Epilogue
The Reputation of a Farmer
In the years following the Revolutionary War, fame and the widespread acclaim for the general-turned-farmer heightened Washington’s attention to reputation and the potential legacy of his agricultural improvements. Beginning in 1785, in his most ambitious transformation of farming, Washington organized his estate not just to demonstrate the private advantages of the full course of British farming, but also to exercise a civic-minded leadership comparable to his service in the military and public office. He presented his example for the emulation of smaller farmers and exhibited for the nation the benefits of his learning and access to a global network of improving landowners and naturalists. He saw the success of his implementation of British husbandry as the measure by which this new form of leadership would be judged, and through his pursuit of agricultural improvement he sought to redefine the traditional role of the master of a large estate by reversing the shortcomings of farming in the United States. His efforts to earn the support of enlightened agricultural leaders in Great Britain and Europe and his aspiration to live up to the revolutionary era ideals invested in him as the American Cincinnatus would have their most profound and unexpected impact in his eventual decision to provide for the freedom of the slaves he owned. The response to that manumission would shape the public memory of Washington the farmer, even as it diminished the influence of a model of agricultural improvement that proved far too demanding for smaller farmers.
By dedicating himself to agricultural improvement and the practical demonstration of enlightened farming, Washington embraced an ideal that was shared by other national leaders in the North Atlantic world. The advocates of the New Husbandry equated agricultural improvement with a renewal of civic virtue, and by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, agricultural learning and farming experience had become esteemed qualities of national leaders. Arthur Young offered Washington his prediction that “the time will come when the best & fairest plume in the wing of the Great Frederick” would be his agricultural improvements rather than his military victories. Young encouraged Washington to “send new votaries to the Plough,” and to serve for the “Western World” as an example similar to Frederick II, who had transformed agriculture in Prussia. Young stressed that Washington’s impact would be inconsequential if he “were merely Mr George Washington planter at Mount Vernon,” but his renown gave him the potential for vast influence. “For a man on whom the eyes of the universe are fixed it is some thing for the good of agriculture to have it known that he regards, practices and studies it.”1
As Young knew well, Washington had an even closer counterpart in George III, whose agricultural experiments and mentors, including Young, closely paralleled those of Washington. Even with limited knowledge of the British monarch’s dedication to farming, Washington understood agricultural improvement to be the proper pursuit of a great leader. He received support from the kings of Spain and France, and from his former French military comrades, who encouraged his return from the army to the farm. In the United States, the members of the early agricultural societies were often public officeholders or former officers in the Continental Army, and Washington shared his interest in farming with influential governmental officials, such as John Jay. Washington’s most notable agricultural peer in public life was Thomas Jefferson, and their exchanges about farming formed their most amicable bond, even as the political differences between them deepened. Washington and Jefferson, like George III, used their public renown and their private estates to promote what they intended to be national models of agriculture, and for the citizens and subjects of their respective nations, the leaders became the most famous proponents of a system of enlightened farming based on scientific knowledge and practical experience.
After the close of the Revolutionary War, Washington was increasingly recognized as a leader of agricultural improvement in service to the new nation, and his image was embedded in the image of farming. At a celebration of the Treaty of Paris in Boston in March 1784, a citizen displayed on the balcony of his house a depiction of Washington not with the trappings of military command, but rather “crowned with a Laurel—at his right hand, Commerce; and on his left, Agriculture flourishing.” Washington’s virtuous attention to farming stood in contrast to the perceived political corruption of the mid-1780s. On the eve of the Federal Convention, “A Farmer” writing in a New Hampshire newspaper praised Washington, who, “like Cincinnatus of old, retired to his farm, and while we had been caballing, and intreaguing has busied himself in improving his lands.” When Washington passed through Alexandria en route to his inauguration, citizens hailed their “improver” of agriculture, among the litany of praises for the newly elected president. The author of an early history of the United States, published in 1795, equated Washington’s dedication to farming with his public leadership, noting, “President (or, as he is sometimes called, Farmer) Washington is as industrious in agricultural pursuits, as he is brave in the field, or wise in the cabinet.” Washington’s role as the public-spirited improver continued in retirement from the presidency, when he was toasted as “the illustrious Farmer of Mount Vernon.”2
The centrality of farming to the public image of Washington’s leadership received its most powerful representation in the sculpture commissioned from Houdon for the Virginia state capitol. After the French sculptor visited Mount Vernon in 1785, he created the standing figure of Washington in military dress, but having just removed his cloak and sword as he takes up the walking stick representative of civilian life. Behind Washington is the plow waiting for his return to life as a farmer. The plow is that of Washington, not Cincinnatus, with the visible barrel of a drill plow like that designed by Washington and manufactured by the enslaved craftsmen at Mount Vernon. Houdon’s inclusion of symbols of Washington’s military, civil, and agricultural leadership followed his consultations with Jefferson, Franklin, and Gouverneur Morris, and their consensus in favor of modern rather than classical dress reaffirmed that Washington’s association with farming was more than an allusion to Cincinnatus and the ideals of virtue from antiquity, it was a critical component of his service to the nation.3
