Yeoman Farmer

The term yeoman is a word dating to the 14th century that came to mean a farmer who owned the land he farmed (unlike nobles of higher rank, a yeoman was usually actively involved in the farming himself, rather than simply owning the farm and delegating its management to others). The etymology of the word is unclear. It may be related to the Middle English term yemen, “to care,” making the yeoman a caretaker of the land, but it has generally been assumed that the word was formed by prepending “yeo” to “man,” as was common throughout English then as now. Early editions of the Oxford English Dictionary read yeo- as a variant of young, and yeoman as “young man,” reflecting the junior status of the yeoman relative to loftier nobles. Later editions of the Oxford dictionary suggested the yeo- could be the same as that of the English and Dutch word yeomath, meaning “second crop of grass,” and that yeoman would then mean “an additional man.” The word's exact usage has varied from era to era; in some centuries, a yeoman is simply a freeman, or a faithful assistant (like the French valet). In others, he is a landowner but may not necessarily farm his land. Older, non-farm-related usages of the word have been retained in phrases like the Yeomen of the Guard, a ceremonial military corps created by Henry VII in 1485 to serve as bodyguards to the British monarch, and in the use of “yeoman” as a military rank in both the British and the U.S. navies, generally indicating minor administrative duties. The connotations of the word have varied, sometimes derogatory (unlike other landowners, the yeoman gets his hands dirty), sometimes laudatory (he is a self-sufficient man who does honest work). Until the 18th century, both “yee-man” and “yo-men” were acceptable pronunciations; since then, only the latter has been used.

In the United States, the term yeoman was often used for farm owners who did not own slaves, and who in many cases hired them from other farmers at harvest time. In some parts of the country, yeomen were significantly poorer than other farm owners (i.e., planters), growing little more than what they needed for self-sufficiency, with the little excess sold to pay taxes and buy goods that could not be produced on the farm, which might range from milled flour or imported spices to appliances like stoves and iceboxes. The yeoman, in many ways, is the archetypal “American farmer,” whose needs have fueled U.S. political debates since before the birth of the union—the hard worker who is unable to be completely self-sufficient and is forced to participate in the market to pay for [Page 462]obligations (taxes, debts), services (education, medicine), and goods that cannot be produced directly on the farm.

It's important to consider the age during which North America was colonized, and during which the United States was formed. Agriculture, once dismissed as the toil necessary for the lower classes to support the upper classes, was newly important in all areas of Western thought. Theology emphasized the nature of Eden as a garden and the role of Man as caretaker of the Earth; the same strains of Western philosophy that would characterize the Native American as a Noble Savage who had been kept pure by living off the land similarly saw the white farmer as honest, down-to-earth, reliable, wise, and possessed of an innate moral character. The New World was compared frequently to the Garden of Eden by writers and speakers of all the European nations who settled it. Often these comparisons were rhetorical—the Americas were untouched by the “civilized world” of the West and Middle East, having existed outside the history and memory of Western civilization, and there were large areas of completely untamed wilderness the likes of which were rarely found in Europe anymore. But more than one comparison was literal, with various religious figures claiming that the New World was the site of the real Eden (with human civilization having been relocated to other continents by the travel of Noah's Ark). This made the role of the American colonist more significant, as he was entrusted not simply with some land to be worked for his profit or the king's but with a holy land where he was meant to coexist with the natural world as Adam had before the Fall. The southern settlers in particular saw as their duty the exploration of ways they could profit from the land without unduly transforming it; the Puritans of New England were more likely to see themselves as the bringers of civilization to the savage wild lands.

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