The Nature of Science

I'm about halfway through watching the recent Bill Nye/Ken Hamm evolution/creation debate that was live this week.  Finding myself talking to my computer screen, I thought I would write this down instead.

Besides the obvious philosophical and theological differences between the two men, the real debate that is going on is on the nature of science.  What is science?  What can it study, and what can it not?  Ken Hamm insists that science must be observable and reproducable.  Bill Nye insists that science can define history and philosophy (there may be others, but those came up clearly).

Hamm is working with the definition of science that most of us were raised with, not matter where we were educated.  Science can make big predictions or hypotheses, but it is only authoritative on what is observable and reproducable in a laboratory setting.  In an argument I once had with my college chemistry professor I asserted this fact, at which point he scoffed and told me I was, "so 19th century."  So my question is, when did it change?  At what point did science stop being a observable and reproducable phenomenon?  Being a creationist myself I would assert that the change came with Charles Darwin; so who's being "so 19th century"?

Being thoroughly a 20th century man, Nye is comfortable with applying science to most aspects of knowledge, including history and philosophy.  Science can tell us what happened in the past, as well as any conclusions we may come to as to whether or not a god was hanging around when that event occurred.  In an atheism v. theism discussion with students one of my geology professors said that "all good scientists are agnostics," which got me thinking, why?  Why must my scientific assumptions inform my historical and philosophical opinions?  Since when did science define everything?

Science does a wonderful job at being science.  History does a wonderful job at being history.  Theology does a wonderful job at being theology.  Of course all knowledge is integrative, but we have forgotten that different fields of study have different methods of proving fact.  Science can be tested in a lab, history must be recorded by a reliable witness, theology should be based on reliable documents and human nature.  When we use scientific requirements on other fields, all knowledge fails.  Can I prove scientifically that we won World War II?  Absolutely not.  I cannot put the armies in bottles and test it in a laboratory.  However, can I prove historically that we won World War II?  I can read reliable accounts and talk to people who were there, and that is proof.

When science becomes our standard to prove all things then we end up with scientism.  This was not what drove Galilleo or Kepler or Newton.  Scientism discovers nothing, but is quite satisfied with the knowledge it already has, which was likely gained from better scientists.

Why I Want Educated Kids

So they can make jokes like this:

Education is Not for You

From time to time I have the privilege of meeting with families who may be interested in sending their students to my kids' school.  Last week I met with a potential family who are currently using a different method of education, and one of the parents teaches at a very different type of school than ours.  This led to a lot of thoughtful questions and discussion, especially about educational methods, and it made me realize something about the way we want to educate our kids.

There are tons of educational methods out there.  For quite a few years now, families have noticed that public schools just aren't hacking it and now alternatives abound.  Homeschooling, Unschooling, Montessori, Waldorf Schools, the Steiner method, and classical education are just a few of the philosophies that are out there.  For the most part, educational philosophers will try to argue that their method is the best for educating your child.

But I realized that what we're really trying to do is not to educate children for the sake of having educated children.  Instead, we're trying to educate kids who are prepared to communicate their education, and the gospel, to a world that desperately needs both.  You can have the smartest kid on the block, but if they don't know how to communicate their intellect, and consequently the gospel, with the rest of the world, what good does that education do?

Ultimately, then, we're not necessarily looking for the best education for our child, but we're looking for the best education that will prepare them to educate the world.

Girls

It's been ages since I've posted on here, so there's probably no one out there anymore, but today I had a thought.  This is a thought that's taken some developing, so here it is, ready to come, ready or not.

The idea of "smashing gender stereotypes" is so old that it appears to be new again.  I was reminded of this as my 2-year-old daughter listened to my Strawberry Shortcake record from 1983 or so, which made fun of the boys wanting to help the girls carry their heavy baskets.  Strawberry Shortcake was the strong, independent girl who didn't need any help from boys.  And then I just saw this video, advertising the new "engineering" girls' toy, Goldieblox.  Aside from the fact that none of those 8-year-old girls know what a record player is, let alone who the Beastie Boys are, I think I get the message.  Baby dolls and pink things are for dumb girls who are stuck in the past, while smart girls want to be engineers.

Growing up I was one of those girls in that advertisement.  I liked science, and did not do dolls.  Every one of my heroes, from Strawberry Shortcake to Orphan Annie to Rainbow Brite told me that this was the way to go.  Even Barbie taught me that, way before Goldieblox.  In college I went into a scientific field where the men outnumbered women at least 10:1, sometimes more.  However, somewhere in there, I realized that I missed out on something.

