Another general theme is that eighteenth-century agriculture, while often subsistence in nature, was still far more sophisticated than we might expect. Its jack-of-all-trades practitioners were at once keen businesspeople, versatile and flexible craftsmen, and communitarians who saw the stability of their localities as inseparable from their own farming fates. They certainly were not indentured servants, European peasants, or sharecroppers bound to the local feudal manor.
Two overriding impulses guided early American agrarian households: the desire for more land for numerous offspring and the constant effort to keep children on the farm, given that city-life was usually far easier, often more remunerative, and certainly more exciting. One of Bushman’s rural newspapermen characterized the city siren song as a narcotic of “some more easy sedentary occupation with the fallacious idea of appearing genteel in the eyes of the world.”
Those eternal allurements, along with mechanization and the technological revolution, explain why only 1 to 2 percent of America’s 330 million citizens are today farmers. And most, as Bushman notes, are by needs agribusiness people who farm with a different mindset than the agrarians of the past: “Only a small percentage of Americans till the earth, and those who do think differently from their forebears. They are businesspeople who calculate profit and run their fields like factories. They are scientific and rational. Self-provisioning means nothing to them.” Still, Bushman’s book never quite decides whether America remains a moral nation because of our long history of agrarianism or whether it is rich, powerful, and technologically omnipotent (and also troubled and confused) because it entirely transcended farming and today is largely an urban and suburban nation.
Bushman emphasizes that there was never a monolithic model of the American farmer, although since the ascendance of the polis Greeks and the Italian yeomen there has been certainly an ideal of a universal Western agrarian working his own small plot, with the aid of his family, in efforts to ensure his political and economic independence. From Hesiod and Virgil to Wendell Berry, that iconic portrait continues to remind even city dwellers of a romantic and supposedly morally superior alternative to the congestion and crassness of urban life.