From Alfred to Victoria

     Both ancient Hebrew and classical concepts of rural life came together in the founding of the United States.  As many as 90% of the earliest colonists from England were Puritans of the yeomen class, which consisted of free landowners.  This class of English commoners had been raised under the 1,000-year-old English common law written by King Alfred in the 700s A.D., who modeled his private property laws on the Hebrew Old Testament.  They were educated by John Wycliffe and William Tyndale who sought to educate the common farmer by widely distributing the Scripture in the vernacular language.  These Reformers arrived in the New World with their thirst for religious freedom, as well as English property law engrained in their hearts and minds.  Thomas Jefferson, the son of Puritans as well as the Enlightenment, wanted to institute the agrarian ideals of liberty that were espoused by both John Locke and the French Revolutionaries, who took their cues from the classical agrarian revolutionaries.  Jefferson believed that the key to democracy and a moral society lay in the equal distribution of property, and even tried to include such requirements in the Virginia State Constitution.  He found a kindred spirit in James Madison who incorporated agrarianist ideals at the Constitutional Convention, into the Bill of Rights, and in the building of Washington, D.C.  
 

     However, the 19^th century saw the beginnings of a break in this ancient, long-standing relationship between productive land ownership and civil rights.  The Industrial Revolution created a society that, for the first time in history, did not have to exist just at or barely above subsistence.  The factory, instead of the home, became the focus of productivity.  Husbands desired the steady paycheck of a factory job, while their wives (who had both servants as well as modern, industrial conveniences), had to justify their lack of productivity in the home.  This situation created Victorian society, wherein the home was transformed into a place of consumption, not production.  In addition, the Romantic Movement reacted to the Industrial Revolution by hailing the beauty of wilderness and naturalism.  The Romantics discouraged farming, viewing it as an activity that imposed upon the inherent beauty and function of nature.  In addition, the creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Civil War placed more constraints on small, family-owned farms to be financially viable, leading even more farmers to abandon the work of their ancestors and move to the cities.