AGRICULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES. 461 



crops introduced by order of the home government. These 

 interesting agricultural statistics, with the exception of a few 

 missing years, are now in the archives- of France. 



The Revolutionary Period. The American colonists not 

 only subdued the wilderness, but conquered its savage occupants, 

 and carried on expensive wars, fighting bravely at Quebec and 

 at Louisburg, at Ticonderoga and at Fort Duquesne. As they 

 advanced in civilization, attempts were made to improve their 

 cultivation of the soil, being stimulated by the premiums offered 

 in England. In 1747 Jared Elliot, a Connecticut clergyman, 

 published a useful work on field husbandry, and the invoices of 

 the London tobacco factors show that there was a demand for 

 the works of Jethro Tull, by the Virginia planters. 



When Dr. Franklin went to England, as the agent of Penn- 

 sylvania, he was not unmindful of its greatest interest, and he 

 sent home for distribution, in 1770, seeds, mulberry cuttings, 

 silkworms' eggs, etc., thus initiating that system of government 

 supply which has been productive of such important results. 



The glorious aid given by the planters and farmers in the 

 Revolutionary struggle of 1776 forms a bright chapter in the 

 annals of American agriculture. Had we had many large cities 

 then, as now, it is doubtful if independence would have been 

 declared, for we should have been so accessible to attack that it 

 would have been madness to have commenced that " resistance 

 to tyrants " which is ".obedience to God." As it was, Tories 

 abounded in the cities, each of which was in turn occupied by 

 the redcoats ; and all must admit that British power was pros- 

 trated on this continent by the hard-handed operatives of iron 

 nerve, a majority of them yeomen, who left their plows in the 

 furrows to aid the farmer of Mount Vernon in unyoking their 

 land from tyranny. In recalling the patriotic devotion of our 

 forefathers, which has since been imitated again and again, when 

 the war-trumpet has been heard in the land, let us bear in mind 

 that when Rome that victorious imperial mother of nations 

 suffered her noble urban citizens to "crush out" the cultivators 

 by unjust taxation and the free admission of agricultural prod- 

 ucts, her power began to wane. Long before the race of the 

 patricians had become extinct, the free cultivators had disap- 

 peared from the fields, leaving no recruits for the once victorious 



