Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic by Ariel Ron

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic by Ariel Ron Kyle G. Volk (bio) Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic. By Ariel Ron. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 308. Cloth, $59.95.) Why did Republicans create the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and land-grant college system in the middle of the Civil War? Historian Ariel Ron's deeply researched and densely packed monograph provides comprehensive answers by exhuming the political and economic world of northern farmers in the decades before the Civil War. In the process, he complements the bevy of recent scholarship on slavery and capitalism by providing powerful new ways to think about northern political economy in the age of sectional crisis. Turning our attention from northern industrialization, Ron shows how the formidable forces of scientific agricultural reform championed policies that threatened slaveholders and fueled the Republican Party and its construction of the national developmental state. Written for scholars and puzzlingly priced not to sell, Grassroots Leviathan should nevertheless be required reading for historians of agriculture, nineteenth-century politics, capitalism, and statecraft, as well as the coming of the Civil War. Ron's taproot is that, long before the Civil War, forward-looking northern farmers used political means to secure government aid for agricultural improvement. Part 1 of his study lays this foundation and implicitly joins political historians in exploring the plurality of political practices in the nineteenth century. After describing elite farmers' stillborn attempts at top-down reform in the early days of the republic, Ron reveals how agricultural reform followed the familiar deference-to-democracy trajectory, blossoming into a more popular affair after the 1820s. Essential to its democratization was the explosion of the agricultural press, local and state agricultural societies, and agricultural fairs, which attracted thousands. By the 1840s and 1850s, this "state-building social movement" sought [End Page 115] state-government support through annual appropriations for societies, the creation of boards of agriculture, and printing subventions for and subsidized circulation of agricultural reports (61). As Ron demonstrates, agricultural reform was not another aspect of Whig developmentalism; it transcended the partisan divide, as northern farmers deployed a mode of advocacy that worked outside the party system and appeared nationalistic and majoritarian, yet apolitical. Subsequent sections in the book add essential layers to this compelling political portrait, guiding readers to comprehend farmers' embrace of and influence on the Republican Party and its developmental policies. Turning to ideas, part 2 unpacks the nationalist (yet northern) vision of political economy that promoted domestic exchange and reconciled the interests of farmers and manufacturers. This occurred first through the "home market thesis" (87), which rationalized tariff protections for industry by emphasizing their ability to grow urban markets for farm goods. Confluences between agricultural and industrial interests continued in the emergent "Republican developmental synthesis" (97), which Ron unearths by situating the influential economic thought of Henry Carey in the ascendant concerns of scientific agriculture, especially fertilizers. Faith in industrial technology's ability to advance agriculture and emancipate farmers from drudgery boosted the significance of science and education, informing calls for the USDA and land-grant colleges. Alongside well-known commitments to free labor, it also became a cornerstone of the Republican antislavery political economy. Highlighting the causal power of scientific agriculture, part 3 details parallel developments in the mid-nineteenth century that more explicitly drove demands for developmental state building. First, the commercialization of fertilizers and other agricultural technologies birthed a crisis of expertise. How were farmers to know which newfangled products actually worked? To businessmen and others, authoritative government bodies—first at the state level and eventually the federal USDA—needed to conduct research, regulate the market, and stamp out frauds. Second, scientific agriculture brought demands for specialized educational institutions. When private institutions and state governments proved unable to provide reliable resources, reformers looked to the federal government to fund state agricultural colleges. In sum, Ron exposes a broad-based and scientifically driven northern agricultural capitalism that craved not laissez-faire but state partnership and intervention. Making farmers' project a reality required the obstructionist, export-oriented slaveholding South to step aside. Part...