God made me a girl, and there wasn't much I could do to change that.  This left me, at base, with an insecurity that needed to be dealt with, and I wasn't at peace until it was.  It wasn't until I realized that I could be a geologist, rock hammer in hand, smashing things in the field and be a lady at the same time that I was really secure in who I was made to be.  I wish someone told me you can be both: you can train to be a godly wife and mother, loving your femininity, and at the same love science, building, being dirty and outside, etc.

That's the problem with marketing to little girls the way Goldieblox does.  We've all been here before, and what we're doing is teaching girls that in order to be smart and brave they must despise being feminine and maternal.  This is not an either/or decision.  My little girl loves pink and babies and Disney princesses.  However, she is also intelligent (at 2 years old she can assemble simple Lego sets) and loves books, and I don't see any reason for teaching her that those desires are in competition.

Classical Education

Being in the classical education world is very exciting.  To see your own kids learning at a young age things you never knew until high school or college (or maybe even never), is encouraging and fun.  I talk to many friends who like to say, "Isn't it amazing what our kids will do?  With an education like this they will take over the world!"

I'd like to think so, but then God doesn't always take over the world in the way we think He should.  Maybe I'm a cynic, but it seems like as public education deteriorates, and in California we're at the head of the pack on that one, the antagonism has only grown towards those who actually care about education.  Regulations on private schools have grown tighter and restrictions increase every year, usually while our legislature is in session.  For example, because of budget cuts, our local public schools have a month less of school then is required by law (they use minimum days to count as full days).  However, we have to make sure our school keeps accurate records of attendance and school days, in case a truancy officer decides to show up on our door.

All this has made me re-think what God is doing with a revival in classical Christian education.  He is definitely preparing our children to take over the world, but it may just be by their martyrdom.  He is preparing a generation who knows what they believe and has the backbone to fight to the end for it.  He used it in Rome to bring an entire empire to its knees, and why couldn't He do that again?

The End

And there it ends.  My rough outline of the history of farming in western civilization has made it's way to the 20th century.  At some point I hope to transform this into a book, but I'm not sure that publishers will be interested in a history of agriculture and politics coming from a geology major with teaching experience.

Still, I have a working title: Life, Liberty, and Property: The history of farming, private property, and democracy.  Look for it in about 20 years at a bookstore near you!

The Government's New Business

The crash of wheat prices in 1929 was followed in 1931 by one of the worst droughts that the Great Plains had seen in over a hundred years.  With no visible sources of water, farmers were forced to let their fields lie fallow.  The suitcase farmers abandoned their lands, leaving millions of acres of plowed-up dirt open to the elements.  When the high winds whipped across the prairie they began to pick up immense clouds of dust, which turned into dust storms that tore through towns and destroyed homes and crops.  As the dust storms continued farmers' lives were in danger, as the dust filled their homes and their lungs.  Over the next 8 years the drought continued, threatening to turn most of western Oklahoma into the Sahara Desert.  After starving and nearly losing their land many farmers began to do the unthinkable--ask the federal government for assistance.  Amazingly, the same man whose policies had created the Dust Bowl by arbitrarily fixing a high price for wheat, Herbert Hoover, was now President of the United States; but he would have nothing to do with helping the farmers.

Angered by Hoover's policies the nation elected Franklin Roosevelt, who was specifically elected on a platform the use the intervention of the federal government to aid the victims of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.  He dispatched federal agents to the Great Plains, having them buy up and destroy surplus livestock and crops (what little there was left) to create a scarcity and drive up prices.  He also issued the first-ever farm subsidies, which paid farmers federal money for not growing crops.  He ordered banks to issue loans to farmers for new equipment.  For many victims of the Dust Bowl this was the first income they had seen in nearly a decade.  However, his policies led to an increasing number of farmers continuing to take farm subsidies.  Also, most farmers could not function without living in debt to banks and loan agencies.  Consequently, U.S. farmland has been transformed into being nearly entirely dependent on the federal government for survival.

