Ron, Ariel

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

Johns Hopkins (Baltimore)

2020

OUR SYNOPSIS: Ariel Ron places agricultural reformers at the center of the replacement of the American slaveholding republic with a new developmental state in the nineteenth century. He demonstrates that “agriculture continued to dominate the economic, social, and cultural lives of the majority of Americans well into the nineteenth century” and connects this to capitalist state-building. (1) Northern farmers came together, shared ideas about agricultural reform, popularized their cause, and substantially modernized agriculture. Agricultural fairs, farming journals, and state agricultural organizations drove much of this reform development. Then these farmers came into conflict with American slavery. Republican politicians took the farmer side of this clash around mid-century, thus appealing to a northern rural base while also condemning slave labor. Ron shows that Republican leaders cemented agricultural reform in official policy during and after the Civil War, fundamentally reshaping the United States.

BIG QUESTIONS:

What was the relationship between antebellum northern agricultural reform and American slavery?
How did agriculture contribute to the development of the modern American state?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“This book shifts attention from industrialization to agricultural development. It shows how northern, middle-class farmers and rural businessmen built an enormous agricultural reform movement, keyed to the slogan of ‘scientific agriculture,’ that they used to institutionalize their presence in a reimagined state apparatus. The upshot was a grassroots leviathan, a popular state-building machine in—of all places—the countryside. The story of who made this apparatus, how it worked, and what it ultimately did challenges standard accounts of the nineteenth-century political system and necessarily pertains to the coming of the Civil War.” (5)
“That an American developmental state arose first and most decisively in agriculture is a surprising fact that requires rethinking some basic categories.” (214)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

“The Farmers’ State Fair,” New York Daily Tribune, September 14, 1849, 1, https://lccn.loc.gov/sn83030213.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS: