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> In the 1800s, 90 percent of the US population lived on a farm, rocking their WFH setups. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Busine

> In the 1800s, 90 percent of the US population lived on a farm, rocking their WFH setups. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance? They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them.

screye 5y ago
> most of the people working on farms were slaves Does that compute? Less than 10% of the US population were slaves and 90% were employed in farming. It seems unbelievable to me that farms were manned exclusively or even in majority by slaves. Now most slaves were employed in farms, but I'm not sure if that relationship is bi directional
- watwut 5y ago
  Where do you have less then 10% of US population being slaves from? I found 18 percent of the total population in 1790, or roughly one in every six people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-... And based on what I know, it then went up due to cotton boom.
  - screye 5y ago
    You're correct that it seems to have peaked around 18%, but mostly hovered between 10-18%. It sat around 15% during the civil war. Note that these numbers do not include native Americans, who constituted between 1-3 million themselves, since the census didn't count them. Considering them as part of the total should indeed bring the numbers under 10%. Whether that is fair or not is up to the reader :) I still maintain that the majority of the people working on farms were most likely white. This is especially true since many states did not have slaves at all. I will admit that it is likely, that the most gruelling work on the field was given to the slaves.
    - watwut 5y ago
      It does not seem to me that Native Americans should count here. Whole discussion completely ignores them in all aspects. The debates are about Americans, it would be like counting Mexico into stats. > I still maintain that the majority of the people working on farms were most likely white. This is especially true since many states did not have slaves at all. I will admit that it is likely, that the most gruelling work on the field was given to the slaves. You have to split it to free states and slave states. Free states have no slaves no matter how grueling work. Slave states have split between slave work, feeman work and white people work, where white people would not do slave work due to it being considered shameful. You have also industrial development going on in exactly this time - and decline of subsistence farming along with it.
      - screye 5y ago
        Fair enough. Your comment adds important context.
- mc32 5y ago
  I may be wrong, here, so correct me if I'm off. My understanding is slaveholding was mostly by plantations (large farms engaged in commercial crops tobacco/cotton). Most farms were not plantations (or haciendas/fazendas south of the border coffee, sugarcane, mining). So most farms in the south had no slaves, but large plantations had many slaves.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  I didn't even remotely try to look up the real number (I did look up the child mortality, but didn't exactly vet the source). Consider it hyperbole if it helps, but whatever the exact number, a whole lot of people living on farms were either dying as children or living in bondage, neither of which is a situation I would consider doing perfectly fine without mental breakdowns or help from Harvard Business Review. Even for the rest of the people, I somewhat doubt having most of your children die or being a slave driver was particularly great for mental health, either. Someone downstream also mentioned Native Americans driving down the proportion of slaves. Sure, but I also don't think having all your land gradually taken and your civilization hunted to extinction was great for mental health. Whatever the exact numbers were in an era where we barely even tried to measure stuff like this, I believe this writer's rosy view of antebellum American life is badly out of touch.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them. IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but... To say claim most farm labor was performed by slaves prior to 1865 flies in the face of the results of about half a dozen federal censuses and childhood mortality says close to nothing about the lives of the people who made it to adulthood.
- Retric 5y ago
  Preindustrial farming involved a lot of downtime outside of the tropics. Essentially a few weeks a year involved 14+ hour days, but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year. It’s a common misconception that summer breaks where for farmers, but historically rurual areas actually had school in summer and winter with breaks in the spring and fall simply because that’s when there was a lot of work to get done. For many in the US this meant a second occupation outside of farming, from preaching to making beer etc.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Do you have any additional information or sources on the subject. Not that I don't believe you, but I grew up in a post-industrial small farming community and 12 hour days were the norm most of the year. If the crops didnt need attention, there was always a long list of other tasks, digging wells, repairing equipment, infrastructure improvement. It would be interesting to see what changed.
    - Retric 5y ago
      https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_... Summing up all of preindustrial farming covers a lot of area but for the major differences. Mostly vastly less land per farmer and minimal equipment, no insecticide and minimal fertilizers mostly animal droppings and marl applied early in the year. Limited and in many areas zero irrigation. This translated into less infrastructure, and fewer things to buy and thus maintain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marl Really lack of resources was probably the biggest reason for lack of work. Logging, hunting, trapping, and fishing supplemented many early American farmers incomes but access to land for that generally wasn’t available in more settled areas.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Farming and aligned professions such as vets have an absolutely appalling suicide rate even today.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > even today Probably should be 'these days'. I believe that's a function of modern mono cropping and corporate takeover that concentrates profit and turns a farm into an inhuman input output system. I've known several small time farmers that had a bit of everything, and they were incredibly proud and very happy.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I think we would have to look at the historic data to draw that conclusion.
monkeybutton 5y ago
If the farming life was so wonderous, people wouldn't have fled to the cities for new and better opportunities. At least in Canada, farming in 1800s was a miserable and hard life. I don't think work-life balance came to mind for the settlers, more survive or perish. edit: After posting I'm thinking of a couple of accounts of what farm life was like on Manitoulin island from back then. I can't get them out of my head so I'll write them here. The first is the story of a farmer who one day finds that some of his sheep have been killed by a black bear. Now he has do something about it because the bear will keep returning until he has nothing left. He doesn't own a gun because guns and ammunition are expensive, so he borrows a trap (which is re-usable!) from a neighbouring farmer. He baits the trap with the carcass of one of the lambs that the bear attacked and waits. The next morning the bear is trapped but alive. What to do? He doesn't want to leave it like that, and he doesn't have a gun to shoot it, so he elects to finish it off with an axe. In the farmer's account he really did not want to do that but said that he had no choice in the circumstances. He still could have easily been injured by the bear and felt lucky that he wasn't. The second account is of the local mail carriers. They were issued riles for self protection and in winter if they came across deer or elk they would shoot them and carry it into the next town in the wagon with the rest of the mail and parcels. The meat would then be cut up and distributed. It was noted that for many of the families it would be the only fresh meat they'd get to eat in the winter.
ecshafer 5y ago
>most of the people working on farms were slaves This is false. 90% of the US were farmers. This is going to be subsistence farmers and people who own farms, sharecroppers, etc. The highest rate of slavery was around 10% of the total population, as the northern states had higher populations, though some individual states had very high rates of slavery. https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm
dredmorbius 5y ago
For a compelling, if morbid, insight to the petite horrors and tragedies of farming and small-town life, see Wisconsin Death Trip: a 1973 non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin, photographer Charles Van Schaick – mostly taken in the city of Black River Falls – and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip

screye 5y ago

> most of the people working on farms were slaves Does that compute? Less than 10% of the US population were slaves and 90% were employed in farming. It seems unbelievable to me that farms were manned exclusively or even in majority by slaves. Now most slaves were employed in farms, but I'm not sure if that relationship is bi directional

watwut 5y ago
Where do you have less then 10% of US population being slaves from? I found 18 percent of the total population in 1790, or roughly one in every six people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-... And based on what I know, it then went up due to cotton boom.
- screye 5y ago
  You're correct that it seems to have peaked around 18%, but mostly hovered between 10-18%. It sat around 15% during the civil war. Note that these numbers do not include native Americans, who constituted between 1-3 million themselves, since the census didn't count them. Considering them as part of the total should indeed bring the numbers under 10%. Whether that is fair or not is up to the reader :) I still maintain that the majority of the people working on farms were most likely white. This is especially true since many states did not have slaves at all. I will admit that it is likely, that the most gruelling work on the field was given to the slaves.
  - watwut 5y ago
    It does not seem to me that Native Americans should count here. Whole discussion completely ignores them in all aspects. The debates are about Americans, it would be like counting Mexico into stats. > I still maintain that the majority of the people working on farms were most likely white. This is especially true since many states did not have slaves at all. I will admit that it is likely, that the most gruelling work on the field was given to the slaves. You have to split it to free states and slave states. Free states have no slaves no matter how grueling work. Slave states have split between slave work, feeman work and white people work, where white people would not do slave work due to it being considered shameful. You have also industrial development going on in exactly this time - and decline of subsistence farming along with it.
    - screye 5y ago
      Fair enough. Your comment adds important context.
mc32 5y ago
I may be wrong, here, so correct me if I'm off. My understanding is slaveholding was mostly by plantations (large farms engaged in commercial crops tobacco/cotton). Most farms were not plantations (or haciendas/fazendas south of the border coffee, sugarcane, mining). So most farms in the south had no slaves, but large plantations had many slaves.
nonameiguess 5y ago
I didn't even remotely try to look up the real number (I did look up the child mortality, but didn't exactly vet the source). Consider it hyperbole if it helps, but whatever the exact number, a whole lot of people living on farms were either dying as children or living in bondage, neither of which is a situation I would consider doing perfectly fine without mental breakdowns or help from Harvard Business Review. Even for the rest of the people, I somewhat doubt having most of your children die or being a slave driver was particularly great for mental health, either. Someone downstream also mentioned Native Americans driving down the proportion of slaves. Sure, but I also don't think having all your land gradually taken and your civilization hunted to extinction was great for mental health. Whatever the exact numbers were in an era where we barely even tried to measure stuff like this, I believe this writer's rosy view of antebellum American life is badly out of touch.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them. IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but... To say claim most farm labor was performed by slaves prior to 1865 flies in the face of the results of about half a dozen federal censuses and childhood mortality says close to nothing about the lives of the people who made it to adulthood.

