How to Survive As a Yeoman in An Oligarchs' World

Lessons from the Old Dominion

Welcome back, and thanks for reading. In response to my recent articles on the decline and fall of America’s WASP aristocracy and the British landed elite—along with what we can learn from that history to build good lives in the present—many asked me to cover the same sort of issue but from the perspective of the middle class and yeomen. It has taken me a good bit of work and research to do so, as the subject is so much broader. Much of that research is in the footnotes, which I really recommend you read. However, I think I have found a helpful and solution-based lens through which we can look at it, one I stumbled across when doing research for The Old World Show’s upcoming series on Virginia.

That is the lens of the disappearing yeoman farmer in Virginia in the years preceding the revolution, and what it shows us about today. I think the comparison is quite close, and will be illuminating. For those interested in learning more, two books—The Great Plantation by Clifford Dowdey and The British Gentry, The Southern Planter, and The Northern Family Farmer by James L. Huston were very helpful. As always, please make sure to tap the heart at the top or bottom of the page to “like” this article so that others can find it! Further, these books are expensive. If you can afford the few dollars a month to become a paid subscriber, I’d really appreciate you upgrading to become one, and doing so will get you access not just to paid articles, but also to the audio recordings of each article, such as this one:

[AUDIO] How to Survive as a Yeoman in an Oligarchs' World

Golden Age of America or not, the employment situation of today appears to be something other than wonderful for all but the very top of the income spectrum. Such is an inescapable fact, and much of the political despair currently present seems to be coming from a mixture of career anxiety and resentment.¹ While the American worker made tremendous gains in much of the post-war period, the impression—rightly or wrongly—is that those gains are largely over. A mixture of high technology like AI, wage suppression via mass importation of illegal and legal workers, offshoring, and the like killed it. Or so the impression goes. I tend toward thinking a McKinleyist policy package of high tariffs, barriers to immigration, and infrastructure investment could ameliorate some of that, though not all of it.

Particularly, the AI genie isn’t going back in the bottle. That doesn’t mean it will upend every sector, put every white-collar worker out of a job, or turn every former spreadsheet jockey into biodiesel to fuel the next data center. It isn’t there yet, and Large Language Models perhaps won’t ever be.² But what AI can currently do is act as an effectively limitless supply of cheap, generally good enough labor.

It can produce digital commodities—things like ”slop” articles, ads, and social media posts—on an infinite scale. The imbecility and lack of discernment of an increasingly slop-addicted, Third Worlder-comprised internet means the market for such products is huge. But that isn’t the only use scenario. When overseen by someone competent, AI “agents” can do basic tasks like scheduling, screening, analyzing, and categorizing, all of which are tasks that human workers used to do.

It is generally not good as an individual yet, but the nature of it means that the best worker enabled by AI can do much more than a mediocre team of three or five people used to be able to do. A team of the best employees enabled by AI can certainly do better than many current corporate teams. That ratio is trending toward AI’s benefit over time, means the mediocre are likely to get pink slips soon, and is increasingly putting everyone who is not the absolute best at risk. The nature of scale and the general indifference we expect out of and with which we treat most products means it works, and companies can cut costs.

That means the middle class is going to face serious problems so long as it wants Office Space-style jobs. When the best coder can use AI to do more than his whole team used to do, when hospitals can use AI checked by doctors or nurse practitioners to do exams and screenings that doctors used to do, when businesses can use one attorney working with AI rather than a whole team of Big Law suits…the white collar armageddon draws near. Production of those goods and services that are not truly bespoke will no longer command salaries commensurate with the production of bespoke goods; coding and computer science are the most obvious current fields in which that is becoming a problem, but it will increasingly become a more general one.

Nor is this confined to white-collar work. While corporate drudgery, medicine, and law are the highlighted use cases of AI, advances in robotics, AI, and precision GPS mean blue-collar work is increasingly on the chopping block as well. Electronic fencing, not humans, increasingly handles cattle. Robots, not humans, build cars. Soon, robots rather than humans will repair cars. Robo-taxis like Waymo are replacing Uber drivers, and soon the same technology could start to replace short-haul trucking, and then long-haul trucking. On and on it goes. As always, the AI-powered robots need an overseer. But legions of men earning good wages are, so it appears, increasingly going to be automated away.

What can one do in such a situation? How can those who just want to remain in the middle, neither part of the teeming underclass nor part of the oligarchic elite, survive in such a station, particularly as inflation and a lack of wage gains commensurate with the real rate of inflation bite in a major way? Fortunately, history provides an example.

The Yeomen of Virginia

Their Rise

Thanks to John Rolfe, sweeter tobacco of a flavor much-liked in Europe began being grown in Virginia in 1612, and the first major shipment of it to England occurred in 1614. Adaptations of the plant followed, but from thenceforth the state’s destiny up until the mid-19th century was settled: it would grow tobacco, as it was the near-perfect place to do so. The soil was right, and the land seemingly infinite. The climate was right. The networks of rivers and tributaries, all of which fed into the Chesapeake Bay, made shipping huge hogsheads full of the valuable leaf easy. It was just the right spot for tobacco planting.

