Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  Population growth alone does not wear out the soil; certain agricultural practices do. Some historians have argued that New Englanders bankrupted the soil by suspending efforts to recycle nutrients back into it. They planted year after year but failed to properly use the manure necessary to keep the soil in good shape. Colonial farmers remained wedded to an extensive mentality—looking for new fields instead of improving the yields of the ones they had—that kept them from employing any of the basic reforms necessary for ecologically sustainable agriculture. Inefficient farming meant declining soils and falling agricultural yields, a pattern made all the worse by population growth.

  A more satisfying interpretation of New England’s demographic dilemma and its ecological consequences emerges when we focus on natural hay meadows—the heart of the region’s agriculture. Meadowland provided a vital source of food for livestock and, through the manure the animals generated, a nutrient boost for the soil. Farming under this system required just the right amount of land suitable for crops, livestock, and hay. Achieving the correct balance between these various types of land uses held the key to putting agriculture on a solid ecological footing. When the demographic crunch emerged in the eighteenth century, it made life for the younger generation difficult in at least one major respect. It now became harder for them to gain access to the right configuration of landed resources, that is, cropland, pasture, and especially meadowland. Soil exhaustion, per se, may not have been the main problem in Concord and other older New England towns, places where farmers lived and died by the availability of natural meadows. Access to meadowland and marsh grass attracted the early colonists and contributed to the birth and longevity of these settlements. Perhaps it can explain their downfall as well.11 When population pressure and inheritance customs made meadowland inaccessible to increasing numbers of young farmers, the diversified basis of the agroecological system suffered. America’s experiment as the land of opportunity foundered on the limits of meadow grass.

  Into this distressing and delicate social and ecological context marched the British with their challenge to the autonomy of the 13 colonies. On four occasions between 1764 and 1773, Parliament asserted its right to tax the Americans, with the last attempt ending in the famous Boston Tea Party. Land pressures alone did not cause the colonies to break with Britain, but they certainly provided a context that made Parliament’s attempt to subordinate the colonies all that more intolerable.12 That Concord, Massachusetts, a town buffeted by the changes outlined here, would serve as the starting point of the American Revolution was no accident.

  THE VOLCANIC SHADOW

  Population pressures aside, New England farmers did have to deal from time to time with conditions of scarcity. To some extent, this problem was an annual event. For centuries, the changing of the seasons exerted one of the most important constraints on food supply and diet. Climate change added to the problem, creating, if not a systematic food crisis, then periodic shortages that left some New Englanders hungry.

  Although they did not move through the landscape to exploit its seasonal diversity, New Englanders found that the time of year determined the availability of certain critical foods. The fall harvest provided the greatest variety of things to eat, as the last of the fresh food from summer was combined with winter provisions. Rye and wheat were harvested in the summer. Apples were also gathered late in that season, and soon thereafter corn and beans were brought in from the fields. Meanwhile, pigs and cattle were slaughtered and salted down for winter use. Following this period of ample food came the winter season, when the diet of the average New Englander was at its most monotonous, consisting often of little more than pork, peas, and bread. But the toughest dietary challenge occurred in the early spring when many families had reached the end of their stored provisions and found themselves scraping the bottom of the grain bag and meat barrel. In April 1803, one New England man described his family’s dire dietary straits: “At breakfast my wife gave me an account of our family—asked me if I had brought home any money to buy provisions for us. I told her I had but very little. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘our meat and meal, and about every other article are nearly gone, and what shall we do?’ I reminded her that the Lord had provided for us when we were in great straits, and I doubted he would not now. I told her she must pray for what she wanted, but this did not satisfy her; she wept bitterly.” Only with the advent of warmer weather did the threat of scarcity recede as seasonal foods such as fish, which annually ascended New England’s streams, became more readily available. As one proverb had it, “We hope meat will last ’till fish comes, and fish will last ’till meat comes.”13

  Climate change may have posed an even more significant threat to diet and agriculture. The period from 1750 to 1850 marked a transition away from the cooler temperatures of the Little Ice Age toward a warmer climate. Such change, however, brought with it unpredictable weather. That posed a problem for farmers, who relied on set patterns to know when to plant and harvest their crops. During any given year, a Massachusetts farmer faced the threat of a killing frost—which might destroy as much as half of the fall crops—at any time between August 29 and November 17. Late spring frosts were equally hard to predict. In May 1773, farmers near Portland, Maine, sowed their fields with wheat and rye; by the middle of the month, potatoes and maize had been planted and were beginning to sprout. The prospects for a good harvest looked excellent—that is, until frosts on May 19 and May 22 killed the burgeoning crops. An entire month’s worth of labor evaporated, literally overnight.14 With the weather changeable and prone to extreme conditions for so much of the growing season, farmers found it hard to plan ahead.

