The Venturous, The Conservative, and the Hard-Pressed in the American Countryside

Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 1993, pp. 177-195 The Venturous, The Conservative, and the HardPressed in the American Countryside Craig Hanyan 177 Christopher Clark. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: WesternMassachusetts, 1780-1860. ltbaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990.Pp. xi+ 339. Wayne Franklin. A Rural Carpenter's World: The Craft in a NineteenthCentury New York Township. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Pp. x + 301 and illustrations. J. Ritchie Garrison. Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770-1860. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Pp. xix + 314 and illustrations. Robert D. Mitchell, ed. Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society & Development in the Preindustrial Era. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1991. Pp. x + 350 and illustrations. Over thirty years ago Marvin Meyers drew on Alexis De Tocqueville and other European obseivers of American ways to sketch the "venturous consetvative " of Andrew Jackson's agrarian republic. That conflicted hustler defined a "national order of instinctive traders" and left only odd corners for the ideal yeoman in the record of Americans who change places and careers to find the quickest and largest reward: who adapt business and industrial practices to the shifting requirements of efficiency and profit: who force their new communities into the market current while the wilderness still surrounds them; who treat land 'like 178 CanadianReviewof AmericanStudies any other kind of merchandise,' freely mixing real estate with farming interest. (1960, 136) Searching for the main chance, the hustler in each American affronted the civicvirtue and personal morality of the Old Hero's idealized "real people," those guileless,industrious, and presumably unique American yeomen and artisans upon whom both the political and the economic order of the republic rested. 1 Confrontation between nagging acquisitiveness and communal ideals created the guilt and fear-ridden tension that fuelled Meyers's "Jacksonian Persuasion." Focusing in great measure on the outlook of the American farmer, historians of the United States have continued to probe the relationship between communal values and individualistic, market-oriented economic behaviour. With the emergence of a "new social history" has come a resurgent interest in the politics of Jacksonian America, now more fully informed of the dynamic quality of social and economic relationships and of class formation in an America undergoing a capitalistic market revolution. 2 Meanwhile, the social history that informed this vantage has continued to range widely over the effects of the increasinglyintense and market-driven capitalism of lateeighteenth - and nineteenth-century America. Following the path initially marked out by three seminal articles of the late 1970s, historians have sought to determine the degree to which farmers acted as profit-seeking individualists who willinglyturned toward a wide-ranging market and the degree to whichfarmers resisted that orientation by limiting their exchanges and their loyalties to those with whom they had enduring face-to-face relationships .3 Although the farmer, embracingthe second of these conceptual opposites, might value himself as the independent yeoman, the good and plain citizen through whom true commonwealth might endure, he also found himself hard pressed from many sides. Rural population growth made it difficult to provide all heirs with enough land to work; surplus labour, along with adequate water supplies, lured new industries to the countryside. Against that invasion, the farmer had few defenses. Legal changes justified dams that flooded his fields and threatened the fishing rights which had guaranteed essential and cheap protein. 4 In part to cope with these problems, farm CraigHanyanI 179 families turned to making articles-shoes, brooms, hats, wood products-for the market. Women, less beholden to the increasingly fragile yeoman ideal, made butter for credit, even cash, establishing a degree of ·economic independence within their own sphere (Jensen 1986).5 Canny merchants and itinerant peddlers began to foster the desire of farm wivesand daughters for goods that made household production easier and dignified the home. The consumption of conveniences and of "gewgaws"further enmeshed the farming family in the market, heightening the tensions within and between families that preoccupied the American mind even more than tensions between classes.6 Some men strove quietly and consistently against entrapment, the course taken by James Calvin Holmes, the central figure in Wayne Franklin's Rural...