Yet further, few other areas could even grow the intoxicating weed, and royal favors initially showered upon Virginia allowed it to do so near-exclusively. Thus, prices were high, and supply was limited. Those who arrived in Virginia, hastily cleared a few acres, and set about planting tobacco on them, could quickly reap fortunes. This they did to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Perhaps they grew a bit of corn and kept around a few cows, chickens, and pigs for milk, eggs, and meat. But that was the only exception, and generally those animals roamed mostly freely. Virginia was tobacco mad, for tobacco was like gold sprouting from the soil in the early days.

More importantly, it was a labor-intensive crop in a state devoid of cheap labor. It required close and continual attention at all stages, from when the little sprouts were transferred from garden to field to the art of choosing when the few broad leaves of the topped plants would be slashed off, and then dried and veined in a similarly painstaking process.³

While large landholders came about, the requirements of tobacco initially militated against massive plantations of leisured owners. No “gentleman” of England could do all the work, much less do it on a grand scale of hundreds or thousands of acres. He needed laborers, and these were both expensive to get and unwilling to work for him indefinitely. Indentured servants would come across for a few years, but were free after terms of generally four to seven years, just as they became quite competent. That was too inefficient to do on a particularly grand scale, and what few Indians were captured made poor slaves.

So, for so long as the labor pool was limited to indentured servants and Indians, farms stayed relatively small for lack of cheap labor with which they could be farmed.⁴ Small farmers, not great landlords, were empowered and able to grow wealthy.

This was the heyday of the yeomen of Virginia. Few made large fortunes, but those who were attentive and did the necessary work were able to thrive. With high prices, little competition on a scale greater than their small farms, and infinite cheap land to take over as they exhausted the soil in a few short years, small farmers could thrive in Virginia as they never were able to in England. They owned their own farms, lived their own lives, controlled their own destinies, and lived better than any others of similar station in Europe. Even those who came as indentured servants could generally acquire their own farms, so long as they survived the subtropical heat of the Chesapeake, and live better than those who stayed in Britain.⁵

Such was the golden age of the Virginia yeomen, those early seekers of America as a land of opportunity. But it lasted no longer than a lifetime. Between the late 1610s, after Rolfe’s miraculous discovery, and the 1660s, when King Charles II ascended to the throne and inflicted the Navigation Acts upon Virginia, was the only period during which the yeomanry flourished.⁶ Before then, conditions were too primitive and opportunities too poor. After the Restoration, the price of tobacco was too low and the scale at which planters could grow it too large. Yet further, Gov. Berkeley was a disaster to them in that he grew intent upon forcing Virginia into the British mold of large estates.⁷ In this, he largely succeeded.⁸

As such, the yeomanry slowly withered and died. It didn’t vanish, but never again did family farms succeed in the South in the way that they ostensibly did in the North. That dream was dead.

Why it died, and how those yeomen who survived did so, is how this story relates to AI and the survival of the middle class.

Slavery, Commodities, and Scale

The basic problem was that the nature of tobacco created an impulse for plantation-building,⁹ or building larger farms that could grow it on a larger scale while accumulating thousands upon thousands of acres of the best land to do so indefinitely. This attracted those who harbored no dreams of being perpetually laboring yeomen living by the sweat of their own brow, but who instead wanted to recreate in America the estate system of England.¹⁰ They had more capital than their yeomen neighbors, were generally much sharper about matters of business,¹¹ and eventually solved the cheap labor question, which enabled their dreams to become reality.

They did so with slavery,¹² something which became increasingly prevalent in the 1660s and eventually developed into the backbone of the plantation system.¹³ It was such a backbone in that it finally created the cheap labor conditions necessary for large farms of a size beyond that which a yeoman could individually farm.

This was important not just in that it allowed more land to be farmed, but in that it meant that the cost-saving, profit-boosting advantages of scale could be taken advantage of.¹⁴ The large expenses of farm draft animals and farm implements, from plows to carts, made the advantage of scale achieved by the large planters particularly important in their ascendance.¹⁵ As such, the yeomen were gradually forced under by the plantations because¹⁶ those plantations were not just growing more tobacco, but doing so at scale-granted cost advantages thanks to their legions of overseen, cheap-labor workforces.¹⁷

This was particularly true in Virginia, where the early planters were merchants and shippers in addition to being tobacco planters. In dedicating their much more ample spare time to business, they had a huge advantage over the yeomen, who typically spent their time hunting, fishing, or relaxing instead of building mercantile empires.¹⁸

So, as the planters built ever-larger workforces of imported African slaves, they could then achieve economies of scale that kept them afloat even as tobacco prices declined precipitously. Meanwhile, struggling yeomen increasingly went broke as prices declined by over 90% from the 1620s to the 1670s, the decade that saw the nadir in prices of the formerly golden leaf.¹⁹ As they did so, the new Virginia gentry brought its resources to bear and bought their farms up, turning them into tenants or “engrossing” their lands into part of the already established plantation estates.²⁰

None of that could have happened without slaves and slavery. It is what provided the planters with a low-cost form of labor that was much more reliable and efficient than indentured servitude, was self-perpetuating,²¹ and could save them high costs on the farms by producing manufactures—thus cutting out the middle class.²²

Which Yeomen Survived?

Importantly, this process didn’t destroy all of the yeomen.

