A Fortune in Fruit: Nicholas Longworth and Grape Speculation in Antebellum Ohio

Nicholas Longworth (1782-1863), the "father of American wine"—more accurately, father of the first commercially successful American champagne—has been lauded as the harbinger of an ideal democratic agrarian republic.¹ In his 1858 portrait, Longworth, also known as the "Western Bacchus," stands among the things that brought him wealth: hundreds of acres of land receding in the background, and his grapes (see Figure 1).² Viticulturists had known for decades that the most popular European winegrapes (Vitis vinifera like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay) would not grow well in North America under normal circumstances. The cultural importance of finding a native American wine, as well as improving the quality and taste of America's antebellum vinous productions, are at the heart of Longworth's accepted honorific life story.

In this celebratory vein, fruit speculators, although quite common in the nineteenth century throughout all regions, have not undergone the same scrutiny as the typical litany of traders, capitalists, and real estate men who populate the story of U.S. territorial and market expansion.³ Many fruit growers across the region did more than just grow fruit. As speculators, they sought to capitalize on their fruit as well as the resale of the "improved" land the fruit grew upon and the margin of profit that could be added by employed labor. Specifically, behind the Longworth horticultural egalitarian myth is a story of wealth made through land speculation and, crucially, decades of labor exploitation that has been obscured by the democratic mythos of American fruit production and fruit tourism. Nineteenth-century pomology (the art of growing fruit) provided an excusable, even commendable, framework for turning public property into private property and for hiding any questionably exploitative dealings in the shade of its fruitful bowers. Claiming a kind of passive, utilitarian, scientific, and benevolent role in the landscape and society, viticulture and fruit growing functioned to deny the realities of land speculation, agricultural imperialism, and the exploitation of labor that were key ingredients of the business as it was practiced in the Cincinnati area.⁴

Figure 1.

Robert Duncanson, Portrait of Nicholas Longworth, 1858, oil on canvas. Collection of the University of Cincinnati. Photo courtesy of the Taft Museum of Art.

At one time the second-wealthiest man in the United States, "Old Nick" should take a more prominent place within the history of the market revolution and early capitalist development of western agriculture. The multimillionaire viticulturist modeled an early type of capital accumulation previously thought to have begun in California decades later, and he did it in antebellum Ohio, no less. Ohio, in this regard, also deserves a more prominent place in the history of fruit- and grape-growing, alongside the better-known pomological loci of New York and California.⁵

Dreaming a larger vineland in Ohio

Early- to mid-century Ohio has a unique place in the history of the Old Northwest, although it was a part of the larger market transformation happening throughout the antebellum West and upper South. National policies distributed land to farmers and encouraged farm expansion from east to west, achieving the goal of nation building through settlement by white migrants.⁶ In 1803, military lands were opened for sale in Ohio; before 1814, pioneers could also use squatters' laws to claim land. Through mid-century, investors leased school and military lands very cheaply, for terms as long as ninety-nine years. The Homestead Act of 1841 further opened lands in the Midwest to sale and farming.⁷ The Ohio River, in addition to its utility in commerce, developed as a symbolic boundary between freedom and slavery. As "far western country," a kind of first stop "across the mountains," Ohio was an ideological boundary, yet also an artery, linking the nation east to west and north to south.⁸

Popular opinion held that one major city would eventually dominate the interior of the continent, and Cincinnati emerged as the early regional leader.⁹ In his 1851 popular guidebook and who's-who list for the city (reprinted every few...