The image of Washington as Cincinnatus resonated in Great Britain as well as the United States. When the Marquess of Lansdowne in 1797 received the gift of Gilbert Stuart’s standing portrait of Washington as president, he placed it near a sculpture of Cincinnatus in his London townhouse. The veneration of Washington as agricultural leader reached wider audiences in Great Britain soon after his death. William Tatham commissioned a copy of Houdon’s bust of Washington for presentation to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, in recognition of Washington’s patronage of agriculture and the practical arts and his refusal of the “temptations of popular power, or selfish emoluments.” When he delivered the bust in February 1802, Tatham made no reference to the general or the president, only to “George Washington Esqr. of Virginia, … friend of Franklin.” Tatham praised Washington for his efforts “to inculcate, by practice, those lessons of industry, economy, conciliation and philanthropy, which tend to bring mankind nearer together.” That same unifying effect of Washington’s commitment to improvement was a central theme of the several volumes of his agricultural correspondence published in Great Britain soon after his death. Sir John Sinclair, James Anderson, and Arthur Young published many of the letters that Washington had requested be kept private during his lifetime, and each of the agricultural writers presented his respective correspondence as evidence that Washington, in his pursuit of agricultural improvement, had promoted reconciliation and the recognition of common interests among nations. Sinclair, in the introduction to his volume, paid tribute to Washington “who, though the immediate cause of the separation between Great Britain and America, yet is the person to whom, in a great measure, is to be ascribed, the good understanding which now so happily subsists between the two countries.”4
For Sinclair, as for Anderson and Young, Washington embodied the principle that agricultural improvement should be a universal effort, removed from political disputes and national jealousies. James Anderson of Edinburgh recalled there had been no “political intrigue” in the correspondence between a “nameless individual in North Britain” and a man so exalted as Washington. Washington also served as the most compelling example of a great national leader who surrendered power for the life of a farmer. Arthur Young told readers it was “a pleasing spectacle to a reflecting mind, to see so close an attention paid to the practice of Agriculture, by men in the highest situations; who, from commanding Armies, and presiding in Senates, can descend to the humbler walk of Husbandry, and find it an employment sufficient to interest the most splendid talents.” Sinclair encouraged his readers to contemplate “a person elevated by the voice of his fellow-citizens, to the summit of political authority; who, instead of wishing to aggrandize himself, and to extend his power, was anxiously bent to quit that situation.” Sinclair hoped publication of Washington’s agricultural letters would restrain “those, who might otherwise be induced, to dedicate themselves entirely, either to the phantoms of military fame, or the tortures of political ambition.”5
Sinclair published his volume of letters with engraved facsimiles of Washington’s distinctive handwriting, which he thought would make the edition a valuable keepsake in the United States and Great Britain “a Century or two hence.” Arthur Young published most of the letters he received from Washington as an account of his farming, and he included the first published print of Washington’s 1793 survey of the five farms at Mount Vernon. Young, the publisher of so many agricultural tours and national surveys, concluded that few countries had been described as well as in Washington’s survey of farming in the Middle Atlantic and Chesapeake states. James Anderson first published a character study of Washington along with two letters in his monthly magazine. These and additional letters exchanged by Anderson and Washington were gathered in a volume published in Massachusetts in 1800. An Alexandria, Virginia, bookseller combined the Washington letters to Sinclair and Young in a single volume published in 1803.6
Sinclair wanted leaders in both nations to read the agricultural correspondence, and he distributed the volume widely. In apparent ignorance of political divisions in the United States, Sinclair in June 1800 sent the volume to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, urging them to join one another in support of the national board of agriculture proposed by Washington. Sinclair sent the volume for inclusion in the library of George III, and he deposited the original letters from Washington in the British Museum, “as the precious relics of a great man fit to be preserved in that valuable repository.” Sinclair sent Martha Washington the published correspondence, with assurances that he would dedicate any profit from sales of the volume to some suitable tribute to Washington. Sinclair in his plan of publication had suggested to potential subscribers that he would like to fund an agricultural college or other public institution, such as Washington would have promoted. (Instead of establishing a school, Sinclair commissioned from the Scottish architect Alexander McInnes a monument to Washington, to be erected in the square of the model new town he established in a remote area of Northern Scotland, where he renamed one of his farms “Mount Vernon.”)7
Fig E.1 “Plan of Washington’s Monument to be erected … opposite the new Town of Thurso.” Rendering by Alexander McInnes. When Sir John Sinclair in 1800 published his correspondence from Washington, he assured Martha Washington that the proceeds from the volume would fund a suitable tribute. Sinclair commissioned the design of this monument that he planned to erect in the model new town he established in the far north of Scotland, but it was never constructed. British Library, Maps K.Top.49.47.2.
