DAILY LIFE IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC

LIFE ON THE LAND

From the beginning, the most urgent human need has been to produce enough food to sustain life. Only in the modern period has abundance made for surpluses of food that permit other human endeavors, for without enough food there can be no cities, no arts, no culture, no progress. The reality of this fundamental human necessity and the relatively recent conquest of it is attested to by the fact that most Americans during the early Republic were farmers. In 1790 approximately 90 percent of the population cultivated the land. Yet the remarkable agricultural advances that would become so much a part of the American story—advances that in the early twenty-first century would have about 3 percent of the American population supplying most of the world’s food—were already under way in the years following the American Revolution. In fact, the three decades after 1790 rank among the most extraordinary for agricultural advances. “Agriculture here assumes her most cheerful aspect,” a traveler earnestly reported.1
By 1820, about 72 percent of Americans were farming, still a remarkably high figure by today’s standards, but also marking a sharp decline during the preceding 30 years that would not be matched again until the next century. (During the next 20 years, for instance, progress slowed, so that in 1840, farmers still made up about 70 percent of the population.) The figures reveal that in the early Republic, Americans were employing significant mechanical advances in farming equipment and adopting innovative practices for the use of the land.

GROWING

Equipment and innovation aside, wherever and whenever growing things on the land has been practiced, it has always required four clearly defined steps: (1) soil preparation, (2) planting and tending, (3) harvesting, and (4) processing. In the beginning of all farming, there must be broken ground, and hardly anything is so physically demanding and tedious as preparing a field for planting. Changeless for centuries, the plow was the principal tool for turning the earth, and its design as well as the way it was pulled over the ground decided where farms would lie and how extensive they could be. Plows consisted of three basic parts: the blade that cut the earth was called the “plowshare”; the “moldboard” caught the broken soil and turned it away to create a furrow; and the “land side,” the flat surface opposite the moldboard, provided the plowshare with a firm grip on the soil.  Plowing appeared quite simple—it seemed that one need only direct the blade in a fairly straight line for the length of the field.  Actually, though, plowing required considerable skill, and the cruder the plow, the more astute the successful plowman needed to be. Setting too fast a pace caked up the moldboard and spoiled the furrow. Going too slow prevented the share from properly cutting the ground. Old hands claimed, with good reason before the days of standardization, that each plow had a different temperament, requiring a different pace and a different way of handling to work the soil well. Oxen were frequently used as dray animals, but the preferred work animal for plowing was eventually the mule. Mules had long been in North America when, in a famously generous gesture, the Marquis de Lafayette sent George Washington a pack of asses from the Mediterranean island of Malta. Washington bred them to produce mules at Mount Vernon, joining a growing number of farmers who judged the mule superior to any other working animal.  Given their tendency to kick, mules could be bad-tempered, but they were generally steadier than horses and rarely ran away. They thrived on the simplest diet of corn husks and straw, while horses could be finicky and preferred a varied menu. Mules were healthy and hardy, did not require much attention, and withstood physical injury with remarkable stoicism. Agricultural progress was closely tied to advances in plow designs and plowing methods, and important improvements occurred during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. As in many changes of the time, the Enlightenment played an important part in this process, because the Age of Reason did not concern itself only with political philosophy and intellectual inquiry. A strong practical bent emerged from Enlightenment thinkers whose contemplation of how to make the world more efficient encouraged them to apply systematic, mathematical principles to everything from rocking chairs to stovepipes.  Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, a true child of the Enlightenment, always regarded himself as a farmer as much as the world marked him a statesman, and many credit him with creating the first improved plow design in America. Though Jefferson’s plow was an advance—John Randolph, one of Jefferson’s enemies, acidly remarked that his plow was the only worthwhile idea he had ever had—his dream of it being produced on a large scale was never realized.