  On at least two occasions, global climate change, connected to volcanic eruptions around the world, teamed up with various other factors to create food shortages. Hunger became a serious issue during the spring and summer of 1789 throughout New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Canada. A visitor to the Green Mountains of Vermont observed: “The year 1789 will be remembered by Vermont as a day of calamity and famine…. It is supposed by the most judicious & knowing that more than ¼ part of the people will have neither bread nor meat for 8 weeks—and that some will starve.”15

  The causes of the calamity were severalfold. Some contemporary observers blamed the Hessian fly—a pest purportedly brought by German mercenaries recruited to fight in the Revolutionary War—which attacked the wheat crop. (In truth, the fly had troubled American farmers for some time before 1776.) The plant and the insect, as it turns out, originated together in Asia. The fly, which thrives in cool, damp weather, invades the wheat and its larvae feed on the crop, in the end destroying it. Inclement weather conditions conducive to the spread of the fly surfaced in 1788 and 1789 because of an unusual global climate pattern. Volcanic eruptions in Japan and Iceland sent millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, lowering global temperatures, and adversely affecting the food supply.

  The extended winter weather compelled many farmers to exhaust their winter fodder, leading them to slaughter their cattle rather than see them starve. The cold weather also forced them to postpone planting. Given the especially short growing season in northern New England, any such delay raised the prospect that the crops might not mature before a frost killed them in the fall. Farmers became alarmed and some at least began hoarding grain, driving up prices.16

  Just how unpredictable the weather could be was demonstrated again in the early years of the nineteenth century. Another period of extraordinary volcanic activity between 1811 and 1818 brought more unstable weather. Agricultural prospects declined and soon a dearth prevailed. On April 13, 1815, the eruption of Mount Tombora in Indonesia lifted huge amounts of rock and ash into the sky. It was the greatest volcanic event in over 300 years. “The bright sun was extinguish’d,” wrote poet Lord Byron from Britain 16 months after, “and the icey earth/Swung blind.” On a “dust veil index” designed to measure the obscuring impact of volcanic ash on
global weather patterns, the famed 1883 Krakatoa eruption registered a 1,000. Tombora rated three times that.17

  By 1816, the Tombora eruption resulted in severe cold across New England, as well as in much of the western world. Snow and ice were reported in parts of New England for all 12 months of the year. “I presume the oldest person now living knows of no such weather the 8th of June,” wrote Joshua Whitman, a farmer from Maine, in 1816 after a three-hour snowstorm. “Many of the leaves of the trees are blown off and to pieces by the roughness of the weather.” The exceptionally cold conditions unquestionably affected New England agriculture. Assessments of the 1816 harvest from every part of the region confirm that the corn crop was nearly a total loss. The hay crop was small, and the harvests of wheat and rye were anywhere from fair to normal. (The effects of the cold were felt even in the South, with crop deficiencies reported in South Carolina.) The rise in corn prices created a dearth in New England. In the interior parts of New Hampshire, “the cattle died for want of fodder, and many of the inhabitants came near perishing from starvation.” In Vermont, families reported being forced to subsist on hedgehogs and boiled nettles.18

  What was happening in New England was part of a much larger calamity that historian John Post has dubbed the “last great subsistence crisis of the western world,” a transnational disaster that may have spawned social and economic upheaval throughout Europe and North America. The volcanic activity serves as a reminder that seemingly irrelevant natural processes in far-off lands can shape the course of American history. Despite the efforts of historians to view it as a self-contained region with its own unique history, New England remained part of a globally interdependent environment with its fortunes tied to whatever distant fires happened to be brewing in the earth.

  GO WEST, COLD MAN

  Climate may also have played an important role in spurring westward migration. With the Indians and British forced by the 1790s out of New York, New Englanders had an unobstructed path westward. In 1795, an observer in Albany, New York, counted some 500 sleighs loaded with the personal effects of entire families. As a result of the migration west, the population of New York rose fourfold between 1790 and 1820 to 1.4 million, making the state the most populous in the nation.19 Why did people suddenly become so footloose?

  Many factors were involved. Increasing population pressing against limited land, especially meadowland, certainly played a role. In 1825, the completion of the Erie Canal facilitated the transport of produce from the Midwest to the East, a trend that tended to undermine New England’s agricultural prospects. But it is difficult to fully comprehend the particular timing of the exodus, especially the logic behind its ebb and flow, without examining climate. Colder weather accounts in part for the steady stream of migrants between 1810 and 1820. Over 60 towns in Vermont recorded a loss in population during this time. The years from 1816 to 1817, corresponding to the cold and dearth, witnessed a veritable flood of travelers. “In the pressure of adversity,” one observer noted, “many persons lost their judgment, and thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become a part of the frigid zone.” The result was “a sort of stampede” out of “desolate, worn-out New England” to the rich farmlands of Ohio.20

  Significantly, the push westward abated in the 1820s, precisely the decade when a temporary respite—a trend to warmer temperatures—occurred. Migration out of New England picked up again during the following decade, as temperatures moved significantly downward, perhaps the result of another massive volcanic eruption in Nicaragua.21 It is obvious that more than weather alone was at work in these migration patterns. But its role should not be ignored.

