T. H. Breen
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
BACK TO SWEAT AND TOIL: SUGGESTIONS
FOR THE STUDY OF AGRICULTURAL WORK
IN EARLY AMERICA
I
In a recent essay James A. Henretta declares, "The history of the
agricultural population of pre-industrial America remains to be
written."' Henretta's sweeping assertion cannot be easily dismissed. To
appreciate how little we know about the work culture of Early
American farmers, we have only to consider the impressive literature
produced over the last quarter century dealing with other aspects of the
colonists' lives. Studies of American Puritanism have generated subtle
and sophisticated insights into the life of the mind. Demographic
historians have revolutionized our understanding of the family-as well
as many other things-in New England and the Chesapeake. Scores of
investigations of colonial towns have deepened our knowledge of Early
American community life. Historians have explored the evolution of
slavery and the origins of a distinct Afro-American culture. We have
learned a great deal about colonial cities, mob behavior, urban artisans,
and yet despite this extraordinary flowering of colonial scholarship,
historians have virtually ignored agricultural work, the endless jobs, in
other words, that occupied the attention of the majority of the colonists
during most of their waking hours.
Fifty years ago the study of agrarian culture enjoyed higher standing
than it does today. Indeed, historians of immense talent then sifted
through plantation accounts and farm records, and it is to these
scholars-A. 0. Craven, Percy W. Bidwell, John I. Falconer, Lewis
Cecil Gray, Ulrich B. Phillips, Richard H. Shyrock, Robert Walcott,
and others-that we frequently turn to discover the character of
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agricultural life before the American Revolution. 2 One example in
particular stands out. Gray's monumental two-volume History of
Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 first published in 1933
remains the standard guide to southern colonial agriculture. The work is
regularly cited in the pages of learned journals, a striking phenomenon
considering that most writings of Gray's more famous contemporaries,
intellectual, social, and economic historians, have been superseded by
later scholarship.
The strengths of these studies are obvious to anyone who bothers to
review them. The authors were themselves familiar with an agrarian
world that we have lost. They experienced the sights, sounds, and smells
of farm life, and those memories enriched their analyses. Wesley Frank
Craven's Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, for example,
contains deeply personal passages describing colonial Virginians who
"smelled of tobacco, cattle, and sweat." Craven imagined what it must
have been like to sail past an isolated seventeenth-century farm. "The
bark of a dog, the crow of a rooster, the cluck of a fretting mother hen, or
the cry of children at their play," he explained, "were among the sounds
that carried over the water a familiar notice of the farmer's clearing in
the woods."3 Craven not only wrote well, he also understood what
producing a harvest required.
So did Ulrich Phillips. In his brilliant study, Life and Labor in the
Old South, Phillips reminisced about his own boyhood experiences on a
Georgia farm. Phillips "followed the pointers and setters for quail in the
broomsedge, the curs for 'possums and 'coons in the woods, and the
hounds on the trail of the fox; and for one season, suspending my college
course for more serious affairs, I guided the plow and plied the hoe in a
crop of my own, gaining more in muscle and experience than in cash." 4
The drudgery in Georgia's red clay led in time to one of the more
sensitive descriptions of staple agriculture ever written. One, of course,
did not have to walk behind a plow to recapture the world of the Early
American farmer, but apparently it helped.
After World War II the history of colonial American agriculture
entered a fallow period. The concerns of an earlier generation were
forgotten. Scholars transformed agricultural work into statistical
abstractions, quantitative measures of production that were generally
divorced from actual sweat and toil. Economic historians counted barrels
and bales shipped to the West Indies and Europe, giving little thought to
how export crops were produced or how their cultivation shaped the
daily activities of countless colonial Americans. Hogsheads of tobacco or
rice acquired interest only as units of international commerce. It was as
if one set out to understand the meaning of industrial labor in the lives of
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243
modern workers by counting the number of widgets and stopcocks that
their factories had manufactured. The myriad local studies that
appeared in the 1960's and early 1970's seldom mentioned Early
American agriculture. In these investigations, men and women formed
families, obtained land, joined churches, participated in town meetings;
they did almost everything except work in the fields.5
The contrast between English and American agricultural history
during the post-war period is striking. At the very time that scholars on
this side of the Atlantic turned away from rural culture, English
historians advanced the study of agrarian life to new levels of sophistication. Joan Thirsk, Margaret Spufford, E. L. Jones, Alan Everitt, and E.
Kerridge-just to cite a few of the more prominent names-explored the
relation between agricultural production and social structure. 6 The most
impressive work was The Agrarian History of England and Wales
edited by Thirsk. In this splendid investigation of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century agriculture, Thirsk drew important distinctions
between highland and lowland cultivation, between pastoral and woodland economies, between chalky and clay soils. Not surprisingly, British
agricultural history became identified with microanalysis. The results of
this scholarship were extraordinarily provocative. Even small differences in soil types or in crop selection profoundly influenced the
character of community activities, religious as well as political.
Drawing upon the insights of this recent European scholarship,
James Henretta published in 1978 a seminal essay entitled "Families
and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America." This much cited
article adumbrated a large research project in progress, but even in this
preliminary statement, Henretta sought to deepen our understanding of
"the economic and cultural consciousness of the mass of the agricultural
population." Most important, this work forcefully reminded colonial
historians of the centrality of agriculture in the lives of the Early
Americans. Indeed, Henretta issued a challenge. The time had come, he
asserted, to rethink old, inadequate assumptions about "those activities
that dominated the daily lives" of the majority of colonial men and
women. 7
The first substantial reinterpretation of Early American agriculture
in several decades, Henretta's analysis deserves serious consideration.
