Preface.  These are a few of my kindle notes from Steven Stoll’s “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia” that may give you an idea of how people might survive after collapse. It is a damning critique of capitalism.

A few excerpts:

This book is about the ordeal of greater West Virginia in the counties that gave rise to the Whiskey Rebellion; in Scotts Run, a long industrial hollow near Morgantown; and in the coalfields near Flat Top Mountain, up against Kentucky and Virginia. It is based on the collision of two forms of economy: one represented by corporations, the other manifested in families and farms and as old as agriculture itself, if not older.

By grant and purchase, the Revolutionary elite came into millions of acres. None of the owners moved to western Virginia or eastern Kentucky. Properties the size of major watersheds belonged to men who would know them only as described on parchment. Most of the land was too steep to be cultivated in cotton or tobacco and too far from cities to have any other commercial use.

Past occupants of hollows and ridges lived in a manner typical of humans all over the planet. They attained sufficiency, a makeshift existence, not always thriving but rarely starving. They were not poor until they lost the forest, their ecological base, a vast renewable fund of resources that provides space for fields, food for gathering, fodder for cattle, and habitat for wild game that gives everything but costs nothing.

Nothing else compares to the loss of this commons. Without the woods to provide them with commodities for exchange, they depended on wages for the money that connected them to the rest of the world. Yet dependence on wages meant subjecting themselves to corporate authority, the vagaries of coal markets, and other things out of their control.

I am under no illusion that they lived abundantly or easily.

I do not believe that they always tended their land well or that they could have maintained themselves for another century. But the virtues of their makeshift have been largely erased and the historical causes of their poverty are little known to the reading public.

Arcadia is not Eden. It’s not where you have anything you desire but everything you need. It’s a dream of sufficiency, not of hedonism. This is why Rousseau called this moment the happiest for humankind. Painters and poets longed for the freedom it represented from rents, taxes, and other instruments of organized power.

Capitalism demands that every form of production result in capital. That has meant the relentless modernization of food and farming. The peasant garden, the village field, the diversified landscape of products and employments, must everywhere become fully monetized, integrated, engineered, and subordinated.

The way back to Appalachia leads through the history of capitalism in Great Britain. The reason is that English lords established the idea and legal procedure of enclosure. We can understand much about what happened in the southern mountains by looking at this first instance. Americans might not think that capitalism on these shores required the seizure of land, but it did.

One reason for a brief history of capitalism is to make the point that it has a history. It cannot be understood as the outcome of evolutionary stages. It did not dwell for millions of years in the human brain like a dormant virus. It is no better a reflection of human nature than any other social construction. Just a few hundred years ago, it didn’t exist.

It came from a new set of relationships having to do with the control of land and labor.

I hope you’ll consider buying it in hard copy to help preserve knowledge in the future, and I left so much out that is fascinating. For more book ideas see my book lists here. If you found this post of interest, you may want to read this post and buy the book No friends but the Mountains. Dispatches from the worlds violent highlands

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Book lists  Podcasts: Financial Sense, WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Stoll S (2017) Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia.

This book is also about country people throughout the Atlantic World over the last 400 years. By country people I mean settlers, peasants, campesinos, and smallholders, all of whom make their livings by hunting, foraging, farming, gardening, and exchanging for the things they cannot grow or fashion themselves. The general word for them is agrarians. My purpose is to unite the experience of backcountry settlers of the southern mountains with that of agrarians elsewhere, to demonstrate that English peasants in 1650 and Malian smallholders in 2000 shared a similar fate and encountered similar sources of power as Scots-Irish farmers in 1880.

 

This book is about the ordeal of greater West Virginia, regarding that state as exemplary for the region as a whole. It takes place in the Pennsylvania counties that gave rise to the Whiskey Rebellion; in Scotts Run, a long industrial hollow near Morgantown; and in the coalfields near Flat Top Mountain, up against Kentucky and Virginia. It is predicated on the collision between two forms of economy: one represented by corporations, the other manifested in families and farms and as old as agriculture itself, if not older.

By grant and purchase, the Revolutionary elite came into millions of acres. None of the owners moved to western Virginia or eastern Kentucky. Properties the size of major watersheds belonged to men who would know them only as metes and bounds described on parchment. Most of the land was too steep to be cultivated in cotton or tobacco and too far from cities to have any other commercial use. Owners filed their deeds and forgot about them, unaware that a frontier society took shape on their property. The first census of the United States revealed that 56,000 whites, blacks, and Indians inhabited the area that became West Virginia, a density of 2.3 per square mile. Each household tended to claim around 400 acres by squatting or “tomahawk right,” but others claimed much more, with the expectation that Virginia or Kentucky would acknowledge their titles.

After the Revolution, the Commonwealth of Virginia granted millions of acres in its far-distant counties to soldiers, politicians, and financiers. The owners often turned around and sold their holdings, setting off a frenzy. The thought that wilderness land might be valuable sent all sorts of people into the mountains to grab it up. Kentucky was part of Virginia until 1792, and Boone joined in the rush. He bought and sold warrants, which conferred the right to make a claim that might result in title (meaning ownership). But if another claimant proved that he had made the first survey or demonstrated a superior right in some other way, all competing warrants became void. This made buying a warrant like placing a bet. The process required tenacity, a touch of mendacity, and a smattering of legal knowledge. Between the early 1780s and the early 1790s, Boone bought warrants to at least thirty-nine thousand acres, resulting in about twelve thousand acres in his name.

Poor whites also became a despised race defined by their own circular argument. Descriptions of mountaineers emphasize their supposed degeneracy and grotesqueness, which came from their isolation, causing moral depravity, resulting in … degeneracy and grotesqueness. Once a racial type is in place, any worsening of a subject people’s condition reinforces the type, providing proof after proof. Racialization has often gone along with ejectment and enclosure, offering an intellectual tool for taking resources away from people said to be incapable of progress or change. This is what we find in the southern mountains.

Corporations lay track into thousands of hollows and pulled billions of dollars in lumber and coal from the region over the following century. Still, those searching for the causes of poverty in Appalachia—throughout the twentieth century and even today—blame its isolation.

For foresters, missionaries, and businessmen, the thing to be overcome was the very cultural distinctiveness that travelers and geographers admired. When they said that mountaineers were different from other white citizens of the United States, they meant that highlanders wasted the resources under their control. They meant that a people who used common lands for common uses lived within a deviant economic culture. By the late nineteenth century, they meant that industrial agriculture would not work in Appalachia. Sloping, rocky, narrow, inaccessible fields could not be modernized. A vast monoculture for export would never be planted there. Credit from financial institutions would never flow there.

No two dispossessions are the same. The white settler culture of the southern mountains did not share the same fate as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek. The compulsory removal of these five nations in 1838, known in Cherokee as the Trail of Tears, would seem to have no connection to the coming of corporations to West Virginia. Still, these events bear a resemblance. They rhyme. In both instances, a privileged commercial class depicted the members of a target group as a despised race before taking their land.

The electoral defeat of the Federalists in 1800 left Indians subject to Thomas Jefferson, an expansionist with little commitment to tribal sovereignty. Instead, Jefferson thought up ways of dispossessing the Chickasaw by predatory lending and foreclosure. Let the Indians come and trade, he said, and the army would furnish them “with all the necessaries and comforts they may wish,” encouraging them “to run in debt for these beyond their individual means of paying.” Once the scam was running, “they will always cede lands to rid themselves of debt.

Urbanized people of the 21^st century tend to know little about the household mode of production, and often approach it with misconceptions and prejudices. Peasants, campesinos, and smallholders provoke two typical responses. They represent either a past of deprivation and suffering from which the people of the industrial world have escaped, or they exemplify lost simplicity, mutuality, and natural community to which we must return. They’re either brutish or noble, stupid or wise.

It might be that the persistence of peasants and smallholders violates our implicit belief in progress.

This sense of progress is embedded in capitalism, a social system that demands constant expansion into new environments, absorbing new people in order to increase its rate of profit. Since expansion brings wealth to those who own and invest in production, they conceive of it as progress in the world-historical sense. Tens of millions of people link their identities, the trajectory and meaning of their lives, to a social system with all sorts of destructive tendencies, associating it with the highest aims of society itself. But if the perpetuation of capital is the same thing as progress, where does that leave smallholders all over the world, up to their shins in muck day in and day out?

We compare their daily labor and stock of food to the abundance we experience on automotive gathering expeditions to the supermarket. Peasants sometimes don’t have enough to eat, though they might work at little else. Periodic shortages of food can happen because of drought, flood, or a fast-growing population. But smallholders with sufficient access to the landscape rarely go hungry. The diversity of their environments and occupations provide safeguards and fallbacks.

Consider Haiti. Once slaves freed themselves and took over the island, their French tormentors threatened to invade with a massive force if the struggling society did not pay for its freedom. France wanted an amount equal to all former plantation property, including the lost value of the people themselves. France enforced this indemnity between 1825 and 2010, declaring it void only after an earthquake killed thousands in Port-au-Prince. The total amount charged against the country would be worth somewhere between $20 and $40 billion today. It sapped Haiti’s national income and stifled its development.

The people I am concerned with practiced household food production and vigorous exchange. The form of their economy likens them to peasants in other places and times. They traded close to home and far away, in two transactional realms. They depended on an extensive landscape that sometimes did but often did not belong to them. Governments attempted to capture the value they created through taxation (the United States) and by offering up the landscape to corporations (the state of West Virginia). The takeover of the landscape and the industrial cutting of the forest brought an end to their autonomy

Most generally I say that the past occupants of hollows and ridges lived in a manner typical of humans all over the planet. They attained sufficiency, a makeshift existence, not always thriving but rarely starving. Mountain people ran into trouble for their own reasons.  They were never poor until they lost the forest, their ecological base. This is a vast renewable fund of resources that provides spaces for fields, food for gathering, fodder for cattle, and habitat for wild game. The base gives everything but costs nothing.

