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The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America
This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history.
The essays cover a broad range of the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."
The essays cover a broad range of the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
About the author
Steven Hahn
21 books68 followersSteven Hahn is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at the University of Pennsylvania.
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March 25, 2009
Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island.”
Kulik reads legal conflict about fishing laws in Rhode Island as “a conflict over the coming of industrial capitalism.”1He presents three distinct groups: the farmers, for whom fishing (particularly for migratory fish) forms a major part of the household economy; the owners of “small rural mills,” who used water power, but were bound up in intimate economic relationships with the farmers; and the owners of blast furnaces. The first two sought to maintain traditional fishing rights, and, with it, the traditional rural economy; the third, in seeking to establish a capitalist economy, came into direct conflict with the traditional one.
Thomas Dublin, “Women and Outwork in a Nineteenth-Century New England Town: Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, 1830-1850.”
The system of outwork, Dublin argues, was fundamental to the inclusion of (especially poorer) farming families into the capitalist economy. While a young woman going away to work in a mill was more obviously removed from the traditional economy, the outwork system, which allowed family members to stay at home and continue participation in the domestic economy, increased entire families’ participation in (and financial dependence on) the capitalist economy.
Jonathan Prude, “Town-Factory Conflicts in Antebellum Rural Massachusetts.”
Prude, examining the towns of Dudley and Oxford, Massachusetts, argues that conflicts between town and factory tended to be driven by the centralization of power in the factory. Because of the broad distribution of land and easy availability of interest-free credit, the concentration of capital in agrarian New England was not accompanied by a similar concentration of power; the factory owner, however, exerted considerable power, concentrated in a single person, and so undermined the democratic ethos of the New England town. The fear of economic domination led townspeople to fight against any attempt by mill owners and managers to gain a semblance of political power. In the case at hand, mill owner Samuel Slater, in response to difficulties with the towns, organized the new town of Webster.
David Jaffee, “One of the Primitive Sort: Portrait Makers of the Rural North, 1760-1860.”
Jaffee argues that itinerant portrait makers in the Northeast “constructed a new commercial order and sanctioned a new cultural code of consumption.”2 By their employment of technical and technological means of reducing the time necessary to complete a painting, they brought the cost of this formerly luxurious item within the means of the middling sort. With reduced costs and the advertising necessary for an itinerant, low-cost painter to obtain customers came an increased demand for the consumption of portraits.
John Scott Strickland, “Traditional Culture and Moral Economy: Social and Economic Change in the South Carolina Low Country, 1865-1910.”
Strickland argues that the South Carolina Low Country, uniquely among regions in the south, organized slave labor in a manner conducive to the preservation of familial and communal ties among slaves. After the war, the freedpeople, who were part of a community more like “peasant peoples throughout the world than commercially oriented farmers elsewhere in America,” were relatively uninterested in the production of surplus crop, preferring, instead, to structure their labor for plantation owners in such a manner as to ensure a minimum of independence and subsistence.3
Steven Hahn, “The ‘Unmaking’ of the Southern Yeomanry: The Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1860-1890.”
Hahn, like Dublin, argues that the transition to a market economy was less uniform than imagined, and driven, ironically, by attempts to maintain the coherency of the traditional household unit. Various economic factors, including the growth of the merchant class and shifting economic mechanisms related to the end of slavery (slaves, for example, could no longer be used as collateral), contributed to a shift that was inescapable, but less thorough than often imagined.
Robert C. McMath, Jr., “Sandy Land and Hogs in the Timber: (Agri)cultural Origins of the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas.”
McMath argues, in a difficult-to-summarize, Central-Texas-history homage to Marc Bloch, that the rise and subsequent behavior of the Farmer’s Alliance - particularly its relationship with the Knights of Labor and the manner in which it interacted with commercial cotton interests - was primarily a product of the history of the cultivation of the land, with its cotton-corn-hog, fenceless agriculture, and, secondarily of the history of movement (and particularly Greenback) politics in the area.