For one, those who were tolerant of being tenants could obtain farms from the planters on easy terms that allowed them to compete with their larger neighbors. In that way, the huge and open landmass of America worked to their advantage, keeping down rents or allowing them to move West as desired. However, tenancy was generally undesirable, as it meant they would no longer be “independent,” and thus effectively full citizens. They could also move to cities and towns and work in middle-class occupations.²³

More importantly, those who wanted to hold onto their farms could do so by switching from the production of commodities, particularly tobacco,²⁴ and instead focus on growing produce or other food crops.²⁵ In so doing, they could make a good living by selling to what cities existed or to the Sugar Islands of the Caribbean, which were always in need of food. The advantages of slave labor and scale applied to the production of massive amounts of commodity crops—in Virginia, first tobacco and later grain²⁶—not produce, which required much more attention.

But selling vegetables to what small towns existed in Virginia was a dismal and precarious existence, and becoming a lawyer was a highly competitive and limited field, even in highly litigious Virginia. Some great minds of limited means, such as Patrick Henry, could make a living as a lawyer. But not all could, particularly those who lacked the time for learning in the first place.²⁷

While non-slaveowning yeomen were always at risk of falling behind and losing their farms to the steadily-growing gentry, Dowdey notes that there was a “narrow” gate through which yeomen could pass and become either securely established in their position or even small planters. For those who wanted to remain farmers and not live on the fringes of cities growing vegetables, it was the only real option.

Available through the late 17th century, this “narrow gate” was the process by which sharp-minded yeomen farmers worked tirelessly and strenuously to produce enough high-quality tobacco by their own effort to be able to afford an indentured servant. So long as that servant didn’t die too quickly from the climate (typically they were well treated), hiring such a servant is what could kickstart the wealth accumulation process, as the hard-working yeoman could continue working hard to profit while using the servant’s labor to clear and plant new acres. With the profits of those new acres, he could then acquire a new servant. That process could build upon itself until a few slaves could gradually be acquired—they were more expensive than indentured servants because they were far more profitable—and from there, the wealth snowball could start to roll in a noticeable degree. The headright system of land grants, which gave 50 acres to anyone who imported a settler to the colony, allowed those who succeeded in this and brought multiple servants over to quickly expand their land holdings and establish a degree of stability not available to their less fortunate peers.

This was the path many of the First Families of Virginia took to becoming landed gentry. It was not open forever, but was a possible—if narrow—path for multiple generations. What it required was acquisitiveness, business sense, and a bit of luck in stringing good price years together while scaling the farm or estate. For those who could continue working hard and profiting while bringing more servants and slaves onto the plantation, year after year, and got lucky with prices as they did so, it was the path to wealth and becoming either a prosperous yeoman or small planter. Ownership of a few slaves was all it took to establish a bit of financial safety and stability, and so enabled them to hold their lands and exist well into the future.

Eventually, the narrow path became mostly shut, as the decline in prices and advantages of scale the great planters had made it too difficult for those yeomen with no slaves or servants to acquire any. But, for those who acted early and tirelessly, the path of opportunity remained open for decades and gave them more than enough time to establish a stable base of wealth that they could use to hold their ground against the grandees in future decades and generations. Such is how those yeomen who survived as farmers with any degree of prosperity did so.

While it wasn’t easy, and many would now damn them for participating in the slave economy, it was the sole and narrow route to remaining a prosperous yeoman in Virginia. Those who didn’t take it became landless, as about half of Virginians were by 1770.²⁸

Why It Was Important

Why not become a tenant? Why not work in the towns in some job or trade? Because land ownership was inextricably intertwined with “independence.” Those with land were seen as full citizens, and those without it were not. As Huston notes, not only was it true that “Nonslaveholders depended on access to land to maintain their yeoman culture and independence,” but also:

To understand the worship of the yeoman farmer, the ethos of competency needs to be employed. Since Jefferson, if not before, orators sang all sorts of praises to the yeoman farmer. What they glorified was neither his subsistence nor commercial style of agriculture but the fact that in North America the yeoman owned his own land and had ‘independence’.

It is possible to understand this stress on independence and landownership in a more modern idiom. Robert Leslie Jones in his recent study of Ohio agriculture decided that 'most farmers really liked farming. They relished 'being their own men.'

To hold onto the land was to remain something more than a peasant or cottager, like they would have been had they or their ancestors remained in England. It was to be outwardly prosperous, potentially upwardly mobile, have some financial resources at one’s command, and to be a full member of society. As such, all wanted land on a scale that tobacco—long the surest path to wealth, even with price declines—could be grown efficiently, which meant hundreds of acres, indentured servants, and likely slaves.

By staying smart, using opportunities like the produce market or mercantile ventures to make extra cash, and acquiring as much land and labor as possible, the best of the yeomanry put itself in a position to do so.

Why This Remains Relevant

Slavery has been banned for a long while, of course. Or, at least, it has been exported out of sight and out of mind to the dark and dim regions of the world—the cobalt mines of the Congo and sweatshops of Southeast Asia—rather than remaining visible in America. Similarly, the nature of wealth has changed, and land is no longer generally seen as the basis of civic virtue, personal financial independence, and prosperity.

But many of the same lessons remain. Much as the shift to large farms meant the British and Virginia yeomanry disappeared due to the advantages of scale present on larger farms that could take advantage of cheap labor, the work environment in America strongly favors the large and established.