Instead plows were painstakingly hewn from wood on homesteads or, if the luxury of iron was available, pounded out, glowing red hot, under pinging hammers by leather-clad blacksmiths. Because iron was scarce and therefore costly, wood was used to fashion all but the working parts of plows until the eighteenth century. Plowshares and moldboards, the surfaces that cut and turned the soil, were frequently made of iron or at least had iron straps protecting a wooden base, but after the American Revolution, rising iron production meant the increasing appearance of entirely metal plows. The first U.S. patent for a cast-iron plow was granted in 1797 to Charles Newbold of New Jersey, whose design was a sturdy implement of one piece. Newbold’s plow, however, had limited appeal because it was both expensive and difficult to repair.  In fact, its one-piece design meant that damage to any part of the plow frequently rendered it useless. Sixteen years later, Baltimore inventor R. B. Chenaworth was selling a cast-iron plow with a removable plowshare, moldboard, and land side, a feature that facilitated replacement when parts were worn or damaged. In 1814 New Yorker Jethro Wood patented a similar plow with several additional improvements including superior and less expensive parts. Eventually Wood’s plow set the standard for the implement, and when Edwin Stevens discovered a way to make the plowshare more durable in 1817, Wood integrated the process in his 1819 design. Widespread use of the iron plow with interchangeable parts revolutionized farming during the early Republic. Like most machines, the plow was designed to allow more work to be accomplished by fewer people. In the South, the use of slave labor discouraged labor-saving innovations, so that hoeing and chopping persisted as the means to prepare soil for planting. Small southern farms tended to employ trowel-hoe plows and shovel plows.  The trowel-hoe broke ground by slicing a single trench rather than a furrow. The shovel plow, on the other hand, was a simple device resembling a large spade with handles. It did not so much cut the soil as scratch it to about a three-inch depth, a result that restricted its use to certain types of soil unless it was supplemented with hoe and ax. The shovel plow was popular on poorer farms because it did not require as much animal power or skill as moldboard plows, and cotton planters preferred it because they could use it to cross-plow while not producing the large chunks of earth the moldboard plow did. Even in the North, the American plow was lighter than its European counterpart. In part the difference stemmed from the American practice of regarding all innovations as temporary milestones on a path to something better. Utility was more important than sturdiness, and the lower cost of today’s less durable product was appealing when gauged against the belief that clever improvements would make something superior available tomorrow. In addition, American farmers only rarely needed heavy plows in soils that gave fine yields with shallow cuts and small furrows. Labor saving was the main object of improved plows, which were able to accomplish half again as much work as their predecessors using half the number of animals. As the size of farms increased and the need for animal power and human labor lessened, the limitations on production ceased to be a problem during the planting phase and instead emerged during the harvest season. Not until the advent of mechanical reapers in the 1840s would the harvesting problem be mastered, but the road to an amazing increase in food production began in these years with these humble but important American innovations to one of the world’s oldest farm implements. Moldboards slowly drawn over fields tended to leave large lumps of soil unsuitable for planting, so plowing was only the first stage in preparing the ground for seeding. Horses or mules then pulled a harrow over the ground to produce the right soil consistency. The harrow was simply a wooden frame with attached spikes or metal disks that could break up large clods. Occasionally farmers hitched heavy round logs on axles behind a horse to squash down furrows and break up small earthen chunks.
How one planted or seeded depended on the type of crop. Many plants require space for proper growth and to ease cultivation once they take form, but some general procedures applied to all. Using a hoe or a similar implement, the farmer opened holes in plowed furrows and placed seeds in them. Grass, grain, and some vegetable seeds were usually broadcast, literally strewn by hand in sweeping motions over broken ground and then later thinned or transplanted. Tobacco was planted this way in seedbeds for transplanting, a tedious and backbreaking chore. Corn planting went faster with two workers, one to work the hoe and the other to place a half-dozen seeds in the hole and close it with his heel to make a small hill. Hand corn planting devices—tubes that dispensed a measured amount of seeds—were occasionally used, but they did not solve the problem of covering the seed, so they were mainly employed in gardens rather than large open fields. Nonetheless the relatively large seeds in corn planting made them tempting candidates for mechanizing the seeding process, usually through the use of drills, which were in limited use after the Revolution. Jefferson, for example, experimented with seed drills in his fields at Monticello. Seed drills could be quirky tools, though, because they had to place a certain number of seeds in consistent patterns along set intervals. The slightest irregularity in the ground could disorder the machinery, and the occasional rock could damage it. The advantages of mechanical seeders were obvious in the diminished wastage and larger yields they produced, but during the early years of the Republic, farmers found them expensive and temperamental experiments rather than useful tools. Cultivation commenced once plants sprouted. It took different forms depending on the crop. Wheat, for instance, required little attention, while almost all other crops needed some degree of thinning and weeding. Depending on the availability of labor and the method of planting, weeding was done with hoes or plows during the growing season. The era knew nothing of pesticides, so insects were removed by hand. Some larger farms employed irrigation if near a source of water, but for most, rainfall was the main irrigator, and droughts could devastate a crop; several years of drought could destroy a farm. By far the greatest enemy of the American farm during the period was soil exhaustion caused by repeated overplanting. Fields worn out by such a practice were frequently deserted and allowed to return to native grasses. Farmers would put in “Mays [corn] as long as it will grow, perhaps to two or three crops: the land is then left to nature, and fresh land resorted to and worn out in its turn.”3
Conscientious farmers let fields lie fallow for one or two years and sometimes as long as four years. By the late eighteenth century, some were planting clover, a restorative plant, to refurbish fallow fields while providing pasturage for livestock. Most livestock roamed free, however, and manure was not widely used for fertilizer. Near coastal regions, diligent farmers applied fish and seaweed. Indian lore prescribed one fish per maize mound; seaweed was spread at a ratio of 10 loads per acre, usually every third year. In the South, the repeated planting of tobacco and cotton so rapidly depleted the soil that when yields declined, people tended to move west to settle on relatively cheap, fertile land.  These migrations resulted in tobacco culture spreading to the piedmonts of Virginia and North Carolina and cotton into the piedmont regions of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Writers like John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, encouraged soil conservation during this period, and some began early efforts at it, but the most important writings on the subject came after 1820. Meanwhile a few farmers experimented with lime, marl, and gypsum, but the abundance of land to the west and the ease of migration away from depleted farmsteads discouraged systematic and widespread efforts to sustain and replenish the soil.4
Climate, weather, and pests dictate farming techniques as much as soil conditions, and the natural rhythm of seasonal change made farming a strange mixture of the routine occasionally interrupted by the disagreeable and unexpected. The routines of spring planting, summer cultivation, and fall harvest were the constants, but sometimes things went awry. Wheat farmers in the mid-Atlantic states and New England were devastated by the invasion of the Hessian fly in 1797. In 1816 the weather turned bitterly cold and remained subnormal for several years afterward. People who lived through this peculiar chill referred to 1816 as the year without summer or, more colorfully, “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” Rather than merely diminishing the growing season, the climatic change almost eliminated it in New England when even the summer months experienced killing frosts.  The consequences rippled out like waves from a stone tossed in a pond: food shortages resulted, some farmers were ruined, and a westward exodus commenced to what migrants hoped would be more temperate climes. The cause for the abnormal cold was unknown to those afflicted by it, but we now know that a violent volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815 hurled so much debris into the air that the Earth cooled noticeably in the years following. All this is to say that farmers have always been hostages of fate even as they have always been reassured by the regularity of seasonal change. Just as the farmer can be sure that the sun will rise each day, he knows that the approach of autumn will require him to harvest and handle his crops, and much of his labor all year long is directed to that final, key process.
Harvesting requires speed, and new tools for reaping grain that appeared after the Revolution helped. For years, farmers had used sickles or scythes to cut grain. The sickle, with its dramatic arc and sharp blade, could cut grain stalks close to their tops, but the scythe’s tendency to smash grain usually restricted it to grass and hay cutting. Whatever the case, wielding these tools was difficult and exceedingly time-consuming work.  Near the end of the Revolutionary War, American farmers began harvesting grain with a device called the cradle. An imported European invention, the cradle was a scythe fastened to a wooden frame from which extended curved metal fingers set just above and back from the blade. Competently swept, or “thrown,” the implement sheared the wheat stalks into the fingers (hence “cradle”), from which the reaper could toss them to the ground for bundling into sheaves.

