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6 - The Farm, The Farmer, and The Market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Jeremy Atack ,
Fred Bateman  and
William Parker
Edited by
Stanley L. Engerman  and
Robert E. Gallman
Jeremy Atack
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
Fred Bateman
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
William Parker
Affiliation:
Yale University
Stanley L. Engerman
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, New York
Robert E. Gallman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between the farmer and the market in the nineteenth century was frequently ambiguous and fraught with contradictions. Agriculture’s champion, Thomas Jefferson, the philosopher and politician, urged farmers to avoid “the casualties and caprice of customers” through self-sufficiency. But Jefferson the farmer lamented the total want of demand except for our family table” and wished for nothing more than “a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden [emphasis added].” While Jefferson exalted the self-sufficient farmer, he was among the first to admit that Americans had a decided taste for navigation & commerce. Indeed, the debt-free farmer with the means of sustenance at his back door was free to choose his level of market involvement in a way open to few, if any, others. For most, self-sufficiency and barter were indicators of market absence, not market avoidance. The “moral economy” where community values dominated individual self-interest, where prices were set by custom, and where reciprocity governed exchanges may have existed, but only temporarily and hardly ever by choice. Settlements on the frontier had little choice but to be self-sufficient. With low population densities, great distances, and high transport costs, few crops could be profitably marketed by the frontier farmer. Under such circumstances, the successful farmer – one who best provided for his family – was indeed the one “who did everything within himself.” Such a person survived and prospered only on the fringes of Von Thünen’s Isolated State, but his isolation did not last long.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Economic History of the United States , pp. 245 - 284
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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