They can take advantage of financial resources and products on a scale that the smaller cannot, for example, much as the expansion of the gentry and “engrossment” of its lands was powered by access to financial resources.²⁹ They have used that to expand, to buy out or crush competition, and to lobby for special favors. Yet further, they—not unlike the less honorable members of the early Virginia gentry or British landed elite—have used those favors to further push the financial snowball to their advantage and edge out competitors. They too have used worker importation schemes of both the illegal and legal varieties to drive wages down and profits up in a way employers who don’t wish to import teeming foreign hordes cannot. AI is more generally accessible, but certainly exacerbates the problem for those who can’t or won’t use it.

So, those who just want to be normal people face the same sorts of issues the yeomen of Virginia faced in the mid-17th century, but largely without the option of just leaving and heading West. One can work hard to try and acquire enough assets and skills to compete on a relatively level playing field with the big companies, and thus remain mostly independent, or sink gradually into the bounds of wage slavery and/or welfare reliance when dealing with the powers that be.

The former is far preferable to the latter. It is the path to remaining vigorous, building wealth, and remaining part of the middle rather than sinking into the underclass. While there is no silver bullet or universally applicable, specific advice, I think a few primary lessons hold true. I’ll discuss them below.

Be Agentic, and Use Changing Circumstances To Your Advantage

Those who did well at a relatively small level in Virginia were generally not the ones who competed with the massive, latifundia-like plantations in terms of scale and cost in production of a sole cash crop. They had to do that to some degree—until the late 18th century, nearly all grew at least some tobacco, but their strength was their ability to more quickly and profitably take advantage of changing conditions or their asymmetric advantages to compete.

For some, this meant dedicating more attention to each plant and thus producing higher-quality tobacco than the big planters, from which they would make more money per pound.

For others, this meant using the low-cost workforce to produce enough tobacco to keep the landed operation afloat until prices improved or new opportunities arose, while using the breathing room granted by that to spend more time surveying, practicing law, growing produce, or growing grain. Those were largely not activities in which the big planters engaged, and thus gave them a unique way to build wealth while remaining landed. For example, George Washington built his plantation operation not just by inheritance and marriage, but by becoming a surveyor and using the wages he earned from that work to speculate successfully in land.³⁰

Generally, those who survived were the types who were agentic.³¹ They weren’t too wedded to any one way of doing things to not shift to a more profitable alternative, such as growing wheat rather than tobacco as the soil was exhausted. They were the sorts who learned how to harness a fluctuating situation to their advantage, and profit off of it because the pairing of their small size and useful base of assets meant they were more nimble while still being capable.

The obvious modern parallel here is small business. The large corporations have all the costs of scale as well as the advantages, from Civil Rights law being applicable and enhanced legal scrutiny to sclerotic bureaucracy and “useless eaters” in the workforce.

As shown by startups in big markets like Anduril and the countless small businesses that dot the conservative ecosystem, there is a real market for new entrants that aren’t constrained by that which makes corporate life reminiscent of Dilbert. This opportunity spans everything from media to manufacturing, real estate to services like financial planning and financial services.

Right now, that’s the “narrow path” that is open. It will probably close at some point, as the one in Virginia did. But while it’s open, it’s what must be taken advantage of if one wishes to avoid dispossession. My friend Arbitrage Andy has been particularly good about harping on this point: right now, those who don’t have enough assets to live well off of and aren’t building something that finds a unique way of competing with the big corporations are setting themselves up to become part of the underclass. Sadly, that’s just how things are trending. Understanding as much, and acting based on it, is an imperative.

Become the Sort Who Harnesses What Is New

Those who had nothing but took advantage of tobacco early, even if on a small scale, had the best chance of becoming successful. Doing so when prices were high gave them a clear path to acquiring more land, acquiring low-cost labor, and getting the wealth-building flywheel started. Doing so turned many of them into the First Families of Virginia, or at least the successful and relatively large yeomen who ended up populating the state. Those who waited and arrived without resources late in the 17th century faced a far harder situation.

Similarly, those who hopped on the slavery or indentured servitude track early were able to use it to the most effect, as it gave them a substantial advantage over their peers while still being relatively cheap. There was risk, of course, but it paid off handsomely.

The obvious parallel right now is AI. Yes, it cannot do most of what its promoters claim it can do. It needs an overseer, isn’t good at outright creation, and makes mistakes. It’s much like a slave workforce, to be crass. But it often does well enough, and if paired with the sort of people who, as Montana Classical College put it, “develop real skills beyond the prompting and who harness AI” to do their bidding,³² it can already be very powerful.³³ That trend is increasing, and is one to watch closely.

These sorts of opportunities don’t last forever, and taking advantage of the opportunity right now to become familiar with how the programs work while the stakes are relatively low, and learn how to harness them when the competition is limited, is an unpleasant but increasingly obvious necessity of getting ahead.

Much as working harder while adopting the trends of cheap labor and agricultural scale was the path to prosperous independence rather than the underclass in 17th century Virginia, working harder³⁴ and plowing resources into building operations that benefit you while using these programs is incredibly necessary at this present moment. Or working harder to learn how to do something that will forever dodge the impact of AI, such as bespoke craft goods making—things like handmade wooden windowsills with nice molding are always in short supply, and can’t be made with machines. That said, the market for Purdey shotguns, Henry Poole suits, and hand-crafted windowsills is only so large, and requires an immense amount of talent.

