Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (review)

The question of when and how the residents of the United States and other Western nations became more scientific and quantitative in their outlook toward the natural world is one of the perennial questions in the history of technology and science. In Notes from the Ground, Benjamin Cohen argues that science became "culturally credible" (p. x) in the United States in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, largely through the writers, agricultural improvers, and "agrarian citizens" (p. 8) who helped persuade a broader public that mastery of the soil encompassed virtues that went beyond the simple matter of crop yields.

Cohen divides his tightly argued and well-supported case into two parts. In the first, he establishes that several American observers of agricultural practice embraced a "georgic" approach to the land. Influenced by the Roman writer Virgil, authors such as John Spurrier, a British transplant to 1790s Delaware, asserted that careful improvement of the land was among the first prerequisites for the young nation to advance both agriculturally and culturally. Other well-educated American farmers became convinced that attention to European science, combined with hard, physical labor in their fields, would help Americans combat soil exhaustion, stem emigration to the west, and uplift the moral standing of citizens left on the land.

Among its many persuasive arguments, Notes from the Ground establishes that American agricultural improvers were not empty vessels yearning for scientific advice from European chemists. Rather, their georgic framework combined with practical experiences meant that Americans had established the organizations, rhetoric, and forms of communication that became forums for "scientizing the land" (p. 145). Agriculturists who questioned the pronouncements of chemists like Justus von Liebig were not hopelessly backward, but expressing valid concerns about the credibility and local applicability of European chemistry.

The second part of the book focuses on antebellum Virginia, where leading agriculturists engaged in sophisticated analyses of agriculture's complexities. These gentlemen became convinced that their local observations, careful recordkeeping, and public dissemination of research results could become keystones in reversing soil depletion and preserving the socioeconomic status quo. In an engaging section on Virginia's state soil surveys of the 1830s, Cohen demonstrates that these were more than a small episode in the early history of geology, but instead an intentional program that collected data from disparate local landowners in order to inform statewide approaches to agricultural improvement and sociopolitical action. Although the surveyors encountered challenging realities and technological barriers—poor roads, broken instruments, and ineffective communication systems—their work allowed Virginians to gain a greater appreciation for a "science of place" (p. 190) and their own role as citizens actively connected to the soil.

Especially intriguing is Cohen's suggestion that both sides in the nation's sectional controversies looked to agricultural science for answers. For some northerners, georgic and scientific agriculture presented yeoman farmers with the tools needed to remain independent and prosperous. In contrast, some prominent southerners argued that agricultural science offered the means to preserve a slave-based economy. Political motivations clearly drove Edmund Ruffin to partake in his thorough study of Virginia's soils and to prescribe the use of shells and marl to neutralize acidic soils. Along these lines, Cohen also makes explicit something that is often unstated: slaves, not elite landowners, did the work that made agricultural improvement possible in antebellum Virginia, for it was they who mined the marl, collected the seeds, and applied the fertilizers.

For all its strengths, Notes from the Ground has a few weaknesses. The maps are simple and most illustrations contribute little. At times, Cohen gets bogged down in extensive exegeses of relatively minor texts; what is more, scholars such as Steven Stoll, John Majewski, and Jack Temple Kirby have already assessed several of the same texts in their own recent works. Perhaps most intriguing, but also questionable, are Cohen's repeated claims that the agricultural improvers of early...