Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860

1. Self-sufficiency: The developing American Farm

i Self-sufficiency The developing American farm On Christmas day in 1827 Mrs. Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman , arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi River to begin a three and one-half year stay in America. Her observations on life in the new country, published five years later, proved to be a scathing commentary on the manner and customs of Americans. Food and cooking were especially repugnant yet, despite this, she recognized the general availability of food and observed that the "ordinary mode of living is abundant." She was impressed by the food market in Cincinnati "which, for excellence, abundance, and cheapness can hardly, I should think, be surpassed in any part of the world."1 Three quarters of a century earlier, Peter Kalm described a similar abundance in the Delaware River Valley area: The annual harvest, I am told, always affords plenty of bread for the inhabitants. . . . A venerable Septuagenarian Swede . . . assured me that in his lifetime there had been no failure of crops but that the people had always had plenty. . . . Noris it likely that any great famine can happen in the country unless it please God to afflict it with extraordinary punishments.2 These impressions of foodstuff "abundance" were not unique since most European travelers in Americareacted similarly. After having seen and heard of food shortages in both Europe and Asia, many saw America as a 'land of plenty" whose resources were abundant and production virtually unlimited. On the whole, such impressions were well founded. Few areas have served the food needs of their people so unstintingly and few have responded so bountifully to a minimum of effort expended on agriculture. Blessed by an extraordinary combination of factors which made it highly productive, American agriculture has seen over production rather than shortage become 1 2 HOG MEAT AND HOECAKE the rule. The constant expansion of agricultural land in America over a period of more than three centuries has managed to keep the reserve of producing land well above the demands of an increasing population. This, together with a rapidly expanding farm technology, has maintained agricultural productivity in America at an extremely high level. In fact, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when American agriculture was being maligned by European visitors as shamefully wasteful and inefficient , the American farmer was producing an abundance for home consumption as well as a substantial surplus for export. While the overall supply of foodstuffs in the United States generally has been adequate, individual farm units rarely were diversified enough for each farmer to produce all the agricultural products he needed. Asfar back as the colonial period most farmers concentrated on a few crops while either doing without or depending upon other producers for items they could not orwould not produce themselves. Limitations of soil, climate, plant or animal diseases, lack of skills-any number of inhibiting factors -made it difficult or impossible for farmers to produce all the commodities needed for subsistence. Moreover, the desire for exotic goods such as sugar, coffee, salt or other condiments as well as for manufactured goods required a cash outlay and encouraged agriculturists to produce in commercial quantities those goods they were best able to market. Thus, while producing a variety of goods for domestic use, the American farmer also directed a portion of his resources toward the production of commercial goods. Despite this tendency toward the growing of commercially marketable crops to be used in buying or trading, the typical farm of the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries was a highly independent and self-supplying entity with a diversified production of plants and animals answering most of the farmer's own needs. On the whole, most farmers wanted to be as self-contained as possible. The degree to which this wish was realized depended upon a number of factors, varying from place to place within the country and changing with time. The location of the farm in relation to markets, the farmer's ability to produce foodstuffs and other items for his own use, the cost of producing such goods as compared with their market value, and the farmer's own personal predilections concerning the crops or livestock he Self-sufficiency: The developing American farm 3 produced, all affected the level of his subsistence and dependence upon extrafarm sources. For example, an agricultural unit located in a remote area such as the back country of the central Appalachians or in...