Unstinted praise of the special virtues of the farmer and the special values of rural life was coupled with the assertion that agriculture, as a calling uniquely productive and uniquely important to society, had a special right to the concern and protection of government. Az ltetvnyvezetbl szrmaz Yeoman gazdlkodk a gyapot rtkestsi folyamatnak egyes rszeit vetgpekre tmaszkodtk, mivel nem engedhettk meg maguknak a gint. Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. American society, which valued freedom so much, could support slavery and other forms of coercion because freedom is only applied to . Rather than finding common cause with African Americans, white farmers aspired to earn enough money to purchase their own slaves and climb the social and economic ladder. Others sold poultry, meats and liquor or peddled handicrafts. It contradicted the noble phrases of the Declaration by declaring that White men were all equal, but men who were not white were 40% less equal. On a typical plantation, slaves worked ten or more hours a day, from day clean to first dark, six days a week, with only the Sabbath off. Although farmers may not have been much impressed by what was said about the merits of a noncommercial way of life, they could only enjoy learning about their special virtues and their unique services to the nation. The object of farming, declared a writer in the Cornell Countryman in 1904, is not primarily to make a living, but it is to make money. The sheer abundance of the landthat very internal empire that had been expected to insure the predominance of the yeoman in American life for centuriesgave the coup de grce to the yeomanlike way of life. It was the late of the farmer himself to contribute to this decline. Beginning in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, the declining popularity of the once ubiquitous dogtrot signaled the concurrent demise of yeoman farming culture in the state. Hands should be soil enough to Halter the most delicate of the new labrics. They could not become commercial farmers because they were too far from the rivers or the towns, because the roads were too poor for bulky traffic, because the domestic market for agricultural produce was too small and the overseas markets were out of reach. During the 1850's, pro-slavery arguments from the pulpit became especially strident. or would that only be for adults? The Jeffersonians, moreover, made the agrarian myth the basis of a strategy of continental development. However, southern white yeoman farmers generally did not support an active federal government. The main reason for doing so was that slavery was the foundation of the. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats preferred to refer to these farmers as "yeomen" because the term emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance. From the beginning its political values and ideas were of necessity shaped by country life. In 1860 corn production in Mississippis yeoman counties was at least thirty bushels per capita (ten bushels more than the minimum necessary to achieve self-sufficiency), whereas the average yearly cotton yield in those counties did not exceed thirty bushels per square mile. Residence within a free state did not give him freedom from slavery. Before long he was cultivating the prairies with horse- drawn mechanical reapers, steel plows, wheat and corn drills, and threshers. A couple dancing. For while early American society was an agrarian society, it was last becoming more commercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agricultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere. Like almost all white men in the nineteenth-century South, the men of the yeoman class exerted complete patriarchal authority, born of both custom and law, over the property and bodies connected to their households. Ingoglia pointed to the Democratic Party's support of slavery before and after the Civil War and said the proposal is a reaction to liberal activists pushing to remove statues and memorials . By contrast, Calvin Coolidge posed almost a century later for a series of photographs that represented him as haying in Vermont. Since the yeoman was believed to be both happy and honest, and since he had a secure propertied stake in society in the form of his own land, he was held to be the best and most reliable sort of citizen. Because he lived in close communion with beneficent nature, his life was believed to have a wholesomeness and integrity impossible for the depraved populations of cities. Influential southern writers defended slavery as a positive good, projecting a false image of happy enslaved people that contrasted sharply with reality. The farmer knew that without cash he could never rise above the hardships and squalor of pioneering and log-cabin life. In Massachusetts around 1786 and 1787 a lot of the yeoman farmers had just got back from fighting in the Revolutionary War and had not gotten paid what was . Writers like Thomas Jefferson and Hector St. John de Crveceur admired the yeoman farmer not for his capacity to exploit opportunities and make money but for his honest industry, his independence, his frank spirit of equality, his ability to produce and enjoy a simple abundance. A preacher in Richmond exalted slavery as "the most blessed and beautiful form of social government known; the only one that solves the problem, how rich and poor may dwell together; a beneficent patriarchate." The mistress of a plantation (the masters wife) strove to embody an ideal of femininity that valued helplessness, submission, virtue, and good taste, while she also managed a significant part of the estate. The failure of the Homestead Act to enact by statute the leesimple empire was one of the original sources of Populist grievances, and one of the central points at which the agrarian myth was overrun by the commercial realities. His well-being was not merely physical, it was moral; it was not merely personal, it was the central source of civic virtue; it was not merely secular but religious, for God had made the land and called man to cultivate it. How were Southern yeoman farmers affected by the civil war? Copyright 1949-2022 American Heritage Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners. Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949, Changing times have revolutionised rural life in America, but the legend built up in the old. To take full advantage of the possibilities of mechanization, he engrossed as much land as he could and borrowed money for his land and machinery. Keep the tint of your fingertips friendly to the red of your lips, and eheck both your powder and your rouge to see that they best suit the tone ol your skin in the bold light of summer. For the farmer it was bewildering, and irritating too, to think of the great contrast between the verbal deference paid him by almost everyone and the real economic position in which he lon ml himself. In addition to such tasks as clearing land, planting, and adding to or improving his home and outbuildings, the male head of a yeoman household was responsible for protecting, overseeing the labor of, and disciplining the dependents under his roof. Some writers used it to give simple, direct, and emotional expression to their feelings about life and nature; others linked agrarianism with a formal philosophy of natural rights. Direct link to ar0319720's post why did they question the, Posted 2 years ago. He became a businessman in fact long before lie began to regard himself in this light. Number One New York Times Best Seller. But what the articulate people who talked and wrote about farmers and farmingthe preachers, poets, philosophers, writers, and statesmenliked about American farming was not, in every respect, what the typical working farmer liked. If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked. He concentrated on the cash crop, bought more and more of his supplies from the country store. Answer: Yeoman farmers were whites who owned land or farmed for plantation elites and lived within the slave system but were often not slave owners. They must be carefully manicured, with none of the hot, brilliant shades ol nail polish. In areas like colonial New England, where an intimate connection had existed between the small town and the adjacent countryside, where a community of interests and even of occupations cut across the town line, the rural-urban hostility had not developed so sharply as in the newer areas where the township plan was never instituted and where isolated farmsteads were more common. Throughout the Nineteenth Century hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of farm-born youths sought their careers in the towns and cities. Elsewhere the rural classes had usually looked to the past, had been bearers of tradition and upholders of stability. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers. Were located primarily in the backcountry. In origin the agrarian myth was not a popular but a literary idea, a preoccupation of the upper classes, of those who enjoyed a classical education, read pastoral poetry, experimented with breeding stock, and owned plantations or country estates. Yesterday, United teased us with this spot: More often than not they too were likely to have begun life in little villages or on farms, and what they had to say stirred in their own breasts, as it did in the breasts of a great many townspeople, nostalgia for their early years and perhaps relieved some residual feelings of guilt at having deserted parental homes and childhood attachments. For 70 years, American Heritage has been the leading magazine of U.S. history, politics, and culture. As the Nineteenth Century drew to a close, however, various things were changing him. He was becoming increasingly an employer of labor, and though he still worked with his hands, he began to look with suspicion upon the working classes of the cities, especially those organized in trade unions, as he had once done upon the urban lops and aristocrats. But slaveholding itself was far from the norm: 75 percent of southern whites owned no enslaved people at all. Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. Abolition. About a quarter of yeoman households included free whites who did not belong to the householders nuclear family.
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