Plowing up the Plains

The idealism that was a hallmark of 19th century Victorianism came to an abrupt end with the beginning of World War I.  In 1917 a businessman named Herbert Hoover was appointed head of the U.S. Food Administration, which was charged with stabilitizing U.S. food prices during the war.  As head of the administration Hoover created the first ever federally-controlled price limits on produce, effectively turning food into a commodity.  Up until this time Russia was the largest supplier of European wheat, but because of the war front, their farmers could not sell their produce.  Hoover wanted the U.S. to take over this market, and by artificially fixing a high price for wheat, U.S. farmers began planting lots of it.  Millions of acres in the central United States, espeically the plains of newly-settled Oklahoma, were plowed under for wheat.  This entire region, which had once been a dry grassland, was plowed up to make room for more wheat.  Wheat became so profitable that it led to the rise of "suitcase farmers," wealthy businessmen from the East Coast who would buy up land in Oklahoma and pay someone else to farm the land for them.  They bought up huge tracts of land, radically transforming the landscape of the Great Plains.  Hoover, meanwhile, won an humanitarian award for sending money to the starving Russian farmers that his economic policies put out of business.

Eventually, even in the U.S., the prosperity grown on wheat came to an end.  In 1929 the stock market crashed and the price of all commodities plummeted.  Farmers in the Great Plains continued to produce wheat, even when the price dropped below the cost of planting.  Since the price of wheat dropped, they just plowed up more land to plant more wheat, increasing the economic damage that was to come.  There was so much wheat that much of the stores rotted before they could be transported, and much of it was burned.  While unemployed workers and broke businessmen in the cities were starving, farmers in the Great Plains were burning their excess wheat crops because there were no trains to take them to market.

Without a source of income most farmers turned to subsistence farming, keeping their families alive with what they could produce in their own gardens at home.  That, however, changed when the Dust Bowl began.

Feminism and Consumerism

Another result of this movement away from the land was the rise of feminism.  In her book The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas describes the rise of modern feminism through analyzing 19th century women novelists.  In a rapidly industrializing economy upper-class women felt the need to justify their increasingly ample leisure time.  These ladies had the old-world benefits of servants, along with the new-world benefits of automation, which left them with a lot of time on their hands.  Douglas traces this movement from production to consumerism while analyzing Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels:

"In the newly commercialized and urbanized America of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the woman consumer, Stowe demonstrates, is more important, more indispensable, than the woman producer; luxury items can and must function as necessities.  With her usual acumen, Stowe had grasped the actual meaning of the sentimental heroine and her crucial role in the rise of consumer culture."

This older feminism eventually gave rise to the newer feminism.  The sentimental idealization of women's roles included the idealization of any office they could hold.  Anything a mother did for her children was excused for sentimental reasons, and Douglas cites at least one early feminist who joined combat in the Civil War as a Mother to her country.

For the first time in history people were not measured and counted by what they could produce, but by what they could consume. Many children in a home was, until recently, considered a blessing.  Those little ones would grow the farm and provide for the community and their parents as they grew, more little producers eventually made more wealth for everyone.  Now many people forgo the privilege of having children because they don't want to raise little consumers who will take from their parents.  As Wendell Berry noted, "the present natural ambition of the U.S. is unemployment.  People live for weekends, or vacations, or retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines."

Communism and Evolution

The unfamiliarity with the land, and consequent fear of destroying it, characterized much of the cultural reactions to the Industrial Revolution.  This is seen in Romanticism, but also in the political movement of Communism.  Much of Communism was in direct contradiction with not only the agrarianism that had undergirded society for thousands of years, but also with the political thought of the Englightenment, especially John Locke's writings on private property and the importance of labor.  As a result of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, the Communists desired a completely materialistic interpretation of history, one stripped of any gods, heroes, or villains.

Frederick Engels, a close friend of Karl Marx, wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884 to create a historical justification for Communism.  He argued that man's original communities existed of small, matriarchal tribes that held all women, children, and property in common.  This became the ideal to which Communists desired to return.  He argued that Greek city-states contained the origins of private property and that ancient despots set themselves up as kings over and against these matriarchal tribes.  He believed that these petty kings retained land for themselves which was the origin of private property.  Consequently, he also believed that our idea of a nuclear family only came about to provide some means of inheritance to the king's property.

Engels had no substantial historical backing for most of his claims, however, that would not stop them from being used to provide the foundation for nearly every 20th century metanarrative: from Darwinian evolution to modern feminism and socialism.  Evolutionary biology can even be seen in the transformation of land ownership from "husbandry" to "agricultural science."  This reinterpretation of a relationship to one of science-ism also reinterprets the world materialistically and into one without reference to human interaction.

