Open Sturges Final Diss.Pdf

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts DWELLING ON THE LAND: THE LITERATURE OF AGRICULTURE IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC A Dissertation in English by Mark C. Sturges © 2013 Mark C. Sturges Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2013 The dissertation of Mark C. Sturges was reviewed and approved* by the following: Carla Mulford Associate Professor of English Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Robert Burkholder Associate Professor of English Ian Marshall Professor of English and Environmental Studies Stephen Browne Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Mark Morrison Professor of English Head of the English Department *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii Abstract This project explores the relationship between literature, agriculture, and political discourse in the early American Republic. Focusing on four locations—Virginia, Connecticut, the Susquehanna Valley, and Cherokee Territory in Southern Appalachia—I survey a range of regional writing from the 1770s to the 1830s, and in the process I argue that a sense of place has the potential to shape an environmental ethic. Each chapter demonstrates (1) how farmers from these four regions responded to environmental problems like soil exhaustion and deforestation; (2) how writers from each region expressed a new ecological anxiety about the waste of natural resources; and (3) how these writers employed different modes of literary persuasion to promote a more permanent sense of place and a more sustainable system of land management. In other words, my study tells the story of an early American environmental movement. Typically, historians trace the roots of American conservation to a later date, often to the work of George Perkins Marsh or Gifford Pinchot, while literary critics privilege the writings of Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, but I find a similar environmental conscience in the early national era. Through new readings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, William Bartram, and the Cherokee writer Elias Boudinot, my project recovers a lost ethic of agrarian land stewardship and thus proves that the canon of American nature writing has roots much deeper than the mid-nineteenth century. These “founding farmers” cultivated a vision of sustainable agriculture that later inspired the Populist Party of the late-nineteenth century; in the twentieth century, their ideas resurfaced among neo-agrarian writers who began to challenge industrial agriculture; and today, the same core values have shaped the contemporary local-foods movement. Their work provides not just an insight into the past, then, but a model for a more durable future. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………… v Introduction The Agrarian Revolution…………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter One Cultivating Virginia: Agricultural Surveys and Ecological Anxieties………………………. 35 Chapter Two Manufacturing Connecticut: Georgic Discourse and the Didactic Sense of Place………….. 104 Chapter Three Settling the Susquehanna: Frontier Narratives and the Culture of Improvement…………… 169 Chapter Four Surveying Cherokee Territory: Literary Geography and U.S. Indian Policy………………... 237 Conclusion Revising the Revolution……………………………………………………………………... 302 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………. 310 iv Acknowledgments First and foremost, I wish to thank Carla Mulford for directing this dissertation and for showing me the way of rigorous historical scholarship. Thanks to Robert Burkholder for his friendship over the past few years and for teaching me to think more deeply about place and region. Thanks to Ian Marshall for guiding me along the trail of ecocriticism and for the example he sets with his own work. Thanks to Adam Rome for his lectures in environmental history, and thanks also to Steve Browne for his many helpful insights along the way. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my fellow graduate student, Ethan Mannon, for the great harvest of feedback he provided in our chapter workshops. I also wish to acknowledge the Penn State English Department and College of the Liberal Arts, as well as the Center for American Literary Studies, all of whom furnished generous financial support, without which this project may have withered on the vine. I am also indebted to the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography for publishing my early thoughts on Jefferson, some of which have resurfaced in a slightly different form in the following pages. And I wish to thank the Folger Institute and Professor Eric Nelson for hosting a research seminar in the summer of 2012 that enhanced my understanding of the American Revolution. Last but not least, I offer my most heartfelt thanks to Rachel, my folks, my friends, and my dog. v Introduction The Agrarian Revolution In the summer of 1776, that most symbolic of American seasons, when the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Britain, Thomas Jefferson wanted to stay home. He had a headache, his mother had just died, and the mountains of Virginia easily trumped a trip to the city. Only reluctantly did he leave Monticello in May, return to Philadelphia, and resume his post in the Continental Congress. Over the next six weeks, in that immortal room on Market and Seventh, he sat at his immortal desk, immortal pen in hand, and drafted that immortal document, the Declaration of Independence. Despite the mythology of history, Jefferson devoted more attention in those weeks to the affairs of his home state than to the content of the Declaration, which he regarded largely as a symbolic gesture. More vital to the fate of America, he believed, were the ongoing efforts to establish functional state governments. During May and June, Jefferson wrote three drafts of the Virginia Constitution, a document involving a more practical plan for the future than the blend of philosophical liberalism and emotional polemic comprising the Declaration. In the first of those drafts, Jefferson outlined a policy that would have allocated fifty acres of property to every landless Virginian before allowing speculators, land companies, or wealthy individuals to purchase the surplus. Although the plan never came to fruition, its proposal established a key relationship between land policy, environmental philosophy, and the national project. At this pivotal moment in American history, Jefferson was cultivating an agrarian ideal; he was framing an environmental ethic; he was dwelling on the land.1 1 In early August, shortly after the Declaration was signed, Jefferson sent a letter to Edmund Pendleton deliberating the issue of land tenure. He described American lands as “allodial,” the exclusive possession of the colonists independent of the king and his imperial regime. According to Jefferson, the new nation should abolish the feudal system and free private citizens from the economic demands of landlords and a distant sovereign. No longer would individuals pay rent or labor for another’s profit. Instead, they would work (and own) the land as freeholding farmers subject only to the authority of state governments. Of course, this vision of land ownership required a pair of erasures: first, the states had to incorporate and reformulate colonial titles and existing land claims; second, the American Indians either had to accept new laws and lifeways or relinquish their relation to the land. Jefferson closed his letter to Pendleton with a frenzied review of this second point.2 At the outbreak of the War of Independence, several Indian nations had allied with the British and launched a series of raids down the spine of the Appalachians against white settlers whom the Indians considered a threat to their territorial sovereignty. Jefferson believed that the success of the Revolution depended on forestalling these alliances between Native Americans and the British. The Shawnees and Delawares, he told Pendleton, “are disposed to peace.” The Iroquois, on the other hand, required a more forceful diplomacy. “We directed a declaration to be made to the six nations,” Jefferson wrote, “that if they did not take the most decisive measures for the preservation of neutrality we would never cease waging war with them while one was to be found on the face of the earth.” As for the Cherokees, Jefferson intended to make an example of them: “I hope the Cherokees will now be driven beyond the Mississippi & that this in future will be declared to the Indians the invariable consequence of their beginning a war.” Thus, the 2 conflict in the colonies provided Jefferson with a convenient excuse for displacing the native peoples, the brutal prerequisite for the fulfillment of his agrarian project.3 Unfortunately, history too often spotlights the founding fathers, leaving other characters and their contexts in the darkness. Such is the theater of American exceptionalism. Throughout 1776, while Jefferson forged a link between national politics and agrarian economics, alternative visions of the land were evolving elsewhere in the colonies. On the southern frontier, William Bartram had just concluded a four-year tour of Creek and Cherokee territory. He served briefly in a Patriot militia in Georgia, but when hostilities escalated, he decided to return home. Back in Philadelphia, for the next fifteen years he wrote and revised an account of his travels. Primarily, Bartram hoped to present the fruits of his botanical

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