Even more than a decade after his death, Washington remained a paragon of agricultural leadership in the United States. In the preface to a Philadelphia agricultural society publication in 1811, Washington was praised for establishing “the happiness of his country” through his attention to farming. As a military leader, its writer recalled, Washington laid “the foundations of our present prosperity,” and in peacetime he was, “in addition to his other virtues, distinguished for his ardent devotion to the interests of AGRICULTURE; and delighted in its practical pursuits.” The figure of Fame, “long the faithful eulogist” of the departed military chief, now appeared in the garb and emblems of Ceres, and in the recital of Washington’s example the goddess of agriculture called citizens and “the industrious and sober husbandman” from “subjugated portions of Europe” to the cultivation of the nation’s fields. Should a monument be raised to the memory of Washington, the preface concluded, its most conspicuous tablet should read: “the encouragement of agricultural improvement, and information, was among the favourite wishes of his heart.”8
The representation of Washington as the American Cincinnatus would live on in the nineteenth century as a model of public virtue and personal integrity, but the veneration of the farmer Washington was divorced from any particular project of agricultural improvement, and the popular image of Washington in retirement at Mount Vernon almost invariably excluded any reference to the emancipation of enslaved people that had closed his life as a farmer. In the nineteenth century, as partisan politics and the pursuit of self-interest characterized so much of public life in the United States, Washington as a farmer remained an exemplary symbol of disinterested service to the nation. His practical methods of farming, however, found few followers after 1800, and his manumission of slaves became so entangled with the politics of slavery and sectionalism as to overshadow his achievements as a farmer.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, new kinds of agricultural reform rendered the model of improvement advocated by Washington obsolete. In Virginia, collective associations promoted more rigorous scientific analysis of soil and focused on the particular challenges of the state’s slave-based agriculture. In northern states, agricultural reform became more democratized and local in its organization, and it was premised on active participation by many farmers rather than demonstrations by large landholders. Washington’s model of agricultural improvement had always required too great an investment of time and money for most farmers, who now gained easier access to agricultural knowledge without reliance on the examples of the wealthy few, such as Washington and his associates in the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. Washington’s emphasis on the renewal of the soil and his advocacy of the incremental settlement of farm communities held little appeal in an age of restless expansion and cheap land made possible by the steady dispossession of the territory of Indian nations west of the Appalachians.9
Like many of his British mentors, Washington had long believed that the widespread adoption of improved farming methods depended on the individual initiatives of wealthy landowners, like himself, who could bear the costs of experimentation and who were in a position to exchange their findings and their experience with leading agriculturalists on both sides of the Atlantic. His trust in the persuasive example of respected landowners had always been misplaced, but never more so than in the years following Independence, when farmers were disinclined to defer to the models of wealthy landowners, particularly after prices for American grain dramatically increased in the 1790s. Washington’s influence was also limited by his reluctance to present his agricultural innovations to a public audience, consistently declining invitations to publish his observations in the Annals of Agriculture and making no contributions to the publications of the several agricultural societies with which he was in frequent contact. He was equally reticent to participate in public political debates leading up to ratification of the Constitution, but in agricultural matters his reserve may have betrayed his disdain for most common farmers. He frequently referred to the “slovenly farmers” of the United States, and he condescendingly offered his agricultural innovations as an example for “the gazing multitude, ever averse to novelty in matters of this sort, & much attached to their old customs.”10
Fig E.2 Sixteen-sided barn on Dogue Run farm, c. 1870, glass lantern slide, manufactured by A. D. Handy, Stereopticons and Supplies (Boston, MA). The innovative barn Washington designed for the treading of wheat by horses was abandoned and collapsing by the 1870s. This is the only surviving photograph of the several large barns constructed by enslaved laborers using bricks made at Mount Vernon. As early as 1833, a visitor described “the ruins of capacious barns” on Washington’s estate. Courtesy of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