Romanticism

Much like the Homestead Acts and the Morrill Act were political reactions to rising industry, the Romanticism of the early 19th century was a cultural reaction to industrialization. 

Many of the leaders of this movement were city-dwellers, not farmers, who would renounce the moral corruption of the cities and retreat to some wilderness cabin.  Not being farmers, these men and women were unacquainted with the land, and saw civilization as the enemy of the land; effectively making Romanticism the enemy of Agrarianism.  As Henry David Thoreau said, "if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide the swamp."  One might conclude that Thoreau was not all that familiar with swamps.

Wendell Berry noted that until the Romantic poets of the 19th century, "Western scholars and poets alike had taken for granted that man was part of nature, a part and not separate from it."  Romanticism was at war with the farmer because it viewed humans as separate from the land, instead of an intricate part of it.  Humans, through their machines, were destroying the land, and the only solution was some form of escapism.  Romanticism inevitably led towards present-day environmentalism, and further away from the ancient art of husbandry.

The Creation of Agricultural Science

Along with the Homestead Acts, the Morrill Act of 1862 also created a lasting impact on U.S. agrarianism.  Most of the farmland opened up to the homesteaders would be worthless to these unemployed city dwellers, who had not been raised around farming.  Consequently, the Morrill Act was proposed as a method to educate these aspiring agrarians.  The act gave a portion of public land in each state for the creation of a state college which would house a school of agriculture to educate the newly-formed ranks of independent farmers.  These are the modern land-grant universities, who continue to hold their position of federally-backed agricultural programs tightly.

Over the past 150 years these land-grant universities have transformed the age-old idea of farming as "husbandry" into one of "agricultural science."  The topic of "animal husbandry" has become "animal science."  "Soil husbandry" has become "soil science."  Husbandry had always been understood as the caretaking of a particular piece of property or livestock, a relationship between a man and his land and animals.  Historically it also connoted the importance of conserving farmland for future generations, so you could hand your farm down to children and grandchildren.  However, the universities took a more Darwinian outlook that tried to separate man from his environment.  The agricultural schools became, knowingly or not, a way to put farmers out of business.  It is in the nature of most academics to push their most promising students into a university, a government bureau, or agri-business, not to become independent landowners.

The Homestead Acts

The tension between who had the more virtuous lifestyle, Northern or Southern States, continued right up to the brink of the Civil War.  Most Southerners compared the lot of the Northern industrial workers to their own slaves.  In true Jeffersonian tradition, they insisted that the abolitionists were no better than slaves in their bondage to a paycheck and an employer.  Their arguments seemed justified when in 1857 the economy collapsed and unemployment in the factory cities ran high.  While campaigning for the Presidency, Abraham Lincoln described his vision of a system whereby unemployed factory workers could gain their own land and become self-employed, yeomen farmers--an idea that grew into the Homestead Acts of the 1860s.  The Republican Party platform in the election of 1860 endorsed the homestead measures, which were personally written by the newspaperman Horace Greeley, and Lincoln became his poster child for the Republican cause.  He was referred to as the "child of labor" who proved that "honest industry and toil" were rewarded in the northern economy.  The Republicans together agreed that the best opportunity for the poor was to get them out of the cities and into the farmland. 

Unfortunately, the self-sufficient dream of many homesteaders disappeared.  Very few of the poor from the cities could take advantage of the Homestead Acts--most of those involved in the Western expansion were wealthy, entrepreneurial farmers who wanted more land.  They received the land for free, built it up, and re-sold the land for a huge profit.  Also, because of the rise of industrial agriculture, production was rising as well.  This increased the costs of farming, which effectively shut out a profitable business to those unemployed city workers trying to convert to the farming lifestyle.  Those who did receive land had to rely on banks for credit in outfitting their farms, and the ensuing debts drove many out of business within a generation.

The Middle Class, Farming, and the Republican Party

Besides the formation of the USDA in 1862, other federal laws were enacted in the 19th century to preserve the agrarian way of life.  Horace Greeley, the famous newspaper editor and Presidential candidate, once stated that a country without agriculture "can rarely boast a substantial intelligent and virtuous yeomanry...It may have wealthy Capitalists and Merchants, but never a numerous Middle Class."  Greeley was one of the founders of the Republican Party, which was formed to preserve agrarianism in the Northern states.  However, the Republicans did not believe, like Jefferson, that industry was antithetical to the virtuous farming life, but argued that moral development would follow material development.