Has it, in fact, helped us recapture a lost culture of the colonial farmer?
Henretta began by clearing the field of accumulated intellectual rubble,
scholarly writings that obfuscate our understanding of the farmers'
cultural values. His villains were the "entrepreneurial" historians who
insist in their writings that the colonists "were individualists, enterprising men and women intent upon the pursuit of material advantage at the
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expense of communal and non-economic goals."8 Henretta criticized
Richard Bushman and Charles Grant, but he saved his sharpest barbs
for James T. Lemon, an historical geographer who wrote about
southeastern Pennsylvania in the early eighteenth century. 9 Each of
these scholars maintained that colonial farmers entered into market with
one thought in mind, profit. At every turn Lemon's rural cultivators
schemed to increase their share of the economic pie, and if their grubby
maneuvering left none for their neighbors, then so be it. People looked
out only for their own interests.
Henretta found this argument perverse, and not a little bit offensive.
The 'liberal" interpretation, he maintained, flew in the face of historical
record. In particular, Lemon and his school possessed a shallow theory
of human motivation. Henretta admitted that colonial farmers traded
goods in the market place, but they did so sporadically, even reluctantly.
Individual gain was not the driving force behind their actions. If we
want to comprehend the culture of colonial farmers, we must recognize
that early Americans did not march to Adam Smith's drum beat. The
key to their "consciousness," Henretta believed, turns on quite different
"epistemological principles.""0
Constructive reinterpretation followed demolition. Henretta claims to
have provided insight into the farmers' mentality, a bundle of ideas,
values, and attitudes that formed the core of early American culture. His
rural cultivators were certainly not capitalists. Rather, Henretta
declared, they were obsessed with survival of the "lineal family."
Membership in family units provided men and women with meaningful
identity, a measure of security in an insecure environment, and they
regularly put aside thoughts of individual self-advancement in order to
advance the family's welfare. Generations were bound to the common
quest. Fathers, sons, and grandsons relentlessly strove to preserve the
family from impoverishment or dissolution. "The lineal family-not the
conjugal and certainly not the unattached individual"-Henretta
announced defiantly, "thus stood at the center of economic and social
existence in northern [from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire] agricultural society in preindustrial America."
II
Henretta's essay was provocative in the best sense of the term. It
compelled other historians to confront the culture of agriculture, a
complex fabric of values that not only helped shape public behavior, but
also helped men and women to interpret that behavior once it had taken
place. Surely, his work put to rest the notion that quantitative analysis of
SWEAT AND TOIL
245
exports and imports-in itself-reveals anything significant about an
agrarian mentalite.'2
Before we herald the "new" agricultural history, however, we should
examine some assumptions behind Henretta's analysis. Only if we do
this can we ascertain whether he advanced our understanding of colonial
farm life beyond that of L. C. Gray and Ulrich Phillips. Specifically,
three elements in Henretta's formulation raise doubts about the efficacy
of his overall interpretation: the dichotomous character of his argument,
the extraordinarily broad level of his generalizations, and the tendentious treatment of the family.
The dichotomous quality of Henretta's presentation was puzzling.
He forced his readers to choose: either colonial farmers entered the
market place to make a profit or they eschewed individual gain in order
to preserve the family. This arbitrary separation runs counter to much
of what we know about rural cultivators before the American Revolution. Certainly, the husbandmen of Tudor and Stuart England sold their
produce, and unless a great deal of legislation about forestalling and
engrossing was unrelated to social practice, these farmers do not appear
to have been indifferent to the prices they received. Moreover, the
promotional literature that drew people-many of them young, single
males-to America stressed precisely the values that Henretta is so
determined to deny. "What happiness might they [the migrants] enjoy in
Virginia," John Rolfe remarked typically in 1616, "where they may
have ground for nothing, more than they can manure, reap more fruits
and profits with half the labour." 13
Perhaps the sea change temporarily deadened the entrepreneurial
spirit, but evidence for such a transformation is difficult to find. Darrett
Rutman, for example, demonstrates how the settlers of early Massachusetts Bay aggressively peddled their fish, timber, livestock, and grain
throughout the Atlantic world."4 As Howard S. Russell explains in A
Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England,
these colonists possessed "the ability when the need appeared to adapt
themselves to trade and to an increasingly commercial type of agriculture such as many of them must already have been well accustomed to in
their old homes in Essex, Kent, and close to busy London."' Again,
perhaps profit was not an obsession-a tendency upon which orthodox
Puritans would have frowned-but sumptuary laws in seventeenthcentury New England testified to the purchase of ostentatious finery by
individual farmers."6 The story was not much different in the middle
colonies. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how Henretta could fit
Stephanie Wolf's "urban villagers" of Germantown into his mentalitE.'7
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PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY
And in the tobacco colonies Aubrey Land discovered that a "cash crop
was essential" for the struggling planters.' 8
Henretta's analysis, in short, rested upon an unnecessary dichotomy.
