1
The Experiments of a Virginia Planter
In March 1760, less than a year after Washington returned to Mount Vernon following his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis, he and Peter, an enslaved blacksmith, worked together to make a plow designed in part by Washington. After that effort failed, Washington returned to the smith’s shop a week later to spend “the greatest part of the day in making a new plow of my own Invention.” The following day, the new plow was set to work in the lower pasture and “Answerd very well.” Since February, Washington had been supervising a new regimen of plowing across the estate at the start of the first season of his full-time management of the farms at Mount Vernon. Over several weeks in late winter and early spring, he relied on an enslaved man he referred to as Mulatto Jack and another he distinguished as Cook Jack to plow new ground for growing clover, lucerne, and rye.1
As he directed the sowing of seeds he had ordered from London, Washington turned to Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry for instruction on the cultivation of lucerne and sainfoin, another fodder crop. He carefully recorded the placement of seeds in experimental beds “to try their Goodness” and to measure the “several Virtues” of compost mixtures he prepared. Washington refitted the mechanisms on his plows, both those crafted by the blacksmiths at Mount Vernon and those shipped from England, and he employed a succession of horses to determine which type was best suited to field work. Washington’s new interest in fodder crops and plowing marked the initial step in his application of the methods of British husbandry that would guide his management of Mount Vernon as he made farming his principal occupation over the next decade and a half.2
By the spring of 1760, Washington aspired to be an enlightened landowner, committed to innovation and experiment, drawing on the knowledge found in British agricultural treatises and shared by a select group of Virginia planters. Following the British methods of agricultural improvement, Washington applied his learning to the practical tasks of farming, with daily visits to his fields where he became familiar with the soil and the growth of crops. His close observation of unfamiliar crops and of the use of new implements allowed him to measure precisely the results of his new ventures and to impose greater regularity on the seasonal patterns of farming.
Washington imposed the same demands for order and regularity on the enslaved laborers, who came under his closer observation and the stricter supervision of white overseers. Washington also recognized that agricultural change at Mount Vernon depended on the education of the enslaved in new skills. Mulatto Jack was almost certainly a novice at plowing, since he had until 1759 been enslaved on the Custis estates where no plows were used, but he and Cook Jack made themselves indispensable to Washington as the only slaves capable of managing a plow during this first season of new farming. When Washington ordered these men to other tasks, plowing came to a stop. As Washington diversified agriculture over the next decade, he purchased slaves who would bring valued skills to Mount Vernon, and he directed enslaved workers on the estate to carry out more difficult tasks that previously required the costly hire of free laborers. Washington’s design of agricultural improvement would continue to drive his management of enslaved labor and give greater value to his investment in slaves, even as he moved away from the staple agriculture that had given rise to the Chesapeake system of slavery.3
Washington first leased Mount Vernon in 1754 from the estate of his late brother Lawrence when, following the recent death of Lawrence’s only child, he could anticipate that he would eventually inherit Mount Vernon and that it would likely be his primary source of income. Over the next four years during his service in the French and Indian War, he only intermittingly managed farming at Mount Vernon, even admitting to an English tobacco merchant in 1757, “I am so little acquainted with the Business relative to my private Affairs that I can scarce give you any information concerning it.” Until his resignation from the Virginia Regiment in December 1758, Washington relied on managers and overseers to pursue a familiar pattern of plantation management, with only limited efforts toward diversification.4
Tobacco was well established as the most important cash crop at Mount Vernon as well as at Washington’s Bullskin Plantation to the west in Frederick County. Washington grew varieties of the premium sweet-scented tobacco at both estates, and during the 1750s, he usually sold his combined crop of tobacco through consignment to merchants in England. Alexandria merchant John Carlyle, who as commissary to the Virginia Regiment was in frequent contact with Washington, often managed the shipment of the tobacco, and from 1755 to 1758, Washington’s brother John Augustine managed much of the farming and other estate business at Mount Vernon. On the recommendations of Carlyle and George William Fairfax, Washington opened correspondences with several English merchants, including Richard Washington of London. Washington expected his namesake, although no relation, to become his principal agent in London for both the sale of tobacco and the purchase of British goods to furnish Mount Vernon. In return for the consignment of tobacco, these merchants sent Washington basic farming implements such as hoes and scythes, and clothing for enslaved laborers. Richard Washington also sent tools used in the redesign of the house at Mount Vernon and the goods to furnish what its owner, even from his remote military posts, intended to make a genteel seat characteristic of a Virginia tobacco planter.5
On his infrequent visits to Mount Vernon during the French and Indian War and in correspondence with Carlyle and John Augustine, Washington encouraged new farming endeavors to supplement the uncertain returns from tobacco. Both of his estates produced wheat that was sold locally, and on at least one occasion shipped to a Norfolk merchant involved in the West Indies trade. Washington continued to acquire cattle and sheep for Mount Vernon, and he ordered the creation of new fields and meadows for the support of livestock and the cultivation of new crops. The gristmill at Mount Vernon, despite an unreliable flow of water, attracted the business of area farmers who brought their wheat and corn to be ground.6
The purchase and hire of additional enslaved laborers enabled Washington to take the first steps toward increased production of crops and greater self-sufficiency of labor on his plantations. Between October 1754 and January 1758, he or his agents purchased at least fourteen slaves and rented the labor of four more. Three of the purchased slaves were carpenters who worked on the construction of tobacco houses and slave quarters and the expansion of Washington’s own house. Washington ordered Cleo, whom he purchased for £50 in 1755, to make clothes for the enslaved in what he considered her “leizure hour’s,” presumably after her work in the fields. In January 1756, John Carlyle, accompanied by Washington’s brother, took the liberty of purchasing for Washington three slaves whom they deemed “So Good a bargin.” Carlyle also purchased for Washington an enslaved woman and child sold by Governor Dinwiddie. The additional slaves, however, were insufficient to meet Washington’s demand for labor at wheat harvest, and at Mount Vernon and Bullskin, overseers paid free laborers to thresh wheat.7
The overseers of both estates sought to convince a skeptical Washington that they had satisfied his expectations of detailed attention to farming and constant work from enslaved laborers. Humphrey Knight at Mount Vernon pleaded, “I hope you will not be Douptfull of my Diligence in your buseness. I’ll Loose my life before any thing shall Go amiss.” Christopher Hardwick, overseer at Bullskin, insisted that he never failed to apprise Washington of important business. Knight, with a casual reference to his violent oversight of labor, reported that he closely monitored the carpenters “and has whipt em when I could see a fault.” He promised to work all of the enslaved laborers to Washington’s advantage. The overseers’ repeated assurances, in response to Washington’s complaints about their management and infrequent written reports, were an early indication of the friction that would mark Washington’s relationship with overseers throughout his life.8