Washington had assumed that rural society would remain hierarchical. Among the hired white laborers and managers at Mount Vernon, he enforced categories of class that distinguished between those who might enter his house or even dine at his table and those who remained on the farms or in the workshops, in close proximity to the enslaved. On his lands across the mountains, Washington repeatedly attempted to establish a form of dependency for white settlers through the organization of tenancies that he believed would be a more profitable return on his investments than waiting for the sale of appreciated land. As they discussed the future of slavery in Virginia, David Stuart had shared with Washington his expectation that large estate owners, like Washington, would soon be able to live off the rent paid by tenants. Few were able to do so, but the persistent interest in tenancy revealed the degree to which Washington misunderstood the emergence of an increasingly democratic culture that celebrated the self-made individual. The acceptance of gradations of condition and status may, ironically, have made it easier for Washington to imagine the incorporation of freed slaves into Virginia society, in distinct contrast to Jefferson, whose commitment to equality of citizenship and opportunity for free people led him to insist that any freed slaves be expatriated.11
Washington’s provision for the freedom of the slaves he owned was unanticipated by the public and its potential impact unclear. His widely published will initially elicited praise from abolitionists, most notably Richard Allen, the African American pastor in Philadelphia, whose eulogy in a Methodist church was one of the first public comments on the manumission. Allen linked the liberation of the enslaved at Mount Vernon to Washington’s liberation of the nation, and he praised Washington for overcoming the biases of “popular opinion of the state” in which he lived. Other antislavery writers also likened Washington’s act of freeing the enslaved to his defense of the nation’s liberty in war. To the disappointment of abolitionists, however, Washington’s manumission failed to inspire other slaveholders. Among white planters in Virginia, Washington’s dramatic act was met largely with silence that only deepened after Gabriel’s Rebellion in 1800 and subsequent slave conspiracies led the state assembly to restrict all manumissions in 1806. Despite his grant of freedom for the enslaved, Washington was too closely linked to the constitutional order of government and its union with slaveholders to be embraced as a powerful symbol by abolitionists. In his landmark address “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass in 1852 acknowledged that Washington had freed slaves on his estate but emphasized that the physical monument then under construction to the memory of Washington was “built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men.”12
By the time Douglass spoke, Washington had become a symbol of national union, ostensibly above the conflicts of partisan or sectional politics. In the popular representation of Washington at Mount Vernon, his lifelong reliance on enslaved labor was either ignored or presented without any trace of the harshness of slavery. In the 1850s, two images of Washington as a farmer set him in sentimentalized scenes of a wheat harvest, with enslaved field workers but no suggestion of forced labor. “Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon,” painted by Junius Brutus Stearns in 1851 and widely reprinted as a lithograph, was part of a series Stearns called “The Life of Washington,” depicting the leader’s domestic pursuits as well as key moments of public service. The painting shows Washington “as a Farmer” in presidential dress, speaking with a white overseer in a field, but the painting centers clearly on a neatly dressed Black man, sickle in hand, taking refreshment after his labor. Close at hand two white children play, presumably the Custis grandchildren, further assuring the viewer of the benign character of slavery and labor at Washington’s Mount Vernon. In Nathaniel Currier’s “Washington at Mount Vernon 1797,” published in 1852, the recently retired president sits astride his horse and respectfully confers with an enslaved harvest worker, with no overseer as intermediary. Printed beneath the title is an apocryphal quotation attributed to Washington, extolling agriculture as the “most healthy, the most useful, and the most noble employment of man.” Both images, created by northern artists at a time of intense political controversies over slavery, eliminated any suggestion of Washington’s conflicted attitude toward the system of coerced labor and carried no hint of his grant of freedom for the enslaved. In the midst of serious threats to the union with which Washington was so clearly identified, the compelling image of him as a caring master of enslaved labor displaced any representation of him as an innovative farmer or emancipator.13
