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Thomas Jefferson’s Agrarian Vision
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Sticking true to his Republican ideals, Thomas Jefferson believed in a nation of small farmers, owning enough land to guarantee economic self-sufficiency and personal independence. Independence, political and personal, was the hallmark of republicanism. Jefferson argued that Americans should build their economy around agriculture rather than manufacturing. He suggested that the self-dependency of an agrarian society would directly correlate to an honest, hardworking society whose goals as a nation were to better the country collectively as a whole. Agrarianism proposes that the practices associated with the agricultural life are particularly and in some cases uniquely well suited to yield important personal, social, and political goods. He favored farmers because he feared that manufacturers did not work in the best interest of the union because their values were structured around profit, causing them to develop motives of self-interest, while the farmers had a consistent, routine lifestyle that enabled them to live purely (Berry 146). The best known source of Jefferson’s ideas on farming is his discussion of manufacturers in his book Notes on the State of Virginia that was published in 1787. Rejecting the ideas of the “political economists of Europe… that every state should endeavor to manufacture itself,” Jefferson argued that the “immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman” would create a different set of circumstances in America. He advised that be...
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