[I submitted this paper as part of the requirements for a UF Anthropology class with the title “Rural Peoples in the Modern World” (ANT 5256) taught by Anthony Oliver-Smith, my favorite teacher at the University of Florida, in the fall of 1989. The class was actually a lecture class for underclassmen but Anthropology grad students (and I) took the class for grad credit, the only additional requirement being a term paper. The research that went into this paper was my first foray into trying to figure out how to explain the type of “perverse” economic behavior I believed I had discovered in my work on my Master’s thesis. The full title of the term paper was “Peasants and the Frontier in the Early American South: Some Perspective on the Transition to Capitalism Debate.” Employing a comparative frontier analysis of Latin America and the antebellum South (pp. 22‑42), I attempted to fit the South into a peasant framework emphasizing Gavin Wright, Sutti Ortiz, and Keith Wrightson’s similar analysis of decision making and risk among rural peoples, Ortiz’s notion of traditional and progressive peasants, and Harriet Friedman’s simple commodity producers. Although Oliver-Smith was a bit overwhelmed by the size of this “term paper” but he appeared to like my ideas because he suggested we work together on a paper for a journal like Comparative Studies in Society and History on applying the peasant concept to American development. Darrett’s only comment when I gave him a copy of the paper was “This confirms my opinion that anthropologists have nothing to offer historians concerning peasants.” Darrett and I obviously had differences of opinion, to put it mildly!]
In a 1978 article in the Radical History Review, Edwin G. Burrows stated that “the next major subject of controversy in American history is almost certainly going to be the transition, sometime between the mid‑17th and mid‑19th centuries, from pre‑capitalist to capitalist society” (173). By 1989, although there has indeed been a debate over the transition to capitalism and many historians have directly or indirectly contributed to that debate, the historiography of the transition has progressed relatively little beyond the stalemate that Burrows identified in 1978. One major reason for this lack of progress has been the failure to incorporate a theoretical framework which can handle the complexity of behaviors displayed by pre‑industrial rural peoples. In particular, historians have all but ignored the well‑developed field of anthropology focusing on the peasantry. Although Burrows recommends a Marxist framework, this is only one of several (and not necessarily the best or most developed) frameworks which anthropologists have developed for studying rural peoples.
Although there are undoubtedly many reasons for the failure to use the “peasant” model to analyze early American society, may I suggest that the primary reason is the general failure of all comparative, interdisciplinary, social science historiography to transcend “American exceptionalism.” A concern for the unique and particular has led American historians to ignore the commonality of human beings, past, present, and future. Generally such concern with commonalities is quickly dismissed as historicism. Even those American Studies and Marxist historians who draw on universal theoretical frameworks and seem immune to accusations of historicism rarely transcend “American exceptionalism” in actual practice.
One field of American historiography, that has definitely transcended national boundaries has been frontier studies. Although to blame for much of twentieth century “American exceptionalism,” Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier hypothesis” has captured the imagination of many historians of foreign lands. These studies have all found that indeed the presence of a frontier of readily available land has a significant impact on social and economic development of a nation. Yet the exact nature of that impact can vary tremendously depending on the social context. Because of the wide divergence in frontier experiences, these frontier studies have remained strictly comparative and no single frontier theory has yet developed. Yet the frontier remains a central force in any study of early American society and, placed in a comparative framework, an analysis of the effect of the frontier can focus attention on key elements of that society.
This study will attempt to combine both the peasant and frontier frameworks into an analysis of the early American South from the early colonial era to the late antebellum era. Although many changes occurred in the South during these years, there is much evidence to support the continuity of early Southern development. Indeed, even those who favor the capitalist transformation interpretation of American history believe that the transformation did not reach the South until the end of the nineteenth century (Kulikoff 130). The study will focus on the family farmers of the early American South, what Frank Owsley calls the “common folk,” what Eugene Genovese and most other Southern historians call the “yeomanry,” those people who made up the bulk of the white population in the South. However, I will put forward an hypothesis which places both the slave and great planter within the same general framework.
Peasantry and the Transition to Capitalism Debate
Burrows divides the transition to capitalism debate into three schools: Entrepeneurial, Pastoral, and Marxist. On two points, all three are in complete agreement: (1) the British colonies were never feudal and (2) mid‑nineteenth century America was capitalist. They disagree on whether America was always capitalist or whether there was a transition to capitalism sometime in the colonial/antebellum era. For Burrows, the inability of the Entrepeneurialists and Pastoralists to explain the simultaneous existence of both “capitalist” and “pre‑capitalist” behavior throughout the colonial and antebellum era created the need for the broader theoretical foundation that Marxism offers.
Answering Burrows’s call for a Marxist perspective to enlighten the debate, Allan Kulikoff has made the most significant new contribution in a 1989 article in the William & Mary Quarterly. Burrow’s Entrepeneurialists and Pastoralists are Kulikoff’s “market historians” and “social historians,” respectively. Kulikoff presupposes that “much of rural England [had] already become fully capitalist by the mid‑seventeenth century” and that “colonists‑‑often the urban descendants of peasants or rural folk who feared displacement‑‑migrated, in part, to escape capitalism. Colonists gained sufficient land to reject the dependence of wage labor and sought, however incoherently, to devise economic relations within capitalist world markets that preserved some of the communal and hierarchical ethos characteristic of local communities in feudal England” (124). For lack of a better name for these Amerian colonists and their offspring, Kulikoff calls them “yeomen.”
The term “yeoman” carries a lot of cultural baggage that obscures comparative analysis with rural peoples in other societies. Kulikoff notes the concept of an American “yeomanry” including all “landowning farmers who worked their own land but excluding gentleman farmers” developed in the eighteenth‑century northern colonies, but soon became part of the national mythology through political rhetoric (142). As Kulikoff notes American yeomen were not the equivalent of English yeomen. “In England they were commerical farmers and sometimes tenants near the top of a complicated agricultural hierarchy; in America they were petty producers who grew much of their own food and participated in commercial markets” (140‑141). In Keith Wrightson’s analysis, English yeomen were only the upper wealthier end of a continuum of husbandmen, those who had rentholds worth more then forty shillings per annum (31). As Kulikoff notes, “the term connotes a somewhat romantic view, a myth of the American past, one less involved in class relations, class struggle, gender conflict” (141).
According to Kulikoff, “‘yeoman’ can be construed as a class term, relating to a specific group of farmers‑‑petty producers who owned the means of production (as absolute owners) and participated in commodity markets to sustain familial autonomy and local exchange…Practicing ‘safety‑first’ agriculture, they produced much of the food they consumed and tried to procure the rest through trade with neighbors” (141). “Yeomen were embedded in capitalist world markets and yet alienated from capitalist social and economic relations” (144). This definition of the “yeoman” seems strikingly similar to anthropological definitions of the “peasant,” combining elements from formalist, substantivist, and Marxist interpretations.
However, Kulikoff’s equation of the Marxist concept of petty or simple commodity production with self‑sufficient agriculture is problematical. In contrasting the empirically‑derived concept of the “peasant” with the theoretical concept of the “simple commodity producer,” Harriet Friedmann shows that “household production of commodities corresponds to simple commodity production only when external relations are governed by competition and mobility of factors” (160). Simple commodity production entails “the complete separation of the household from all ties except those of the market” and are thus unable to withdraw from the market (163). By contrast, the “peasant” concept does not entail any “unique set of productive relations” (160) but consists of “those households whose reproduction occurs through communal and particularistic class relations” (163). “Peasant households have important communal relations, including local exchange of products and reciprocal sharing of labour” (165). The “transformation to capitalist relations of production involves the decomposition of a complex of institutions for ‘peasant’ reproduction, but simply the intensification of an existing process for simple commodity production” (175).
Using Kulikoff’s definition and Friedmann’s framework, the Southern yeoman farmers are peasants and not simple commodity producers. Later I will show that both defintion and framework are unnecessarily limiting, but the present point is that the concept of peasantry can not be dismissed from an analysis of the transition to capitalism debate. Why then do Southern historians like Genovese, Kulikoff, and Hahn resist using the “peasant” concept?
Perhaps the main resistance lies in the equation of peasantry with feudalism. And, as everyone agrees, feudalism never reached American shores. In addition, Alan Macfarlane has discovered that in England “the peasantry had in practice vanished by the later fourteenth century,” if not earlier (100). In one of the better studies of rural early Americans, Hal Barron states: “Pre‑ and proto‑industrial American farmers were…neither traditional peasants nor modern profit maximizers but rather transitional figures‑‑in the market but not of it” (5). But clearly the “peasant” concept employed by Friedmann and other anthropologists, most notably in the many excellent articles in The Journal of Peasant Studies since its inception in the mid‑1970s, transcends this dichotomous notion of peasantry restricted to non‑market feudalism.
The most well‑known use of the peasant concept in early American historiography is undoubtedly Kenneth Lockridge’s cooption of Eric Wolf’s “Closed Corporate Peasant Community” to describe the early Massachusetts Puritan community of Dedham. As Lockridge notes, “Only an historian limited by a preoccupation with medieval European peasant society (and indeed by a narrow view of that slice of human experience) would insist that tenancy on the lands of a lord is a necessary characteristic of a peasant community” (19n). To Lockridge, Dedham was a “peasant utopia,” the realization of the “communal ideal” of “an imaginary golden past,” harping back to Perry Miller’s notion of the medieval roots of Puritanism. (19‑20) But, to Lockridge, Englishmen of the era, including the Puritans, were very clearly not peasants. It was only their hamlets and villages which remained peasant, for inevitably Lockridge can not escape his own narrow view of peasantry limited to “villeinage” (20).
