Colonial agriculture was a mix of European, Native American, and African influences. Europeans brought some seed, cultivation techniques, metal tools, and a zeal for material accumulation to the enterprise. Native Americans provided a wealth of new plants and cultivation techniques. Africans contributed significantly to the seed pool, applied skills learned in their homelands, and provided much of the labor that eventually created an agricultural base sufficient to feed a growing population and to accumulate export surpluses. Agriculture was the foundation of the colonial ECONOMY, molded colonial society, and identified political power.
Native Americans practiced agriculture on the North American continent for at least 2,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. By the 16th century extensive Native American agriculture existed from the St. Lawrence River to Florida and west to the Mississippi Valley. Native American agriculture thrived along the river valleys of the Great Plains and reached a level of technological sophistication in the Southwest not seen again until late in the 19th century. Native Americans grew several varieties of maize (corn), beans, squash, pumpkins, TOBACCO, and cotton in fields that in some places extended for miles. Contrary to popular images of Indians as hunters, agriculture provided many tribes with more than half of their fOOD requirements and with important trade items for exchange among the tribes and, later, with Europeans. Maize, or Indian corn, was their most important crop. Maize does not grow naturally; it is the product of at least three different grasses that required generations of cross-breeding and continuous cultivation. By the 16th century it was already the most productive seed grain in the world.
New World agriculture began in present-day Mexico, worked its way to the Southwest and across the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi Valley in the Midwest, then spread across the continent. In the Southwest Native Americans created elaborate irrigation systems that diverted stream flow and captured runoff. In the Salt River Valley of Arizona extensive canals carried water as far as two miles from the river. Southwest farmers developed ingenious methods of diverting runoff by building systems of check dams at the mouths of arroyos that spread the water across their fields.
Southwestern Native American farmers planted at least three varieties of maize, three different kinds of beans, and four varieties of squash and pumpkins. In the moisture-deficient Southwest these crops were planted in separate fields. Native farmers in wetter climates planted their crops in the same field, with cornstalks used to support bean vines and squash and pumpkins used as ground cover to retard weeds. Southwestern farmers also cultivated cotton and tobacco. Until Spanish sheep became available, cotton provided the principal fiber for clothing and blankets.
Native farmers in the East planted maize on wellspaced hills; using a digging stick, they cultivated the ground around the plants, and when the maize was well established they planted beans, pumpkins, orache, and sunflowers between the cornstalks. Farmers in the Carolinas planted three varieties of maize with different maturing rates, allowing for ample time to plant and an extended harvest after about three months of growth. Generally, Native agriculturalists also planted large gardens that produced abundant supplies of vegetables until the maize, beans, and other field crops were mature. In the 16th century and earlier these farmers planted large fields of tobacco (Nicotiana rustica). Later they adopted a tobacco from the Orinoco region of South America (Nicotiana tabacum) that John Rolfe had acquired. Captain John Smith recorded that Natives in the region girdled trees and then pulled out the upper roots to prepare fields for cultivation. Women did the work of agriculture after the fields were prepared, planting maize and beans on hills from May through June and harvesting the crops from August until October. Carolina and Virginia Native farmers husked their maize after drying it in the sun and then stored the seed in woven baskets.
In the 18th century Virginia Native American farmers were observed growing popcorn that ripened by midsummer, watermelon acquired from the English, and peaches probably obtained from the Spanish or from Florida Natives. Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw farmers in the interior raised large crops of maize, beans, and squash. Families maintained individual gardens near their houses, but all participated in preparing and planting communal fields. Individual families then harvested their allotted portion of the crops. Although men among these “civilized tribes” participated in all phases of their agriculture, women did most of the work of planting, cultivating, and harvesting. The civilized tribes eventually adopted many European farming methods, including fencing their fields, but, one authority insists, they refused to adopt the plow, perhaps because it was too efficient and might have led to lack of farmwork for older members of the tribes.