Whatever frustration Washington may have felt about the management of his estates, he received during the growing season of 1758 encouraging reports about the potential for farming at Mount Vernon. George William Fairfax assured Washington that his plantations had produced the finest crops of tobacco and corn that he had seen that year. John Carlyle affirmed that Washington’s crops were the best of their kind in the county, and Humphrey Knight, who managed the crop, added, “I Dont See a better crop of Tob[ac]co any where.” As he prepared to set aside his military ambitions, Washington could anticipate that the management of his agricultural estate might secure his private fortune and his public reputation.9
In the spring of 1759, Washington for the first time had the opportunity to direct a sustained course of farming at Mount Vernon, and through his marriage to Martha Custis earlier that year he gained the financial resources and the control of additional enslaved laborers that would enable him to expand the scale of production beyond anything he previously envisioned. The Mount Vernon estate to which Washington escorted Martha and her two children in April 1759 extended to nearly 2,800 acres, and Washington owned as many as twenty slaves who lived and worked at Mount Vernon. The details of the land were sufficiently unfamiliar to Washington that in October 1759 he decided to mark the exact boundaries of the estate. Relying on his surveying skills, Washington spent two days recording the pole distances along the perimeter of an estate that he described largely in terms of trees. The markers of a “crooked Elm” and a “stooping locust” were characteristic of Virginia deeds, but the survey notes also reflect an instinctive eye for the natural landscape and the agricultural potential of the soil. Washington further noted tenant properties and bogs that would soon be eliminated in his determination to consolidate and coordinate the use of arable land.10
Because Martha’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, had died without a will, she was entitled under Virginia law to one-third of his personal property and to life rights to one-third of the Custis estate’s land and slaves. These dower rights gave Washington access to the Custis cash reserves and the estate’s favorable balance with London merchants, enabling Washington to purchase slaves in unprecedented numbers and to acquire surrounding land. Over the next sixteen years, he would more than double the acreage at Mount Vernon and buy more than sixty slaves. His first land purchase was the largest, more than 1,800 acres across Little Hunting Creek, bought from William Clifton. This problematic transaction eventually brought Washington control of what would form the basis of River Plantation, the largest at Mount Vernon. Before and after coming into ownership of Mount Vernon following the death of Lawrence’s widow, Anne Lee, in March 1761, Washington bought several other parcels that he incorporated into existing plantations or added to the Clifton property. By the summer of 1764, the Mount Vernon estate encompassed nearly 5,500 acres.11
Washington quickly merged his lands at Mount Vernon so that he could bring farming across the estate under his own coordinated management. He chose not to renew the leases of some of the tenants on the estate, and he bought out others. A few tenants continued to rent land on the periphery of the estate and to pay their annual rent in tobacco. Washington followed the same strategy with his newly purchased land on Clifton’s Neck. A survey of the Clifton property, which Washington copied and annotated soon after purchasing the land in 1760, revealed a jumble of leaseholds. Washington determined to consolidate as much of the land as possible to establish new plantations. After removing or relocating several of the tenants, Washington reported in August 1764 that he had “long been pestered with a Tenent that lives in the very heart of the Plantations which I have settled in Clifton’s Neck.” He had already come to the man with various propositions, but “wanting him away now more than ever,” Washington “attacked him again” and persuaded him to relocate to Frederick County where he could lease land owned by Washington’s brother Charles. In a 1766 survey of the Clifton land, which he now referred to as his farm on Little Hunting Creek and the Potomac River, Washington documented the clear division of the plantation into three large fields, which could accommodate the three-year rotation of crops he instituted that year.12
Over the spring and summer of 1759, Washington purchased fifteen slaves, nearly as many as all his previous purchases combined. At the appraisal of the Custis estate that same year, Martha received the property rights to eighty-four slaves. The Washingtons brought at least a dozen of these individuals to Mount Vernon, where they worked and lived alongside the slaves Washington owned, although their legal status remained distinct. Washington controlled the dower slaves during his lifetime, but he could not sell any of them without compensating the Custis estate. If a dower slave married a slave owned by Washington, as often happened, the legal status of their children, like the condition of enslavement itself, was determined by the status of the mother.13
Washington drew on cash from the Custis estate for the several slave purchases made in Williamsburg during the spring session of the House of Burgesses in 1759. In August of that year, he drew £99 sterling from the Custis account with the Hanbury merchant firm in London to pay slave traders who had recently offered for sale in Maryland what they called “choice healthy Gold Coast SLAVES.” The Africans purchased by Washington worked as field laborers at the outlying plantations at Mount Vernon. Hannah and her child, bought from a neighbor of the Custis estate in June 1759, may have been known to Martha and the slaves from the Custis estate; several years later, Washington listed her as the wife of Morris, one of the dower slaves brought to Mount Vernon in 1759.14
During the next four years, Washington continued to purchase slaves, some as individuals and some in groups as large as seven. Most of the individuals he purchased had already been enslaved in Virginia or Maryland, and several were sold as part of the settlement of estates. Washington also participated in sales that exposed the vast scale and brutality of the trade from Africa to the Chesapeake. The August 1759 sale in Maryland had offered 350 enslaved Africans transported on a single ship. Two years later, Washington went to Lower Marlborough, Maryland, to purchase “Sundry Slaves” from the ship Africa, which advertised “A Cargo of Choice Healthy Fine Slaves, consisting of Men, Women, Boys and Girls.” Later in 1761, Washington purchased from Thomson Mason several slaves recently transported from either Africa or the Caribbean.15
The final division of slaves from Lawrence Washington’s estate in 1762 brought his brother control of another five adults and two children. The recently acquired slaves, particularly those who had worked on Virginia plantations, brought a greater diversity of skills to Mount Vernon. Washington increased the number of carpenters, whose work was essential to the introduction of new crops and the construction of shelters for livestock. The carpenters made plow stocks, yokes for oxen, and tumbrils for the oxen to pull. Washington sent more than half the new slaves, and all but one of the enslaved women, to work in the fields. The new purchases, combined with the natural increase of resident slaves, brought the number of enslaved adults at Mount Vernon to sixty-eight by July 1765.16
In his purchase of slaves and land, Washington followed a well-established path of aspiring gentry planters in eighteenth-century Virginia, and he somewhat more cautiously sought to improve his advantages in the tobacco trade, the other traditional foundation of planter wealth. The Custis connection offered Washington an entrée to three prestigious British merchant firms that had managed the sale of the premium tobacco leaf grown on the Custis lands along York River. In May 1759, Washington introduced himself to Robert Cary & Company, the firm that usually received the greatest share of the Custis tobacco. More recently, Martha Custis had managed the estate’s business with the Cary firm following the death of her first husband in 1757. Washington informed the Cary partners that by marriage he was entitled to one third of the Custis estate, and he assured the merchants that he would continue and perhaps increase the consignment of tobacco “in proportion as I find myself and the Estate benefitted thereby.” Washington would soon add the tobacco cultivated at Mount Vernon and Bullskin to the Cary consignments. A merchant firm of the scale and reputation of Cary & Company offered Washington incentives to continue organizing his crop production around the London tobacco market. The Cary firm managed the valuable Custis stock in the Bank of England, it had longstanding relationships with buyers of premium tobacco, and it worked with the leading London shops and manufacturers that catered to the Virginia trade.17