Rather than enlightening the transition to capitalism debate, Kulikoff’s article sends the debate further into the morass of “American exceptionalism” by focusing on the “yeoman,” a uniquely American transitional class of non‑capitalist farmers. Kulikoff’s wishy‑washy use of the term “class” suffers from all of the complaints that make Peter Calvert want to “abandon the concept of class altogether” (Calvert 202‑216). To Kulikoff, the “yeoman” concept is “implicitly comparative” (142) but the concept is not comparative at all. The “yeoman” is clearly an ideological construct, not a theoretical construct. Historians should drop the term yeoman if they are seriously interested in a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to American history. What is called for is not necessarily a Marxist interpretation but rather a broader social scientific or anthropological approach to the study of early American society. The Marxist school is but one among many that might bring a more ordered perspective to the complexities of human behavior. Although the formalist school of peasant studies might be equated with the Entrepeneurial school of early American history and the substantivist with the Pastoralist, both the formalists and substantivists have developed much more sophisticated models of rural people than have early American historians. This is not to say that anthropologists who take formalist, substantivist, and Marxist perspectives do not disagree about the nature of rural peoples, for there is much disagreement. But more important is their basic agreement on the existence of a complex mixture of market and non‑market oriented behavior among all rural peoples. The differences are matters of degree not of kind, about whether the individual, institutions, or modes of productions are most important. The most convincing anthropological studies of peasantry recognize the validity of the other interpretations and, indeed, suggest a continuum of behaviors; not a dichotomy, transformation, or radical transition from one to the other but a gradual shift over time from more traditional to more progressive behavior.
The bridge to employing a more anthropological approach to early American society should not be that difficult to cross for historians have lately moved far towards a more balanced view of early American soceity. As Kulikoff notes, “market historians” and “social historians” no longer argue about complete self‑sufficiency and complete market orientation. Rather, “the two sides contend over the degree of local self‑sufficiency and the extent of market exchange rather than the fact of exchange” (127).
Although each of the approaches has something to offer the study of peasantry, I believe the formalist approach focusing on the rational individual is superior for an anlysis of early American Southern family farmers. Although the use of the peasant concept stresses the commonality of peasants around the world and through time, there are still elements of the American experience which make the American peasantry an unusual case. The English institututions and character of the first immigrants and the abundance of the frontier did indeed contribute to shaping an “American character.” The normal village social institutions associated with peasant life, and stressed by the substantivists, existed only weakly in the South.
Although the Marxist theory provides a general framework for examining societies, there is just too much theoretical baggage of class conflict which almost invariably accompanies the framework. As Kulikoff describes how yeomen “slowly, imperceptibly, even unconsciously…became petty capitalists,” he cannot help but paint a picture of the destruction of yeoman society at the bloody hands of capitalists (140‑142). Like Genovese and all Marxist interpreters of rural American history, Kulikoff faces the problem of trying to find conflict where indeed there was very little conflict. When empirical evidence for class conflict is lacking, then Marxist theorists often resort to varied makeshift explanations for the “apparent” absence. Marx himself simply wrote off peasants as so many “sacks of potatoes” for their inability to realize their class interests. The successful Marxist historians resort to confusing, circular arguments like “cultural hegemony” where everything and anything is explained, but connections are not explicitly clear. Marxist theory thus inevitably becomes a non‑falsifiable verity rather than a theory subject to empirical verification.
However, as the Marxists correctly point out, any study of the peasant economy can not ignore the social context. Indeed, as I shall point out, the effect of the frontier is very much dependent on the social context. However, I believe that the Marxist model concentrating on the social relations of production is most helpful for comparative studies between two very different economies or when a true economic transformation occurs. My point will be that there was no economic transformation in the American South from the early colonial period through the antebellum era and that there was only one social context. The critical point is to explain why there was so much diversity within one social context. I believe this is best explained through the formalist continuum of traditional and progressive behaviors. Both the substantivist and the Marxist approaches tend to pose dichotomies rather than the continuums that empirical evidence suggests exist. The formalist model is overall much more susceptible to empirical verification from historical economic and demographic data than the other two models. However, the other two models have much to offer and should inform any formalist approach.
Peasantry in the Early American South and Early Modern England
Kulikoff’s exceptionalism and dichotomization does not stop at the American shore for he is equally guilty of “Southern exceptionalism” and creating a dichotomy between Northern and Southern peasantries. Kulikoff dismisses the Southern peasantry as insignificant in the Southern planter society with its “noncapitalist and increasingly anticapitalist slave regime” (134). By definition, or at least Genovese’s definition, the slave South is noncapitalist because slavery is noncapitalist. In contrast to planter hegemony, “northern farmers relied on petty commodity production and local exchange for use to keep capitalist class relations at bay” (Kulikoff 134). Kulikoff does not pursue the Southern variant because, by definition, the slave South does not play any role in the transition to capitalism debate until slavery ends, when the transition is all but complete in the rest of the United States.
Both of these characterizations imply the subordinate‑superordinate relationships common to all peasantries, but the relationships were substantially different between North and South. Northern peasants could resist but Southern peasants could not. However, resistance to or ability to resist superordinate intrusions is not a definitional characteristic of the peasantry and does not make either North or South less peasant.
For the South, the “peasant” concept has validity far beyond the transition to capitalism debate. There is much evidence that small Southern farmers, like Redfield’s peasants, had their own “little tradition”. Frank Owsley identifies “southern folkways” built around the family household, “where the whole family worked together, hunted together, went to church and parties together, and expected to be buried together and to come to judgment together on the Last Day” (95). “The rural church, whether a small log house or a pretentious structure, was the center of a community” (96). Comparable to the Latin American peasant fiestas, Southern “plain folk” had their revivals, community singings, and weddings. They were often involved in reciprocal labor exchanges “such as house‑raisings, logrollings, the burning of the woods, and corn shuckings” (Owsley 104).
In many ways, Southern peasant culture was simply a continuation of English peasant culture. Although English households in the early modern era was highly mobile and highly nuclear weakening the concept of a peasant village, according to Wrightson, “neighbourliness” played an important role in maintaining a peasant community organization. Characterized by “a mutual recognition of reciprocal obligations of a practical kind and a degree of normative consensus as to the nature of proper behaviour between neighbours…it [neighborliness] was essentially a horizontal relationship, one which implied a degree of equality and mutuality between partners to the relationship, irrespective of distinctions of wealth or social standing” (Wrightson 51). However, as in peasant societies And the early American South, paternalism and deference also existed based on “permanent inequalities” and “unequal obligations” (Wrightson 57). In England, “a constant process of accommodation served usually to maintain the balance between co‑operation and conflict, between identification and differentiation” (Wrightson 65).
Ultimately, Wrightson resists identifying his English husbandmen with the “peasant” concept because he, like his American counterparts, equates peasantry with feudalism. “England’s small farmers…were far from being peasant subsistence farmers concerned only to provide their families’ needs from their own holdings. England retained pockets of simple subsistence farming, to be sure, but very few small farmers were isolated from the market, and for most, market opportunities were the first factor to consider in their husbandry” (134). Again, surely the “peasant” concept developed by anthropologists is far superior to the simple equation of peasantry with non‑market feudalism.
In the process of the transatlantic crossing, the English social institutions were weakened. No traditional English way of life was established in the American South. There were few villages and few churches unlike New England. The families were spread out into family farms and plantations throughout the South and this dispersal continued through the antebellum era. But undoubtedly much of the English traditional village culture, sense of community, and concept of “neighborliness” was transferred.
The Peasant as Satisficer: A Formalist Theory
What makes human beings tick? The basic driving force of human behavior is self‑interest. The pursuit of self‑interest can lead to many different types of behavior. Self‑interest may be the pursuit of security or the pursuit of self‑aggrandizement. The economics of the pursuit of self‑interest may lie in self‑sufficiency or capitalistic accumulation of capital. There is a continuum of behaviors and economics, with all forms existing in all humans and with some humans closer to one extreme than the other. The placement on the continuum depends on initial starting point (ascribed chracterisics) plus any changes which have occurred (achieved characteristics). Human beings are social creatures because the pursuit of their self‑interest is enhanced by group interaction, whether through exchange or exploitation. The laborer and the employer of labor each gain something from the relationship. However, the pursuit of self‑interest is not conducive to group maintenance; self‑interests are not necessarily those of group interests, although in general the pursuit of group interest will also fall in a comparable continuum of behaviors and economics.
In the pursuit of self‑interest some will gain and some will lose in a relative way thorough natural distribution, which might be due to ascribed or achieved characteristics or pure luck. If group interests are being served so that even the relative losers are benefiting from group interaction, then there is no problem with this relative division. However, if the pursuit of individual self‑interest harms the self‑interest of the relative losers, then the group will tend to fall apart as relative losers tend to withdraw from the group, thus harming the self‑interest of the relative winners. In order to maintain the group intact and to benefit the self‑interest of all, self‑interest must be tempered by group interest.
An infinite number of mechanisms which we call “cultures” have evolved in different groups to assure group survival. These mechanisms can vary from egalitarian distribution of wealth to enforced slavery. Why these different mechanisms? The mechanisms have evolved over many millenia under many different material‑‑technological and environmental‑‑circumstances. Cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution. Humans are able to borrow from other cultures and adapt if necessary, although some cultures are better able to do this than others. Cultures can also evolve internally. Richard G. Wilkinson’s “theory of cultural evolution provides a framework which implies that change takes place for specifically adaptive reasons, solving problems that crop up between man and his environment” (9). Cultures have a staying power as long as they can continue to serve self and group interests.
Is human behavior then driven by economic and demographic factors or cultural and ideological factors? To use the analogy of a steam engine, economic and demographic factors are the engine, cultural and ideological factors are the governor. Although cultural factors may appear to motivate people to action, they are only tempering actions which are motivated by economic and demographic factors under conditions of free will or coercive factors under conditions of forced will. Wilkinson places a primacy on culture in that:
Man’s pattern of living is a product of the particular cultural system in which he grows up…Man has become a creature of culture to the extent that lifestyles vary from one part of the world to another, and from one historical period to the next.
Once man’s behaviour and mode of existence are determined primarily by his culture, then he is able to make adaptive changes to meet his environmental conditions by modifying his culture. (Wilkinson 9)
The key environmental conditions are the economic and demographic factors which impact most directly on individual and group survival. A society’s culture is thus “integrated around the demands imposed by its adaptive function. As Wilkinson notes, “Both individuals and societies will give priority to the maintenance of subsistence activities at a level at least adequate for survival. This is a cultural imperative” (Wilkinson 11). However, although subsistence pressures may force cultural change, Wilkinson acknowledges that some cultural change may come from external contact and that “some cultural systems [such as rigid class societies] may be able to contain the strains set up by inadequate subsitence and prevent the economic system from changing” (86).
