What Hath God Wrought (6 page)

In recent years, one would find a similar standard of living only in the third world. The gross domestic product per capita of the United States in 1820 was about the same as that of Ecuador or Jordan in 2002.
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But although this is an instructive comparison for us, it was of course not one made by contemporaries. They compared their lot with that of European peasants of the time and felt good about it. Most white Americans lived on family farms and worked land that they owned or squatted on. A farm of one’s own had been the dream of Old World peasantry; it seemed the key to dignity and economic security. Only a minority of American farmers owed rent to a landlord; none owed tithes to a bishop or abbot; taxes were low. Many did owe mortgage payments to the banker who had advanced them money to buy their farm; resentment that might have focused on a nobility or an ecclesiastical establishment instead often turned toward banks, indispensable and yet unpopular.

The drastic decline of the Native population left a land-to-population ratio very favorable for the settlers coming in from the Old World. The historian John Murrin has called them the “beneficiaries of catastrophe.” They were able to marry earlier than their relatives in Europe, set up housekeeping on their own, and have more children. Because of their high birthrate, the population of the United States approximately doubled every twenty years. By 1815, it had reached almost 8.5 million, even though the Napoleonic Wars had dampened immigration from Europe and the importation of slaves from Africa became illegal in 1808. Vital statistics bore out the benefits of America for its white settlers and their descendants. At five feet eight inches, the average American man was four inches taller than his English counterpart and as tall as his successor who was drafted in World War II. His health reflected the benefits of the land-to-population ratio: abundant food and rural isolation from contagious disease.
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The American of 1815 ate wheat and beef in the North, corn and pork in the South. Milk, cheese, and butter were plentiful; potatoes came to be added in the North and sweet potatoes in the South. Fruits appeared only in season except insofar as women could preserve them in pies or jams; green vegetables, now and then as condiments; salads, virtually never. (People understood that low temperatures would help keep food but could only create a cool storage place by digging a cellar.) Monotonous and constipating, too high in fat and salt, this diet nevertheless was more plentiful and nutritious, particularly in protein, than that available in most of the Old World. The big meal occurred at noon.
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American farm families generally produced partly for their own consumption and partly for sale or local barter; historians term this practice “composite” farming. Virtually no farm families expected to satisfy all their wants by purchase; neither could any possess the range of skills and tools that would make them entirely self-sufficient. Historians have tried to sort out the extent of their market participation under varying circumstances. From the family’s own point of view, however, this issue seemed less important than that their activities, taken as a whole, enabled them to survive and prosper.
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Whether producing for a market or their own consumption, their way of life depended on the practice of thrift. When a husband hammered together a stool and his wife made the children’s clothes, they were not being “thrifty” in the same way that someone shopping for groceries today is thrifty by remembering to use a coupon. They were performing their occupations, earning their living, just as much as when the man plowed the field or the woman churned butter to sell in the village. Their thrift was a necessity, not an option. Thrift demanded the family set aside enough corn or wheat to be able to seed next year’s crop, feed the animals, and go on farming. Significantly, the very word for their occupation, “husbandry,” also meant thrift, as in the expression “to husband resources.”

