What Hath God Wrought (7 page)

Although independent of higher classes of persons, the American husbandman remained dependent upon nature. This dependence he from time to time acknowledged to God; more often, his wife acknowledged it. The earthquakes centered along the New Madrid Fault in Missouri during the winter of 1811–12, the greatest ever recorded in North America, provoked religious revivals. The prevailing versions of Protestantism preached a stern morality and self-control. Such austere religion did not foster the traditional high arts of music, painting, and sculpture. It did foster literacy for Bible-reading, broad participation in decision-making, and a sense of equality among the lay members. “Membership” in a church, however, was often a closely guarded privilege, and many more people attended services than attained full membership. The characteristic American religious harvest festival, Thanksgiving Day, spread from New England, where it had been observed since colonial times, to other parts of the young republic. (On the other hand, most Protestants shunned celebrating Christmas as a Catholic corruption of Christianity.)
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Their respect for religious tradition reminds us that these Americans displayed less individualism in their culture than they did in their economic activity. Although separate conjugal families each operated their own farm, most people thought of themselves as members of a local community. They usually lived in communities with others of their own background. Euro-Americans already represented a variety of such backgrounds, the Mid-Atlantic states being especially diverse, including substantial Dutch, German, and Swedish minorities. Highland Scots sometimes still spoke Gaelic upon arrival; Germans perpetuated their language for generations in their well-defined enclaves. Immigrants from Ireland, usually Ulster Presbyterians in this period, often settled in remote Appalachian places because earlier arrivals had claimed the more favorable locations. (Though later termed “Scots-Irish,” at this time they more commonly called themselves Irish Protestants.) In areas dominated by whites, the remaining Native Americans typically lived in villages of their own. Besides ethnicity, religion constituted a common tie binding local communities. Quakers and Baptists wanted to live where they could worship with others of their persuasion. In New England, descendants of the seventeenth-century Puritans still predominated, their distinctive villages centered on a “green” and a Congregational meetinghouse. These were the people properly called “Yankees,” a term that southerners would come to apply to all northerners, and foreigners to all Americans.
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Besides the minister, the local community also supplied other occupational specialists like the blacksmith, the storekeeper, and the miller. In some places it might also provide common pastureland and a school. Neighbors bartered with each other and joined in occasional collective efforts like barn raising or corn husking. Their willingness to come to the rescue (if, say, a building caught fire) supplied a primitive kind of insurance. Institutions of local government generally approximated a freeholders’ democracy—explicitly so, in New England town meetings. But within the small communities, consensus appeared more often than divisions of opinion. Local pressures to conformity of opinion were substantial. Ordinary people usually regarded outsiders with suspicion, especially those with pretensions to elite status.
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For all the political liberty that American institutions and ideology promised to adult white men, in practical terms most lives were disciplined and limited by the economic necessities of a harsh environment and the cultural constraints of a small community. Instead of “freedom” from demands, it might be more accurate to think of the American husbandman as possessing “agency,” that is, the ability to act purposefully in the service of goals. The goals might come from family, community, religion, or personal ambition.
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In the America of 1815, a network of unpaved short roads connected family farms with nearby towns or docks on navigable streams. Seldom more than rutted trails, littered with boulders and tree stumps, these “country roads” were muddy when it rained, dusty when dry, and frequently impassable. Local authorities supposedly drafted neighboring farmers to work on the roads during the agricultural slack seasons. Such grudging labor under inexpert direction did not maintain the roads beyond the barest minimum. While these pathways permitted farm produce to be hauled a few miles to a local market or place of storage, they were hopeless for extended journeys. Most long-distance travel and commerce went by water, which explains why most cities were seaports—Cincinnati on the Ohio River and St. Louis on the Mississippi being notable exceptions. To transport a ton of goods by wagon to a port city from thirty miles inland typically cost nine dollars in 1815; for the same price the goods could be shipped three thousand miles across the ocean.
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Though peace came to the Atlantic world in 1815,
distance
remained for Americans “the first enemy,” as it had been for inhabitants of the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century.
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If distance is expressed in terms of time of travel, the country was far larger then than now. To get from New York City to Cincinnati on the other side of the Appalachians took nineteen days in 1817. Travel over water was always faster; sailing along the coast, one could get from New York to Charleston in eight days.
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During the war, the British blockade had cut off the coastal traffic, forcing Americans to rely on difficult overland routes. Slow travel restricted communication as well as commerce, making it difficult to receive news, control armies in the field from Washington, or organize a timely protest against a government action.

