Farmer George

“First in war, first in peace,” one of George Washington’s Continental Army generals declaimed at his funeral, yet during his lifetime Washington wanted to be known as the new nation’s “first farmer.” Immediately upon the British surrender in 1783, he resigned his command to resume his work at Mount Vernon, his family home on the western side of the Potomac River in Virginia. Contemporaries likened him to the legendary Roman leader Cincinnatus, who left his farm to repel an invasion, was quickly victorious, then relinquished power to return to the virtues of the plow. Washington gestured to Cincinnatus’s ideal of republican simplicity; according to a good friend, he found in farming “a personal gratification seen nowhere else in his life” other than in his domestic comforts. But Mount Vernon, which comprised extensive lands, scores of enslaved people under his control, and a mansion that he expanded to include a great room with Palladian-windowed views down to the Potomac, was far from simple. Neither, as Bruce Ragsdale reveals in the prodigiously researched Washington at the Plow, were his agricultural ambitions.

Those ambitions were striking—the management of his land and laborers to establish an agricultural model that was innovative and sustainable and that would inspire other farmers in building the new nation. Ragsdale, whose previous works include a study of economic development and slavery in Revolutionary Virginia, penetrates more deeply than other biographical accounts of Washington’s agricultural ideas and practices through close examination of the records of the Home House Farm—later called the Mansion House Farm—which surrounded the residence, and the four outlying farms, each a separately named plantation, into which Washington divided the Mount Vernon estate. He finds that the records expose “a curiosity of mind and boldness of imagination that few discerned in other dimensions of [Washington’s] life,” including in the military and presidential periods.

They also provide “the most detailed documentation of his engagement with slavery and his conflicted attitudes toward the institution.” Washington recognized that agricultural change at Mount Vernon depended on teaching his enslaved workers new skills or acquiring workers who already possessed them. The farm records report his encounters with the overseers and enslaved laborers who worked his lands, assessments of their attitudes, measures of their skills, descriptions of their tasks, and judgments of how well or poorly they carried them out. His goal of agricultural improvement drove the way he managed them while adding to the value of his investment in them. What is especially distinctive about Ragsdale’s book is its account of the strong, evolving link between Washington’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his beliefs and expectations concerning his enslaved laborers.

Washington, who had leased Mount Vernon from the estate of his late half-brother Lawrence beginning in 1754, inherited the property on the death of Lawrence’s widow in 1761. He had taken over its management in 1759, on his return from four years of duty as an officer in the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. He was newly married to Martha Custis, the widow of a wealthy planter, who brought a dowry of sizable personal property along with eighty-four enslaved men and women and six thousand acres of land, roughly tripling Washington’s total holdings. While some of the estate was used for raising corn, its major crop was tobacco, which Virginia planters had long grown and sold mostly to British merchants, shipping it down the Potomac to the Chesapeake Bay and across the Atlantic.

Washington had earlier worked as a surveyor in western Virginia, and his military service had brought him beyond the headwaters of the Potomac (which gather in what is now West Virginia) and across the Appalachian Mountains into what was then informally called the Ohio country. Although only twenty-seven when he began managing Mount Vernon, he possessed far more knowledge and experience of the colony’s western lands than most of his fellow planters, and Ragsdale writes that he “was eager to explore opportunities outside the traditional investments of the colonial Virginia gentry.” He soon envisioned the creation of an agricultural and commercial region that would reach from the transmontane west via the Potomac to the Chesapeake. Once Britain began imposing restrictive mercantilist controls on the colonies, he came to see Virginia and its neighboring colonies as constituting “a rising Empire,” energized by robust agriculture as well as manufacturing enterprises.

Washington assumed that his place in the future would depend on the development of a thriving agricultural enterprise of his own. To that end, he acquired from the Virginia Colony 33,000 acres of land in the Ohio country intending, in accord with Virginia law, to establish homesteads worked by tenants there. He also added substantially to his land holdings at Mount Vernon. In the years before the Revolution the estate came to comprise, including Martha’s lands, about 11,500 acres, some 3,260 of them arable.

