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Chapter 4 AGRICULTURAL POWER AND PRODUCTION IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

       Kelly Houston Jones

      An observation of agriculture leads directly to essential questions of power and progress in antebellum America. What access and opportunities did this period offer? Who won and who lost as the market expanded? How did exploitation contribute to agricultural production? By the antebellum period, several transformations in America’s economy and society were underway. Immigration, urbanization, technological changes, and commercialization reworked American society. Farmers from Massachusetts to Louisiana experienced these developments in differing and often uneven ways. Ultimately, antebellum Americans’ concepts and practices of agriculture and how it related to freedom and opportunity reaped civil war.

      There was nothing static about antebellum agriculture. The story of farmers in this era—North, South, black, white, proprietors, tenants, men, women, free, and enslaved—is a story of transformation. The most obvious shifts that affected and were affected by farmers were market expansion (explored in more detail later in this chapter) and westward migration (which cannot be disentangled from market expansion). Shifting cultivation and the lure of cheap land were among the factors that drew farmers west. Indian removals created “emptiness,” at least legally, that allowed for settler colonialist agriculture to march west. Although white Americans had already enforced numerous removals, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 set in motion a cluster of treaties forcing native people west of the Mississippi River and, as whites defined it, out of the way of agricultural progress. Southern agriculturalists perpetrated an added level of displacement by forcing the migration of more than one million enslaved people to the cotton interior via the second Middle Passage—a disorienting separation from the lives, loved ones, and sometimes crop cultures that they knew in the eastern South (Wright 1986; Berlin 2003).

Antebellum farmers’ cultivation and innovation of corn bears out some of these movements and connections. Corn’s adaptability and usefulness as a commercial or subsistence crop contributed to its wide cultivation across the US. In the northeast, farmers grew flint corn, a yellow, slender, quickly maturing variety. In more southerly zones, farmers cultivated dent corn, a paler, white corn with a squatty shape that took longer to mature. Hybridization of the two types occurred as populations moved, for example as New Englanders moved southwest to places like Kentucky. People actively hybridized the crop to create several flint–dent varieties by the 1850s. Corn farmers also worked in western Native American corns as settlers spread farther west. Not as labor intensive as some crops, corn did require tending. Farmers battled several types of weeds that invaded their fields and threatened to strangle the plants, like the so-called Canada thistle (not from the Americas), by chopping them out with their hoes or crowding them out with other cover crops. Southerners often planted peas among their corn rows. A versatile crop, corn could be converted to stock. Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman estimated that farmers fed antebellum cattle three bushels of corn per year and hogs ten bushels per year. While corn was grown widely, Ohio and Illinois corn farmers were incredibly productive. Samuel Bowers Hilliard has estimated that yields there were probably more than double the yields found in the South in the same era (Hilliard 1972; Atack and Bateman 1987; Hudson 1994; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

      Like corn, and in direct relation to it, pork was ubiquitous in antebellum agriculture, being the most reliable form of meat to be raised anywhere. By 1840, swine populations in the North were much improved by the importation of stock from Europe and Asia, holding desirable traits like an efficient conversion of corn into weight. Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana herds also benefited from some improvement by the time major pork-packing houses were established in the Ohio River Valley in the 1840s. Hogs in the South and lesser settled parts of the western north mostly ran free, subsisting on nuts and mast from the brush and forests. Farmers rounded them up when they deemed it time to fatten them for fall slaughter. Although some talked of improved boars elevating southern swine herds in the South in the 1850s, Ohio River Valley swine were heavier than southern hogs and northeastern hogs. They averaged about 200 pounds in 1840, while some areas produced hogs weighing more than 500 pounds. In the South, however, where leggy swine still roamed free most of the time, their weights averaged about 130 to 150 pounds. The number of hogs per capita in the United States overall in 1860 was 1.07. In the South, that number was 1.82 while in the Old Northwest it was 1.24 (Hilliard 1972; Nation 2005; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

      Corn and hogs represented an easier proposition for the humbler sort of farmers, while beef cattle required more care, investment, and risk when raised commercially. Many cattle were slaughtered locally, but as the nineteenth century wore on, smaller farmers had trouble competing—they needed credit and meat packers often offered low prices to farmers. While northeastern cattle in places like the Connecticut River Valley enjoyed success, expanses of land used for grazing in the hill country of Kentucky, several sections of Ohio, East-central Illinois, and the prairies of Indiana saw the most growth in the 1820s through the 1840s. In order to supply farmers with profits and urbanites with beef, these herds had to be transported to eastern butchers in places like Philadelphia, New York, and, later, St. Louis and Chicago. This task was often performed by professional drovers who might buy the stock or enter into another sort of brokerage arrangement. After spending months fattening their stock to 1000 to 1400 pounds, northern farmers often entrusted them to these middlemen who could either earn trust and lasting market relationships or exploit farmers. The epic drives of this period were reduced almost completely by the extension of railroads westward. Many farmers preferred to ship their cattle on stock cars instead, especially after rates dropped. Cattle in the South rarely traveled so far. Most southern farmers did not raise stock exclusively and most southern beef was marketed closer to home. Southern farmers allowed cattle to roam and graze on what they would, providing salt, corn fodder, oats, or peas from time to time. Their lower weights reflected the difference in breed and in husbandry, averaging 500 to 700 pounds. This is not to say that antebellum southern cattle raising was without commercial importance. In fact, geographer Terry G. Jordan locates the origins of the open-range cattle ranching system that would become familiar in the West to the antebellum South; by 1820 South Carolina farmers’ methods had made their way as far as Texas (Helen 1954; Hilliard 1972; Jordan 1981; Garrison 1987).

While corn, hogs, and cattle stretched widely across antebellum America’s farmland, wheat did slightly less СКАЧАТЬ