THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN
Joseph Schafer
II. DISTINCTIVE TRAITS AS FARMERS
The agricultural traits and peculiarities of the nineteenth century Yankees were the resultant of partly contradictory forces, some of them evolutionary, others devolutionary. In England the period of the Puritan migration to America and the half-century antecedent thereto was a time of vigorous agricultural change marked by many improvements in cultivation and in land management. The agrarian revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed by business principles. In this new system the production of farm animals—especially sheep—the fertilization of the soil, rotation of crops, and livestock improvement were main factors. Forces and interests were set in motion at this time which, a century or so later, made farming the concern of many of England’s leading minds, whose wise and persistent experimentation benefited the whole civilized world.
The few thousand immigrants to the New England colonies, founders of America’s Yankeedom, were not all farmers. Some were fishermen, some were small tradesmen, others craftsmen; a few were professional men and soldiers. But a goodly proportion were land owners and peasants, and all had a more or less direct knowledge of the principles and processes which governed English agriculture. The influence of habit, always a determining factor in the transfer of civilization from an old land to a new, caused the occasional reproduction in New England of some features of English farming, especially under village conditions. The common field system in Old Salem reflected a disappearing element in English farm life, while the commons of hay, commons of pasture, commons of wood, and commons of mast, with their administrative “hay reeve,” “hog reeve,” “wood reeve,” herdsmen, and shepherds, mark a natural imitating of the ways of parish life at home.
But there were differences in the conditions “at home” and in America as wide as those symbolized by the terms “insular,” and “continental,” applied to the geography of the two countries. Chief among these differences were the generally forested character of the new-world land, the necessity of adapting tillage to an unfamiliar climate, in part to new food cereals, especially Indian corn, and the absolute dependence upon markets which could be created or opened by the colonists themselves. It was in fact the problem of a market which so long subordinated farming proper in New England to a species of country living in which small patches of arable supplied most of the family’s food, while forest and stream were the objects of exploitation for marketable furs, for medicinal plants, and for timber products. Yankee ingenuity, which justly became proverbial, had an assignable cause. It was not an inherited quality, or one which was imported and conserved; it was a distinctively American product, explained by the situation of the average New England farmer—who was, by force of circumstances, more of a mechanic and woods worker than a cultivator of the soil. His house, especially in winter, was a busy workshop where clapboards, staves, hoops, heading, ax handles, and a variety of other articles of utility and salability were always in course of manufacture. All the farm “tinkering” was additional thereto.
In his contest with the forest for a livelihood, the Yankee farmer was gradually changed from the eastern New England village type to that of the American “pioneer.” His axmanship was unrivaled, his skill in woodscraft, his resourcefulness in the face of untried situations were equal to the best. When the time came for taking agricultural possession of broad spaces in the northern and western interior, the Yankee was the instrument, shaped by four generations of American history, to achieve that object.[12]
This general “handiness” was gained not without a partial loss of such acquired knowledge and skill in agriculture proper as the first immigrants brought from England. Close, careful cultivation was impossible among the stumps and girdled trees of new clearings; the amplitude of natural meadows and the superabundance of “browse” relieved settlers from the sharp necessity of providing artificially for the winter feeding of cattle; the mast of oak trees and the wealth of nuts, supplementing summer “greens,” roots, grass, and wild apples, supplied most of the requisites for finishing off pork. Under these conditions farming even at best was an entirely different thing from what it had been at home. At its worst, it was a crude process, affording a vegetative kind of existence, but nothing more. In fact, farming in the New England states hardly attained the status of a business until the nineteenth century, though in some portions it gave the farmer and his family a generous living and afforded a few luxuries. It made thousands of persons independent proprietors who could not have reached that station at home; it gave the farmers as a class a commanding influence in politics and society; “embattled,” it enabled them to wrest their country’s independence from the awkward hands of a bungling monarchy. In short, it contributed incalculably to their importance as men in history. The indications are, however, that as farmers the fourth generation of Mayflower descendants were decidedly inferior to the original Pilgrims and Puritans.
The third generation were probably less skillful than the fourth. For, by the time of the Revolution there were farming areas in southern New England that were looking up. Timothy Dwight, near the end of the century, found and recorded some of the evidences of a movement to improve cultivation, to fertilize the soil, to better the character of farm livestock—a movement which had been going forward under impulses communicated from England, where the eighteenth century was peculiarly fruitful in agricultural development. Dwight was enough of an idealist to appreciate the limits of the improvement thus far reached. Yet he did insist, with evident justice, that the farming of the Connecticut valley and of eastern Massachusetts was at least respectable. Fields were well cleared and carefully cultivated, clover began to be used as a feeding and green manure crop, the beginnings had been made of a system of rotation of crops, livestock was of relatively good quality—especially in certain Connecticut towns which were already noted for the weight of the bullocks they furnished to the commissary department of Washington’s army. By that time, also, leading men in New England lent their influence toward the building up of the agricultural interest; agricultural societies were organized and essays on agriculture came to have considerable vogue. Some importations of purebred livestock from England took place. The first merino sheep were brought in from France, then larger numbers from Spain by Consul William Jarvis. In 1810 Elkanah Watson established his Berkshire County Agricultural Society, with the county fair which became the model for subsequent county and state fairs the country over.
When Tom Paine predicted in 1776 that an independent America would prosper “as long as eating continues to be the custom of Europe,”[13] he assumed one point about which some doubt might in future arise: Would Europe always have the wherewithal to purchase American foodstuffs at prices which would compensate our people for growing them and delivering them to the market? During the continuance of the long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Europe managed to make good Paine’s prophecy, and prices at the close of the wars ruled high. There followed the great expansion era which spread American farmers over the New West, both south and north, into which Yankees entered to a large extent.