity of Philadelphia, grew a variety of crops and produced household items rather than specializing their output for the urban market. Despite the increase in grain prices between 1750 and 1800, the inhabitants of northern rural communities did not sell much of their farm output on the market.6
- 7 See J. Lemon [1972: 150, 156, 180], Henretta [1978: 12-13], J. McCusker and R. Menard [op. cit: 10 (...)
11Agriculturalists, in this way, did not have to match the market prices of their peers, or to keep pace with innovations on other farms. Despite the criticisms of economic reformers, the inhabitants of New England and the Middle Atlantic farmed until the fields no longer yielded decent crops, then moved to other parts of their land, and let the original fields lay fallow for decades. Cultivators obtained yields of 25 bushels an acre on the best land and during the first harvests in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but in general obtained about 15 bushels per acre for corn and 8 to 12 for wheat at the end of the eighteenth century, with the result that most of the farms did not yield marketable surpluses beyond the household’s needs. When yields fell to a bare subsistence, and a farmer deemed such a life intolerable, the household simply sought fresh acres elsewhere. The economy grew along these lines over the course of the colonial period, but so did the population, and per capita output remained stationary.7
12For European immigrants, one of the attractions of North America was the absence of bishops, lords, office holders, and other rulers they knew from across the Atlantic [St. John de Crèvecœur op. cit.: 46, 62-63]. Of course, New England and the Middle Atlantic, like all societies, were stratified by social class. Older and wealthier families in Boston, Philadelphia, and other administrative centers of New England and Pennsylvania—ones often involved in long-distance market exchanges—controlled the colonial legislatures. Yet unlike the gentry and seigneurial classes of Europe, these American elites neither had a presence in every village nor the power to regulate the farming of common lands, woods, meadows, and other untended soils. Inhabitants squatted terrains across North America because the colonial militia did not enforce property rights. The relatively weak colonial ruling class did not have the means to protect property rights, charge for the use of unoccupied land, enforce taxation, enmesh households in debt, and constrain them to produce for the market [Nobles op. cit.: 655; Post 1995: 412, 415-416; 2019: 166, 170].
- 8 See J. H. Henretta [1978: 8, 23-25], J. McCusker and R. Menard [op. cit: 34, 59, 105], G. Nobles [(...)
13The mainstream argument traditionally given for how this community-based system became one oriented toward the market after the 1770s posits “the end of the frontier” and the new scarcity of land in Massachusetts. Rapid population growth and rising land prices, it is argued, led inhabitants to borrow cash, saddled them with payments at interest, and forced families to clear land, work it more intensively, and sell output on distant markets [Clark op. cit.: 62, 80, 319]. However, the bulk of the evidence shows that in late-eighteenth-century New England, a combination of large reserves of unimproved land, the expansion of livestock rearing, and the more systematic sharing of tasks within families and communities led to gains in productivity, and thus exempted households from intensification, declining marginal returns to labor, and self-exploitation. Some families migrated to new lands on the frontier, such as the Green Mountains in Vermont, and thereby lived at ease rather than in anxiety, in satisfaction rather than want, and respectability rather than meanness. Other individuals went westward in the hopes of working their way up the agricultural ladder from laborer to tenant and then to freeholder. This movement helped maintain the stability of mixed farming for local use in New England. It permitted farmers, even in the oldest areas of settlement, to have holdings five to ten times larger than did the typical European peasant. They left much land in pasture, and had plenty to clear and improve as the population grew. North American farmers thus enjoyed a relatively high standard of living and grew taller and healthier than did Europeans of that time.8
14These agricultural traditions and relations to capital—the norm across colonial New England and the Middle Atlantic—had been elaborated over centuries in Europe. They contrasted, according to William Cronon, with the husbandry of Native Americans accustomed to a contented life with the fruits of relatively little labor. The crop-rearing and grazing practices of European settlers in New England meant the population spread out in search of uncultivated land, and caused regions which had supported larger native populations to seem inadequate. The colonists permitted livestock to graze freely over untilled expanses and abandoned fields, and thus did not permit as many nutrients to return to maize farms as did the native population. Unlike the American Indians, who used their hands and hoes to till the land, the settlers used cattle to pull plows. The settlers thus stirred the soil more deeply than before, thereby destroying native plant species. Ground cover was lost through erosion, at the same time as the removal of forests opened the way to destructive floods [Cronon 2003: 80, 141-142, 147, 150].
