Science  /  Book Review

Farmer George

The connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.

“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.