Even as Washington recognized and pursued the potential benefits of trading with leading merchants like Cary & Company, he entered these commercial relationships with a skepticism and mistrust that would grow over the next few years. By the close of his service in the Virginia Regiment, Washington had come to doubt that British officers and administrators accepted colonial Americans as equal partners in the defense and promotion of imperial interests. He confronted each of the Custis merchants with a defensive tone that echoed this perceived lack of British respect for colonials. Early in his correspondence with the Cary firm, Washington criticized the merchants for their premature sale of Custis tobacco, when a short delay would have been to his advantage. When he asked the same merchants for an estimation of prices he could expect for his Potomac tobacco, he advised them to be well informed in their answer or “I might possibly think myself deceivd and be disgusted accordingly.” Washington warned James Gildart, a Liverpool tobacco merchant, to be careful in his selection of goods for the estate because Virginians sometimes “suffer vile Impositions from the dishonesty of the Tradesmen.” After returning to Mount Vernon from his disappointments in the Virginia Regiment, Washington found in each successive consignment of tobacco evidence that the trade in the staple crop was one more supposed benefit of the British empire that, in fact, placed Virginia planters at a perpetual disadvantage.18
The Custis estate had in many ways been a model of the reciprocal benefits of empire for British merchant and Virginia planter in the first half of the eighteenth century, and in his administration of the affairs of Daniel Parke Custis, Washington learned about the organization of one of the colony’s wealthiest estates and largest producers of tobacco. In the year and a half between her husband’s death and her marriage to Washington, Martha managed much of the Custis business and was appointed by a county court as administrator of the estate. At its April 1759 session, the Virginia General Court recognized Washington’s legal authority to administer his wife’s share of the estate and his responsibility for managing the two-thirds of the estate that would be divided between Martha’s two surviving children.19
Between April and October 1759, Washington, working closely with the attorney John Mercer and consulting Martha, drafted accounts of the Custis assets and debts for the commissioners appointed to oversee the distribution of the estate among the three heirs. When he prepared to meet with Mercer in August 1759, he anticipated that it would “be necessary that Mrs. Washington shoud accompany me in order to clear up any doubtful matters.” The various accounts, most of which Washington laboriously copied for his own records, detailed the vast holdings of the Custis estate and the organization of its working plantations. The estate extended to nearly eighteen thousand acres spread over six counties, and at the time of the appraisal controlled 283 slaves, valued at £8,958. Overseers directed work at individual plantations, and the estate was so large that Custis had appointed Joseph Valentine as a steward, in the terminology of English estates, to manage much of the business of the collective plantations.20
Washington made copies of the inventories of property in the six counties, familiarizing himself with the detailed lists of each slave by name and appraised value, the livestock numbering in the hundreds, and scores of farming implements. Despite its scale of operation and the cultivation of corn, wheat, and oats, the Custis estate adhered to an older model of tobacco production, with no evidence of the recent improvements in British agriculture that already attracted Washington’s interest at Mount Vernon. Only on the Eastern Shore plantations were there “4 old plows,” while the Tidewater plantations were firmly fixed in cultivation with the hoe. Nor were there implements of domestic manufactures. The extensive collection of Custis books Washington brought to Mount Vernon included older works on gardening and botany, but none of the British treatises of practical farming that he ordered for himself.21
In addition to the slaves, who were together valued at nearly £3,000, Martha’s dower, which came under Washington’s control and management, included Claiborne’s Plantation, with 2,880 acres in King William County; the Bridge and Ship Landing Quarters, with a combined one thousand acres, in York County; a nearby mill; a house in Williamsburg; and several lots in Jamestown. The Custis estate was remarkable in Virginia for the size of its capital assets, and Martha, in her management of the estate, carried on her late husband’s practice of making large loans to prominent Virginia families. The recovery of debts owed to both her and the Custis children would involve Washington in the business of several of those families and provide him with a unique perspective on the risks of mismanagement and reckless spending by the colony’s largest landholders.22
At Mount Vernon, Washington divided the arable lands into working quarters, called plantations, similar to the Custis estate and other large tobacco growing estates. Before 1759, the cultivated areas at Mount Vernon consisted of the Home Plantation surrounding Washington’s residence and Muddy Hole Plantation to the north, where tobacco was grown. Beginning in 1759, Washington organized Dogue Run Plantation on the creek of the same name and partially formed out of lands purchased in 1757. Williamson’s Plantation, renamed Creek Plantation in 1761, comprised land formerly leased by tenants. Land purchased from William Clifton was consolidated as River Plantation, established by 1761. At the four outlying plantations, which together produced the estate’s tobacco, Washington installed overseers, who, as of 1761, each managed the work of between four and ten enslaved field laborers. The Home Plantation grew wheat, hay, and other crops to support livestock, and was also the site of the largest orchards on the estate. By June 1761, nine enslaved field laborers worked at the Home Plantation. Also living and working in close proximity at the Home House were seven enslaved carpenters, two enslaved blacksmiths, and ten enslaved servants in the mansion. This organization of the estate and division of laborers defined much about the community and family connections for the enslaved, although marriages across plantations were common.23
Washington frequently coordinated the management of the Mount Vernon plantations with that of his Bullskin Plantation in Frederick County. In addition to combining the tobacco crops for marketing, he transferred farming implements and livestock between the estates, and he occasionally moved enslaved workers from one property to the other. Washington was less directly involved in the supervision of the plantation in King William County and the other Custis properties, where Joseph Valentine continued as manager, but he regularly visited these properties on his way to or from sessions of the House of Burgesses. Washington also directed the shipment to Robert Cary & Company of tobacco from the Custis properties under his direct control and those he managed as guardian for Martha’s son, John Parke Custis. Washington understood the operation of the Custis plantations well enough to recruit an overseer from one of the York River quarters to work at Mount Vernon’s River Plantation, and to transfer enslaved field workers who had not been among the initial removal of dower slaves to Mount Vernon.24
