Abstract

Ariel Ron's Grassroots Leviathan is an uncommonly important book that sizzles with originality and incisive connections. Using a rich array of primary sources ranging from antebellum newspapers and agricultural journals to the treatises of prominent agricultural reformers and political economists, Ron shifts northern antebellum agriculture from the periphery to the heart of nineteenth-century American political economy. He shows it to be a dynamic, impactful force in US politics and economics instead of a declining, atavistic sector far removed from the centers of power and the thrust of economic modernity. In so doing, he does for northern agricultural reformers what an earlier generation of historians did for the Populists: he recaptures a surprisingly important and nuanced sociopolitical force that has often been unfairly dismissed, caricatured, or ignored.Ron divides his study into four sections. The first part describes the origins of northern agriculture reform in the early 1800s and the patrician patronage that undergirded it. This section also elucidates the breakdown of that elite-led movement in the face of the democratizing tendencies of the 1820s. The second section explores agricultural reform's revival in the 1840s, but also how the tenets of northern agricultural reform—with its faith in scientific and technical solutions—later came to align so snugly with Republican Party ideology. Using Henry C. Carey in particular, Ron outlines what he dubs the “Republican developmental synthesis,” which posited technological agricultural improvement as beneficial to and benefiting from industrial development, not antagonistic or adjacent to it (97). Thus Ron explains the future Republican Party's appeal in both the urban and rural North and foreshadows his later argument for the salience of agricultural policy in inflaming the sectional crisis.The third part explains the reformers' attempts to enlist federal funding and organization for agricultural education in the 1850s as resulting from the failure of private initiatives and lower-level governance. Farmers wanted authoritative agricultural expertise, but the many purveyors of antebellum agricultural advice were unreliable. Seeking to reduce misinformation, reformers mobilized to put agricultural science and education on more rigorous foundations. But though the 1840s and 1850s witnessed the establishment of numerous agricultural schools, these struggled mightily to stay solvent from private donations and state government funding alone. This inspired reformers to press Congress to found federally funded agricultural colleges and to create a federal Department of Agriculture, efforts that would thrust northern agricultural reformers into direct conflict with the slavocracy.The final portion reveals just how much northern projects for agriculture reform exacerbated the sectional divide. Southerners spent the 1850s furiously fending off what would become the Morrill Land-Grant College Act and the creation of the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA), both of which had to wait for secession to be implemented. Though slaveholders often couched their dissent in constitutional cavils, the real wellspring of their opposition arose from the conviction that both initiatives were stalking horses for northern free labor ideology and abolitionism. In Ron's view, such suspicions were valid, as these ostensibly nonpartisan schemes were anything but. Ron cites the large readership of the Patent Office's annual agricultural report, which were among the most widely circulated texts in the nation. Southern slaveholders realized that such a platform, in the hands of a full-fledged federal department with a heavily Northern constituency, would likely be inveterately hostile to slavery and undercut them among Southern yeomen. Slaveholders also were characteristically dubious about the need for the supposedly master class to be further educated in agricultural matters. Ron powerfully illustrates this point by summoning the words of Andrew Calhoun (John C. Calhoun's son) on the cusp of the Civil War. The junior Calhoun proclaimed that the slaveholder did not need “government aid” to direct their plantations, lest that destroy “manly self-reliance” and lead to the diminution of Southern power and prosperity (199). His fervent objections, and those of many other prominent Southerners—like Jefferson Davis, who thought these projects of agricultural reform “fraudulent”—amply support Ron's contention that agricultural reform was intimately linked to the sectional fissure.Though its contributions to understanding the sectional crisis stand out, the book has many other insights. For instance, Ron's epilogue identifies new research directions: the gap between the USDA's 1862 founding and its mid-1880s expansion, with all the intervening turbulence of Reconstruction, has never been explored in depth. The book is also chock-full of interesting tidbits, such as the “Merino Mania” sheep-importing craze of the early 1800s, or Thomas Jefferson's hatred of dogs. My one critique is that Ron's rendering of northern agricultural reform features little from the everyday farmers that supported it, which felt a bit odd given his stress on its character as a mass “social movement” (44). However, his top-down gaze is sensible, given his emphasis on agricultural reform's national political significance. All told, this is an excellent book that will inform not only historians of American agriculture but also those interested in the growth of the American state, the early Republican Party, and the Civil War.

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