John Mack Faragher, “Open-Country Community: Sugar Creek, Illinois, 1820-1850.”
Taking issue with Turner, Faragher argues that the frontier (or at least frontier Illinois) did not, in fact, encourage individualism or anomie. Rather, the farm country, even in the absence of towns, was bound up in a web of communal relationships - economic, religious, and, most importantly, perhaps, kinship. The kin-centered nature of community, he argues, accounts for transience among settlers; while it was possible to enter into the kinship webs, it was somewhat difficult, and the kinship webs served to place those entirely outside of them at a distinct economic disadvantage. Settlers who found themselves unable to enter these communities tended, as a result, to emigrate.
Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Peasant Pioneers: Generational Succession among German Farmers in Frontier Minnesota.”
Conzen argues that German emigrants to St. Martin’s Township, Stearns County, Minnesota, did, in fact, maintain traditional communal practices. By examining land ownership records, she finds that these immigrants, who came predominantly from regions of Germany where partible inheritance was customary, maintained practices oriented at achieving a similar goal: the permanence of the entire family in the community.
Howard Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600-1890.”
Lamar (again, contra Turner), argues that the West was neither free nor virgin; at the same time, unfreedom in the West did not take the same form as bondage in the South. Rather, the many different kinds of economic enterprise and ethnic and cultural encounter combined to produce a broad and various range of labor systems “exemplified by captive Indians in New Mexico, cowed mission neophytes in California, and Aleutian forced labor in Alaska.”4
Hal S. Barron, “Staying Down on the Farm: Social Processes of Settled Rural Life in the Nineteenth-Century North.”
While rural areas in the Midwest and West and the cities nationwide experienced the rise of capitalism in many similar ways, Barron argues, long-established rural towns in the Northeast did not experience the population turnover that contributed to most of the more contentious cases. Rather, they sought to maintain a certain sense of social stability, centered around a cohesive view of life. Because of this, such towns (Barron focuses, speficially, on Chelsea, Vermont) did not experience the volatility that marked other towns and regions during this period.
Kulik reads legal conflict about fishing laws in Rhode Island as “a conflict over the coming of industrial capitalism.”1He presents three distinct groups: the farmers, for whom fishing (particularly for migratory fish) forms a major part of the household economy; the owners of “small rural mills,” who used water power, but were bound up in intimate economic relationships with the farmers; and the owners of blast furnaces. The first two sought to maintain traditional fishing rights, and, with it, the traditional rural economy; the third, in seeking to establish a capitalist economy, came into direct conflict with the traditional one.
Thomas Dublin, “Women and Outwork in a Nineteenth-Century New England Town: Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, 1830-1850.”
The system of outwork, Dublin argues, was fundamental to the inclusion of (especially poorer) farming families into the capitalist economy. While a young woman going away to work in a mill was more obviously removed from the traditional economy, the outwork system, which allowed family members to stay at home and continue participation in the domestic economy, increased entire families’ participation in (and financial dependence on) the capitalist economy.
Jonathan Prude, “Town-Factory Conflicts in Antebellum Rural Massachusetts.”
Prude, examining the towns of Dudley and Oxford, Massachusetts, argues that conflicts between town and factory tended to be driven by the centralization of power in the factory. Because of the broad distribution of land and easy availability of interest-free credit, the concentration of capital in agrarian New England was not accompanied by a similar concentration of power; the factory owner, however, exerted considerable power, concentrated in a single person, and so undermined the democratic ethos of the New England town. The fear of economic domination led townspeople to fight against any attempt by mill owners and managers to gain a semblance of political power. In the case at hand, mill owner Samuel Slater, in response to difficulties with the towns, organized the new town of Webster.
David Jaffee, “One of the Primitive Sort: Portrait Makers of the Rural North, 1760-1860.”