Either way, what is coming must be understood and planned for. Ignoring it is the path to ruin and downward social mobility.

Assets Matter

This probably seems like a trite point, but it’s an important one: assets matter, both for your life and your descendants. Being able to aquire and then hold onto assets, only ever selling them to aquire other, better assets, is how those who rose in the world did so.

Nearly all of the First Families of Virginia became such, rather than remaining as middling yeomen or drifting into the underclass, because they arrived with a bit of capital that helped them get a head start, particularly in terms of buying laborers. Similarly, those yeomen who could build savings and use them to acquire such a labor force did well out of it, and held onto their farms as a last-resort basis of wealth. Those who could not do so were in serious trouble.

One can’t help but think of that as increasing fears of dispossession set in amongst Americans of every class who work rather than own look at an increasingly bleak future. Having a job won’t save you. The more you make, the more you are an expense the company wants to cross out on the P&L. Yes, that’s unfair, wrong, etc. But it is nevertheless the case, and must be accounted for. Most Americans, for example, are in the upper 10% of the income band at some point in life³⁵; those who use that temporary access to a high income to acquire high-quality assets have a good chance of muddling through. Those who spend it don’t.

Those in the 17th and 18th centuries, Huston notes, who had enough land to take out mortgages were able to not just survive but expand when hard times came. Yeomen or grandee, their resource base gave them the ability to not just survive when times got tough, but grow into the tough times and establish more power and stability moving forward. Further, it was doing this, and using it to remain rooted and part of a community, that gave the yeomen much of their political power, which very often was enough to challenge the grandees if necessary.

That remains true, even if the sorts of assets that are now prized have changed substantially in the interim. The right sorts of assets help establish and maintain independence, and that’s something to remember. Yes, it’s obvious. But the scrimping and saving that helped the yeomen build their farms is what helped them survive. So, when considering acquiring assets versus spending on pleasure, that’s always worth remembering, particularly in times like these, where the narrow path is narrowing as the accumulation from the top proceeds apace. Overall, the lesson is that assets—namely those that keep pace in capital value and income generated with inflation—are far less precarious than income, and should be prized for that reason.

The Narrow Path Narrows

This is all relevant because the path to modest prosperity from the middle seems to be narrowing significantly. Those “good jobs” of yesteryear are largely gone, and what ones remain—namely law, medicine, tech, banking—are gradually being whittled away by technology. Even if immigration problems such as the H-1B visa are corrected and reversed, the technology problem will remain.

That is an issue. It is infuriating, unfair, and disorienting. But it is nevertheless the case, and must be accounted for by those who wish to remain in the middle rather than fall into the underclass.

There are those who survived a very similar situation, in much tougher and more precarious circumstances, centuries ago. A great many members of the Virginia yeomanry did it, even when faced with the acquisitive tendencies and massive advantages of the gentry. The story and lessons in this article are how they did so. They found ways to scrimp and save their way into having the means with which to compete with their bigger neighbors, harness new trends to their advantage, and establish a stable enough asset base to grow rather than just survive or die in hard times.

That was difficult. It wasn’t particularly flashy. It’s less fun than discussing the great estates. But it was a real path to survival and growth, and should be remembered as such.

So, as many have asked for an article on this, I hope it helps, and please let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to build on in this regard!

If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and aids my attempts to share these important stories, such as the recent one on the decline of the WASPs, and what they mean for you.

1. Noted well in this article here:

The Free Market and Career Resentment

2. An interesting take on that:

I'm Sorry to Burst Your Bubble: You Are Being Fooled About AI, and You Will Soon Feel Really Stupid

3. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution is a fabulous book on the subject of tobacco’s requirements and how they shaped the culture of the state

4. Adding to this was that employees sent to Virginia to work either on plantations or “Hundreds” tended to just run away, as Dowdey notes in The Great Plantation

5. As Huston notes:

The Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland was destined to become the land of the great plantations, and soon South Carolina and Georgia would follow their example. These colonies attempted to replicate the British estate system of agriculture, but it took a long time to accomplish. For much of the seventeenth century, farms were more modest in size, resembling a yeoman society. Neither Virginia nor Maryland had the large-scale farm as the model type of farm in the seventeenth century. If newcomers (indentured servants) survived the Tidewater environment, they had a good chance to acquire land and become yeomen.

6. As Dowdey notes:

Virginia was the first “land of opportunity” in the New World; but only briefly—no longer than the span of a single lifetime—did opportunity beckon the small man. Though the illimitable land of the continent was there for everybody, and the access to wealth through the golden leaf of tobacco, the quickly evolving plantation system early gave the rewards to those who conceived largely and executed masterfully. In less than a century the planter class had emerged, forming a new and tight aristocracy which, in turn, formed the character of Virginia as an insulated, aristocratic republic.