15The point, for our purposes, is that the settlers continually spread subsistence agriculture to new lands, and left fields fallow where productivity was in decline. Their cattle foraged unimpeded. These practices, which made sense to the settlers, appeared wasteful to elites interested in applying the latest agronomy prevalent in England at that time. The practices would have reproduced themselves indefinitely had not the older and wealthier families found the means to bring them to an end. For decades, the heads of these families had tried unsuccessfully to expand commodity production through investment in roads and canals, as well as through mortgage lending and other forms of land speculation. They had long sought to regulate the use of public lands for the purpose of replacing kin and communal bonds with contractual relations. But it was only in the late 1780s that they forged the political organization to impose fiscal policies and property rights on the frontier.
- 9 See D. Szatmary [1980: 52], T. Slaughter [1986: 39], J. H. Henretta [1988: 76], J. L. Brooke [1989 (...)
16During the Revolutionary War from 1776 to 1783, northern state governments drove up prices by purchasing unprecedented volumes of supplies on credit. Farmers began to fulfill these purchase orders, producing for sale rather than for subsistence. They borrowed from storeowners to buy the goods they no longer produced for local use. Their debts caused little concern until after the war, when English and New England wholesalers demanded payment from shopkeepers in coin. The newly independent state governments raised land taxes to service the immense debts accumulated during the war. Collectors bore down on the rural households to obtain payment on behalf of the governments and merchants.9
- 10 See D. Szatmary [op. cit.: 50], W. Rothenberg [1985: 787, 801, 804], T. Slaughter [op. cit: 48], J (...)
17Meanwhile, the Massachusetts General Assembly—composed of merchants, land speculators, and investors in public works—refused to grant stay laws to inhabitants of the central and western part of the state driven after the war into insolvency through falling prices, rising taxes, and debts. Countryside people fought back against tax collectors, and shut down court houses where defaulting farmers faced foreclosure. Rural inhabitants joined Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 and 1787 in an effort to obtain inflationary measures and debt relief. This revolt was the best-known example of the innumerable class struggles of the 1780s and 1790s against tax collectors, merchant-creditors, and land speculators in Maine, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, as well in settled areas of the Northwest Territory such as the future state of Ohio. The economic and political elite were alarmed at such class struggles over farmers’ efforts to avoid their possession of land becoming contingent on meeting financial obligations to debt and tax collectors. Landowners, merchants, and investors saw the need for a more elaborate state apparatus. For this reason, the Constitutional Settlement of 1787 and the following years established a national judiciary, a permanent fiscal officialdom, and a federal army to bolster the capacity of state governments to enforce the legal titles of landowners and creditors.10
18Another mainstream argument traditionally given for the transformation of subsistence farming into market-based agriculture in the North of the United States posits the appearance of new technical innovations. However, as agricultural historians have documented in innumerable cases where farmers did not adopt more productive practices available to them, the reason was not ignorance of the advanced methods and technologies. Rather, the overall social and cultural context did not make such methods and technologies seem logical or necessary [Isett and Miller 2017: 10, 99, 113, 193]. As we have seen, colonial Americans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notwithstanding the urgings of agricultural reformers, did not find it sensible to specialize output and invest in improved implements being used in the agricultural revolution in England. It made more sense for colonial Americans to acquire more land, diversify output, and make subsistence farming more secure.
- 11 See W. Rothenberg [1981: 303], R. L. Bushman [op. cit.: 355], S. Stoll [op. cit.: 22, 24-25] and B (...)
