you hear this a lot, but what does it mean, specifically?
the pre-1776 americans who came from a sex, race, and class background that enabled them to participate in the conventional history of america sought to buy into aristocracy as a system of production. they were the youngest sons of minor aristocrats, the children of men with rank and no land, successful but socially limited military officers. there were people other than white men in america, but our history is not defined by them, they were not in power, they struggled to survive and their voices are faint and hard to hear. even the reality of working-class life in america among white men is largely silent; children read thomas paine’s agitation for the bourgeois revolution in america but nothing about his labor agitation in the us and england, nothing about his work as a corsetmaker or his parallel struggles to break into the bourgeoisie personally and defend workers as a class. we learn about the composition of washington’s teeth.
more people know washington had teeth extracted from slaves than know he was rich, and had an obvious and immediate material interest in the revolution as a wealthy planter.
george washington was arguably the richest man in america. not in money, although there is that. he was rich in land; he was a successful surveyor, planter, and politician. “politician” makes sense to us, and while it meant different things in the 18th century (and certainly he would have rejected any attempt to identify him that way) it’s something we can comprehend pretty well.
the planter class were slaveowners. this was a universal fact of revolutionary america; there was nowhere near enough ‘free’ labor in america to maintain their massive, highly inefficient cash crop farms. expanding the population of slaves in america was a major priority to intensify production.
before the cotton gin made cultivars of cotton that grew outside of fertile bottomland economically viable under even plantation slavery by reducing the titanic amount of labor necessary to make their bolls usable for fiber, the major cash crop of america was tobacco.
in america, because of peculiarly american mythology, we tend to believe that in the late 1700s and most of the 1800s people didn’t understand crop rotation or soil nitrogen. even in the context of european agriculture this is incorrect. soil nutrition was an incomplete science, and the primary fertilizer in the west was not an efficient nitrogen source but bone meal, yet american planters understood the basics of crop rotation and fertilization. they simply refused to use them because they would have driven up costs.
the rudiments of the agricultural revolution were things that wealthy american planters chose to forget. this is why america is larger than europe and has only been a food exporter in living memory - not because it is infertile, but because its economy was one of indifference to fertility, and this set down powerful cultural roots and industrial norms. the dust bowl was a product of this history as much as anything.
in slavery times, wealthy american planters planted a crop of tobacco on every surface available to them on good land - and they could tell if land was good for tobacco by means of both common knowledge about agriculture and surveyors’ trade secrets. a good way to tell in virginia was to count the pines.
they continued to plant tobacco season after season, crop after crop. the land was never given rest, never allowed to lay fallow. no land capable of raising tobacco was used for anything else; food and feed crops that would have partially restored soil were grown on bad, rocky, marginal soil.
in a few years, the best land used this way would become utterly infertile, and would be allowed to revert to barrens. the semi-indigent white smallholders of the antebellum south filled this vacuum, and in struggling to make do with an agricultural technology adapted for intensive, land-destructive agriculture, degraded soil still further.
the planters who had used up land then acquired more. land was cheap; formally it was necessary under english law to acquire title from natives, the english system of transfer of title was not a native institution and was easy to use to steal land. the american mythology includes a story about settlers buying manhattan for $50, and a riposte that this represented an easement and not a permanent purchase to the native lenape. there are also stories about natives selling land they did not own. these are both applicable in some cases, inapplicable in others; the interface between white settlers and natives was unstable and heterogeneous. in most cases, white title to land under english law was only ever ambiguous at best, and the land bought in this way rapidly became incapable of supporting people outside of the deformed european style of agricultural production prevalent in america. even if the system were not rigged against natives, economic pressure would still have created a comprador class which sold out and moved north and west, and this would still have intensified political struggles among natives and between natives and white settlers.
these conflicts, and legal hassles for the british government, lead to the proclamation of 1763. we hear mostly about it forbidding squatting - white settlers moving over the mountains and claiming land without title. in the american popular imagination this is what the revolution changed.
