Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010) 860–867
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics and Chemistry of the Earth
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pce
The moral basis of soil science and geology: What antebellum farmers
knew and why anyone cared
Benjamin R. Cohen ⇑
University of Virginia, A237 Thornton Hall, 351 McCormick Rd., Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 22 January 2010
Received in revised form 3 June 2010
Accepted 28 July 2010
Available online 1 August 2010
Keywords:
Antebellum America
Geology
Georgic ethic
Internal improvement
Rural press
Soil science
a b s t r a c t
Soil science and geology had common historical origins in the ‘‘internal improvement” era of the early
American Republic that sought both cultural and material progress. This paper draws from the rural
press, regional agricultural societies, and the first wave of state scientific surveys in that era to discuss
the early Republic foundations of those new sciences. It discusses the dynamic and productive circulation
of soil-based studies in an era that made it possible for later professional scientific activities to gain influence. It also suggests by way of conclusion that soil scientists and geologists of the twenty-first century
can culturally ground their own activities more fully by articulating the purposes of their work as part of
broader moral imperatives. To do this, they can treat new calls for sustainability science as a current version of improvement. By recognizing the fundamentally dual aims of sustainability—materially, to
achieve the protection of resources and, culturally, to make progress toward more sustainable social
structures—soil scientists and geologists can recall the common purpose of their work and avoid the distance from collective cultural activity that professional specialization of the last century and a half has
brought.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Soil science and geology had common origins in an improvement context of the early nineteenth century. During that era,
farmers, planters, natural philosophers, and their neighbors together developed new views on the land and new ways to examine
and define it. This essay looks to the early American Republic,
where I examine the records of farmers and planters to show the
vibrant activity into soil manipulation experiments. Mixing anew
known fertilizers, identifying new ones, systematically testing
the merits of each, producing reports and engaging in debates
about them, the small-hold farmers and larger scale planters knew
a great deal about their soil and minerals.1 Their studies did not carry the label ‘‘soil science” or ‘‘geology” in the professional sense they
later would. Yet this setting was witness to an experimental mindset
⇑ Tel.: +434 982 2004; fax: +434 924 4306.
E-mail address: [email protected]
This article is drawn from Cohen (2009a), where readers can find a fuller analysis
of the activities discussed here. Interested readers might also refer to Worster (1994),
Valenĉius (2004), and McNeill and Winiwarter (2006) for further analyses of the
science-environment nexus as understood through attention to agriculture and the
soil. McNeill (2003) notes that soil science has received limited attention from
environmental historians, a lacuna that scholars in the years after have begun to fill.
Along with the aforementioned sources, Stoll (2002) offers an example of that more
recent environmental history scholarship into the cultural place of soil in the early
Republic.
1
1474-7065/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pce.2010.07.033
where an active subset of the broader farming class pursued soil and
geological studies together.
The early Republic—roughly speaking, the 1790s to the 1850s—
provides a particularly useful forum for exploring these origins.
During that time, some of the most pressing cultural and political
questions were also environmental, soil-based ones. They dealt
with land management, soil amendment, crop productivity, rural
expansion, and, more abstractly, larger scientific questions about
terrain, natural history, and mineral identification. The cultural
and political project of building the new Republic required attention to building an agrarian economic system; that economic system in turn required more intimate knowledge about the soil,
the minerals, and the terrain. In this, Americans took part in activities concurrent in Europe, Asia, and Africa to increase systematic
knowledge of the rural landscape. On the one hand, then, they
were asking questions that had been posed for some time by others
around the world. Yet on the other hand, they were seeking more
knowledge of their landscape for reasons of particular importance
to a unique North American setting.2 While sometimes in conversation with English, French, and Prussian natural philosophers and
advocates for geological and pedological activities, most American
2
Scholars addressing the history of soil science in particular have discussed efforts
in ancient Rome (Olson, 1943; Winiwarter, 2006), medieval Europe (Cooter, 1978),
pre-Columbian South America (Williams, 2006), Prussia (Van der Ploeg et al., 1999),
Russia (Evtuhov, 2006), Britain (Fussell, 1969), France and its colonial holdings (Feller
et al., 2008), and Romania (Petrina, 1995), to name a few.
B.R. Cohen / Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010) 860–867
efforts for ‘‘systematic agriculture” were generated from experiments on their own lands and with ideas developed from those
activities (Rossiter, 1975; Marcus, 1985; Cohen, 2009a). They were
developed within a cultural framework of American improvement,
one that was co-constituted by the moral goal of making a better
society (cultural ‘‘improvement”) and the material goal of improving
the health and thus productivity of the land.
The original symposium that spawned this issue of Physics and
Chemistry of the Earth brought together historical, philosophical
and sociological discussions of soil science and geology. To maintain the interdisciplinary flavor of that symposium, in this article
I ground the histories of soil science and geology in the improvement culture of the early Republic and understand them as histories of science and the environment (see also Haskett, 1995; Landa
and Feller, 2009). Specifically, this article explores the combination
of science and agricultural improvement through the examples of
the rural press, regional agricultural society activities, and state
scientific surveys of the antebellum years. The purpose is to help
explain why soil science and geology were pursued and how the
improvement context was common for both sciences.