7. As Huston provides:

The most noteworthy effort to establish a gentry style of landholding pattern in Virginia, however, came from the designs of Governor William Berkeley (governor 1642 to 1677, except for 1676). Berkeley belonged to the English gentry, believed in hierarchy and rule by the betters, and during the English Civil War supported the Royalist cause. The importance of Berkeley in Virginia agriculture was his activity in recruiting the sons of English gentry to migrate to Virginia by enticing them with large land grants. It was in the last half of the seventeenth century that the First Families of Virginia were established. Moreover, the role of politics in the creation of a class of great landholders has to be stressed. A tight clique ran Virginia and sat in the Governor's Council. These individuals saw no injustice in rewarding themselves and their friends with handsome land grants, a practice that continued into the eighteenth century. Altogether, some 2.35 million acres were patented between 1650 and 1675.

8. As Morris Talapar notes in his The Sociology of Colonial Virginia:

Sir William-Britain's first efficient colonial administrator—was Virginia's governor for twenty-seven out of the thirty-five years he lived there: he remained an Englishman throughout—he was never a Virginian, yet he is easily colonial Virginia's most outstanding figure. He had the responsibilities of state at the height of the period of "Care and Danger": his was an uphill fight; he worked against the spirit of the time, and was opposed by almost everyone in the colony as well as by many in England; ret he met his tasks with courage and with remarkable ability. and he succeeded in recreating in Virginia the sociology of the days of Hotspur.

…

With the crushing of Bacon's Rebellion the Puritan power disappeared, and Cavalier Virginia emerged: post-Restoration Virginia became politically rigidly monolithic, and socially serene; and the foundations from which rose the "First Families of Virginia" were laid to continue for nearly two centuries.

…

In 1677 Virginia was referred to as "the most ancient and profitable of all the English plantations", it was a rich prize, and three distinct groups—the Puritans, Berkeley's Cavaliers and Charles Second's courtiers competed for its possession. The Cavaliers essentially won out. The Puritans were remorselessly erased.

9. As Dowdey notes:

Tobacco early changed the goal of the search, refined the dream and created the plantation as the means to fulfillment. In turn, the plantation beckoned a more substantial class of settler, who conceived the magnificent dream of the private baronies. From these New World principalities--bound by common interests and sharing common concepts—came the final perfected dream of an aristocratic republic with its ruling class dedicated to responsibility for the whole.

10. As Huston notes:

When the English began colonization in North America in the early seventeenth century, they brought over their customs, their values, their religion--and their land laws. In particular, except for the Puritans, they brought over the English estate ideal. They did not bring over feudalism because feudalism had been dead in England since at least 1500. What the upper class carried mentally was the ideal of family ownership of vast acres that were cultivated by tenant farmers who employed cheap labor.

…

The attempt to replicate the estate system in North America led to land 'engrossment,' the term frequently used by contemporaries to describe the consolidation of landholdings into estates of several thousand acres. This process took place in all the colonies, but most markedly in the Tidewater area.

11. As Dowdey notes:

Except for the few who came well endowed to the colony, this is the way they all got to be Old Massa, and those who arrived with substantial property had to show the traits to hold it and increase it.

These were not soft men. Such shrewdness as Harrison's - demanding constant calculation and the most disciplined industry - was not characteristic of the average yeoman planter, any more than it is of the average citizen today.

After a day's toil over tobacco plants, the typical yeoman wanted to relax with his family and enjoy his children. On rainy days, he worked around his house and barn at odd jobs that pleased him. On Sundays, he went to church and visited his neighbors. After he packed his tobacco in hogsheads and a British merchantman or some planter like Benjamin Harrison took it off his hands, the yeoman did not want to go in the house and figure over minute calculations for the future.

He went hunting. Maybe he could get a bearskin for the bedroom floor. When times grew hard under Charles II, he did not envision changing his scheme of life and going in for the bold gambles of the big planters.

12. As Huston notes:

Lorena S. Walsh has found evidence that large Tidewater planters were turning to African slavery as early as the 1630s, but it was after the 1660s, and especially after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, that importations of Africans rose dramatically.

13. As Huston notes:

Slavery entered this struggle by being the backbone of the plantation system. For the plantation to reach its immense size, the planter, like the English gentry, had to have access to cheap labor. The British obtained that labor from a surplus population; the southern planter got it by inventing African slavery. But without cheap labor, both the large British estate and the great southern plantation could not sustain their size.

14. Noting the importance of economies of scale, Huston says, in the British context that was soon to become the American context:

One particular argument [for large farms] connected with the large English farm has application to the question of the efficiency of the southern plantation. It is the matter of the existence of economies of scale. Several English agricultural historians insist that the large English farm developed not because it increased yield per acre, but because it lowered costs per acre. The cost per acre dropped on the large farm compared to the small farm because the same amount of capital was capable of working over more acres than composed the small farm--the capital being in this case plows, hoes, animals, harrows, and other devices.

15. Huston notes, contrasting Southern planters with Northern Family Farmers:

Two other areas produced economies of scale (or size) for the plantation vis-a-vis the northern small farm. The first was work animals. The source of power for the farm was animals; in Illinois and Indiana, those animals were principally horses. In the rest of the North, it was a combination of oxen and horses--very few mules found agricultural service in the northern states. Southerners used mules instead of horses for agricultural work generally; the mule withstood the heat and environment of the South better than the horse. The cost of a mule is assumed to be equivalent to that of an ox or the low end of the price range for a horse.

...

