The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston (review)

James L. Huston’s most recent work is an excellent study that addresses a similar topic as my own book, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, 2015). Together, both works evidence a historiographical turn emphasizing the importance of the northern family farm in shaping Civil War politics. Huston’s witty and iconoclastic writing style, earlier on display in Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003) and in a political biography of Stephen A. Douglas, is engaging and refreshing. The argument is convincing, rigorously documented, and overdue in Civil War historiography.

In the last decade, both Huston and I put our fingers on a problem in the study of nineteenth-century America. The explosion of industry and corporate America after the American Civil War had seduced historians to look at the past with this future in mind. Ever since Charles A. and Mary R. Beard advanced the notion, scholars have wanted to believe that the war pitted an agrarian South against an emerging industrial juggernaut. Even the main philosophy associated with the Republican Party of the 1850s—free labor—has been interpreted as an urban ideology. Yet such claims run into some intractable problems. As Huston pointedly notes, “What connection did [Abraham] Lincoln have with urban industrialization? Answer: none” (p. 188). A bigger problem with the Beard thesis and its derivatives is “that some 70 percent of the northern population” was engaged in small farming (p. 77).

The reality of northern landownership suggests a much different picture of Civil War politics than has been told. The Union that went to war in 1861 was a nation of small farmers, owning or seeking to acquire 80 to 120 acres of land. These landownership patterns created an egalitarian ethos that prized manual labor and the ability of the poor to rise in material prosperity. The Confederacy represented large plantations where a “slaveholding elite presid[ed] over an impoverished mass of slaves and whites” (p. 223). These landownership regimes came into conflict during westward territorial expansion, instigating the war.

The origins of Huston’s story begin in Great Britain and the English Civil War. New England Puritans, supporters of the parliamentary side, identified land distribution patterns as the key flaw in English society during the seventeenth century. Concentrated landholdings created a leisure class that mocked manual labor and ran roughshod over those deemed inferior in social standing. The English yeomanry struggled to gain freedom from wealthy landlords and from tenancy. Thus, in the colonies, New Englanders enacted land policies that promoted smallholders.

In the American South, however, the landed gentry proved victorious. Huston theorizes that large plantations derived economic advantages over smaller enterprises from “specialization of labor, economies of scale, and [the] ability to allocate labor as needed” (p. 168). Yet he ultimately maintains that planters decided to engage in slave agriculture because they wanted the lifestyle of the British gentry.

By contrast, Huston marvels at the small towns and regional cities of the rural North. Smaller farms required hard work and mutual dependence. Free men and women engaged in “bending, lifting, hoeing, shoveling, mending, and stitching . . . all done by hand and with primitive tools” (p. 116). In return for this labor, as Huston shows, farmworkers were able to save their wages and purchase their own land, acquiring economic independence and prosperity. They also lived where they could trade with others for goods not produced on the farm.

Thus, unlike An Agrarian Republic, Huston places the origins of landownership differences squarely on human choice and British customs, not soil or climate. This is an important and needed revision of my work. While Huston would not be so crass...