The American Agricultural Societies and the Making of the New Republic, 1785–1830

Abstract

Amidst the proliferation of agricultural societies in the eighteenth century, the growth of those in America displayed specific characteristics. Flourishing between 1785 and 1830, their spread was linked to the events of the American Revolution and the subsequent clash between the Republican and Federalist parties. Faced with making strategic choices for the new nation, Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans encouraged the societies’ activities as a means of supporting the party’s project of agrarian democracy, which was based on the primacy of agricultural development and opposed to the financial and manufacturing model of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists who followed the example of Great Britain. All the ideologists of American agrarian democracy, from Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin, George Logan and John Taylor, were involved in agricultural societies and used French economic thought, in particular physiocracy as their theoretic point of reference. This was because physiocratic authors provided the first scientific analysis of an economic process founded on the pre-eminence of agriculture, and outlined an alternative development plan to that of the British model. The aim of this essay is to trace the life of agricultural societies in order to better understand an important moment both in the reinforcing of support for the new republic as well as the United States’ response to physiocracy and its contribution to the consolidation of American national identity.