Since those early years, the histories of soil science and geology have followed common patterns of specialization that led
the two forms of environmental science into separate professional
activities. One consequence of that specialization has been the
production of discipline-specific terminology and references. References to soil, geology, and science in the antebellum years, for
example, were more loosely construed and generally used than
they would be today. This was so not just for the language of
the practitioners, but for the names of their studies as well. Terms
like systematic agriculture, the science of agriculture, and agricultural chemistry were less distinct during that era than they would
later become. The soil science I refer to in this article was likewise
less precise.
Another consequence has been the resulting ends-means relationship between science and culture. In modern professional settings, scientific pursuits are often cast as ends themselves.
Scientists seek goals internal to their disciplines and professional
communities, at least primarily, rather than a means to some other
end, such as cultural improvement. Research agendas are frequently aimed at improving technical calculations, providing more
refined instrumental readings, or articulating more specialized versions of the already specialized subsets of soil and geological scientists. Certainly this is a tendency of modern specialization, not a
universal law; it is not always the case today, nor has it always
been the case historically. Efforts after the founding of the Cooperative Extension Service in 1914, for example, and Hugh Bennett’s
work with the Soil Conservation Service in the 1930s found scientists aligned more clearly with an applied, practical agenda that
was dictated by broader cultural concerns (Rasmussen, 1989;
Henke, 2008; Helms, 2008). Yet, as represented by the differences
between soil science, agricultural chemistry, crop science, geology,
agronomy, mineralogy, biogeochemistry, and more—and as evident in the unprecedented 2008 joint meeting of the Soil Science
Society of American, Geological Society of America, Crop Science
Society of America, and American Society of Agronomy—research
goals today are often geared towards audiences of other sub-specialists within, not beyond, science.
At the end of this article I return to comments on the future of
soil science and geology to speak to the opportunity for them to
again re-conceptualize activities as means to ends other than
themselves. I argue that although the dual moral and material contexts of the history of soil science and geology were shaped by a
particular nineteenth century improvement ethos, that dual context remains relevant for future pursuits of soil and geological sciences in the twenty-first century. This is because scientists today
might also reengage their own sense of pursuing means to ends
861
other than further professional development. We might see the sciences as shaped by and contributing to larger cultural notions of
progress and environmental improvement for our time.3
2. Background: science, environment, culture
But first, antebellum America, where three factors—a unique
cultural framework of American improvement, an agricultural
environment, and a shift in science that historians have called
‘‘the second scientific revolution”—shaped the pursuits of soil science and geology. In those decades, an active and influential cohort
of early Republic Americans was enthusiastic about ‘‘systematic”
pursuits of agriculture. Having worked for decades to observe
and coordinate fertilizer procedures and land management practices, the ‘‘era of systematic agriculture,” as one New England
advocate wrote, was fully upon them by the early nineteenth century (Adams, 1824, 33; also see Cohen, 2009a, Chapter 1). Later
studies dedicated to similar efforts would be labeled scientific
and directed through institutional structures of experimenting,
funding, and researching, but in the fields of the early Republic
they were part of the everyday life of an agrarian world.
The cultural framework of innovation and progress was characterized by a complicated zeal for ‘‘internal improvements.” Practical appeals for ‘‘internal improvements” in the United States were
a subset of broader efforts that followed the Enlightenment’s
fabled values of progress, rationality, and knowledge production.
In the US, advocates put a practical emphasis on the philosophical
principles. Roughly spanning the 1810s to the 1840s, the politically characterized ‘‘era of internal improvements” saw canals,
turnpikes, and railways offer the promise of better economic,
transportation, and political structures, mostly to transform the
products of the land more effectively into saleable goods (Larson,
2000). These were state level efforts, with New York’s Erie Canal
(1825) perhaps providing the paradigmatic example (Sheriff,
1997). Some scholars have referred to this time period as the
transportation revolution; some have called it the market revolution; some have called it the era of scientific surveys (Millbrooke,
1981). Each was part of what can be collected under the rubric of
internal improvements.
Yet the zeal for improvement was complicated, I note, because
improvement referred to a range of things beyond just better
transportation and more attention to soil fertility. Some proponents also promoted the more efficient exploitation of enslaved
people (while others promoted abolition); improvers also sought
the appropriation of new, western territory from native Americans
(even as others questioned westward migration); still others were
motivated to ‘‘improve” labor management, as with the more
effective control of a population of agricultural laborers. These less
ennobling undercurrents must be seen as part of the same world
and ethos that champions would herald as progressive.4
No matter the name or the morally contentious character concealed under it, though, almost all improvement efforts involved
attention to agricultural lands and the agrarian life. In this sense,
and against stereotypical characterizations of American history that
cast industrialization and agrarianism as opposing political economies, early industrial efforts were consistent with the goal of processing and distributing agricultural products (grains, produce,
animals, fibers) from land to market. Within that dynamic forum,
3
In this, my point resonates with several authors in Warkentin’s (2006) edited
collection. See, in particular, Addiscott (2006), Gregorich et al. (2006), and Showers
(2006). See, among others, Hillel (1992) and Montgomery (2007) for fuller explorations of soil and socio-historical conditions. Also see Cohen (2009b) for more
exploration of the historical connections between environmental ethics and soil
science.