Americans could “mow four acres of oats, wheat, rye, or barley in a day,” marveled one observer, possibly with some exaggeration.5 Harvesting with a cradle was physically demanding but relatively fast, allowing a strong and experienced reaper to cut twice as much acreage in the same amount of time as someone wielding a sickle. Cradles, undergoing various improvements in design, would persist well into the nineteenth century as the preferred implement for reaping, until mechanical harvesters gradually began replacing them in the 1840s and 1850s. Cutting the grain was only the first step in harvesting. As the reaper threw the cradle, another worker followed with a hand rake to bind the stalks into sheaves that were in turn bundled together into shocks for drying in the field. The grain then had to be removed from husks by threshing. As the name indicates, threshing was long accomplished by simply beating (thrashing) the husks, and New England farmers who grew grain for their own food stores usually threshed it by striking it with flails.  Commercial growers in the mid-Atlantic region threshed their larger quantities by trampling it with livestock, a process called treading. Because the ground considerably dirtied treaded wheat, a better quality resulted from treading on platforms to produce cleaner and more expensive grain. The process used depended on the intended market, with southern farmers, whose wheat would be locally sold, using less costly ground treading. Large commercial operations aimed at international markets always used platforms.
The corn shock of stacked stalks with fat pumpkins resting in between has been emblematic of harvest season in America since the beginning of agriculture. Indians were planting pumpkins and corn to ripen together long before the first white settlers arrived. Corn’s high yield in proportion to acreage had always made it a staple of human and animal diets in America, yet planting, harvesting, and processing corn required considerable effort because everything had to be done by hand. Expensive and unreliable seed drills obliged the farmer to put in seeds by hand; at harvest time, he had to remove the ears from their stalks, husk their thick shucks, and remove their kernels, all by hand. Different techniques for harvesting corn either had harvesters shearing cornstalks or pulling the entire stalk from the ground, but whatever the method, the cornstalks had to be bunched into shocks in the open field for ripening and drying. When using corn for fodder, the farmer could pulverize the cob and the kernels together, but ideally corn was shelled from the cob. Some writers have suggested that the early use of seashells to scrape kernels from corncobs was the origin of “shelling” to describe the procedure. In the South, shucked corn was sometimes shelled by setting it on gapped shelving and flailing it with poles to beat the kernels from the cobs, but the method wasted a considerable amount of corn. Hand shellers used metal scrapers to rasp corn kernels from ears, a slow and tiresome chore that encouraged Americans to invent machinery for the job.  The simplest mechanical sheller was also the most enduring basic design. It comprised a set of drums with spiral teeth through which the ear was cranked, stripping off the corn along the way. Mechanical shellers tended to miss a portion of the corn by leaving the tapered ends of the cob untouched, but improved designs gradually diminished the waste, and shellers were slowly introduced in all parts of the country. Farmers in all regions made whiskey by distilling grains. Corn or rye in liquid form was frequently easier to transport across difficult terrain and fetched better prices. In remote western Pennsylvania, farmers even used whiskey as currency and thus were especially resentful when the new federal government levied a tax on it in the 1790s. The result was the notorious Whiskey Rebellion, which quickly dissolved when George Washington summoned militia to suppress the uprising.  The Whiskey Rebellion indicated, however, how widespread and important personal whiskey making was in the early Republic. The availability of West Indies molasses in New England ports encouraged rum making, and farmers everywhere distilled whiskey, gin, and brandy. An avid taste for spirits led to the creation of factory distilleries that provided an important market for farm commodities as well, as commercial distillers needed countless wagon loads of grain, potatoes, and apples. Distilleries could also profit by selling grain residue for animal fodder. By the same token, brewers created a demand for barley and hops that led some farmers in various parts of the country to devote extensive tracts to these crops.
For most of the colonial period, livestock on farms were a marginally domesticated lot of free-roaming animals that foraged for themselves. They were fenced out of crop producing fields and were periodically rounded up from open woods for slaughter. Pigs, for instance, ran free and were largely feral, such as the razorbacks that came to be associated with western areas. A traveler in Kentucky noted that “of all domestic animals, hogs are the most numerous.”6 Even large towns had marginally tame pig populations that roamed muddy streets and scavenged garbage-strewn back alleys, and it was true that the most omnipresent farm animals were pigs. Pork rather than beef was the much more prevalent dietary meat. Pigs ate anything, making them easy to sustain, but they were runty and stringy unless the farmer took care in feeding and finishing them. Successful pig growers supplemented garbage with beans, fruits, vegetables, and cornmeal.
Beech nuts were said to improve the taste of pork noticeably. Everyone grew poultry of all sorts, both for home consumption and for market. The woman of the house generally tended the poultry, and the socalled egg money she earned at the local farmers’ market helped meet household expenses. Chickens were most numerous, but geese and turkeys were plentiful also. Several times a year, women plucked goose feathers to stuff in bedding and mattresses and to sell for fashioning quill pens.
Improving roads saw the colonial oxcart gradually replaced by horse drawn carriages and wagons. New England in the 1790s was the origin of a particular breed of horse whose short, muscular legs and fast gait made it especially desirable. Named after Justin Morgan, the owner of the breed’s progenitor, a stallion named Figure, Morgan horses were sought out in New England and, with westward migrations, moved to newly settled regions as well. In due course, Kentucky, with its ample expanse of bluegrass, would establish itself as the premier horse-producing region in the country. Many New England farmers began raising sheep when they found they could no longer compete with the longer growing seasons and more fertile soils of western settlements. Sheep supplied both wool for local textile mills and mutton for the table. At the turn of the century, the introduction from Spain of long-staple Merino sheep rapidly transformed New England sheepherding into a major enterprise that encouraged investment in textile factories and contributed to making the region the nerve center of American manufacturing.
Eighteenth-century agricultural advances in fodder crops and the better understanding of how animal manure replenishes the soil promoted more vigilant animal husbandry, especially for sheep and dairy cattle. When properly tended, sheep could yield two to three pounds of wool per animal. Farmers in all regions began to pasture their cattle during the summer. The South’s warm climate allowed farmers to graze their animals in pastures throughout the winter as well, but by 1810, many southerners were emulating their northern neighbors in feeding their animals fodder in the colder months.
Dairy farmers took care to shelter their animals in stables, where they fed them hay, corn, and oats. As western migration increased after the War of 1812, newer and more fertile wheat-growing areas in the West encouraged eastern farmers to emphasize animal husbandry and boost dairy farming. As a consequence, hay production to increase stores of winter fodder became important. Farmers planted large stands of hay and rapidly harvested it in autumn with scythes, clearing as much as two acres per day. After drying on the ground, hay was raked up for use in the winter. Better grades of fodder produced better milk, so care went into the feeding of livestock, a routine called “finishing.”  Farmers forked fodder into feedlots or brought it into barns on carts to toss into stalls. It was commonly pitched onto the ground in both barns and stockyards, a practice that both wasted fodder and undernourished animals, but the custom remained in force through the middle of the nineteenth century. Virtually all dairy products were processed on farmsteads during the early Republic. Cows’ milk, drawn by hand, was transferred into tubs and stored in a relatively cool place, such as a cellar or an outbuilding called a springhouse, so named because it was situated over or near a stream (or spring). The brick floor of the springhouse usually had several inches of water diverted onto it, where the milk tubs sat while the fatty, lighter portions of the milk (cream) rose to the top. If the farmer desired whole milk, he let the cream sit on the top long enough to sour a little before skimming it off with a ladle; skim milk resulted from ladling off the cream sooner.
The springhouse did little more than slow the souring of milk and at best cooled it as a beverage to tepid temperatures. Butter was produced by churning cream, a laborious and lengthy procedure that was never done to whole milk. Instead farmers skimmed the cream and placed it into a churn, a tall, enclosed wooden vessel where the cream was agitated with a paddle to congeal it into butter. The farmer then placed the butter in a tub or a large cask called a firkin. Because subsequent churnings were added until the firkin was filled, farm butter varied greatly in quality; the oldest layer in the lowest part of the cask would be rancid, while the most recent on the top was relatively sweet.  Nothing was wasted, though: rancid butter could be used to coat milk curds as they ripened into cheese. Because the cream had reached some degree of sourness before churning, even the topmost butter had a strong tang that probably would not appeal to today’s palates. After 1810, commercial dairy farmers who produced butter for market had pioneered the use of sweet cream churned in large vessels that could hold many gallons at a time. These commercial churns were connected to treadmills or wheels powered by small animals, such as dogs. After the cream had turned to butter, it was set in large tubs or casks and covered, sometimes with cloth but usually with salt, and sealed to produce a consistently sweet butter. Nonetheless butter did not travel well in the absence of refrigeration or pasteurization (the process of heating and rapidly chilling to kill bacteria), and such advances were still decades away in 1820.  Consequently butter was a local product, and only places near dairy regions could regularly enjoy it. Cheese, on the other hand, profits from age and thus could travel far beyond the point of its creation without refrigeration. Cheese traveled so well that communities sometimes offered it in tribute to acclaimed events or people. In one celebrated episode, dairy farmers in the small Massachusetts town of Cheshire commemorated Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency by combining a single day’s milking of their thousand cows to make a giant cheese more than a yard across, almost two feet thick, and weighing about 1,200 pounds. A committee of Cheshire’s citizens transported this enormous cheese by wagon and boat to the new capital of Washington, where it was presented to Jefferson on New Year’s Day, 1802.
Cheese was sometimes made on farms by simply allowing milk to sour, a bacterial process that produces a thick precipitate (curd) and a watery residue (whey), which was removed. Cheese makers could speed curdling by heating the milk and adding rennet, the lining of a calf’s stomach. The curd was then salted, for taste and curing, and ladled into a cheese press, a barrel with a perforated bottom lined with cheesecloth. After weight applied to the top pushed out additional whey, the curd remained for two or three days in the barrel. It was then taken out of the press, placed in molds, smeared over with something to seal it, such as lard or sour butter, and stored in a cool place for ripening. Ripening took anywhere from weeks to several months, during which the curing cheese was occasionally turned. All the cheese types during this period were of European origin; Dutch Edam is said to have been the first.
Farmhouses were usually extremely simple frame or log cabins. More prosperous farmers might have clapboard houses, but they were rarely painted until later in the period, when the increasing manufacture of linseed oil made paint available as well as affordable. Farms obtained their water from wells with buckets or, if near a spring, from crude aqueducts fashioned by boring holes in logs.
All the tasks of farming were accomplished only by unremitting toil performed by many hands. In the North, if the farm was too large for the family to work, extra hands were hired. As in other trades, young boys could be apprenticed to farmers who would teach them how to farm while providing them with clothing and shelter. The apprentice was usually indentured to work under this arrangement until reaching 21 years of age, when he was released from his obligation, almost always leaving with gifts and money to help him make his start in the world.