Washington, who had picked up the rudiments of farming from Lawrence, involved himself in most of the estate’s operations and rode its expanse daily, a habit that he followed, when he was home, for most of his life. In regular touch with the soil, his managers, and a number of his enslaved workers, he recognized early on that the agricultural potential of his estate as well as of the rest of Virginia was threatened by soil exhaustion, a consequence of the long devotion to tobacco and corn. He sought to pursue a husbandry that would both restore the soil and yield products with markets beyond the mother country.

He turned for guidance to the “New Husbandry”—the methods and approach of the agricultural revolution that by the mid-eighteenth century was taking hold in Britain and spreading to France. Led by the owners of the great estates and their leaseholders, it was suffused with the tenets of the scientific revolution, casting aside ancient authority and practice in favor of empiricism and experimentation. Its advocates promoted new methods of sowing seeds, cultivating crops, and breeding animals, encouraged access to information through personal exchange and local societies, and published journals and treatises.

Washington initially learned of the New Husbandry from fellow gentry in Virginia and tobacco merchants in England, then after independence through correspondence with several of its British advocates. To his sensibility, they expressed an enlightened civic obligation that he considered worthy of emulation by his fellow American estate holders—“gentlemen who have leisure and abilities to devise and wherewithal to hazard something,” as he wrote to an enthusiast of the New Husbandry in Pennsylvania, men who would inspire the common farmer to take to the new agricultural methods. After the Revolution such men formed societies for agricultural improvement in a number of states, and several elected Washington to honorary membership. But while he endorsed their purpose, he refrained from publicly promoting the cause of innovation, preferring to encourage it via private influence and personal example.

Ragsdale writes that Washington acquired and studied a number of treatises on the New Husbandry, but he overlooks the fact that the treatises provided neither consistent nor straightforward instruction. Among those works, two in particular, influential on Washington and others, illustrate the point: Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s A Practical Treatise of Husbandry, new editions of which were published as Washington was taking over the management of Mount Vernon.¹

Tull, a mechanically resourceful estate owner in Berkshire, had invented a drill for sowing seed at uniform spacing and depth and a horse-drawn hoe for turning the soil while plants were growing. Duhamel, a polymath and member of the French Academy of Sciences, was distinguished in botany and agronomy. But while both extolled the New Husbandry in principle, they differed sharply on the best practices for pursuing it. Tull contended that finely turning the soil added significantly to its nutrient value and thus did away with the need for manuring and fallowing the land.² Duhamel, while admiring Tull’s sowing and hoeing, marshaled evidence from numerous experiments that without manuring and fallowing, cropland wore out.

In the face of such contradictions, Washington relied on his own resources and judgment. In the late 1760s he replaced tobacco with wheat as his principal cash crop. Wheat would liberate Mount Vernon from dependence on the British market. It could be sold locally or for export as either grain or flour; in 1770 Washington built his own gristmill and soon, in response to Virginia’s requiring strict inspection of all flour for export, registered the brand “G. Washington,” marking it on all casks intended for foreign sale. By itself wheat, too, would deplete the soil; following Duhamel, Washington rotated the planting of it with successive seasons of corn, which he needed to feed his enslaved workers, and fallow. Apparently drawing on Tull, he cultivated wheat with a soil-turning plow but departed from him in applying a covering of manure.

On returning to Mount Vernon in 1783 after an absence of eight and a half years with the Continental Army, Washington resumed riding his farms and soon regretted that he had “continued so long in the ruinous mode of farming, which we are in.” Eager to change course, during the remainder of the decade he “put in place his most ambitious plan of farming,” Ragsdale writes.

He learned fresh strategies from recent British treatises—he solicited such works for the rest of his life—and from Arthur Young, Britain’s leading chronicler of the New Husbandry, who regularly sent him his Annals of Agriculture and advised him by correspondence on seeds, livestock, and farming tools. Washington assured him that the Annals would be his “guide.”

Young, doubtless with manure in mind, told him that in England farming succeeded in proportion to the attention given to cattle. Washington, like most American farmers, had been negligent with his livestock, and he resolved to improve them by establishing better meadows. He also constructed a large, functional barn, its design an eclectic joining of specifications from Young, among others, and his own judgment, that included stalls for dairy cows, pens for other livestock, and arrangements for the efficient distribution of feed and removal of dung.