4
For a flavor of some of these narratives see Stilgoe (1983) and Thornton (1989).
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B.R. Cohen / Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010) 860–867
Americans contributing to the goals of improvement did so with a
need for more direct attention to soil and geological properties.
That agrarian environmental context was pervasive, so that
debates about political economy and national policy were also
debates about agricultural land use. For the founders, agrarianism
also meant that the virtue of the farmer and the moral basis for
the new nation were synonymous. This ideal rested on a much
broader conception of ‘‘the farmer” than the strict occupational
one we hold today. As the historian Marcus (1988) has noted,
in the early nineteenth century ‘‘farming was a state of mind
and its practitioners included virtually all Americans regardless
of where they lived, how they made a living, or how much wealth
they had accrued. . .. Farmers,” Marcus writes, ‘‘extolled the virtues of orderliness and Godliness [and of] working with one’s
hands.” They were the ‘‘self-reliant souls upon whom the democratic Republic was based” (7). The term ‘‘farmer” was broad enough to include a wide range of citizens, though narrow enough
to define a specific moral code. While the ‘‘farming class” is a
socioeconomic reference too vague to hold up under scrutiny today, in the first decades of the country’s history the improvement
of that class was commonly understood as a cultural, material,
and political goal of national significance. It was also the basis
from which Americans understood and defined the natural
environment.
The backdrop against which they were seeking to define that
environment—the soil, crops, animals, mountains, rivers and other
water sources—was shaped not only by an improvement ethos of
the American agrarian world, but as part of broader shifts in the
history of science itself. They did so, that is, within an era that historians have referred to as the ‘‘second scientific revolution.” Cunningham and Perry (1993), for example, write that ‘‘it was not until
the beginning of the nineteenth century that the term ‘science’ was
used for the enterprise of investigating the natural world in the
way that it is used today” (420). While the well-examined scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
witness to shifts in epistemic authority from the church to natural
philosophers—and this, unevenly, problematically, and not untheologically—it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the forms of modern science we characterize
in today’s world took on meaningful shape. And while the dating of
this era reflects the Western European character of such endeavors,
the American locations I return to below participated in the same
shifts spawned across Europe.
During this period, all new were discipline formation (as with,
for example, biology, geology, physics, physiology), educational
direction and formalization (as with schools and textbooks), professional opportunities (as from new social organizations like regional science societies and government agencies, places where
one could be employed, that is), and the invention of the laboratory
as a space to conduct scientific activity. As Cunningham and Williams summarize it, the early nineteenth century was ‘‘the period
which saw the origin of pretty well every feature which is regarded
as essential and definitional of the enterprise of science: its name,
its aim (secular as distinct from godly knowledge of the natural
world), its values (the ‘liberal’ values of free enquiry, meritocratic
expert government and material progress), and its history” (427).
At a time when science’s professional status was yet to be
established, those who produced studies of the soil and agrarian
nature were part of wider, less centralized knowledge communities. Geological and soil studies were not always in league with
theory formation, laboratory assessment, or professional scientific
advance. Instead, they were the product of activities on the land by
often unknown, dispersed, and locally interested actors. Rather
than looking to the later professionalizing process, taking the era
on its own terms helps reveal the dynamic activities citizens performed as ways to understand better the soil and larger terrain.
Coming to view soil science and geology in that era thus requires
attention to the everyday practices of actors whose interests in soil,
mineral, and sub-stratum knowledge were based on impulses
other than professionalization.
Why, then, would one pursue soil science or geology? In the
early Republic, attention to soil quality, mineral identity, and geological features were secondary, approached in aid to the goals of
cultural improvement of an agrarian life. There, the sciences were
means to ends other than themselves. The cultural, environmental,
and scientific contexts outlined above provided the setting into
which soil science and geology took root. Three examples speak
to this point, each illustrating the community-based activities of
rural advocates: debates in the antebellum rural press; county-level agricultural activities; and statewide geological and agricultural surveys.
3. Systematic antebellum activity
‘‘The first main step towards [the work of recovery], is to make
the thieves restore as much as possible of the stolen fertility.”
James Madison, ‘‘Address to the Agriculture Society of
Albemarle,” 1818
‘‘[By observing soil properties] we shall derive both satisfaction
and improvement. We can mark distinctly the results of various
improvements and experiments; [we will] banish those loose,
haphazard, careless, and guess work habits, but too prevalent
among us, and unquestionably the bane of all good husbandry.”