The apprenticeship system could be cruel and exploitative, depending on the temperament and character of the master, but it could also be instructive and familial. In any case, at most the system prescribed a term of limited service that helped young men get a start rather than ensuring, as southern slavery did, that they would never have a chance. In contrast, bondage in the South not only offset the high labor demands of growing and tending crops but tainted honest labor with the brush of slavery, discouraging whites from working anywhere but on their own land. When hiring extra labor often proved too difficult or expensive for farmers who needed it only briefly, such as during a hectic season like the fall harvest or for specific chores like raising a barn, neighbors could band together for a “bee,” an event that underpinned a festive social gathering with hard work. The men labored, and the women cooked; after the task was completed, jugs were raised and hearty appetites satisfied in a ritual that fostered neighborly cooperation and encouraged reciprocal generosity. On the less settled, remote frontier and in poorer regions such as the marginal lands of the South, women might work alongside the men at all but the most physically demanding farming chores, although one observer in Kentucky noted that “women seldom assist in the labors of the field.”7 Women in more established farming communities only took to the fields when an emergency required all hands to save the crop. Women toiled at equally demanding jobs, though, such as tending poultry and livestock, especially dairy cows, in addition to concentrating on their principal responsibility, the household.
There a woman’s days were filled from before dawn to well after dark with cooking, cleaning, spinning thread, weaving cloth, stitching clothes, making candles, molding soap, and raising children, a duty that frequently included their basic education as well as their moral improvement. She was the family’s doctor of first and sometimes only resort, its moral arbiter, its chief confessor, and its primary comforter. The old homily about man working from sun to sun but a woman’s work never being done persisted because it was so true.

SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE

The South has a growing season with killing frosts in the winter, but unlike the North, the region enjoys much warmer temperatures for a longer period. In the upper South across the region spanning from Maryland through Missouri, the growing season lasts about six months. The region from the Virginia coast south to northern Georgia and east to west-ern Tennessee has a growing season of about seven months, the Piedmont regions of the Carolinas about eight months, and the Carolina Low Country and coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico a luxurious nine months. The length of those various seasons determined the most prevalent crops in them. Generally speaking, tobacco flourished in the upper South, cotton would come to thrive in the middle regions, and rice, indigo, and sugarcane grew in areas with the longest summers.
Where rice was grown in abundance, such as the Low Country of South Carolina, it was the principal dietary cereal grain. Otherwise corn held pride of place, specifically the variety called “Indian corn.” In those early days, yellow corn was almost always used for animal fodder. Southerners prepared corn in a variety of ways, from roasting or boiling whole ears to shelling the kernels and boiling them to a mush, a concoction called hominy. Coarsely ground corn produced grits (always in the plural: there is no such thing as a “grit”), while a finer grind produced cornmeal for corn pone, which was corn bread usually made without eggs.
Corn muffins and spoon bread, so named because it remained doughy after baking and required a spoon for eating, were also traditions. Southern corn bread was never sweetened with sugar, as it frequently was in the North. Because Irish potatoes did not store well in the South’s hot climate, the southerner’s substitute was the yam, which he called a “sweet potato.” Sweet potatoes ripened slowly in autumn and were only bested by corn as the main staple of southern diets. Amid their stands of corn, southerners grew cowpeas, a legume that more resembled a lima bean than an English sweet pea, which required cooler weather to prosper.
Apples grew in higher regions, and peaches flourished in the hot, humid weather of lower areas. Melons, especially watermelons, thrived throughout the region. Common but inaccurate conceptions of the Old South have been formed by motion pictures in which opulent homes with white-columned terraces are surrounded by lush gardens and extensive fields of cotton. Actually, the South’s large plantations constituted a very small fraction of the land and were lived on by an even smaller portion of the population. A visitor in 1825 to the Georgia frontier noted that the plantation he was visiting, “like all others, is made up of log houses. Through our quarters the wind blew to its heart’s content; no light could keep burning, so that we had to see by the flames of the great fireplace. There was no ceiling, only the shingle roof directly above us through which the light penetrated.”
In any case, by 1800 the plantation system was not fully developed throughout the South, and cotton had not yet become the region’s dominant staple. In 1820 cotton was gaining rapidly in importance, but its days of overarching importance in both the southern and national economies still lay ahead. That said, it should be noted that as the plantation system evolved in the South, small subsistence farms, inhabited by the poor whites of the region, tended to be less prosperous than northern farms. The result was a strangely oligarchic culture, extremely stratified, with a small proportion of wealthy planters at the top, a larger number of middling planters below, and the great majority of the white population in the lower class. That is not to say that the South did not have a middle class, but its members were more likely to be in commerce, banking, and the professions. Slave labor was used in the South, but its scale was more limited than commonly believed. During this period, only about a quarter of the white population of the South was even indirectly involved in slavery, and a much smaller percentage owned slaves. In addition, most slave owners were not plantation grandees but rather were farmers who owned a few slaves and usually worked with them in the fields. Wealthy planters constituted a very small minority of the population, and even their homes were usually more practical than splendid. Very few planters had inherited their wealth during this period. Most were selfmade men who ran large working farms rather than lavish agricultural showplaces. Generally, the largest houses consisted of two stories divided into 10 to 15 rooms, the lower level serving as a social area with a dining room, parlor, and perhaps a library, the second floor containing the bedrooms.
Because of fire danger and to keep the heat of cooking fires away from the main house, the kitchen was a separate building, as was the smokehouse. Stables also sat some distance away. Larger plantations also featured a cotton gin and separate offices to oversee operations. Rather than exhibiting affluence, the planter was expected to behave as a gentleman with honor and to fill his proper place in society, especially by extending hospitality to strangers and friends alike. A visitor to a crude log plantation in Georgia in the mid-1820s was pleased with the fine meal and “surprised to see the works of Shakespeare” on his host’s bookshelves. 9 Yet the plantation culture, for all its intended graciousness, promoted and preserved the degrading institution of human slavery. Immediately after the American Revolution, slavery was actually in decline because the decrease in foreign markets depressed prices for plantation products such as rice, indigo, and tobacco. Consequently, some planters began freeing their slaves, partly for idealistic reasons, but also because economic trends encouraged them to do so. Troubled by the incongruity of slavery in a free republic, southern churches began to question the institution of slavery, and after 1810 many southerners joined the American Colonization Society, a group organized to promote the transport of freed slaves to the west African country optimistically named Liberia. Yet significant changes in southern agriculture regrettably undermined and ultimately destroyed these benevolent impulses.  As early as 1803, with the admission of Louisiana to the Union, the need for laborers in the sugarcane fields increased the demand for slaves in that region. By then, more importantly, the cotton gin was revolutionizing cotton growing in the South, and the need for an abundant labor supply to grow and harvest cotton unfortunately solidified slavery as a southern institution.10 Grains dominated the agricultural landscape of the North, and while corn and wheat were obviously grown in the South, they were rarely grown commercially. The exception was in northern Virginia, where a fading tobacco culture was gradually replaced late in the period by wheat farming on a scale comparable to that in the North. In the main, though, tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, and sugarcane were the prevailing southern crops.
Tobacco was the principal crop during most of the colonial period because it enjoyed the best market, especially because cotton was difficult to process until the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s. Tobacco, on the other hand, posed special difficulties in planting because its seeds are minuscule: about 10,000 will fill a teaspoon. Because sowing such small seeds in an open field was a pointless exercise, they were mixed with sand or ash and broadcast in seedbeds prepared by mixing in cinders, both to enrich the soil and hinder the growth of competing plants, weeds, and grasses. Planting was done near the end of winter to give the small plants the best chance of surviving relocation to open fields during spring rains.