Dung now ranked at the top of his agricultural armamentarium, figuring explicitly in what he wanted in a farm manager: a man deeply knowledgeable about advanced British husbandry who could “above all, Midas like…convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards Gold.” Washington built the first repository in the United States—a stercorary—for storing, mixing, and aging his animals’ droppings. Drawing on The Gentleman Farmer by the Scottish lord Henry Home, he devised his own expanded schedule of crop rotation, a seven-year cycle that started with corn and wheat, moved to revitalizing clover and grasses, and proceeded successively to turnips, barley, and pasture.

During his presidency Washington bought a license to install at Mount Vernon a remarkable milling machine that had been invented by the mechanical genius Oliver Evans, had been granted US Patent No. 3 in 1790, and processed grain from the first milling to flour packed in barrels. During his seven presidential years in Philadelphia—the country’s “thriving center of agricultural improvement and scientific inquiry,” Ragsdale reports—he paid close attention to “the practices that made Pennsylvania farming so productive and so distinct from the agriculture of Virginia.” After 1797, in his short postpresidential life, he remained a restless risk taker, devising a new plan for agriculture at Mount Vernon and investing in experimental enterprises and mechanical improvements. One such venture paid off handsomely: a distillery that “quickly became one of the largest producers of whiskey in the nation,” Ragsdale notes, and added substantially to the value of the estate’s grain production.

In the 1760s Washington had begun planting seeds in experimental beds that he eventually incorporated into a botanical garden, aiming “to try their Goodness” and measure the “several Virtues”—“powers,” in the botanical language of the day—of various compost mixtures. He grafted fruit trees onto rootstock and assessed varieties of English cherry, French pear, and walnut trees as well as grapes in the hope of creating a good Virginia wine. In the 1780s, in service of crop rotation and optimal preparation of the soil, he assessed different seeds and plants for how they flourished in various mixtures of soils and dungs, precisely recording experimental measurements as well as virtually every other detail of farming. Ragsdale notes that determining the ideal rate for sowing seeds per acre “became for Washington a quest comparable to his search for the proper sequence of crop rotations.”

Now famous on both sides of the Atlantic, Washington was a salient figure in an international network of agricultural exchange. Admirers at home and abroad, including the US ministers in Britain, sent him new plants and seeds as well as improved breeds of cattle and sheep, among them a calf produced by the first bull imported into the US from the herd of Robert Bakewell, the famed British pioneer of modern animal breeding. Particularly prominent in the network was the Marquis de Lafayette, a general of the wartime French forces and a lasting ally, comfortable in requesting Washington’s assistance to obtain seeds from Kentucky for King Louis XVI’s garden and generous in sending him a strong Maltese jackass for the production of mules, as well as two jennies (female asses) for multiplying the breed. Washington, no stranger to animal improvement, bred foxhounds in collaboration with his fellow huntsmen and earned steady stud fees for the services of his fine stallions, noting to his manager that he had “these kind of improvements very much at heart.”

The animal improvement closest to his ambitions, however, centered on mules, the offspring of jackasses and mares. He greatly valued large mules as draft animals, sterile though they are, ranking them superior to horses for their strength, longevity, and cheaper feeding costs. Powerful jackasses were uncommon in the United States, but he had learned about a Spanish breed during the war. Although Spain prohibited the export of its jackasses, in 1784 King Charles III, eager to curry favor with the new nation, authorized the export of two of them, one of which survived the Atlantic voyage and arrived at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in October 1785.

Newspapers covered its journey to Mount Vernon, one describing it as “the largest Jack Ass I ever saw.” Naming the animal “Royal Gift,” Washington put him to servicing mares, at first with little success, but by the next year, after using a jenny “as an excitement,” he could write, “Royal Gift never fails.” News of Royal Gift’s prowess spread, prompting Maryland planters to send mares and jennies to Mount Vernon for servicing. After Royal Gift’s death in 1796, Washington continued his mule production thanks in part to the Maltese jackass from Lafayette and his own enlarged stock of mares.

Having no counterpart in Britain’s New Husbandry, mule breeding constituted an independent initiative, Washington’s response to American agricultural needs. He explained to Young that he hoped “to secure a race of extraordinary goodness, which will stock the Country,” adding, “Their longevity & cheap keeping will be circumstances much in their favor.”