Nothing else compares to the loss of this commons. Without the woods to provide them with commodities for exchange, they depended on wages for the money that connected them to the rest of the world. Yet dependence on wages meant subjecting themselves to corporate authority, the vagaries of coal markets, and other things out of their control.

I am under no illusion that they lived abundantly or easily. They sometimes wrote eloquently about the hardships they faced, but their sense of fairness and justice often did not extend to African-Americans or Native Americans. I do not believe that they always tended their land well or that they could have maintained themselves for another century. But the virtues of their makeshift have been largely erased and the historical causes of their poverty are little known to the reading public.

Arcadia is not Eden. It’s not where you have anything you desire but everything you need. It’s a dream of sufficiency, not of hedonism. This is why Rousseau called this moment the happiest for humankind. Painters and poets longed for the freedom it represented from rents, taxes, and other instruments of organized power.

With the same dark brilliance of James Steuart. In 1767, nine years before the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Steuart completed his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, the first comprehensive work of its kind. With an iciness that makes his thought incomparably fascinating, Steuart asserted that the new order did not need the farmer, only the farm. Agriculture forms the basis of wealth and population, he said, “the most essential requisite for the prosperity of a state,” but it can’t be independent. “That would be inverting the order of things, and turning the master into the servant.”16 Steuart thought that country people who managed to exist without turning all their labor into money inverted the order of things. He really hated vinedressers, or a certain hypothetical vinedresser. A vinedresser earned some money by pruning grapevines and tilled his own “spot of ground for subsistence.” Steuart said that the time the vinedresser spent planting his garden produced no commodity for anyone else. But whenever he worked for wages, he proved himself useful. Steuart even believed that only when the vinedresser got paid did he become a member of society, only then did he exist. “Consequently, were it not for his trade, the state would lose nothing, though the vine-dresser and his land were both swallowed up by an earthquake.” Steuart didn’t hesitate to draw out this point.

“If we can suppose any person entirely taken up in feeding himself, depending upon no one, and having nobody depending on him, we lose the idea of society.” Our notion of progress, of history, and of people who do not work within the global economy owes much to Steuart.

“When hunger is either felt or feared,” wrote Joseph Townsend, “the desire of obtaining bread will quietly dispose the mind to undergo the greatest hardships, and will sweeten the severest labors … In the progress of society, it will be found, that some must want.” Only by this threat did beast-like peasants put in a day’s work, said Townsend. Patrick Colquhoun blessed poverty as an engine of affluence. Without it, “nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth.” Peasants who became wage earners maintained the logic of household survival. Cheap grain allowed them to stretch wages for weeks. They often quit work until their shillings ran out. William Temple recommended keeping them hungry. “The only way to make them tempered and industrious is to lay them under the necessity of laboring all the time they can spare from meals and sleep, in order to procure the necessaries of life.

In More’s view, keeping the poor intent on their survival kept them from sin. It made no sense for the rich to relieve this blessed condition. These are some of the ways that political economists construed hunger as improvement and poverty as progress.

As List saw it, as long as indolent farmers had rights over the countryside, waterpower languished, minerals remained buried, trees stood in the forest, and rivers flooded the lowlands rather than providing navigation and trade. Indolent peasants held the state and its progress hostage.

Karl Marx liked peasants no better. He saw them as set apart from all the action and tumult of the century, the flow of historical change going on around them. “Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. Marx showed that under capitalism, only labor that takes the form of commodities possesses social value. So any people who labor for themselves are outliers yet to be absorbed into capitalism.

As the World Bank put it in the 1970s, “Development is concerned with the modernization and monetization of rural society and with its transition from traditional isolation to integration with the national economy.” But “traditional isolation” was the invention of the modernizers. They invented isolation as a malady and offered fully monetized commodity production as the cure.

Capitalism demands that every form of production result in capital. That has meant the relentless modernization of food and farming. The peasant garden, the village field, the diversified landscape of products and employments, must everywhere become fully monetized, integrated, engineered, and subordinated.

The way back to Appalachia leads through the history of capitalism in Great Britain. The reason is that English lords established the idea and legal procedure of enclosure. We can understand much about what happened in the southern mountains by looking at this first instance. Americans might not think that capitalism on these shores required the seizure of land, but it did.

One reason for a brief history of capitalism is to make the point that it has a history. It cannot be understood as the outcome of evolutionary stages. It did not dwell for millions of years in the human brain like a dormant virus. It is no better a reflection of human nature than any other social construction. Just a few hundred years ago, it didn’t exist.

It came from a new set of relationships having to do with the control of land and labor.

For thousands of years before very recent times, people were rich if they could command large quantities of food. Piers Plowman is a fourteenth-century poem about a peasant by that name. Piers daydreams about “beans and baked apples … by the lapful,” cream and curds, the best brown ale, white bread, and fresh baked meat. The aristocracy and the clergy demonstrated their power any number of ways, but one of the most remarkable was the giving of feasts. They reinforced the obligations that kept them powerful by feeding plowmen like Piers. The Lords and peasants might have gone on like this for another thousand years. Money would have become more abundant as a means of exchange. Traveling fairs offered opportunities to buy things from far away and sell local crafts for gold and silver. Some merchants became rich from international trade, but they had great trouble finding ways to invest their money at interest. It’s not obvious how the feudal system could have morphed into something else. It did change, but not from within itself.

Capitalism emerged out of this enormous crisis. The Black Death should be seen as related to if not identical with the Little Ice Age, the period between 1350 and 1850 when falling temperatures upset long-standing patterns. Outbreaks of plague did not cease after its first visitation. Periodic harvest failure (1504–1526), followed by a decade of famine (1526–1536). Spring rains spoiled the crop of 1527, when bishops commandeered wheat off the highway on its way to the pope.

This is how feudalism died, but in order for capitalism to have been born, a degree of stability needed to return. Science might well have arisen from out of the disorder as a way of finding rational explanations for the triumph of death and chaos over every existing institution. By the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton and John Locke had demoted God, revealing that people could calculate the motion of planets with their own minds and organize themselves politically without divinely ordained monarchs. Inventors and improvers drained bogs, rotated crops, and devised new animal breeds. The last famine in England ended in 1624. The last instance of epidemic plague ended in 1666. Better prospects for survival were cause and consequence of intensified exchanges and more circulating money. An infusion of food and other resources from the American colonies changed the horizon, suggesting the possibility of return on investment. The gentry had their own plans. They decided that profit in money would replace the tribute and mutual obligations between vassal and bondsman.

Even as the dreary cold lingered over Britain, lords moved to restore the control over laborers they had lost in the demographic disaster and take advantage of commercial opportunities. But doing all or any of these things demanded that they redefine the foundation of the entire social order: land.

Before the sixteenth century, no one in England owned land, not even Richard II. It existed within a bewildering index of tenures and estates, defining who could use it, what could be done with it, and for how long. It did not slide from hand to hand in the alienable form that we know. It was wrapped and bundled in customary rights that cascaded downward from king to knight to peasant. They all lived off a complex commons. A commons is any set of resources that is used or controlled by a village, town, nation, or some other group. It is a managed environment, with households or individuals possessing specific rights to plow, hunt, or gather. A commons is not free for all but exists under certain rules.

English peasants and lords each had different kinds of rights to the commons, called tenures. Some of these arrangements (like copyhold) gave peasants something very close to private property. In others (at will), a lord exercised absolute power over how villeins and serfs farmed. Most peasants lived as smallholding tenants who paid a fee in food, labor, or money to the manor. But the real point is that lords and peasants adhered to the customs of the commons. Village associations—not lords themselves—often determined what could be planted and where, even to such minutia as what portion of a certain field would be pasture rather than tillage. These governing bodies made the landscape a collective undertaking. They also made doing anything new with it nearly impossible.

This is what began to change in the sixteenth century. By then, the British lordly class had lost its military purpose. English knights no longer jousted in armor or bashed their enemies over the head. They also no longer extracted tribute by threatening peasants with violence (though extreme brutality and imprisonment awaited anyone who refused). Instead, peers of the realm lent the use of violence to an increasingly centralized state. The one thing still under lordly control was land. But the demographic shift and their vanished power of coercion left them with only economic means of extracting value. They did not want that value paid to them in quantities of food or days of labor but in money. In attempting to solve these problems and maintain their wealth and power, they created a new social system. Making money by extracting value from land required new techniques, new commodities, and new relationships

Enclosure began with wool. Throughout the middle of England, for example, including the counties of Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, food for a rebounding population ran up against the extent of land. Tension emerged between how much area would be allotted to crops like oats and wheat and how much for raising sheep. Peasant and lord alike favored sheep. Wool emerged as the most significant export commodity of late medieval England, a trend that intensified in the following centuries. Along with meat, leather, and tallow, wool required lighter labor and sold for higher prices than grain. But the lords saw a greater potential. They looked past the domestic market to a North Atlantic trade. They knew of experiments in converting fields from grasses like timothy to fodder crops like turnips. This sophisticated husbandry increased the numbers of small livestock that could be sustained in a given space. But no improving lord or tenant farmer could do any of these things as long as common-use rights reigned over the English countryside.