As the plants germinated in the seedbeds, growing fields were plowed and then fashioned into small mounds at three-foot intervals. At the first rain, slaves worked frantically to move the small plants from the seedbeds to the muddy fields, the best receptacle to prevent transplant shock. When the fields went dry, the transplanting ceased to await the next rain. A cycle of idleness and frenzied activity continued until the entire crop was transplanted. As the plant leafed out during the summer, considerable care had to be exercised in tending it. Those with experienced eyes knew just the right time to cut off the uppermost section of the stalk to promote sizable leaf growth. Shoots that sprouted between leaf and stalk—called suckers because they literally sucked out the plant’s vitality and inhibited large leaf formation—were immediately pinched off throughout the growing season. Both the tops and undersides of leaves were regularly inspected for voracious hornworms, which could strip every plant in the field if left alone. In early autumn, yellowing leaves signaled harvest time. Stalks were cut and laid in the fields for wilting before being strung on racks to dry. Prosperous planters could dry tobacco by hanging it from the rafters of tall barns. Outdoor curing was sometimes accelerated with low fires. Cured leaves became brittle and crumbled if handled too much, so the dried plants were left alone for the bulk of the winter. The return of humid weather in early spring made the leaves pliable and ready for final processing. Stalks were taken down and piled to preserve foliage texture as leaves were stripped and sorted into three grades of quality: the prime bright leaf, the less desirable darker leaves, and lugs from the lowest part of the plant. Bundling took place in wet weather for prizing, the packing of the bundles into casks called hogsheads. Weights and presses ensured that a hogshead was packed tightly to weigh about a thousand pounds when sealed off. The hogsheads’ considerable weight meant that their transport was most easily accomplished by rolling them to river landings that served as shipping depots, a trip almost always undertaken in summer because roads were driest then. As this was taking place, the new crop had already been seeded, transplanted, and was under cultivation.  It was all hard work with little idle time, since last year’s crop was being processed while the current year’s was being tended in the fields. Harvesting was backbreaking, curing required skill, and sorting and packing were arduous. “Nothing but a great crop, and the total abnegation of every comfort, to which the Negroes are condemned,” wrote one traveler in 1788, “can compensate for the cost of raising this product and getting it to market.”11
Rice was grown only where a large supply of water was readily available and fields could be designed to dam it and drain it away, a procedure that required elaborate levees and networks of ditches. Consequently, rice was grown in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. Brooks or swamps were the ideal location for this thirsty crop. Certain other necessities were required as well. Fields had to be situated in freshwater tidal floodplains to facilitate flooding and draining. Considerable ingenuity and vigilant maintenance were always necessary, and almost everything that could go wrong usually did. River creatures often damaged the dams, unexpectedly draining the crop and sometimes ruining it. Too much water was just as bad as none at all. Bad weather could bring freshets that scoured the fields, and coastal hurricanes could shove the ocean far up estuaries to turn freshwater tides brackish. After the fields were broken, broad hills about a foot apart received broadcast rice seeds. If the hills were already muddy, they were covered; if dry, the field was flooded (or flowed) to promote sprouts. A set pattern of flowing and draining the rice fields could vary, but generally fields were flowed after the plant’s first appearance, again in midseason, and finally when the mature stalks needed support to keep from breaking under the weight of the grain. Flows were interspersed with drainings for cultivation to remove weeds and grass with hoes. Upon draining the final flow, harvesting commenced as the stalks were cut with a sickle and put aside for sheaving and drying. As with wheat, threshing was done by flailing or animal treading in preparation for milling. Unlike the grinding of wheat, which is meant to separate the chaff and break the kernel, rice milling seeks only to remove the husk.
Rice mills thus resembled great mortars and pestles, with larger timbers mechanically raised and dropped to hammer the rice rather than smash it. After milling, the rice was winnowed, sifted, polished, and packed into barrels, the whole grain for market and broken kernels for the farmer’s family. The chaff was either sold to brewers or fed to livestock. Although planted and cultivated in the same way as cereal grains are, indigo is actually a legume. Because it was a valuable source of dye and ink—its leaves yield a dark blue resin when fermented—the whole object of indigo growing was the reclamation of this dyestuff. After the plants bloomed, they were carefully harvested to preserve the leaves intact. The whole leaves were soaked in vats of water to produce a slurry that fermented in another vat while being violently agitated. At just the right moment, fermentation was halted with a stop agent, such as limewater.  When the suspension settled, the water was drained off, leaving a solid, foul-smelling residue that was scooped, strained, pressed into cubes, and dried for market. Indigo was a demanding crop whose yields were relatively light—frequently less than a hundred pounds of dyestuff per acre. In its heyday, however, it offered a moderately good return for the investment of time and labor. In due course, West Indies indigo supplanted the American variety, especially because British bounties for growing it ended with the Revolution. By the late 1790s, some indigo growers were turning to long staple cotton. Sugarcane grows only in regions with long summers.
Cane fields did exist as far north as middle Georgia, but southern Louisiana had the best growing conditions. Despite its demanding cultivation requirements and difficult characteristics, sugarcane could be a lucrative crop. Some plantations by the late 1790s were producing a high grade of sugar that netted as much as $12,000 per season, the modern equivalent of almost $200,000. Cane growers planted their crop in deep, parallel furrows as early as possible in the year to take advantage of a long growing season. Even so, cultivation would not seriously commence until late summer. Because frost ruined the crop, cane was reaped anytime after reaching some level of maturity. Harvesting occurred in two stages. The first consisted of cutting a portion of the crop for seed cane that would remain in the field for reseeding in the following year. The second stage consisted of stripping and cutting the cane stalk by swinging a large machete in four rhythmic swipes: two to remove leaves, one to chop off the stalk at its base, and the final to remove its top.