The "determined pursuit of profit" occurred within large, extended
lineal families. One only has to mention someone like Samuel Sewall to
realize that a man of traditional values could care deeply about the
welfare of his kinfolk and also drive a hard bargain in the marketplace.' 9
Colonial cultivators tried to obtain the highest possible price when they
sold their produce, and by so doing, they advanced not only their
individual interests and those of the conjugal unit, but also those of
future generations that would bear their surnames. Historians of
pre-Revolutionary agriculture simply do not have to choose between the
"lineal family" and profitable producers. What we need is an analytic
framework capable of dealing with both dimensions of rural life.
A second problem inherent in Henretta's argument is an inappropriate level of generalization. He sets out to tell us something significant
about the values of northern colonial farmers, all of them, a body of men
and women scattered over thousands of miles and living in strikingly
diverse social and physical environments. From this broad perspective, it
is difficult to distinguish between Henretta's rural cultivators and the
ubiquitous yeomen who once flourished in the pages of American
history textbooks. These intrepid democrats sprang up everywhere; one
looked pretty much like any other. Henretta does not attempt to
resuscitate a lost American yeomanry, but by failing to take regional and
local differences into account, he creates an "ideal" type, a rural
abstraction that only loosely explains the beliefs and customs of any
particular group of early American farmers.
English agricultural historians-among others-have forcefully
reminded us of the difficulties that arise from this level of generalization.
Joan Thirsk made the point eloquently in the opening lines of her
Agrarian History: "The variety of England's scenery is a commonplace
to the Englishman, yet his textbooks of economic history have not so far
taken full account of the significance of this variety in ordering man's
work and shaping their societies. The conventional notions about
farming and the structure of rural communities still rest upon the
convenient generalization that England was composed largely of
nucleated villages, populated by corn-and-stock peasants, who farmed
their land in common fields and pastures." What a man grew and
where he grew it turn out to be considerations of major importance in
understanding agricultural cultures in the past.2 '
Although the colonial American countryside-north or south-has
SWEAT AND TOIL
247
not been analyzed as thoroughly as England's, we do know that different
areas within the colonies became identified with distinct crops. Striking
variations sometimes occurred within rather small regions. Howard S.
Russell, for example, complained of New England agricultural historians who have "treated farming as though it were a single comprehensive
occupation, carried on practically everywhere according to a uniform
pattern." Russell's own research revealed that from the very beginning
of English settlement "the types of agriculture varied in response to
natural conditions of soil and surroundings, available markets, and the
experience an individual farm family brought or inherited from
England." 2 2 Soil types, length of the growing season, the farmer's
European background, proximity to dependable markets, even chance
(as in the case of the discovery of indigo in South Carolina) influenced
the character of agriculture in the scattered American settlements.
Within each region the dominant crop became the arbiter of time, not
to mention the farmer's expertise. It set the annual schedule, and one
person's year-indeed, his day-might not have borne much resemblance to that of a cultivator dwelling only a short distance away.
Consider the relation between tobacco and wheat, two crops that figured
prominently in the development of the late eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonies. A planter who made a crop of tobacco worked steadily
throughout the year. The tasks were well-defined: planting, hilling,
transplanting, hoeing, topping, suckering, cutting, curing, prizing, and
finally, a full fifteen months after the tiny seeds were first placed in a
bed, marketing the loaded hogsheads. With wheat the annual routine
was notably different. The farmer sowed the seed and chased away pesty
birds, but for the most part, a person who cultivated wheat simply
waited for the grain to ripen, a sign that an exhausting harvest season
was at hand.2 3 It is not surprising that after George Washington
dropped tobacco cultivation for that of wheat, he discovered that he had
more time for foxhunting, his favorite pastime. As his biographer,
Douglas Freeman, explained, wheat altered the pace of Washington's
life, for in this type of agriculture, "The ground was plowed; the grain
was planted; after that, nothing need be done or could be done, except
keep livestock away, until harvest." 2 4 In South Carolina and Georgia
still another routine prevailed. In this region, especially along the rivers,
rice was master. As Sam B. Hilliard, an historical geographer, remarked
with some amazement, "Rarely has a single crop ever dominated so
completely the energies of agriculturalists as rice did during its heyday
along the South Atlantic coast." 25
By lumping farmers together in a single cultural category-cereal
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PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY
and livestock men-one cannot take proper note of major agricultural
shifts that occurred before anyone thought of mechanization. There is no
question that colonists changed the dominant, regional crops from time
to time. They did not always do so with enthusiasm or because they were
intent upon entering the new market. But whatever their causes, such
transformations altered basic agricultural routines and inevitably
affected fundamental values associated with crops, land, and work.
In the early decades of settlement almost everyone from Massachusetts Bay to South Carolina seems to have concentrated on raising
livestock. Within a relatively short period, however, people discovered
other, more promising agricultural opportunities. Eighteenth-century
Carolinians took up rice, and to a lesser extent, indigo. By the
mid-seventeenth century Chesapeake planters relied almost totally upon
tobacco. For some colonists even that dependence eventually came to an
end. In the late eighteenth century many established Tidewater families
in Virginia and Maryland were forced to plant wheat where tobacco had
once grown. And in pre-Revolutionary New England, because of black
stem-rust that destroyed wheat crops, and because of competition from
cereal producers in the Middle Colonies, farmers shifted their attention
back to livestock. Albert Laverne Olson has written of Connecticut's
agriculturalists, "As the eighteenth century advanced, the inhabitants
raised cattle, horses, and mules to be sold in the West Indies and to be
driven to points within the colonies. By the post-Revolutionary times
many areas formerly tilled were used as pasturage for animals." 2 6
Whatever the mentality of the Early American farmers may have
been, it varied according to place and time. A comparison between
agricultural and industrial work is instructive here. No one would claim
that work meant the same thing to the women of early nineteenthcentury Lowell as it does to modern laborers assigned to an automobile
assembly line. Moreover, foundry work and metal lathe operation was
clearly different from other types of industrial work. My point is that
historians must bring the same kinds of qualitative and temporal
distinctions to agricultural work as they reflexively bring to industrial
labor.
