Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/29

 YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN Joseph Schafer

II. DISTINCTIVE TRAITS AS FARMERS

The agricultural traits and peculiarities of the nineteenth century Yankees were the resultant of partly contradictory forces, some of them evolutionary, others devolutionary. In England the period of the Puritan migration to America and the half-century antecedent thereto was a time of vigorous agricultural change marked by many improvements in cultivation and in land management. The agrarian revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed by business principles. In this new system the production of farm animals—especially sheep—the fertilization of the soil, rotation of crops, and livestock improvement were main factors. Forces and interests were set in motion at this time which, a century or so later, made farming the concern of many of England's leading minds, whose wise and persistent experimentation benefited the whole civilized world.

The few thousand immigrants to the New England colonies, founders of America's Yankeedom, were not all farmers. Some were fishermen, some were small tradesmen, others craftsmen; a few were professional men and soldiers. But a goodly proportion were land owners and peasants, and all had a more or less direct knowledge of the principles and processes which governed English agriculture. The influence of habit, always a determining factor in the transfer of civilization from an old land to a new, caused the occasional reproduction in New England of some features of English farming, especially under village conditions. The