Above all, however, the myth was powerful because the United States in the first half of the Nineteenth Century consisted predominantly of literate and politically enfranchised farmers. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by Sabine Baring-Gould - Complete text 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. In the very hours of its birth as a nation Crveceur had congratulated America for having, in effect, no feudal past and no industrial present, for having no royal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, or monarchial power, and no manufacturing class, and had rapturously concluded: We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here was the irony from which the farmer suffered above all others: the United States was the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress. Why did poor white farmers identify more closely with slaveowners than with enslaved African Americans? Direct link to David Alexander's post This is from ushistory.or, Posted 3 months ago. Related. Chiefly through English experience, and from English and classical writers, the agrarian myth came to America, where, like so many other cultural importations, it eventually took on altogether new dimensions in its new setting. In 1860 almost every family in Mississippis hill country owned at least one horse or mule, there were about as many cattle as people, and pigs outnumbered humans by more than two to one. To this conviction Jefferson appealed when he wrote: The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.. We unlock the potential of millions of people worldwide. . Nothing can tell us with greater duality of the passing of the veoman ideal than these light and delicate tones of nail polish. Like almost all good Americans he had innocently sought progress from the very beginning, and thus hastened the decline of many of his own values. While the farmer had long since ceased to act like a yeoman, he was somewhat slower in ceasing to think like one. They could not become commercial farmers because they were too far from the rivers or the towns, because the roads were too poor for bulky traffic, because the domestic market for agricultural produce was too small and the overseas markets were out of reach. To what extent was the agrarian myth actually false? The yeoman, who owned a small farm and worked it with the aid of his family, was the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being. wait, soooo would child slaves be beaten and tortured and sent to the chain gang too? As settlement moved west, as urban markets grew, as self-sufficient farmers became rarer, as farmers pushed into commercial production for the cities they feared and distrusted, they quite correctly thought of themselves as a vocational and economic group rather than as members of a neighborhood. To call it a myth is not to imply that the idea is simply false.
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