The distribution of population reflected the existing realities of transportation and communication. Most Americans lived not far from the coast. Of the 7.23 million people counted in the third census, taken in August 1810, only about 1 million lived in the new states and territories west of the Appalachians. The mean center of population was located in Loudoun County, Virginia, forty miles from Washington, D.C.
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Extensive American settlement in the continental interior awaited improvements in transportation, both to get the people in and to get their products out. Improvements in communication had perhaps even more far-reaching consequences. For example, they would greatly facilitate the development of mass political parties in the coming years. It is no accident that so many leaders of these parties would be newspapermen, or that the largest source of political party patronage came from the Post Office.
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The “frontier” in 1815 was not so much a specific line on a map as any area where it was hard to get produce to market. In such a place, economic self-sufficiency was involuntary, forced upon the settlers. They had traded consumer civilization for land, but they did not want the trade-off to be permanent. With few exceptions, westward migrants worked impatiently to liberate themselves from the oppression of isolation. The exceptions to the rule consisted of religious communities like the Pennsylvania Amish, who deliberately insulated themselves from the outside world, and some people, mainly in the milder climate of the South, who seem to have preferred subsistence to market farming as a way of life. Historians now realize that there were fewer of the latter than they once thought. Even farmers in the remote southern piney woods raised cattle and hogs for market.
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The simple methods of agriculture limited the number of people the land would support. As a result, explosive population growth prompted migration inland. From the standpoint of the United States as a nation, this westward movement brought expansion and increased power. But from the standpoint of the individuals involved, westward migration did not necessarily constitute a success story. It might well reflect a disappointment in the East, the crop failures of 1816 being the most dramatic example. Often soil exhaustion prompted a move. A Virginian complained in 1818, “Our woods have disappeared and are succeeded, too generally, by exhausted fields and gullied hills.”
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A large landowner could allow some fields to lie fallow until they recovered fertility; a smallholder could not. For him, a move west constituted a resurgence of hope. Families usually stayed in the same general latitude when they moved, so they could keep their accustomed farming practices and use their seed crops. But sometimes farm families would fail and move repeatedly in a recurring cycle of hope and despair. Moving entailed risk. For the first few years in a new location, the family’s living standard would probably fall. Unless they simply “squatted” on land they didn’t own, the family might well have to borrow money to pay for their new land. People lacking the requisite ambition or access to credit might end up as tenant farmers or, if unmarried, look for wage work.
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Unfortunately, although farm families moved west in hope of a better life, in these early years their migration often took them farther away from access to markets, toward less rewarding forms of agriculture, and into conflict with the Native peoples. In fact, once on the frontier, white settlers did not always pursue a way of life strikingly different from their Indian neighbors’; both mixed agriculture with hunting. In the Old Southwest, both whites and Indians raised a lot of cattle to sell for their hides and tallow, more practical to ship a long way than unrefrigerated beef. All too often both peoples succumbed to alcohol abuse. In sum, the agricultural economy of 1815 contained no necessary tendency toward economic development or diversification. Instead, the westward movement tended to perpetuate a dispersed population practicing relatively primitive agricultural methods.
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The United States in 1815 resembled the economically developing countries of today in many ways: high birthrate, rapid population growth, most people being in the agricultural sector, and surplus rural population migrating in quest of a livelihood. Poor transportation meant that many farms in the hinterland operated only just above subsistence level. As usual in such countries, communication was slow; infectious disease was prevalent; conflicts among ethnoreligious communities sometimes became violent. Save in New England, free public education represented the exception rather than the rule. Like developing countries generally, the United States needed to import manufactured goods and paid for them with agricultural staples and the export of raw materials like timber, tar, and fur. Over the next three decades the United States would confront many issues common in developing countries: how to attract or mobilize investment capital; how to provide municipal services (police, water, fire protection, public health) for the suddenly growing cities; how to create and fund a system of public education capable of delivering mass literacy; how to combine industrialization with decent labor conditions and hours of employment; how to arbitrate disputes between indigenous peoples and white settlers intent on expropriating them. Realizing the hopes of America’s family farmers and the transformation of their underdeveloped country awaited the coming of trade, transportation, and communication. With them, everyday life would improve significantly both for those agriculturalists who could get more produce to market and for the growing number of townsfolk who bought that produce. For the very poor and for those enslaved, however, little would change.

III

Aaron Fuller of Massachusetts had reason to worry about the future. He had not yet established himself in farming (or any other career), and his wife had just died, leaving him with four small children. In September 1818, Fuller wrote out an account of “The Life I should like.” He hoped someday to own a “mercantile business,” large enough to “employ two faithful clerks.” He also hoped to farm “about fifty Acres of Good Land,” not only for economic reasons but also because agriculture was “of the greatest importance to the whole human family—it supports
life
&
health
.” Fuller hoped that his business and farm would keep him out of debt but not bring in so much income that he forgot to “use economy” or became “slothfull & indolent.” His vision of happiness hinged, he realized, on finding the right wife—“a partner,” “affectionate,” “prudent,” and a good cook. Aaron Fuller’s dream came true. Within two years he had remarried, to Fanny Negus, who took good care of his four children and bore him seven more in the course of their twenty-five years together. The two of them operated a bakery, an inn, and a farm in the Connecticut River valley that sold livestock, cranberries, corn, and dairy products. The historian Catherine Kelly offers their partnership as an example of “companionate marriage,” both emotionally fulfilling and economically productive.
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Aaron Fuller’s dream was the typical American dream of his generation, though it did not come true for everyone. A family farm offered the key to a life of “virtue”—a word then used to mean wholesome, productive, public-spirited independence. What made for independence in this sense was not literal economic self-sufficiency but self-employment, heading a household of one’s own, and owning real estate in fee simple, clear of mortgage indebtedness. Aaron Fuller’s linking of agrarian virtue with small-scale commercial endeavor was not unusual. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited from France in 1831, he noticed that “almost all farmers of the United States combine some trade with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade.” As early as 1790 the Jeffersonian Albert Gallatin, an astute economic observer, had remarked: “You will scarcely find a farmer who is not, in some degree, a trader.”
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Farming certainly had its commercial aspect. If a farmer could market a good crop and get a merchant’s “bill of exchange” in return, he might clear his account with the storekeeper and have enough left to invest in one of the recently invented agricultural implements, like a steel plow. Demand generated by prosperous farmers helped encourage the new industries of New England.
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Still, as Aaron Fuller’s manuscript indicates, many family farmers aspired to competence rather than wealth.