Antebellum Timeline

1770s- 1820s From Frontier to Revolution / New France, New England, Green Mountain Boys, Jefferson

Between the long troughs of the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers extends a narrow finger of lowland, shut in by parallel ranges of hills and mountains, and stretching from Long Island Sound to the Champlain region… This section of prosperous farms along the western border of the state formed a distinct district in our historical period. It was the home of the radicals. Here those religious revolutionaries, the Separates, settled to escape the persecutions of the Standing Order of southern New England.

It is significant that Vermont was passing through the frontier stage of settlement at the very time that a new government and a new social order were arising in America. A remarkably vigorous and unmannered society came into being which showed little respect for traditional ties and institutions. Free for the moment of the controls of religion and the civil state, a postwar generation in Vermont indulged in a period of loose living and freethinking almost unparalleled in American history.

The cult of Deism flourished in Vermont in the years lying roughly between 1780 and 1800. Dissemination of rationalism had been greatly stimulated by the first years of the Revolution. The Declaration of Independence, breathing the natural rights philosophy of John Locke, did much to popularize a naturalistic outlook among the American provincials. The French Alliance of 1778, moreover, sealed a cultural bond that was to outlast the political tie by many years. The humanitarian teachings of our French brothers-in-arms, many of whom were aggressively anti-Christian and even atheistic, struck a synchronous note with a people seeking freedom from both political and ecclesiastical oppression. "My affections are Frenchified," joyously cried Ethan Allen in 1779.

From Revolution to Republic / the general store and farmers’ markets

The American Revolution had many repercussions aside from its stirring military campaigns and momentous political events. It was a social upheaval of great consequence…it is a mistake "to think of the patriots as having simply left their shops and farms for military service and returning to them unchanged when the fight was won. The old order was gone for good by the time they came back to their families and firesides, and a new order, intellectual, social, and political, had begun to form.

In America, the newly formed Democratic Republican Party under the aegis of Thomas Jefferson became the champion of the leveling, antireligious ideas coming out of France. The seed of Republicanism in Vermont was planted by Jefferson himself. In the spring of 1791 the cultured Virginian made his famous "botanizing trip" up the Hudson River Valley and into New England. At Bennington he communed with Moses Robinson and laid plans for the formation of an anti-Federalist group.

In the early years of the new century a series of powerful religious revivals swept this region as well as the rest of the back country of the great American frontier. Here the evangels of the Gospel won their greatest triumphs over the forces of infidelity, atheism, and Universalism—species of freethinking claiming many adherents. Growing out of the fervor generated by intense revivalism came a ready attachment to the campaigns of social amelioration that raged in the thirties and forties.

For the shaping of a Vermont politician, Morrill’s business experience from 1825 to 1850 was ideal. The country general storekeeper saw the world in microcosm. His business was to satisfy his diverse customers, keep books on debtors, find ways to help them pay off, report the news from the cities visited with a freight wagon of produce on buying trips. The rural shopkeeper is always on ‘change, never in the ivory tower. He does not invent; he markets inventions.

1830s – 1880s From Republic to Union / The Republican Party, abolition, education

The smoke of industrialism, now beginning to blacken the towns and cities of the seaboard, failed to cloud the skies above the Green Mountain communities. Factories were few and the proletariat was small. Nevertheless, the industrial revolution brought important changes to the local economy in the 1830s and 1840s

From Cabinets of Curiosities to Science / clearing the land, exploiting the soil, sheep, and dairy

In the 1850's the voice of industry first became an effective power. It signalized a new trend in American history, for with the coming of age of the factory system the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian republic receded into the background.

From his position of leadership, he put through the Land Grant College Act. Its passage was his top legislative accomplishment at the peak of his career, but the idea was not his. Neither he nor anyone else acquainted with the long history of the movement to expand higher education beyond the classical curriculum of church-related college ever claimed it was. But he did direct the campaign that made the bill a law embodying the idea.

”In no other country is there a more everlasting ambition, among both men and women, to obtain a thorough education, or something beyond the three R's; and it is not limited to the few looking up to professional pursuits, but all, the children of the poor as well aa of the rich, are eager for its supreme and admitted advantages. The farmer, searching for better fertilizers or for better labor-saving machines, finds it a constant helper. The mechanic, striv­ing to increase the value of his individual labor and thus to increase the public wealth, finds it an unfailing resource”.

From the rise of the Industrial Elite and the Horticultural Movement to Civil War

Before the Civil War, Americans contemplated the national character with growing apprehension. Materialism, restlessness, intemperance - any of these could be the downfall of the republic. Horticulture enthusiasts, like adherents of any of the moral reform movements typical of the era, were convinced that horticulture could save America from these dangers, and their message reverberated throughout an increasing number of horticultural periodicals and societies.

Why, queried Andrew Jackson Downing, is the meanest English hovel adorned with vines and flowers, while in America there is little taste for gardening? Because Americans suffer "from that lowest species of idolatry," he answered, "'the love of money."' They cannot appreciate anything that does not have a market value. Flowers are morally not monetarily precious; hence, Americans have no taste for them. So long as "the mind is absorbed at the shrine of Mammon," echoed the MHS Transactions, the products of horticulture will be "neglected or despised."

Thus, a taste for horticulture became an index of freedom from materialism, and materialism in the antebellum era was of no minor concern. The horticulture vogue was simultaneous with the condemnation of Americans, by evangelical preachers and highbrow European travelers alike, as a people absorbed in a feverish pursuit of material gain. A major theme of the republicanizing campaign was that, from the urban flowerpot to the suburban estate, the rewards of cultivation were available to all, rich and poor alike. Even the products of horticulture themselves acquired moral significance. Fruits became republican luxuries-innocent and inexpensive.

From Civil War to the Land Grant Act

"The most valuable direct favor the Government has ever bestowed upon agriculture and the mechanic arts was unquestionably the endowment of the so-called agricultural colleges, where the leading object provided was "to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes."

The Legacy of the Land Grant Act 

crop diversification /soil reclamation/agroecology