So many and varied were the aspects of farm labor that unmarried farmers were exceedingly rare; to operate a farm household took both a man and woman. And so the word “husband,” originally meaning “farmer,” came to mean “married man.” Typically, American farms were economically individualistic, operated by a single nuclear family, not an extended kin-group or communal enterprise. Families might supplement their own labor with that of a “hired man” or “hired girl” (called a girl because not yet married), but wage labor was relatively expensive, and the employee expected decent treatment. The preferred sources of agricultural labor consisted of family members, neighbors offering reciprocal favors, or (for those who could afford the investment) bound workers, indentured or enslaved. Children could perform many of the necessary errands and tasks: fetching water from the well, feeding chickens, collecting firewood. Foresight, not irresponsibility, prompted farm couples to have many children. In 1800, the white birthrate stood at an average of seven children per woman; by 1860, when it had declined to five, the rural percentage of the population had fallen from 95 to 80.
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Although the particular crops grown varied with the local climate, some principles of family farming were common to all regions. Following the principle of “safety first,” newly settled agricultural families generally began by growing food for their own consumption, then turned as quickly as possible to supplementing this with something they could market. Their “market” might be a neighbor—or a “factor” who would ship the produce halfway around the world. A composite-farm family could simultaneously live in a local world of barter and engage in international commerce.
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Market success and a measure of self-sufficiency were not even incompatible goals. Big landowners producing staple crops for export and commanding a large labor force (perhaps enslaved) achieved the greatest degree of self-sufficiency. They could afford to grind their own grain and employ their own artisans like blacksmiths, carpenters, and saddlers. When an ordinary farming family needed something they could neither produce for themselves nor swap with a neighbor, they could visit the local storekeeper. With currency chronically scarce, people seldom paid for their purchases using actual coins or banknotes. Instead, the storekeeper kept an account book, which recorded who owed what. When the husband bought a tool, he was debited; when the wife brought in a surplus cured ham, she was credited. In many little towns, the storekeepers still kept their accounts in shillings and pence fifty years after the Revolution. If customers had been paying cash, it would have made sense to convert to dollars and cents, but since nobody expected this, why not go on using the old-time familiar units of exchange?
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Most family farms relied on crude agricultural methods and the natural fecundity of the soil. Their wooden plows differed little from those used at the time of the Norman Conquest. Livestock foraged for themselves, so they bred unselectively and their manure did not accumulate for fertilizer. Fences encircled the cultivated land to keep the animals
out
, not
in
. Clearing land to plow was arduous labor, and a man might leave tree stumps in his fields for years rather than go to the work of removing them, even if this required him to use a hoe instead of a plow. As Virginian James Madison, a critic of prevailing methods, complained in 1819, “Whilst there was an abundance of fresh and fertile soil, it was the interest of the cultivator to spread his labor over as great a surface as he could, land being cheap and labor dear.” Madison spoke for an enlightened minority of agricultural reformers, often large landowners living in areas long under cultivation, who recommended means of conservation such as crop rotation and fertilization. Their ideas would spread, along with technological improvements in plowing, harrowing, and threshing, during the years after 1815.
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Almost all life’s activities went on within the household setting: production as well as consumption, birthing and child-rearing, transmitting the rudiments of literacy, caring for the sick and those few persons who lived to old age. Work we would label “manufacturing” took up a lot of a typical housewife’s time. A government report in 1810 estimated that two-thirds of all clothing and linens were produced in households. Such production would not necessarily be for the woman’s own family, for merchants “put out” spinning, weaving, and sewing to women to do at home for payment. The early industrial revolution would not put an end to such home manufacturing. When women could buy fabrics instead of having to weave them, they did not stop making clothes at home. They welcomed new technology, including eventually sewing machines, as enabling them to clothe their family better or to earn more money.
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The man was the “head of the house,” by both law and custom, and he could exploit the labor of other family members, as his predecessors had done for centuries. Yet in practice, the other members of the household enjoyed increasing autonomy in white America, and fathers could not control whom their sons or daughters married. In the decades to come, men would lose much of their legal control over the property and labor of their wives and children. Despite the common law of “coverture,” which deprived married women of legal independence from their husbands, women almost always looked forward to the prospect of marriage. Only by marriage could a woman acquire a home of her own; as a spinster, she would have to live in some other woman’s home. Except for some aspects of dairy farming, custom clearly labeled most work activities as either men’s or women’s. A family farm worked best when husband and wife cooperated closely and accorded each other mutual respect. Enslaved women, however, could be set tasks otherwise reserved for men.
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It was a young society: The census listed the median age as sixteen, and only one person in eight as over forty-three years old.
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Women bore children in agony and danger, making their life expectancy, unlike today, slightly shorter than that of men. Once born, infants often succumbed to diseases like diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough. One-third of white children and over half of black children died before reaching adulthood. The women had enough babies to beat these grim odds. To help them through labor, neighbors and trained midwives attended them. Doctors were in short supply, hospitals almost unknown. This proved a blessing in disguise, for physicians then did as much harm as good, and hospitals incubated infection. The upside of rural isolation was that epidemics did not spread easily.
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The widespread distribution of land had powerful consequences, psychological and political as well as economic. Ownership of his own land meant a lot to the American husbandman. It meant that one’s livelihood was not dependent on the goodwill of another, as was the case, presumably, with tenants, serfs, indentured servants, wage-workers, or chattel slaves, as well as women and children. Americans affirmed a resolute egalitarianism among white men. The custom of shaking hands, a gesture of social reciprocity, replaced bowing. Not only the widespread ownership of land but also the widespread ownership of horses fostered a rough equality of esteem among free adult males. In the Spanish language, the word for “gentleman” (
caballero
) literally means “horseman.” In a society where riding a horse did not signify a special status, neither did the designation “gentleman.” The American husbandman nurtured a pride comparable to that of a European gentleman; he defined himself as a citizen rather than a subject, and he did not hesitate to assert his rights as he saw them.

Political leaders had to take account of this yeoman’s worldview, especially his aversion to taxes and suspicion of all authority (except, sometimes, that of religion). American republican ideology gave formal expression to the outlook. Thomas Jefferson was the leading formulator of the ideology during the Revolution and also proved its most successful political practitioner afterwards. This republican ideology had intellectual precursors in England: John Locke’s social-compact philosophy and the writings of the eighteenth-century “commonwealthmen” who traced their lineage to the English Puritan Revolution. Although historians have pointed out intellectual differences between Locke and the commonwealthmen, Americans of Jefferson’s generation were interested in what they had in common: their defense of liberty. Besides asserting individual rights and equality, Jefferson’s republican ideology celebrated popular virtue and free enterprise, in religion and politics as well as in economic undertakings; it expressed deep suspicion of pretensions to power and privilege.
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This was not a relaxed, hedonistic, refined, or indulgent society. Formal education and family connections counted for comparatively little. The man who got ahead in often primitive conditions did so by means of innate ability, hard work, luck, and sheer willpower. Disciplined himself, he knew how to impose discipline on his family, employees, and slaves. Impatient of direction, he took pride in his personal accomplishments. An important component of his drive to succeed was a willingness—surprising among agrarian people—to innovate and take risks, to try new methods and locations. With an outlook more entrepreneurial than peasant, the American farmer sought to engross more land than he could cultivate in hopes that its value would rise as other settlers arrived.
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For most white men, this proud, willful independence derived from having one’s own land. However, one did not actually have to operate a family farm to embrace such an outlook. Thinking of their tools and shop as the equivalent of a family farm, artisans appropriated the yeoman outlook to themselves. So did planters using slave labor, for they did not apply the rights they claimed for themselves to people of other races. Indeed, slaveowning planters like Jefferson wrote the most learned expositions of the yeoman ideology and exploited it most successfully in their political leadership.