In important ways, Washington’s ambitions for Mount Vernon diverged from the model of the Custis estate and the traditional focus on tobacco cultivation. By the time Washington assumed the management of his estate, Virginians were learning about new methods of farming that had dramatically increased productivity in Great Britain over the past several decades. Many of the changes dated to Jethro Tull’s frequently reprinted book, Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, first published in 1731, which emphasized the importance of plowing for the preparation of the soil and the proper sowing of seeds. Even greater gains in wheat and barley production came from crop rotations and the widespread introduction of fodder crops, especially clover, that both restored soil fertility and allowed livestock to be raised in smaller spaces, thereby increasing supplies of manure for further enrichment of the land. These methods allowed for a much more intensive cultivation of land at the same time that the increased size of farms and consolidation of estates added other efficiencies. At least as significant as the changes in cultivation and animal husbandry or those in estate management was the widespread commitment to experiment and the dissemination of agricultural knowledge.25
The advocates of these farming practices sometimes referred to their methods as the New Husbandry, and the most enthusiastic and influential proponents represented a new type of farmer, as well. The literature of agricultural improvement introduced Washington to the emergence of a new rural order in Great Britain and the critical influence of the self-defined gentleman farmer. The widespread adoption of the New Husbandry coincided with a final wave of land enclosure and the consolidation of agricultural estates, facilitating the coordination of crop rotations and livestock breeding. The increasing concentration of landholding allowed estate owners to bring more land under cultivation and to control the methods of farming on the best land. A growing number of landless laborers provided a readily available workforce for estate owners.26
The New Husbandry was always more than a response to these practical opportunities; it represented a different and often self-conscious cultural role assumed by many of the British estate owners who now spent much of their time directing the farms on their lands. Improvement for these estate owners depended on daily supervision of cultivation, but even more important were their reading in a new type of agricultural treatise and their participation in networks for the exchange of scientific knowledge about agriculture. Beginning with the model of Tull, the publications associated with the New Husbandry represented something different in British writing on agriculture in their blend of practical information and scientific analysis. Many of the most effective and influential improvers were lesser gentry and highly capitalized tenants who shared their experiments and experience with one another and who provided an eager market for agricultural treatises. The number of agricultural publications increased dramatically after 1750, and these books, the same type of volumes that brought the New Husbandry to Washington and other farmers in the British colonies, were the most important means for spreading information about improved farming methods.27
In addition to their detailed instructions for the management of crops and livestock, the publications of the New Husbandry defined agricultural improvement as a public good that members of the landed gentry were best placed to serve. The gentry, uniquely among residents of the countryside, could bring to farming a learning and understanding of which the common farmer was thought incapable, and the gentry, unlike the aristocrat, had the practical skills to demonstrate models of cultivation for more general adoption. The emphasis on practical experience and scientific process fixed the New Husbandry in the Enlightenment belief in progress and the ability of humans to improve the world around them. Farming could be a way of understanding the natural world and controlling its resources for the benefit of society.28
Agricultural treatises frequently associated the efforts of the improving gentry with virtuous farmers of antiquity, like Virgil and Pliny, and the allusions to the ancients reaffirmed the professed civic purposes of the gentry who pursued the New Husbandry. “Among the Romans their senators ploughed; and the great examples they gave of virtue and industry laid the foundation of all their after greatness” wrote Edward Lisle in the Observations in Husbandry, which Washington received in 1759. The georgic verses of Virgil enjoyed enormous popularity in Great Britain at the time, and the term georgic came to define far more than a rediscovered style of verse about the countryside. Georgic denoted a pervasive ideal of rural life in which human endeavor transformed nature through labor, reason, and the aesthetic design of the landscape.29
The same ideals and practical knowledge inspired agricultural projects throughout much of Europe, where British models of improvement held sway as they did in the American colonies. Frederick the Great of Prussia, one of the first national leaders to present his agricultural improvements as a public model, hired an English farmer to introduce crop rotations. Agricultural treatises were exchanged between Great Britain and the Continent, although translations from English to European languages predominated. These publications and the correspondence between improving farmers of various nations reflected a commitment to the generous communication of agricultural knowledge from which Washington would benefit in the 1760s and in which he would later participate. Washington joined with enlightened British and European landowners in his eager demand for agricultural knowledge and in his belief that large estates with contiguous farms were the most advantageous sites to demonstrate a new, rational system of agricultural improvement in any society.30
Soon after he returned to Mount Vernon in 1759, Washington immersed himself in the literature of the New Husbandry as part of his self-education as a farmer. In May, in his first correspondence with Robert Cary & Company, he asked the London merchants to send “the newest, and most approvd Treatise of Agriculture,” along with specific titles that indicated his knowledge of the favored books found in the collections of the small group of Virginia planters who embraced British models of agricultural improvement. On a trip to Williamsburg and the Custis estates in the fall of 1760, Washington consulted another planter’s library to confirm the title of Thomas Hale’s A Compleat Body of Husbandry, which he ordered from the Cary firm. Over the next several years, he received from London some of the essential British agricultural treatises, including Lisle’s Observation in Husbandry, Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening, and the first six volumes of Museum Rusticum. Washington relied on the office of the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg to order other books, most notably Duhamel’s A Practical Treatise of Husbandry, and his was one of the first copies in Virginia of what would become an enduring volume in American agricultural libraries well into the next century.31
The treatises that Washington gathered in his library in the 1760s introduced him to the culture of agricultural improvement then flourishing in England and Scotland, but new to Virginia. For decades, organized support for agricultural innovation in Virginia had focused on the traditional goals of mercantilism, with a search for crops that could be produced in the colony and shipped to Great Britain in exchange for credit and finished goods, much as the tobacco trade had long functioned. Silk and wine had been the objects of investment and experiment since the second half of the seventeenth century, and at the same time that Washington assumed the management of farming at Mount Vernon, a Committee on Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures, established by the Virginia Assembly in 1759 and chaired by Charles Carter of Cleve, promoted experiments with wine, olives, and cured sturgeon, all for export to Great Britain. Although Washington joined other prominent neighbors to invest in a vineyard, his acquisition of the British agricultural treatises signaled his intention to break from the mercantilist model on his own estate. Washington’s goal was not simply to diversify crops, as Carter and many other Virginia planters had been doing through the middle decades of the eighteenth century. He planned to emulate British estate owners by integrating the cultivation of crops with the management of livestock and incorporating the latest advances in husbandry with the lessons of his own experiments.32