Dabney Minor, speaking to the Agriculture Society of Albemarle,
1820
3.1. The rural press
The rural (or agricultural) press began in earnest by the 1820s.
Its formation resulted from a confluence of factors. High among
these was the rising prominence of regional agricultural societies,
which were interested in communicating their meeting minutes
and public addresses. James Madison, then concurrently President
of the United States and the Agriculture Society of Albemarle (ASA)
in Virginia, spoke of the central problem of soil fertility at the ASA’s
founding. Dabney Minor, a prominent ASA member and fellow central Virginia farmer, expanded the point soon after, agitating, as the
epigraph above has it, to banish ‘‘loose, haphazard, careless, and
guess work habits.” He articulated the plea for agricultural
improvement that helped structure new experimental practices
on the land.
The press forged a tight relationship with regional agricultural
societies as both forums shared a focus on the salient issues of
improvement and economy. Such organizations played a key role
in producing acceptable knowledge, vetting new practices, and
encouraging innovation. The Philadelphia Society for Promoting
Agriculture (PSPA), Agricultural Society of Virginia (ASV), and the
ASA each had its own Memoirs or Proceedings. For even greater
influence and reach they could also count on the press to spread
their organized advice. The press and societies worked together toward improvement by publishing reports on society prizes
awarded for the best studies of farming experiments, detailing
the activities on the society members’ lands, fostering a cooperative spirit between the members of those societies and the readers
of the press, and publishing the transactions of the societies. These
factors stood as early markers of closer attention to systematic,
experimental, and discursive expressions of promoting rational
agriculture.
Along with agricultural societies, the press was shaped by diligent local editors and new publishing and mailing opportunities
B.R. Cohen / Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010) 860–867
that made serialized literature possible. Its purpose was to advocate rural economy by providing a forum for presenting and debating the issues of agriculture. It worked as a complement and
counterweight to urban newspapers, listing market prices for farm
goods, advertising rural products, and commenting on agricultural
development.
From the eighteenth century, individual farmers and planters
had been publishing treatises on various aspects of their farming
experiences in forms the later rural press would reproduce. In England, Tull’s (1733) The Horse-hoeing Husbandry and, in the American colonies, Eliot’s (1762) Essays Upon Field Husbandry in New
England, were but two of numerous examples (see Sayre, this issue). These were personal works on land practice, expressions derived from the experience of the writers. Through their accounts of
everyday interactions with the field they reflected an active orientation to the land.
Concerns for soil improvement through attention to fertilization
were emphasized in the later rural press. At the time, fertilizers
were thought of as natural agents added to the dirt, products of
the farm or the land such as animal dung, vegetable manure, lime,
marl (crushed shells), and plaster of Paris (or gypsum). To fertilize
a field was to perform a simple, routine task that generations of
farmers had enfolded into their daily practices. The dung heap
was long a mainstay of farm life; there was certainly nothing
new about using various manures to help vegetation grow.
The methods for using fertilizers, however, were coming into
development as was an increased understanding of variety (Wines,
1985). At the same time, earlier references to ‘‘science” for the sake
of agriculture were losing their vagueness as a result of calls for the
kinds of systematic approaches to land use and particular invocations of agricultural chemistry societies like the PSPA and ASA
advocated. This plea for systematization was ubiquitous. In his
Agricultural Reader, the New Hampshire physician and farmer
Adams (1824) asserted that ‘‘the ‘era of systematic agriculture’ has
actually commenced” (33). Improving the cultural strength and
material capabilities of agricultural America was becoming a matter of methodical and systematic attention to soil practices.
In the rural press of the early American Republic, experiential
knowledge from living on the land framed the impetus for improving the soil. Although the press was driven by individual editorial
personalities, and in this sense linked to the rhetorical structure
of earlier personal treatises and compendia, it was more basically
a collective approach to circulating reports about land practices,
soil fertility experiments, and agrarian political economy, this from
its range of contributors and reprints. Here it offered an extension
beyond the prior era of personal treatises and individual collections of soil manipulation experience. Helping promote that ostensibly communal, collective approach to disseminating and
debating agricultural knowledge, the papers’ editors had a strong
though mostly informal affiliation with the regional agricultural
societies who shared a zeal for resolving fertility problems as mutual problems of culture and nature. Each paper also participated in
bringing the science of agriculture into public debate by arguing
for innovations in method and for the virtue of rational, field-based
experimentation.
In the 1820s, that first wave of papers had an air of commonality, especially with their various invocations for improvement. Differences that might have been expected from the geographical and
political space that separated them were minimal. Baltimore’s The
American Farmer, for instance, published reports and commentaries
from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina,
New York, and Europe in its first volume. The material was sometimes original, but just as often reprinted from sources as diverse
as the Albany Argus, the Memoirs of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, The Richmond Enquirer, and The Nashville Whig.
