Agricultural Labor

Agriculture was the backbone of American life in the new American nation. More than 85 percent of the American people participated directly in agriculture, making agricultural labor arguably the most important single factor in the early national economy. In an age that relied on human and animal muscle to accomplish virtually all farming tasks, a regular supply of labor was always a crucial consideration. Agricultural labor was performed in four contexts: family labor on family farms; hired labor on family farms; hired labor on commercial farms; and slave labor on plantations.

family farms

For the majority of people in the new American nation, agricultural labor was family labor. Family farms dominated the northern, mid-Atlantic, and western states, but even in the South, despite the high visibility of plantation agriculture, family farms far outnumbered tobacco, rice, and, later, cotton plantations. Although conditions varied slightly from region to region, family farming followed a common life and labor cycle. Newly formed families and families with children younger than seven or eight years of age often did not have enough labor for the myriad tasks—plowing, planting, harvesting, pruning, and building—that early national farming required. This was especially true in frontier areas, where trees had to be felled, land cleared of boulders and stumps, fences erected, and farmhouses and outbuildings constructed. Lacking family labor in these early years, young couples usually hired labor from surrounding farms, young women to help the new wife and mother and young men to help the husband and father. In most rural areas, these "helps" (as laborers were called) were teenaged men and women from surrounding farms who spent from two to three years working for neighboring farmers to save for their dowries or to help them purchase land for their own future farms.

Once a family's children reached an age when they were capable of regular farm work, parents let their "helps" go and introduced their children to the routines of farm labor. As children grew through childhood and into the teenage years, their labor became an essential component of the family's well-being. Beginning with simple, easily learned tasks, children mastered the regime of labor, and by the time they were eleven or twelve years old, they had became full-fledged family workers, supplying at least as much labor as their fathers and mothers.

As the family aged and children neared adulthood, the family labor cycle shifted again. Now children had to be launched into lives of their own. Better-off parents kept their older children at home, helping the family until they married. In less prosperous families, older children left home to work as "helps" for others. In both cases, when sons reached their early-to-middle twenties and daughters their late teens or very early twenties, they married and left the family homestead. Most farm families were large, however, and the departing older children were replaced by their younger brothers and sisters, who quickly took on their siblings' former role as laborers.

The final stage of the farming labor cycle came when the youngest children reached maturity. By this time both parents were aging and less able to keep up with the labor demands of the farm. Just as they did in their early child-rearing years, farm families needed help in middle and old age. This help often came from the youngest son, who stayed in the home with his own family, helping his parents and eventually inheriting the family farm when his parents died. Where the youngest son was unable or unwilling to stay, parents turned again to hired labor from surrounding farms, much as they had done when they were first married.

This family labor cycle described the lives of the majority of Americans in the new American nation, but in areas where land had been worn out and families grown too large to provide for, life held out a different and less pleasant future. Faced with few prospects at home, young adults by the early 1790s could be seen roaming the countryside, looking for work far from home. These surplus men and women walked from farm to farm and from town to town in hopes of finding employment as farm laborers or household servants or in the rural textile mills that were beginning to dot the American countryside. Little is known about the fate of this growing body of displaced men and women, but they were an increasingly visible and troublesome phenomenon in long-settled agricultural regions, especially in New England.

commercial farms and plantations

Even less is known about agricultural labor on northern commercial farms. Large commercial farms producing grain for national and overseas markets existed in small numbers near the ocean ports of New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Work on these commercial farms was performed with hired labor, the workers most likely coming from the flow of displaced agricultural workers mentioned above or from the growing number of Irish immigrants, who began entering the new nation in the early nineteenth century.

Southern plantations were the largest agricultural enterprises in the new nation. Growing tobacco, rice, wheat, and—by the mid-1790s—cotton for export, these plantations relied by the mid-eighteenth century almost exclusively on the labor of African American slaves. Agricultural work on southern plantations was arduous and often unrelenting. Unlike the labor cycle of family farms, which was regulated by the shifting priorities of the seasons, plantation owners demanded constant work from their slaves, putting them to nonagricultural work when crops did not need attention.

Continuing the labor regimes of the colonial period, plantation owners worked their slaves following one of two labor systems. In the gang system, large contingents of slaves were marched to the fields by overseers and given specific tasks to perform. Oversight was intense and slaves had little freedom under the unrelenting gaze of the overseer. The task system allowed much more freedom and self-direction and was much preferred by slaves. In the task system, slave foremen were given a list of tasks and an expected time of completion. The organization of tasks and laborers, as well as the apportionment of work time, was left to the slaves themselves. Both labor systems were in common use throughout the early national period; George Washington, for example, worked his male slaves by the task system and his female field hands by the gang system.

Wherever one traveled in the new American nation, one found men and women working in fields, orchards, and gardens. Not until the advent of the McCormick reaper in 1831 did the age of mechanical agriculture begin. And with it came a new kind of agricultural work unthought of in the new American nation.

See alsoAgriculture; Childhood and Adolescence; Farm Making; Plantation, The .

bibliography

Hahn, Steven, and Jonathan Prude, eds. The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Innes, Stephen, ed. Work and Labor in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Ulrich, Laurel. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Random House, 1990.

Vickers, Daniel. Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Ronald Schultz