Early in the 17th century French explorers in the St. Lawrence Valley area observed extensive Native farming. Native farmers raised large crops of maize, both for their own consumption and for trade to the hunting Indians in the interior. Huron men participated in the agricultural enterprise by burning trees and removing brush from fields, although women did most of the work preparing the fields around the dead trees and removing rotting tree roots. The Huron and others in the region raised crops of flint corn and maize as well as sunflowers, squash, and beans. One branch of the Huron raised so much tobacco they became known as the Tobacco Nation. Huron and other Native farmers tried to raise sufficient maize and other crops to last for two or more years as a guard against famine. One authority estimates that Huron fields produced nearly 40 bushels per acre. When the crop fell significantly below that level, the Hurons abandoned the field for several years. Agricultural products probably accounted for more than 60 percent of Huron food needs.
South of the Huron in interior New York, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederation engaged in a sophisticated agriculture that yielded food for consumption and an important trade item. Particularly in the 17th century, the Iroquois carried on an aggressive campaign against the Huron that extended to the destruction of smaller agricultural tribes north of Lake Erie in pursuit of dominance in the fur trade. Food stuffs, which the Iroquois had in abundance, were a key trade item with the hunting Indians of Canada. Iroquois men generally participated in burning trees and underbrush to prepare fields while the women performed the work of cultivation and harvesting. The products of the field were the property of the women and added to their unusual influence in the business of the Five Nations. The Iroquois also constructed platforms from which the young and women guarded the crops. In addition, they encircled their fields with snares to trap small animals, soaked their seed corn in hellebore to poison raiding birds, and hung captured crows by their feet around the fields to discourage other raiders. About every 10 years, when soil fertility declined, the Iroquois abandoned one area for another nearby that previously had been prepared. In the 18th century the Iroquois incorporated cattle, swine, and poultry into their agricultural mix.
When Europeans ventured to the Atlantic coast and later into the interior, they discovered a relatively large, generally sedentary Native population that subsisted on an abundance of agricultural products. Although Europeans often thought Indian agriculture “primitive,” Indian technology, including wood, shell, flint, and bone hoes, digging sticks, and mattocks, was efficient and tended to preserve soil conditions at a high level of fertility for relatively long periods of time. Indeed, early explorers and later colonists
This mold-board plow was the type often used by Anglo-American farmers. (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)
From Maine to Georgia benefited and often owed their survival to Indian agriculture.
Agriculture dominated economic activity in the North American colonies, rivaled only by the fur trade in economic importance. By the time English settlers were permanently implanted in the New World, Spanish settlers were already well under way appropriating and exploiting Native American fields and irrigation systems in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, rapidly moving into the Salt River Valley and its extensive irrigation works, and introducing cattle, sheep, horses, and fruit trees to the Southwest. From their entry into the Southwest in the late 16th century until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Spanish settlers stole land and virtually enslaved the Native population for agricultural labor. The Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico and Comanche activity in Texas forced the Spanish back to the lower Rio Grande for more than a decade. Early in the 18th century the Spanish returned to Texas, where they established large cattle ranches that produced for the market in New Orleans, and to the upper Rio Grande, where they established more cattle ranches and introduced irrigated wheat farming to the Pueblo. The
Spanish brought a wealth of new crops to the Southwest, including wheat, oats, onions, peas, watermelons, peaches, and apples, as well as sheep, horses, and cattle. Spanish invasions of the Southwest profoundly affected civil government among the Native population and the agriculture they practiced.
Agriculture was always part of the program the Virginia Company of London intended for the first successful English colony. Colonists at Jamestown were expected to raise their own food as well as produce items for trade with the mother country. Colonists soon learned from local Native farmers how to plant and cultivate maize themselves, but without maize acquired by theft, barter, or gift from Natives, the colony probably would not have survived. Not until Governor Sir Thomas Dale allotted each settler three acres of fee simple land on which to cultivate his own crops and abandoned communal farming did the colony begin to produce sufficient food to feed itself. Maize became the salvation for many new colonies. It could be cultivated in fields already prepared by Native farmers and harvested late or early with simple hand tools. By contrast, European small grains, such as wheat, required well-prepared fields and threshing and milling machines to produce sufficient supplies. Maize essentially solved the problem of survival for the Jamestown colony, but it did not provide a product that produced a profit.
