The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History by Richard Lyman Bushman (review)

Over the past half century, Richard Lyman Bushman has made major contributions to early New England social and political history, the history of material culture, and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. An interest in rural life flows through his work. The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century, his most recent book, places farmers and farming at the center of the early American experience. Bushman builds on a large, contentious literature on agriculture, farmer ideology, rural uprisings, and rural capitalist development and imaginatively uses farm diaries, farm account books, tax lists, and probate records to paint the daily lives of people who farmed the mainland British colonies.

Bushman devises a familial model of farming, eliding debates about the nature of rural society. Historians disagree about farmers' place in the Atlantic economy. They agree that farmers wanted subsistence, traded with neighbors, and vended goods at market, but using models devised in neoclassical economics, neo-Marxian theory, or the new social history, they have imputed farmers with capitalist, precapitalist, or anticapitalist ideas, all while debating the meaning of capitalism. Bushman does not engage these sometimes sterile debates but argues that, because early American farmers were uninterested in determining profit and loss on capital, their familial system did not encompass capitalist agriculture.

Bushman distinguishes farming in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, places broadly representative of their regions. Distinctions, he contends, developed out of climatic differences: in places with 180 or more frost-free days, farmers, their families, servants, and slaves could work the entire year. In New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies, save small areas along the coast, farmers had fewer than the 180 frost-free days. Thus, New England farmers never found a staple export, and those in the mid-Atlantic, who exported wheat, rarely used labor full-time.

Farmers, Bushman argues, ran family enterprises. All members of the household—wives, children, servants, slaves—labored to sustain the farm, striving for food security. Fathers and children had an implicit bargain: children began working on the farm as soon as they were able and worked, under their father's (or mother's) guidance, through their teens until marriage. At marriage they received a marriage portion—land, household goods, or slaves. When their father died, his assets, after paying debts, went to his wife and children. Bushman gives examples of this training in each region and, separately, for white children, Indians, and slaves.

"Self-provisioning" farmers wished to make as much food, cloth, and implements on their own farms as they could. They traded surpluses with neighbors and sold exportable goods to merchants. Bushman earlier called such farms "composite farms" because of their mixture of subsistence and commodity production. Poorer planters in the Chesapeake region, even those with a slave or two, could not compete with richer tobacco planters; instead, they directed their families and slaves to the lumbering and craft work (carpentry, in particular) great planters needed.

Farmers needed access, and preferably ownership, of land to perpetuate their family lines. To achieve food security, they required more land than most English farmers had. Unimproved land had to be cleared before cultivation. Then, farmers cropped the land until it lost fertility, kept it fallow for two decades, moved on to another piece of land, and repeated the process. To fulfill the bargain to supply their sons with land, they regularly purchased land, accumulating five hundred to one thousand acres depending on how many children reached adulthood. Bushman suggests most American farmers bought sufficient land to perpetuate their lineages, even if they failed to acquire many hundreds of acres.

Bushman's model works best with the detailed examples he gleaned from diaries and other farmer accounts. His analysis of New London, Connecticut, farmer Joshua Hempstead, based on Hempstead's nearly half-century diary, is the most informative of these sketches. Digging imaginatively into this text, Bushman sketches Hempstead's...