Another area in which economies of scale were significant was the use of wagons and carts. Farms engaged in a constant transportation of crops, equipment, and manure, not to mention trips to marketplaces. Wagons were expensive...The typical plantation and northern family farm do not exist, but to demonstrate how size of farm reduced capital costs per acre...

As evidence for that, from the mid-19th century (and in mid-19th-century prices):

For farming implements: Cost per acre when the improved acreage was:
500 acres: $3.60
840 acres: $2.14
1,000 acres: $1.80
Family farm of 60 improved acres: $5.50

Animals to acres:
Virginia and Cotton South has around ~30 acres per animal
Great Lakes around 19 and New England 22.7

So the cost advantages were large, as scale meant that the planters needed fewer animals and less equipment per acre, driving down their costs substantially

16. Huston notes:

So long as slavery existed, the incentive to grow the plantation larger was positive and attractive. And that meant the southern yeoman was under attack if he or she owned land susceptible of cultivating the great southern staples. The economies of scale were obtained not because of a specific crop but because of the size of the farm.

17. Huston also notes:

Whether the employment of gang labor made slave labor more productive than free labor I leave to the technical expertise of the cliometricians and their search for better data and more revealing models. Rather, it is time to take a cue from British historians as to where the efficiencies of large farms came from-they arose from the use of capital over a broader area. Removing the complications that always result when slaves are treated as capital stock, a difficulty not encountered in the British example, economies of scale arose simply because the big farm was big. A plow that could cut furrows on a thirty-acre farm could do so with no less depreciation or waste of time than on a farm of three hundred acres. Large agricultural farms obtained economies of scale; they drove down the cost of production per acre.

18. To repeat the important passage from Dowdey:

Such shrewdness as Harrison’s - demanding constant calculation and the most disciplined industry - was not characteristic of the average yeoman planter, any more than it is of the average citizen today.

After a day’s toil over tobacco plants, the typical yeoman wanted to relax with his family and enjoy his children. On rainy days, he worked around his house and barn at odd jobs that pleased him. On Sundays, he went to church and visited his neighbors. After he packed his tobacco in hogsheads and a British merchantman or some planter like Benjamin Harrison took it off his hands, the yeoman did not want to go in the house and figure over minute calculations for the future.

He went hunting. Maybe he could get a bearskin for the bedroom floor. When times grew hard under Charles II, he did not envision changing his scheme of life and going in for the bold gambles of the big planters.

19. Prices fell from between 12 and 36 pence a pound to 1 and 1.5 pence a pound over the 1620s to 1670s, as a massive increase in volume produced and the Navigation Acts crippled the price

20. Huston notes:

To live a life of gentility without manual labor, one needed a huge estate and cheap labor to cultivate it. Once the Tidewater had a measure of safety and promise, the people with money in England were attracted, and they had the means to purchase vast tracts cheaply . . . The other route to land engrossment was similar to the means in England: wait for small farmers of fifty acres or less to run into debt due to difficult times and then buy them out.

21. Huston notes:

[The Southern planters] obtained their cheap labor by the institution of racial slavery, the racial aspect being the manner in which they obtained a social consensus on its legitimacy. But slavery required vast quantities of land to operate successfully, so the plantation needed to be big. Then came the demographic reality: slavery in the United States was unique among the world's plantation economies because only in the southern states did the slaves have a positive population growth rate. That meant, as the number of enslaved grew, more land had to be obtained to make slavery profitable so long as slavery remained tied to agriculture.

22. Huston notes:

If one uses the total manufacturing employees instead of only skilled craftsmen employees per county, then the potential number of slave artisans jumps to 60,000. In either case, the likelihood is that slave artisans represented 34 to 50 percent of all craftspeople in the slaveholding rural counties. Thus, slavery was eroding the position of the free whites of the South by substituting slave craftsmen for free craftsmen.

23. Dowdey notes:

Except for the skillful aspirants to power, the bulk of the population was blocked off from advancement, and this caused a shifting and unsettledness as families and individuals groped to discover their own level. The legend that divides Virginia's population into patrician and plebeian ("poor white") still persists after all proofs to the contrary. Virginia developed a very fine middle class, with all the traditional characteristics (except acquisitiveness) of the planter class. They were later to form the body of Lee's army, to which they contributed Stonewall Jackson, but at the end of the seventeenth century they had found neither their economic or social position.

The self-respecting, modestly ambitious families were, except for those who migrated out of the state, to find their way in one of three courses: as cities began to grow, some moved into town as artisans and clerks, merchants and lawyers, or simply as workers; as the west-em part of the state was opened, some moved beyond the big planters domination; those who stuck it out in Tidewater abandoned the money crop and became in time the "Virginia farmer" as differentiated from the planter. They were good people. When young Harrison emerged into personal power at the turn of the century, these courses had not been defined, and there was great unrest outside his periphery.

24. See above

25. Huston notes:

In this scenario not every yeoman was destined to disappear--just as in England, some small farmers managed to endure, With urban development, some small farmers could profitably supply city dwellers with fruits and vegetables.