Enclosure was just what it sounds like. Lords secured the places where peasants had planted, herded, mowed, gathered wood, and hunted, and then literally surrounded them with hawthorn hedges or stone walls. They made claims in local courts and eventually in Parliament in order to create a new and shocking category of land use: private property. It was new because it had never existed before in England or anywhere else. It was shocking because never before had individuals possessed an exclusive right over land. The process of transferring the English countryside into real estate took centuries and reflected regional differences, like the power of lordship and traditions of use. It sometimes proceeded by public agreement (though probably accompanied by private threat). Enclosure’s appearance in any given place often depended on whether arable crops grew in proximity to markets or whether pasturing predominated.

By 1850, the grasping lords had enclosed all of the South Midlands (2.8 million acres), along with 75 to 80% of all the farmland in England.  Enclosure solved a problem much grander than increasing pasturage for sheep. It transformed people who had always decided when or whether to sell the things they made into wageworkers whose every motion created a commodity for their employers to sell.

Dependency always travels with its shadow, a depth of poverty unknown before the sixteenth century. The word pauper first appeared in 1516, meaning someone with no home but the poorhouse and no means of livelihood.

“The depriving the peasantry of all landed property has beggared multitudes.” He had seen “an amazing number of people … reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of hirelings, who, when out of work, must immediately come to their parish.

A dispossessed army of labor could be hired at prices “below its proper level,” resulting in a destitution he had never seen, the starving “crowded together in decayed farm-houses, with hardly ground enough about them for a cabbage garden.” Cast out of work, they ran out of food.

What else were the wars against the Cherokee and the Sioux but acts of accumulation by dispossession?

Enclosure continues today in Africa, where corporations lease land from financially fragile governments to produce sugar and rice. The enclosure of West Virginia happened differently. Legally speaking, the commons there was not really common. Much of it already belonged to capitalists. But the people who took from that land for a century regarded it as theirs. It functioned as common property.

For centuries, few institutional pathways existed for employing income in order to earn additional income. Capital appeared along with these pathways, as people needed a word to differentiate this new entity from merchant wealth and the dividends represented by lambs and calves.

Being an agrarian in England or West Virginia or Mali or anywhere else promised very little in comfort or security from any number of hardships. But it did promise one thing: autonomy from the tyranny of money.  Smallholders depend on specific conditions, without which they become desperately poor. The question is whether development should strive to maintain those conditions. The alternative is to say that agrarians are not made for the world as it is, that the resources they use for subsistence and barter are too valuable. The forest will be turned into lumber; the river will be diverted for irrigating sugarcane.

The single most important thing to know about settlers, peasants, campesinos, and smallholders is that they do not conform to the particular rationality described by capitalist political economy. What they maximize and waste, how they regard money, and how they organize work come from different assumptions and circumstances. “The distinctive economic behavior of the subsistence-oriented peasant family,” as James Scott puts it, “results from the fact that, unlike a capitalist enterprise, it is a unit of consumption as well as a unit of production.” All such families use their production to enhance their consumption in a circuit, one different from the one that creates capital. This one begins and ends with commodities, not money. Agrarians create useful things, consume some of what they raise, and swap the rest for money or other useful things. They exchange in order to gain the tools and luxuries that they cannot make.

All agrarian households must manage the tension between available acres, working hands, and wanting bellies.  Unlike capitalist firms, peasants have an acute sense of “enough” and only exert themselves to attain it. As the anthropologist Enrique Mayer explains it, “Because householding is self-provisioning, the cycle is complete when all that is needed is produced.” The true product of the agrarian household is the survival and reproduction of the household itself.

English-speaking travelers who visited peasant societies often admired them. Henry Colman, once the commissioner of the Agricultural Survey of Massachusetts, spent the 1840s going village to village throughout Europe. “A more civil, cleanly, industrious, frugal, sober, or better dressed people than the French peasantry … I have never known,” wrote Colman. He saw two and a half acres in Flanders “give ample support for a man and wife and three children … add to it three acres more, which this amount of labour is more than sufficient to cultivate, and you add a considerable surplus for other purposes.

John Candler, a British Quaker, toured the West Indies between 1839 and 1841. In Haiti he found a nation of proud smallholders cultivating land that once belonged to the very slaveholders who owned their parents and grandparents. He noted their “few wants … common faire, coarse clothing, and enjoyments of a mere animal nature: it is true, they work to live, as without some labor they cannot subsist; but they do not, and they will not[,] work hard to please anybody.” Their dwellings were well kept, continued Candler, “their coffee is clean and vigorous, their gardens are flourishing, their fences neat—every thing indicating order, industry, and content[ment].

The Andean peasants he studies maintain two kinds of cultivated spaces, one for subsistence and the other for cash. They keep these “accounts” strictly separate. What they grow in order to eat never enters the market, and the money they earn by selling commodities enhances their standards of living but does not sustain their households. In other words, they can endure a complete loss on the cash crop with a shrug—nothing gained and just a little labor lost. Such a failure might prevent them from buying certain things but without posing an existential threat. Andean peasants recognize two “transactional realms,” one in the village and the other beyond the mountains, one grounded in social relationships within the community and the other purely for profit and therefore impersonal.

the question of a tipping point, a movement toward greater dependency after which money ceases to be an option and becomes a compulsion, did not exist before recent times. It has to do with financial institutions and international trade (which proliferated currencies), nation-states and colonial governments (which taxed), and loans against land (which created debt). Valuations in money reached peasant producers, who had to decide how to respond. On one hand, money opened possibilities for comfort and novelty that did not exist before. On the other, it brought into question whether they could exist without the exchanges they desired.

there are two primary ways that money can wreck agrarian systems. The first is debt and its state-sponsored version, taxation. Agrarians have turned themselves into commodity producers in a hurry whenever a creditor or colonial official has given them a choice between paying up in cash or rotting in prison.

The second is the destruction or enclosure of those common resources that enable production and consumption without money. Remove the ecological base and agrarians have no choice but to sell their labor in order to live. But a rising population can also grind down the viability of shared resources, multiplying users in a limited space. New farms cleared from a dwindling forest will be smaller though they have to support more people. The solution is and has always been for gardeners to exert more effort and innovate, to make two stalks of maize grow where one grew before.

When workers received a wage, they might not be paid enough to meet their needs. When land had a price, it could be bought up for speculation and locked away from active use by an owner who did not live in the community. Farms that cost money had to make money, especially if the farmer was in debt to a bank. That changed what farmers planted and how much land they cleared. It changed the countryside. And when a farmer owed a debt he could not service for lack of money, or when the price of gold fluctuated, leaving him with worthless paper but his debts undiminished, his land could be taken away, along with his freedom. When farmers protested and criticized money and greed in order to advocate for themselves as a class, they began to shape a political language that came from their experience—agrarian politics.

Thomas Jefferson is often thought of as representing agrarianism. But he said little about it and did even less to further it. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Jefferson referred to those who labored in the earth as “the chosen people of God,” in whose incorruptible breasts God had deposited “genuine virtue.” He wrote vaguely, never specifically, about those virtuous laborers because he was not one of them and did not know them. Though he gazed at the Blue Ridge from the windows of Monticello, he remained aloof from the log-cabin dwellers just a county or two away. More pointedly, Jefferson did not limit the expansion of slavery into the lower Mississippi River Valley, near New Orleans. The region had been a backwater to the slave-and-cotton economy. All sorts of displaced people, including the evicted Acadians, had ended up there with small allotments. He could have protected them. Instead, he said nothing as enslavers moved in and planted sugarcane during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Jefferson’s engagement in agrarian politics was more symbolic than substantive. As a planter himself, he represented the very land regime that caused smallholders to flee to the mountains

The New England naturalist Wilson Flagg echoed Julian’s fears in 1859. Flagg trembled at the thought of the steam engine. He made the crucial distinction between the machine and its social relations, between its “apparent benefits upon mankind” and the “inevitable tendency of this great invention to concentrate all wealth and power into the hands of capitalists.” Joint-stock companies in western New York planned to farm on a new scale. “These corporations, executing almost all their heavy labor by steam power and mammoth implements, would crowd out of the ranks of agriculture all those whose farms were of such small extent, that steam could not be profitably used by them.” He calculated. If steam power cut and threshed the same commodity for ten dollars that the small farmer grew for a hundred, then it wouldn’t be long before agents arrived at every kitchen door offering to buy. Husbandmen would then sell, for any price.

He envisioned the gentleness and diversity of the landscape—oaks and maples, hills and ponds—uprooted and swept away “by some giant infernal machine” and graded into “one vast level,” all to make it possible for engines to do their relentless gauging and skimming.

Most of the factors of what would become industrial agriculture existed by the 1850s. Within a decade, growing wheat on the northern Great Plains and in the San Joaquin Valley of California took on a scale unprecedented in North America. Farmers became hirelings in the service of infernal machines, just as Julian and Flagg feared.

Daniel Boone’s cultural ancestors, if not actually his genetic ones, were Swedish woodsmen who arrived in the lower Delaware River Valley, north and south of what would become Philadelphia, in 1638. Swedes do not figure much in the following pages, but they brought the tools, houses, and temperament that eventually covered the southern mountains. In other words, the culture of Appalachia began in practices imported from the hardscrabble northern fringe of Europe. The emigration of the first Swedes was really more of an exile. Even by the standards of other forest dwellers, these kirvesmiehet were considered volatile. They hated permanent farming, preferring to follow the hunt no matter where it led them. The Swedish government didn’t want them roaming around and somehow persuaded them to ship for North America.