The Republican Party was formed from a group of former Democrats and Whigs who were united under the Free Soil Party.  The Free Soil Party existed to promote the idea of free labor in the North (as opposed to slavery in the South).  The Free Soilers promoted the rapid expansion of Western territories in order to provide more land for free farmers.  They believed these farmers would provide a protection against the expansion of slavery by creating a "middle class," which was a new term at the time.  U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens stated while addressing Congress, "The middling classes who own the soil, and work it with their own hands are the main support of every free government."  Charles Francis Adams, a congressman and the grandson of John Adams, stated "the middling class...equally far removed from the temptations of great wealth and of extreme destitution, provided the surest defense of democratic principles."

Instead of a moral agrarianism, the preservation of the middle class became the foundation for morality and democracy.  Many from the Whig Party and the Democrat Party were divided on issues such as economics and abolitionism, but this position united those them, and eventually formed the basis of the Republican Party platform.

The Industrial Revolution

The United States was, then, founded as an "agrarian republic" at the end of the 18th century.  Although many did not realize it at the time, this was the twilight of agrarianism as a way of life for the western world.  George Washington so believed in the goodness of agrarianism that he proposed an office for an agricultural advisor to the President in an address to Congress in 1796.  This suggestion would not be realized until Millard Fillmore proposed the formation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1851 in a speech to Congress.  The USDA would still not come into existence until Fillmore's bill arrived on Abraham Lincoln's desk in 1862.  This establishment of agriculture in the federal government was likely a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which had begun to change the entire make-up of society.  Thomas Jefferson noted this, as he saw the rise of industrialism in the northern colonies, which was why he desired to place the new capitol of the United States in the agrarian, Southern states.

However, even Jefferson did not foresee the dramatic changes that took place in society during the 19th century.  Ernest Nathan Manning, the agrarian author, states in his thesis on the sources of ancient Greek and Hebrew agrarianism, "It seems that because all civilized societies were agricultural until the Industrial Revolution, that figures of all stripes--academic, literary, and otherwise--often took it for granted."  There were some ways in which industry aided agrarianism, the yields that a tractor could give over a horse-drawn plow could make even a small farmer productive and wealthy.  As well, a steam engine could open up markets to those who lived far from the farm.  However, the fundamental change the revolution was bringing frightened many people.  It was their reactionary moves against industry that eventually had the opposite effect, and drove the 19th century out of farms and into the cities.

And Lastly, John Adams

John Adams was a much smaller-scale farmer than his contemporaries Washington and Jefferson.  His modest 500-acre farm was tiny compared to their large plantations.  However, he enjoyed the farming life every bit as much, and saw the value in working his own land over arguing politics in Philadelphia.  Abigail Adams said that he would not have been able to handle his political life if it were not for the distraction of farm work.  Adams wrote in a letter to Jefferson in the summer of 1796, "I have spent my summer so deliciously in farming that I return to the old story of politicks with great reluctance."  His farm was a retreat from the Constitutional Convention.  When frustrated with hours of political debate his stated, "My time might have been improved to some purpose in moving grass, raking hay, or hoeing corn, weeding carrots, picking or shelling peas."  Even after Adams was elected president he stated, "I should prefer the delights of a garden to the Dominion of a World."

Throughout his political life Adams used the skills he had learned on the farm to inform his public decisions.  In his book A Defence of the Constitution of the Government of the United States of America, he discusses how the insights he had gained as a farmer influenced his political theory.  For example, when driving a wagon down a steep hill he would put one team of oxen in front and another in back to counterbalance the load.  This division of powers inspired his thinking on the separation of powers in the branches of the U.S. government.  Also, in his home state of Massachusetts Adams tried to include rewards for agriculture in the state constitution.

Washington the Farmer

George Washington was also a firm believer in the virtuousness of farming.  He maintained, with Jefferson, that American agriculture was the key to avoiding the decadence and moral corruption of Europe.  The man who had been compared to the Roman Cincinnatus, in his peaceful abdication of power and return to his farm, hoped that the U.S. would become an agrarian republic and "a storehouse and granary for the world." 

Washington loved his own farm and created many innovations to further keep the U.S. from becoming dependent on other countries.  For example, he planted his home, Mt. Vernon, in all native species, which was highly unusual at that time among the colonists.  He had also noticed that colonial soil was losing its fertillity because the fields lacked manure.  American farmers let their livestock wander in the forests instead of on fallow fields.  Washington invented a manure container to store and rotate manure for spreading on the fields in the spring.

