CHAPTER X
Development of Agricultural Proletariat
IN THE preceding chapters we have traced the development of American agriculture and the effect of machinery both upon production and rural population. In the present chapter we will attempt to show the development of a distinctly proletarian class upon the farms.
The American census reports are utterly unreliable for the period prior to 1850, for the reason that they were entirely general in their character and failed to gather that particular information which would give an exact view of the condition of the rural population. The authorities are completely at sea as to many phases of the agricultural problem and hold divergent opinions regarding the same, thus making one man's idea quite as reliable as the other's and all of them open to question.
Only in the South, where the negro slaves constituted the laboring population, was there specialization in agriculture (in the cotton and tobacco raising industries). In the Middle States and in the North where general farming was practised, there was no genuinely rural proletariat, for the reason that the lands were cheap and the undeveloped West