Finns of the Savo-Karelian culture arrived at about this time, bringing many of the same skills. By 1681, a culture group had formed, numbering around one thousand people in scattered enclaves up the tributaries into New Jersey. Over the next century, this hybrid continued to hybridize, absorbing emigrants from Wales, France, and Germany. They lived in the territory of the Lenape, who taught them foodways, herbal cures, and warfare. The Ulster-Scots or Scots-Irish were another people from the hardscrabble, another hybrid. They had been thrown together by the British colonization of Northern Ireland before fleeing to North America around 1715. The Scots-Irish rapidly emerged as the majority ethnicity of the woodland settlement culture. These fire-wielding hunters with their long rifles and log cabins composed one of the most land-extensive and socially explosive agrarian societies the world has ever known.

They scattered from their hearth along the Delaware River into Maryland, Pennsylvania, and western Virginia, through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ohio River Valley. Generations linked to the same core group sought unencumbered land in Illinois, the Great Plains of Kansas and Nebraska, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where they finally ran out of continent. In the midst of this feverish movement, they became soldiers in the British wars for North America and in the expansion of the United States. And they engaged in violence with Indians, in innumerable skirmishes and massacres. They disrupted relationships, as well as landscapes, wherever they went.

Settlers claimed to protect their families from Indians while they employed vigilante violence to seize Indian land. Writes the historian Honor Sachs, “By negating Indian agency … backcountry residents embraced a racist ideology of Indian hating that portrayed the enemy as savage, predatory, less than human.  Backwoods settlers saw themselves as a force of racial purification, clearing Indians away in order to replace them with people like themselves.

A century later, the descendants of these same woodland hunters had lost control of the woods, found themselves politically vulnerable, their agriculture insufficient to protect them against forces that pried them out of the same hills that had once provided them with abundance and autonomy. They endured an American version of enclosure.

Before the invasion or the tax, the backcountry seethed with rebellion and intrigue. George Washington dreaded the West, which he considered a haven for “banditti who will bid defiance to all authority.” That authority seemed everywhere under attack and in decline. Here are just a few of his frontier problems. James Wilkinson, a brigadier general residing in Kentucky, took it upon himself to negotiate an agreement with the Spanish colonial governor in New Orleans to open the Mississippi River to upcountry commerce. To seal the deal, Wilkinson swore allegiance to Spain in 1787. Around the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington learned that British Canadian officials and Pennsylvania rebels had been planning the secession of the western counties of that state. Indian nations demanded their own independence,

Some blamed the disorderly frontier on the size and complexity of a nation-state too big to govern. Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear predicted, “Within fifteen years the inhabitants to the westward of the Alleghany will be a separate, independent people.”

Agrarian protest suffuses the history of British North America. Shift the focus and the Whiskey Rebellion takes its place as one event in an era of agrarian violence: Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), Virginia’s Plant-Cutter Riots (1681–1683), the Conojocular War (1732–1737), the Jersey Land Riots (1745–1755), the colonial New York anti-rent riots (1753–1766), the Paxton Riots (1763–1764), the North Carolina Regulation (1769–1784), the Vermont insurgency (1770–1775), Shays’ Rebellion (1786–1787), and John Fries’ Rebellion (1799). They were wars over autonomy and against taxation or the penalties of debt.

These conflicts should be understood as political rebellions in which settlers and Indians asserted their own conceptions of independence. The United States attempted to crush their autonomy in order to achieve legal and economic uniformity.

For 125 years, the West unleashed a barrage of violence comparable to the 300 years of peasant uprising in Europe that Fernand Braudel called “a latent social war … a structural kind of warfare without end.

Hamilton fought this structural war—an attempt to bring administrative control to the unruly people of the West.  The law of 1784 called for the land west of the mountains and north of the Ohio River to be divided into states. The law of 1785 stitched the wilderness with a grid. It created the federal survey system: townships of six square miles divided into 36 sections, each of which consisted of 640 acres. This conceptual infrastructure facilitated the transition of wilderness into private property. Declaring a boundary did not produce thoroughly governed space. Borders on a map meant nothing to people living in the folds of the mountains.

The Whiskey Rebellion took place in four western counties of Pennsylvania, which is to say that it took place in northern Appalachia. Nearly the entire population of Kentucky nullified the tax. The tax and the invasion represented the first attempts since the end of the Revolution to force the backcountry into the Atlantic economy. Hamilton’s method of choice was to lever open western households by compelling them to sell more of the things they made. As he had learned from Adam Smith, value comes from labor exerted against environments in making useful things. Money converts this value into a form that can travel far away and accumulate in banks. A nation-state can grab its share by collecting taxes. The Whiskey Tax proposed to do something that Hamilton once called impossible. It reached into the relationship between mountain farmers and their land by requiring that they convert one very important product of their labor into money.

But coal and lumber companies did not want to monetize only a portion of the value highland folk created. They sought to separate them from land altogether, compelling them to turn all their labor into money. Mountain people became enmeshed in the national economy and the global division of labor.

Hamilton’s map looked more like the peace of 1783, stressing enforceable borders and internal improvements. He wanted one seamless system that governed every acre of the United States. One way of doing this was to tie distant people to the central government by making them pay a tax. The tax, in turn, would demand an infrastructure and instill a national presence. Taxation was so essential to Hamilton because it fused authority and economy. His political economy is more accurately understood as a governing economy. The future of the state could not be separated from the commercial evolution of its people. In his optimistic phase, Hamilton saw a virtuous cycle. A thoroughly administered nation fostered a widening division of labor. Money from commerce sustained taxation. And taxation created a robust and powerful state, with institutions and internal improvements. This led to further widening of the division of labor as the state reached into new territories.

It is often said that Shays’ Rebellion moved the Revolutionary leadership to “establish justice and insure domestic tranquility,” but it did not move them to address any of the reasons given by farmers for their insurrection. Instead, the framers of the Constitution instilled the chief executive with the power to crush future uprisings by calling up federal soldiers and state militias.

Hamilton elaborated in the months that followed. There could be no exception to the sovereign right to tax, which he propounded in The Federalist, No. 12: “As revenue is the essential engine by which the means of answering the national exigencies must be procured … the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation.

The proliferation of money as a medium of production and exchange encompassed much of Hamilton’s conception of the United States.

But what distillers found as obnoxious as the tax itself was the government’s thuggish way of collecting it. Those who made whiskey needed to paint the words DISTILLER OF SPIRITS on their houses so agents of the state could ride into a village and quickly identify them. They needed to make an “entry in writing” at a central office three days before distilling. No one could remove whiskey from any distillery at night. All stills needed to be inspected with the liquor percolating in situ, not after the fact. Officers needed to brand each cask with a serial number to mark its origin, its quantity, and its proof (“ascertained by actual gauging”), then collect the tax and write a receipt. Only then could a cask travel the roads and rivers to market. Congress piled on the penalties for fugitive stills and noncompliance. Officers who came across unmarked goods on the turnpike had the authority to seize all casks, horses, cattle, carriages, harnesses, tackling, boats, and the full value of the cargo (not just its taxable value) on the spot.

Other infractions carried a hundred-dollar fine—an impossible sum. When collectors showed up in Westmoreland, Fayette, Washington, and Allegheny counties, armed men coated them with tar and feathers and whipped them. The insurgents destroyed the stills of any who cooperated. They kidnapped a federal marshal and stopped the courts from operating.

Hamilton could have taxed other things. He had recommended that the state of New York tax meadows, salt, tobacco, and houses by size. He thought up a tavern tax and a lawyer tax. He could have placed duties on slave sales or absentee land ownership and the proceeds of speculation. Merchant houses were flush with foreign currency. Deriving revenue from malt and brewing enraged the Scots, but it would have been a fairer production to attach because it affected people in every state. He could have squeezed money from citizens who actually had it, in other words, rather than from those whose property sometimes consisted of a cow and a horse.

Settlers emigrated to stay ahead of something they could not abide—the valuation of land. The conversion of wilderness into real estate sent them higher and higher into thousands of narrow valleys. Between 1780 and 1810, nonresident planters and merchants engrossed 4.5 million acres, or 93% of the land in western Virginia. The average holding consisted of 5,485 acres. Actual settlers occupied the other 7%, or 324,000 acres, in various degrees of possession.

Since the states didn’t perform their own surveys for decades, who owned what remained unknown. Such grand omissions cast a cloak of invisibility over oceans of ridges and valleys where dispossessed Indians, escaped slaves, and poor whites found all the resources they needed to live. In fact, we should not think of a single land system as taking shape but two. Official grants and private surveys represented the first. In the other, settlers occupied and later exchanged scraps of landscape with impunity.17 Some of these scraps are known as runs, coves, and hollows. From six miles above the earth the country looks like wrinkled paper. Each fold is a tiny watershed with a stream or branch that flows into a larger creek or river. Broad and steep at the top, hollows often taper down the middle, where sunshine is limited, opening into marshy glades at the bottom. Floods can rise quickly in a hard rain and can take away topsoil. No one searching for top-quality farmland considered felling trees to plow up a dim and damp hollow. “It seems very strange that any person should have settled there at a time when the whole country was almost vacant,

But people who placed a high value on game animals saw nothing strange about it. The folds of the mountains allowed them space for hunting, for burning, and for plowing up to plant rye. They settled at high altitudes out of necessity, They knew what they were doing.