Even when president, Washington would state: "I can truly say I had rather be at Mt. Vernon than to be attended at the seat of government by the officers of state and representatives of every power in Europe."  After his retirement from the presidency, Washington separated his farm into large plots and leased each plot out in order to reduce the number of slaves on his plantation, and he grouped his slaves together with their families so nobody was split up.  He was also the only founding father who freed all his slaves upon his death.  Washington saw the future of the United States in free, landowning farmers.  As Andrea Wulf states in her book Founding Gardeners:

"The Commander-in-Chief [Washington] saw the future of America as a country peopled not by soldiers but by farmers--an agrarian society that could be industrious and happy, where 'our swords and spears have given place to the plough share and the pruning hook.'  The general who had defeated the British army idealized not the military tactician or the political revolutionary, but the farmer. 'The life of a husbandman above all others is the most delectable.'"

More Founding Farmers

Thomas Jefferson was also fully aware of the revolutionary connotations of the ancient Roman concept of agrarianism, and embraced them.  He was an admirer of the French Revolution, and even tried to include in the Virginia Constitution a statement that every free person in the state was entitled to an equal share of 50 acres of land.  His reasoning was that "the small landholders are the most precious part of a state."

Conversely, Alexander Hamilton's desire to industrialize the United States eventually caused him to part ways with his fellow Federalist, James Madison, who was also a farmer.  Madison then joined ideological forces with Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson believed that merchants and manufacturing laborers were not as tied to their country as farmers, and was so shocked at the industrialization of the Northern states that, as early as 1816, he thought the South should secede.  He made sure that Washington, D.C. would be placed in the South in an attempt to keep it far from New York and the other industrialized, corrupt Northern cities.

As president, Jefferson proceeded with the Louisiana Purchase because it ensured that enough farming land would be available to keep America virtuous, and not become centered on manufacturing and industrialism.  Lewis and Clark's exploration of the new territory would also make them emissaries from Jefferson, as part of their mission was to encourage the Native American tribes to settle down and become farmers.

Jefferson

Over the next 100 years the importance of productive, privately-held land ownership became a backbone of  the United States.  Nearly all of the founding fathers, those who had a hand in the Constitution and the federal government, were farmers who believed in the ethical value of using private land productively and were suspicious of the moral laxity of cities and the wastefulness of industry.  Classically educated, they drew their inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman traditions of the moral small farmer, as well as the Protestant work ethic, and the political ideas of John Locke.

Thomas Jefferson quoted Hesiod by saying in one of his letters that "cultivators of the earth are the most vigorous, and the most independent, the most virtuous [of men]."  Although we now view Jefferson as somewhat of a Renaissance Man, with interests across the board, he saw himself as a farmer.  In his own words, "I have made researches into nothing but what is connected to agriculture.  I am entirely a farmer, soul and body."  He believed that "agriculture is the surest road to affluence and best preservative of morals."  In fact, Jefferson's belief in the virtue of farming was so strong that he believed only farmers should be elected to Congress because they were "the true representatives of the great American interest."  Everything that was morally superior in the world, Jefferson believed, was derived from the productive use of private property.  John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was Jefferson's inspiration for the Declaration of Independence.

Yeoman Colonists

The English Separatists finally left Holland for North America, and their boat, The Mayflower, landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.  Their governor, William Bradford, discusses in his diary, Of Plymouth Plantation, the living conditions in this early colony.  In fact, the colonists first attempted a communistic society, where all property was held in common.  However, this encouraged laziness among the colonists and, as a result, many pilgrims starved.  The plantation was then divided up into private property, with each colonist owning and working his own farm, which greatly increased their productivity.

Similarly, only 8 years later, another fleet of ships began to arrive in Massachusetts.  This was the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which had most of New England under their authority.  Over 20,000 settlers arrived, mostly Puritans, to found their "city on a hill" in the New World.  At least 60% of these settlers made their living directly from the land as farmers, husbandmen, herders, or hunters.  An extremely small percentage of these settlers were any type of nobility.

The overwhelming majority of the early American settlers were small landowners and farmers who had no ties to the noble class.  They were mostly Protestant, due to the influence of Wycliffe and Tyndale and their Bibles, and were known in their homeland by the English class of yeomen.  Such was the effect of the yeoman class emigrating to North America that the American Heritage Dictionary published in 1828 defines the word yeomanry as "the collective body of yeomen or freeholders.  Thus the common people in America are called the yeomanry."