The View from the Farmhouse: Rural Lives in the Early Republic

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that early United States was overwhelmingly a rural society, and that this remained so well beyond mid-nineteenth century. Yet in early years of social history in 1970s many historians regarded rural people and their experience as rather peripheral to main patterns of American growth and development. Early social historians of nineteenth century adapted community studies from colonial period, but they tended to regard rural societies as residual phenomena, about to be overtaken by urbanization and industrialization. The exceptions to this tendency did not undermine it. The frontier and westward were still discussed within a framework set out by Frederick Jackson Turner and his Progressive-era colleagues and were largely ignored at first by new social historians. Slavery and rural South, while subjects of pioneering historical methods, were still portrayed as aspects of old, rather than new. Adherence to agriculture and reliance on slave labor were badges of South's backwardness, preludes to defeat in Civil War and to continued poverty and underdevclopment thereafter. Rural America seemed marginal to important currents of change, and victim rather than progenitor of changes that came about.During Journal of Early Republic's lifespan this perspective on rural history has been altered significantly. The invitation to reflect here on dimensions of rural peoples' lives between 1783 and 1850 offers a chance to draw attention to this shift of emphasis and to suggest, ways in which future research might carry it further. As field of labor history went into decline, many social historians redirected their traditional focus on industrial workers. The rise of women's history led to recognition and use of fresh source material, much of it relating to rural women.1 European historians' interest in cottage industry and protoindustrialization suggested that countryside might be a source of economic and social trends, not just their recipient. Scholars of slave South questioned assumption that region was economically backward, and stressed efforts of many southern farmers and planters to adopt agricultural improvements and methods of production.2 Rural societies moved towards center of attention. In 1840 agriculture remained predominant economic activity; only in Rhode Island was it no longer leading occupation, and in nation as a whole agricultural employment exceeded manufacturing employment by more than four to one. Freehold farming ensured that proportion of property holders in population was high by international standards. As a group richest antebellum Americans were large plantation owners of South, whose control and exploitation of slaves more literally made them Robber Barons than their successors among merchants, industrialists, and financiers of Gilded Age.Recognition of rural societies' scale and scope accompanied a fresh understanding of rural peoples' roles in key processes of change, starting with American Revolution itself, which one recent historian has dubbed the farmers' war.3 In New England resistance to Britain turned into revolution only when rural folkjoined disputes initiated by their urban cousins. In Virginia planter gentry and yeomen farmers headed movement for independence. Rural communities provided most of war's soldiers, and most of its food and other supplies. Rural peoples' demands for land and migration to regions had helped foster tensions between colonies and Britain in first place and provided driving force behind expansion of white settlement beyond original thirteen states after independence. As historians have explored early republic's rural societies in more detail, they have recognized them as sources of important economic and social changes of nineteenth century. …