In 1612 John Rolfe introduced a tobacco variety that had a milder taste than the locally grown types; the colonists then had their money crop. Within a few years tobacco dominated Virginia agriculture and spread throughout the Chesapeake region. Within a decade Virginia farmers exported more than half a million pounds of tobacco each year. With the exception of relatively small food crops, Virginia farmers planted tobacco exclusively. A crop that quickly depleted soil fertility, tobacco forced constant expansion of fields and rapid movement into the interior, initiating conflict with Natives that twice between 1620 and 1650 led to the near destruction of the colony. By the end of the colonial era Virginia had increased tobacco production to more than 18 million pounds a year.
Tobacco agriculture initiated a system of production that dominated the social, political, and economic life of Virginia and, ultimately, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Those who could acquire large tracts of land farmed their acreage intensely, then allowed it to lie fallow for as long as 20 years while new acres came into production. Those who could not obtain large tracts were forced to abandon their land and move farther into the interior. Large plantations became the norm in the southern colonies near the coast. Large planters dominated colonial legislatures and sponsored numerous laws to control the production and quality of the tobacco crop. Nevertheless, overproduction plagued the region. Declining prices, as low as a penny per pound by the end of the 17th century, encouraged further legislative efforts to control production and quality. Most small farmers ignored planting restrictions for as long as they could. Then, in 1730, Virginia enacted a comprehensive Inspection Act that established mandated grading of tobacco and required the crop to be sold only through warehouses where government-appointed inspectors ensured the quality of the product. Tobacco that did not meet the standard was destroyed. Large planters benefited from the destruction of tobacco that did not meet quality standards, while smaller farmers were hastened off the land.
South of the Chesapeake Bay in the Carolinas, settlers first produced Indian maize but quickly turned to rice as a staple crop. Early rice planting was only moderately successful, but with a rice variety from Africa cultivation expanded rapidly. By the end of the 17th century South Carolina planters exported nearly 400,000 pounds; by 1730 rice exports reached more than 9 million pounds. Exports continued to increase until 1770, when planters exported more than 80 million pounds, primarily to the West Indies. In the early years of cultivation, planters generally sowed their rice on upland fields and presumed that sufficient rain would nourish the crop. By the mid-18th century, however, planters employed irrigation or planted in swampy areas near the coast. Rice became for South Carolina what tobacco had become for Virginia. Large planters accumulated land, slaves, and wealth that one author noted “provided the economic basis for the most extensive plantation system in colonial America.”
By the middle of the 18th century, rice culture had spread to the Savannah River region of Georgia. There, one enterprising planter developed a method for capturing tidal flow through a series of dikes that held the freshwater on his fields. The method allowed much larger fields, planting farther inland, and the reduction of the time spent eliminating competing weeds. Using the tidal flow along South Carolina and Georgia rivers quickly became the common method for raising rice. At the time of the American Revolution, rice was exceeded only by tobacco and flour in the value of agricultural exports from British North America.
From 40 years before the American Revolution, indigo also became an important crop in South Carolina. During King George’s War shipping became difficult for bulky products like rice, and some planters turned to indigo, which had a high price and relatively small bulk. In 1748 Parliament established a bounty on all indigo grown in the American colonies, which lasted until the revolution. In 1770 South Carolina planters exported more than 150,000 pounds of indigo. Although the cropping of indigo lasted only three or four decades before the end of the British bounty made it unprofitable, profits from its cultivation allowed many planters to accumulate land and slaves that, in turn, permitted them a relatively easy transition to cotton agriculture. Coastal planters in South Carolina and Georgia possessed the land, slave labor, and capital to begin large-scale production of sea island cotton.
