ABSTRACT
Hamlin Garland had been dissatisfied, often in trouble, prone to tragedy as his children became aware of his diminishing power or drifted off to the city to leave him with fewer companions than before. Yet the farmer reorganized to employ new machinery, to augment his sources of communication and entertainment. If the farmer no longer inhabited a garden of Eden or a land of milk and honey the farmer was far from being reduced to the “valley of ashes” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s later imaginings. Thomas Jefferson, though more wholly committed to the farming interest, inhabited a world of Deism and mechanics, which most of his farmer associates in Virginia found of little use in their practical concerns. The “farmer’s cause” seemed to grow in post-Civil War decades and to reach a desperate climax during the Populist revolt of the 1890s.