A third troubling feature of Henretta's analysis concerns the family.
Henretta argued that values, attitudes, and assumptions associated with
the family were wellsprings of behavior in rural America. "Lineal
family values did not constitute, by any means, the entire world
view-the mentalite-of the agricultural population," he explained,
"but they did define a central tendency of that consciousness, an abiding
core of symbolic and emotive meaning; and, most important of all, they
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249
constituted a significant and reliable guide to behavior amid the
uncertainties of the world."2 7
The problem is that the family cannot possibly carry the interpretative weight that Henretta has placed upon it. The family, after all, is a
universal human institution, and it is difficult to think of a society, any
society, in which the family did not provide "an abiding core of
symbolism and emotive meaning." In other words, to declare that the
family-however defined-shaped the way that people interpreted
day-to-day life experiences is a truism.2 8 During wars, famine and
plague, when national governments have dissolved, when the very fiber
of society has seemed to unravel, men and women have always fallen
back upon family members for love, fulfillment, and security. Consider
the impressive historical literature on the slave families in ante-bellum
America. For black people faced with systematic debasement, the family
proved to be an amazingly resilient institution for carrying distinct
Afro-American values over generations; it placed the individual within a
web of relationships that provided meaning and identity.2 " For white
European migrants the family served many of the same functions.
Indeed, so central was the family in early Salem, Massachusetts, that
authorities ordered single men to form artificial families. 30 No one
would deny the need to explore in greater detail the character of colonial
families. It seems unlikely, however, that this research in itself will
significantly advance our understanding of the specific cultures of early
American farmers.
III
After pointing out the problems with Henretta's argument, we are
still left with his initial challenge. The history of the agrarian population of colonial America has not yet been written, and if the "lineal
family" does not hold the key to lost agrarian mentalites, it is incumbent
on us to consider how the history of Early American farm cultures might
be constructed. One place we might start is with the insights of scholars
like Craven and Phillips. These historians recognized that agriculture
involved work-hard physical labor-and a clearly defined series of
tasks that varied from region to region. Production, then, becomes our
focus. Even in this preliminary discussion, we need to consider the
complex relation between the actual cultivation of a crop-be it rice,
tobacco, or wheat-and the farmer's cultural values.
Cultural anthropologists provide us with insights into the ways crops
may have influenced the producer's perceptions of time.3" As we noted
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earlier, each plant dictated a slightly different production schedule.
Colonial historians might profitably explore the cultural implications of
different agricultural work routines. The tobacco calendar-to cite a
familiar example-was relentlessly demanding, filling the planter's
entire year (with the possible exception of several slow weeks in late
fall), with prescribed tasks. Moments of recreation, visits with friends
and distant relatives, even the timing of life-cycle events such as
marriage and baptism, may have been fitted into this demanding work
schedule. The planters' dispersed settlement pattern only added to the
difficulty of arranging communal gatherings.
By contrast, the cultivation of wheat culminated annually in a
harvest, a period of intense labor requiring an enlarged work force.
Often the harvesters were hired hands. They were sometimes strangers
in the community, and their very presence increased the anxiety of the
harvest. After the grain had been safely carried to the barns, however,
the cereal farmer could relax, give thanks, and celebrate with neighbors.
Tobacco generated no such special days precisely because a new crop
was in the ground long before the old one was ready to ship to market. 32
This staple created no "dead time," no natural cycle of social events, and
it is not surprising that the patterns of face-to-face relations in the
Chesapeake differed markedly from those of the Middle Colonies.
Tench Coxe, an essayist and politician who studied these rhythms,
observed in the 1790's that farmers in New England and the Middle
Colonies were particularly well-prepared to become artisans and craftsmen in the New Nation. The "union of manufactures and farming,"
Coxe explained, "is found to be convenient on the grazing and grass
farms, where parts of almost every day, and a great part of every year,
can be spared from the business of the farm, and employed in some
mechanical, handycraft, or manufacturing business." 3 3
By knowing more about how colonial farmers perceived and organized work, we may better understand why contemporary observers so
frequently criticized agricultural practices in pre-Revolutionary America. Take the example of New England's rural cultivators in the
eighteenth century. Since the time of Jared Eliot, commentators on
agriculture in this region have chastised Yankee farmers for their
slovenly, wasteful habits. These colonists, it seems, refused to rotate
their crops, ignored agricultural innovations, and engaged in extensive
cultivation when they might have produced the same harvests with much
less damage to the soil through more careful, intensive procedures.
It does not appear to have occurred to these critics that New
Englanders may have been doing quite well by their own standards.
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251
Indeed, what seemed to be lazy, untidy farm methods may have resulted
from a cultural decision not to let women work regularly in the fields.