Landon Carter, brother of Charles and owner of Sabine Hall Plantation in Richmond County, had in the 1750s gathered British agricultural books in his library while he increased wheat cultivation and adopted the plowing, manuring, and crop rotations of the New Husbandry. John Baylor of Caroline County, a friend whose extensive library Washington had visited, purchased more recent British farming publications. That Baylor and Washington also purchased agricultural books through the Williamsburg shop of the Virginia Gazette indicates there was a broader audience for these practical guides, and Washington had opportunities to speak with other improving planters who served with him in the House of Burgesses. His most important sources of information about farming, however, were British books and British merchants who assisted him in the selection and purchase of the implements of husbandry.33
In his growing collection of agricultural books, Washington read about a world of voluntary associations in Great Britain and the collaboration of British landowners committed to sharing their own practical experience and the results of measured experiments. The members of London’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce described their Museum Rusticum as “a channel of intelligence” that would share the recent advances in English agriculture with the gentry and nobility as well as with farmers and artisans. Other volumes, such as Francis Home’s Principles of Agriculture and Vegetation, were written in response to the offer of premiums by improvement societies. Robert Maxwell’s The Practical Husbandman sought to preserve and disseminate the transactions of the Society of Improvers of Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland. The stated aim of many of these books was to establish fixed principles and rational systems that might lead farmers away from the destructive practices of the past.34
In the treatises Washington gathered in his library, the British authors and advocates of agricultural improvement often presented themselves as patriots, promoting the agriculture upon which “the Wealth and the Happiness of the Kingdom depend.” Robert Maxwell dedicated The Practical Husbandman of 1757 to William Pitt, noting that the “greatest and best Men, in all Ages, have been Lovers and Encouragers of Husbandry.” The members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce expected their Museum Rusticum would be “an honour to the kingdom, and a blessing to mankind.” Others agreed that agricultural improvement should be a transnational project, through which Britons would share their notable advances in farming with a wider world. Hale’s Compleat Body of Husbandry aimed to collect and disseminate the most useful agricultural lessons from various nations, so that “they may learn one from another.” The publisher of the 1751 edition of Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, which Washington consulted, combined the patriotic and the imperial in his suggestion that the new methods should be introduced to the British colonies in America to protect the balance of trade and power. As an active reader of these treatises and in his adoption of the principles of the New Husbandry on a Virginia plantation, Washington was able to participate in these discussions, confident that he could contribute to the general prosperity of the empire.35
Many of the New Husbandry volumes that Washington read linked agricultural improvement to civic responsibilities in ways that reinforced the Virginia planter’s sense of his own social authority. The authors favored by Washington argued that meaningful improvements in agriculture must be the work of gentry landowners who were actively engaged in the daily tasks of farming and who held influence over smaller farmers. The Farmer’s Compleat Guide held that the proper advocate of agricultural improvement was “a gentleman who has a large farm in his own hands.” Lisle, in Observations in Husbandry, declared that of all the advantages arising to a gentleman engaged in farming—health, character, material security—none was greater than that of doing good on the public stage. Washington would through much of his life as a farmer similarly present his improvements as a public example that he and other wealthy Virginians with access to British knowledge and superior farming implements were uniquely qualified to implement on their plantations.36
Washington had every reason to believe that his adoption of the cultivation practices of the New Husbandry would bring the same practical benefits to a Virginia plantation. Beginning in 1760 with the seminal text of Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, Washington initiated his practice of excerpting practical information, often in small notebooks that he could carry in his coat pocket when he rode to his fields, and the British books that he added to his library offered practical guidance and encouragement for his innovations. His early experiments with seed germination were almost certainly inspired by Home’s Principles of Agriculture and Vegetation, which he had recently received from Robert Cary & Company. From Hale’s Husbandry, which his London merchants sent in March 1761, Washington learned about the use of river mud as a soil enrichment, which he began to apply in 1762. In the same volumes of Hale, he read of the advantages of sowing turnips with a drill plow, one of which he ordered from Cary & Company in the fall of 1761. Duhamel’s Practical Treatise persuaded Washington of the merits of the Rotherham plow, which he ordered from England soon after receiving the volume.37
While Washington remained invested in tobacco cultivation, his innovations in farming at Mount Vernon in the early 1760s were largely focused on other crops and inspired by the model of British husbandry. “The chief Art of an Husbandman is to feed the Plants to the best Advantage,” wrote Jethro Tull, and much of the subsequent agricultural literature consulted by Washington offered instruction on the examination and preparation of soil. Washington undertook a series of carefully observed experiments to discern the optimal preparation of the soil for different crops. In April 1760, he designed a multi-compartment box with ten sections, each filled with a different mixture of soil and amendments, including three types of dung, mud, sand drawn from the river, and marl, a calcium-rich clay. With a specially made device, Washington planted three grains of wheat, oats, and barley in each compartment and then measured their progress, finding that the “black mould” from swamp land was the most effective.38
In a bed prepared with dung, Washington sowed clover, lucerne, and rye grass in numbered rows to compare their density of growth. Another field of lucerne was partially sowed by drills and partially sowed by raking in. A specially prepared bed was divided between trefoil clover and lucerne, “both done with design to see how these Seeds answer in that Ground.” He extended his experiments to tobacco, planting five sorts of sweet-scented tobacco in equal allotments of dunged soil and soil left without amendment. At another quarter, Washington ordered tobacco to be planted in hills with and without marl, “giving both equal working and let them fare exactly alike in all Respects.”39
Soon after he returned to Mount Vernon in the spring of 1759, Washington assured one of his English tobacco merchants that he would “conduct my own business with more punctuality than heretofore as it will pass under my own immediate Inspection.” He imposed time-based metrics on the work of enslaved laborers and free artisans. In his agreement with an indentured joiner, John Askew, Washington required that any time lost, whether to sickness, negligence, or private business, would be made up at the end of the year, and Washington maintained an account of days worked. From the first of January 1760, Washington required weekly accounts of carpenters’ work to be submitted by Will, purchased as a slave in April and now working as the lead carpenter at Mount Vernon. Washington entrusted the enslaved miller, Anthony, to deliver an account of the days worked by the free laborer hired by Washington to rebuild his mill.40
Washington devised his own work programs, which he expected enslaved laborers to follow. In early February 1760, on a daily circuit of his plantations, Washington noted with disapproval that a team of four enslaved carpenters had hewed only 120 feet on a shortened work day. He sat down to observe the carpenters as they worked at their own pace, while he measured the time expended and the lumber finished. Accounting for the length of the day, Washington calculated that two carpenters were each capable of hewing 125 feet of poplar wood a day, while two others could together saw 180 feet of plank. Washington would expect of the carpenters an increased productivity as the days lengthened into spring. He also noted the need for precise measurement of work with other types of wood.41