Albany’s The Plough Boy, Boston’s The New England Farmer, and
863
soon dozens of others used similar patterns of publishing and
reprinting (see Demaree, 1974; McMurry, 1989).
This is not to downplay the differences in labor regimes and
ideologically imbued structures of land management between
southern and northern farmers and planters, but to illustrate that
with respect to the cultural and moral motives for improving soil
fertility, papers all along the Atlantic coast had a concern for preventing emigration with their pleas for local improvement. Historian Stoll (2002) has characterized South Carolinians and
Pennsylvanians seeking to improve soil fertility and maintain stable land use practices as early conservation efforts. The improvements were meant to alleviate the need for the population to
shift westward to fertile land. Better land management in the East
would obviate the need for emigration and prevent cultural decline. The editor of the New England Farmer, Thomas Fessenden,
wrote of much the same vision in his 1822 editorial ‘‘The Science
of Agriculture and Book Farming.” There he noted that the ‘‘practical farmer. . . must understand, and in some degree practice these
improvements,” such as systematic rotation of crops and the use
of plaster of Paris, or else ‘‘he must go. . . either to a poor house
or to the state of Ohio.” Virginia’s Richmond Enquirer reported in
1837 that improvement efforts could ‘‘arrest the flood of Emigration [to western states by] unfold[ing] our natural resources.”5
Though Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York had important differences of culture and political economy, those differences were less
prominent within the consistent calls for more systematic attention
to agricultural practice. The rural press presented this common view
of agriculture in need of attention and improvement.
The press was dedicated to the experiential values of agricultural progress with the principle that it would ‘‘improve the soil
and the mind,” as the masthead of Albany’s Cultivator announced
with each issue. It carried on discussions about soil exhaustion
and fertility that were widespread across the countryside. And
the press pursued with weekly and monthly attention the possibilities of improvement through systematic practice. Editors and contributors alike were promoters, prescribing certain modes of action
and discouraging others as viewed through the lens of experience.
The rural press stands here as an example of the dynamism of
discussions about systematizing soil intervention, of how those
pursuits were born of and shaped by a complex notion of
improvement that was at once cultural and material.
3.2. County-level systemization
In league with the efforts of the rural press, if independent of
them, were the preponderance of county agricultural activities in
the early Republic. As with the ASA in Virginia or the Philadelphia
Society for Promoting Agriculture (PSPA) in southeastern Pennsylvania, the agenda of these organizations provides a second example of the vibrancy and active circulation of attention to soil
fertility and identity. The core ideals of these societies included
the value of personal, local experience, the increasingly popular
virtue of systematic attention to the land, and grounding in the cultural concern for strengthening the agrarian constitution of their
region.
Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut all had regional groups devoted to advancing agricultural
causes (Rossiter, 1974; Baatz, 1985). These organizations were a locus of advocacy for measures that defined specific land management
practices,
making
systematic
and
experimental
identification of measures of fertility the centerpiece of such efforts. The PSPA, for one, had originated in the 1780s when a group
of urban elites sought to improve agricultural productivity and
5
Fessenden (1822) was writing in the New England Farmer. The Enquirer’s
comments appeared in the February 2, 1837 edition of their paper.
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B.R. Cohen / Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010) 860–867
with it economic power. To the South, James Madison and his ASA
believed that they needed to detail ‘‘a mode of conducting agricultural experiments with more precision and accuracy.”6 For this, the
identity of the soil lay at the root of the problem—soil as something
improvable; as an entity governed by principles; as matter that
could be studied, analysed, and experimented upon; and thus as
something that could be made more productive. While the organization of these practices highlighted attention to soil identity, the organizations themselves were a product of the same deeper moral
imperatives discussed above: as with Thomas Fessenden’s concern
for his neighbors leaving exhausted soil to move to Ohio, their plea
for cultural and material improvement framed the activities for
improving the land as part and parcel of improving cultural viability.
The activities were member-driven and member-defined by the
regional societies. As opposed to the more urban elites of Philadelphia, in Virginia planter elites led efforts to recover lost fertility
and promote systematic attention to soil properties. Coming as
they did from the South, these efforts have mostly escaped historical attention. A few reasons help explain this scholarly slight. One
is that they have received scant attention in the literature of soil
science history because they are about farmers and planters, not
scientists. Another reason is the slave dynamics at play. Scholars
have written that the planters’ slave ownership prevented any
legitimate efforts toward soil exhaustion remediation. With a slave
labor force, it was easier to open up new fields and leave exhausted
ones behind, the argument goes. Yet the record of scores of planters in the South reveals that the fact of slave labor did not determine whether or not one sought to improve soil fertility. In fact,
rather than avoid experimentation and systematic attention to soil
conditions, evidence shows that slave-owning planters used their
slave forces as technicians in the field, the operators who conducted the fertilizing experiments. This exemplified the complicated valences of the improvement ethos, where progress for
some was the product of subjugating others. Thus, even as the
morally corrupt system was carried forth, efforts toward a more
systematic soil treatment approach carried on.7
The example of communication noted above, writing for the
press, was evident with the ASA’s publishing agreement with Skinner’s American Farmer and the ASV’s agreement with the Richmond
Enquirer. Reports of members’ land management practices were
another form of such communication. The ASA, for example,
brought together the general and practical in member reports
when it outlined 10 ‘‘Objects for the Attention and Enquiry of the
Society” in October 1817. The list ranged from animal care, crop
rotation strategies, fertilizing options, and mechanical implements
to calendars of work, building structures, and a ‘‘succinct report” of
rural economic practices by members. The members saw this last
as the most appealing of the ten statutes, promising that ‘‘a judicious execution of this article alone might nearly supercede [sic]
every other duty in the society.”8 It was a clear example of going beyond the traditional pillars of their agricultural system and into new
realms of codified knowledge.
