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 Sally McMurry (bio) Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic By Ariel Ron. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 324 pages, 18 halftones, 3 maps, 1 graph, 6" × 9". $59.95 cloth., $59.95 ebook. Author Ariel Ron has tackled a big question in Civil War era studies—how to integrate into broader analyses the fact that although the North’s industrial might was undeniable, the region was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. In trying to explain the North’s support for Republican policy, historians have typically either downplayed the farming sector (focusing on industrial “free labor,” for instance) or fallen back upon a gauzy notion of a Jeffersonian yeomanry vaguely linked to “free soil.” In this book, Ariel Ron more carefully considers how farming people in the North worked, thought, and most importantly, organized. He brings fresh insight to an old agricultural history narrative and adds fresh information. Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic is a major achievement. [End Page 215] Ron’s arguments are subtle and complex, so in this review I will focus on a few major points, mainly from an agricultural history vantage point. Ron provides new evidence for the Northern farm sector’s vigor, but more significantly, he hitches that picture to a novel conceptualization of the Northern farming community’s mobilization as a social movement. He envisions the agricultural reform movement as a predecessor to the Progressive Era’s interest groups and its focus on administrative functions of government. Ron establishes a basic point: that in the rural North, farming people “pursued their own modernities” (3) by actively advocating for agricultural improvement and vigorously courting the “home markets” that resulted from industrialization and urbanization. Three new institutions constituted the agricultural reform movement: agricultural societies, the farm press, and the agricultural fair. By engaging with them, Ron argues, Northern farming people were enabled to imagine themselves as a class. Through “a distinctive mode of advocacy” that Ron calls “nonpartisan anti-politics” (6), the agricultural reform movement (though repudiating party politics) advocated policies that antagonized slaveholding interests. The most significant of these (in Ron’s telling) were the Morrill Act and the establishment of a federal Department of Agriculture. Southerners feared both as “slippery slope” extensions of federal power that could set precedents for interfering with slavery. Ron’s re-creation of the Northern agricultural public is well documented. Building on earlier scholars’ work on agricultural journals, societies, and fairs, he deepens the evidence base in various ways. For example, he notes that reprinting vastly extended the agricultural journals’ public; he amasses revealing demographic data from local society records; and he demonstrates that agricultural information accounted for large chunks of printing budgets at both the state and federal levels. This last point was a revelation to this reader, who for many years has happily mined these reports without giving much thought to why they are so widely available even now. Ron also supplies attendance figures for agricultural fairs. From these indications he concludes that the agricultural reform movement constituted a “state-building social movement.” A strong sectional disparity characterized it; Ron attributes the difference in part to “deeper consumer markets” and “thicker associational networks” in what he calls the “Greater Northeast.” A set of maps by cartographer Bill Nelson provides excellent visualizations. Ron’s characterization of northeastern agriculture draws on both old and recent scholarship. Scholars like Paul Gates and Clarence Danhof long ago contrasted Northern agricultural innovation, the rise of “home markets,” new crop mixes, and so on, to Southern stagnation. More recently Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode have argued that sustained “biological innovation” allowed farmers to maintain per-acre crop productivity and improve animal quality. Technological innovation was another key to Northern agricultural reform. Any historian who browses nineteenth-century farm journals will soon encounter rosy rhetoric extolling the cultural and intellectual benefits of farm mechanization. Ron offers a fresh perspective when he suggests that the “Republican developmental synthesis . . . contrasted slavery’s malignant exploitation with technology’s ostensibly benign utilization of [End Page 216] nature” (97...