With the family's effective labor force so reduced, the cultivators had to
adopt extensive practices in order to survive. When Timothy Dwight,
Connecticut's famed diarist, visited Hudson, New York, he saw for the
first time women at work in the fields. "I was presented with a prospect
entirely novel to me," Dwight marveled. "Ten women, of German
extraction, were arranged in front of a little building, busily employed in
dressing flax. In my childhood I had seen women, in a small number of
instances, busied in the proper labour of men; particularly in raking hay
immediately before a shower, when the pressing nature of the case
demanded extraordinary exertions. Even this I had not seen for thirty
years. Women in New England are employed only in and about the
house, and in the proper business of the sex. I do not know, that I was
ever more struck with the strangeness of any sight, than with the
appearance, and business, of these German females."3 4 Not only does
Dwight's account reveal how substantially agricultural practices varied
within a small geographic area, but it also reminds us how much about
agriculture is a matter of cultural values associated with work.
Whenever colonial farmers and planters gathered, they spoke of the
state of "certain privileged crops," a marvelous phrase devised by the
Marquis De Chastellux during a visit to the United States in the
1780's. 35 Around the courthouses of Virginia, in the smart clubs of
Charleston, along country roads in Carolina, outside mills in Pennsylvania, after town meetings in New England men talked about agriculture.
Indeed, if they had not done so, we would have reason to be surprised.
Their lives were intimately tied up with the plants in the fields. In 1680,
for example, a Dutch minister, Jasper Danckaerts, left New York City
to observe the character of Long Island's truculent farmers. He certainly
found no Puritans. "The boors ... talked foully and otherwise. ..,"
Danckaerts reported, "even without speaking a word about God or
spiritual matters. It was all about houses, and cattle, and swine, and
grain."3 6 Josiah Quincy, Junior, a curious Bay colonist who toured the
South in 1773, discovered that in South Carolina, "The general topics of
conservation, when cards, the bottle and occurrences of the day don't
intervene, are of negroes, and the price of indigo and rice: I was
surprised to find this so general."3 7 Even retired presidents were
obsessed with obtaining news about agriculture. In 1796 Benjamin
Latrobe visited Mount Vernon and reported the "Coffee was brought
about 6 o-clock. When it was removed[,] the president addressing
himself to me enquired after the state of Crops about Richmond." 3 8 The
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discussion turned to the Hessian Fly, Indian corn, and finally, the design
of plows, and if Latrobe was disappointed, he could at least take comfort
in the knowledge that similar topics dominated dinner table conversation throughout the young republic.
These conversations tell us much about the culture of agriculture in
Early America. Indeed, if we were to examine this rhetoric closely, we
would find that colonial farmers were simply not passing the time of day
when they chatted about prices and yields. The quality of one's
crop-be it rice, tobacco, wheat, or livestock-was a central element in a
complex agrarian moral system. Producers measured the worth of other
men as well as themselves by these public exchanges, by the appearance
of the plants, by the prices they received, by the ability to manage a farm
or plantation.
If farmers had been less personally involved in production, if like the
great sugar lords of the Caribbean they had been absentee investors,
then they might not have been so sensitive to what other men obtained in
the marketplace or so worried about comparisons made by neighbors
riding past one's fields. But throughout colonial America such was not
the case. In Virginia, for example, Tidewater planters calculated not
only their own standing but also that of their competitors by the
appearance of fully cured tobacco leaves. "I know in this neighborhood,"
Landon Carter declared, "people are very fond of speaking meanly of
their neighbor's Crops and I am certain mine has been so characterized." Fortunately for Carter, as he travelled about the Northern Neck
gratuitously inspecting other men's tobacco, he did not "see any so good
[as mine]," and he even ventured, "a wager with the best of them both as
to quantity and quality." 3 9 In this agrarian culture, Carter's good
management publicly demonstrated his private virtue.
Agricultural production, therefore, seems to have shaped powerfully
group behavior, though not precisely in the manner that Henretta
suggests in his essay. Over an extended time, several generations at least,
men living within a specific region were constantly judged by the quality
of their crops. They assessed others by the same standards. These
exchanges, repeated until they became an unconscious part of daily life,
slowly transformed the dominant plant and the particular work schedule that it demanded into an emblem of local culture. Migrants and
young persons in the area learned that one grew a certain crop in that
part of the country. To do otherwise was unthinkable, an anti-social act,
an individual decision that ran counter to the symbolic world of the
producing community. At markets and fairs, in the newspapers and
almanacs, in face-to-face relations at grinding mills or tobacco ware-
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253
houses, farmers reaffirmed a traditional relation between crop and
culture. J. E. Spencer and Ronald J. Horvath, two historical geographers, explained, "The argument of two neighbors over some cropping
technique or the advice given to new arrivals in the area by older
residents can have far-reaching consequences, in view of the fact that
this same scene is taking place throughout an area about to become an
agricultural region settled by an immigrating population." They also
observed that "A farming 'mentality' in this context refers to the totality
of the beliefs of the farmers over a region regarding the most suitable use
of the land in an area. 4 0
This argument suggests that agricultural change may have involved a
difficult, even wrenching cultural process. Such shifts were not matters
of simple economic expediency. Considering the specialized expertise
associated with each crop, one could hardly expect early American
farmers to have jumped from crop to crop in a frantic effort to maximize
profits. Rather, agricultural shifts were deeply disturbing events within
an established symbol system. An example of such a profound redefinition seems to have occurred in Tidewater Virginia during the last
quarter of the eighteenth century. For planters who had acquired a
sense of individual moral worth through the cultivation of tobacco,
whose families time-out-of-mind had produced the leaf, the movement
from tobacco to wheat as the dominant local crop created a crisis of
self-perception. The familiar fabric of everyday life was filled increasingly with problems. The sights and sounds of the fields became less
reassuring; a traditional ranking system lost meaning. 4 ' As N. F. Cabell,
an early nineteenth-century historian of Virginia agriculture, remarked,
"Many planters first lessened their crops of tobacco and then abandoned
them altogether. Planters thus became farmers, and as such entered on a
general course of improvement, but suffered much during the period of
transition." Cabell did not explain what he meant by "suffering," but
one suspects that the planters' distress was not purely economic. 42
Analysis of agrarian work culture leads inevitably to a reconsideration of ideas, political as well as religious. We know that various
colonists were more or less open to evangelical religion in the mideighteenth century. Moreover, some Americans accepted the teaching of
whig political theorists with greater enthusiasm than did others. At this
time we can only speculate on the possible relation between specific
forms of agriculture and receptivity to particular ideas, but it does not
seem unreasonable to assume that a farmer's ideology was, in part at
least, bound up with his daily work experiences.