26. Noting the success of Virginian grain farmers, Huston provides:

But proper methods of cultivation and the application of fertilizers began a rejuvenation of wheat agriculture by the 184os, or so it was advertised. By 1850 Virginia had become the third-largest wheat producer in the nation. The resurgence of Virginia agriculture from its doldrums was the proud theme song of an agricultural reformer, Willoughby Newton. In 1854 he declared that 'ten years have wrought a mighty revolution in the fortunes of Virginia.' Virginian planters expected to obtain 25 to 40 bushels of wheat to the acre and to match the output of the international leaders of wheat cultivation, Great Britain and Flanders. Reports in the press flourished about one wheat planter producing 21,000 bushels of wheat, another 12,000 bushels. These numbers compare well with the output of some of the largest British farms.

This surge in wheat production was not coming from family farms; it was coming from slave plantations. Newton made it explicit. Slavery was eminently practicable in wheat cultivation. It had not been slavery that brought desolation to the James River area between 1770 and 1830 but awful husbandry. Now that planters knew how to take care of the land, the earlier problems had disappeared and wheat production by slave plantations was eminently profitable.

...

Wheat cultivation in Virginia showed none of the traits that contemporaries and historians believed slavery induced. One fault in particular was proven mistaken-the mating of slavery with machinery. The wheat planters of Virginia talked about harvesters all the time, as well as drills and steam engines. The planter John H. Cocke recognized that machinery was not only labor-saving but also yield-enhancing.

…

The slave plantation was escaping the supposedly rigid boundaries of semitropical staples. Virginia planters grew wheat and corn for market; those were the two staples that supposedly were the heart of the northern farm economy. In fact, the wheat plantation using slavery looked far more profitable than the family farm in the Great Lakes area. One can conjecture that the North was early saved a ferocious battle over slavery in the Old Northwest because of fortuitous timing. Because the early English settlers of the Tidewater were so consumed with planting a crop that earned an immediate profit, they turned to tobacco. Concentration on tobacco deflected them from considering other crops, the primary one being wheat. It took time to learn how to cultivate wheat without ruining the soil, and evidently by the 1840s the proper techniques were being discovered. If planters had established successful wheat plantations between 1730 and 1770, one wonders if the Northwest Ordinance could have ever been passed banning slavery in the Great Lakes area. If the profitability of slave-grown wheat had been proven by 1780, Virginia planters would have made a strenuous battle to enable expansion of slavery into Ohio and Indiana.

27. This was a frequent complaint of small farmers, and did much to credit the gentry’s insistence that only they had the time to learn and rule well. As Huston notes:

When William Cooper Howells wrote his reminiscences of life in early Ohio, he hit upon another theme that was important in explaining why some children abandoned the farm for the town. The amount of labor crushed out the realm of mental adventure . . . [farming] consumed all of his time and left none for reading. Howells's complaint was not unlike that of Abraham Lincoln, who also had an active imagination and found that farming detracted from it. The mental vista farming permitted was sometimes quite limited.

28. Huston notes:

[T]he existing studies indicate that in the two colonies by 1770 about one-half of the white male adult population were landowners and the other half were landless; the landless were perhaps composed of 30 percent agricultural laborers and 20 percent tenants. Thus one does get a 'yeomanry' in Virginia and Maryland, but its significance is difficult to assess.

29. Both Dowdey and Huston note this. Huston, describing it in somewhat more detail, says:

Many now believe the fate of the small propertyholders was determined by price movements, weather, and inaccessibility to financial services. For those who owned less than twenty acres, life was precarious. They had enough land to feed the family and perhaps generate a minimal surplus, but saving for difficult times was out of the question. A series of bad harvests could throw cottagers and peasants into desperation, leaving only the possibility of selling the few acres they possessed. Because of their minute size, they could not arrange bank loans. Over time, the larger landowners simply bought them out when they fell into indebtedness.

…

Financial capabilities of the peers and gentry expanded markedly after 1690 and were largely responsible for the consolidation of landholdings. A mortgage market emerged in the late seventeenth century that gave the landed magnates income beyond their rents. Thus, when land became available through some misfortune of the small landowners, the magnates had no difficulty in getting the finances to purchase the land. It is well known that the gentry and aristocracy were eager to expand their holdings in the eighteenth century. The result was the amassing of land into a few tamilies until by 1873 or earlier some 7,000 families owned 80 percent...

30. Douglas Southall Freeman covers Washington’s business activities well in his Washington. I have found, and look forward to reading, George Washington, Entrepreneur, which covers this in more depth.

31. Johann Kurtz had a good article on agency recently:

Agency at every age

32. The Bifurcation of Humanity

33. A good X post on this from BowTiedFox

Fox@BowTiedFox

the highest-leverage use of AI is discovering opportunities to make money, NOT automation and generation automation and generation usually assume the problem is already fixed: automate customer support, generate an ad, write the copy but the deeper value of AI is that it can

Fox @BowTiedFox

there's still a ton of opportunity out there even with all this AI stuff because people always overestimate downside and underestimate upside think about ads. you spend $100 to test something. worst case you lose $100, best case you find an angle worth 10x more but most people https://t.co/ZAN7ULB2d2

8:38 PM · Mar 16, 2026 · 35.9K Views

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16 Replies · 45 Reposts · 454 Likes

34. Normally I can’t stand Tyler Cowen, but this is a good point of his:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/03/why-you-should-work-much-harder-right-now.html

35. https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/04/the-middle-class-the-top-10-and-the-bottom-50/