Gathered up on carts and taken to the plantation’s mill, the cane was run between heavy rollers that mashed the stalks to squeeze out a clear liquid-sugar solution. Harvesting and milling could take place simultaneously, but a threat of frost focused all attention on clearing the fields. The necessity for speed at harvest made for a relentless schedule of virtually nonstop labor, especially at the mill. Extraction was a wasteful business because the spongy stalks tended to reabsorb some of the liquid sugar as they exited the rollers. The smashed stalk also released impurities that had to be removed to permit the sugar to crystallize. Boiling the solution in a series of cauldrons brought up this residue as a scum that was repeatedly skimmed off to clarify the solution. The boiling also reduced the mixture to create a concentrated slurry that, when cooled and drained, became a mass of crystals, tinted brown because of the high molasses content. During the first 20 years of the nineteenth century, improvements in beet processing, especially in France, were successfully used to process sugarcane. Pressure cookers and condensers allowed for higher temperatures that increased clarification and reduced molasses to produce a higher-quality, whiter sugar. Also, by 1817, new types of sugarcane, such as rapidly ripening variegated ribbon cane, shortened the growing season and increased yields. Despite such advances, though, American sugarcane was never able to match West Indies varieties, which reseeded with little trouble and flourished in the much longer growing season.  Sugarcane in the West Indies was so abundant, in fact, that much of it was only partly processed to extract a heavy molasses for making rum, one of the ingredients in the infamous triangular slave trade. Slave traders bartered West Africans for West Indies molasses, which they sold to New Englanders at significant profits. In contrast, the relative smallness of the Louisiana crop, the considerable domestic demand for refined sugar, and the competition of Kentucky and Ohio corn and rye whiskey meant that Louisiana cane was rarely used to make rum. There are many varieties of cotton, but only two grew in the American South. The most common was short staple cotton, produced from green seeds with a velvet covering that clung tightly to the short fibers in the boll. Short staple cotton thrived in the uplands, while the other variety, long staple cotton, flourished only in the special climate and high moisture provided by coastal regions. It was frequently called Sea Island cotton because it was best grown on the islands off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Grown from shiny black seeds, long staple cotton was relatively new to the continent in the 1790s.
When indigo was waning as a lucrative crop, farmers in the coastal regions sought to replace it by importing seeds from the Bahamas, by most accounts beginning in 1786. Sea Island cotton was noted for its long, silky fiber that was ideal for lace or fine linens; short staple cotton was more suited for coarser fabrics.
Carefully nurtured, long staple cotton could yield as much as threequarters of a million pounds in one season, valued at more than $300,000, the equivalent of about $4 million today. Despite its great value, however, long staple cotton posed special difficulties. It could flourish only in the special conditions along the coast, limiting the amount of acreage the crop could occupy. Planters preferred to prepare the ground for Sea Island cotton by hoeing rather than plowing because they claimed that even shovel plows clumped the soil. After harvest, seeds could be removed with relative ease by hand, and that practice continued even after the invention of the cotton gin.  Ginning tended to break the long fibers and robbed the lint of its most desirable characteristic. Sea Island cotton required cleaning by hand. Until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, cotton of the more abundant short staple variety stood little chance of becoming a viable cash crop. Whitney’s cotton gin had a profound impact on southern culture, but it also had a significant influence on national and international finances. Cotton became profitable as its more efficient processing coincided with the advent of textile mills in the North and in Great Britain. Over the next few decades, cotton production and export grew at a slow but steady pace, and the insatiable search for new places to plant cotton was one of the reasons for the rapid settlement of Mississippi and Alabama, which became states in 1817 and 1819.