Several possible links between ideas and work might be explored. To
254
PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY
modern political historians, the Tidewater planters' support of the
American Revolution, and in some cases, of radical, even egalitarian
notions about governance seem inexplicable. These gentlemen were
wealthy slave-owners, connected commercially and socially to England,
and they appear to have had nothing to gain by fomenting rebellion. If
we take a different, more anthropological view of the evidence, however,
their actions become less mysterious. The difficult shift from tobacco to
wheat-again, we are considering only the region's dominant cropmay well have caused men like Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, and Landon Carter to contemplate a bold reordering of their entire
symbol system, one that includes kings as well as tobacco. There is no
hard evidence that this was the case. But one finds tantalizing suggestions. Thomas Jefferson, the most innovative mind of his generation,
coupled Virginia tobacco cultivation with dependence upon England
and in Notes on Virginia announced he was happy to be free of both of
them. 4 3 And one Maryland planter explained: "As the culture of wheat,
and the manufacturing of it into flour travelled southward, the people
became more happy, and independent of the British storekeepers who
had kept them in debts and dependence."44
Popular religious persuasion may also have been connected to
agrarian work culture. Certainly, this relation deserves investigation. It
is possible, for example, that a crop such as tobacco heightened the
producer's confidence in his ability to control nature. Leading Virginia
planters in the Revolutionary period spoke of themselves as managers,
as crop masters, as persons capable in other words of making decisions
affecting the quality of the finished leaf. One had to know when to top
and worm the plants, when to cut the tobacco, how long to let it cure. As
little as possible in this long work schedule was left to chance. Failure,
therefore, resulted from personal dereliction, and by the same token,
success implied "virtu." It is not surprising that members of the Virginia
gentry generally subscribed to a calm, reasonable, low-church Anglicanism, a theology that did not challenge their Pelagian tendencies. How
different the experiences of the wheat farmer. He found himself
dependent upon natural elements beyond his direct control. The vulnerability of the cultivator, his enforced passivity during much of the
growing season, may have convinced him of God's terrible omnipotence.
It would be interesting to know if cereal producers favored the Great
Awakening in significantly greater numbers than did the tobacco
planters.
The most influential evangelical preacher of the eighteenth century,
George Whitefield, certainly recognized a relationship between forms of
SWEAT AND TOIL
255
agricultural production and a people's receptivity to the "new light." He
loved the prosperous farmers of Pennsylvania. "Their oxen are strong to
labour," he recorded in his journal, "and there seems to be no
complaining in their streets. What is best of all, I believe they have the
Lord for their God.... The Constitution is far from being arbitrary; the
soil is good, the land exceedingly fruitful, and there is a greater equality
between the poor and rich than perhaps can be found in any other place
of the known world." How different Maryland and Virginia appeared
to Whitefield! The dispersed tobacco planters had neglected building
towns of consequence; there were few churches. When Sunday services
were held, farmers offered lame excuses why they could not possibly
attend. Tidewater society, so full of "wicked men," discouraged even the
indomitable Whitefield. "The greatest probability of doing good in
Virginia," he concluded, "is among the Scots-Irish, who have lately
settled, in the mountainous parts of that province. They raise little or no
tobacco, but things that are useful for common use."4 5
The next decade could be an exciting time for colonial agricultural
historians. Some years ago Keith Thomas, a highly respected British
scholar, remarked, "For a historian to write about both eighteenthcentury religion and eighteenth-century agriculture would be highly
eccentric." 46 This statement is less true today than when it was written.
An increasing number of scholars concerned with reconstructing past
cultures will return to old sources and discover to their delight a rich
variety of farm mentalities. And in time, this work will compel us to
rethink much of what we take for granted about other aspects of early
American life.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at "The Lives of Early Americans:
Anthropological Perspectives on Colonial Society," 41st Conference in Early American
History of the Institute of Early American History and Culture, sponsered by Millersville
State College, April 30,1981. The author thanks Professor Richard Beeman and Michael
McGiffert for their helpful suggestions.
