An Agrarian Proposal: New England Agrarianism in Service of the Common Good

By Rebecca Judge and Charles Taliaferro

An Agrarian Proposal examines how the communitarian perspectives shared among colonial New England's settlers and the farming methods they employed can be adapted to cultivate contemporary agricultural practices, policies, and ethical commitments. Together these promote sustainable farming and land stewardship, even as they valorize farming as a vital locus for cultivating virtue. In contrast to the celebration of libertarian ideals and the general distrust of government regulation characterizing the writings of many prominent modern agrarian writers who follow the tradition of Jefferson and the Southern agrarians, An Agrarian Proposal explores how faith-based commitments shared among colonial New England's settlers resulted in resource distribution and stewardship practices that created a sustainable approach to land and resource management. An Agrarian Proposal adds to contemporary considerations of the ethics and practices of agrarianism by exploring a time and place where regulation was deemed a necessary means of fostering good land stewardship and where a faith-based communitarianism challenged individualism to promote sustainable land practices by individuals farming New England's rocky and isolated fields.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Dec 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666710113

Rebecca Judge

Rebecca Judge is Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies and holds the Husby-Johnson Endowed Chair of Business and Economics, St. Olaf College.

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An Agrarian Proposal

New England Agrarianism in Service of the Common Good

Rebecca Judge and Charles Taliaferro

An Agrarian Proposal

New England Agrarianism in Service of the Common Good

Copyright © 2022 Rebecca Judge and Charles Taliaferro. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-1009-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-1010-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-1011-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Judge, Rebecca [author]. | Taliaferro, Charles [author]

Title: An agrarian proposal : New England agrarianism in service of the common good / Rebecca Judge and Charles Taliaferro.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-6667-1009-0 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-6667-1010-6 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-6667-1011-3 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology—New England—History | New England—History | Agriculture—Moral and ethical aspects | Agriculture—Environmental aspects | Agriculture—Economic aspects | Agriculture—Religious aspects—Christianity

Classification: GF504.N45 J83 2022 (print) | GF504.N45 (ebook)

02/24/22

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: An Agrarian Integration in the New England Colonies

Chapter 2: An Economic Characterization of the Commons in New England Agrarianism

Chapter 3: Threats to Colonial New England’s Commons and Its Agrarianism

Chapter 4: A New England Agrarianism for Today

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our immense gratitude to our editor, Revd. Dr. Robin Parry, whose encouragement and close reading of our work was truly inspirational.

We also acknowledge with thanksgiving colleagues, friends, and family who supported us, inspired us, and tolerated us as we labored on this project. Among these are Gene Bakko, who changed Taliaferro’s life as a gifted co-teacher of a course on the ethics and biology of agriculture. Other faculty colleagues who have inspired both of us by their interest in reclaiming agriculture as a calling include Ed Langerak, DeAne Lagerquist, Kathy Shea, Charles Umbanhower, and Charles Wilson. We are also grateful for the contributions of Garry Comstock, David Legvold, and Rick Taylor.

Finally, we thank our colleagues and spouses, Anthony Becker and Jil Evans, for their wise insights and faithful encouragement.

Introduction

From a world historical perspective, the birth of agriculture some ten thousand years ago marks a major shift in human history; without surplus agriculture there could be no cities or standing armies. Productive agriculture, sustained by irrigation, tools, and domesticated animals, has served as the foundation for almost every stage of human history in terms of the development of communities, households, languages, transportation, political and economic life, religion, military power, trade, and the evolution of law and its institutions of discipline, punishment, and the distribution of benefits and liabilities. Conversely, the collapse of agriculture in a region, both historically and today, is invariably a crisis for persons and domesticated nonhuman animals, the site of die-outs, compulsory migration, and other traumatic events. Despite the indisputable importance of agriculture, farming has not always been praised as a vital, virtuous practice.

Agrarianism is the term used today to identify the philosophy and practice of farming that does not praise any and all farming, but valorizes farming when it is an important cultural site for the cultivation of virtue, both in terms of civic life and in terms of the sustained stewardship of land and animals. There is a long history of praising farming as a special vocation that can be traced back to Greco-Roman times in the work of Cato, Virgil, Seneca, Cicero, and Horace, among others. While Plato did not elevate farming as a practice for the rulers of his ideal city (the Republic), he recognized that his city required the service of lifelong, productive, reliable farmers. Aristotle identified the household, including the farm household, as the foundation of the city or polis. While farming has been viewed as just another form of production (farmers are involved in food production while a mason is involved in producing stone buildings), those recognized as agrarians see good farming—often small-scale as opposed to large, corporate, market-driven farming—as a complex set of inter-related goods: the proper care of land and animals, good neighborly, community-oriented practices, intergenerational cooperation, self-sufficiency, and more.

Throughout most of its existence, agrarianism has been associated with the just, or equal, distribution of the land as a means of sustenance. The word, agrarian, itself goes back to Roman times, when the lex agrarian, or agrarian laws, governed the appropriation of cultivated land acquired through Roman conquest. Some of these lands became the ager publicus, or public lands, so designated with the intent of providing a supply of cultivated land for the poor by limiting the amount of conquered lands that any single citizen could lay claim to, even via otherwise legal market transactions. Centuries later, eighteenth-century philosopher James Harrington, in his The Commonwealth of Oceana, described agrarian law as that which concerns fixing the balance in lands. Of their origins, Harrington argues that agrarian laws were first introduced by God himself, who divided the land of Canaan to his people by lots. Harrington appears to be referring to passages in Joshua that describe God’s direct involvement in land allocation among the twelve tribes in the soon-to-be occupied lands of Canaan (Josh 14:2 and 18:1–10). This balance in lands was essential, according to Harrington, as without it, government, whether monarchical, aristocratical, or popular, has no long lease.¹ While Harrington only spoke of balance in the distribution of land, by the end of the eighteenth century, agrarianism was associated with the forced equalization of the ownership of cultivated land.² As such, it was an anathema among the liberty-loving founders of this nation. Thomas Jefferson himself praised the American Congress for providing protection against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people.³

Over time, however, and largely through the influence of the Twelve Southerners, the term has taken on an entirely different meaning.⁴ The theory of agrarianism, according to these writers, is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preferences.⁵ From this perspective, agrarianism is often seen as reaching a highpoint in Thomas Jefferson’s 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia.

It has to be said at the outset that while Jefferson’s agrarianism may have admirable aspects, the man was deeply embedded in the racism of his day. Still, we cite him below at length because Jefferson articulates some of the seminal ideals of an agrarianism that persists today. Those ideals include his recognition of the value of the farmer in the life of a democratic culture (some agrarians today advocate what they call food democracy), his view of the importance of farmers being self-sufficient, free of the corruption that seems rife in cities, and specifically his contrast between the virtues of a farmer and the vices of an industrialist.

Jefferson writes:

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe.⁶

As noted, Jefferson was hardly consistent in many areas. While he spoke favorably of limited federal governance, he held three national offices, including the presidency, and expanded the size of the United States dramatically with the Louisiana Purchase. In any case, Jefferson’s spirited form of agrarianism had some influence on the Twelve Southerners and their intellectual heirs. Especially relevant for those agrarians in the southern United States was a suspicion of big government’s impact on farming. A contemporary of Jefferson’s, John Taylor, writing in 1814 does not recall a single law, state or continental, passed in favor of agriculture and blames government of the wretched state of