By the end of the 18^th century, settlers arriving in the southern mountains entered a landscape that often belonged to other people. Households sometimes received grants from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the same kind of grants Washington received. But more typically, they moved onto land regardless of who owned it. One of them recounted years later, “Many squatted down on lands, not knowing or caring whose they were.” While no one was looking, they wrote and recorded their own deeds, surveying by metes and bounds in the hand of anyone literate. A grantee residing in Philadelphia often had no idea that hundreds or thousands of people regularly bought and sold parts of his estate.

When absentee owners found out about squatters and locally written deeds, they had to act, even if it meant traveling long distances. If they did nothing, they risked challenges by adverse possession. If Party A owns a piece of land but makes no use of it, and if Party B grazes cattle on it and puts up a cabin, then Party B can assert title after a designated period, usually ten years. Absentees could defend themselves in court, but they needed to explain why they had never visited or turned a spade and why the interlopers did not deserve the benefits of their “sweat equity.” This happened to George Washington.

51.6 percent of the 492 names on the county tax list owned no farm, but they all had access to the ecological base. In this sense, landlessness is a misleading term.

We tend to think of manufacturing as organizing work in eastern cities, not in the backcountry. But that’s a false distinction. In the 1780s, a saltworks in Kentucky at Bullitt’s Lick employed landless white men, African-American slaves, and children who spent their days boiling the water of a saline pond. Their situation reveals that household autonomy could be elusive.

One thing never changed, however. The agrarian economy of the mountains depended on the forest. The backwoods culture was not founded on farming, but hunting. This single subsistence activity formed the core of a land-extensive, open-range materialism. Hunting yielded spectacular quantities of food for little exertion. But it also posed a problem. Nothing provided like the hunt, and yet nothing was as fragile. Animals migrated and their numbers fluctuated for ecological and other reasons. Too many hunters in the woods resulted in smaller and fewer creatures. Disruption in the supply of game prompted families to move on. But when moving on was not an option, a scarcity of game compelled households to fall back on farming. As a combined subsistence strategy, hunting, herding, and farming spread risk in the backwoods. But these practices, it should be clear, required an extensive landscape, unencumbered by private property.

The strategy of seeking the high elevations had its pull and push. Hunting pulled; slavery pushed. Planters had no reason to hire when they had a captive labor force. “Far more whites moved from slave to free states than from free to slave states,” writes Allan Kulikoff. “Because cotton production so thoroughly focused the migration paths of slaves, whites who moved west from the old South often found themselves in virtually free societies.

Like agrarians everywhere, the first backwoods settlers used swidden, burning and planting in spatial rotation through the ecological base. The method is known by many other names, like forest fallow, burnbeating, and shifting cultivation. Agriculture transfers fertile nutrients from soils to plants to people. There is a constant limiting factor of production, whether nitrogen or phosphorus, below which production is inefficient or plants won’t grow. The purpose of forest fallow is to use forest dynamics to replace nutrients by allowing trees to regenerate before again releasing their stored-up elements with fire.

Another method was to girdle the trees by cutting a band around the trunk. After the canopies died, the trees could be burned or planting could begin amid the standing skeletons, as long as sunlight reached the forest floor.

By the time John Lorain encountered mountain farmers, around 1820, he saw them removing deadened branches and logs and burning them in a pile. This method kept the fire under control, so it was better adapted to closer neighbors and snake-rail fences. Lorain saw them shifting, too. Right after they had finished clearing one stand, they girdled and cut the next. He saw their land overworked and hard-run, “so much exhausted that cockle, cheat, and other weeds form by far the principal part of his crops.” But Lorain wrote thirty years after the Whiskey Rebellion. Swidden had already become a questionable strategy where a larger population made land to shift in more scarce.

The largest and most labor-intensive spaces in the tripartite system were clearings for fields. A mountain farm did not consist mainly of fields. Someone who used, claimed, or owned an area of two hundred acres usually improved no more than around twenty. About half of all landowners maintained between one and ten cleared acres at any given time. And because the classification of improved land included pasture, the number of acres dedicated to corn and rye would have been substantially lower. Ninety percent of a typical farm in Springhill Township, Westmoreland County, remained in forest in 1783.

Evidence from other places suggests that a group of five to seven people could have sown, weeded, and harvested eight to ten acres of grain. In other words, whatever they planted represented a significant investment, resulting in a commodity they would have prized and protected.

Rye is the only other bread grain, though it does not work up to the same light texture as its close cousin. Settlers in hardscrabble places embraced it for the way it thrives in environments too cold, dry, acidic, sandy, or worn out for wheat. It can be planted later in the season and at higher altitudes. As a winter cover crop, it returns nitrogen to the soil when it is folded under in the spring. It requires less time and attention than wheat or corn and doesn’t attract the same plethora of diseases.

Highlanders in Pennsylvania did more than plant rye. They conducted it. They put it down for pasture, threw it to pigs as feed, and ate it themselves as porridge. Some planted a mixture of rye and wheat, producing flour known as meslin, which makes a heavy, dark bread. Others used it as a rough form of coffee. And just about everyone turned it into something else entirely. “All the back country of America is very favorable to the growth of rye,” wrote the English traveler William Strickland. “This grain is entirely consumed in the distillation of whiskey, chiefly for the consumption of the Irish frontier-man.” Converted into spirits, rye became nonperishable, densely valuable, and transportable.

Whiskey accelerated trade and exchange. A horse carried three or four bushels of grain, but it carried the equivalent of twenty bushels converted into liquor. In a world where most production fulfilled subsistence needs, whiskey connected agrarians to that second transactional realm, where distant commerce offered profit as the reward for entrepreneurial risk. Locally, it could be used to acquire every item of necessity and luxury. It paid the wages of workers and bought consumer goods. Anything that siphoned off its value threatened the entire economy of the backwoods.

In 1798, a Kentucky congressman estimated the total circulating currency in the state at less than ten thousand dollars. The distance from banks was one reason, but another was that money wasn’t necessary for most transactions.  Regardless of the supply of money, however, the Whiskey Tax demanded that distillers lay their hands on it. The bluntness of this requirement is central to any materialist interpretation of the rebellion. It ignored the way people bought and sold things.

A Pittsburgh storekeeper in 1786 accepted flour, whiskey, beef, pork, bacon, wheat, rye, oats, corn, ashes, candlewick, and tallow. Others traded for ginseng, snakeroot, skins and furs, and homespun linen. Everyone accepted gold and silver whenever it came around, regardless of whose head was stamped on it. By one estimate, fifty currencies circulated in and around Pittsburgh, including Spanish, French, English, and American. But notes issued against gold or silver reserves posed a problem. Every transaction began as a negotiation over their value. They traded at a higher discount the farther they traveled from the issuing institution. Did the South Carolina bank that printed its own bills have any gold?

“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

The reason that no one bartered “pure and simple” is that it isn’t easy to do. My desire for your whiskey is likely far greater than your desire for my woolen sweaters. How much of one equals the other? We could go ahead and make the trade, but one of us is going to walk away feeling ripped off (you).

Citizens in Westmoreland wrote their grievances before they strapped collectors to timber and coated them in tar. They petitioned against the bill in 1790, arguing that it took aim at a foundational practice. “In this new country, laborers are exceedingly scarce, and their hire excessively high and we find that liquor proves a necessary means of engaging their service.” In other words, where people have universal access to land, no one is available or much willing to work for anyone else. Households exchanged work, of course, but in cases where someone had to be paid, whiskey was as good as gold. “For these reasons,” they continued, “we have found it absolutely necessary to introduce a number of small distilleries into our settlements, and in every circle of twenty or thirty neighbors, one of these are generally erected … without any commercial views whatever. The proprietor thereof receives the grain (rye only) from the people, and returns the stipulated quantity of liquor.” If making whiskey was like minting money, this currency appeared and disappeared; it was created and soon destroyed. It did not float around for very long, transmitting the value of labor. By defending themselves with these arguments, the people did not persuade Hamilton not to tax them. They convinced him that he was right all along.

By then, he had flipped the position he outlined in The Federalist. He would no longer wait for farmers and distillers to evolve into money-using, tax-paying, fully commercial citizens. Writing to Washington, he clenched his teeth. “Moderation enough has been shown; it is time to assume a different tone.” He would wield the excise as a spur to compel the backcountry into getting money. By insisting on the tax, Hamilton insisted on the means of paying

In Hamilton’s world, the evolution of society meant that the ecological base would cease to sustain households with the food it generated. Instead, it would generate money. It would be cleared and cultivated for full-time commodity production.

It’s well known that Hamilton favored a national debt (which he described to Morris as “a national blessing”) because he expected that the credit earned by paying it off would attract investment and advance the good name of the United States. He also wrote that a national debt served a social purpose by creating the necessity of taxation, calling this a “powerful cement of our union,” a “spur to industry.” All citizens needed to work, their individual debts forming slices of the great national debt that united their efforts. “We labor less now than any civilized nation of Europe, and a habit of labor in the people is as essential to the health and vigor of their minds and bodies as it is conducive to the welfare of the State.” No political economist or colonial governor would have disagreed. They all believed that nations form when citizens assume a collective debt and work together like bees in a hive to pay it down.

Looked at one way, victory belonged to the highlanders. The tax not only turned the backcountry against the Federalists, it contributed to the “revolution” that brought Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans to power in 1800. Jefferson oversaw the repeal of the Whiskey Tax, an action that appeared to nullify the entire idea of an excise on domestic production. From the end of the Rebellion through the end of the Civil War, the federal government made no attempt to impose an internal tax.

But victory did not protect the backcountry folk

Absentee ownership continued to reduce the area available for makeshift economy.

Mountains fend off centralized authority.  Roads exist seasonally, washed out by rivers and creeks. Nothing moves in a straight line. Time slows down.

The English scholar and critic Samuel Johnson took a trip to the Hebrides, the western islands of Scotland. There he posited that elevation determined a people’s loyalty to their monarch. He said that highlanders lived in savage freedom, “ignorantly proud and habitually violent,” high and away from civilizing influences, where “every new ridge is a new fortress.” These states within states were “so remote from the seat of government, and so difficult of access, that they are very little under the influence of the sovereign.

The Union high command pursued more than one tactical objective in the battles of Harpers Ferry, Cheat Mountain, Chattanooga, Fort Sanders, and Blountville. But without question they wanted control of the Shenandoah Valley, source of the Confederacy’s food supply. General Ulysses S. Grant ordered General Philip Sheridan to seize it and torch it. “Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can,” Grant wrote to Sheridan. “Carry off stock of all descriptions, and negroes, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” During the Valley Campaign of 1864, Sheridan’s army burned thousands of barns and mills.

We can mark the beginning of the industrial takeover of Appalachia to the Civil War. The damage Sheridan inflicted on the Shenandoah lingered for decades, contributing to a weakened economy that made the entire region more vulnerable to a different kind of invasion in the decades that followed. And that invasion didn’t really begin with the industrialists themselves or with their lawyers or even with the absentee landowners. It began with the gathering of geographical and geological information before and especially during the war.

The mineral form of fossilized carbon attracted little attention before the war. Residents of New England were more likely to burn a hydrocarbon rendered from whale blubber than anything that came out of the ground. The first factories in the United States didn’t burn anything. At Lowell, Massachusetts, giant mills operated thousands of spindles, turning out tons of cotton cloth, powered by the Merrimack River. As a fuel for steam engines, coal radiated more energy than wood. But in 1838, only 1,850 stationary steam engines and 350 locomotives operated in the United States, and most of them burned wood.

One joint-stock company set the tone for the coming decades, declaring of West Virginia, “Her hills and valleys are full of wealth which only needs development to attract capitalists like a magnet.” Full of wealth, they said, and empty; nothing but a vast, neglected “squatter’s farm.

Another way of saying this is that Alexander Hamilton and the monopolists performed Act One in the drama of extracting value from the mountains: taxation and speculation. A new generation of capitalists performed Act Two: full-scale industrialization. The timeline worked this way: Land purchases to gain hold of resources began as early as the 1840s and intensified after 1865. The state of West Virginia was founded in 1863. Its governors, legislators, and members of Congress all acted to attract industry. Railroad lines extended across the state between the 1850s and 1870s, the Baltimore and Ohio in the north and the Chesapeake and Ohio in the south. By 1880, close to 56,500 stationary steam engines operated in the United States, all of them needing coal.

But mining was not the only or even the primary form of extraction. Felling the forest affected a much larger area. A great many counties had no coal. All of them had trees.

Commercial logging began in the 1870s, but the two industries functioned simultaneously, often undertaken by the same companies, dependent on the same railroad infrastructure, and employing the same workers. For as profoundly transformative as coal mining proved to be, it would have left most households in place. Clear-cutting the woods changed everything.

The Virgina above 1000 feet  declared its independence from the Virginia below.  The friction between Virginia’s western counties and its planter class had more to do with speculation in land than with slavery.

They prevented any public money from flowing uphill as improvements because although roads and schools would have increased the value of land, they would have also caused higher property taxes. This behavior might seem self-defeating. But speculators understood that modest improvements would not have resulted in the boom they dreamed of. So even as population surged on the Plateau, Virginia’s patrician class continued to regard the mountains as their private tax shelter.

Subsistence societies have strong bonds within and between groups of related people. By themselves, households cannot endure all sorts of stressors and threats. In famine or violence—when lords, enemy tribes, or central governments threatened—survival required alliances, escape, and retrenchment. In the southern mountains of the nineteenth century, a kin group or clan consisted of linked households. These sprawling hierarchies included unrelated people united by proximity, common political interests, and financial dependency. Where few institutions existed for individual expression, family membership facilitated social and political life. That inspired loyalty and insularity. A patronage system emerged, in which one’s influence in the county depended on one’s well-placed relatives and allies. Certain offices bounced around among the members of certain groups. Two researchers explain it this way: “Personal ties and connections became the foundation on which public politics was transacted and antagonisms from economic life easily spilled over into public policies and governance.” This also meant that if one clan endured humiliation or diminished influence due to the actions of another, a larger conflict might ensue.

No matter the immediate or circumstantial reasons that they fought each other, families did so against a backdrop of declining opportunities for profit and the looming imperative of wage work.

The founders of West Virginia had no interest in the democratic engagement of citizens. They wanted to wield without opposition all the power vested in governing institutions and offices. Liquidating the forests and mineral deposits depended on legally constituted authority. Governments claim dominion over economic activity within their borders. They decide what is permissible on private property. They can charter corporations, thus granting these organizations legal permission to do certain things in certain places. The legislature chartered 150 corporations in 1866 alone, including the Sand Hill and Mud Lick Oil Company, the Marrowbone Oil and Mining Company, the Great Kanawha Petroleum Coal and Lumber Company, and the Hartford Oil and Mining Company.

Corporations sought legal protection from local statutes. They also wanted to limit the number of their political clients, thus freeing them from the perplexing and unseemly task of placating every notable citizen. An obscure piece of jurisprudence allowed state legislatures to sanction corporate activities without gaining the consent of anyone whose life might be interrupted. It was called Dillon’s Rule. One effect of Dillon’s Rule was to streamline access to natural resources. A corporation only needed to sway a governor or a fistful of legislators in order to condemn land, restructure tax laws, defeat striking workers, and otherwise extract where they pleased.

By shifting power over local environments from towns and counties to state governments, Dillon’s Rule contributed to a new kind of powerlessness, one essential to the scramble for Appalachia.

But industrialists didn’t really need Dillon’s Rule. A revised constitution seemed to clear the way for their greater influence. West Virginia Democrats never accepted Republican influence over the founding of the state. In 1872, they held a second convention to make an instrument of government more to their liking. The new version magnified the power of county judges, elevating them from legal adjudicators with significant authority to government administrators who performed almost every role. They superintended the police and approved all matters of county finance, including roads, bridges, and mills. The effect narrowed the number of influential officials and enhanced their power. To the extent that judges could be bought off or swayed toward corporate interests, the new constitution fed the scramble. The same document loosened laws of title, making purchases easier for investors.

The confluence of money, private property, and political power accomplished what no invading army could have. It delivered an ax to the neck of the peasant economy within half a century.

Every homeplace had its own provision ground, a space as large as two acres given over to vegetables and fruits. Beans formed the mainstay. The people also harvested cushaw, a smooth winter squash that can grow to thirty inches and twenty pounds, using it as a starchy staple to make soups and breads. They bought and sold lots of things, but they kept the garden for themselves. For one thing, everyone grew the same plants. For another, paths to market were too distended and unreliable for transporting perishable foods. Residents in twenty-four West Virginia counties reported no annual income from their gardens in 1860, and only ten counties reported totals of $1,000 or more. Wyoming County’s figure of $2,140 averages to $5.50 per farm. Statewide, household gardens earned households 56 cents each. Yet the garden, by itself, did not produce a livelihood.

We might think of a farm as consisting of fields of grain, with a couple of cows and a spate of woods in the background. But that’s a particular kind of farm, one that takes its renewed soil fertility from manufactured fertilizers. That farm is geared entirely for commodity production.

The garden’s closest relation was not the cornfield but the woods. It might seem odd to compare the most and least intensively cultivated spaces, but both provided fresh green vegetables. With winter stores of dried beans and fruit preserves diminished and the first squashes months away, people bought what they could in town and exchanged with neighbors. The forest made up every shortfall. Households foraged for uganost, a Cherokee word for wild greens. They brought home toothworth (a horseradish-like root), corn salad (a sweet flower), and especially ramps. Ramps provided a subsistence bridge between spring and summer.

But it would be a mistake to think of foraged foods as meager provisions, eaten in desperation. They were a delicacy, a seasonal event, a cherished custom.30 The forest offered so much more than greens; it held a diversity of species comparable to Amazonia. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina and Tennessee, might include 100,000 species. In 2009, researchers found 240 birds, 75 fishes, 65 mammals, 40 amphibians, and 40 reptiles. There are 2,700 species of fungus and 1,600 vascular plants.

Between garden and forest came fields, usually planted in maize. As a summer crop, it could be sown after rye. Like rye, it could be used as cattle and hog feed and could be turned into mash for whiskey. But corn made up a larger part of the diet than rye. Mixed with wheat flour, it made bread. Fried in lard, it provided the essential starch at just about every meal. Combined with beans, it formed a complete protein. Two to three times the yield of wheat and rye and for only 16 labor-days a year.

In 1882, even a visitor as unsympathetic as the anonymous author of “Poor White Trash” described plenty of food during a two-month stay in eastern Kentucky. “Every mile or so, a little log-cabin sits in a varied growth of beans, potatoes, maize, and tobacco.” He saw squashes and melons, pawpaws and apple trees. The author joined a Sunday dinner, sitting elbow to elbow at a table wedged tightly between the front door and the bed. The meal began with a dozen watermelons before moving on to chicken, bacon, green maize, beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, apple pudding, biscuits, and cake. People with control over a robust landscape work hard, but they don’t go hungry.

