Agriculture.

As important as trading was to the United States economy, the economic activity that Americans were most directly involved with was farming. Agriculture was the mainstay of this economy and the culture it supported. The early United States was overwhelmingly rural, with only 3.3 percent of the population living in cities with over eight thousand people in 1790, rising to only 4.9 percent in 1810. In the North wheat, corn, and other grains were the principal crops, and their production increased as the cities along the Atlantic coast began to grow more rapidly after 1790. Land in coastal areas was already becoming scarce by 1790, however, fueling the dispersion of the population to the west. As white Americans settled the trans-Appalachian interior, farming there began to grow as well. It was hampered at first by the difficulty of clearing land and establishing farms. The typical pioneer family would arrive...