In this delightfully instructive book, Bruce A. Ragsdale provides an enthralling account of George Washington doing what he liked to do best of all, but as we rarely see him. “Washington at the Plow” tells the first president’s story as “the first farmer of America.”

Ragsdale demonstrates that “agricultural improvement and the work of nation building were firmly joined in Washington’s mind.” Paying attention to “the story of Washington’s life as a farmer,” he submits, “fundamentally reshapes the familiar biography of the general and president.” It does so centrally concerning – as the book’s subtitle styles it – “the question of slavery.” Ragsdale, the author of “A Planters’ Republic” and a former director of the Federal Judicial History Office at the Federal Judicial Center, maintains that “Washington understood slavery primarily through his management of agricultural labor and his recurrent efforts to adapt enslaved labor to new kinds of farming at Mount Vernon.” His case is compelling.

Review

Cover courtesy of Belknap

“Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery”

By Bruce A. Ragsdale

Belknap, 368 pages

$29.95

In eight chronologically arranged chapters, Ragsdale fastidiously re-creates Washington’s farming efforts from the late 1750s through his death in late 1799. Drawing upon the “scrupulous accounts” Washington kept “of every kind of transaction” related to his farming, Ragsdale allows us to peer behind Washington’s farm operations and see their inner workings at Mount Vernon and elsewhere. He puts to good use surviving ledger books and detailed weekly reports prepared by Washington’s farm managers, men such as English-born Anthony Whitting and Marylander William Pearce. What do these various documents show?

One narrative they reveal is that, over time, Washington’s land holdings multiplied – by inheritance, through his marriage in 1759 to Martha Dandridge Custis and by tracts subsequently purchased. Washington’s attitudes about the enslaved labor employed on his expanding estates changed over time as well. To appreciate how that happened requires Ragsdale to give attention to what Washington read and said and did.

Washington was constantly on the lookout for ways to improve his farming operations. Farsighted “restructuring” efforts included replacing tobacco with crops, such as corn and wheat, less depleting of the land’s nutrients. Ditches were dug to drain swamplands. Aesthetically pleasing “living” hedgerows were planted to demarcate fields. Crop rotation was introduced and amended. Washington was guided, argues Ragsdale, by “the latest models” of 18th-century British agricultural techniques, the “New Husbandry.”

Indeed, a significant strength of this volume is its nuanced attention to Washington’s lifelong absorption of British Enlightenment “improving” ideas. These came through his readings in enduring agricultural classics, such as Jethro Tull’s “Horse-Hoeing Husbandry” (1731), a book that stressed the advantages to be gained for soils by plowing fields. Thomas Hale’s four-volume “A Compleat Body of Husbandry” (1758-59) was another of Washington’s favorites. Ideas also came via personal correspondence with “improving” authors. Foremost here were the English agriculturalist Arthur Young and Scottish Enlightenment figures, such as Sir John Sinclair and James “Bee” Anderson of Edinburgh. Washington learned from all of them and encouraged others to do so as well. The president even recommended Anderson – whose periodical, the Bee, Washington promoted in the Gazette of the United States – for membership in the American Philosophical Society.

Neither did Washington overlook contemporary American agricultural innovators. Some of that set and their activities remain well-known – Thomas Jefferson and his experiments at Monticello, for instance. Others, renowned in the 18th century, are now largely forgotten, among them members of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture such as John Beale Bordley, Richard Peters and Samuel Powel. Their society, founded in 1785, named Washington an honorary member. He fit in.

Still, many of Washington’s innovations for land use had negative consequences for farm laborers. His adjustments often “imposed a far more demanding work regimen that redefined much about the lives and labor of the more than two hundred enslaved people at Mount Vernon.” Increasingly, Washington suspected that the “ideal of a balanced order rooted in nature and improved by human endeavor” was “in conflict with the system of enslaved labor” practiced at Mount Vernon and on his other farms. He came to see that “his system of improved farming could not be reconciled with slavery.” In his last will, Washington famously freed more than 120 of Mount Vernon’s enslaved people – a “momentous provision,” Ragsdale concludes.

The volume is charmingly illustrated with a variety of images. Several of Washington’s many maps and farm plans are reproduced, as is the only surviving photograph (circa 1870) of the 16-sided barn that Washington designed for “the treading of wheat by horses.” We have portraits of Anderson, Sinclair, Young and even of “General Washington’s Jack Ass,” named Royal Gift. (The last, a gift of Spain’s King Charles III in 1786, was the star of Washington’s energetic mule-breeding endeavors.) Representations of Washington include Jean-Antoine Houdon’s acclaimed sculpture of him as Cincinnatus as well as Junius Brutus Stearns’s “Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon,” the painting that graces the book’s cover.

In this reliable and thorough rendering of “the most celebrated farmer of the age,” Ragsdale undeniably casts new light on Washington on the question of slavery. By bringing to life Washington’s farming world, he does more than that. “Washington at the Plow” reminds us of the importance of agriculture and its enlightened improvement to America’s founding. In doing so, it illuminates much for early-American specialists and general readers alike.