by Steven Stoll
Yet farmers of modest means gained in the South and West following the Civil War, including black farmers. Though many African-Americans ended up shackled to crop liens owned by landlords and furnishing merchants, others abandoned the South at nearly the moment Union soldiers withdrew after the negotiated end to Reconstruction in 1877. These emigrants recalled that whites in Colorado and Kansas had favored abolition before the Civil War, and they knew that the Homestead Act offered favorable terms. One group founded the town of Nicodemus, Kansas. Brick buildings and a newspaper suggested a thriving community before the drought of the 1880s destroyed harvest after harvest. When three major railroads bypassed Nicodemus, almost everyone moved away.22
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ROMANTIC ESSAYISTS MIGHT NOT SEEM like the obvious commentators to turn to at this point. But they expressed a commitment to agriculture through their larger commitment to Nature. Even before the number of farms in New England began their decline, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson speculated darkly. Each predicted that Yankee makeshift would be eclipsed.
The most famous American agrarian of the nineteenth century was not a farmer. In 1845, Emerson invited Thoreau to live on a woodlot he owned about a mile from the center of Concord, Massachusetts, on the edge of Walden Pond. Thoreau built a small cabin and planted beans a few steps away. The journal he kept during the next two years, two months, and two days—published as Walden (1854)—established him as an important writer. He was a contrarian philosopher who advocated asceticism amid rising consumption, an exemplar of the waning virtue of thrift, a holdout against the capitalist logic on display at Lowell, twenty miles from his cabin door.
Thoreau did not engage in a caricature of makeshift economy, growing all his food and buying nothing. He planted a considerable bean field, far larger than he required. If the rows of his two and a half acres could have been placed end to end, they would have spanned seven miles. From this he harvested twelve bushels (or ninety-six gallons, an exceptionally low yield), reserving three for himself and selling nine. The profit from his market crops, including potatoes and hay, came to $8.71. Not an impressive sum. Add in the rice, molasses, and rye meal he bought, in addition to the $28.12 he spent to build his tiny house, and the venture lost money.
But money was never Thoreau’s goal. Like anyone else with a garden, a pond for fishing, and a stretch of woods where he gathered and hunted, a monetary loss didn’t hurt him. Thoreau’s negative financial result actually confirmed his peasant existence. He sought money without depending on it for survival.
I learned … that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present … I was more independent than any farmer in Concord.
This is the true yield of Thoreau’s political economy. Like Crèvecoeur or any other agrarian advocate, he believed that material independence translated into freedom of thought and being. Like any peasant, he worked only to meet his needs, refusing to take on additional land or domesticated animals. His good-enough yields rewarded him with time each day to swim, write in his journal, and observe ants at war. When he said that property seemed to own its owners, he sounded like the socialist Albert Brisbane. He also sounded a little like Karl Marx.
They were born one year apart. Marx was twenty-six in 1844 when he first wrote on political economy. Thoreau was twenty-eight in 1845 when he moved to Walden Pond. Both sought to experience the fullness of human expression, leading them to reject moneymaking for its own sake. Thoreau pitied the owners of hundred-acre farms, calling them “serfs of the soil” who spend their days “laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt.” Marx noticed that those who dedicated themselves to wealth often renounced basic pleasures. “The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.” Thoreau didn’t dance or carouse in the public house like Marx did, but he would have agreed that money makes everyone its servant. And what else did he resist at Walden than alienated life and estranged being?23
The estranged beings Thoreau knew best were the improving farmers of Concord. The improvers advanced a kind of prosperity gospel, in which the rewards of the market flowed from land well tilled. They experimented in manures, cover crops, and animal fodder in order to increase the productivity of land and thus its returns. Restoring worn or otherwise infertile soil and making it pay became the highest virtue, the sign of grace. But one thing plagued Thoreau about his commercializing neighbors. Their greater output changed the landscape in ways that he loathed and feared. Railroad links to Boston and experiments with cattle breeds enabled them to produce more milk. A bigger business called for larger spaces cleared from the woods.