While rice remained preeminent in the Deep South, it was generally confined to the coastal regions or limited by tidal flow to relatively few miles inland. New migrants to the region were shut out of the rice culture and turned to livestock instead of planting. Many rice planters also raised extensive herds of cattle. Cattle were already important in North and South Carolina by the end of the 17th century, and this expanded in the half century that followed. Cattle roamed freely, grazing on the public, or “King’s,” lands. Fall cow hunts (round-ups) separated marketable cattle and marked calves. The West Indies provided a ready market for hides, tallow, and dried beef. By the early 18th century South Carolinians grazed nearly 100,000 head of cattle. The cattle industry thrived in the Carolinas and Georgia until midcentury, when deteriorating ranges and disease diminished their numbers. The cattle industry moved west along the Gulf Coast and continued to supply the West
Indies market, but most shipping by the end of the 18th century was through Mobile and New Orleans rather than Charleston and Savannah.
While staple crops like tobacco and rice continued to dominate southern colonial agriculture, the 18th century witnessed some diversification. Large planters had always planted corn and wheat in fields where tobacco had depleted fertility. A growing domestic population and periodic crop failures in Europe created demand for American-grown small grains and some maize. Western Virginia farmers in the Shenandoah Valley raised wheat for milling and substantial maize that they used for their own consumption and to fatten cattle and hogs. The growth of Baltimore and Philadelphia provided a market outlet for western farmers in Virginia and Maryland. Tobacco planters on Maryland’s eastern shore found it more and more difficult to acquire sufficient land to allow worn-out tobacco fields to lie fallow for extended periods. Many consequently switched to wheat and maize in the mid-18th century. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean, with their large slave populations, proved a profitable market for Maryland wheat and maize.
Staple crop production in the southern colonies required extensive land use and intensive labor. Land distribution in the colonies varied according to the status of the colony as either royal (such as Virginia after 1624), proprietary (like Pennsylvania), or corporate (Massachusetts). English land holding was heavily encumbered by a host of feudal remnants in the form of rents, services, and homage. Whether royal, corporate, or proprietary, attempts to replicate the English system generally failed in the American colonies. Even when quitrents or other services were attached to land, colonial farmers tended to see their land as fee simple, unencumbered by any obligations but to pay local taxes, and then only when they could not be avoided. Inheritance laws in England such as entail and primogeniture, meant to preserve a stable hierarchical society, existed in most colonies but were generally ignored. Farmers and speculators easily transferred land titles by simply registering the fact of the transfer with a local magistrate. The ease of transfer allowed for land accumulation and encouraged white settlement.
Virginia established the pattern of land acquisition that prevailed in the southern colonies as well as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York. To attract settlers, Virginia in 1618 offered a “headright” of 50 acres to anyone who could pay their own cost of transportation and an additional 50 acres for each family member whose transportation was paid. Although the proprietary colonies preferred to sell land, all eventually employed some variation on the headright system to attract settlers. Early in the 18th century the British government offered Crown lands for purchase. Wealthy Englishmen such as Robert “King” Carter and William Byrd II acquired tens of thousands of acres by purchase from the Crown. Virginia required no survey before the sale of lands, and farmers frequently found they had purchased or squatted on land that belonged to someone else. Conflicting land claims dominated the Virginia courts until well into the 19th century. Nevertheless, land passed into the hands of farmers who quickly placed as much as they could into commercial crops.
Squatting became nearly institutionalized from Pennsylvania to North Carolina in the interior. Scots-Irish settlers with little regard for English law insisted that the abundance of land was a gift from God. During the Revolutionary War, at least in part as a way of retaining the loyalty of back-country farmers, Virginia enacted a preemption act that allowed squatters the first right to purchase land on which they settled or, if someone else purchased the land, to be paid for improvements they had made. In any event, Crown and proprietor efforts to install a land system that replicated the deferential domain of England largely failed. If farmers could not purchase land, they rented with the intent to buy in the future. When all else failed, they moved farther into the interior and squatted on the land until forced to leave.