Jaffee argues that itinerant portrait makers in the Northeast “constructed a new commercial order and sanctioned a new cultural code of consumption.”2 By their employment of technical and technological means of reducing the time necessary to complete a painting, they brought the cost of this formerly luxurious item within the means of the middling sort. With reduced costs and the advertising necessary for an itinerant, low-cost painter to obtain customers came an increased demand for the consumption of portraits.
John Scott Strickland, “Traditional Culture and Moral Economy: Social and Economic Change in the South Carolina Low Country, 1865-1910.”
Strickland argues that the South Carolina Low Country, uniquely among regions in the south, organized slave labor in a manner conducive to the preservation of familial and communal ties among slaves. After the war, the freedpeople, who were part of a community more like “peasant peoples throughout the world than commercially oriented farmers elsewhere in America,” were relatively uninterested in the production of surplus crop, preferring, instead, to structure their labor for plantation owners in such a manner as to ensure a minimum of independence and subsistence.3
Steven Hahn, “The ‘Unmaking’ of the Southern Yeomanry: The Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1860-1890.”
Hahn, like Dublin, argues that the transition to a market economy was less uniform than imagined, and driven, ironically, by attempts to maintain the coherency of the traditional household unit. Various economic factors, including the growth of the merchant class and shifting economic mechanisms related to the end of slavery (slaves, for example, could no longer be used as collateral), contributed to a shift that was inescapable, but less thorough than often imagined.
Robert C. McMath, Jr., “Sandy Land and Hogs in the Timber: (Agri)cultural Origins of the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas.”
McMath argues, in a difficult-to-summarize, Central-Texas-history homage to Marc Bloch, that the rise and subsequent behavior of the Farmer’s Alliance - particularly its relationship with the Knights of Labor and the manner in which it interacted with commercial cotton interests - was primarily a product of the history of the cultivation of the land, with its cotton-corn-hog, fenceless agriculture, and, secondarily of the history of movement (and particularly Greenback) politics in the area.
John Mack Faragher, “Open-Country Community: Sugar Creek, Illinois, 1820-1850.”
Taking issue with Turner, Faragher argues that the frontier (or at least frontier Illinois) did not, in fact, encourage individualism or anomie. Rather, the farm country, even in the absence of towns, was bound up in a web of communal relationships - economic, religious, and, most importantly, perhaps, kinship. The kin-centered nature of community, he argues, accounts for transience among settlers; while it was possible to enter into the kinship webs, it was somewhat difficult, and the kinship webs served to place those entirely outside of them at a distinct economic disadvantage. Settlers who found themselves unable to enter these communities tended, as a result, to emigrate.
Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Peasant Pioneers: Generational Succession among German Farmers in Frontier Minnesota.”
Conzen argues that German emigrants to St. Martin’s Township, Stearns County, Minnesota, did, in fact, maintain traditional communal practices. By examining land ownership records, she finds that these immigrants, who came predominantly from regions of Germany where partible inheritance was customary, maintained practices oriented at achieving a similar goal: the permanence of the entire family in the community.
Howard Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600-1890.”
Lamar (again, contra Turner), argues that the West was neither free nor virgin; at the same time, unfreedom in the West did not take the same form as bondage in the South. Rather, the many different kinds of economic enterprise and ethnic and cultural encounter combined to produce a broad and various range of labor systems “exemplified by captive Indians in New Mexico, cowed mission neophytes in California, and Aleutian forced labor in Alaska.”4
Hal S. Barron, “Staying Down on the Farm: Social Processes of Settled Rural Life in the Nineteenth-Century North.”
While rural areas in the Midwest and West and the cities nationwide experienced the rise of capitalism in many similar ways, Barron argues, long-established rural towns in the Northeast did not experience the population turnover that contributed to most of the more contentious cases. Rather, they sought to maintain a certain sense of social stability, centered around a cohesive view of life. Because of this, such towns (Barron focuses, speficially, on Chelsea, Vermont) did not experience the volatility that marked other towns and regions during this period.
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