How then does peasant behavior differ from non‑peasant behavior? Formalist anthropologists say that, in general, peasants behave like non‑peasants, motivated by self‑interest, driven by economic and demographic factors, restricted by cultural and ideological factors within a technological and environmental framework. “[M]ore often than not it is assumed that Western farmers allocate resources rationally in such a way as to maximize profit…[but] Western farmers are just as much influenced by values, social rewards and desire for satisfaction of their own personal needs and family needs as a peasant farmer” (Ortiz 301‑302).
Manning Nash finds that Indian peasant economies “do not lack economic rationality, the matching of means and ends for best outputs; they do not hedge economic activity with a host of traditional barriers; they do not despise wealth and hard work; and they exhibit the free market where each man can pursue his own economic interest. Thus they have the values, the markets, the pecuniary means of exchange, the ability to calculate, and the interest in economic activity” (Nash 201).
Samuel Popkin argues that peasants are rational, are not adverse to risk‑taking, and do not place too much faith in the social insurance provided by the “moral economy.” Popkin finds a highly stratfied peasant village striven with competition and conflict. “Stratification occurred before production for markets because peasants were interested in individual security abd approached villages as sources of gain, just as they did markets” (61). Contrary to Wilkinson, Popkin finds that there is no need for a dramatic subsistence crises before peasants will be driven to innovation. Peasants are constantly trying to improve their income and consumption levels.
Kazimierz Dobrowolski takes the middle ground between Wilkinson and Popkin, claiming the omnipresence of “two fundamental, though contrasting, tendencies which manifest themselves with varying intensity in diferent phases of historical development”: a conservative desire to maintain the existing social order and a radical desire for social improvement. The conservative tendency dominates in oral cultures, although the radical tendency may come to the forefront in “crucial periods of social upheaval and revolution” (262). Literate cultures, on the other hand, tend to be less conservative and traditional. To the extent that peasant societies pass down their culture by oral transmission, we may expect to find that Wilkinson’s scenario better explains peasant behavior.
In general, formalists adopt a general theory of human behavior developed by Herbert Simon which postulates that rational decision making is not a process of maximizing, but rather is a “bounded” process of “satisficing.” The key is to find “a course of action that is ‘good enough'” due to the inability of the human organism to estimate “joint probability distributions, or of complete and consistent preference orderings of all possible alternatives of action” (Simon 204‑205). “When making a decision an individual selects, from innumerable opportunites offered by the environment, a set small enough to be able to evaluate the probable outcomes of each and to compare them against each other” (Ortiz,1987,302). “A farmer can formulate an expectation about his harvest only if he can have a mental picture of the outcome and if he has any confidence about the likelihood of his prognosis. With such a high degree of uncertainty few individuals could formulate an expectation; it should not surprise us that as uncertainty decreases [e.g., with irrigation] farmers are less likely to express prospects in terms of fate or supernatural events” (Ortiz,1987,300). “Many so‑called traditional techniques are no more than well‑tested ways of minimizing the chance of total loss and starvation” (Ortiz,1987,302).
Popkin, in contrast, believes that peasants are “maximizers.” As rational individuals, peasants “evaluate the possible outcomes associated with their preferences and values. In doing this, they discount the evaluation of each outcome in accordance with their subjective estimate of the likelihood of the outcome. Finally, they make the choice which they believe will maximize their expected utility” (31). However, I believe that Popkin attributes properties to peasants that few human beings can live up to and that “satisficing” is typical human behavior, peasant or non‑peasant.
Ortiz would place Popkin’s “maximizers” at the one extreme of a traditional‑progressive continuum of peasant behavior. Following Ortiz’s framework, “traditional” peasants are oriented not only to the household, but also to the community and the internal prestige system, preferring to make their investments in the social domain. “Progressive” peasants are oriented to maximization of cash resources and luxury goods and are less concerned with security because they can always sell land, cattle, or other investments. The prestige referrent group for the progressive peasants lies outside the community. Both types of peasant grow crops for the market and subsistance, but progressives resist growing any more food beyond basic household needs.
There is, however, not a dichotomy, but a continuum between the two ideal types of peasant behavior characterizing these ideal types. The “two general and distinct trends of economic aspirations…are not, of course, mutually exclusive” (Ortiz,1973,177). “The difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ Indians is one of degree of concern in the general orientation of farming and other economic activities” (Ortiz,1973,179). The two labels refer not to differences in mentalite but “to differences in wealth of assets (not necessarily money) and hence the type of strategy used by each” (Ortiz,1973,275).
Ortiz’s traditional‑progressive peasant continuum is strikingly similar to Keith Wrightson’s identification of a husbandman‑yeoman continuum in 17th century England. “Yeoman status was accorded to men who farmed a substantial acreage, usually in excess of fifty acres, though there was no precise norm and the holdings of yeomen varied considerably. Farmers of smaller acreages, say between five and fifty acres, were generally accorded the name ‘husbandmen’ in conventional usage” (Wrightson 31‑32). Yeoman farmers “were not ‘a contented peasantry that reaped and sowed as the seasons fell,’ but often ‘ambitious, aggressive, small capitalists…determined to take advantage of every opportunity, whatever its origin,for increasing their profits'” (Wrightson 135).
Less well‑placed to prosper were England’s small husbandmen. Though not isolated from the market, these smallholders were less able than their yeoman neighbors to exploit its opportunities to the full. They simply produced too little, and as a result the problem of maintaining their families loomed proportionately larger in their economic calculus. Given these circumstances they were necessarily more cautious, less willing to try new methods or to engage in improvements, for they could afford neither the attendant costs nor the risks involved…Nevertheless, few smallholders were insulated from the economic trends of the day; they could not retreat into mere subsistence farming. (Wrightson 136)
Such striking similarities between the two continuums suggest that English society might well benefit from the use of a comparative peasant framework.
The Peasant and the Frontier: A Comparative Analysis
“American exceptionalism” has long had a symbiotic relationship with the “frontier myth.” Nevertheless, a frontier of available land, ready for the taking from the Indians, played a significant role in the development of early American society, North and South. Any analysis of the Southern peasantry must come to grips with the effect of the frontier in shaping that peasantry. But the incremental effect of the frontier will only be discerned through a comparative analysis of other frontiers. Why do forced‑labor plantations dominate some frontier regions while free peasant family farms dominate other frontier regions? To answer that question and hopefully to develop an understanding of the social relations of production in the early American South, this analysis will compare the Southern frontier with various Latin American frontiers.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” dominates the study of the frontier on every continent, ancient or modern. Although heavily criticized for being too ethnocentrically American and for not being empirically testable, nevertheless, his thesis has captured the fascination of many historians as a theme for writing a unified national history. For Turner, the most significant property of the frontier is the availability of “free land.” In his famous 1893 address to the American Historical Association, Turner stated that “so long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power” (32). Turner points out that English authorities and Eastern interests would have prevented the expansion of the frontier if they could. But as Edmund Burke analyzed the situation immediately before the American Revolution, Englishmen would not be so easily checked:
If you stopped your [land] grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You can not station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people are already little attached to particular situations. (Turner 33)
For Turner, the American frontier promoted individualism which in turn promoted democracy not only in the West, but also back East and in Europe as well.
Although only playing “a surprisingly small place in his essays,” the safety valve hypothesis‑‑”the view that the frontier constituted a kind of safety valve of opportunity which prevented America from developing class consciousness and acute class struggles” has been one of the most widely applied and criticized elements of the general frontier theory (Hofstadter 6‑7). Safety valve effects have been noted in many countries. “Where the source of one’s misery is social oppression rather than of natural provenance, it has sometimes been possible simply to leave: to light out for the frontier, for new zones of colonization where land was free. In the eighteenth century, Thai kings had to be careful how far they went in exacting tribute from their subjects, for if they became too demanding the peasants would simply disappear into the jungle. In the early nineteenth century, the big ‘squatter’ landowners who imported English labourers to Australia found that, on arrival, they soon took off to establish themsleves as small ‘cocky’ farmers, for land empty (or emptied) of aboriginals was freely available” (Worsley 121). In Russia “the frontier provided the possibility of [peasant] escape from the lord’s oppression…’Beyond the last stockade…there was a no‑man’s‑land that drew out to itself many a free‑hearted peasant who had no taste for the obligations of the serf'” (Worsley 97).
Yet others have shown that availability of land, rather than providing a safety‑valve, actually leads to oppression. In Russia, “since labour was by far the scarcest factor of production, not land, control over that labour, whether on the frontier or elsewhere, became the sine qua non of the system of exploitation” (Worsley 97). “The latifundio, the general term for a large estate worked by landless labourers, became the backbone of Latin American agriculture” (Hennessy 89).
In Latin American, the latifundio worked by landless laborers thrived on the frontier. “The small farms which quickly became the economic basis for much North American settlement had scarcely any parallel in Latin America until the wave of European immirgation in the nineteenth century and then they tended to be concentrated in specific areas such as southern Brazil, Santa Fe and Corrientes in Argentina, and southern Chile [i.e., temperate regions]” (Hennessy 89).
Obviously the effect of the frontier on the social relations of production differs radically from country to country. In some countries, the frontier promotes independent family farms and, in other countries, plantations employing some form of dependent labor (slave, wage, tenant, etc.). Why this happens is crucial to understanding the effect of the frontier on the peasantry. Academics in many different disciplines have developed theories but no consensus has been reached. Martin Katzman’s analysis of several of these theories in conjunction with the Brazilian frontier provides a good comparative perspective for examining the early American South.
Neoclassical economic theory defines the social relations of production as “‘social technolgy’ that can be adopted or discarded as they facilitate or hinder the maximization of the landlord’s profits” (Katzman 276). The production‑function approach, also known as the “staples” approach and best represented in the work of Robert E. Baldwin and Douglass C. North, “attempts to derive the social relations of production in a newly settled region from the technological conditions under which the regional staple is produced” (Katzman 277). Factor and commodity prices and soil and climate dictate whether a relatively labor‑intensive “plantation commodity” or a relatively capital‑intensive “non‑plantation commodity” will be most profitable. Usually “there are significant increasing returns to scale in the cultivation and processing” of the “plantation commodity”, whereas the “family‑size farm gives an efficient scale of production” for the “non‑plantation commodity.” (Baldwin 166‑167).
