Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America

Steven Stoll

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jul 3, 2003 - History - 320 pages

A major history of early Americans' ideas about conservation

Fifty years after the American Revolution, the yeoman farmers who made up a large part of the new country's voters faced a crisis. The very soil of American farms seemed to be failing, and agricultural prosperity, upon which the Republic was founded, was threatened. Steven Stoll's passionate and brilliantly argued book explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," who believed in practices that sustained and bettered the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it was wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Stoll examines the dozens of journals, from New York to Virginia, that gave voice to the improvers' cause. He also focuses especially on two groups of farmers, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. He analyzes the similarities and differences in their farming habits in order to illustrate larger regional concerns about the "new husbandry" in free and slave states.

Farming has always been the human activity that most disrupts nature, for good or ill. The decisions these early Americans made about how to farm not only expressed their political and social faith, but also influenced American attitudes about the environment for decades to come. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

Contents

• Litchfield: 3
• On soil and civilization: 19
• Agricultural improvement and the history of the early Republic: 31
• The critique of American land: 41
• marked a new beginning for rural reform: 63
• Island States: 69
• Hints to Emigrants: 96
• Merino sheep usher farmers into the manufacturing economy: 120
• Slavery and the agroecology of South Carolina: 143
• The erosion of land and population in the southern Piedmont: 150
• Edmund Ruffins desperate synthesis: 166
• Toward Conservation 1 7 3: 185
• The legacies of improvement: 209
• Notes: 227
• Bjbhocraphv: 253
• Index: 275

About the author

Steven Stoll, an assistant professor of history at Yale University, is the author of The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America
• Author: Steven Stoll
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003
• ISBN: 1466805625, 9781466805620
• Length: 320 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / 19th Century; Technology & Engineering / Agriculture / Agronomy / Soil Science