Independence of the Peasants
A citizenry capable of providing for itself has universal appeal, even today
📷: early farming with tractors in Stamford area (via Museum of the West Texas Frontier)
On October 28, 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote a famous letter to his friend James Madison. This is the letter in which Jefferson famously called small landholders “the most precious part of a state.” This was no mere philosophical musing.
Jefferson was on a diplomatic mission to France on behalf of the new American republic. While he was there, he observed the plight of the French peasants. Jefferson saw a countryside in which opportunity was lacking and he saw a clear cause: a small aristocracy disproportionately controlled the country’s power and resources. The aristocrats doled out most of the jobs to laborers, servants, and artisans. Living wages were hard to come by and affordable rent was even more scarce (sound familiar, America?) It was very difficult for an average person to improve their lot in life in a meaningful manner. And yet, Jefferson looked around and saw large swaths of land lying fallow. Jefferson saw opportunity for the French peasants to grow crops, pasture livestock, and forage for wild game and plants, but instead, these lands were protected as giant game reserves for the aristocrats’ sporting pleasure.
Jefferson was incensed. He wrote to Madison, “wherever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property has been so far extended as to violate natural law.” Jefferson saw it as crucial to prevent this from happening across the Atlantic. Jefferson’s “yeoman farmer” was the archetype of a deeply agrarian society, but he was also an exemplar of something larger that should permeate through society: the small, independent property owner who could make a living on his own. Whether he farmed, hunted and trapped on the frontier, ran a store in town, or worked as an artisan or craftsman, this American could provide for himself and his family, dependent on neither big business nor big government to survive.
That will preach, even moreso today.
The famous Kentucky author and activist bell hooks (pen name for Gloria Jean Watkins) wrote of her own family’s outlook in the aftermath of her ancestors’ emancipation from enslavement, in “Belonging: a Culture of Place”1:
“Both grandparents owned land. Like Booker T. Washington, they understood that black folks who had their ‘forty acres and a mule,’ or even just their once acre, could sustain their lives by growing food, by creating shelter that was not mortgaged. Baba and Daddy Gus, my maternal grandparents, were radically opposed to any notion of social and racial uplift that meant black folks could lead us away from respect for the land, that would lead us to imitate the social mores of affluent whites.
This independence has universal appeal. French peasants longed for it when Jefferson encountered them. It underlies the “forty acres and a mule” promise that hooks speaks of, thwarted by Jim Crow. It brought immigrant settlers to North America in the first place and it pushed them across the prairie to build homesteads despite great danger and hardship.2 It drives the European farmer protests that we are seeing today. It inspired Wendell Berry to abandon a promising career in New York City and head back to Kentucky to spend a lifetime farming in an independent manner, deemed archaic by the agricultural policy establishment, while writing books and essays advocating for the expansion of this sort of self-sufficient living.
Why did I open this series on the future of localism by taking a hard right turn into Jeffersonian philosophy and 18th century history? I believe that this notion of independence is fundamental to the renewal of our rural communities and a successful localism built on solid foundations. Our country’s so-called biggest “problems” are unlikely to be “solved” anytime soon, because the entire political ecosystem relies on problems continuing to exist. But we CAN solve the problem of rural prosperity on our own. We CAN revive this spirit of independence and bring forth a new era of yeoman farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and artisans who can build all or a part of their livelihood around that independence, without the support or involvement of big business or big government.
This requires people who are truly willing to dedicate themselves to their own efforts and to supporting others who are so dedicated. A single spark in a single community could soon envelop the rural countryside in a manner that would leave Jefferson in awe and admiration. Join us, will you?
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James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.
It may surprise some readers to learn that pioneering feminist hooks was close friends with fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry. This quote is featured in the opening of Berry’s “The Need to Be Whole” and, as I recall, when hooks passed in 2021, Berry gave one of the eulogies.
We really don’t talk enough about the Inclosure Acts and the manner in which they permanently altered the English people’s relationship with the land. For an excellent insight into contemporary writing on the era, I recommend this great essay at Plough.