Because of the economies of scale, larger units are able to outbid smaller units for land and thus plantations come into being. However, in a labor scarce society with an abundance of land, as on a frontier, the plantations will be restricted, not by land, but by the availability of labor. In the free market, the plantations can pay the higher wage required to draw labor away from smaller units and compensate the laborer for his loss of independence. However, if this wage differential exceeds the economy of scale benefits, then “plantation owners as a class have an incentive to create restrictions on labor mobility, via serfdom or slavery.” If plantation owners can engross all of the fertile land, then any available labor will be forced to work on the plantations (Katzman 277‑278).
As Katzman notes, the “staples” thesis is flawed in several respects. Plantations existed where there were few if any economies of scale and, on every plantation frontier, small farms coexisted with great plantations. Indeed proof of economies of scale in agricultural production is often severely lacking. In many cases, economies of scale are simply presumed by the existence of large‑scale enterprises. Katzman states that beneficial “in situ” processing leads to economies of scale but fails to show why such processing can not be handled off site. Katzman inevitably acknowledges that “there is considerable evidence that family‑farm and plantation crops cannot be easily distinguished on the basis of economics of scale or factor‑intensity” (279). A staple like wheat is grown on small family farms in mid‑nineteenth United States but on large plantations using a “combination of settlers, tenant farmers, sharecroppers and migrant labour” in late nineteenth century Argentina (Hennessy 91). In fact, Katzman’s econometric analysis of various output elasticities completely contradicts the “staples” thesis indicating “that temperate‑zone agriculture should operate on a large scale, with considerable mechanization, and a dependent labor force; and that the tropics should be characterized by small‑scale, lightly capitalized agriculture” (279).
Katzman asks the question: “If workers had a great disutility to working in a dependent status on the plantations, why does the landowner not capture some of the benefits of the workers’ demand for independence by selling the land to them instead of exploiting it directly?” (278). He believes the answer lies in “the imperfection of the markets in both financial and human capital” which discriminate against workers whereas other historians have stressed prestige and power maximization (278). But, in my opinion, all of these arguments confuse the economics of scale with the economics of exploitation and economics of investment. To analyze the economics of exploitation, one would compare slavery and serfdom with more voluntary forms of wage labor and sharecropping. To analyze the economics of scale, one would compare wage labor or sharecropping with fixed rent tenancy. To analyze the economics of investment, one would compare fixed rent tenancy with land sales. Although the capital market certainly affects all of these economics, it affects the economics of scale least and has negligible effect on land tenancy. Also small farms in the plantation regions were not capital intensive as long as land was relatively cheap; the greatest need for capital came with expansion through slave labor. To analyze why the landowner does not capture some of the benefits of the workers’ demand for independence, one should analyze, not land sales, but why the landed did not resort to fixed rent tenancy rather than serfdom or slavery.
Concerning the economics of exploitation, “presumably, slavery would be profitable in any region where the marginal productivity of labor exceeded maintenance costs of the slave, plus those of the system itself (policing, etc.)” (285). (Similar economics could easily be applied to exploitation of land since land rights also have maintenance costs, such as policing against squatters.) Stanley Engerman notes that the costs of enforcing slavery included “both the maintenance of cartel stability to prevent competitive bidding for labor leading to benefits for the workers, as well as the costs of preventing runaways among the enslaved [costs which were much higher on the frontier]. The latter costs were lowered by the forced migration of the enslaved population from their homelands, and by having slaves with particular distinguishing features, such as race and speech patterns” (61). The economic costs of policing native Indians were undoubtedly higher than foreign Africans which is one reason Indian captures were often shipped to the West Indies in exchange for black slaves. The disappearancee of serfdom among the English might be explained as the costs of serf labor exceeded costs of free labor in England. The costs of serfdom in the New World would probably be even greater because of the separation from metropolitan control and the difficulty of policing a frontier region, unless the metropolis supported the introduction of serfdom.
The economic explanation of social relations of production begs the question of “social” costs of maintaining the system. Indeed, these costs might better be attributed to legal, political, and cultural norms. John Locke’s proposed feudal constitution for the Carolinas indicates that the elite might have considered feudalism a more economically efficient form of frontier development, but societal norms doomed such a plan to speculative theory. The disappearance of slavery in the United States North might be explained as much by diverging cultural context as by diverging economic context. Yet such non‑economic norms do not readily explain why the exact form of bound labor differed so radically across plantation frontiers, from imported slaves to tenant farmers.
Forced labor was not an inevitable economic consequence of the frontier. Katzman notes that “equally plausible” outcomes of frontier labor scarcity are “a frantic competition among landlords for labor” or, as the Turner frontier thesis holds, “the rise of an independent yeomanry as a powerful class”. “Population sparseness increases the bargaining power of rural, and even urban labor, while increasing the landlords costs of enforcing their property rights.” Katzman’s study suggests that “this hypothesis has some validity in Brazil” (285).
Indeed tenancy and freeholds, along with wage labor, sharecropping, and squatting, coexisted on many frontiers. The landed did sell land to the landless. In this conjunction, Katzman examines another neoclassical approach, the property rights paradigm, which states that “the distribution of attitudes towards risk and independence” determines the contractual relationship between landlords and tenants. (282) Katzman finds this paradigm both unrealistic and unhelpful. “Indeed, it may be taken as axiomatic that every Brazilian sharecropper, tenant, or field hand would like to own his land regardless of the risks involved” (282‑283). And yet he acknowledges that people may be willing or unwilling to migrate to free lands, which leads to the conclusion that independence has an economic value. The small farmer, outbid for land by the great planter, can choose to become a dependent laborer or migrate. Indeed, using data from a study of migration in Brazil, Katzman calculates that the “independent status for the landless is as attractive as a 10 per cent increase in volume” (283). Likewise, in the colonial Chesapeake one finds hardly any freedmen who willing become indentured servants (although there were some), so certainly their freedom was worth more than assured room and board. Yet with land available for patent, although perhaps marginal in terms of both quality and access to market, at a cost within the reach of most heads of households, tenancy was quite common. Obviously a complex matrix of social and economic factors enter the decision to migrate or purchase a freehold versus tenancy or some other form of dependent labor.
Why some frontiers resort to forced labor depended on both the social and economic context. No matter how much control of available land and labor they have, planters still face a shortage of labor. There always has to be a balance between available labor supply and land attitudes. If there is nobody to work the land, then the land is valueless. If labor has to be attracted, then there must be a more liberal land policy. If labor can be coerced, then there can be a more rigid land policy. The problem is one of enticing labor from the metropolis or other regions to migrate to the frontier. Often there are substantial costs associated with this migration, especially for transoceanic transportation. The nature of immigration affects the labor supply. Voluntary immigration, whether free or indentured, must be enticed with opportunity, not forced servitude. If the planter pays for the transportation costs, then he wishes to recoup his investment, in a perpetually labor short society, in the form of labor rather than through the less assured means of land speculation or land tenancy. Yet eventually the indentured servant will have to be freed and have the opportunity to acquire land or else there will be little incentive for additional people to voluntarily immigrate and the frontier will continue to face a labor shortage.
Just as coerced labor is always a possibility, so is coerced immigration. Again the economics are set in a social context. The English and most Europeans frowned upon kidnapping their own people for forced labor. Only convicts and undesirables were forced to labor in the colonies. However, because of racial attitudes, there were no such qualms about forcing immigration from Africa. Black slavery offered an answer to the frontier labor shortage in the New World and slavery became a major component of the labor force when voluntary immigration from England slowed in the late seventeenth century.
Inevitably no neoclassical economic model can stand divorced from the social context. Historians of quite different persuasions have noted this obvious point. Robert Brenner, examining from a Marxist perspective, has shown that economic and demographic changes do not by themselves explain societal change. For medieval Europe, the “qualitative character of landlord‑peasant class relations” determined who was to benefit from either a growing demand for land or a growing demand for labor (Brenner 40). Stanley Engerman, looking at the slavery issue as a supply‑and‑demand equation, states the point succinctly:
By definition a high land‑labor ratio means labor is relatively scarce, making slavery desirable for the ruling classes, but also more difficult to achieve. Thus we need to know more about the nature of political factors, themselves not to be regarded as exogenous variables, not only as they affect the classes of resource owners, but also, as Blum emphasizes, the extent of the central government upon the landowning class. (Engerman 59)
Engerman notes the financial as well as religious and moral costs of slavery and that, in the Western hemisphere, slavery was restricted to different racial groups.
Katzmann dismisses social context because he finds that the same metropolis gave rise to quite different frontiers, North and South, within both the United States and Brazil. But Katzman confuses primacy with interdependence, sufficient with necessary. His analysis reflects a lack of understanding about the social relations of production and the social and economic contexts on these different frontiers. Just because land under the Homestead Act was not necessarily “free” does not mean that land was equally available in the United States and Brazil (i.e., for a price). Likewise, to equate land distribution in the southern colonies with the latifundia‑minifundia pattern common in Latin American is to grossly distort both frontiers. Clearly, much of Katzman’s confusion comes from the weak historiography on American land tenure, which has not progressed much beyond Marshall Harris’s fine but limited study published in 1953. The lack of such data makes comparative analysis of frontiers a very treacherous field, yet new studies of land acquisition and landholding in the American South make a new comparative examination of Latin American and southern frontiers worthwhile.
Land Tenure as Social Context: A Comparative Analysis
“The concept ‘land tenure’ refers to the manner in which and the period for which rights in land are held” (Harris 1). Stressing the legal and political factors implicit in any economic concept, Harris reminds us that, “Contrary to some popular usage, property is concerned with relations among men, and not physical objects. Property is rights, not things” (2). “In the tooth and fang economy of early society,…the system of land tenure was…based principally upon the idea that might made right…As social organization became more complex, law rather than might became the basis for rights in land” (Harris 3).