Thoreau responded with barely restrained rage, calling them mad with greed. “Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor,—poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap … A great grease-spot, redolent of manures and butter-milk! Under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of men! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the church-yard!” The historian Robert Gross thinks that Thoreau preferred to poke fun at the improvers rather than condemn them. Gross imagines Thoreau’s bean field as a philosophical prank. “By contrast, Thoreau claimed to have done just the opposite. He started with exhausted, barren land, did nothing to improve it, obtained little from it, and announced himself quite content.”24
Thoreau was anything but content. His experiment in subsistence was not intended merely to satisfy him or prove to the world that he could farm. Nor should we think of it as a romantic retreat into an untouched Nature, a communing with wildness, when Thoreau knew well that the people of Concord made constant use of Walden Pond and the woods that surround it. The key lies in his anger and the suggestion that greedy farmers exceeded their limits and sacrificed society to their narrow ends. Seen from these passages, Walden looks like the jeremiad of an ascetic intellectual in the midst of change he could not control. Thoreau set out to embarrass his neighbors by creating a viable subsistence on a strip of marginal ground, some of the worst soil in Concord. His denunciation and the alternative he constructed came from his anxiety about the pursuit of wealth and the commodification of the landscape.
Thoreau offers a complicated legacy that I cannot assess here. I sometimes think that his puritanism and psychological introversion explain more about him than anything else. And like other critics, I cannot help but see his contradictions. He overstated the purity of his economy by neglecting to mention that he paid nothing for his few rods of ground and lived there rent-free with the permission of the landlord. Thoreau said more about private property in Civil Disobedience. Owning land required one to pay taxes, which required one to make money. His solution was a fugitive existence, without community or continuity. “You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.” It tells us something unflattering about him that rather than write letters to the newspapers and form a coalition against speculation in land, he recommended dissolving all social bonds and leading a life on the run.
The most significant American intellectual also struggled with aut
onomy and freedom as they related to rural life. Emerson’s two abysmal essays on the subject are known today as “Farming” and “Wealth.” The first began as “The Man with the Hoe,” an oration delivered at a cattle show in 1858. It would be unfair to compare it to the hundreds of similar addresses published in New England between the 1820s and the Civil War. Almost every one of them is superior in conception and content to Emerson’s catalog of platitudes.
Emerson’s essay opens with this flourish: “He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food[,] which was not, he causes to be. The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.” Emerson moves on to compare farmers to the managers of a faultless machine. “In English factories, the boy that watches the loom, to tie the thread when the wheel stops to indicate that a thread is broken, is called a minder. And in this great factory of our Copernican globe, shifting its slides, rotating its constellations, times and tides, bringing now the day of planting, then of watering, then of weeding, then of reaping, then of curing and storing,—the farmer is the minder.” Soils, plants, the weather itself, he said, were as tools in the hand of the husbandman. It is impossible to imagine Wilson Flagg saying anything like this. No farmer would have spoken with such confidence when hail or drought or the Hessian fly could wreck a season’s labor in a day. Emerson’s philosophy is so devoid of reality, his language so insipid, that he could have been describing Virgil’s Arcadia but certainly no earthly location in 1858.25
In “Wealth” (1860, revised 1876), Emerson mulled over a tougher problem. How did the ascent of a money-dominated economy change the meaning of self-reliance? He once fretted over the deepening division of labor in New England and the fracturing of the human totality it appeared to represent. “There is one man,” he insisted in “The American Scholar” (1837). “Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all.” But the onset of “the divided or social state” sorted people into professions, to the point that “this original unit, this fountain of power … has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” Emerson further condemned the times in “Self-Reliance” (1841). He rejected progress as a metaphysical force in history. “Society never advances … It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.” The New Englanders of the nineteenth century compared badly to the savage foil Emerson created, “the naked New Zealander.” Riding in a coach made them too weak to walk. Wearing a Swiss watch made them forget how to tell time by the sun. Writing in notebooks ruins memory! Not even Rousseau was so hostile to the simplest innovations.26
But two decades later, Emerson strained to find a coherent way forward that would salvage some of the old creed. “Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer,” he tells us, and his definition of wealth sounds like good old Yankee wisdom. Wealth begins “in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes,… in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp.” Affirmed the great individualist, “Each man should feed himself.” Then he swerves. The farm that provided everything, that “begins and ends with itself,” existed in the past. It’s gone, he says. “When men now alive were born, the farm yielded everything that was consumed on it. The farm yielded no money, and the farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his aid … Now, the farmer buys almost all he consumes,—tin-ware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad-tickets, and newspapers.” Emerson created a farm that never existed and then justified the money economy against it. There was nothing new or shocking about farmers buying sugar and newspapers. This is the false distinction between autonomy and exchange. No farm ever “yielded everything that was consumed on it.” Emerson’s Yankee farmer is the same caricature as Adam Smith’s savage.
