What was republican agrarianism

User Tools. Sign In. Skip Nav Destination Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Volume 46, Issue 4. Previous Article Next Article. Article Navigation. February 01 This Site. Google Scholar. The GOP supports lower taxes, free-market capitalism, restrictions on immigration, increased military spending, gun rights, restrictions on abortion, deregulation, and restrictions on labor unions.

The Jeffersonians sought to align the American economy more with agriculture than industry. Agrarianism in the early 20th century The French-born poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc argued for a wide distribution of property and upheld the importance of the traditional household and local community.

Watch it now, on Wondrium. But in the s, the confidence with which Jefferson spouted those opinions about farming and agriculture was rooted in hard fact, rather than just mere private Republican fantasies. In , England had only 36 percent of its population engaged in agriculture, while the American Republic had between 75 to 90 percent. By contrast, America had only 33 towns with a population of more than 2,, and only five of those in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, Boston, and Charleston held more than 20, people.

Philadelphia, the largest city in the American Republic at 70, people hardly counted as a city in comparison to London with its one and a quarter million inhabitants. The people whom Jefferson had the most to thank for this situation were the British, or at least the former British colonial administrators of North America. This was because during the s Britain emerged from a century of economic turmoil and political upheaval as one of the most successful examples of commercial capitalism in the world.

It was determined to treat its colonies in North America as suppliers for that success, not as the rivals. Capitalism was the most natural and spontaneous of all economic relationships, which meant the exchange of goods at a profit to oneself and the conversion of those profits into more goods for exchange for more profits. No one did better in the practice of commercial capitalism than the English.

Home Close. View Inside. The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a rapidly industrializing North. However, Adam Wesley Dean argues that the Republican Party's political ideology was fundamentally agrarian.