Washington’s contradictory attitude toward slavery as a system of agricultural labor had already complicated the legacy of his manumission of the slaves. At each reorganization of farming on his estate, Washington found innovative ways to adapt enslaved labor to types of work that differed significantly from the cultivation of the staple crop tobacco that had been the impetus for the introduction of slavery in colonial Virginia. Yet in his vision for agriculture in the new nation, Washington saw little future for slavery and implicitly assumed that the cultivation of grain, which he saw as the most promising prospect for farming in the United States, would neither depend upon nor benefit from enslaved labor. Whenever Washington offered his thoughts on the future of farming in the United States, he consistently excluded from consideration the Carolinas and Georgia, with their extensive reliance on enslaved labor and staple agriculture, and unlike Jefferson, he had no interest in drawing on the global exchange of plants and agricultural knowledge to support the expansion of slave-based plantations into the region west of the Carolinas and Georgia. Washington believed the model for the westward extension of commercial agriculture was to be found in the grain-producing region stretching from New York south to Virginia. The most promising practice of farming in the United States was, Washington acknowledged to Sinclair, in Pennsylvania, precisely because that state’s enactment of gradual abolition of slavery had encouraged widespread agricultural improvement and increased the value of farmland.14
At his own estate, however, Washington, again and again, had through his management and supervision found ways to increase the value of enslaved labor in new systems of farming. In the 1760s he transferred enslaved field hands from tobacco to wheat and found profitable work for a growing number of slaves in the cultivation and processing of crops. In the 1780s he devised an original system for the allocation and supervision of enslaved labor that made possible his implementation of the complicated rotations of British husbandry, and he was largely successful in his efforts to rely more exclusively on enslaved artisans who learned the skills necessary to support the new course of farming. In his final retirement, he initiated plans to transfer slaves from Mount Vernon to work at new farms on his lands west of the Appalachians. In each successive adaptation of enslaved labor, Washington foreshadowed the decisions of other slaveholders who would perpetuate slavery as a viable labor system in Virginia and the Upper South until the Civil War. But while other plantation owners continued to profit from their use of enslaved labor in mixed agriculture, and forcefully relocated or sold many of the increasing number of slaves to new agricultural settlements in the West and Southwest, Washington instead decided to free the slaves he owned. His path to that decision revealed his very different priorities as an estate owner and his acknowledgment of the public attention to his private affairs.
Washington’s renown as the hero of the American Revolution and a symbol of liberty, not only in the United States but also in Europe, exposed him to a standard of expectations that applied to no other Virginia slaveholders, and his service as a general and president introduced him to leading antislavery advocates. In Lafayette’s first appeal for Washington’s support of an experiment in gradual emancipation, he argued that Washington’s example would motivate other slaveholders to follow his lead. Similar appeals to Washington continued through the rest of his life, many emphasizing that his stature and reputation would attract broader support for abolition. Washington refused to be a public advocate or supporter of any kind of antislavery movement, but he found instead in a system of farming the hope that he might be able to eliminate the most inhumane aspects of life for the enslaved and to demonstrate how slavery might operate as a more benevolent and productive system of agricultural labor. He aspired to implement a rational system of estate management that embodied the Enlightenment ideals of scientific farming, with an efficiency of work and the cultivation of a harmonious landscape for the betterment of all. For a few years, Washington believed he might reconfigure his estate to demonstrate the benefits of enlightened farming and to improve the lives of the enslaved. But he could never eliminate the violence or the corrosion of trust at the heart of slavery, and he recognized that Virginia was falling behind Pennsylvania, where small farmers prospered in the wake of legislation for the gradual abolition of slavery. It was only after Washington failed to achieve the ideals of improved husbandry while relying almost exclusively on enslaved labor that he finally decided to act on the antislavery principles that he professed to share as early as 1783. The ownership of slaves, he privately acknowledged more than a decade later, had become something repugnant “to my own feelings.”
