. By 1910, 93 percent of the vernacular houses in Mississippis hill country consisted of three to five rooms, while the average number of household members decreased to around five, and far fewer of those households included extended family or nonrelated individuals. Much later the Homestead Act was meant to carry to its completion the process of continental settlement by small homeowners. As the Nineteenth Century drew to a close, however, various things were changing him. Moreover, when good times returned alter the Populist revolt of the 1890s, businessmen and bankers and the agricultural colleges began to woo the farmer, to make efforts to persuade him to take the businesslike view of himself that was warranted by the nature of his farm operations. They also had the satisfaction in the early days of knowing that in so far as it was based upon the life of the largely self-sufficient yeoman the agrarian myth was a depiction of reality as well as the assertion of an ideal. Offering what seemed harmless flattery to this numerically dominant class, the myth suggested a standard vocabulary to rural editors and politicians. The old man at left says God Bless you massa! Thousands of young men, wrote the New York agriculturist Jesse Buel, do annually forsake the plough, and the honest profession of their fathers, if not to win the fair, at least form an opinion, too often confirmed by mistaken parents, that agriculture is not the road to wealth, to honor, nor to happiness. 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. During the 1850's, pro-slavery arguments from the pulpit became especially strident. They must be carefully manicured, with none of the hot, brilliant shades ol nail polish. Even farm boys were taught to strive for achievement in one form or another, and when this did not take them away from the farms altogether, it impelled them to follow farming not as a way of life but as a carrer that is, as a way of achieving substantial success. To call it a myth is not to imply that the idea is simply false. In 1860 almost every family in Mississippis hill country owned at least one horse or mule, there were about as many cattle as people, and pigs outnumbered humans by more than two to one. All through the great Northwest, farmers whose lathers might have lived in isolation and sell-sufficiency were surrounded by jobbers, banks, stores, middlemen, horses, and machinery. The Declaration of Independence was only a document, a statement, a declaration. Direct link to CalebBunadin's post why did wealthy slave own, Posted 3 years ago. How did the South argue for slavery? But no longer did he grow or manufacture almost everything he needed. All through the great Northwest, farmers whose lathers might have lived in isolation and sell-sufficiency were surrounded by jobbers, banks, stores, middlemen, horses, and machinery. Particularly alter 1840, which marked the beginning of a long cycle of heavy country-to-city migration, farm children repudiated their parents way of life and took oil for the cities where, in agrarian theory if not in fact, they were sure to succumb to vice and poverty. As historian and public librarian Liam Hogan wrote: "There is unanimous agreement, based on overwhelming evidence, that the Irish were never subjected to perpetual, hereditary slavery in the. Planters looked down upon the slaves, indentured servants, and landless freemen both White and Black whom they called the "giddy multitude." aspirational reasons the racism inherit to the system gave even the poorest wites legal and social status. Here was the significance of sell-sufficiency for the characteristic family farmer. Why did yeoman farmers largely support slavery (list two reasons)? 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. They owned land, generally did not raise commodity crops, and owned few or no slaves. After the lawgiver Solon abolished citizen slavery about 594 bce, wealthy Athenians came to rely on enslaved peoples from outside Attica. So appealing were the symbols of the myth that even an arch-opponent of the agrarian interest like Alexander Hamilton found it politic to concede in his Report on Manufactures that the cultivation of the earth, as the primary and most certain source of national supply has intrinsically a strong claim to pre-eminence over every other kind of industry. And Benjamin Franklin, urban cosmopolite though he was, once said that agriculture was the only honest way for a nation to acquire wealth, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, a kind of continuous miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favour, as a reward for his innocent life and virtuous industry. The rise of native industry created a home market for agriculture, while demands arose abroad for American cotton and foodstuffs, and a great network of turnpikes, canals, and railroads helped link the planter and the advancing western farmer to the new markets. 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. CNN . Ingoglia noted that the Democratic Party had "adopted pro-slavery positions into their platforms" at its national conventions in 1840, 1844, 1856, 1860 and 1864. 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. Direct link to delong.dylan's post why did this happen, Posted 2 years ago. 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. 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. He concentrated on the cash crop, bought more and more of his supplies from the country store. By the 1850s, yeoman children generally attended school, but most of them went only four or five months a year, when farm chores and activities at home slowed down. For it made of the farmer a speculator. From the beginning its political values and ideas were of necessity shaped by country life. In those three decades, the number of Mississippians living in cities or towns nearly tripled, while the keeping of livestock, particularly pigs, declined precipitously. Agrarian sentiment sanctified labor in the soil and the simple life; but the prevailing Calvinist atmosphere of rural life implied that virtue was rewarded with success and material goods. one of a class of lesser freeholders, below the gentry, who cultivated their own land, early admitted in England to political rights. The close proximity of adults and children in the home, amid a landscape virtually overrun with animals, meant that procreation was a natural, observable, and imminently desirable fact of yeoman life. But slaveholding itself was far from the norm: 75 percent of southern whites owned no enslaved people at all. It took a strong man to resist the temptation to ride skyward on lands that might easily triple or quadruple their value in one decade and then double in the next. 9. A quarter of Mississippis yeoman households contained at least 8 members, and many included upward of 10. Me! Yeoman, in English history, a class intermediate between the gentry and the labourers; a yeoman was usually a landholder but could also be a retainer, guard, attendant, . Most of the Africans who were enslaved were captured in battles or were kidnapped, though some were sold into slavery for debt or as punishment. 