Land tenure policy in the South began with the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company granted by the English Crown in 1606 the right to plant a colony in the New World. To attract immigrants and investors, the company offered shares of land for a specific number of years of service or a specific level of investment. When the company was dissolved in 1624, the Crown took over control of the fledgling colony but basically continued the land tenure policy of the London Company, granting land on the basis of headrights and treasury rights. The headright was almost exclusively the grounds on which land patents were awarded during the seventeenth century and was in force throughout the colonial era. Although there were many variations, the basic headright guaranteed that a grant of fifty acres be made for every person immigrating to the colony, the grant being “‘made respectively to such persons and their heirs at whose charge the said ersons going to inhabit in Virginia shall be transported'” (Harrison 16‑17). In 1699, the Crown introduced the treasury right which allowed a person the right to acquire a land patent by payment of a fixed fee.
The Crown had a vested interest in preventing land engrossment. Engrossment would discourage immigration to the colony, thus inhibiting any increase in tobacco production upon which the Crown was heavily dependent for revenues. The only revenues that empty lands brought in were quitrents, and as Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton pointed out in 1699, “in actual revenues the establishment of one planter on every fifty acres would result in returns from tobacco duties 200 times as great as would be derived from the same area unoccupied, even if quitrents should be fully collected” (Gray 1:400). One of the main purposes for the adoption of the headright as the basis for land acquisition was to intricately tie land to population in order to prevent engrossment. The Crown, in its best mercantilist tradition, always strove to ensure an equitable distribution of land as the best means of preserving the peace in the colonies and providing the greatest returns to the mother country.
These earlier London Company land policies were used in other Southern colonies‑‑whether royal, corporate, proprietary, or composite‑‑and eventually even continued by the Federal government for one basic reason: the policies worked. Although there were many abuses to the system resulting in much speculation, colonial planters could never fully control the land system because the real power lay in London. The Crown did not want to create a colonial elite that could challenge the Crown’s authority. London came down hard on colonial leaders if there was notice of discontent among the rank and file, as in the recall of Governor Berkeley after Bacon’s Rebellion. The colonies were simply an economic mercantile tool and the Crown did not need troubles.
But, as Harris shows, to induce free immigration, the Crown was no more free than John Locke to install feudalaism in the New World. The concpet of English land tenure that colonists brought to the New World had distinct origins as far back as the pre‑Roman Celtic era. The system gradually evolved under Norman feudalism but always continuity was stressed and became imbedded in the English common law. “[I]n all colonies the theoretical basis of tenure was the common law…The common law understanding, either stated or implied in all the charters, tended toward homogeneity in the wild, lawless, and heterogeneous situation of early Colonial America” (Harris 144).
The English common law notions of land tenure contrasts strikingly with the Iberian aristocratic notions of land tenure. In colonial Brazil, “when immigrants were considered by the crown as a solution to the labor shortage in the coffee frontier, the plantation owners blocked the granting of freeholds in all but the most inaccessible and exhausted lands, compelling most immigrants to work in some form of dependent status on the plantations” (Katzman 287). “From the beginning of its colonization, Brazil was gradually parceled out in estates of immense size. The Portuguese crown, seeking a profit from the export of sugar, was obliged to provide an extremely generous incentive to the colonists” (Dean 606‑607). “The royal grants, called sesmarias, were clearly not homesteads,” ranging from one to three leagues in extent (16.7 to 50.1 square miles) (Dean 607), much greater than land grants in Virginia which averaged less than half a square mile. These “huge holding were granted to noblemen on condition that a permanent rural population be attracted to generate production taxable by the crown,” similar in intent to the headright system of the English colonies. However, “most of these grants expired, without their conditions being fulfilled” (Katzman 287). “Royal admonitions to measure and cultivate these grants do not seem to have been carried out for many sesmarias were sold almost immediately without signs of land boundaries or cultivation of crops and it seems likely that the sesmarias were often sought purely for their negotiable value” (Stein 10).
Land was not for development but for speculation and prices were bid up far beyond the reach of ordinary farmers. “During the [Brazilian] empire, those with means could purchase huge holdings from the crown, a policy continued under the republic” (Katzman 287). Hennessey notes that “concentration of ownership was not so much a legacy of the colonial period as a consequence of redistribution in the first decades of independence. Where there was no strict policy for occupation it was possible for individuals to buy up huge expanses of public domain at knock‑down prices. Although this was often made conditional on effective use, there was in fact no method of enforcement. The attempts of governments dominated by landowners to control frontier lands were designed to head off colonization and to discourage the flight of labour from poorly paid sharecropping” (Hennessey 90).
In contrast, in the colonial South, long‑term speculation was inhibited by two restrictions on land tenure: the payment of quit‑rents and requisite development within three years of at least part of the tract. If land were left undeveloped for more than three years, the land would “lapse” and could be claimed by another patentee. Although there is very little evidence of anyone losing their lands due to these two restrictions as long as the land had not been abandoned, the record shows that most quit‑rents were paid and much lapsed land was re‑patented in Virginia during the late seventeenth century (Baird 35‑52). Land speculators were interested in taking advantage of the patent system and then selling for a quick profit, not buying land already patented by another speculator and holding for further speculation. In the colonial Chesapeake new land patents quickly led to land sales (Kelly 190; Clemens 72). In the antebellum South, “the principal object of most of the [land] investors was rapid turnover” (Young 101). Gavin Wright confirmed a significant correlation between new land sales and increases in cotton production (1971,114‑115).
Warren Dean finds that, in 19th century Brazil, there was so little effective reform of land ownership, despite noble efforts, due to “the difficulty of reform from within a political system dominated by the landed elite” (Dean 606).
Where land was distributed by cabildos dominated by landowners, the pattern of ownership remained unbalanced. Grants made by the bureaucracy could restore the balance but with the eighteenth‑century increase in population the number of poor Spaniards and mestizos, squatting or renting increased. These peasants either farmed their minifundios for subsistence or were forced to sell their products to the local latifundista to whom many owed labour services as part of their rent. It was as difficult to attract European peasants avid for land ownership to migrate into such a social system as it would have been to expect them to migrate to a slave society. (Hennessy 89‑90)
But Latin America was not one solid unit. Where there were regional exceptions to land acquisition, the social relations of production also differed. Individual landowners, railway companies, private land companies, and national governments, who recognized that “the value of their land would increase with crop‑farming,” instigated colonization projects (Hennessy 91). In the province of Santa Fe in Argentina, land “could be bought by an industrious peasant in four or five years” (Hennessy 91), which is about as long as an indentured servant had to serve in the colonial South. In Antioquia in Colombia, where the people were called the “‘yankees of South America,'” “with no traditions of labour intensive agriculture, and lacking a landowning tradition, the miner‑merchant elite had little incentive to try to close off the frontier to settlement. On the contrary, settlement was encouraged in order to establish cattle and coffee farms…Antioquia was a rare case in Latin America of a frontier producing a rural middle class” (Hennessy 97).
Overall, though, the early colonization schemes in temperate parts of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile were unlikely to succeed even with government support, and attempts in tropical climates were doomed from the start (Hennessy 93). Scobie shows that the Argentinian government never gave proper direction to any immigration policy and that colonization efforts failed because most simply wanted to use the immigrants to settle on marginal land or land still threatened by Indian attack. Planters were too obsessed with pastoral interests and land speculation to worry about long‑term development of the Argentinian economy (31). “[T]he pastoral interests accepted the agriculturalist as a servant only in order to open up new lands and plant new pastures,” constantly moving him from plot to plot to make way for cattle and sheep (Scobie 47). “[T]he economics of increased land values and a society of pastoral and class traditions denied them [these dependent agriculturalists] ownership of that land. The result was pampas without settlers‑‑a frontier filled with migrants” (Scobie 53).
In the early colonial years, Brazil lacked a systematic land grant policy and squatting was the general rule. From the point of view of the Crown, “it has been suspected that the vagueness of the grants was as deliberate as their extensiveness. The Brazilian planters were thereby kept busy plotting against each other rather than against the crown” (Dean 607). Squatters had land rights “embodied in a series of Portuguese dispositions protecting effective cultivators of the soil from eviction” (Stein 11). But the “irresistable advance of the coffee bush” changed Brazil from “an era of contemplation of virgin forest to one of bitter defense of each yard of land” (Stein 12). In this “tooth and fang economy,” to use Marshall Harris’s phrase, the only land policy was “Might makes right.” Gunmen were hired to murder the competition (Dean 611) and revolts and rebellions were endemic (Dean 615). Nevertheless the squatters could not long compete with the planters, lawyers, and politicians all lined up against them. Eventually the squatters were kicked off the land only to linger on as aggregados (non‑rent paying subsistence tenants), overseers, and laborers (Stein 57).
Undoubtedly, the land policy in the early American South did not satisfy everybody. Indeed, Edmund Morgan attributes the main source of Bacon’s rebellion in colonial Virginia in 1676 to anger over land engrossment by the great planters (218‑221). But an analysis of land acquisition in colonial Virginia reveals that land was continually available in the older sections as well as along the frontier, and there was never any impediment to acquiring new land (Baird 35‑52). In the antebellum South, Mary E. Young found that “the federal government made a consistent practice of offering more land for sale each year than could possibly be purchased” (174). Overall examining the entire early American South, Lewis C. Gray concludes “the various land policies did not seriously restrict the supply of land, although in time inertia of population and the tendency toward engrossment caused the better lands in older settled districts to appear scarce” (1:403). Like Turner, Harris finds that “the frontier economy apparently was an important influence in liberalizing the tenure structure during Colonial times, and in the maintenance and further liberalization of those principles when decisons had to be made at the time of the emergence of our land tenure system” (363‑364). As long as land was available on the frontier and in marginally profitable areas for a fixed small price, land prices could not become exorbitant and a family farm was within the reach of the vast majority of white southerners.