At the outset of his mule breeding, Washington told Lafayette another of his reasons for propagating the animals: they “are so much more valuable under the care which is usually bestowed on draught animals by our Negroes.” The pros and cons of relying on enslaved labor were never far from Washington’s thoughts on agricultural improvement. Ragsdale emphasizes that all the tasks of his new, innovative order—cultivation, experimentation, use of new tools—had to be “incorporated within a system of supervision and enforcement for which no British agricultural treatise would offer guidance.”

The more Washington expanded his efforts in the New Husbandry, the greater his reliance on enslaved workers, especially, as the enterprise grew more complicated, on those who were brought to Mount Vernon with essential skills or were taught them there. By 1774 Washington had acquired fifty-two additional enslaved hands—by purchase, natural increase, and transfer of some of Martha’s dower slaves—to work his enlarged estate and his western lands, bringing the total to 120 adults. Between 1786 and 1799 the number grew by at least another hundred, to a total of slightly more than three hundred able-bodied adults, children, and the elderly. They planted and cultivated the wheat and the multiple rotation crops with Tull-like mechanisms; worked at the gristmill and the distillery; managed the cattle and the sheep; gathered and applied the manure; and dug ditches and planted hedges to mark the estate’s boundaries. The carpenters among them coopered the barrels for the flour, helped build more housing for the burgeoning workforce, and joined with brickmakers to construct the elaborate barn, a project “of unprecedented scale and complexity,” Ragsdale notes.

At Mount Vernon, Washington likely brought to the management of the increasingly complicated New Husbandry the powerful shaping experience of his recent command of the Continental Army, an influence that Ragsdale neglects to consider. That job had included a broad range of interconnected responsibilities, including the acquisition of sufficient weapons, ammunition, and supplies; the training, feeding, discipline, and protection from disease of his ragtag troops; and the forging of them into a unified fighting force. At Mount Vernon, beginning in 1785, he reviewed weekly accounts that recorded the activities of his laborers, obtaining the data first himself and then from his overseers. A US senator later recalled that Washington’s overseers might “be styled generals,” adding:

The Friday of every week is appointed for the overseers, or we will say brigadier generals, to make up their returns. Not a day’s work but is noted what, by whom, and where done; not a cow calves or ewe drops her lamb but is registered…. Thus the etiquette and arrangement of an army is preserved on his farm.

Washington was always concerned that Mount Vernon earn enough to cover the combined expenses of his self-styled gentleman’s life and farming operations. Ragsdale holds that the weekly reports reduced his enslaved laborers “to quantifiable units of production,” but he adds that Washington did not subject them to bookkeeping to determine profit and loss. Rather, the exercise aimed to assess the merits of managing the New Husbandry’s interwoven complexities with a reliance on enslaved labor.

Washington considered it a betrayal, perhaps something akin to desertion, when his enslaved workers ran away. He supported all efforts to recapture escapees from his own and others’ service. Like most slaveholders, he counted his enslaved laborers as strictly property suitable for sale or barter, or as currency for repayment of debts, valued according to their physical attributes, much as one might price a stallion or mare. On offering a consignment of salted fish and flour in Barbados, he declared that he would like payment “in Negroes”—two thirds young men and boys “not exceeding (at any rate) 20 yrs old,” the rest girls no older than sixteen, all “to be strait Limb’d, & in every respect strong & likely, with good Teeth & good Countenances—to be sufficiently provided with Cloaths.”

Before 1774 Washington had rarely acknowledged the cruel injustice of slavery and had taken its legitimacy for granted. But his attitudes began changing in response to the necessities of the Revolution and the forces it unleashed. To meet the need for able-bodied troops, several northern states allowed Blacks to join their militias. Washington resisted, but the initiative compelled him to participate in discussions of the “role of free Blacks and of slaves” in the war, Ragsdale writes. He reversed his stand, and ultimately some five thousand to eight thousand persons of African descent served in the Continental Army, making up as much as 3.5 percent of the total.

Amid spreading insistence that the principles of liberty applied to all human beings, Washington privately dismissed Quakers who encouraged enslaved people to seek their freedom, claiming that they “tampered” with men and women in bondage who were “happy & content to remain with their present masters.” However, he could not ignore Lafayette, a staunch enemy of slavery distressed by the idea that he might have enlisted his sword in defense of a country intent upon maintaining it. He urged Washington to endorse abolition and emancipate his slaves; several years later he tried unsuccessfully to enlist Washington’s support for an experiment in gradual emancipation. Washington assured his friend that he supported the scheme in principle, but he found reasons to stall.

