Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic

Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia

by Ariel Ron

How a massive agricultural reform movement led by northern farmers before the Civil War recast Americans' relationships to market forces and the state. Recipient of The Center for Civil War Research's 2021 Wiley-Silver Book Prize, Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society In this sweeping look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers. Ron shows that farming dominated the lives of most Americans through almost the entire nineteenth century and traces how middle-class farmers in the "Greater Northeast" built a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that fundamentally recast Americans' relationship to market forces and the state.

Genres: History

324 pages, Hardcover

Published November 17, 2020

Reviews

[Jim Gulley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ariel Ron argues that the antebellum North’s economy was still predominantly agricultural even though it had a rapidly developing industrial base. The difference with the South was that their agriculture was exclusively composed of small farms. They were not like yeoman farmers of the South who prized independence over all else; Northerners relied on a growing home market as a lucrative trading partner. For this reason, Northern farmers supported tariffs to protect New England industry. The Southern plantocracy vehemently opposed tariffs because it undermined the global cotton price.

Ron points out that the federal government supported Northern interests by creating the Department of Agriculture and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, both of which were passed during the Civil War after all the political opposition had seceded from the Union. This is an interesting read and an important contribution to our understanding of the causes of the Civil War.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting book about a very under-appreciated aspect of US history: the role of Northern farmers in shaping politics before the Civil War. For me the most interesting part was chapter 4, about the work of economist Henry Carey on the economic and nutrient connections between cities and the countryside.

[Ryan Fischer]

A great complement to Pawley's NATURE OF THE FUTURE - this delves deeper into the economic and political context of the development of northern ag with some useful elaborations on Foner's free labor interpretation of the early Republican Party.