Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

Click on the title to examine the digitized book
(Some books are in scanning production; links will become live as soon as scanning is completed)

Wells, David A. The Year-Book of Agriculture; or The Annual of Agricultural Progress and Discovery, For 1855 and 1856. Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1856.

David A. Wells. The Year-Book of Agriculture; or The Annual of Agricultural Progress and Discovery, For 1855 and 1856. Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1856. p. 7.

Wedding the progress of science to the improvement of agriculture, Wells saw the United States as a leading global nation in competition especially with Britain and France.

Read a passage from the book

Never, in the history of our country, has Agriculture, in all its great and varied departments, presented so prosperous and promising a condition as at the close of the year 1855. The season that has passed, in striking contrast with that which immediately preceded it, has proved fruitful to an extraordinary degree, and the careful estimates of the gathered crops almost exceed belief: Indian corn, ten hundred millions of bushels; wheat, from one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty millions; oats, four hundred millions; rye and other grains, one hundred millions; and cotton, with a crop undoubtedly smaller than that of some former years, not less than three million two hundred thousand bales, or, estimating four hundred pounds to the bale, one billion two hundred and eighty millions of pounds.

With this increase in material prosperity, a marked progress has also been made in all that pertains to agriculture, considered as a science and an art — in the improvement and perfection of tools, implements, and processes — in the increase and improvement of agricultural literature — in the introduction and propagation of new and valuable animals and plants — in the increased patronage of the National and State governments — and in the more widely extended means and opportunities for elementary agricultural education.

Nor has this progress and improvement been confined to the United States. In Great Britain, the examples and teachings of Mechi, Wilkins, Lawes, and Gilbert, the late Mr. Pusey, Prof. Way, of the Royal Agricultural Society, Prof. Anderson, of the Highland Agricultural Society of Scotland, and many other practical, far-seeing men, are producing most beneficial results. Their efforts are also indirectly seconded by the manufacturers, as in the case of Mr. Salt, who has introduced the Alpaca sheep and Angora goats, and by others who utilize the refuse of their vast manufacturing establishments for fertilizers; or by their statesmen, as in the case of Lord Clarendon, who, while Foreign Secretary, did much, in virtue of his position, to facilitate the introduction of foreign trees and fruit. In France, under the direction of St. Hilaire and the patronage of government, the Society for the Introduction and Acclimation of Useful Foreign Domestic Animals and Plants, are active and strenuous in their efforts. Under the direction also of government, aided by private individuals, the streams and lakes of the empire are becoming rapidly stocked with a profusion of fish, propagated by artificial means. American agricultural implements — partially through the results of the Great Exhibition of Paris, partially through an increased information — are finding a ready market in France, and in Vienna a warehouse for their exclusive sale has been established. Lastly, but not least, it must be recorded that Algeria, best known to American readers by its former piracy and white slavery, competed honorably with the United States at the Paris Exhibition in reaping machines; that the National Agricultural Society of the Sandwich Islands, during the past year, has issued its third annual report and awarded six hundred dollars in prizes, and that Liberia has established a model farm and plantation.