The members followed up on the idea of the report in their subsequent meeting, recommending that ‘‘each member of the Society
be required to make a report of his own practices in Agricultural
and Rural Economy.” They asked questions about rotations of
crops, number of acres under the course of cropping, quantity
and description of manure carried out yearly, quantity of plaster
6
The quote is from Madison’s address to the ASA in 1818.
Craven (1926) likely introduced the first sustained commentary about slaves and
agriculture in the South. In addition to Cohen (2009a), for a sampling of discussions of
soil and the South since then see Rubin (1979), Corgan (1982), Scarborough (1989),
Helms (2000), and Stoll (2002).
8
The quote is from the Minute Book of the Albemarle Agricultural Society, page
265, available at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia.
7
used, general description of the soil, and the labor-saving implements used. They understood soil chemistry, as evident through
the case of fertilization experiments, as a practice on the farm,
making observations of the micro-identity of the soil as important
as reports on its macro-manipulation. On the face of it, the reports
would give a synopsis of cultivation strategies. They indicated how
members treated their property, what they expected from it, and
how their practices were either exhausting or resorting fertility.
More deeply, the ASA was evaluating soil content and identifying
the degree of local exhaustion, in the process promoting the view
that the earth was subject to codifiable scrutiny and analysis.
These county-level activities were placed into the framework of
experience-based knowledge production already noted. They were
shaped by the same improvement ethos that characterized the rural press. They also fit with the politically and geographically more
ambitious state-based survey activities discussed next.
3.3. State surveys
In the agricultural society and rural press examples, soil science
(and its close kin, agricultural chemistry) was a more common referent than geological science. Activity at the state level might best
represent the co-production of geology and soil science. While regional activities had limited interest in stratigraphy or theories of
mountain formation—which might serve as good examples of a
geological focus at the time—they did appeal in their work to identifying the sub-features of the soil and sought to identify lime and
gypsum sources along riverbanks and elsewhere. Survey work at
the state level, to which I now turn, began in earnest across the
early Republic in the 1830s and quite frequently defined itself as
cohesive geological and agricultural activities. There too one can
find the active circulation of attention to soil fertility, soil identity,
and geological land features that would come to mark the sciences
of geology and the soil.
During the era of internal improvements, practices of land
improvement like the survey exemplified the moral plea for dual
attention to culture and soil and offered a new way for agrarian
Americans to orient themselves to the land. Virginia’s first state
Geological Survey (1835–1842) highlighted the same growing
antebellum circulation of the earth sciences as county activities,
but on a larger political and geographical scale and with more explicit geological intent. The Geological Survey detailed the state’s
soil composition with a system of correspondence between its leader—the University of Virginia professor of chemistry, mineralogy,
and geology William Barton Rogers—his field technicians, and
numerous local contributors from across the commonwealth. With
that collective of contributors, the survey maintained a constitution of members that kept statewide interests enrolled in the process of soil improvement.
Virginia’s Governor Littleton Tazewell prefaced Rogers’s firstyear reconnaissance report to the House of Delegates in 1836 by
claiming that it was Rogers’s ‘‘reputation as a geologist and chemist [that] induced the board without hesitation to appoint him to
make said reconnaissance.”9 His younger brother, Henry Darwin
Rogers, had recently returned from an immersion in geological debates in London. It was from him that William learned of the newest
Europeans theories of mountain formation, stratigraphy, geological
nomenclature, and technique (see Gerstner, 1994). The brothers
were not only active contributors to the geological, agricultural,
and mineralogical communities, but prominent in the formation of
the Association of American Geologists in 1840. Later that decade,
as historian Kohlstedt (1976) has summarized it, the AAG would lead
to the newly created American Association of the Advancement of
9
22.
Tazewell’s comments to the House of Delegates are reprinted in Rogers (1884),
B.R. Cohen / Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010) 860–867
Science (AAAS, 1848). Rogers, the geological and agricultural surveyor, later moved from Virginia to Massachusetts where he founded
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861. Thus were soil
science and geology not only common members of the early Republic, but formative contributors to the later development of an American scientific identity.10
Virginia’s Rogers Survey was the sixth state-funded project
when it was formed in 1835, following North Carolina, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Maryland. Within the next
few years, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Ohio followed
suit. They each had their eyes on cataloging and cultivating nature’s resources within an agrarian milieu; they were all operating
in a time of agricultural dominance in the political economy of the
Union, fitting neatly into the climate of agricultural improvement.