1. James A. Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America,"
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXV(1978), 3. Philip J. Greven, Jr., made
much the same point in his Four Generations:Population, Land, and Family in Colonial
Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970), 9.
2. Percy W. Bidwell, "Rural Economy in New England at the Beginning of the
Nineteenth Century," Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Transactions,
XX(1916); Richard H. Shyrock, "British versus German Traditions in Colonial Agriculture," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXVI(1939-1940), 39-54; Walter Kollmorgan, The German-Swiss in Franklin County, Tennessee (Washington, D.C., 1940);
G.E. Fussell, "Social and Agrarian Background of the Pilgrim Fathers," Agricultural
History, VII(1933), 183-202; Robert R. Walcott, "Husbandry in Colonial New
England," New England Quarterly, IX(1936), 232-33; Percy W. Bidwell and John 1.
256
PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY
Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (New York,
1941); Lewis Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (2 vols.,
Washington, D.C., 1933); Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston,
1929); A. 0. Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the AgriculturalHistory of Virginia
and Maryland, University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, XIII, no. 1 (Urbana,
Ill., 1926), and Stevenson Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agricultural and Country Life, 16401840 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1940).
3. Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1689
(Baton Rouge, 1949), 211-212.
4. Phillips, Life and Labor, 123.
5. To be sure, there are notable exceptions. See, for example, Darrett B. Rutman,
"Governor Winthrop's Garden Crop: the Significance of Agriculture in the Early
Commerce of Massachusetts Bay," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XX(1963),
396-415; Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth: Farms and Villages in the Old Colony
1620-1692 (Boston, 1967); Edmund S. Morgan, "The Labor Problem at Jamestown,
1607-1618," American Historical Review, LXXVI(1971), 595-611; and James T.
Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: a Geographical Study of Early Southeastern
Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972).
6. Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV: 1500-1640
(Cambridge, 1967); Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villages in
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974); E. L. Jones, Agriculture and
the IndustrialRevolution (Oxford, 1974); Alan Everitt, "The Marketing of Agricultural
Produce," ch. viii in J. Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History; E. Kerridge, The Farmersof Old
England (London, 1973); Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (London, 1967). Also
see, B. H. S. Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500-1850 (New
York, 1963).
7. "Families and Farms," 13, 20.
8. Ibid., 3-4.
9. According to Henretta, obvious examples of "entrepreneurial" writings include
Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country; Charles S Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut
Frontier Town of Kent (New York, 1961); and Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to
Yankee: Characterand the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1967). Lemon responded in "Comments on James A. Henretta's 'Families and Farms:
Mentalit& in Pre-Industrial America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser.,
XXXVII(1980), 688-96, and this statement in turn sparked Henretta, "Response to
Lemon," ibid., 696-700.
10. "Families and Farms," 14.
11. Ibid., 32.
12. On this point see, B. S. Yamey, "The Study of Peasant Economic Systems," in B. S.
Yamey and Raymond Firth, eds., CapitalSaving and Credit in Peasant Societies: Studies
from Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean and Middle Atlantic (Chicago, 1964), 377.
13. Historical Manuscripts Commission, 8th Report, Appendix, Part II, 31. On developing English markets see, Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an
English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York, 1979), 1-7, 19-25; Peter Clark and
Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500-1700 (Oxford, 1976), 1-32; Joan Thirsk,
Economic Policy and Projects: the Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern
England (Oxford, 1978).
14. "Governor Winthrop's Garden Crop," 396-415.
15. Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New
England (Hanover, N.H., 1976), 68.
16. Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: the PuritanSocial Ethic in the First Century of
Settlement in New England (New Haven, 1971), 23-29
SWEAT AND TOIL
257
17. Stephanie G. Wolf, Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in
Germantown, Pennsylvania 1683-1800 (Princeton, 1977), esp. Pt. l.
18. Aubrey C. Land, "The Planters of Colonial Maryland," Maryland Historical
Magazine, LXVII(1972), 126. Rachel N. Klein, "Ordering the Backeountry: the South
Carolina Regulation," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXVIII(1981), 663-65.
19. See, Charles G. Steffen, "The Sewall Children in Colonial New England," New
England Historicaland Genealogical Register, CXXXI(1977), 163-72; Foster, Their
Solitary Way, 182-86.
20. Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History, 1 [emphasis added]
21. T. H. Breen, "The Culture of Agriculture: the Symbolic World of the Tidewater
Planter, 1760 to 1790," (forthcoming, 1983). Also see, Albert 0. Hirschman, "A
Generalized Linkage Approach to Development, With Special Reference to Staples," in
Essays in Trespassing:Economics to Politicsand Beyond (Cambridge, 1981), 65-96.
22. Russell, Long, Deep Furrow, 151. Also, David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: the
Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to
Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981), 229-31.
23. Breen, "Culture of Agriculture."
24. Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington: a Biography (6 vols., New York, 194854), III, 196. Also see, Harry Roy Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth
Century: A Study in Historical Geography (Chapel Hill, 1964), 123.
25. Sam B. Hilliard, "Antebellum Tidewater Rice Culture in South Carolina and
Georgia," in James R. Gibson, ed., European Settlement and Development in North
America: Essays on GeographicalChange in Honour and Memory of Andrew Hill Clark
(Toronto, 1978), 92-93.