For those who could not afford the minimum capital cost to hew a farm out of the wilderness, there was always tenancy. In a family farm region, as Katzman describes the American North, there is no “permanent rural proletariat or tenantry. Dependent workers tend to be individuals who work a few years to accumulate enough savings to purchase their own farm” (279). Those who have studied the plantation South have found that southern tenantry worked very similarly. In a most thorough study of antebellum tenancy in Georgia, Bode and Ginter concluded that “tenancy makes land available, particularly to those, such as youngers sons,who have not the capital to purchase” (6). Indeed, “since most forms of tenancy require relatively low levels of capital allocation when compared with slave or free white hired labor under direct management, some form of tenancy was therefore a preferred choice on those lands that were either poorly adapted to staple production and therefore to high capital returns or that required substantial new clearance” (Bode 182).
Finally, as in Latin America, there was always squatting. The study of squatting in the early American South is a terribly neglected subject. Although the English colonies made land available at reasonable prices, the abundance of land and and inefficiencies of the land system made squatting a distinct alternative. In colonial America, the exact status of squatters was uncertain although the colonial records are filled with “de facto” recognition of land tenure based on occupation and use. “Among the settlers themselves, pending official approval, custom recognized such claims as ‘tomahawk right,’ ‘corn rights,’ and other criteria of preemption” (Gray 1:392). However, unlike Latin America, the status of squatters improved with time. After the Revolution, many states passed laws recognizing preemption rights. “For a number of years there were official attempts to eject and punish squatters, but for the most part they were interlopers only as a legal fiction. The tendency was for officials to accept the facts of occupancy and improvement, however irregularly and informally accomplished. From 1801 to 1841 eighteen special preemption acts were passed recognizing claims of squatters in various parts of the public domain…In 1841 the policy was made a permanent part of the land system” (2:634).
So we see that both the English and Portuguese crowns sought a colonial mercantile system that would generate the greatest revenues for the crowns, but where the English crown promoted small landholders, the Iberian crowns promoted great landholders. These colonial land policies were continued well past the colonial era in both regions. These policy decisions had relatively little to do with the “staple” economy for they were decided before any staple had even been discovered. Such decisions on land tenure policy were due mostly to the legal, political, and cultural norms of the metropolis. And whereas the Iberian governments basically left land policy in the hands of the colonial aristocracy, the initial immigration to the English colonies created a substantial number of small farmers who balanced the power of the planter elite.
North and South: Economic Context versus Social Context
So if social context dictates land tenure, why the difference in South and North, in both Brazil and the United States? Why did family farm societies arise on the frontiers of the more temperate regions of Brazil and the United States, but plantation societies on the frontiers of the more tropical regions? The answer to this question is equivalent to why forced labor existed in the more tropical regions and not in the temperate regions, because frontier plantations existed where a forced labor supply was available. Inevitably, although other forms of forced labor were important, the introduction of African slavery explains the origins of the great plantations.
Simply put, within Latin America, the different social contexts as reflected in differing land tenure policies determined the differences in the effect of the frontier. As has been shown, Latin America was not one solid unit; when land was generally available, small family farms flourished. For Brazil, different land policies in tropical and temperate regions reflected changing economic conditions. The temperate regions just were not fully developed until the late nineteenth century after the abolition of slavery when the focus had shifted to encouraging European immigrant laborers. In Brazil, the effect of the Law of September 18, 1850 shows exactly how much difference a change in policy can make. Designed to promote smallholding and colonization by Europeans, the bill included “an initial fund of 200,000 milreis to subsidize immigration.” “[B]y the end of the Empire the crown had given nearly a third of the Province of Santa Catarina, and large areas of Rio Grande do Sul and Parana, to colonization companies. European immigration, which had averaged about five hundred a year before 1850, grew to 4,400 in 1851, and 20,000 by 1859.
The efforts of the General Bureau of Public Lands, and of the commission within the Ministry of Agriculture which succeeded it, guaranteed these colonists secure titles and a reasonable prosperity” (Dean 622‑623). Free immigration and model land laws created small family farms (Nicholls 60). Taking into account restricted access to land in Argentina, social context also explains the different modes of wheat production in Argentina and the Northern United States.
Social context is primary but, within any social context, economic context takes predominance. Although there were attempts to establish alternative settlement systems in many colonies, overall there was little difference in land tenure policy between North and South, in either the colonial era or the later federal era. Gavin Wright presents a picture of the South much different from the plantation myth. “In every part of the Cotton South one could find slave‑using cotton farms, and in every section one could find small slaveless farms, many of which grew little or no cotton” (1978,23). “If we compare the median improved acreage of farms in the cotton belt with that of farms in the Northern United States [in 1860], we find surprisingly little difference. In an older state like Ohio, the typical farm was actually somewhat larger than the typical farm in the small‑farm regions of the Cotton South” (1978,25). What was different between North and South was the presence of some very large plantations in the South.
There was no differing social context over slavery between North and South in the colonial era. “Land‑labor conditions were intially similar in all of the colonies, as were attitudes toward profit‑making and slavery” (Wright 11). Slaves were present in all the colonies. Menard shows that if the supply of indentured servants had been sufficient, slavery probably would probably not have flourished in the South. Planters “seem to have preferred servants, or perhaps more accurately, they were reluctant to exchange laborers they were used to for workers who were unfamiliar and, doubtless to some, frightening…it was only after blacks had come to predominate among bound labor that planters expressed a clear preference for slaves” (373‑374). Undoubtedly the preference of European immigrants for more temperate climates contributed to the absence of voluntary immigration to both the more tropical regions of the colonial South and Latin America. Thus planters in tropical regions in need of additional labor were forced to turn to slavery.
For all of the economic analysis paid to plantations and slavery, nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain why slavery did not flourish in the North. Earle focuses on the difference in daily labor demands between “plantation crops” like tobacco and “non‑plantation crops” like small grains. For plantation crops, “the frequent and even demands for labor invariably drove up wage labor costs beyond slave costs. By contrast, broadcast grains such as wheat demand labor in concentrated applications…The economically rational antebellum wheat farmer almost always employed wage labor because the few days of labor required times the daily wage rate usually fell below the cost of slaves” (1976,54‑55). But Earle, as Anderson and Gallman demonstrate (24‑46), ignores the alternative uses slaves could be put to when not tending the main staple and the absence of independent wage labor in most plantation areas.
However, such fine farm‑level analysis examines only the demand side of a supply‑demand equation. Ultimately, to explain why slavery never flourished in the North, such demand‑side agricultural economics must be examined within the context of the supply‑side economics of an international slave market with a limited supply of slaves. Put simply, slavery never flourished in the North because northern agriculture could not compete for slave labor with the more profitable sugar, tobacco, and rice plantations to the south. “North American colonies had to buy African slaves on a world market at prices which reflected the high profitability of slavery in the sugar colonies of the West Indies. For this reason, despite the underlying similarity on factor proportions, slavery expanded only in areas where profitable export staples were available” (Wright 11). “There was no inherent incompatability between slavery and Northern climes and crops; it was strictly a matter of relative returns” (12). The supply‑restricted slave trade could only meet a fraction of the insatiable demand for labor in the New World.
Northern ideology followed northern economics, as the “market‑determined difference of the eighteenth century became a legal and political distinction in the nineteenth century” (Wright 12). It is doubtful whether the average northern farmer would have come to look upon slavery as evil if slavery would have been generally profitable in the North. Carville Earle notes, for example, “the strength of slavery sentiment among tobacco‑producing Quakers on Maryland’s western shore” (1976,56n).
But economic context did not always rule out slavery as uneconomical in the North. The midwestern staple economy underwent major changes in the decades before 1860. “The wheat staple suffered from disease and humidity, particularly in the south central tier of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and as wheat became less attractive, the southern demand for hogs and pork encouraged a corn‑hog staple economy. Wheat was supplemented and then displaced by these new regional staples” (Earle 61). “By the mid‑1850’s, slave labor probably was less costly than free labor in the production of corn, a multiple‑day crop [compared to wheat, a few‑day crop]. To make matters worse, slaves had long since mastered the techniques of corn production, and they employed these in Kentucky, just across the river from freedom” (Earle 62).
Clearly only the anti‑slavery social context blocked the introduction of slavery into the Midwest. Yet the changing economic context led to “an acceleration of proslavery advocacy and legislation emanating from the central and lower midwestern corn region during the 1840’s and 1850’s.” The midwestern states abolished slavery by referenda in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, reognizing the de facto economic sense of free labor in a wheat economy. But any institution eliminated by referenda could equally be reinstalled by referenda (Earle 62). According to Earle, the threat of slavery in the Lower Midwest inevitably led to the Civil War and the move to abolish slavery once and for all as the archnemesis of free labor and a free society. “Corn culture, rising wages, and incipient slavery in the Lower Midwest had brought the nation to its great impasse” (65). However, Earle finds that, proslavery advocates and abolitionists alike, “all subscribed to and acted on the same set of economic principles. The thesis that moral superiority motivated antislavery northerners must be shown for what it is: a comfortable liberal myth which obviates examination of the basic amorality of the antebellum American economic system” (65).
Earle’s explanation of the events leading up to the Civil War fits in very well with the theoretical framework used in this paper and could easily be empirically verified in a more rigorous hypothesis test. However, such a test would still leave some important questions about northern society unanswered. In my comparative study of Latin America, it seemed fairly easy to identify a single source from which changes in social context emanated. But in the highly pluralistic northern United States, it seems very difficult to determine whether there was even any change in social context, let alone the source of that change. A decentralized democratic polity, not the metropolis, determined the social context. How such a process worked seems crucial to understanding the social context. Clearly social context prevented the introduction of slavery into the Midwest, even before conditions of favorable economic context. Did a “real” change in economic and social context occur, or was this all just political squabbling within one economic and social context? If social context truly changed, what were the key factors‑‑a true subsistence crisis, external cultural influences, Dobrowolski’s “deep human craving for new and better forms of social life” (262), or a host of other factors too numerous to mention? How did all of this affect other northern and southern states? Answers to these questions, which lie beyond the scope of this paper, are crucial to understanding the nature of the relationship between economic and social context in the early American North and South and the extent to which the two regions diverged.