The Richmond Whig editorialized that the primary objective of the
survey was ‘‘the better development of the State’s Agricultural resources” (March 11, 1854). Rogers (1884) argued before the survey’s inception that ‘‘on the subject of a geological and chemical
survey [Virginia] would behold, spread out beneath her soil, the
rich earths, which [are] soon to diffuse fertility over the hills and
plains” (172). The surveys integrated agricultural and civic goals
in much the same way regional activities had. The official ‘‘geological” title for the survey should not obscure its fundamentally soilbased and agricultural constitution.
Spatially, the Rogers Survey covered nearly all corners of the
state at some point in its years-long duration. In terms of land
use, those regions were themselves uniquely defined. Whether a
region was distinguished primarily by agricultural, coal, or other
market interests depended on the particular topography of that region, meaning that there was a reciprocal relationship between
geography and economy. That topographical variety reveals the
interdependence of land management practices and social fabric:
the dynamics of slave labor were often tied to elevation, with slave
culture relatively limited above the thousand-foot line; patterns of
emigration were connected to soil conditions; the problems of tobacco-caused soil exhaustion, so often used to explain the impetus
for Virginians to enact programs of statewide revitalization, were
less substantial in the west than in southern counties; and prevailing thought at the time had it that older geological strata were tied
to the differential availability of fertilizers like marl and lime. For
the survey, the larger plantations of the east, central, and southside
counties sought more agricultural attention and market opportunities, whereas those representing western coal fields and unearthed
coal deposits around Richmond (the state capitol, on the eastern
edge of the state’s piedmont by the falls of the James River) sought
the geological knowledge of rocks, minerals, and ores.
After the rural press and regional level activities, the state survey offers my third example of integrating cultural and material
goals not because of the professionalizing aspirations of Rogers,
but because the survey involved and was dependent on the participation of statewide citizens. Few if any of them were interested in
the theoretical possibilities Rogers saw in studying rock strata, but
thought that their own agronomy would improve with, as the General Assembly noted in 1835, ‘‘a view to the geological features of
our territory, and the chemical composition of its soils, minerals,
and mineral waters.” Rogers, his assistants, and the roster of contributors to his efforts from across the state organized and deployed a scientific and technological apparatus for the purpose of
measuring, assessing, and defining the land. This task further cemented the model of science as an agent of improvement and as
a participatory activity in the eyes of Virginians. It also helped pro10
Amundson and Yaalon (1995) discuss professional and institutional entanglements between agricultural and geological scientists later in the nineteenth century.
Their paper on Eugene Hilgard and John Wesley Powell offers a useful continuation to
the earlier episodes of integrated agricultural and geological work.
865
mote the similar goals of smaller county surveys and regional efforts by integrating technical analysis with the goals of cultural
improvement.
The official survey was leveraging a system of sample analysis
acquisition that already existed throughout the commonwealth.
Before the survey began—and in part because of the county-level
activities—Rogers received and analysed samples from statewide
farmers. In 1834 he wrote to Henry that ‘‘letters are coming to
me every mail asking advice on the subject of marl or some other
thing.” He would write in the 1837 annual report that ‘‘the high value of these researches, manifested by the eagerness with which
the chemical details in the annual reports are referred to practical
objects, is still more strikingly indicated by the numerous enquiries
addressed to me, and the numerous specimens transmitted for
examination from various quarters of the state” (Rogers, 1896,
113). Samples were in this sense relatively accessible. It helped
too that people learned of the survey in the rural and urban
presses. The Farmer’s Register reprinted the survey’s first-year report in its fourth volume and made occasional comments on it. Local papers in Richmond published comments and editorials about
the survey and its associated legislation. Rogers (1896) proudly
told his brother Henry during the survey that the ‘‘daily papers
of Richmond have lauded my efforts in a very complimentary
style” (118). The survey’s variety of non-scientist contributions
were a consequence of the belief by antebellum citizens that soil
science and geological pursuits were useful for their cultural, not
just material, improvement goals.
The results of Rogers’s analyses served him well, because they
helped solidify ideas about the relative ages of layers of earth
examined with geological interest. Henry Rogers had already completed work in New Jersey identifying ‘‘green sand” as a constituent of the marl beds. Together, the brothers extended this work
into geological considerations of the Appalachian chain. The results
also served the state constituency well. Making the agricultural
character and state appeal of the work more salient in the reports,
Rogers (1884) reminded those authorizing the work that ‘‘further
detailed information in regards to [the analysed] rocks [was] so
important in their application to agricultural and architectural purposes” (169).
