“A Laudable Spirit of Enterprise”: Renegotiating Land, Natural Resources, and Power on Post-Revolutionary Long Island

Abstract

In the wake of the American Revolution, Long Island farmers faced severe intertwined environmental and economic crises. Amidst on-going Indian removals and the gradual manumission of enslaved African workers, the region’s land and labor resources were also in flux. Deeply concerned about the region’s declining productivity, Ezra L’Hommedieu (1734–1811), a gentleman farmer and advocate of modern agronomy on Long Island’s East End, sought to promote scientific agriculture in response to ecological problems (such as soil depletion and invasive pests), changing patterns of migration and land use, and growing social tensions. He and his circle of like-minded associates sought to appropriate indigenous agricultural knowledge as part of a supposedly enlightened land restoration agenda, albeit one that hinged on the displacement of native people and continued access to a dependent labor force. Laying claim to scientific expertise—in the service of economic development and, less overtly, of cultural hegemony—was one channel whereby L’Hommedieu and his peers sought to reassert their authority and status. As contestation over land, power, and natural resources reshaped Long Island, its preservation as a productive agricultural region became inextricably bound up with the national politics of western expansion and Indian removal in the Early Republic.