19But then, after the Revolutionary War, the context changed, as the inhabitants of the northern United States were ensnared in taxes and debts, and were constrained to sell output formerly used for subsistence. They had to compete for market share to obtain the cash needed for economic survival. Agriculturalists had to adjust ever more precisely to fluctuating patterns of demand, spend on upgraded methods and implements to cut costs, immediately adopt innovations used on rival farms, and build up reserves of money. In these circumstances of the early nineteenth century, publications on scientific farming suddenly seemed straightforward to working agrarians. A culture of improvement took hold, as everyday citizens came to treat scientific practice as the legitimate means of interacting with their land. Agricultural publications proliferated and reached tens of thousands of purchasers and readers. Improvement meant discipline rather than aimless extensive expansion. It meant not plowing up too much land at once, nor scattering seed or labor too thinly. The new common sense was for farmers to build fertility in a process of moral progress, making the landscape more bountiful, and building up wealth.11
- 12 See W. Rothenberg [1981: 303], C. Post [1995: 394, 405-406, 419] and J. Atack et al. [2000a: 258].
20On a material level, whereas equipment, techniques, and yields remained basically unchanged over the course of the colonial period, the number of improved plows and output per farm grew considerably from 1785 to 1815. Inhabitants of the northeast relied on credit to finance the adoption of crop rotation of pastures and meadows to associate arable land with animal rearing and thus augment fertilizer and yields. Productivity grew by 0.21% per year over the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Heightened competition and gains in productivity increased social inequality, but also led to rising real wages and per capita wealth.12
- 13 See C. Danhof [1963: 254, 270-271], J. M. Faragher [1986: 96, 98-99, 105, 201-204], W. Rothenberg (...)
21Agrarian profits, and the wages they made possible, facilitated the spread of agriculture westward after 1800. Settlers sought an independent existence in the colonial era and the nineteenth century. Of course, they had to contend with Native Americans who, at the beginning of the 1800s, held nearly half of Ohio, two-thirds of the Michigan Territory, and more than 90% of Indiana and Illinois. Squatters also had to put about twenty years of work into felling trees, chopping roots, and pulling up rocks to prepare a farm for plowing with horses. They had to pay for seed, draft animals, a house and barn, implements, timber for fencing, and transportation westwards. Settlers raised much of this revenue by selling eastern lands to farmers who had worked for wages. Rural workers in the Midwest earned even more than their counterparts in the East and several times more than agricultural workers in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many laborers in the Midwest saved money and began production up the river valleys in advance of state land surveys. Records attest to enormous farms of maize and other grains, orchards, and vegetable gardens, as well as various types of livestock yielding meat and dairy produce in central Illinois. Although these farmers sold large volumes of meat to consumers in St. Louis, they continued to use the money to finance additional land, distribute farms as payment to hired workers, live off of their own crops and livestock, and generally work in ways condemned as unproductive by agricultural reformers.13
- 14 See A. Taylor [1995: 99], Atack et al. [2000b: 315] and P. Frymer [op. cit.: 73-74, 104].
22Needless to say, most households had to become tenants before accumulating enough money to place a down payment. Like most land purchasers after the 1840s, they accrued considerable mortgage debts, which had to be paid off within five years. The debts resulted from Congress’s insistence that the squatters pay for the land they had improved through their own financial and physical efforts. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, federal officials focused their attention on fully securing and incorporating the lands between the Appalachians and Mississippi River. They suspected that squatters would feel independent, and loosen US control over the Northwest Territory. Those who paid for the land, by contrast, would want the state to protect their investment. Federal politicians, moreover, hoped that sales of national land would help finance the national debt. The administration and Congress therefore kept boundary lines intact and moved slowly to settle the Northwest, carefully regulating population movement and the distribution of the public lands. Federal officials prohibited private purchases of Indian lands so as to manage the distribution of property on the frontier.14
- 15 See P. W. Gates [1963: 355-357], R. Swierenga [1968: 50, 100-101], C. Post [1982, 2019: 179], T. S (...)
