Agrarianism

Agrarianism, a complex set of ideas that celebrates the moral, spiritual, and political superiority of men who cultivate the soil, was a central cultural theme of early American society, and it has heavily influenced American understandings of manhood. For agrarian thinkers, farming provided a basis for manly virtue and egalitarian ideals of republicanism and democratic citizenship. The agrarian ideal was personified in the image of the male yeoman-citizen, a land-owning farmer who embodied the republican ideal of economic independence and public-minded democratic participation.

Imported to early America from Great Britain and France, agrarian ideas were evident as early as the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin, for example, believed that rural people—particularly male farmers—embodied the values of thrift, hard work, and self-reliance. Similarly, J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, who came to America from France and took up farming in New York, wrote in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), a popular and widely read work upon its publication, that the nation's farmers were the happiest, most virtuous, and most independent citizens, and that they would be the strength of the new republic.

Agrarian ideals were not only expressed in rhetoric, but were to a considerable degree embodied in American social and political reality. Because cheap land was abundant and social relations relatively fluid in the early republic, farming did provide the large majority of white American men of the lower and middling classes the opportunity to own property, enjoy social status and economic security, and exercise the privileges of political citizenship. Thus, agrarianism became a key component in constructing white masculine definitions of citizenship and republicanism.

The agrarian belief in a close relation among land ownership, economic self-sufficiency, political independence, and manhood became foundational to the political and economic philosophy of the young nation. Agrarians articulated a belief in a close relationship between economic independence and political independence. Thomas Jefferson most eloquently expressed the political philosophy of agrarianism in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), where he wrote that “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue”(Koch and Peden, 280). Leaders such as Jefferson and John Adams believed that the agrarian bases of republican manhood would be corrupted and destroyed by industrial and urban development, since men employed in manufacturing would become dependent upon wages. This dependency would render them subservient, and thus unfit for political citizenship. Jefferson and other agrarian thinkers also contrasted the idealized virtuous yeoman with corrupt and unmanly urban bankers, merchants, and industry owners, whose commercial interests were perceived as anathema to the tenets of republicanism. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, agrarianism reflected a perceived dualism between the independent white masculinity of the rural yeomanry and the degraded or immoral manhood of their urban counterparts.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Jefferson's agrarian vision of manly land ownership and independence fueled a national expansion, with people migrating westward in search of more land and greater economic opportunity. During the Jacksonian era, as the northeastern region of the country grew more industrialized, agrarianism became more closely associated with the western and southern regions of the expanding nation. As the American frontier expanded westward, agrarianism [Page 21]became increasingly tied to cultural assumptions about pioneer masculinity, rugged self-reliance, and the celebration of the self-made man. By the mid–nineteenth century, agrarianism had become inextricably linked with the populist sentiment of Jacksonian democracy. As the ranks of clerks swelled in urban centers, proponents of agrarianism came to associate city occupations with emasculating weakness and dependence, while a closeness to the land and to nature was associated with such masculine qualities as courage, virility, and independence.

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