Grassroots Leviathan:: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding RepublicThe United States was an overwhelmingly rural society before the Civil War and for some time afterward. There were cities and factories, of course, especially in the northern seaboard states. In 1860, Manhattan's population was nearing a million. Brooklyn, which had been farmland at the time of the American Revolution, was itself home to 250,000. New England's mill towns were already well known, and Chicago's growth elicited awe. But these were