who wanted america to be an agrarian society
Thomas Jefferson
title: History of agrarianism text: of orchards and gardens. Agrarianism claimed agriculture was the source of all wealth and called for the wide distribution of land as the foundation of democracy and freedom. The Country Life Movement was a loose grouping of social reformers, church leaders, and urban progressives; they sought solutions for rural economic decline, social stagnation, and the depopulation of the countryside. In American history important spokesmen included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735–1813), and John Taylor of Caroline (1753–1824) in the early national period. The memory of George Washington was often upheld as an ideal agrarian. In title: Agrarianism text: Confucianism, the farmer was considered an esteemed productive member of society, but merchants who made money were looked down upon. That influenced European intellectuals like François Quesnay, an avid Confucianist and advocate of China's agrarian policies, in forming the French agrarian philosophy of physiocracy. The physiocrats, along with the ideas of John Locke and the Romantic Era, formed the basis of modern European and American agrarianism. United States president (1801–1809) Thomas Jefferson was a representative agrarian who built Jeffersonian democracy around the notion that farmers are “the most valuable citizens” and the truest republicans. Peasant parties first appeared across Eastern title: American System (economic plan) text: costly. This program became the leading tenet of the Whig Party of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. It was opposed by the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan prior to the Civil War, often on the grounds that the points of it were unconstitutional. Among the most important internal improvements created under the American System was the Cumberland Road. American System (economic plan) The American System was an economic plan that played an important role in American policy during the first half of the 19th century. Rooted in the "American title: History of agrarianism text: farms. Jefferson wrote in 1785 in a letter to John Jay that The political philosopher James Harrington influenced the development of explicit agrarian designs for the colonies of Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. James Edward Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia in 1733, implemented a comprehensive physical, social, and economic development plan organised around the central concept of "agrarian equality." The Oglethorpe Plan allocated land in grants of equal size, prohibited acquisition of additional land through marriage or acquisition, and prohibited slavery for moral reasons as well as to prevent the formation of large plantations like those that existed in neighbouring South Carolina. title: American School (economics) text: until it was self-sufficient in all necessary economic products. Hamilton rooted this economic system, in part, in the successive regimes of Colbert's France and Elizabeth I's England, while rejecting the harsher aspects of mercantilism, such as seeking colonies for markets. As later defined by Senator Henry Clay who became known as the "Father of the American System" because of his impassioned support thereof, the American System was to unify the nation north to south, east to west, and city to farmer. Frank Bourgin's 1989 study of the Constitutional Convention shows that direct government involvement in the economy was intended by