Once back at Mount Vernon, Ragsdale says, Washington hoped to secure recognition on both sides of the Atlantic as an “enlightened and humane estate owner.” During the war he had ordered his manager to avoid the breakup of enslaved families and to refrain from selling any member without the enslaved person’s agreement. Now he told his overseers to continue providing his enslaved workers with adequate food and clothing, a draft of spirits during harvests, and medical care, emphasizing that they be treated “with humanity and tenderness when Sick.”

From the mid-1780s onward, troubled not least by the heated debates over slavery at the Constitutional Convention, Washington grew increasingly conflicted over his ownership of other human beings. Privately he confided that he considered it repugnant, in contradiction to the principles of the Revolution, and a form of property holding that undercut his enlightened identity. He found himself publicly attacked by antislavery advocates—for example, William Duane, an influential newspaper editor in Philadelphia, who lambasted “the great champion of American Freedom” for possessing “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY.” In much of the Anglo-American world that Washington cared about, “enlightenment” and “enslavement” were simply not in rapport.

Moreover, Ragsdale emphasizes, Washington increasingly realized that the system of enslaved labor, with its inflexibility and coerciveness, was antithetical to the trust and collaboration necessary to realize the New Husbandry agriculture on which he believed the commercial future of the United States in part depended. Many of the tracts on slavery in his library reinforced his experience that enslaved labor was an obstacle to agricultural improvement, and his inquiries into farming elsewhere revealed that its strength in Pennsylvania greatly benefited from its free-labor character. He held that in return for the sustenance he provided, his enslaved laborers had a “duty” to work steadily and reliably. He judged them “capable of much labor” but lacking incentive to do it; he counted them “ignorant,” untrustworthy, inept, and “more & more insolent & difficult to govern.” In the Continental Army he had rallied his troops by successfully coupling inspiration to authority; as the manager of an enslaved labor force he had no call to higher purpose that might transform duty into effort.

During his presidency Washington began contemplating the emancipation of his enslaved laborers, but since he continued to hope that they could be made to serve his plans for agricultural improvement, he took no action. To the contrary, while living in Philadelphia during his presidency, he worried that the several enslaved workers attending him might be infected by the ideas of freedom loose in the city and by the prospect of emancipation entailed in a Pennsylvania law that enabled them to become indentured servants for a limited term after six months’ residence. To protect his property, Washington prevented them from exercising their legal right to eventual freedom by sending them temporarily out of the state before the six months ended. To protect his reputation as well as his authority over his enslaved servants, he insisted to his manager that the move be accomplished in utmost secrecy “under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.” At Mount Vernon he allowed his overseers to mete out corporal punishment, which he had intended to end. His averred resistance to selling slaves evaporated, likely for economic reasons; by his death in mid-December 1799 more than 70 percent of his married enslaved persons lived apart from their spouses.

In the late 1790s Washington drew up a plan for reorganizing operations at Mount Vernon, Ragsdale finds, to relieve the estate of much of its reliance on enslaved laborers and make it more closely resemble those of his model improving landowners in Great Britain. However, in 1799, unable to devise a strategy for his New Husbandry without enslaved laborers, he abandoned completely the aim of freeing any of them during his lifetime. His essential preferences by then, however, were revealed in the new will that he composed in July, five months before he died. It formally freed all the 124 slaves he owned upon his death but deferred their actual manumission until Martha’s death. He also stipulated that his heirs provide support for the elderly, infirm, and children among them, and he required that the young be taught to read and write. Martha, uneasy about keeping Washington’s freed but still-enslaved men and women in bondage, liberated them on January 1, 1801. By March, most, evidently not as happy and content as Washington had liked to believe, had gone elsewhere.

The emancipation came too late for establishing the model for economic growth that Washington had wanted to achieve at Mount Vernon. He had been farsighted in trying to promote agricultural innovation, but he had been shortsighted in sidestepping Lafayette’s plea that he strike a blow for emancipation, and he had doomed his own efforts in the New Husbandry by shackling them—and keeping them shackled—to an enslaved labor force.