Overseers met with separate expectations of regularity as well as the frequent displeasure of Washington. Washington considered Christopher Hardwick at Bullskin in Frederick County to be a “Rascally Overseer,” who abused livestock and ignored severely ill slaves. On a visit to one of his Mount Vernon plantations in January 1760, Washington found the overseer Robert Stephens absent, “According to Custom,” and soon thereafter he “severely reprimanded young Stephens for his Indolence.” A week later, Washington found Stephens “hard at Work with an ax—very extraordinary this!” John Foster provoked Washington’s fury when he absented himself for several days from his charge at Dogue Run Plantation. Neither Stephens nor Foster lasted long under Washington’s direct supervision. Stephens had left by the fall of 1760 when Washington personally assumed direction of the tobacco harvest at Williamson’s Tract; John Foster ran away from Mount Vernon in the spring of 1762.42
Washington hoped to enforce steady work by overseers and free artisans through written agreements that outlined responsibilities and the consequences of failure. John Askew, who came to work as a joiner in September 1759, signed an agreement to labor “duely from Sun rise to Sun set, allowing proper times only for Eating.” When Burgess Mitchell arrived as overseer of the Home House plantation in May 1762, he agreed “to attend strictly to all orders and directions” from Washington, and to execute those directions “with the greatest care Expedition and exactness.” Washington even required the overseer to behave in such a diligent and commendable manner as “to gain the good esteem & liking of his said employer.” Mitchell acceded to Washington’s stipulation that he would forfeit his wages and be turned off the estate if he failed to fulfill any article in the letter of agreement. Without further explanation or payment, Washington recorded that Mitchell departed less than three months after he arrived.43
In written agreements and terms of hire, Washington made the overseers responsible for the control of enslaved workers under their management. Edward Violette at Bullskin agreed to remain constantly at the Plantation, “looking after his People.” Nelson Kelly at Dogue Run plantation was required to prevent the slaves from visiting other plantations without his consent. He also promised “to forbid strange Negroes frequenting their Quarters without lawful excuses,” a provision that implicitly acknowledged that familiar slaves from other estates or free blacks often visited relatives and friends among the enslaved community at Mount Vernon. Washington initially managed the agricultural labor at the Home House farm, but by 1762, as the number of field workers increased, he hired an overseer with the explicit responsibility for supervising and working with the enslaved laborers at that farm. At the same time that overseers enforced steady labor, they were required by Washington to ensure the care of the enslaved under their management, “treating them with humanity and tenderness when Sick.” The agreements with overseers made Washington’s plantations more reliant on enslaved labor by discouraging the employment of hired workers, who had often assisted in the harvesting and threshing of wheat. The compensation of the overseers was henceforth to be reduced by deducting from their share of crop sales the proportionate costs of any free workers they hired.44
Washington hoped to impress upon the overseers his intention to have his tobacco managed as carefully as possible. Edward Violette and Nelson Kelly obliged themselves to grow the type of tobacco prescribed by Washington and to manage it according to his specifications. To promote the quality of the crop, Washington notified the overseers that he would always be in attendance when the tobacco arrived at the inspection warehouse and that he expected it to appear “very good, very neat, and very clean.” Washington acknowledged that his emphasis on the quality of tobacco leaf might reduce the quantity grown, and he designed compensation accordingly. Overseers on the plantations that produced tobacco for market received a specified share of the proceeds from the sale of the crop and a bonus determined by the amount by which the sale price in Great Britain exceeded the price offered by buyers on the Potomac.45
When Washington shipped his first consignment of Potomac tobacco to Robert Cary & Company in spring 1761, he assured the merchants of his careful management of the crop and asked for advice on the future preparation of his crop, “for I am more anxious about the quality than quantity of what I ship.” At the subsequent suggestion of the merchants, Washington agreed to remove the stems from some of his tobacco, but insisted on shipping leaf with and without the stems so that he could judge if the sales price justified the additional effort. The same year, he divided his shipment into three lots, each with a different kind of tobacco, and he asked the Cary merchants to report on the market value of each sort. Unfortunately, the merchants misunderstood the instructions, according to Washington, who suggested that they might want to read the letter again. When the Cary partners criticized some of the shipment, Washington conceded that the narrow leaf in question had been planted by mistake, and without his approval.46
During the first full season under Washington’s direction, tobacco production at Mount Vernon and Bullskin increased from slightly more than twenty thousand pounds to more than thirty-two thousand pounds. Packed into thirty hogsheads, the combined Potomac crop grown in 1760 was shipped to Robert Cary & Company, while Washington consigned to Richard Washington only the lower-quality tobacco he received in payment of rent from tenants. In the following season, the Mount Vernon and Bullskin plantations produced more than fifty-two thousand pounds of tobacco for export, and Washington again consigned his entire Potomac crop to Cary & Company. This crop, only the second grown under Washington’s direct supervision, would be the largest produced at either Mount Vernon or Bullskin. The combined yield fell to just under thirty-eight thousand pounds in 1762, to about thirty-five thousand in 1763, and to twenty-seven thousand in 1764. When the tobacco grown in 1762 was shipped to Cary & Company, Washington made up for the deficiency with fifteen hogsheads of inferior rental tobacco. He further apologized for the quality of his own crop, assuring the merchants that much of it was of a sort that he would never again raise.47
Despite Washington’s close management, neither the careful instruction of the overseers nor the experiments in improved cultivation increased the quality or the quantity of the tobacco grown at Mount Vernon. Each season seemed to bring new obstacles to a successful tobacco crop. In 1762, the Potomac region suffered one of the most severe droughts in memory. In 1763, a wet spring, a summer drought, and an early frost combined to ruin Washington’s crop. When Washington attempted to repeat his experiment with different sorts of tobacco, the weather destroyed the plants and reduced his anticipated crop by half. During the first several years of Washington’s management of Mount Vernon, the continuing war between Great Britain and France required merchant ships to wait for convoys, and insurance was so expensive that Washington chose not to insure for the full value of his crop. He hoped the prospect of peace in 1763 would restore the fortunes of merchants and planters, but, in fact, the free flow of the tobacco trade brought a decline in prices that had reached their wartime peak in 1759.48
Early in their correspondence, Washington asked the merchants of Robert Cary & Company what prices he might expect for Potomac tobacco if it were grown in the same manner as the best tobacco cultivated along the York and James Rivers. He quickly learned that neither plant stock nor skillful management could ensure the prices offered for the York River leaf esteemed on the small but lucrative domestic market in England. By the 1760s, most tobacco grown along the Potomac was sold directly to British buyers in Virginia, often the Scottish merchants who sold the cheaper grades of tobacco to growing markets on the European continent. Washington repeatedly reminded the merchants of Robert Cary & Company that he could have received a better price for his tobacco if he had sold directly to traders in Virginia, as he had done in 1759, but he continued the correspondence with the firm to maintain the personal contact with London and to facilitate the large annual order of goods for the estate.49