Although planting, tending, and harvesting cotton was extremely hard work, the greater problem had always been processing it. Short staple cotton’s green seed clung tenaciously to the fibers in the boll, and removing it by hand was so time-consuming that progress was measured in ounces rather than pounds. Whitney, a northerner who had been a mechanic in his youth, was visiting a Georgia plantation when he set out to conquer the age-old problem of removing seeds from short staple cotton.  The device he contrived was remarkably simple but remarkably effective. Two cylinders sat in a box, one bristling with fine wires, the other covered with brushes. The bristles protruded through a slotted side of the box against which the cotton was pressed. As the bristles rotated, they pulled cotton lint through the slots but left its thick seeds behind. The brush cylinder removed the clean cotton from the wires. His original design “required the labor of one man to turn it and with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before now, and also cleanse it much better than in the usual mode.”12 Based on this prototype, large gins (short for “engine”) could clean enormous amounts of cotton, making it profitable and hastening the transformation of what had been predominantly a tobacco-growing culture into the eventual Cotton Kingdom of the antebellum South. Economics drove the change. In 1799, South Carolina planter Wade Hampton produced 600 bales that sold for about $90,000, a result that was at first tempting and then irresistible. As more planters and farmers planted increasing acres of cotton, the market fluctuated annually, occasionally falling precipitously when bad news from foreign markets suppressed demand. Such an event occurred in 1812, when the news of war with Britain saw the price plummet a whopping five cents per pound in one day. In addition, cotton made for other maladies. In spite of appeals for farmers to raise corn and other food grains, cotton continued to dominate southern agriculture for the rest of the nineteenth century.
The problems of processing solved, cotton nonetheless remained a demanding crop to plant and harvest, requiring prodigious labor from start to finish. The usual planting routine was to prepare fields with shallow-draft shovel plows that were driven over fields twice to break the ground more thoroughly. Then, moving single file over the tilled ground, one slave shaped a hill with a hoe and opened a hole in it, a second seeded, and a third scraped the soil to cover the seed. The process was carried out simultaneously by slave trios working in tandem across large acreages, moving side by side along lengthy rows from dawn to twilight.
To keep down weeds, fields required backbreaking hoeing during the high heat of summer, and in the autumn, cotton was harvested by hand. Picking cotton was simply grueling because the low plants bent backs and the tough fibers of the cotton boll cracked all but the most callused hands. Cotton rapidly depletes the soil, but drives for replenishment through fertilization were slow in coming. Instead there was a tendency for centers of high cotton production to move west, with new settlements established in the search for fruitful soil. By 1820, the richer earth of Alabama and Mississippi had already made the region, known as the Old Southwest, much more important for cotton growing than the eastern areas of the South.
Southwestern planters could rely on the westward-spreading wheat boom in the North for food and could thus focus exclusively on cotton production. Slaves spent relatively little time producing food on these plantations, and planters worked these slaves intensely to swell production. Most crucial in cotton growing was assessing how much the labor force could harvest, for planting and tending a crop grown exclusively for commercial outlets was pointless if it could not be brought to market. Small farmers took their cotton to gins throughout the South, and large planters frequently installed their own to clean their cotton and that of neighbors for a fee. During the 1790s, ginned cotton was stuffed by hand into hemp or burlap sacks and tamped down for baling, a slow process that could take a laborer a full day to fill one sack. Many planters used a lever press to pack their cotton, but gradually the more powerful screw press replaced it and by the early 1800s was the most prevalent method of sacking. Usually worked by two men and a mule team, the screw press could produce about 15 bales a day. Even so, planters rarely packed their cotton compactly enough to suit cotton brokers, whose shipping costs were determined by weight instead of volume.
Consequently, southern ports featured large presses that further compressed the cotton before shipment, ideally to a standard weight of 500 pounds per bale. Brokers also erected fireproof cotton houses to store bales safely before they were shipped. Once the cotton was sold for shipment, slaves would roll the 500-pound bales to docks where stevedores, wielding hooks and tugging on block-and-tackle rigs, hoisted the bales into the ships’ holds, their destination northern or British ports. Planters commanded prices for their cotton according to quality determined by the excellence and length of its fibers.

NOTES

1. France Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America, ed. Paul R. Baker (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 99. 2. For Randolph’s remark and the circumstances that prompted it, see David
S. Heidler, Pulling the Temple Down: The Fire-Eaters and the Destruction of the Union (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994), 6.
3. William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795, ed. Reverend J. E. Strickland, with a facsimile edition of William Strick- 72 Daily Life in the Early American Republic, 1790–1820 Self-Sufficiency land’s “Observations on the Agriculture of the United States of America” (New York: New York Historical Society, 1971), 126.
4. “Gypsum costs about 3 Dolls [dollars],” noted William Strickland, but he also remarked that “frauds are imputed to the dealers in Gypsum, as some barrels are found to have little or no effect when compared with others, it is supposed that they grind chalk, or some sort of limestone along with the Gypsum” (ibid., 108).
5. William Cobbett, A Year’s Residence in the United States of America: Treating of the Face of the Country, the Climate, the Soil, the Products, the Mode of Cultivating the Land, the Prices of Land, of Labour, of Food, of Raiment; of the Expenses of House-Keeping and of the Usual Manner of Living; of the Manners and Customs of the People; and, of the Institutions of the Country, Civil, Political and Religious. In Three Parts (New York: Clayton and Kingsland, 1818), 190.
6. Francois André Michaux, quoted in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 245. 7. Michaux, quoted in Gold Thwaites, Early Western Travels, 250.
8. Bernard Karl, Duke of Saxe-Weimer-Eisenach, in Oscar Handlin, ed., This Was America: True Accounts of People and Places, Manners and Customs, as Recorded by European Travelers to the Western Shore in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 161. The planters of Alabama by this time were more prosperous, and only slave cabins were made of logs.
9. Bernard Karl, in Handlin, This Was America, 161.
10. The lives of slaves are discussed in chapter 7.
11. Jean Pierre Brissot, in Handlin, This Was America, 86.
12. Eli Whitney wrote these observations to his father in September 1793. The letter is printed, in part, in The Annals of America: Volume 3, 1784–1796, Organizing the New Nation (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968), 551–52.

By DAVID S. HEIDLER & JEANNE T. HEIDLER in the book 'DAILY LIFE IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 1790–1820: Creating a New Nation' GREENWOOD PRESS, Westport (U.S.A) and London, 2004, p.54-69. Edited, illustrated and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.