Introduction

According to traditional histories of early American agriculture, frontier agrarian communities were nearly always based on subsistence farming, because the roads were poor.[1] Farm products could not be easily transported to seaport markets, so farmers were unable to sell their surpluses and buy urban manufactures or imports. Rural culture languished until better roads and the growth of local industrial centers caused a farm-products boom.[2] Seeking potential profits, urban capitalists invested in transportation infrastructure like the Erie Canal and early railroads, which spurred agriculture in, and migration to, the Middle West.[3] Backward, somewhat ignorant New England farmers were caught unaware by rapid economic changes and were unable to compete with rich western farmlands. The abandoned farms of the eastern states were quickly overrun with second-growth forests.[4] This vision of early America is considered out-of-date by historians such as Brian Donahue, who observed that, contrary to previous portrayals, commercial farming continued in many New England towns until the end of the nineteenth century, and that, when agriculture did decline, the reduction in planting was balanced by substantial appreciation in the amount of farmland being abandoned. Also relevant is William Gilmore-Lehne’s discovery that the reading habits of rural New Englanders were much wider and more varied than had previously been suspected.[5] Some of the specific errors of American agrarian history are less well known, however. Peppermint Kings, which begins in a very remote backcountry hill town that did not even get a telegraph until the 1890s and follows the rapid adoption and spread of commercial production, addresses some of these errors.

Since Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous speech at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, westward migration and the frontier have been a major focus in our understanding of the nineteenth century.[6] Every history that covers territory west of the original coastal republic must in some way address Turner’s frontier thesis.[7] Taking cues from agricultural and economic historians, an earlier generation of historians of westward migration considered some combination of population pressure, improving transportation networks, and expanding markets for farm products as the primary enablers of expansion.[8] Initially, many of these histories repeated Turner’s narrative of a frontier experience so powerful that it even stripped eastern culture and patterns of thought from the settlers. Migrants in these histories were thought to have returned to an earlier, less civilized state of mind, and social evolution to have recapitulated at each new outpost on the frontier.[9] Peppermint Kings shows that people moving to the nineteenth-century agricultural frontier remained deeply embedded in family networks that shared information, retained ties of affection and obligation, and even did business across the miles.

Later historians abandoned Turner’s romantic notions of social evolution and focused on the peculiar eastern traditions settlers took with them.[10] Some historians of migration focused mainly on immigrants from Europe or on domestic migrants who moved from city to city.[11] Others explored the cultures of the old, rural New Englanders who stayed behind.[12] In most cases, these populations of urban migrants or rural stay-at-homes were treated as individual groups, embedded in distinct cultures little affected by interaction with other groups or indeed the rest of American society. Peppermint Kings suggests that a more accurate depiction would focus on families rather than locations. A multigenerational look at families shows dynamic, fluid movement of people, information, and capital between old eastern and new western communities.

In addition to migration, historians of the early republic have debated the character of economic change. At the turn of the twentieth century, progressive historians such as Charles Beard proposed that economic interests influenced social and political life from the nation’s founding. Following Beard, Richard Hofstadter located the roots of the Populists’ nostalgia in Jefferson’s agrarian myth, and Louis Hartz declared that capitalism had come to America with the Pilgrims. But in the 1970s, social historians began to question the details, timing, and even existence of a transition from pre-commercial agrarian society to a market economy.[13] America’s New Social Historians drew both on British social history and on earlier agricultural historians who, following Adam Smith, had argued that commerce could not develop where goods could not reach markets. They suggested that before inexpensive transportation linked producing areas with consumers in American cities, Europe, and the West Indies, many American farmers enjoyed a period of relative isolation, during which they engaged in a “subsistence-surplus” style of agriculture.[14] Farmers produced first for their own family use; only after they had provided for their families did they sell their surpluses in the market. The need to provide a secure, consistent food supply for the family dictated the types and quantities of field crops and livestock farmers chose to raise. And because they only rarely sold commodities for cash, these remote farm communities relied on personal relationships and traded work among themselves, forming elaborate webs of interdependence and mutual obligation.[15] Peppermint Kings shows that these remote frontier outposts were not as isolated from markets and consumer culture as they had seemed to be.

As soon as the New Social Historians had articulated this vision of precommercial rural life, factions formed to their political left and right. On the left, historians argued that the rapid expansion of the frontier was due in part to people fleeing as far as possible from the market-driven Atlantic economy. The agrarian frontier, these scholars argued, was a commerce-free haven for Europeans and Americans seeking a life outside the capitalist market.[16] On the right, another group of historians argued that early farmers were keenly interested in getting to market with their surpluses as early and as often as possible, and that even Jeffersonian agrarians were commercial. Farmers did not object to capitalism, these historians insisted; they objected only to aristocratic urban merchants.[17] The argument over the transition to capitalism became heated, the passion frequently reflecting contemporary political divisions rather than irreconcilable historical claims.[18] It is most useful to read this debate, which continues into the twenty-first century, as strong evidence of the variability of nineteenth-century conditions.[19] Peppermint Kings suggests that both sides in the debate were right: commerce began early and extended to the remotest frontiers, but rural people imagined their relationship with markets quite differently from the depictions in many histories.

Business and banking histories, like many of the more commerce-friendly histories of the market transition, are usually written by economic historians.[20] In contrast to the industrial orientation and celebratory nature of most business history, a few social historians have focused on frontier manufacturing, on the processing of rural commodities, and on the growth of western cities as intermediaries between eastern markets and western producers.[21] Other historians have chronicled the growth of transportation and communication networks that enabled trade and rural consumerism.[22] And environmental historians have followed the flow of resources from hinterlands to manufacturing centers, the return flow of consumer products to the periphery, and the financial mechanisms that facilitated these transfers.[23] Peppermint Kings uncovers a commercial network that existed before the advent of advanced transportation networks, bringing not only consumer products and market sensibilities but also news, information, and even political controversy to the remotest farmsteads of the frontier.

The historiography of banking may actually extend farther back into the nineteenth century than that of manufacturing because accounts of the history of banking were operative in debates about its future.[24] Banking has been socially and politically contested throughout American history, and historians of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century America have entered the fray.[25] Recently, a new generation of business historians has begun to chronicle the histories of state banks before the national banking acts of the Civil War era.[26] But reflecting the traditions of their predecessors, these historians have retained a centralist approach to issues such as credit and capital formation, even while they have extended their view to the varied regional banking regimes of antebellum America. The primary sources explored in Peppermint Kings suggest that rural businessmen had very sophisticated ideas about finance and credit, which are not adequately accounted for in center-focused banking histories.

These are some of the main historiographical issues explored in Peppermint Kings. By following the stories of three families of leaders in the peppermint oil business, some of whom actually referred to themselves as peppermint kings, I hope to deepen the depiction of rural America in the nineteenth century and to complicate histories of the settling of American frontier, the growth of commerce, and the integration of rural economies in the world market. The peppermint kings were agricultural entrepreneurs. They moved easily between rural and urban settings and were effective in both. They built enterprises that helped expand frontiers of western expansion. They refused to conform to religious, political, and social norms prevalent in the times and places they occupied. And they had a much more complex understanding of their identities and their roles in American society than historians have usually attributed to country people. Not every complication improves a story, but I believe the complications introduced in Peppermint Kings add interesting and important insights that deepen our understanding of rural American history.

 

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  2. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951); Paul W. Gates, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960). ↵
  3. Roberta Balstad Miller, City and Hinterland: A Case Study of Urban Growth and Regional Development (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Donald Hugh Parkerson, The Agricultural Transition in New York State: Markets and Migration in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995); Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). ↵
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