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 . They must be carefully manicured, with none of the hot, brilliant shades ol nail polish. They were suspicious of the state bank and supported President Jackson's dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States. Slavery affected the yeomen in a negative way, because the yeomen were only able to produce a small amount of crops whereas the slaves that belong to the wealthy plantation owners were able to produce a mass amount, leaving the yeomen . The American farmer looked to the future alone, and the story of the American land became a study in futures. The yeomen farmer who owned his own modest farm and worked it primarily with family labor remains the embodiment of the ideal American: honest, virtuous, hardworking, and independent. He became a businessman in fact long before lie began to regard himself in this light. Number One New York Times Best Seller. wait, soooo would child slaves be beaten and tortured and sent to the chain gang too? In 1860 a farm journal satirized the imagined refinements and affectations of a city in the following picture: ET. The yeoman families lived much more isolated lives than their counterparts in the North and, because of their chronic shortage of cash, lacked many of the amenities that northerners enjoyed. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, when the American population was still living largely in the forests and most of it was east of the Appalachians, the yeoman farmer did exist in large numbers, living much as the theorists of the agrarian myth portrayed him. The most common instance used to support this was the, in the southern opinion, disregard for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. However, southern white yeoman farmers generally did not support an active federal government. Improving his economic position was always possible, though this was often clone too little and too late; but it was not within anyones power to stem the decline in the rural values and pieties, the gradual rejection of the moral commitments that had been expressed in the early exaltations of agrarianism. 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. My farm, said a farmer of Jeffersons time, gave me and my family a good living on the produce of it; and left me, one year with another, one hundred and fifty dollars, for I have never spent more than ten dollars a year, which was for salt, nails, and the like. The shift from self-sufficient to commercial farming varied in time throughout the West and cannot be dated with precision, but it was complete in Ohio by about 1830 and twenty years later in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. There survives from the Jackson era a painting that shows Governor Joseph Ritner of Pennsylvania standing by a primitive plow at the end of a furrow. 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. Yeoman farmers usually owned no more land than they could work by themselves with the aid of extended family members and neighbors. The ideals of the agrarian myth were competing in his breast, and gradually losing ground, to another, even stronger ideal, the notion of opportunity, of career, of the self-made man. The application of the natural rights philosophy to land tenure became especially popular in America. Before long he was cultivating the prairies with horse- drawn mechanical reapers, steel plows, wheat and corn drills, and threshers. a farmer who cultivates his own land. 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. 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. A learned agricultural gentry, coming into conflict with the industrial classes, welcomed the moral strength that a rich classical ancestry brought to the praise of husbandry. The farmer was still a hardworking man, and he still owned his own land in the old tradition. In 1840, John C. Calhoun wrote that it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. Inside the home, domestic violence was encouraged as a way of maintaining order. by Howard E. Bartholf 12/3/2018. Hands should be soil enough to Halter the most delicate of the new labrics. In one of them the President sits on the edge of a hay rig in a white shirt, collar detached, wearing highly polished black shoes and a fresh pair of overalls; in the background stands his Pierce Arrow, a secret service man on the running board, plainly waiting to hurry the President away from his bogus rural labors. Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. The farmer knew that without cash he could never rise above the hardships and squalor of pioneering and log-cabin life. Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. these questions are based on american people in the south essential questions: question 1: for what reasons will one group of people exploit another?focus questions: question 1: what influenced the development of the south more: geography, economy, or slavery?question 2: what were the economic, political and social arguments for and againsts slavery in the first half of the 19th century. Yeoman farmers stood at the center of antebellum southern society, belonging to the ranks neither of elite planters nor of the poor and landless; most important, from the perspective of the farmers themselves, they were free and independent, unlike slaves. To what extent was the agrarian myth actually false? The Yeoman was the term for independent farmers in the U.S. in the late 18th and early 19th century. As settlement moved west, as urban markets grew, as self-sufficient farmers became rarer, as farmers pushed into commercial production for the cities they feared and distrusted, they quite correctly thought of themselves as a vocational and economic group rather than as members of a neighborhood. In reality, these intellectual defenses of slavery bore little or no resemblance to the lived experience of enslaved people, who were subject to a brutal and dehumanizing system that was every bit as profit-driven as northern industry. The more commercial this society became, however, the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values. The Poor White Class. We unlock the potential of millions of people worldwide. Show More. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. Out of the beliefs nourished by the agrarian myth there had arisen the notion that the city was a parasitical growth on the country. Slavery affected the yeomen in a negative way, because the yeomen were only able to produce a small amount of cropswhereas the slaves that belong to the wealthy plantation owners were able to produce a mass amount, leaving the yeomen with very little profit. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats preferred to refer to these farmers as "yeomen" because the term emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance. Slavery affected the yeomen in a negative way, because the yeomen were only able to produce a small amount of crops whereas the slaves that belong to the wealthy plantation owners were able to produce a mass amount, leaving the yeomen with very little profit.. What was the significance of yeoman farmers? What effect did slavery have on the yeoman class? . But many did so despite not owning slaves themselves. Yeoman farmers from the plantation belt relied on planters for parts of the cotton selling process since they couldnt afford gins. 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. And the more rapidly the farmers sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. At first the agrarian myth was a notion of the educated classes, but by the early Nineteenth Century it had become a mass creed, a part of the countrys political folklore and its nationalist ideology.