For mountaineers, grains and vegetables usually did not serve as exchange commodities. Of the 7.8 million bushels of corn grown in West Virginia in 1860, little of it left the state or even the cabins where it originated. Something so bulky and commonplace didn’t pay for transport. Instead, the most essential products south of Pennsylvania and west of the Blue Ridge were not plants but animals. Since the eighteenth century, visitors traversing winding roads witnessed the visible wealth of the mountains mooing and snorting their way to Lynchburg, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and other regional cattle markets.

According to the Census of 1870, livestock (including horses) accounted for 73% of all the exchange-value from agriculture in West Virginia. Animals slaughtered on the homeplace or sold for slaughter accounted for 20% of all the money farmers earned. But while livestock made up a larger portion of relative farm value than in nearly any other state, its absolute value was among the lowest. Annual profits from cattle averaged just $432 per farm, placing West Virginia 29th out of the 37 states. If cattle were money on the hoof, the most valuable product, then why did farmers sell so few of them? Why did they rarely house them in barns or raise hay for them to eat?

Frederick Law Olmsted never saw a cow under shelter. Even in the heart of winter, “they are only fed occasionally, hay or corn being served out upon the ground, but this is not done daily, or as a regular thing, It was just as common for Olmsted to meet people who never fed their cattle at all, though they might find the animals dead in heaps from starvation or freezing when the snow melted. One author familiar with the practice confirmed that cattle “seldom have any sheds to run to, but are accustomed to ‘rough it’ under the lee of hills, or timber, as best they may.” These hard-bitten animals not only had to survive the cold but also wolves and bears. Olmsted listened as neighbors in one North Carolina county tallied the pigs they had lost to predators during the previous two months. “It amounted to three hundred.” By what logic did they allow their livestock to die of neglect? By the logic of the ecological base. Like other commodities that came from the base, free-range livestock sold for money without costing money.

Keeping bears in business, so to speak, kept them on the menu just in case it ever became necessary to roast one on a spit. The base gave cattle or it gave bears. All that mattered was that it gave. As long as woods pasture provided something above a total loss, it raised enough animals to be converted into enough money to suit household needs. Paying scant attention brought forth commodities with little labor and nothing spent.

As early as the 1780s, some farmers over the Blue Ridge began feeding corn to cattle. The beasts needed to be fattened for weeks before final sale. As early as the 1780s, some farmers over the Blue Ridge began feeding corn to cattle. They invented the feedlot. Young cattle spent the summer in woods pasture before being corralled into cornfields during the fall and winter. They ate the ears right off the stalk. A middling rancher might have run between twenty and thirty head. But making the transition from casual grazier to cattle merchant required specific advantages. A rancher needed land with secure title in order to remain in control of woods, deep river bottom for a steady supply of corn and hay, and close proximity to coal camps and market towns.

 

Mountaineers had long been part of the capitalist world by selling commodities into it, like whiskey, lumber, and cattle, without becoming subject to wages.

Instead, for the majority of these families, the transition came about under four linked conditions: population pressure, the loss of the homeplace itself, ecological destruction, and the dwindling value of mountain commodities. Subsistence regimes die by a thousand cuts, and the wounds proliferated after 1860.

The first cut came from within mountain society itself. The plain folk increased at a terrific rate, an indication that their practices and strategies succeeded. But subsistence economies are sensitive to population. More people require more cleared spaces for fields and gardens, more cattle browsing for forage, more ramps and mushrooms gathered in springtime. In the decade leading up to the Whiskey Rebellion, residents of western Pennsylvania shot up 61% in seven years, to 63,500 by 1790. The thickness of humans across the region, at about 19 per square mile, might not seem very impressive, but it likely rid the woods of large game animals. And since so much land was already in the hands of financiers, proliferating households competed for land to set down on. Those who decided not to risk an ejectment suit or who had lost one accepted tenancy

Though Boserup didn’t know of West Virginia in the nineteenth century, she explained what people there faced. Rapid population growth in an agrarian economy presents hard choices, she said. “The cultivators must be able to adapt themselves quickly to methods which are new to them, although they may have been used for millennia in other parts of the world, and—perhaps even more difficult—they must get accustomed, within a relatively short period, to regular, hard work instead of a more leisurely life with long periods of seasonal idleness.” No Arcadia here. Adding to working hours yields more food but less time for leisure. It interrupts chatting with neighbors by imposing tasks like building terraces and hoeing into evening.

So why didn’t this farm appear all over West Virginia after the Civil War? Why didn’t this intensification take place? Why, instead, did Appalachia experience poverty and dependency? Mountaineers needed to think differently about how they did things as their condition rapidly worsened. But they approached the landscape with long-standing assumptions that they could not (or would not) adjust or abandon. It was not that they failed to understand what it meant to harvest more food from a limited space. Everyone who has ever kept a garden knows how. But extending an intensive system over their fields as well required a kind of knowledge they did not have at hand. Instead of continually clearing for new fields, they needed to restore the soil in those already planted. Doing that would have required them to build new structures and plant fodder crops. An intensive system called for them to internalize some of the functions that the forest had always provided, to reduce the subsidy they received from the wider landscape.

That 15-acre farm that I dreamed up would have been difficult to replicate in McDowell County. Sloping fields could not be intensified. They lost topsoil immediately, accelerating the need for shifting, even as farmers ran out of forest to clear. This meant their labor would not be recompensed with an adequate harvest, that they would work harder and harder just to stay in place. The mountains seemed to close in on them.

But where would he begin again? No higher altitudes awaited. Some might have left for the Plains to become small-scale commodity producers on arid quarter sections, but perhaps not many. Emigrating cost money and entailed risk. Men owed a debt here and a favor there or awaited the inheritance of land. The perceived lack of options further limited their view. Increasingly trapped in place by a web of private property and the disadvantages of topography, mountaineers had no way to make up their losses.

Smith responded to those who condemned the mountaineer as a savage. “He is doing the best he can … He should be taught better, and that is the task of the schools and of the great organizations that we have built up for the dissemination of agricultural knowledge. We have a Federal Department of Agriculture, many State departments, State colleges, State experiment stations … Can they not among them develop and teach a mountain agriculture that will make the mountaineer prosperous and leave him his mountain?

Between 1840 and 1880, almost every commodity raised there—corn, potatoes, cattle, and pigs—deteriorated in quantity and value. As the mountains diminished, the flatlands bounded. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin had matched or surpassed the Plateau in every one of these products. During the 1880s, West Virginia farmers hauled in twenty-three bushels of corn per acre. Wisconsin farmers hauled in thirty. The prairie and Great Plains attained tremendous economies of scale compared to the mountains because their large, square, flat, and unobstructed fields were ideal for machinery

Merchants and later banks offered credit, and though easy credit sometimes led to chronic indebtedness, agriculture is not possible without it.

The institutions that defined emergent industrial agriculture were not designed to function in a world of subsistence and barter.

To make the transition from a chartered pool of capital to an organization capable of blasting tunnels into the sweltering depths of the earth, it needed to acquire great stretches of the countryside in one of the advantageous counties. After that, it needed to remove anyone living there.

Private property is different. It carries an exclusive right regardless of use. Governments that create private property often eliminate collective rights because the two are usually incommensurate. Mountain households in the nineteenth century tended to see land as fulfilling both roles. Some of it they held close, as homeplace, where they farmed and gardened. Other pieces they exchanged within families, to launch a young couple or to provide for an elderly relative. When they established ownership, they sometimes sold to speculators and corporations. But operating across the two transactional realms generated a contradiction. Subsistence livelihood cannot endure the widespread commodification of land. When every knob and hollow carries a price, young couples can’t start out. Household reproduction can no longer continue outside of wage dependency.

The mere act of selling land took on different meaning in western Virginia. Imagine a game with hundreds of rules but all sorts of exceptions. Every squatter making a bid for ownership and every absentee with a colonial deed navigated the most fraudulent, dysfunctional, and maddeningly complicated property regime in the United States.

The game of squatting in the crevices worked only as long as absentee landowners remained remote and unwitting. This is what began to change. First, landowners asked legislatures to secure their titles, whether or not they visited their land or did anything with it.

As the two classes—agrarian and capitalist—ran into each other with increasing frequency, they ended up in court. By the 1840s, the Commonwealth of Virginia confronted the problem of whose deeds—indeed, which species of deed—would prevail.

All rights to property come from governments, which modify these rights to serve their most powerful constituents

dispossession in the southern mountains, like in England and Ireland a century earlier, followed more than one script: freely agreed-upon purchase, trickery and bamboozlement, judicial process, environmental destruction, and handcuffs.

In one instance, managers sent Welch to protect them from adverse possession. “In regard to the 3225 acre tract 2/3 of which is owned by the trust … [you are] advised to put someone on the property at once and take possession, as without this is done there is no title. I want you to attend to this as soon as possible. If there is no house on the tract, you had better select someone and have a cabin put up at once and the Company will pay for it.” Another fixer watched a piece of land for twenty years, keeping track of who used it and how often. When the Totten family failed to pay taxes for five years, the company got hold of it.

Neediness swirled around them in a way it hadn’t a generation before. To put this differently, mineral and timber rights amounted to the only equity in land, since no one would buy a farm intending to farm it where everyone knew coal companies would soon operate. So when mineral buyers came around, any ridge with an outcropping of coal, any river bottom that was not part of the homeplace, must have looked like a stack of cash.

Even when the money was good, a pile of cash hardly guaranteed a household’s security. People with limited financial knowledge could not invest it to earn an income.  Once they burned through it, they had nothing.

