Thomas Jefferson and Agricultural America

Under the Presidency of George Washington, his Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, produced an economic plan that would aid the newly budding economy by favoring big business and the manufacturing wing of the Northern states of America. As the third President Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State under Washington and political enemies with Hamilton, set out to reverse this trend of heavily supporting the manufacturing aspect America. Jefferson wanted to support America as a republic and as an agrarian society. Jefferson was able to accurately depict many Americans as subsistence farmers who farmed or found labor to farm their own land in order to support themselves and their family. Jefferson was favorable towards subsistence farmers and the agricultural society of America because he was less than trusting of capitalism.

Jefferson supported subsistence over capitalism and agrarian life over the manufacturing life because the idea of capitalism was to sell a product at a value that was higher than its actual value. The idea of making profit, Jefferson argued, was unethical. Jefferson likened capitalism and trying to make as much profit as possible to the English, whose governmental rule the Americans had just thrown off half a century before. Market exchange depended on supply and demand, and if the supply was scarce then citizens would have to pay extraordinarily high prices in order to get the goods, which Jefferson did not approve of as the means for a society. To prevent this from happening to American society, Jefferson wanted America to remain an agricultural nation and prevent any real business growth, though he did feel small businesses were a part of society.

In order to keep America an agricultural society, Jefferson argued that agriculture was the symbol of America's independence. In England as well as other monarchies, the farmer was someone of low status. Because America did not have an aristocracy or the same social structure of England, farmers were not the poor that they were in other countries, and if a man owned his own land this would give him empowerment and the ability to vote in the American political system - in effect, landowners, mainly farmers, were able to control a large amount of politics because of their ability to vote. Among farmers there was little social difference, where as in highly stratified nations such as England, which had a king, the wealth difference between subjects could be drastically different than it was in America.

Instead of being a market system based off of capitalism, an agricultural nation would be a less stratified society that was based merely off of producing enough food for one's family to eat and little more. Because in many regions of the country agrarian life was successful, there was no need for the currency of a national bank because farmers, as well as their children who also worked the small farms, had no need for currency as a way of exchanging or bartering. Agrarian life was not as strict socially as the market-exchange lifestyle was, because more personal relationships were forged with the exchange of produce and goods and debt was not in the form of money and interest, another capitalist technique for gaining profit.

The land on the American continent was so vast that it seemed endless. Perhaps the land itself was at one point, but it was not always open. Population expansions as a result of the agrarian lifestyle came into conflict with the American Indians that lived on the western frontier land that Americans believe was theirs. American Indians were agrarian societies, so for the ones that chose to adopt an America lifestyle, if they adopted the American agrarian life it was not very drastically different from their own in an economic sense. Many Indians, such as Tecumseh, chose to resist. The forces Tecumseh led were defeated a year before America would be occupied with the War of 1812, and the British arming of American Indians, to the Americans, seemed an aggressive move and turned public opinion against England.

Sources:

"The Market Revolution" by Charles Sellers