The Country People: An Agricultural History of the American Revolution

What did the American Revolution look like from the fields and farms where most Americans actually lived?

In The Country People, R. Douglas Hurt shifts the focus of the Revolutionary War away from battlefields and famous commanders and onto the farmers, planters, and rural communities whose lives sustained the new nation. His subject is agriculture, but the story reaches far beyond crops and livestock. Because farming was central to the economy and daily life of the period, the pressures placed on farmers reveal the Revolution in unusually tangible terms.

Hurt shows a farming population that was far from simply producing food for itself. Many farmers combined subsistence with market production, leaving them vulnerable to disruptions in trade, restrictions on imports and exports, shortages, and the competing demands of armies on both sides. As the war moved through the countryside, farmers could find themselves caught between political loyalties and the immediate demands of survival—even being compelled to supply military forces they did not support.

The consequences lasted well beyond the fighting. Independence opened the way for renewed expansion into western lands and new agricultural opportunities, while Loyalists could lose farms and property because of their allegiance to the Crown. Seen through agriculture, the Revolution becomes not just a struggle for political independence but a profound upheaval in the economic and social life of ordinary Americans.

Hurt’s agricultural lens may sound specialized, but in eighteenth-century America it encompasses an astonishing amount: food, trade, property, labor, politics, military supply, loyalty, and westward expansion. The Country People offers an expansive account of the Revolution by asking what happened to the people whose farms were, quite literally, part of the war.

Paperback. Black-and-white photographs.