23When the state sold the public land at auction, it kept prices high by requiring the purchase of at least 640 acres, far more than a family needed. At the time of Illinois’s incorporation in 1818, businesses and speculators bought much of the property, including the military areas, thus leaving vast tracts empty. Bankers acquired 29 of the 38 million acres of public land sold between 1835 and 1837. Settlers had to take out loans to pay these private speculators and real-estate companies if they wanted legal title to property west of the Appalachians. They had to produce commodities to service debts contracted with moneylenders representing banks and businessmen.15
- 16 See A. Bogue [1955: 264-265], P. W. Gates [op. cit.: 355-61], A. Cayton [1986: 130, 140, 150], J. (...)
24Eastern investors and bankers thus placed enormous amounts of capital in loans to farmers and in infrastructure projects in anticipation of commercial agriculture. The credit made available to farmers drove up land prices and made it impossible for squatters to purchase their farms out of savings at government auctions. In fact, over the entire nineteenth century, squatters in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska often took out loans to purchase more land than they planned to till, betting that rising prices would make them fortunes. These practices contributed to speculative waves of boom and bust, in 1819, 1837 and 1846, which struck the new republic in previously unheard ways. Colonial farmers had been able to return to subsistence agriculture in periods of deflation and withdraw from the market. But in the new capitalist context—when people depended on the market for sales, purchases, wages, and credit—the crises left hundreds of thousands of people unemployed across the country. Crises undermined profitability, or the rent, a farmer could obtain from arable land. Farmers then focused even more fixedly on improvement in order to stay in business and keep their land. The crises, however, inevitably caused higher rates of foreclosure, tenancy, and fresh migrations further west in search of new lands to squat.16
25The commercial depression of 1837, in particular, reduced the revenues of local governments in Illinois, Ohio, and other Midwestern states over the following years. American and British bankers and merchants, who held public bonds, pressured the states to restructure their tax systems, raise revenue, and service their debts. State governments rapidly raised taxes despite the protests of farmers. The federal army and a growing number of state surveyors, land-office administrators, and fiscal bureaucrats put pressure on the inhabitants of the Midwest to meet their financial obligations [Gates 1963: 355; Post 1995: 425-427].
- 17 See H. Friedman [1978: 565-566], B. Page and R. Walker [1991: 292], C. Post [1995: 428-430; 2019: (...)
26For these reasons, by the 1840s and 1850s, the inhabitants of the Midwest had become petty capitalists, dependent on the market for the money needed to pay off debts and taxes, and compelled by market logic to improve productivity. Growth accelerated, driving down commodity prices and impelling farmers to contract additional debts, acquire more land, obtain better equipment and breeding stock, and increase production. The high labor costs entailed in producing the commodities required to obtain money and remain solvent led agriculturalists to acquire machines, forego a wage bill, and still cultivate additional land. Farms saw sharp increases in productivity in the 1850s as a result of this pressure to enhance output relative to labor time. Farmers in the Ohio Valley and Great Plains specialized in a combination of wheat and livestock to augment manure fertilizer and yields. The compulsion to lower costs led to the rapid diffusion of the horse-drawn steel plow developed by John Deere and of a variety of seed drills, which improved the soil and raised labor productivity. The horse-drawn mechanical reaper, which combined reaping and raking, increased labor productivity 75% over the former hand tools. The mechanical thresher, which separated wheat from the chaff, reduced the labor required to prepare grain for the market. The number of man-hours required to produce 100 bushels of wheat thus fell from 233 in 1840 to 152 in 1880, 108 in 1900, and 87 in 1920. The increase of labor productivity in northern agriculture, in both arable fields and animal husbandry, matched or surpassed that of industry between 1840-60 and 1900-10.17
- 18 See C. Clark [1990: 327], C. Post [1995: 410-411, 428-429] and A.-L. Cox [op. cit.: 177].