A Malthusian Interpretation of the Early American South
Within a general economic context imbedded in a social context, a combination of economic and demographic variables tend to drive human behavior. Many early American historians would accept this general framework but would argue over whether either economic variables or demographic variables predominated. Each interpretation carries a significantly different behavioral implication. The “Malthusian” model, focusing on demographic variables, claims that “farmers were not much concerned with profit, that their principal interests were subsistence and the long‑term security of the farm, that they did not try to maximize production of cash crops and marketed only their surplus, that they avoided risk and were suspicious of innovations.” The “staples” model, focusing on economic variables, counters that “farmers were latent entrepeneurs, willing to take risks and accept innovation, who found their drive for profits frustrated by high factor prices, primitive technologies, poor transportation networks, and weak markets” (McCusker and Menard, 298). Much evidence supports both interpretations (Baird 5‑19). However, a recent econometric study of land acquisition in the colonial Chesapeake led to rejection of the staples model in favor of the Malthusian model (Baird 87). Although both models have a certain intuitive appeal and much more testing is required, I believe that the Malthusian model will prove superior and, when fully developed, will allow historians to write a unified history of pre‑industrial America.
The Malthusian interpretation of farmer behavior has obvious implications for the application of peasant studies to the early American South. Again, employing Friedmann’s framework, Malthusian farmers were clearly peasants and not simple commodity producers. The Malthusian model also draws in my theory of human behavior, formalist theory on satisficing, and Wilkinson’s theory on cultural evolution. “America, with its vast reserves of unsettled land and unknown resources, was regarded as providing an unlimited supply of all the natural resources people needed” yet Wilkinson still “locates resource shortages at the center of the [American] developmental process” (147).
To support his view, Wilkinson draws on Kenneth Lockridge’s identification of a population crisis in 18th century Massachusetts and Avery Craven’s analysis of soil erosion in the South. Yet, both of these views have been seriously questioned by historians who have found migration to the frontier acted as a “homeostatic mechanism” (Rutman 275). From the earliest days of colonization through the early 19th century, “although rapid natural increase created economic, social, and political difficulties, migration toward the frontier served to equilibrate the system” (Smith 15). Wilkinson claims that “things would have been all right if the land had been allowed to revert to forest after an initial period of cropping” (Wilkinson 164). But Carville Earle has shown that colonial farmers did just this, practicing what is called the “Chesapeake school of husbandry” and thus maintaining tobacco yields over time (1975,25). But such agricultural practices still depended on the migration of surplus labor to the frontier in order to avoid a genuine population crisis.
Wilkinson recognizes the importance of the frontier to the cultural evolution or, perhaps more correctly, the cultural stasis of America. “One of the important differences between the ecology of resource exploitation in America and the situation in more densely populated parts of the world, is that when things got bad in America people could migrate to new areas. They did not have to find a solution to their problems within the area: places could be left to die” (Wilkinson 164‑165). Migrants, constantly moving to new lands, were able to maintain their ecological equilibrium and avoid the subsistence crisis which leads to cultural evolution. Southern culture thus did not evolve as long as frontier lands existed and people were able and willing to migrate.
Eventually, however, erosion and resistance to migration did lead to some sort of population crisis in the oldest regions of the South. In grand Malthusian tradition, “the general course of American agricultural development follows a predictable pattern if we accept that it was basically a process of adopting more onerous intensive techniques as the land to population ratio became less favourable” (Wilkinson 168). Although there has been very little study of such agricultural intensification in the early American South, what studies that have been done tend to confirm Wilkinson’s observation. (See for example Merrens 147; Marks 113‑125; Goldfield 238‑239; Gray passim.)
Southern Peasant Society
Gavin Wright offers one of the best analyses of the Southern family farm, moving beyond the transition to capitalism debate to try to understand the behavior of both planter and farmer in their own context. Wright finds little evidence for economies of scale in the cotton South, but stresses that the plantation and slavery, even in the face of no economies of scale, was not based on “cultural, psychological, or other noneconomic motives.” Instead Wright traces the origins of the slave plantation to “the barriers to expansion faced by free family farms” (Preface xii). “The overriding economic fact of life in early America was the extreme difficulty farmers encountered in hiring non‑family labor with which to expand their operations…farms were dispersed broadly over the countryside, population density was low, information channels were slow, and farm labor markets were at best highly imperfect if they existed at all” (Wright 45). “A fundamental feature of slavery was that it provided an elastic supply of labor to the individual farm, allowing indefinite expansion even at a constant efficiency or constant returns to scale” (55).
“The essential reason for the scarcity of farm labor is that farmers preferred farm ownership and were able to attain it. Most farmers owned more land than they could cultivate efficiently themselves; hence they had little reason to hire themselves out to others part‑time” (Wright 45). As shown by Bode and Ginter, because of the limitations of the Parker‑Gallman sample, Wright underestimates the importance of tenancy in the antebellum South. But Bode and Ginter’s general support of Owsley’s findings, and their focus on the importance of tenancy as a capital accumulation stepping stone to eventual farm ownership, lend credence to Wright’s analysis of the South.
But Wright eliminates all of the romantic notions of Kulikoff’s “yeomen.”
It does no justice to the thinking of free households to attribute the preference for owner‑operated family farms to an irrational desire for ‘independence’ or an attachment to family farming ‘as a way of life.’ However prevalent such ‘nonpecuniary’ motivation might be, there were good economic reasons as well. The family farm provided a substantial measure of security‑‑against starvation, unemployment, or old‑age destitution. In an era of undeveloped and risky financial institutions, the family farm provided a means of accumulating wealth in a reasonably safe form…At the same time, family farming combined security with the possibility of large financial gains through an increase in land values. As Danhof writes: “Speculation of this nature was nearly universal…If large capital gains were by no means assured, the risks of loss were relatively small. (Wright 46‑47)
Concomitant with this “safety‑first” concept of a family farm was a conservative approach to agricultural production. Antebellum southern farmers did not maximize profits by producing capacity levels of cotton (Wright 62). Southern farmers were satisficers, not maximizers. “Why should farmers not maximize profits? The farmers themselves would have thought the question absurd: they well knew that the results of their decisions were highly uncertain, and in the context of uncertainty, only a fool or a rich man could safely maximize expected profits in the Cotton South” (62‑63). Wright demonstrates that cotton was the riskier crop “not because the physical output of cotton was less certain than that of corn‑‑a question on which opinions differed‑‑but because using cotton as a means of meeting food requirements involved the combined risks of cotton yields, cotton prices, and corn prices” (64).
Stein finds in Vassouras exactly the food crisis that southerners wished to avoid in the antebellum era. “Before the early 1850’s both large coffee planters and small agriculturalists had grown foodstuffs for personal consumption, with the surplus going to the local markets” (Stein 47). But deforestation and a “diminishing supply of labor” led to greater concentration on cash crops and declining self‑sufficiency. “The slightest variation in their harvests forced them to turn to the formerly bountiful local market,” and inevitably a bad harvest drove food prices sky high (Stein 47‑48).
But not all farms and farmers in the early American South were the same. Wright shows that both slaveholders or farmers with greater personal wealth (perhaps one and the same) were more willing to risk a much larger fraction of their resources to the production of the cash crop (55,67‑69). And most farmers aspired to become slaveowners. Wright finds no inconsistency between a desire for self‑sufficiency and a desire for slaves and cotton fields (71). “Safety‑first behavior may not be an indication of restricted vision or a lack of interest in improved standards of living; to the contrary, the last thing an ambitious young farmer would want to do (if he had the choice) is to place in jeopardy his clear farmownership, his independent decision‑making capacity, his room for maneuver. Perhaps the strongest evidence for this interpretation is that we observe a crop‑mix continuum, not a sharp division between subsistence farms and staple‑growing plantations” (70‑71). Wright finds that similar hedging between market and subsistence behavior existed in the antebellum North.
Self‑sufficiency and farm ownership make the concept of class divisions between great planters and small farmers difficult to apply. “The small farm..had comparatively few direct economic relations with the plantations‑‑certainly nothing comparable to the relationship of employer and worker in the North” (Wright 39). Although the South was no “economic democracy” in terms of wealthholding, “there is nothing in this evidence to justify a claim of planter domination of the small farmers in the sense of exercise of power or control” (Wright 39).
James Oakes’s analysis of slaveholders, large and small, supports Wright’s conclusions on a farmer‑planter continuum. “[D]espite huge disparities of wealth, it is futile to locate clearly delineated boundaries between slaveholders and non‑slaveholders, just as it is difficult to draw simple numerical distinctions between small slaveholders and planters” (67). Historians have typically identifued planters as holders of twenty or more slaves. Oakes questions this arbitrary distinction of planters as a special breed of slaveholder. Although planters held a bare majority of the slaves, four‑fifths of slaveholders were not planters. “[M]ovement in and out of the slaveholding class may have been the rule rather than the exception for the majority of masters” (Oakes 40). “Most slaveholders spent their lives defying the statistical boundaries historians so emphatically establish. Masters commonly entered the slaveholding class from the yeomanry, they moved from the ranks of the small slaveholders into the middle class, and if they were lucky, they crossed from one definition of planter to the next in predictable patterns” (52). A slaveholding culture “developed from historical conditions that were only in part related to the ownership of slaves and only minimally associated with plantation agriculture. The dominant slaveholding culture grew out of the colonial expereince in America and embraced the diversity of southern society. It took form in the rapidly expanding slave economy of the antebellum period and so produced a world view that equated upward mobility with westward expansion” (68).
Wright’s analysis supports to a great degree Frank Owsley’s conclusions about the southern society. To Owsley, the “plain folk” were no “formless mass” and “not class conscious in the Marxian sense, for with rare exceptions they did not regard the planters and men of wealth as their oppressors. On the contrary, they admired them as a rule and looked with approval on their success; and they assumed, on the basis of much tangible evidence, that the door of economic opportunity swung open easily to the thrust of their own ambitious and energetic sons and daughters” (Owsley 133). “The abundance of cheap land, the generally high prices received for farm products and livestock, and the rapidly developing political democracy were the principal means of keeping the economic door unlocked” (Owsley 134). Other “important forces that diminished the feeling of class stratification and helped in the creation of a sense of unity between the plain folk and the aristocracy” included “the association of rich and poor in all religious activities and in the schools, the frequent ties of blood kinship between them, and the generally folkish and democratic bearing of the aristocracy” (Owsley 134). Many other Southern historians, from Wilbur J. Cash to Bertram Wyatt‑Brown, have emphasized the intricate kinship links between planters and farmers.
