Tilling the Ground
By Nathaniel Peabody Rogers
This essay on the dignity and necessity of manual and in particular agricultural labor - from the Herald of Freedom of July 10 1846 - bears comparison, for example, to various writings of Thoreau.
This is the only thing mankind can do that deserves the name of occupation. To till the ground and raise the bread out of it, "the staff of life." This is occupation. I don't mean, raise it by slave labor, or even by paid labor - or the people's labor in any shape, but by your own labor. The threat of your own, identical, bona fide forehead. Nobody with health enough to labor with his hands and with a chance to get at the face of the earth to vex it with the plough or the glorious hoe, and wit enough to work, should eat any bread, unless he earned it in ground labor. Every mechanic should also be a worker on the land to the extent of raising the amount of his own bread. Health demands it. Duty to our mother earth, whose face needs culture and dressing, demands it, and duty to the laborers among our fellow-men, demands it, who, but for that, will have to sustain us, ever and always maintaining themselves and theirs. Human happiness and advancement demand it at the hands of every body. It will take that amount of manual labor on the ground, to make any body content with human life. A man can't be happy without it any more than a bird can without a chance to sing or to fly. The human muscles claim that amount of stretch, and if every body would afford them that, mankind are all provided for, and the dear, old Mother Earth would be all of a blossom, like a rejoicing young apple-tree in the Spring. It would be a pretty place, this Earth, then to live on. Sightly. Now the mass of it is good for nothing but to run away from, or make roads over, for folks to abscond on, from other like places.
And it should be the chief ambition of young men to know how to do this labor and to succeed in actually doing the most of it, to the best advantage. The genius for it should be regarded as the first genius - above all your lawyers, doctors, divines, traders, politicians, and even your poets.
The first man on "God's Earth" should be the best farmer on it. The man, who has done the most with his own hands, towards making the best farm. The handsomest place to live and the most productive of the beautiful and good things of this life. The prettiest place to look at, for folks going by - travellers. Not the greatest place, but the smallest that would answer the great purpose of family existence and elegant supports. By elegant support, I don't mean what most people would think I did. The farmer's dress should be the standard of fashionable beauty - the homespun frock and trousers. They may be made becomingly. And when their wearers lead the ton of fashionable life - their dress will become the standard. The glorious, coarse blue and white, that sturdy labor wears at the plough-tail, it is princely to the right eye, beyond any thing that traitors can conjure out of broadcloth and satin. Only let it be heroically worn, and it is more becoming than the dashiest Uniform, or the latest cut of the metropolis. Fashion can make it so, as it has now made it otherwise. It is fashion only, that could render present dress - and dress generally - tolerable to the eye or endurable to the limbs and body. Let fashion and habit be brought to correspond with nature and natural taste. It would prevail if the adopters of it would take the rank in society that really belongs to the producers of the staff of life.
Toward Labor on the Ground, then, let the young ambition of mankind be directed, and let the idle vocations go take their place behind it. Then Labor would be sought instead of shunned, as it is now, as degrading to respectable mankind and fitted only for slaves.