27These successful farmers in the Ohio Valley and Great Plains fed the nation, selling hogs in Cincinnati and Chicago, and wheat in New Orleans and Pittsburgh. In fact, the low commodity prices generated by the mechanized farms of the Midwest drove the farmers of New England and the Middle Atlantic out of grain and beef markets, compelling them to adopt new specializations in fruit, dairy, and market gardening, as well as in oats for horses used in the towns. Tobacco became a particularly valuable crop for the farmers in the valleys of western Massachusetts in the 1860s and 1870s. Members of households unable to compete labored as wage earners in eastern manufactures.18
- 19 See G. Wright [1984: 51-54, 107-108, 116-117, 141] and C. Post [1982, 2012: 12, 137, 147].
28In a word, households across the North—from New England and the Middle Atlantic to the new states west of the Appalachians—faced market competition and so had to constantly increase the value of their labor by specializing in the most lucrative crops and cutting production costs. Their economic behavior stood in stark contrast to what was prevalent in the South. There, the slaveholders’ economic and social existence was predicated on the ownership of laborers, not capital writ large, transferable, that is, to all forms of property, including technology used to replace labor. Slaveholders did not see labor as a recurrent production cost, or wage bill (variable capital in Marxist terminology), which in the North was relatively high and which had to be constantly reduced, because of competition, through better implements and methods. In the South, the slaveholders held down costs by keeping their enslaved labor, or fixed capital (constant capital in the Marxist lexicon), incessantly at work. The intensity of work increased in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as overseers adopted the gang system to supervise large numbers of slaves, coercing them to follow the pace of the fastest cotton pickers. Nevertheless, output relative to the human energy expended increased relatively little. It was irrational for a slaveholder to adopt a new machine or technique if enslaved laborers then went unused, not producing value and defraying their cost. Inactive enslaved laborers meant a decline in their value and thus in the fortunes of the slaveholder class.19
29Moreover, unlike investors in the North, the slaveholders in control of the southern states had little to gain from immigration, which could only bring down the value of the labor they owned as property. Immigrants competed with the slave labor put to work in non-agricultural activities. They also competed for the new fertile lands the slaveholders continually appropriated. One way slave owners could enhance the productivity of their labor force was to move it from lands where fertility was in decline to new fecund fields. Investors in the North, by contrast, positively encouraged immigration to raise the market value of land and leases, and to control the costs of labor. [Wright 1984 : 123-4 ; Post 1982 ; Post 2012 : 12]
- 20 Christopher Isett and Stephen Miller [2017: 159-168] elaborate on this divergence of capitalist fa (...)
30Southern plantations also restricted the internal market. The slave economy of course created a market for cotton gins, steam presses to make bales, engines for water transport, and other advanced technologies. However, since slaveholders had already paid for their labor force, they necessarily ignored instruments of production that would leave it inactive. They thus limited the development of industries producing means of production. Slaveholders, moreover, sought to hold down the costs of their captive labor force by having it produce its own subsistence. They typically had enslaved laborers produce corn during the down-time in the agricultural cycle of cotton. The enslaved laborers’ time could be put to productive use making the meagre cloths and household wares needed for their survival as a workforce. Slaveholders sought to make the plantation self-sufficient [Wright 1984: 60-61, 122; Post 1982, 2012 : 147].20
31In the North, by contrast, the rural population became a mass market for farm implements and consumer goods. Whereas families of central Illinois had once produced the majority of their domestic supplies, they virtually gave up such tasks in the 1850s, as they devoted more time to intensively farming larger farms and sold crops quickly to cover the costs of land acquisitions, implements, household provisions, and taxes. Capitalist agriculture turned northern farmers, but not southern ones, into a growing mass market for industrialists such as John Deere and retailers such as Montgomery Ward [Faragher 1986: 208; Cronon 1991: 336-7].
- 21 See J. M. Faragher [op. cit.: 208], B. Page and R. Walker [op. cit.: 282, 292-294], C. Post [1982, (...)
32Descriptions of US industrialization generally begin with textiles and footwear manufacture, as well as railroads which called machine-making and innovations in iron production into being. A more accurate description starts with the westward expansion of capitalist agriculture, a veritable agro-industrial complex. The manufacturers of machinery, tools, and supplies for farmers were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialists such as Cyrus McCormick churned out plows, harrows, hoes, and seed-drills, as well as mechanical rakes, reapers, and threshers. They also produced seeds, fertilizers, harnesses, carriages, and wagons, in addition to saw-timber and nails for fences and buildings. The early manufacture of iron in places like Pittsburgh was largely directed toward agricultural implements and products for farmers, such as stoves, kettles, skillets, and rifle barrels.21
33Capitalist agriculture and the expanding output of Midwestern farms fueled the leading sectors of industrial growth, such as brewing, distilling, grain milling, and hog butchering in Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and other northern cities. Food-processing industries represented much more than intermediaries between grain farmers and eastern consumers. They appeared at the outset of settlement, went through technical innovations, and became machine-based enterprises. Flour milling led all American industries in terms of the total value of output between 1850 and 1880. Meat packing ranked fourth nationally in total value of output in 1880, and first in 1905 [Page and Walker 1991: 293-294; Cronon 1991: 97]. The expansion of capitalist agriculture westward constituted the motor of economic development, drawing in ever larger investments by bankers, industrialists, and insurance companies.
34Capitalist economic behavior, requiring constant increases in labor productivity, has not come naturally to human beings. In the eighteenth century, the inhabitants of New England and the Middle Atlantic did not strive to match the prices of their peers, systematically turn out innovations, or narrowly specialize their productive activities in response to fluctuations in market demand. It required much more than prospects for economic gain in town markets to induce farmers to invest compulsively in labor-saving implements and to accumulate cash reserves.
35Farmers aimed to preserve their households, which were bound up with their land and communities. They performed all farm tasks with the work of family members and neighbors, rather than deplete household resources in expenditure on implements for tasks they could do themselves. For this reason, per capita output remained constant during the colonial period. The advantage of the inhabitants of New England and the Middle Atlantic over their counterparts in Europe was the absence of an autonomous ruling class—such as the English gentry or continental seigneurs—with the capacity to regulate access to untilled areas. The colonial militia proved ill-suited to preventing American settlers from clearing new land as their numbers grew, thus continually reproducing subsistence agriculture and self-sufficient communities on the frontier.
36This mode of farming changed as a result of the Revolutionary War, when merchants and officials in the former colonies took control of the federal and state governments, and enforced the debts accumulated by rural inhabitants of New England and the Middle Atlantic in the 1770s and 1780s. The federal government asserted sovereignty over western land and auctioned the great majority of it in large tracts which only banks and insurance companies could afford. Thus, across the northern United States—from New England and the Mid-Atlantic, to the land in newly settled areas west of the Appalachians—inhabitants had to adopt capitalist norms of behavior (producing for money rather than for local use) if they were to have access to land. Farmers in the former colonial areas had to produce for the market to fulfill their obligations to tax and debt collectors. If they sought farms in western areas, they had to take out loans from land-speculation companies.
37In other words, the farmers of the United States had to raise output relative to the time spent working in order to match the competitive prices of their peers and remain viable. Increasingly productive work generated mounting supplies of crops and livestock at declining prices. The farmers’ focus on gaining value from the market turned them into a mass of consumers, as they gave up non-remunerative work like producing their own tools, clothes, and food. These two byproducts of capitalist agriculture—cheap farm output and the mass consumer market—fueled the leading sectors of the industrial revolution such as food processing businesses, farm implement plants, and manufacturers of household wares. In short, rural development did not result from the market stimulus of the new industrial towns. Quite the reverse: it was agricultural capitalism, resulting from social struggles over the land, which thrust the new industrial towns onto the landscape of nineteenth-century America.
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