26. See, Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern
Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca, 1980); Albert Laverne Olson, Agricultural
Economy and the Population in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut, Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut, XL(New Haven, 1935), 1-4; Bidwell and Falconer,
Agriculture in the Northern United States, 84; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: the
Rise of the PlanterClass in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), chs.
2 and 6; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in ColonialSouth Carolina From 1670
Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), pts. I and II; Carville Earle, "A Staple
Interpretation of Slavery and Free Labor," GeographicalReview, LXCIII(1978), 51-65;
David W. Galenson and Russell R. Menard, "Approaches to the Analysis of Economic
Growth in Colonial British America," Center for Mathematical Studies in Business and
Economics, Report 7952 (Dec. 1979), 33; James M. Clifton, "The Rice Industry in
Colonial America," Agricultural History, LV(1981), 275.
27. "Families and Farms," 32.
28. See, for example, Peter Laslett, ed., Household and Family in Past Time; Camparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group Over the Last Three Centuries
... (Cambridge, 1972). Also, Francis L. K. Hsu, "Structure, Function, Content, and
Process," American Anthropologist, LXI(1959), 690-705.
29. Ira Berlin, "Time, Space and the Evolution of Afro-American Society in British
Mainland North America," American Historical Review, LXXXV(1980), 44-78; Allan
Kulikoff, "The Beginnings of the Afro-American Family in Maryland," in Aubrey C.
Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse, eds., Law, Society and Politics in
Early Maryland (Baltimore, 1977), 171-96; T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, "Myne
Owne Ground: Race & Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York,
1980), ch. 4.
30. First General Letter of the Governor and Deputy of the New England Company for a
Plantation in Massachusetts Bay ... [April 17, 1629] in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., The
Founding of Massachusetts: Historiansand the Sources (Indianapolis, 1964), 460.
258
PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY
31. Julian H. Steward, et al., The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology
(Urbana, Ill., 1968); Fernando Ortiz Fernandez, Cuban Counterpoint;Tobacco and Sugar
(New York, 1947).
32. Breen, "The Culture of Agriculture."
33. Tench Coxe, A View of the United States ... (Philadelphia, 1794), 442. Carville
Earle and Ronald Hoffman, "The Foundation of the Modern Economy: Agriculture and
the Costs of Labor in the United States and England, 1800-60," American Historical
Review, LXXXV(1980), 1055-94.
34. Cited in Bidwell and Falconer, Agriculture in the Northern United States, 116.
35. Marquis De Chastellux, Travels in North America, ed. by Howard C. Rice, Jr. (2
vols., Chapel Hill, 1963),11, 533.
36. Cited in Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: a History (New York, 1975), 94-95
(emphasis added).
37. "Journal of Josiah Quincy, Junior, 1773," Massachusetts Historical Society,
Proceedings, XLIX(1915-1916), 456. Also, Phillips, Life and Labor, 128.
38. Edward C. Carter, II, ed., The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe
1795-1798 (2 vols., New Haven, 1977), 1, 170.
39. Jack P. Green, ed., The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752-1778,
Virginia Historical Society Documents, Volume 4 (2 vols., Charlottesville, 1965), I, 474.
The wives of the great planters were also caught up in the culture of agriculture. Philip
Fithian, a young tutor at Princeton, hired by Robert Carter, reported, "I had the pleasure
of walking to Day at twelve o-clock with Mrs. Carter; She shewed me her stock of Fowls &
Mutton for the winter; She observed, with great truth, that to live in the Country, and to
take no pleasure at all in Groves, Fields, or Meadows; nor in Cattle, Horses, & domestic
Poultry, would be a matter of life too tedious to endure." (The Journal and Letters of
Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773-1774: a Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, ed. by
Hunter Dickinson Farish [Williamsburg, 19451, 42.)
40. J. E. Spencer and Ronald J. Horvath, "How Does an Agricultural Region
Originate?" Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LIII(1963), 81. Also,
Russell, Long, Deep Furrow, 80; Clifford Geertz, AgriculturalInvolution: the Processesof
Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley, 1963), ch. 1; Richard Lyle Power, Planting
Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old
Northwest, Indiana Historical Society, Publications, XVII (1953).
41. T. H. Breen, "Culture of Agriculture"; Louis Morton, Robert Carterof Nomini Hall;
a Virginia Tobacco Planterof the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1941), 138-41.
42. N. F. Cabell, "Some Fragments of an Intended Report on the Post Revolutionary
History of Agriculture in Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., XXVI(1918),
115.
43. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, introduction by Thomas P.
Abernethy (New York, 1964), 159. On the far-reaching implications of the shift from
tobacco to wheat see, Joyce Appleby, "Commercial Farming and the 'Agrarian Myth' in
the Early Republic," Journalof American History, LXVIII(1982), 833-49.
44. John Beale Bordley, Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs (Philadelphia, 1801), 301, cited in Cary Carson, "Homestead Architecture in the Chesapeake
Colonies," paper delivered at the 41st Conference in Early American History, Millersville
State College, April 1981.
45. George Whitefield, Journals (1737-1741), intro. by William V. Davis (Gainsville,
1969), 384, 386-87.
46. Keith Thomas, "History and Anthropology," Pastand Present,No.24(1963), 7. Carl
Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience: Society in Rhode Island, 1636-1690
(Providence, 1974), xix-xxiii.