Retric 5y ago
Preindustrial farming involved a lot of downtime outside of the tropics. Essentially a few weeks a year involved 14+ hour days, but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year. It’s a common misconception that summer breaks where for farmers, but historically rurual areas actually had school in summer and winter with breaks in the spring and fall simply because that’s when there was a lot of work to get done. For many in the US this meant a second occupation outside of farming, from preaching to making beer etc.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Do you have any additional information or sources on the subject. Not that I don't believe you, but I grew up in a post-industrial small farming community and 12 hour days were the norm most of the year. If the crops didnt need attention, there was always a long list of other tasks, digging wells, repairing equipment, infrastructure improvement. It would be interesting to see what changed.
  - Retric 5y ago
    https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_... Summing up all of preindustrial farming covers a lot of area but for the major differences. Mostly vastly less land per farmer and minimal equipment, no insecticide and minimal fertilizers mostly animal droppings and marl applied early in the year. Limited and in many areas zero irrigation. This translated into less infrastructure, and fewer things to buy and thus maintain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marl Really lack of resources was probably the biggest reason for lack of work. Logging, hunting, trapping, and fishing supplemented many early American farmers incomes but access to land for that generally wasn’t available in more settled areas.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Farming and aligned professions such as vets have an absolutely appalling suicide rate even today.

reedjosh 5y ago
> even today Probably should be 'these days'. I believe that's a function of modern mono cropping and corporate takeover that concentrates profit and turns a farm into an inhuman input output system. I've known several small time farmers that had a bit of everything, and they were incredibly proud and very happy.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I think we would have to look at the historic data to draw that conclusion.

monkeybutton 5y ago

If the farming life was so wonderous, people wouldn't have fled to the cities for new and better opportunities. At least in Canada, farming in 1800s was a miserable and hard life. I don't think work-life balance came to mind for the settlers, more survive or perish. edit: After posting I'm thinking of a couple of accounts of what farm life was like on Manitoulin island from back then. I can't get them out of my head so I'll write them here. The first is the story of a farmer who one day finds that some of his sheep have been killed by a black bear. Now he has do something about it because the bear will keep returning until he has nothing left. He doesn't own a gun because guns and ammunition are expensive, so he borrows a trap (which is re-usable!) from a neighbouring farmer. He baits the trap with the carcass of one of the lambs that the bear attacked and waits. The next morning the bear is trapped but alive. What to do? He doesn't want to leave it like that, and he doesn't have a gun to shoot it, so he elects to finish it off with an axe. In the farmer's account he really did not want to do that but said that he had no choice in the circumstances. He still could have easily been injured by the bear and felt lucky that he wasn't. The second account is of the local mail carriers. They were issued riles for self protection and in winter if they came across deer or elk they would shoot them and carry it into the next town in the wagon with the rest of the mail and parcels. The meat would then be cut up and distributed. It was noted that for many of the families it would be the only fresh meat they'd get to eat in the winter.

ecshafer 5y ago

>most of the people working on farms were slaves This is false. 90% of the US were farmers. This is going to be subsistence farmers and people who own farms, sharecroppers, etc. The highest rate of slavery was around 10% of the total population, as the northern states had higher populations, though some individual states had very high rates of slavery. https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm

dredmorbius 5y ago

For a compelling, if morbid, insight to the petite horrors and tragedies of farming and small-town life, see Wisconsin Death Trip: a 1973 non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin, photographer Charles Van Schaick – mostly taken in the city of Black River Falls – and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip