Ariel Ron's impressive new book about the agricultural reform movement in the antebellum United States opens with a series of straightforward but crucially important statistics. Prior to the Civil War, the vast majority of Americans resided in rural places and the United States remained a predominantly rural society. While “revolutions” in transportation, technology, and manufacturing remade landscapes, reorganized production, and reoriented the daily activities and livelihoods of many Americans, in 1860 eighty percent continued to live in small towns with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. Fifty-nine percent of Americans carried on working in agriculture. Even in the Northeast, where most of the nation's industrialization and urbanization was concentrated, nearly two-thirds of its people lived in rural places. For most Americans, then, agriculture remained paramount throughout the antebellum period.
Those statistics help frame Ron's deeply researched and densely argued account of how an agricultural reform movement comprised of middling farmers, journalists, and rural businessmen mobilized one of the largest mass social movements in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet, despite the movement's size and influence, scholarship on agricultural history, state formation, and political economy has overlooked the reform movement's political significance. Ron suggests two primary explanations for this historiographical gap. First, the region's industrial transformation has obscured the importance of northeastern farmers by directing attention to urban workers instead. Second, farmers have been misconstrued as the mythic yeomanry of Jefferson's agrarian republic: potent symbols of political ideology and the nation but largely dissociated from political activity and the state.
This view, Ron compellingly demonstrates, is profoundly mistaken. Northeastern agriculturalists were not atomized and disinterested cultivators. They were political agents who mobilized on a mass scale to realize their vision of economic modernization and whose organizational efforts profoundly shaped the federal government and its relationship to rural life in the United States. Whereas recent scholarship has examined southern planters to investigate the character of capitalism, Ron uses the agricultural reform movement to elucidate the development of the state. Across eight chapters, he explains how the agricultural reform movement developed into a powerful social movement and why it played a crucial role in the passage of two enormously consequential pieces of legislation in 1862: the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which established the nation's system of land-grant universities, and the creation of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Ron first traces the reform movement's transformation from a largely patrician enterprise in the early nineteenth century to one broadly inclusive of the North's white rural population. Central to this process, Ron shows, were the editors and journalists who toiled to create an extensive agricultural press that not only edified rural Americans but also fostered the creation of a cohesive “agricultural public” that could be mobilized to political ends. Agricultural fairs and societies similarly worked to bind farmers together. Next he examines the interrelationship between the material and ideological, showing how the emergence of a domestic economy enabled agricultural reformers and northern economic nationalists to forge a common developmental vision that linked manufacturing and agriculture—what Ron labels the “Republican developmental synthesis” (p. 97). Positing a mutually beneficial relationship between domestic manufacturing and agricultural interests, this “theory of ago-technological development” emphasized that “manufacturing provided agriculture not only with markets for its output, but with technological inputs to enhance its productivity” (p. 96).
Scientific agriculture and technological progress thus became key tenets of the reform movement and for proto-Republican politicians and theorists of political economy. Reformers hoped that scientific agriculture would enable farmers to overcome the environmental and economic obstacles that hindered their prosperity. But instead of resolving their difficulties, the introduction of products designed to improve agriculture created new problems. Farmers confronted a bewildering array of “new-fangled agricultural technologies” without the means to effectively evaluate them (p. 141). By the mid-1850s, the potential for fraud, suspicion, and disillusionment surrounding these technologies metastasized into a “crisis of agricultural expertise” (p. 139). Reformers believed that a reliable source of “authoritative knowledge” and institutions of education and research had become necessary. This determination, Ron suggests, explains why reformers sought both a system of public agricultural colleges and a new federal department of agriculture.
Reformers initially looked to state-level and privately sourced funding to institutionalize agricultural education and research; when those sources proved insufficient and unstable, they turned to the federal government instead. As the reform movement mobilized lobbyists, petitioners, and Republican political allies in the 1850s to push for the creation of these new federal agricultural institutions, they encountered a national government engulfed in an intensifying political crisis over slavery. Though reformers had always presented the movement as national in scope by adopting a “distinctive mode of advocacy” that Ron describes as “nonpartisan anti-politics,” its sectional character became clear as southern congressmen strenuously opposed their efforts (p. 45). Most southern politicians rejected proposals for new federal institutions on constitutional grounds. But Ron leaves no doubt that southern opposition stemmed from fears that new federal agricultural institutions could interfere with slavery. Only after secession removed southern obstruction did the reform movement and its Republican allies succeed in establishing the USDA and a system of land-grant colleges.
Overall, the persuasiveness of Grassroots Leviathan stems from its intricate argument and conceptual rigor. But it is also a book brimming with fascinating material uncovered by Ron's close reading of numerous agricultural journals, diaries, newspapers, patent office records, political pamphlets, and more. Business historians of this era may wish that Ron delved deeper into the business practices of agriculturalists, but they will find much that is useful in Grassroots Leviathan, especially its cogent analysis of antebellum political economy and its detailed rendering of the social and political worlds of northeastern farmers, businessmen, and lesser-known economic thinkers. Most importantly, historians of nineteenth-century business and U.S. capitalism will need to grapple with the implications of Ron's broadest claim, that “an American developmental state arose first and most decisively in agriculture” (p. 215).
