...To Jefferson, as everyone knows, there was something saintly about the self-sufficient husbandman: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if he ever had a chosen people, whose breasts he had made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine...

...own land, sending his surplus production to market.45 For example, he wrote in his Notes on Virginia: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God. . . . Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has...

...one's Virginia home meant more than emotional security. Above all, Virginia meant a life on the soil. "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God," Jefferson had memorably written in his Notes on the State of Virginia. The only truly virtuous, free,...

...for instance, linked the virtues necessary for a robust republic to the life of the yeoman farmer. 15. To prevail upon governments to establish a purely nationa he wrote, while ascribing to manufacturing the characteristics of venality, subservience, dependence,...

...manufactures and handicraft arts for the other?" Jefferson did not hesitate to answer. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus...

...eighteenth and nineteenth-century white American men. Jefferson famously wrote that those "who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people." "Dependence," which Jefferson equated with the nonownership of land, "begets subservience and venality,...