  OFF TO MARKET

  For those who stayed behind, the challenges of weather, climate, and demography demanded new agricultural techniques. The trend toward market farming was perhaps the most important development in this respect. Colonial farmers had always engaged in production mainly to meet the needs of their families. In general, farmers frowned on any marketing activity that might put a family’s welfare in jeopardy. Still, from as far back as the seventeenth century, some farmers, generally those located near port towns, grew crops for sale elsewhere. After 1650, farmers near Boston supplied grain for trade with the West Indies. During the eighteenth century, market farming expanded further inland in Massachusetts. One study of Massachusetts farm households revealed that in 1771 most were unable to meet all their needs for corn, fuel, and hay without turning to exchange.22

  The shift toward commercial agriculture was clearly a complex and multifaceted process. Why market production emerged when it did is susceptible to no single answer. But it may have been linked to climate change. The trend toward more erratic weather between 1750 and 1850 coincides with this important economic transformation. Farmers may have increasingly viewed trade as a way of adapting to the unpredictable spates of extremely cold weather, using market transactions to insulate themselves from the vagaries of nature.23 Even if we do not accept the rise of market farming as inevitable or “natural,” we can credit that nature (in the form of climatic forces) played a role in the emergence of this new form of economic organization.

  How exactly did the market help farmers deal with bad weather? The sale of livestock was one way. In early New England, settlers commonly allowed their cattle to roam free in the woods, grazing on whatever plant matter they could find. But beginning in the late eighteenth century, farmers began raising cattle with an eye to their market value, herding them off the open range and into fenced pastures and barns. In Brighton, outside of Boston, a cattle market began about 1776 (in response possibly to the need to feed the Continental army). Now when cold weather damaged the hay crop, farmers could sell their cattle before the animals starved.

  Livestock helped farmers through hard times in other ways as well. During years of ample grain and hay yields, the surplus food could be used to fatten cattle and swine. In periods of grain scarcity, the animals could be slaughtered to supplement the family diet. During the dearth of 1816, grain was in such short supply in one New England town that no family had enough to board a school-teacher. Farmers, strapped for fodder, found themselves unable to feed their livestock, a dilemma that ultimately provided a way out of the schooling problem. A farmer with a heifer he could no longer feed stepped forward and offered to slaughter the animal. Cut into pieces and then salted down, the meat provided food for the teacher and education for the students.24

  Market-oriented agriculture meant that farmers focused increasingly on the production of cattle, hay, and wood, commodities that could earn them money. Farming became more commercial as well as more rationalized. Agricultural reforms, viewed in the early years of settlement as too labor intensive, now proved attractive to a people more concerned with economic efficiency than survival. To increase production, farmers developed artificial meadows, sowing their land with English grasses such as timothy and clover rather than relying solely on the natural grass along rivers and marshes. Between 1801 and 1840, Concord farmers doubled their English hay output from four to eight tons. English grasses entered New England in the mid-seventeenth century, but the colonists, seduced by the “free lunch” provided by natural meadows, had paid them little attention. Evolved to survive on soil compacted by grazing animals, the British hay provided a much higher nutritional content than the species indigenous to the eastern part of North America, and thus was a better source of fodder. Farmers throughout New England rushed off to drain swampy land and sow it with foreign grass, hiring workers to help them in their efforts.25

  New England farming was gradually moving away from extensive cultivation—involving the application of scarce labor in a land-rich environment—toward an intensive regime that bolstered yields by employing far more labor, technology, and capital. Under the newly intensified system, farmers began to show more concern with fertilizing the soil and with crop rotation. They also adopted better tools. Harvesting small grains had always been a high-stakes gamble, with no more than
a two-week window before the grain became overripe and prone to damage from rain and wind. Farmers needed to hurry, but as late as the early nineteenth century the relatively primitive scythes available slowed them down. In the decade and a half after 1830, however, improved scythe blades, grain cradles, and hay rakes raised the prospects for success.26

  Ultimately these agricultural improvements produced a more reliable and diverse source of food. By the late eighteenth century, New England’s food supply became less dependent on seasonal changes. The threat of springtime scarcity receded as grain yields rose in response to ample English hay and improved soil conditions (in part the product of more cattle and manure for transporting nutrients). Farmers also turned to kitchen gardens, growing vegetables that could be stored for winter use and increasing the diversity of the household diet. More cattle also meant the potential to preserve larger quantities of salt beef, tiding farmers over until summer. The seasons—formerly a powerful force in both Indian and colonial subsistence strategies—slowly loosened their grip on everyday life.27

  CONCLUSION

  Thoreau’s death in 1862 corresponded with the end of the story that had been unfolding in New England for over two centuries. By the 1860s, the region’s longstanding battle to conquer the forest was coming to a close as farmers migrated out of the region to richer soils in the Midwest. Trees began to encroach on the abandoned farmland. But it was a unique new forest environment that developed. The oaks, hickories, and chestnuts that had carpeted southern New England when the colonists arrived did not return right away. A new kind of forest arose, one composed of tree species adapted to life in a landscape filled with fields. It was a simplified woodland, made up largely of white pine trees, a drought-tolerant species with seeds easily dispersed by the wind. The reincarnation of New England as a white pine region was an artifact of its earlier creation as a land of fields and farms.28