Post 4: Almanacs

Agriculture in the Tidewater Region

The Farmers’ and Planters’ Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1845 has a series of essays at its beginning that describe the importance of agriculture and set out guidelines and tips for various agricultural activities. These include talking about common mistakes farmers make, best practices for selecting seed, how to weigh wheat, how to deal with rats, and more. This makes sense given the fact that this is a farmer’s almanac, but it also speaks to the importance of agriculture in the region.

It was published in Salem, North Carolina, firmly placing it within the Tidewater American nation. The economy of Tidewater was defined by cash crops grown on plantations using slave labor. Two of the most important crops, tobacco and cotton, are described in the first essay as the sources of money for the nation. This essay uses a lot of this kind of language. It even starts off with “Agriculture is the foundation of wealth”. These phrases initially suggest that the author is trying to defend the importance and value of agriculture. This is understandable given that we rely on agriculture for food, textiles, etc., but when you look at some of the other lines it starts to read more like a coded defense of slavery.

This region would have heavily relied on slave labor to build the wealth of plantation owners and in 1845, the moral and legal status of slavery was a huge issue in the United States. In the essay, the author writes “Money is coveted because it can command labor; but of what use would it be, if labor would not be commanded.” The phrase “command labor” reads to me like a direct reference to slavery. When the author writes “what use would [money] be, if labor would not be commanded”, it seems like he is implying that the wealth derived from agriculture is dependent on “commanded labor”. He is making the economic argument for slavery that was popular with southern planters. The placement of this essay that makes a coded defense of slavery so early on in the almanac is a signifier of how reliant on exploited labor the Tidewater economy was and the lengths they would go to defend that system of oppression.

Bibliography

Woodard, Colin, 1968-. American Nations : a History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York :Viking, 2011.

Farmers' and Planters' Almanac for the Year of Our Lord ... [Serial]. John C. Blum, 1828. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/farmersplantersa1845blum/page/10/mode/2up. Accessed 5 Dec. 2021.