In “Wealth,” Emerson tells us that the farm can no longer provide the central metaphor of the age. He saw agrarians as narrow and pinched, their tight roofs dripping, their suits looking frumpy and worn. He asked and answered a new question. “Will a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried peas? He is born to be rich. He is … tempted out by his appetites and fancies to the conquest of this and that piece of nature, until he finds his well-being in the use of his planet, and of more planets than his own.” Hopelessly tied to Earth, farmers failed Emerson’s test of universality. But buying and selling seemed to harness the forces of the cosmic order. The merchant’s laws “are laws of the Universe.” Like any of the mediocre political economists churning out pamphlets at the same time, he blandly naturalized capitalist motion as heat and light. “The Merchant has one rule: absorb and invest: he is to be capitalist: the scraps and filings must be gathered back into the crucible; the gas and smoke must be burned, and earnings must not go to increase expense, but to capital again.” This is where Emerson leaves it, with phony physics and the Protestant austerity that Thoreau and Marx ridiculed.27
“Farming” and “Wealth” are not about dispossession but the demise of New England makeshift as a cultural virtue. The first partakes of that faint praise for agriculture that lasted well into the twentieth century. The second says goodbye to the farmer as the exemplar of social and national progress. Emerson never seems to have understood that businessmen and bankers are entirely reliant on everyone else’s labor. They consume without producing. But like many others, he had moved beyond self-reliance. When oysters collected from Long Island Sound could be served ten days later in Buffalo, what did it mean to live within oneself or a small community? What did it mean to refrain from consuming in all the new ways? Other intellectuals struggled with similar questions, including the ownership of the landscape itself. Among them was George Inness.
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THE FIGURE HOBBLES ON A CANE across a footbridge spanning a dry and shadowy creek. The creek runs down the center of a meadow, where other figures stand or sit in the middle ground, as a locomotive slices across the horizon in the opposite direction of the walker. The gloom and uncertainty of the ravine heaves in the foreground, all the more threatening because the footbridge is rickety and rotted, suggesting the demise of the walker and the world of the meadow. This is the action in George Inness’s Short Cut, Watchung Station, New Jersey (1883), a painting that depicts the end of one rural land regime and the ascent of another.28
Short Cut is interesting for reasons other than the tension it expresses between Nature and Culture, the most common way scholars have approached depictions of the American countryside since the publication of Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden (1964). The locomotive in Short Cut, however, is not merely set against the meadow, like the whale against the ship in Moby-Dick. Let’s not talk about the sound of the whistle from the woods. We know how the railroad “gave rise to a symbolic motion away from centers of civilization toward their opposite, nature, away from sophistication toward simplicity.” Yet the Machine in the Garden says nothing about the social and environmental dislocation inflicted on people. It ignores those represented in the painting who practiced some version of agrarian household economy—growing a portion of their own food, hunting where and when they could, and exchanging vigorously for all the things they did not make.29
Imagining engine smoke as harmonizing with clouds elides the totalizing claims of industrial technology to replace certain people and practices with others. It misses dispossession as the dominant social fact of the countryside in the nineteenth century. In Short Cut, Inness chose not to look away from the rural poor of New Jersey, who increasingly lost or sold their land to join the urban working class. In a series of paintings quite different from others in his catalog, Inness depicted relationships and individ
uals on the cusp of change.
Short Cut evokes a much more famous Inness painting, The Lackawanna Valley (1855). Both depict a locomotive crossing a cultivated plain with a figure in the foreground, but where the earlier work is grandly sphinxlike in its refusal to resolve its ambivalence about progress, the latter one is more pointed as social commentary. Lackawanna Valley presents a country path meeting steel tracks at the edge of a third space, a stump-covered hillside. But that hillside could belong to either the agrarian or the industrial economy, and the tracks themselves curve, as though asking a question or offering a proposition. Short Cut is more blunt. As the locomotive rushes onward, the peasant world is poised (literally) to topple over.30
A shortcut saves time or distance between two points, but only someone who knows how the parts of a place fit together knows where to veer off into bushes or through a backyard. In this sense, the man with the cane knows how to get across the creek without having to go all the way to the road, where there might be a stone overpass. But what moves through time faster than a locomotive? It always travels the shortest distance between two points. And what could be more tedious and circuitous than the path the walker takes? Short Cut might be interpreted as presenting local knowledge as a viable alternative to the worldly industrialism, but for the decrepit bridge barely spanning the ominous creek. Together, these visual elements present the bent-over walker on a shortcut to nowhere. If we assume a northern orientation, the train heads west while the walker crosses east—against the direction of time. The tension in the painting cannot be reduced to Nature versus Culture. It is not nostalgic. Inness does not give the viewer a past to return to, an alternative to the railroad, or an idyll to dwell in.