Agriculture was the mainstay of the American economy both before and after the Civil War. The majority of the population of the United States, North and South, was rural, and nearly three-fourths of the nation’s exports were agricultural in 1860. The actual type of agriculture and methods of farming varied enormously within the vast country, however. This was a reflection of a number of variables: the topography and quality of the soil, land policy, access to markets, availability of labor to tend crops, and the use of farm technology.
The South was the most agrarian section of the United States. Southern agricultural exports accounted for three-quarters of the total U. S. agricultural exports before the Civil War. The South’s staple crop was cotton, and everyone from large planters to yeoman farmers grew the crop. Cotton required a large amount of labor due to the many steps involved in its production, from the sowing of cottonseeds to months of picking, ginning, hauling, and baling the finished product. Planters relied on slave labor as much as possible, according to their financial ability. At one extreme, wealthy planters used gangs of slaves while at the other, yeoman farmers tended to rely on family labor. For this reason, planters could generally focus on growing only cotton, while smaller farmers diversified and also grew the food needed for family sustenance.
Cotton was profitable because owners of England’s textile mills provided a market for American cotton. As a result of the soaring demand for the crop, planters grew cotton year after year instead of diversifying their crop. When the soil inevitably became depleted, they often secured new land farther west and started the process over
Again. The boom in the cotton economy came in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1830s and expanded westward across Louisiana to Texas.
Similar patterns characterized the growing of the second-most-important commercial Southern crop, tobacco. As in cotton production, large slaveholding growers monopolized the land and trade. Commercial tobacco growing depleted the land almost as much as growing cotton, and like cotton growers, tobacco planters would often migrate westward. The old tobacco states of Maryland and Virginia eventually gave way to Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
The Civil War largely destroyed all forms of Southern agriculture. The Northern blockade uprooted the critical cotton trade. Further, invading armies destroyed the Southern transportation system, along with most of the crops and supplies of food in their path. Southern troops also harmed farmers. They confiscated meat, grain, and other produce for their food. At the close of the war, the production of Southern farmers was a fraction of prewar levels.
In the years after the Civil War, agriculture gradually reemerged in the South, with cotton remaining the primary crop. In fact, Southern farmers became even more dependent on a one-crop economy. Large plantations continued to dominate agriculture, but now Northern capitalists replaced some of the Southern planters. For the exslaves who received neither land nor money, a new system of dependence emerged in the form of sharecropping. Sharecroppers obtained food, farming tools, and a plot of land from merchant planters on credit. In return, sharecroppers agreed to turn over their crop to the merchant to pay their debts with interest. Under the conditions established by the merchants, the sharecroppers never were able to get out of debt from year to year, and they remained permanently tied to their land.
Like the South, the North was a primarily agrarian region. In the North, however, farming more clearly reflected the influence of urbanization and manufacturing, both increasingly important over the course of the 19th century. The price of land increased near cities, while at the same time city dwellers created a demand for agricultural produce. In order to afford the land they needed, farmers specialized in products that were sold to the cities. Many New England and mid-Atlantic farmers turned to the production of butter, milk, cheese, eggs, or vegetables. Other farmers gave up their eastern farms and headed west, where land was cheaper.
The prairie states of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Iowa became the breadbasket of the nation by the time of the Civil War. Farming on the prairies was very challenging—tall grasses stretching out for miles were supported by a dense, dank root system that defied traditional plows and bred mosquitoes and disease. The lack of timber for housing and fences along with poor access to transportation added to farmers’ problems.
The Civil War accelerated trends in the North and Midwest that were already underway. The needs of the army increased demand for farm goods and raised prices. At the same time, enlistments drained farm hands from rural areas and caused a rapid increase in mechanization. Given the high costs of mechanical equipment, farmers were drawn away from subsistence agriculture into the commercial economy, with its complicated relationships to creditors, middlemen, and food processors. Farmers were becoming businessmen. Meanwhile, Northern farming interests shifted increasingly westward, as the states of New England and the Atlantic coast became more and more urbanized.
During the war, several pieces of legislation served to widen farmers’ horizons. The Department of Agriculture was established as part of the national government, furnishing farmers with information on crop conditions, weather reports, scientific advances, and agricultural business trends. Land-grant college legislation was passed, establishing new universities geared toward scientific agriculture. A third piece of legislation, the Homestead Act of 1862, had a more ambiguous impact. It established a procedure for settlers to acquire 160 acres of free land. While this would seem to be a boon for farmers, by the 1860s the principal tracts of land available were only good for livestock or other types of large-scale agriculture that required more land than 160 acres.
In the postwar years, agricultural settlement of the plains and the West proceeded at a furious pace. In the plains states, family farmers found life difficult economically and socially. Wealthy wheat ranchers with vast acres and expensive machinery were the ones who most prospered. In California and the southwestern states, the ongoing transition from Mexican to American jurisdiction revolutionized land policy and farming techniques. Mexicans in California and New Mexico had been accustomed to raising livestock in a partly subsistence and partly commercial agricultural economy. American farmers brought dramatic changes geared toward commercial agriculture. Some farmers were able to buy up huge chunks of land as they worked to find profitable cash crops that could be transported and sold to distant markets in the East and abroad. Their main successes were in the grain industry and, after the 1870s, in the orchard industry.
After the Civil War, the increased settlement of the plains and the West, along with the reemergence of Southern agriculture, turned the United States into the world’s foremost producer of agricultural goods. Despite this, the predominant theme of the postwar era was the rise of manufacturing and big business. Increasing numbers of Americans abandoned farming for jobs in the cities. Those farmers who remained were increasingly forced to mechanize and to involve themselves directly in the national economy. Farmers found themselves subject to economic and human factors beyond their control, often to their great detriment. Ultimately, this would give rise to increasing political militancy among farmers in the 1870s and 1880s. The era of Thomas Jefferson’s independent, yeoman farmer ended during the Civil War years.
See also MoRRiLL Land-Grant Act.
Further reading: David Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Paul Wallace Gates, The Farmer's Age: Agriculture 1815-1860 (Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989); Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture 1860-1897 (Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989).
—Jaclyn Greenberg
World History