the reality is that the main thrust of the proclamation of 1763 was that the purchase of native land in america by private agents was forbidden, and all such purchases had to be formal purchases by agents of the crown itself. to a planter class whose bloated, vampiric way of life depended on shady and frequently illicit private land deals between themselves and natives, this was a deadly threat. from the word go, it was challenged by planters - who, being sustained by the legal system in a basically predatory life, in general took pains to be literate in the formal law of england and keep copies of significant precedents in common law courts - using a forged version of the pratt-york opinion.
the pratt-york opinion held that the british east india company was within its rights to purchase land from princely states in india. it held, unambiguously, that its decision did not apply to america, and american skeptics always expressed scorn and ridicule about the idea it suggested of dealing with indian “princes” and “governments”. (after the war, john marshall made it clear that there was no homology in the eyes of anglo-american law between the formal, legitimate governments of the raj and american indian nations.) but when you think about it, the same logic was really at work: the british east india company was an agent of the crown in its own right so its expropriating land from natives was in the crown’s interest even without its formal say-so. and so in a sense were american planters agents of the crown in this capacity. if george washington, the richest man in america, was not an agent of the crown in north america, who even was?
forged versions of this opinion, which clipped off language making it unambiguous that the decision was inapplicable to america, circulated widely. they are in evidence in the personal effects of washington, jefferson, lewis and clark. whatever the crown said, the land grab would continue, be damned any border or line. more land was needed so more land would be taken.
before, during, and after the revolution, washington was a surveyor; he wrote down the characteristics of land which white people had seen but had not investigated in depth for its suitability for plantation agriculture. he took the best land of the west for himself. it was not considered unseemly or ridiculous that he would do this even while on campaign; it was a necessary part of his profession and a universal behavior of the plantation aristocracy.
the use of land in this way continued after the war, and especially after the war with tecumseh’s confederacy was won at tippecanoe; land was close to free for the first white people to survey it, and cheap as dirt for the rich planters that came after them.
this is how americans became rich. this is how american capital came to exist. this land grab logic extended into the west, and this is part of the reason oregon was settled so far in advance of the great plains - the thick, dry grasses of the modern breadbasket of the us were not suitable country for cash crops, and only at its southern margins did plantation slavery ever successfully advance.
it is sometimes treated as inevitable that this should have ended, that plantation slavery reached its zenith before the civil war and the civil war was part of its decline. but this country was literally founded by people who stole land to farm so intensively with slave labor that it was destroyed for agriculture for generations - and those people would never have imagined most of what we think of as ‘the south’ being subject to their economic system. it was not suited for tobacco or long-staple cotton. but american and european industry, whose hunger for production was insatiable, found a way.
this form of production followed exploration, opening, and exploitation of native nations distant from white settlement by a diverse class of explorers and outdoorsmen. it followed that exploration and opening more or less everywhere. when we read histories of the rest of america we encounter other, less discussed cash crops, far outside of the main area of plantation slavery: ginger, indigo. (ginger in particular was a cash crop because of british merchants’ penetration of markets in china.) the same economic logic that applied in plantation slavery applied everywhere, and while some crops were limited by the absence of free labor, enormous families and punitive economic policies against the indigent were tailored to minimizing that. the same economic idea - land is limitless and can be destroyed without consequence, and labor can be someone else’s problem - underlay everything america did. it underlaid acquisitions of millions of acres of land with no conceivable economic use to agriculturists.
it underlies, in distant echoes, the modern american system, where the acquisition and mortgaging of domestic land is one of the primary ways capital disburses to the middle-class; where intensive use of land in existing settlements under gentrification follows a predictable pattern of exploration, exploitation, expropriation, and transfer to large investors. state violence is not the end-all and be-all of this legalized theft but it is always present and always on the side of capital and its agents.
and the american innovation, the core of the american experiment, is that if you have enough money you’re as good as god’s vicar on earth. it worked for washington and it works for your landlord.
happy fourth of july, everybody!
