The opening of the trails-Allegheny region, its protection from slavery, and the purchase of the Louisiana Territory were the first great steps in a continental strategy designed to establish an internal empire of small farms. Thousands of young men, wrote the New York agriculturist Jesse Buel, do annually forsake the plough, and the honest profession of their fathers, if not to win the fair, at least form an opinion, too often confirmed by mistaken parents, that agriculture is not the road to wealth, to honor, nor to happiness. In the Populist era the city was totally alien territory to many farmers, and the primacy of agriculture as a source of wealth was reasserted with much bitterness. Less than one-quarter of white Southerners held slaves, with half of these holding fewer than five and fewer than 1 percent owning more than one hundred. I paste this one here to show you how little political argumentation has changed in 160 years: "JAMES THORNWELL, a minister, wrote in 1860, "The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and slaveholders, they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.". His well-being was not merely physical, it was moral; it was not merely personal, it was the central source of civic virtue; it was not merely secular but religious, for God had made the land and called man to cultivate it. Like almost all white men in the nineteenth-century South, the men of the yeoman class exerted complete patriarchal authority, born of both custom and law, over the property and bodies connected to their households. ET. Slavery In The US Constitution . He was becoming increasingly an employer of labor, and though he still worked with his hands, he began to look with suspicion upon the working classes of the cities, especially those organized in trade unions, as he had once done upon the urban lops and aristocrats. An illustration from 1841 showing an idealized vision of plantation life, in which caring slaveowners provided for enslaved people from infancy to old age. The more commercial this society became, however, the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values. Direct link to David Alexander's post This is from ushistory.or, Posted 3 months ago. There has a certain class of individuals grown up in our land, complained a farm writer in 1835, who treat the cultivators of the soil as an inferior caste whose utmost abilities are confined to the merit of being able to discuss a boiled potato and a rasher of bacon. The city was symbolized as the home of loan sharks, dandies, lops, and aristocrats with European ideas who despised farmers as hayseeds.

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