The Geological Survey offers a site of analysis for historians that
helps demonstrate how and why antebellum Americans were
developing new ways to produce natural knowledge through agricultural and geological science. It was an integrated effort of geologist and farmer, agricultural chemist and planter, gentleman of
science and politician. As with the practice of fertilizer experiments on farms across the early Republic, the process of participating in survey science was becoming an element of the working
experience of small-hold farmers and large-scale planters. The
era of internal improvements which helped shape the Survey project aimed to strengthen the nation morally, materially, and economically. The soil and the resources under it lay at the root of
many improvement schemes, where knowledge of agrarian nature
was essential for the success of many improvement plans. As a civic effort intended to benefit the cultural identity and viability of
the state, those who helped Rogers were active agents in the production of scientific means for improvement ends.
4. Conclusion
In their early nineteenth century years, soil science and geology
were shaped in common by a complex improvement ethos. New
ways to work the soil were encouraged by new calls for cultural
viability and improvement. Chemists, geologists, farmers, and politicians across the Republic participated in a variety of activities to
promote newer, more systematic studies of the land.
866
B.R. Cohen / Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 35 (2010) 860–867
This article speaks to why the predecessors to today’s soil scientists and geologists sought more methodical attention to soil and
terrain. I have not ventured to evaluate how well their studies were
conducted or how closely aligned with later theories and concepts
those practices were. I have also not discussed the counter-arguments to these new endeavors at the time that were grounded in
evidence from the experiences of everyday life, and, in many cases,
as rational as the arguments in favor of the new studies. My interest in the case has been to highlight the circulation of soil-based
studies in an era that made it possible for later professional scientific activities to gain influence.
Of greater relevance for the history and future of soil and geological sciences, the dual cultural and material constitution of the
antebellum improvement ethic offers the chance for scientists to
see the ends-means relationship of their work differently. Rather
than pursuing methods for studying the soil and land for its own
sake, efforts in the early Republic were motivated by goals other
than science. Shaped by a complicated ethos of improvement, the
sciences were part of broader agendas to achieve progress.
So it was nearly two centuries years ago, and so it has been periodically in the decades since (as with USDA and Soil Conservation
Service activities). In the future, soil and geological sciences will be
shaped by a new improvement ethos defined not by the contours
of early America but quite sensibly by the concerns of the
twenty-first century. This is neither a prediction nor a contentious
claim; although it is not clear what the future contours will be nor
how the cultural pleas will be produced alongside material needs,
it has always been the case that those cultural pleas have lurked
beneath environmental activity. The questions in this sense are
not what is soil science or geology, but what are soil science and
geology for?
By way of conclusion, I want to suggest that the twenty-first
century notion of improvement and progress is becoming increasingly prominent in the functioning of research agendas. In terms of
environmental—and soil and geological—improvement, those actions are currently wrapped up in tropes of sustainability. Characterizing improvement through the lens of sustainability suggests
that a better agronomy and a more fertile soil regime are ones
whose vitality and health can be sustained.
A sustainable future is one that goes beyond the limitations of a
reductively industrial system. No matter the precise connotation of
this diffuse term, sustainability, that one draws on—as diffuse now
as improvement was in the early Republic—the industrial logic that
has driven soil use since the post-bellum period of the later nineteenth century was made possible in part by principles of soil
amendment and processes of mineral identification developed in
the antebellum years. Within industrial logic, technical scientific
pursuits are ends themselves. When advocates seek to move beyond the limits of the industrial agricultural system, as much of
the prospectus for ‘‘sustainability science” in our day infers, those
scientists might approach it as a moral problem and consider soil
and geological sciences as means to the ends of improvement,
not the ends themselves. At the same time, by recognizing the fundamentally dual aims of sustainability—materially, to achieve the
protection of resources and, culturally, to make progress toward
more sustainable social structures—soil scientists and geologists
can recall the common purpose of their work and avoid the distance from collective cultural activity that professional specialization of the last century and a half has brought.
In America’s early Republic, soil science and geology developed
together as shaped through a multi-faceted improvement ethos.
The sciences were forms of interaction between humans and the
land, ways to study, experiment on, and work agricultural landscapes. Matters of material progress such as cultivating more land,
increasing crop productivity, and adding to economic output were,
in its more ennobling forms, produced alongside matters of cul-
tural progress such as maintaining populations and political
strengths, strengthening ideals about how to structure community
life, and improving the viability of the political economy. In a time
when professional activities did not set the patterns for scientific
activities, when those activities were still in-the-making, a range
of contributors participated in soil-based and geological endeavors.
The situation today is far different in terms of material circumstances (soil fertility, erosion, land use patterns, metrics of productivity) and cultural ideals (values of improvement and ideals for
land use). Nonetheless, newer notions of improvement remain
influential for how scientists set their research agendas, demonstrating that it remains the case that material goals are shaped
by cultural directives. Through the fundamentally dual aims of sustainability, soil scientists and geologists can conceptualize their
work not as ends themselves, but as means to achieving the current goals of improvement, namely, a sustainable future.
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