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

Abstract

In Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic, author Ariel Ron reexamines the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s by turning his scholarly attention to the agricultural communities of the North. It is there, Ron argues, that historians can better understand the Republican Party coalition and its ability to surpass the entrenched powers that made up the slaveholding republic in the decades that predated the Civil War.Ron argues that too much historiographical weight has been given to the “free labor” ideology—a political philosophy that has placed far more significance on the concerns of industrial workers over those of the agriculturists. Such arguments might make sense a few decades later in the midst of the Gilded Age but not in the 1850s. Afterall, the American population in the antebellum era was overwhelming rural and decidedly agricultural. Grassroots Leviathan outlines how agriculturists in the rural north shaped the political landscape of the 1850s through—of all things—agricultural reform movements. Ron states, “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” (5). Look to northern farms, Ron argues, that is where historians can best understand the rapid rise of the Republican Party as well as the foundational legislation that defines the Civil War–era party.The agricultural reform movement of the 1850s may seem like an unlikely place to track political developments at first glance. Farmers formed societies, they subscribed to agricultural journals, and began meeting at state and local conventions. Though these may not seem like explicitly political acts, the collective power of these novel and organizational actions bound rural northerners together to form what Ron identifies as nonpartisan anti-politics. Ron writes, “Agricultural reformers insisted that farmers had a uniquely legitimate claim on the collective resources of the republic but shunned the partisan arena that contemporaries equated with politics itself” (7). Rarely did these societies, presses, or conventions endorse specific parties or candidates; however, the collective message across the venues provided agriculturalists a clear vision of their role in the republic. As the 1850s progressed, agriculturists in the rural north expressed a clear political imperative that ultimately pressed the Republican Party, and the federal government, to enact particular policies that embodied the reforming impulses of the preceding decade. The influence of these nonpartisan anti-politics can best be seen with the passage of the first, major federal policies enacted during the Civil War—the creation of the United States Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act. These bills were not anomalies. Ron states, “They were the culmination of a decade-long campaign powered by a massive agricultural reform movement that had been building up in the North since the early national period” (5).Grassroots Leviathan will appeal to those interested in the history of agricultural reform in Pennsylvania and how the Keystone State fit into a larger cultural, environmental, and political movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Like their counterparts in other states, farming and agricultural advocates in Pennsylvania formed societies, printed regionally specific journals, and pushed state legislators to take their interests seriously. In fact, the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania (to be known later as Pennsylvania State University) was born amid this 1850s impulse. Agricultural reformers pressed the state government to take a more proactive position in protecting and promoting the interests of Pennsylvania farmers. As Ron notes, “The Agricultural College of Pennsylvania defined itself as an ‘educational,’ ‘practical,’ and ‘experimental’ institution,” that embraced reformers’ desires. The institution was explicitly designed to protect, “‘the industrial interests of the State, and most especially the agricultural interest’” (140). Through nonpartisan anti-politics, agriculturists in Pennsylvania channeled the same energies coursing through the rural north to impress on their governments an explicit desire to expand the role of the State in very particular ways.Grassroots Leviathan is significant not only in the ways it reframes the 1850s but also in how we should understand the political dynamics of the postwar period. Ron demonstrates that the primacy of agricultural reform legislation, not the question of slavery, served as the major motivating factor for rural voters. In doing so, he finds clear historical roots to the Patrons of Husbandry, the Farmers’ Alliance, and the new, national coalition of white agriculturalists in the post–Civil War period. “The irony of the Civil War is that, by destroying slavery, it removed a basic obstacle to white solidarity,” Ron observes. “It seems at least possible that the new centering of racism that followed Reconstruction’s demise and accompanied the USDA’s emergence as an exemplar of federal administrative state was predicated on the shifting composition and geographical center of agricultural organizations made possible by the Civil War’s undoing of the master class” (226). By providing a thoughtful examination of the nonpartisan arguments posed by agricultural reformers of the 1850s, Ariel Ron challenges historiographic assumptions about the political developments of antebellum America while also prompting new questions about the nature of coalitional politics throughout rural America in the Gilded Age.