PAPERS READ AT THE DECEMBER MEETING OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HIS

TORICAL ASSOCIATION

(Chicago, Illinois, December 28-31, 1914)

THE AGRARIAN HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES AS A SUBJECT FOR RESEARCH

BY WILLIAM J. TRIMBLE

The United States has reached a stage in its development which may afford opportunities for the investigation and interpretation of its history on a scale more comprehensive and with a finality more assured than ever before. The passing of the easily available public domain has brought to an end the first great era of our national history. The last two decades have been characterized by perturbations attendant upon new conditions. There are indications that the American people have passed the more severe perplexities of the process of adjustment, laid down broadly the policies which are to control in the new period, and are now about to enter upon a growth less hurried and perhaps better meditated than that of the past. The new period may furnish a favorable atmosphere to historians for bringing to fuller fruition the choice labors of the past; for interpreting that past with a somewhat broader range of vision than was possible to scholars in the unmatured era; and for incorporating into the body of our history important elements hitherto overlooked. One of these elements may be the agrarian history of the United States.

By agrarian history I do not mean the bare consideration of the development of the technique of agriculture, though that has an important place; but I have in view, also, wider study of laws, politics, transportation, markets, production, and correlated manufactures; education, religion, social movements, and ideals; types of society all of these studied sympathetically in their re

lation to agriculture as focal and measurably determinative, rather than as merely subsidiary and tangential. In other words, I would have the facts of our agrarian history considered from the inside out rather than from the outside in. An example is afforded in Prothero's treatment of English history in his English Agriculture Past and Present. Such a conception, however, emphasizes a systematic, conscious method of approach rather than the entrance upon an entirely new field; for many of the facts of our agrarian history have been considered in other connections. But this method of approach undoubtedly involves also investigations on new lines, the acquisition of much new data, and the reëstimation of old.

The leading occupation of the people of the United States, as they possessed themselves of the continent, was agriculture. If it be true that the occupations of a people and their response to physical environment in the pursuit of these occupations largely mould society and shape politics, then it is also true that an adequate history of our nation (as, indeed, of most nations) must deal extensively and familiarly with the facts of agricultural history. This is not now the case. The history of agriculture in the United States, declares Wright in his valuable monograph on Wool-Growing and the Tariff, "has suffered from the most amazing neglect," and Dr. Ely in the American Historical Review, July, 1914, remarks that, "Strangely enough one of the very greatest fields of research has been, comparatively speaking, unworked, one which will prove particularly fruitful, and that is the field of agriculture."

There can be no doubt, at least, of the importance of this phase in the history of the Mississippi Valley; for here the dominance of agriculture is clear. Considered broadly, on a scale befitting our prairies, the history of agriculture in the Mississippi Valley holds forth an in

viting prospect the first rude wrestling of its earliest agriculture, after the older fashion, with the density of the woodland; the growing appreciation of semi-prairie regions; that wonderful emergence upon the prairies, one of the great steps in the world history of agriculture; the preeminence of corn as it took possession of the flat river valleys and then moved out upon the black prairies; the vast extension of the cattle industry with its new methods and unique types of life; the rise of specialized agriculture; the growth of the wheat industry, as great forces of production here converged; the application of machinery on a scale and with a skill unmatched in history; finally, the leap forward in total volume of production, a prodigious fact not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of the modern world. Consider, also, tributary and auxiliary developments, such as the rise of packing and milling centers, the growth of transportation, the spread of the unique and characteristic manufacture of agricultural implements, and affiliations with mining and lumbering. Have we not in such history an indispensable background for the biography of many a statesman, and for the history of more than one political movement?

Indeed, such history reveals some new and engaging aspects of men already prominent in American history and brings into focus new characters. Men like Jesse Buel and Peter Gideon and Solon Robinson may not unworthily come into the ken of students of history. New facts, it may be surmised, will emerge in the course of investigation, and others will be broadened in significance. I wonder how many of our historians, even of those familiar with New England, know the location of the famous Brighton Market, a picturesque gathering in the forties to which stockmen from many states converged? Another fact, of more far-reaching consequence, may be cited. One of the most enduring of human institutions