Some of the agricultural labor in the Middle Colonies and most of it in the South was performed by bound laborers. In the 17th and early 18th centuries approximately half the European immigrants to the British colonies came as indentured servants. Mostly young men, servants sold their labor for a period of years, usually four to seven, in return for passage to the colonies. The indenture contract was a negotiable instrument that could be bought and sold along with the indenture. Purchasers of indenture contracts generally agreed to provide food, shelter, and clothing for the term of labor and pay “freedom dues” of clothing, food, tools, and occasionally land at the end of the term if, indeed, the servant survived. Life for a servant was one of work and brutal conditions. They had little recourse from abusive masters while being subject to severe punishment or added years to their servitude for the most trivial crimes. One authority estimates that nearly 40 percent of indentured servants did not survive their term of indenture and that many of those who survived still were unable to obtain land. Nevertheless, some became middling farmers or took advantage of other commercial opportunities in the growing colonies. In the southern colonies beginning in the late 17th century, indentured servitude largely came to an end, and black slavery became the dominant form of forced labor.
Slaves of African descent accounted for the largest single group of migrants, albeit forced, to British America in the 18th century. Slaves faced a life as harsh as that of servants, but without the saving promise of eventual freedom.
Some scholars argue that many of the first slaves who arrived in Jamestown in 1619 were granted freedom after a term of service, but by the late 17th century slavery became the norm for laborers brought from Africa. Nevertheless, during the 17th century some slaves gained their freedom, established thriving communities, and sometimes even purchased slaves of their own.
Slave labor became more extensively used and more restrictive in the 18th century. In 17th-century South Carolina slaves often raised food for themselves and for sale, enjoyed some freedom to travel for hunting and fishing, and, by law, had Sundays free of labor. The development of rice agriculture initially curtailed those freedoms. Rice was labor intense; mastering of tidal pools greatly increased the acres planted and the demand for slave labor. Large plantations bought slaves directly from Africa, kept them relatively isolated during their first months, then placed them under close supervision. Later in the 18th century, as masters began to rely on the “task system,” slaves were assigned a certain amount of work, or task, to accomplish each day. Many slaves managed to use this system to their own advantage to carve out extra time that they controlled.
The restrictions on slaves and their increase coincided with the flowering of the plantation system in the 18th century. Wealth produced from tobacco and rice provided planters the opportunity to emulate the country gentlemen of England. Large plantation houses sprang up throughout the South, a command structure of slave overseers and task work systems became the norm, and the master and his family grew more remote from the daily lives of their slaves. Whites seldom joined their black slaves in the fields, and fears of slave rebellion, real and imagined, became more common. Slaves, indeed, did rebel, sometimes by destroying equipment, engaging in work slowdowns, and running away. Violent rebellions occurred in 1710 in Maryland, in New York in 1712 and 1741, and, most well known, in the Stono Rebellion of South Carolina in 1739. Individual and organized resistance occurred among relatively new arrivals and among slaves relatively acculturated to British ways. As slaves successfully created families and communities, kinship ties may have influenced a decline in organized rebellion, although individual acts of resistance continued.
By the end of the first quarter of the 18th century, the pattern of agricultural development around staple crops and cattle raising within a plantation system dominated by slave labor was well established and could not have existed without the continual arrival of African bondpeo-ple. Africans brought agricultural skills from their homelands that were critical to the success of the southern cattle industry. Rice culture clearly would have been seriously retarded in South Carolina and Georgia without rice varieties from Africa and the knowledge of slaves about how to grow the crop. The large-scale production of tobacco could not have occurred had not black slaves provided the intense labor necessary to produce a crop. Southern agriculture was black agriculture, with the profits going to whites.
While staple-crop agriculture developed through the 17th century south of the Chesapeake, a wholly different agriculture dominated the colonies north of the Chesapeake. European farming began in New England in 1620 with the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Plymouth dissenters came to free their souls from the corruption of the Anglican Church but needed to feed their stomachs as well. Stolen caches of corn fed the Pilgrims their first winter, but in spring 1621 Pilgrims began to plant maize in the manner that local Native Americans taught them and in fields that Native farmers had used for generations. Later in the decade Puritan immigrants north of Plymouth brought large numbers of cattle, goats, and swine, and in 1635 Dutch merchants introduced sheep to the colony.
