F u R t h E R R E A D I n g . James D. Essig,
The Bonds of Wick- edness: American Evangelicals against Slavery 1770–1808,
1982; Lawrence J.
Friedman,
Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870, 1982; Stanley Harrold,
American Abolitionists, 2001; Idem,
The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism:AddressestotheSlaves,
2004; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton,
In Hope of Liberty:Culture,Community,andProtestamongNorth- ern Free Blacks 1700–1860, 1997; Julie Roy Jeffrey,
The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in theAntislaveryMovement, 1998; Matthew Mason,
Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 2006; James M. McPherson,
The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the CivilWar and Reconstruction, 1964, reprint, 1992; Richard H. Sewell,
Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860, 1976; James Brewer Stewart,
Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists andAmericanSlavery, 2nd ed., 1997.
S tA n l E y h A R R o l D
agrarian politics
Agrarian politics
describes the strategies, tactics, and values of the farmer-based political movements that played a prominent reform role in American political history. Its purest manifestation came in the Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, but its language, goals, and methods persisted, in a more subdued way, in the New Deal Era and beyond.
Agrarian politics played an important role in the evolution of American democracy and the construc- tion of public institutions to regulate business with- out diminishing its productive energies. Indeed, the regulatory goal of agrarian politics after the Civil War provided the confidence that consumers, service us- ers,
and investors needed to buy, sell, and ship in a market economy. Agrarian politics—egalitarian, rights-based, inclusive, electoral, and targeted at the legislature where the most numerous classes pre- sumably have their best shot—produced important structural reforms of national institutions, at least those not won by war: the Bill of Rights,
direct elec- tion of senators, antimonopoly laws, an income tax, regulation of big business (starting with railroads), a monetary system controlled by public officials and not based on gold, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively (and of agricultural coopera- tives to similarly operate without being charged as “conspiracies in restraint of trade” under the Sher- man Act), and the lowering of tariffs (the most preva- lent and burdensome taxes) on goods consumed and used by ordinary people, to name just a few.
The term
agrarian is virtually synonymous with
republican, denoting a mode of politics and political thought nurtured by British and French Enlighten- ment philosophy that flowered in eighteenth-century North America. It was no doubt encouraged by the immigration of dissenters and the mode of settle- ment in what became (in 1789) the United States—a
nation of independent landowners who belonged to
diverse religious communities, themselves permeated by democratic demand, in contrast to the hierarchi- cal denominations prevalent in the Old World.
Agrarianism’s central tenets were galvanized by the struggle for independence from Great Britain. Its foremost philosopher was Thomas Jefferson, the apostle of sturdy yeoman farmer democracy (or, more accurately,
self-government), whose creed came together in the cauldron of revolution and who pro- vided the revolutionary language of that struggle. Agrarianism’s principal antagonist was Alexander Hamilton, the foremost intellectual advocate of economic industrialism, commercialism, and po- litical elitism.
In Jefferson’s
philosophy, the hand of government should be as light as possible, keeping opportunities open without favoritism, exploitation, or needless constraints on human affairs; and that hand’s guid- ance should be in the legislature, the popular branch of the people’s elected representatives. If its public of- ficials became unresponsive to the sufferings
of their constituents, the spectacle of a passionate people ris- ing up in arms against its government (as in Shays’s Rebellion in 1787) was not for Jefferson the night- mare it was for Hamilton.
Popular mobilization
against bad, and
for better, government, with wide participation by citizens and guaranteed commitment not to infringe on the per- sonal rights on which good government depended— these were the tenets of Jeffersonian republicanism that shaped the rhetoric and action of agrarian poli- tics. Individual rights, but a strong role for collec- tive action; decentralized power, but enough govern- mental authority to protect the people from private exploitation—these became the central tensions of agrarian republicanism. This may sound like the ros- iest statement of an American creed. But while an American creed
without Alexander Hamilton, busi- ness politics, and a powerful presidency is possible to imagine, an American political history without Jef- fersonian republicanism is not.
Yet agrarian reformers had to struggle for decades to achieve their political goals; their successes were episodic, concentrated in reform periods like the Populist and Progressive eras, and the New Deal. Their opponents had far greater material resources and the deference of many elected officials (as
well as the federal courts, historically skeptical of regulation and redistribution).
The first national manifestation of agrarian politics came in the battle over the Constitution itself. Given the elite composition and Hamiltonian persuasion of many delegates at Philadelphia, the small farmers of the interior and less-developed regions who had con- stituted the left flank of the Revolution would not accept this ominous concentration of power in a na- tional government without the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, and only its promise got the new Consti- tution ratified.