One unfortunate omission in Wright’s analysis concerns the importance of geographical mobility to the maintenance of the family farm. Although he recognizes that “the migration of cotton and slaves was not a mindless east‑west movement from exhausted to virgin soils, but a rational process of geographical expansion and relocation which continued along similar lines well after the war” (Wright 17) and that “the overall pattern of stability depended on continued access to good cotton land in the newer regions,” (Wright 33) he never tries to explain what drove this process and how it affected the family farm. Exactly how does a conservative “safety‑first” mentality jive with such a radical move as moving across a continent in search of better land. Most economic historians, including Wright himself, who have examined new land acquisition in the antebellum South have concentrated on a “staples” interpretation and economic factors. However, my own research on land acquisition in the colonial Chesapeake and Wright’s own model of the family farm make a Malthusian interpretation, concentrating on demographic factors, a much more believable interpretation.
Wright’s analysis fits very well within both the formalist peasant and comparative frontier theoretical frameworks developed in this paper and refutes Kulikoff’s impression of an exceptional American yeoman class. Wright’s farmer‑planter continuum is essentially the same as Ortiz’s traditional‑progressive peasant continuum and, indeed, essentially the same as Keith Wrightson’s English husbandman‑yeoman continuum. Planters were merely the peasant elite, Ortiz’s more progressive peasants with outside reference groups (perhaps English aristocrats or Northern merchants) withdrawing away from the tradtional community. There were no superordinate relationships within the southern peasant community, although there were definite inequalities. This framework also carries significant implications for the analysis of the southern household using the analogy of the patriarchal peasant household. Further refinement of the comparative peasant framework would help develop a greater understanding of many other aspects of the early American South on which historical sources are rather mute.
Harriet Friedmann clearly aligns the southern family farm described in this paper with a particular form of “peasant” production that she calls “independent household production” which “resists commoditisation” presupposing “a context of land availability.” “[G]iven appropriate social and natural conditions, the absence of pressure on land allows for subsistence production, usually with village organisation, even when commodities are produced” (176). Although helpful, Friedmann’s framework is not consonant with the formalist framework adopted in this paper. Friedmann’s peasant household “whose reproduction occurs through communal and particularistic class relations” does not really describe the southern peasant household. The southern peasant community was considerably weaker than a traditional peasant community and much more organized around the self‑sufficiency of the individual household and class relations played a negligible role. Neither the simple commodity producers who “are in competition and cannot withdraw from the market” (164) nor the peasants who “typically do not relate even to product markets individually and competitively” (165) reflect the Southern peasant farmer. In many ways, Friedmann’s peasant‑simple commodity producer dichotomy presents the same problems as Kulikoff’s yeoman‑capitalist dichotomy, problems that disappear if one accepts a continuum of economic behavior.
There are other problems with Friedmann’s framework. For Friedmann, peasant economies exist under conditions of high immobility of factors of production, but simple commodity production and capitalist economies exist under conditions of high mobility of the same factors. (163) The question is what is high? Is there no middle ground between high mobility and high immobility? Would the tremendous geographical mobility of the peasant household itself constitute high mobility of factors of production?
Unlike peasants, Friedmann’s “simple commodity producers have improved productivity of agriculture, adjusted birth rates in response to changing economic conditions…, and responded to reduced labour requirements in agriculture by moving in great numbers into other sectors and regions. While the last may be painful for individuals and families, it is part of the logic of labour mobility in capitalist social formations, and the very opposite of underdevelopment” (Friedmann 175). Since, in support, she quotes Richard Easterlin’s article on “Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States,” she is claiming that antebellum Northern family farmers were simple commodity producers. But Easterlin also states that “while the American South had its distinctive features, the process of settlement, including the decline in white fertility, has many similarities to that in the North” (Easterlin 73). Friedmann is obviously trying to create a place for 20th century Midwest wheat farmers within a peasant framework but ends up creating an unnecessary dichotomous polarization between family farmers, North and South.
An Alternative Framework
However, I do not feel that Friedmann’s framework should be simply dismissed. Indeed, I feel a framework combining elements of Friedmann’s Marxist approach with Ortiz’s formalist approach provides a strong analytical scalpel for dissecting both of the major topics addressed in this paper: the socioeconomic structure of the early American South and the transition to capitalism. As I understand both Ortiz’s and Friedmann’s frameworks, they can be presented graphically as in Figure I. I believe that these frameworks represent only two of an infinite number of alternative routes in the transition to capitalism. Firstly, we must realize that all of the categories presented here‑‑traditional peasant, progressive peasant, simple commodity producer, capitalist‑‑are ideal types and do not exist in any pure form in reality. Assignment of any “real” person to any of these categories blurs socioeconomic realities. Divisions between the categories will always be rather arbitrary.
I believe a strong case can be made for a theoretical framework presented in Figure II. “Self‑sufficiency” reflects the degree to which the social reproduction of the household was independent of the market. For the transition from peasant to simple commodity producer, Friedmann calls this “resistance to commoditisation,” defining “commoditisation” “as the proportion of goods purchased at market determined prices for productive and personal consumption over time” (174). Although Friedmann helps define the concept more specifically, I have trouble with her definition because she does not specify her proportion fully. If the proportion is to total goods employed in productive and personal consumption, what standard unit of measure are we to employ: market prices or some sort of arbitrary measure of use‑value? Obviously, any more specific definition will be subject to similar reservations, but I believe that an empirically measurable proxy for “self‑sufficiency” can be developed with further research.
The definition of “profit orientation” is left even more vague because there are many ways to define this concept. A Marxist economist might focus of labor exploitation and surplus appropriation whereas a neo‑classical economist might focus on corn‑cotton ratios. As identified by Gavin Wright, assuming a certain level of self‑sufficiency, profit orientation is the degree to which household production is expanded beyond the basic needs for social reproduction. This could also be the degree to which “exchange values” replace “use values.” For the transition from simple commodity producer to capitalist, Friedmann does not specify a standard of measure but simply notes the unimportance of profit to the simple commodity producer.
Friedmann and Ortiz trace two different pathways to capitalism. Both Friedmann’s simple commodity producer and Ortiz’s progressive peasant represent transitional characters caught between two worlds. The pathway being followed in the early American South is Ortiz’s pathway from traditional peasant to progressive peasant to capitalist. The small farmer dependent strictly on family labor, not terribly profit‑oriented, selling his cotton more for its use value than its exchange value, fits the picture of the traditional peasant. The slave‑owning farmer aspiring to be a great planter or the great planter himself, still maintaining a self‑sufficient household production, increasingly profit‑oriented in his business, selling his cotton for its exchange value in order to pursue further investments, fits the picture of the progressive peasant.
Over time there exists a general shift from traditional to progressive peasant behavior that comes with increasing integration into the market. But, of most interest to the transition to capitalism debate, under what conditions will these peasants become capitalist farmers? Obviously capitalism demands even greater integration into the market and also greater specialization in cash crops. But before farmers will specialize, the market in food crops must become fully developed, both regular in its supply and price, so that farmers can rationally opt out of the self‑sufficient mode of production. In the South, such markets were undeveloped in the colonial and antebellum eras.
But even with development of markets, peasants will resist abandoning the traditional system of agriculture. In the evolutionary approach adopted in this paper, only a subsistence crisis will generally lead to such a change in cultural norms. In Friedmann’s framework,
population growth, state intervention, or other factors may change the social conditions of reproduction of independent households. The mechanism of pressure on reproduction is insufficiency of land allowing for direct subsistence. Given the absence of a historic landed class, pressures on land tend to lead to the incorporation into reproduction of relations with merchant captial or usury capitalor both. For merchant capital, this should lead to commoditisation, if conditions within the social formation also foster the development of factor markets. (177)
Such changes would probably drive traditional peasants in the direction of simple commodity production and progressive peasants towards capitalist production. Such changes, however, did not occur before the Civil War due to the general availability of land in the early American South.
Conclusions
This paper has developed a new framework for examining the transition to capitalism question which combines elements from both formalist and Marxist theories of the peasantry. I have shown how, in conjunction with “staples” and “Malthusian” theories of economic growth and development, this framework can explain the social relations of production in the early American South. Analyzing the concentration on self‑sufficiency of both southern farmers and planters, I find little polarization between the two groups, but rather a continuum of behaviors between “traditional” farmers and “progressive” planters. Under the social context occurring in the British colonies and in the United States, formalist theory of the peasantry explains early American southern behavior quite well. My analysis supports the general belief that the transition to capitalism did not occur in the South until after the Civil War. Hopefully this new theoretical framework should help focus the examination of the post‑bellum era to identify more precisely how the transition to capitalism did occur.
To avoid the inherent problem of “American exceptionalism,” I have rejected Kulikoff’s use of the “yeoman” concept in favor of a comparative “peasant” approach. The anthropological concept of the “peasant” has become substantially more sophistiated than the traditional association of peasantry with pre‑market feudalism. Indeed, this “peasant” concept provides an important theoretical link for the study of rural peoples in all places and all times. Likewise, comparative frontier studies focusing on the availability of land show great promise as a tool for analyzing the social context of those rural peoples.
Low population density and general availability of land on the frontier played a major role in shaping this society, but only in the social context of a land tenure policy that assured accessibility to the land. Within the social context, the economic context best analyzed in “staples” theory helps to explain why certain modes of agricultural production developed, such as why slavery and cotton plantations flourished in the American South but free labor and family wheat farms in the American North. However, within the general social and economic context of early America, the “Malthusian” model and demographic factors help explain general economic growth and development. Traditional, non‑capitalist peasant farmers seeking household security responded much more to population pressures than to short‑term price fluctuations. In the early American South, there was little cultural evolution because tremendous geographical mobility prevented any genuine subsistence crisis. In this way, we can truly speak of an early American South, artificially divided by historians into a colonial era and an antebellum era.
Works Cited