It looks like a locomotive with a ship’s mast. It clanks and spits, chugs steam, and sweats grease from its wheels and pistons. The power from the coal is released by the engine and transmitted to long cables that extend from the mast every which way. Workers attach them to fallen trees, pulling or skidding the logs hundreds of feet to a railroad flatbed. During the 1880s, the high-pitched whistle of the steam skidder echoed in the coves. The men worked in crews, cutting everything, leaving the slopes barren but for the stumps, branches, and bark that burned whenever a spark from a railroad wheel or glowing ash from a tinderbox fell on the detritus. Dorie Woodruff Cope, who grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains and moved to a logging camp with her family as a child, recalled the fires that burned through cutover hills, the eerie orange skies, the pine needles that shot like darts, and “the hissing sound of sap boiling.

Mountain people had always cut trees and sold them. In winter and spring, when nothing else went for sale and money ran low, they felled a giant yellow poplar or a black walnut. They would build a dam across a creek to hold back its flow, then roll their logs into the pool that formed against the earthworks. Opening one of these dams let go a torrent that heaved logs, rocks, and tons of debris down the hollow, into the river. They lashed the logs into rafts and steered them west toward the Bluegrass or Cincinnati. John Fox, Jr., traveled down the Kentucky River during a spring flood. “Sweeping around the bend I saw a raft two hundred feet long at the mouth of the creek—tugging at its anchor—and a young giant of a mountaineer pushing the bow-oar to and fro.” Rafting logs only worked in one direction. To reach the seaboard they assembled yokes of oxen to haul the trunks overland to sawmills. This was the cottage phase of logging. Households directed it, managed it, and took the profits.

The Hatfields and the McCoys confronted each other across a rising current of economic and ecological deterioration that reduced the viability of mountain makeshift. The central figure in the conflict was William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, an aggressive logging entrepreneur. His litigiousness—not any act of violence—earned him his nickname. Devil Anse did not represent backward-looking traditionalism or a refusal to adapt. His financial success and cussed tenacity stirred resentment in others, most of all in Randolph McCoy. McCoy’s own attempts in the same business had not gone as well.

The most revealing aspect of the feud is also the thing most misunderstood about it. Kinship does not explain it. Members of both families crossed sides. Fewer than half of Hatfield supporters were related to Devil Anse. And of those who took his side, 85%  worked in his logging crew, including three men named McCoy. Financial dependence on wages and anxiety over how they would provide for their own households created new loyalties among young men. When it ended in 1890, writes the historian Altina Waller, “the conflict was no longer rooted in the internal dynamics of the community; instead, the feudists were now enmeshed in a raw struggle for economic and political power.” The Norfolk and Western Railway acted as an unnamed instigator of the bloodshed. Everyone involved knew that it would change social life and the landscape, spreading fear.

The industrial class in Charleston and Wheeling also cheered the conversion of the blanketing woods into money. They justified the human and ecological fallout of the takeover as the necessary violence in the achievement of something greater—civilization, historical progress, social order. “Already, the peaceful seclusion of those hills and vales is a thing of the past. The timber-hunters, the oil-explorers, the coal-buyers, the projectors of new railroads, the seekers after cheap lands for homes or for investment, are everywhere.

“One sees these beautiful hills and valleys stripped of nature’s adornment; the hills denuded of their forests, the valleys lighted by the flames of coke-ovens and smelting furnaces; their vegetation seared and blackened … and one could wish that such an Arcadia might have been spared such ravishment. But the needs of the race are insatiable and unceasing.

The total destruction of the forest took about fifty years. Of the 10 million acres that had never been cut in 1870, only 1.5 million stood in 1910. Mountaineers had no place in this landscape. They had no way of living on denuded hillsides and no rights to dwell in national forests or parks. Both private and public planning ruled them out.

In 1904, a fungus accidentally introduced from Japan killed American chestnut trees in New York City. The blight spread west, destroying billions of trees over the next few decades. Before the blight, chestnut represented 15 to 20 percent of all trees in parts of Appalachia and up to 60 percent in others. It can attain a height of two hundred feet. Its rot-resistant wood made furniture and tools. Its bark tanned leather and could be sold for cash. And its nuts provided forage for pigs and a sweet and substantial fall meal, adding to the complement of foods mountain dwellers took from the landscape. By itself, the loss of the American chestnut would have been wounding. Combined with industrial deforestation, it was devastating.

The arid phase of an arid climate that caused so many to abandon the Plains turns out to have been the North American visitation of a global drought and recession. A series of El Niño oscillations shifted the location of the monsoons from the western to the eastern Pacific. The redistribution of heat and moisture affected the entire Northern Hemisphere. The droughts of the 1870s and 1880s caused human misery from the Deccan in the peninsular interior of India to the Sertão in northeastern Brazil. But the vanished monsoons account for only part of the cause. As Mike Davis argues, tens of millions died of starvation across the tropical world from their recent incorporation into commodity markets. “They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism,” not because they were isolated from the emerging world-system “but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.” (Frank Norris gives these words to a grain dealer in The Pit [1903]: “Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. They make the price. They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can’t pay the price he simply starves.”)

“In the upper part of Charleston District the planters are quietly holding meetings at which they pass resolutions not to sell land to negroes … In Beaufort District they not only refuse to sell land to negroes, but also refuse to rent it to them.” White landowners threatened aspiring black farmers with execution if they signed a lease “and undertook to work for themselves.”19 One of the most effective tools of coercion was enclosure. During Reconstruction and well into the 1880s, counties all over Georgia passed statutes requiring that domesticated animals be fenced from grazing in the open woods. Landowners asserted rights over land they rarely visited, not to make use of it but to prevent it from functioning as a commons. A statute for fencing livestock might not seem very manipulative, but it trapped black forest squatters in a double bind. They could neither afford the cost of building fences nor the impoundment of their cattle.

In Steven Hahn’s words, planters moved “to circumscribe the freedmen’s mobility and access to the means of production and subsistence. The legal and extralegal actions taken by the planting elite to prevent blacks from owning land … were products of such an offensive.

The same legal and extralegal enclosure drove English peasants into wage work and West Virginia smallholders into mills and mines.

Landowners invented other legal tools for coercing blacks and whites into peonage. Among the most effective were vagrancy laws that criminalized poverty and unemployment. The idea that the poor are redeemed from immorality and sloth through value-creating labor goes back to early capitalism.

In 1886, there were 64,349 convict laborers in the United States, most of them in the South, all of them once slaves or agrarians. Every one of them had been denied landed autonomy and endured incarceration for a condition forced upon them yet obscured behind the veil of law and civility. After they lost their freedom, many lost their lives.

Thoreau offers a complicated legacy that I cannot assess here.

I cannot help but see his contradictions. He overstated the purity of his economy by neglecting to mention that he paid nothing for his few rods of ground and lived there rent-free with the permission of the landlord. Thoreau said more about private property in Civil Disobedience. Owning land required one to pay taxes, which required one to make money. His solution was a fugitive existence, without community or continuity. “You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.” It tells us something unflattering about him that rather than write letters to the newspapers and form a coalition against speculation in land, he recommended dissolving all social bonds and leading a life on the run.

“We never seemed able to make much over. All that we saved above what it cost to live … all went into the mortgage-debt. It would have taken so little to make us happy. A little more rest, a little more money—it was the nearness that tormented.” They carried the mortgage like a bushel of rocks. “There was a bitterness in sowing and reaping, no matter how good the crop might be … And there was the need, the awful longing, for some sort of permanence and surety; to feel that the land you ploughed and sowed and lurched over was your own and not gone out from under your feet by a cipher scratch.” The family farm replaced the possibility of subsistence adversity with financial adversity, but whereas the old household could maneuver within most bad situations, the new one owed its existence to creditors.

Farm subsidies would seem to have offered the solution to the discordance between the homestead of a few hundred acres and the perplexing forces of the global economy. During the Great Depression, Congress paid farmers not to produce, in order to maintain higher commodity prices. The purpose of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was to preserve the number of farms and farmers and to ensure them a dignified standard of living. This thinking changed during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz reengineered the subsidy. Henceforth, the government encouraged the largest harvests with the maximum efficiency possible, resulting in the greatest quantity of corn for the lowest prices ever seen. Congress used public money to shore up the difference between low prices and the cost of production. “Get big or get out” described the new policy and the end of any pretense to promoting a way of life.

Monsanto, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland can exist in an atmosphere of low prices. They make money on small margins and titanic volume, most of it sold on world markets. Subsidies allow corporations to make a profit even when the prices resulting from supply and demand run below their costs. In other words, the policy insures them against the depressed values that they cause. The effect is to undercut smallholders in other countries by making it impossible for their crops to compete. This is how the United States has set off a race to the bottom that feeds global dispossession. Nation-states with few resources other than farmland, seeking to boost GDP, act rationally when they propose to replace smallholders with corporations. Only corporations can pay long-term leases and turn out commodity crops on an industrial scale. The use of public money, once a mechanism for keeping family farmers in business, now drives them out all over the world.

If the United States had wanted family farmers, it would have done more to sustain and encourage them. Yet the commonplace narrative creates the illusion of unavoidable tragedy and historical necessity.

Any Scots-Irish, Cherokee, or African-American with a cabin and garden knew that dispossession served someone else’s purpose. It was an instrument of control, not a sign of progress.

The mountain man who became a miner “moves his family and a few household goods from the picturesque cabin in the cove or on the ridge to a desolate shack in the sordid village that has sprung up around the mine. He had not realized that he would have to buy all his food … He has to pay even for water to drink.” Rent on their uninsulated board-and-batten shanties ran against these families all the time, even when the mines were closed, a policy meant to “bind them as tenants b <You have reached the clipping limit for this item>