The Pilgrims had intended to farm communally, but disputes within the congregation soon ended cooperative ventures; by 1627 Plymouth had allotted 20 acres of farmland to each family for their individual use. Individuals were intent on raising surplus crops for profit, and farms quickly expanded production to include wheat, rye, and oats, along with sheep and cattle. Generally, sheep were confined while cattle and hogs grazed freely in the forest. The British West Indies provided a ready market for New England agricultural products. Boston and New London, Connecticut, became thriving markets for beef from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. As one author put it, “if New England had staple crops, they were annual crops of beef, pork and wool.” Until surpassed by South Carolina late in the 17th century, Massachusetts was the largest livestock producing colony in North America. The rapid expansion of English settlements in New England in the 17th century and encroachments on Indian land led to bloody confrontations with Natives in 1636 and 1675. New England farmers praised God, but mammon competed quite well for their affection.
New England farmers also produced quantities of maize and wheat in the 17th century along with tobacco, particularly in the Connecticut Valley. Connecticut tobacco was a different variety from that found in Virginia and had been acquired from Native American farmers. Although never grown in the quantities found in the southern colonies, it still was sold profitably to England in the 18th century. Black stem rust and insects began to seriously deplete wheat culture in New England by the latter part of the 17th century. Farmers consequently increased their production of maize and rye. Wheat cultivation migrated west and south to New York, Pennsylvania, and western
Maryland. There, wheat production increased dramatically in the 18th century and encouraged the development of a flour milling industry centered around the Chesapeake and Philadelphia. The West Indies again provided the principal market for milled wheat.
Farmers in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland also raised “neat” cattle intended for beef and milk. Generally, production was low, and farm women converted most milk to cheese and butter for home or local consumption. In the late 18th century better breeding habits and importation of improved livestock led to cattle intended specifically to produce milk. Increased production meant a surplus of cheese and butter. By 1769 Philadelphia had become a center for marketing butter intended for the West Indies trade. Cheese and butter production, nevertheless, tended to remain the work of farm women, and the products sometimes became a principal source of family income.
New England and Middle Colony farms remained comparatively small by the standards of Virginia and the southern colonies. Livestock, wheat, maize, and other small grain cultivation was not as labor intensive as tobacco and rice. Nevertheless, northern farmers were also in need of labor beyond that provided by family members. Slavery entered the northern colonies within a few years after the first slaves arrived in Virginia and spread to every colony north of Maryland. In the northern colonies slaves often lived in towns and worked in the growing shipbuilding industry, in construction, or as assistants to artisans. Most, however, worked on the farms of the countryside, often alongside their owners. Few northern farmers owned more than one or two slaves, who sometimes lived in the master’s house and ate at his table. The largest concentration of slaves in the North was in Rhode Island, near Narragansett Bay, where immigrant planters from the West Indies tried to replicate the plantation system of their former homes. They built manor houses that rivaled those in the South, often owned more than fifteen slaves, bred race horses, and practiced the ways of country gentlemen. The tobacco farms of the Connecticut Valley became the home of another concentration of slaves in New England. Control of slave labor was always more lax in the North, and slaves often were hired out and occasionally were allowed to retain some portion of their earnings. Still, they remained slaves.
By the time of the American Revolution, colonial agriculture had developed into a profitable enterprise. The production of staple crops supported a plantation economy in the southern colonies. Food stuffs, primarily wheat and other small grains, dominated the Middle Colonies, and a mixed agriculture of livestock, wool, and maize characterized most of New England. The enterprise was sufficient to support a rapidly growing population that doubled in size about every 25 years. It provided surpluses for export that supported merchant concentrations in several cities and a host of auxiliary occupations like mariners, teamsters, blacksmiths, land agents, lawyers, doctors, and the like. None would have been possible without land the Indians had long cultivated; crops, particularly maize, that Native American farmers had bred to high levels of return; varieties of crops such as sorghum grains, rice, and indigo brought to North America by slaves; the forced labor of thousands of displaced black Africans; and the insatiable material demands of Europeans. All joined in the mix that produced American agriculture in the colonial era.
Further reading: Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); R. Douglas Hurt, Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987); Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Howard S. Russell, A Long Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1982).
—Thomas R. Wessel
World History