Washington’s management of enslaved labor had since the Revolutionary War reflected his profound concern with personal reputation and public identity. In deliberating over the possible sale of slaves and his expressed wish “to get quit of Negroes,” Washington wanted to disassociate himself from any public sale or any appearance of acting against the wishes of the enslaved individuals designated for sale. In his effort to ameliorate the conditions of the enslaved after 1785, he considered the inadequacy of food or medical treatment an embarrassment to him as well as an injury to his “feelings.” In the recovery of an escaped slave during his presidency, he instructed his estate manager to avoid any publication of the runaway notice in newspapers published north of Virginia, in the cities where antislavery sentiment was growing. He ordered his secretary to deceive the enslaved and the public about his efforts to circumvent the Pennsylvania abolition law by transporting enslaved servants out of the state. The extraordinary provisions of his will went well beyond the legal requirements for support of the freed slaves and ensured that Washington would never be associated with the impoverishment of the former slaves or their return to some other form of servitude.
The costly provisions for the support of the freed slaves and the absence of any public explanation of his motivation for the manumission by his will suggest Washington did not expect other slaveholders to follow his lead. According to the account of the French abolitionist Brissot, who visited Mount Vernon in 1788, Washington had concluded that most Virginia planters were unwilling to support any form of gradual abolition, and by the time he wrote his will in the summer of 1799, he had even more reason to doubt that his example would inspire individual acts of emancipation. By 1799, the declining number of manumissions and the assembly’s imposition of additional legal restrictions on slaveholders’ ability to free slaves eliminated any lingering expectation that Virginia might enact the general abolition that Washington considered essential for the future prosperity of agriculture in states reliant on enslaved labor. He was left to his own choices, and in his will he at last fulfilled his pledge from 1794 “to liberate a certain species of property.”
By the close of Washington’s life, the agricultural economy, like the political culture, had changed in ways that limited the influence of a wealthy landowner’s example, even if the owner of the estate was the most revered of the founders. The model of agricultural improvement at Mount Vernon had been an essential component of the leadership Washington wanted to offer the new nation. The design of a new course of farming and its execution in collaboration with British agriculturalists reflected Washington’s expectation that a particular form of agricultural improvement would help to define the nation’s engagement with the wider world. The exchange of agricultural knowledge and peaceful commerce with Europe based on the produce of the United States would forge new connections to replace those of an older empire. Enlightened farming and the trade arising from it would ensure the United States’ commercial strength and its respect among nations. Washington used his renown and his control of landed resources and enslaved labor to demonstrate a civic commitment in ways that would advance his private interests as well as those of the nation. The depth of his attachment to British models of farming and his further attention to reputation in the face of steady appeals from antislavery advocates finally led Washington to acknowledge that his system of improved farming could not be reconciled with slavery. In his will, Washington ensured that more than 120 enslaved persons would find freedom from their bondage at Mount Vernon, and in that action, unique among the founders in its scale, he endorsed a revolutionary legacy of liberty.
In his provision for the emancipation of enslaved people, Washington secured his reputation and affirmed his identification with enlightened advocates of improvement on both sides of the Atlantic, but he left the nation no principled statement of opposition to slavery and no practical plan that might have encouraged other planters to end their reliance on enslaved labor. The broader terms of the will, particularly the division of the farms among family members who were almost certain to continue the enslavement of agricultural laborers, represented an abandonment of both the project of agricultural improvement and the hopes for any statewide policy of gradual abolition. With the text of the will that would serve as his only public statement on the subject of slavery, Washington ensured that his name would be linked with emancipation, but the model of agricultural improvement that had transformed his own management of enslaved labor and led him to consider freeing the enslaved on his estate could not reverse the deepening commitment to slavery among landowners in Virginia and states to the south.
Washington closed his life as a farmer in much the same way that he exited from his military career and public service, with a keen awareness of his example and a sure sense of responsibility. If he could not establish a system of farming that eliminated the brutality of slavery or opened the way to free labor, he could answer the many appeals that urged him to free the enslaved people he owned as a fulfillment of his role as the most celebrated defender of American liberty. He characteristically let his actions speak for themselves, with no effort to explain himself or to persuade others of the rightness of his choice of emancipation. In ensuring the freedom of the enslaved, Washington looked beyond the interests of his family and other Virginia planters, and toward the promise of an enlightened community among nations that had originally drawn him to the transatlantic culture of agricultural improvement.