When Washington in May 1764 learned from Cary & Company that he had fallen more than £1,800 in their debt, it proved to be a moment of reckoning for his participation in the tobacco trade and for the management of the entire estate. Although he claimed to be at a loss to understand the size of the debt, Washington conceded that to pay for slaves and land, he had depended on cash from the Custis accounts and drawn too heavily on the sterling balance with Cary & Company to provide Martha’s son, John Parke Custis, his share of the Custis personal estate. The debt was deepened by the failure of four bills of credit, totaling more than £400, submitted to Cary & Company by Washington over the past three years. Always protective of his reputation, Washington wanted the merchants to acknowledge that the debt was a result of “Mischances rather than Misconduct.” Washington insisted that, had his crops proved good and sold well, he would have had a favorable balance with his London merchant, but his hunger for slaves and land had revealed the limits of a trade that would no longer support the expansion of estates as it had earlier in the eighteenth century.50
The alarm of the debt and the repeated disappointments in the traditional consignment tobacco trade emboldened Washington to advance the kind of diversification that had excited his interest since 1759. After the harvest of the crop planted in the spring of 1764, Washington sharply curtailed the production of tobacco on his Potomac lands. In 1765 he planted small crops at just two of his Mount Vernon plantations and abandoned tobacco altogether at Bullskin. In 1766 he grew no tobacco at all on his Potomac lands, and Mount Vernon ceased to be a tobacco plantation. Washington would henceforth rely on tobacco from the more productive dower lands in King William County to meet his obligations with Robert Cary & Company. At the same time, he lessened his reliance on the credit extensions of his tobacco merchants, assuring them that he would reduce his annual order of goods from London while the debt was outstanding. To reduce his expenditures further, Washington suspended for several years the purchase of slaves and of additional lands adjoining Mount Vernon.51
Wheat replaced tobacco as the most important cash crop at Mount Vernon. Washington had already taken a significant step to expand the marketing of wheat when in January 1763 he entered into an exclusive contract with the Alexandria merchant firm of Carlyle & Adam. Beginning with the next wheat crop at Mount Vernon and continuing for seven years, Washington would sell all of the wheat raised for market to the partnership of John Carlyle and Robert Adam for a fixed price per bushel of three shillings, nine pence of Virginia current money. Washington agreed to deliver the wheat to landings in Alexandria, at which time the merchants and their millers would assume all further risk.52
Like most estates in mid-eighteenth century Virginia, Mount Vernon had long produced wheat, the surpluses of which were most commonly sold in the colony. Since mid-century, demand for North American wheat had increased in Europe and the Caribbean, and by the 1760s merchants like Carlyle & Adam began to serve those markets. In 1764, the Mount Vernon plantations delivered 257 bushels of wheat, less than a third of their production, to Carlyle & Adam; a year later they delivered their entire crop of 1,112 bushels, as the grain became the most important responsibility and the largest source of income for the overseers on each farm. Overseers, for the portion of the crop negotiated with Washington, received the contract price per bushel of wheat of three shilling, nine pence.53
In 1765, at the same time that Washington phased out tobacco plantings and increased wheat crops, he devoted other land at Mount Vernon to the cultivation of hemp, and he encouraged his overseers with the promise of a share of the market sale. Parliament repeatedly had offered a bounty for the colonial production of hemp, usually without much effect, but more recently Virginia planters had shown interest in the crop. At least by 1763, hemp had been grown commercially at Washington’s Bullskin Plantation in Frederick County, a region in which hemp was becoming the most important agricultural commodity. For his Mount Vernon plantations, Washington secured hempseed from his own plantation in Frederick and purchased more from a Fredericksburg merchant, the likely source of the English seed he tried in 1765. That year, the overseers at Muddy Hole, Dogue Run, and River plantations all grew hemp and experimented with the several methods of rotting the crop, by which the fibers used in rope making were freed from the stems. Washington also invested in the equipment for the final processing of hemp and for weaving it into coarse cloth.54
The introduction of hemp at Mount Vernon was part of Washington’s broader exploration of agricultural opportunities in the face of the declining prospects for tobacco at his Potomac estate. He inquired into the market for corn and grains through the wine trade to Southern Europe, where demand was high. In 1763, he considered the more active cultivation of farmlands on his property to the west, and he negotiated with a former overseer, Christopher Hardwick, to manage 240 acres in Hampshire County, hoping to bring “Tobacco Hemp Grain Beef Porke Butter and other Things to Market.” Washington provided Hardwick with an enslaved laborer, Troy, who had worked in the fields at Mount Vernon for a year, and he committed to buy as many as five additional enslaved Africans from “some Guinea Ship,” as well as to supply Hardwick with livestock and farming implements. Washington, however, was seldom comfortable managing an overseer from afar, and he closed out his account with Hardwick several months before the partnership was to go into effect.55
Washington had better luck when for the first time he hired a manager to assist in supervising all of the activities across his Mount Vernon estate and at the plantation in Frederick County. Lund Washington, a distant cousin, had managed the Virginia and Maryland estates of Henry and William Fitzhugh before he came to Mount Vernon in the fall of 1764. He would remain as the estate manager for over twenty years, and he also served as a kind of assistant or secretary to Washington. In his early years at Mount Vernon, Lund hired and paid free workers, delivered wheat to Carlyle & Adam, and purchased livestock for the estate. Lund arrived with sufficient agricultural knowledge to instruct the overseer at Bullskin in the cultivation and processing of hemp. The hire of Lund followed Washington’s recognition that in the absence of the owner, an estate required “a Person of Character to manage the whole.”56
As he adopted new crops with different seasonal routines, Washington sought to maximize his gain from the labor of the slaves on his plantations. Wheat and hay harvests required the timely coordination of laborers across the estate, regardless of their primary work. A growing number of enslaved carpenters, smiths, and laborers at the Home House farm joined the field workers to complete wheat harvests at the outlying plantations. Washington directed the work of laborers in moving a tenant’s house off one of the newly organized farms and again when they repaired the mill dam. The carpenters, smiths, and field laborers from the Home House were employed in the harvest of sixty acres of wheat at River and Creek plantations in July 1763, and the carpenters spent extended days working in the cornfields under John Chowning at River Plantation and Josias Cook at the Creek Plantation. In an early instance of measuring the working days of slaves in monetary terms, Washington deducted from each overseer’s allotted share of the crop an estimated cash value of the work of the enslaved laborers from the Home House.57
The scale and complexity of operations across the estate heightened Washington’s demand for closer supervision and control of enslaved laborers. He was particularly concerned that overseers curtail night visits between the several plantations, but as he soon discovered, the larger number of enslaved field workers, living at separate quarters, opened an opportunity for collaborative resistance and flight. In August 1761, just a few days after Washington traveled to Maryland to purchase several slaves recently transported from Africa, four enslaved field workers escaped from Mount Vernon. Although they left from Dogue Run plantation, one of the men, Neptune, worked at River Plantation, suggesting some coordination across the estate. The four men, ranging in age from twenty-five to forty, had each been at Mount Vernon for about two years.
