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Morbidly Excited Soil: Sylvester Graham and the Environmental Ethos of Antebellum Reform

A long intellectual tradition holds that gathering local waste, turning it into compost, and applying it to fields can remind us of ostensibly natural connections among humans, animals, and plants. Yet, in the nineteenth century, physiological reformers led by Sylvester Graham saw the application of manure as an overstimulating, prurient, noxious, and unnatural practice with consequences for individual health and the social body. These reformers developed a powerful narrative about the interdependence between human and earthly metabolism. They believed humans, animals, plants, and soil were bound together in an unhealthy stew of stimulation, viciously and violently acting upon one another, and always reflecting the diseased condition of broader American society. Mid-nineteenth-century physiological reformers constituted a countercurrent regarding the meaning of nature and its implications for ideal agricultural practice and health, one that sheds new light on historical connections between medical discourse, agricultural practice, and environmental thought. Graham’s views lost salience with the decline of antebellum reform movements and with a shift away from the medical model of overstimulation. Yet agricultural experts argued for the self-sustaining power of the soil without amendments through the early twentieth century, and the Grahamite notion of “hygienic” agriculture, while marginal, found a following for well over a century.