Although group flight was relatively uncommon in Virginia and especially at Mount Vernon, it was most likely to involve Africans, and the runaways in the summer of 1761 were all African born. Two of them, Neptune and Cupid, had been transported on the same ship from which Washington purchased them, and in Washington’s view, they spoke “unintelligible English.” Peros, “esteemed a sensible judicious Negro,” had been enslaved for many years at a Custis property near Williamsburg, and Jack, more recently transported from Africa, had lived in Middlesex County and was probably one of the nine slaves purchased there by Washington in 1759. None of the enslaved men, to Washington’s knowledge, had experienced recent conflict with anyone at Mount Vernon or met with the anger of their overseers, which Washington assumed the likeliest provocations for most runaways. While individual runaways had sometimes remained near the estate and occasionally returned of their own accord, this group, Washington suspected, would “steer some direct Course (which cannot even be guessed at) in Hopes of an Escape.” Each failed in that escape, and upon recapture, Washington was intent on reclaiming their labor. He returned each individual to field work but on separate plantations, three at Mount Vernon and one at Bullskin, where Neptune again ran away and was again recaptured in 1765.58
Washington considered another runaway sufficiently dangerous that he decided in 1766 to sell the slave, Tom, to a buyer in the Caribbean, even though Washington acknowledged that Tom was a highly skilled field worker as well as foreman of a work gang on Mount Vernon’s largest plantation. Tom had only recently attempted to run away, and the fact that he was also a “rogue” in Washington’s estimation “was by no means remarkable.” The decision to sell Tom in exchange for a shipment of liquor and sweetmeats marked some unexplained limit to Washington’s willingness to manage slaves and their perceived recalcitrance as long as he was able to extract their valuable labor. Abram and Cloe, two enslaved field laborers who worked at River Plantation under Tom’s direction, had run away two months before Tom did, and upon their recapture, Washington sent them back to work in the fields, as he had with the four men who ran away in 1761. The banishment of Tom to the harsh work of the sugar islands may have been intended as an example to be made of a slave with a certain degree of privilege, but his sale and separation from the plantation community remained an infrequent form of punishment at Mount Vernon, where Washington was more concerned with securing the maximum labor from each slave.59
However many “rogues” he identified among the enslaved workers, at no time before the Revolutionary War did Washington indicate that his reliance on slavery might impede the transition to wheat or the broader project of agricultural improvement at Mount Vernon. In fact, his renewed purchases of slaves beginning in 1767 and his transfer of more than twenty additional slaves from the Custis estates to Mount Vernon in 1770 suggest that Washington was confident that enslaved labor, closely supervised and apportioned across the estate’s arable land, would enable him to establish a thriving operation based on mixed agriculture and livestock management. The challenge, as it had been with tobacco, was to cultivate enough good land to employ the enslaved field workers to his advantage, preferably on a consolidated estate that he could personally manage.60
The implementation of Washington’s vision of agricultural diversification had since 1759 depended on a greater variety of skills among the enslaved laborers. In his 1759 indenture agreement with the John Askew, Washington required the joiner to “use his best endeavour’s to instruct in the art of his trade any Negro or Negroes which the said George Washington shall cause to work with him.” In 1760, Anthony, a dower slave who may have learned the trade at a Custis estate, was serving as Washington’s miller and lived at the mill with his wife, Betty. Anthony was succeeded by another enslaved miller, George, who continued at the mill for more than five years. Mulatto Jack not only worked as a plowman, he frequently traveled west to Bullskin and south to the plantation in King William County, delivering farm implements and livestock as well as acting as a courier for Washington’s letters. On at least one of the outlying plantations, as was typical of other large Virginia estates, one of the enslaved workers served as a foreman of the gang of field workers. By 1765, Washington enumerated eleven enslaved tradesmen, a term that encompassed carpenters, millers, and blacksmiths, at the Home House.61
In the parlance of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia, Washington, by rejecting tobacco cultivation at Mount Vernon, became a farmer rather than a planter. His identity as a farmer would involve far more than his choice of crops. The term connoted for him a commitment to experiment and innovation, and responsible stewardship of the land under his cultivation. Being a farmer also meant adopting the principles of the New Husbandry and making practical use of implements designed for the most advanced British agriculture. Washington believed that this course of farming would depend for its success on his knowledge and his ability to direct the operations of his estate, which he understood to include the adaptation of an enslaved labor force to the work required of a new kind of agriculture. The pursuit of this agricultural model also redefined his relationship with Great Britain.
Fig 1.1 Illustration of the Rotherham plough, from Robert Maxwell, The Practical Husbandman, 1757 (fig. 1, plate 1). Washington in 1765 ordered a Rotherham plow from the Yorkshire town for which it was named. The plow was described in two treatises Washington added to his library by 1764, and he relied on tobacco merchants in Great Britain to obtain this and other farming implements to support his transition to wheat cultivation. Courtesy of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
Washington’s transition to farmer was made possible by his existing commercial ties with British tobacco merchants, even as he moved away from that traditional staple crop of colonial Virginia. The tobacco merchants, who were Washington’s most important personal link to the center of empire, offered him access to the knowledge and materials he needed to establish a new agricultural foundation for his estate. Washington relied on the British tobacco merchants, particularly Robert Cary & Company, for the seeds, the plows, and the scythes required to cultivate wheat, and also the grasses and fodder crops to support livestock husbandry and soil improvement. The Cary merchants selected agricultural treatises relating to improved farming and provided access to the mechanical improvements Washington read about in British publications. In March 1765, Washington used a single consignment of his tenants’ tobacco, shipped to Liverpool merchants, to procure a Rotherham plow. He insisted that this implement, one of the essential designs of the New Husbandry, must be purchased in the Yorkshire town where it had been invented, “for none but the true sort will answer the end of my sending for it.”62
Washington’s connections with tobacco merchants in London and other British ports enabled him to pursue a course of farming that strengthened his identification with a community of improving landowners in Great Britain. The farming implements he ordered for use by enslaved field laborers provided a material link with the transformation of English agriculture over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Washington might continue to chafe under the perceived slights of London shopkeepers who sent defective wheat sieves he dismissed as useless lumber, but the trade also brought him plows and sheep shears from the prominent ironmonger Theodosia Crowley, seeds from “an eminent Hop Merchant in Southwark,” and farm implements from traders who supplied the leading agricultural estates in England.63 This shared material culture and common farming practice allowed Washington to participate in a new kind of partnership with Great Britain, while his agricultural innovations eroded the older commercial ties of empire.