Introduction
The Life of a Husbandman
In late July 1787, during a brief adjournment of the Federal Convention, George Washington traveled with Gouverneur Morris from Philadelphia to a fishing camp near Valley Forge. In the early morning, while Morris went trout fishing, Washington rode to the nearby site of the former encampment of the Continental Army. He found the remaining works at Valley Forge in ruins, and the grounds of the encampment uncultivated. On his ride back to the fishing camp, he observed some farmers at work and stopped to speak with them. Washington learned about their cultivation of buckwheat, a crop he had recently introduced into his experimental system of farming at Mount Vernon. The farmers told him about the various uses they found for the crop, and Washington recorded their advice on sowing the seed. The chance exchange with the unsuspecting farmers was one opportunity among several Washington had to learn about improved agriculture during the summer he presided over the Federal Convention. He attended a meeting of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, which had inducted him as an honorary member soon after its founding in 1785. He visited the farm of his friend, Samuel Powel, president of the agricultural society, and together they toured the famous nursery of William Bartram. With other convention delegates, Washington observed a farmer’s experiments with a soil amendment, which Washington then ordered sent from Philadelphia for application on the fields at his own farms.1
Agricultural improvement and the work of nation building were firmly joined in Washington’s mind by the time he attended the convention to draft a new constitution. Soon after his return to Mount Vernon following resignation of his command of the Continental Army, Washington in February 1784 described the prospects for the new nation in the language of farming. “We have now a goodly field before us, & I have no wish superior to that of seeing it judiciously cultivated; that every Man, especially those who have laboured to prepare it, may reap a fruitful Harvest.” Washington gave life to that metaphor in his ambitious plans for the reorganization of farming at his own estate and in his determination to prove the practicability of an agricultural system that he believed would be the foundation of commercial prosperity and political stability. Agriculture and commerce were inextricably linked in Washington’s vision for the new nation, and he saw in the improvement of agriculture “the only source from which we can at present draw any real or permanent advantage; & in my opinion it must be a great (if not the sole) means of our attaining to that degree of respectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.” As he reminded a Maryland planter in the midst of debates on ratification of the Constitution, “in the present State of America, our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands and turning the produce of them to the best advantage.” A new agricultural order, based on grain farming and stewardship of the land, would promote settled communities and the shared commercial interests that Washington considered the only durable bond of political unions and the foundation of the “rising empire” he had envisioned even before the war for independence. The pursuit of agricultural improvement and exchange of scientific knowledge about farming promised to establish peaceful ties between the United States and European nations. Washington equated the promotion of agriculture with “the cause of humanity.”2
The story of Washington’s life as a farmer fundamentally reshapes the familiar biography of the general and president. A commitment to agricultural improvement defined Washington’s pursuit of private opportunities and his expectations for the new nation. The public example of farming at Mount Vernon reflected his ideals of leadership and civic responsibility. Farming framed much about his engagement with the world, near and far, in ways that extended well beyond the marketing of crops. Perhaps most significant, Washington understood slavery primarily through his management of agricultural labor and his recurrent efforts to adapt enslaved labor to new kinds of farming at Mount Vernon. An examination of Washington the farmer also offers a view of his personality and character barely glimpsed through study of his military or political career. Washington considered farming the activity best suited to his disposition, more rewarding than military service or public office, and his agricultural interests revealed a curiosity of mind and boldness of imagination that few discerned in other dimensions of his life. Agriculture was central to Washington’s identity and reputation, and in his life as an innovative farmer, Washington defined a new role for an estate owner in an independent nation.
Washington grew up in an agricultural society dominated by the production of tobacco that was sold on tightly regulated markets in Great Britain. By 1732, the year of his birth, the great tobacco planters who owned enslaved laborers and rich lands along Virginia’s tidal rivers had gained tremendous wealth and controlled access to both economic opportunity and political authority within the colony. Even as many aspiring planters invested in new enterprises or increased their cultivation of grain, they continued to grow the tobacco that remained the most important means of obtaining British credit and manufactured goods. The tobacco trade with Great Britain also offered wealthy planters access to the center of the empire and the personal services of merchants, who represented Virginians in legal matters and family business. For all of the many advantages of tobacco cultivation, however, the limits of colonial Virginia’s economic success and the costs of its dependence on British trade would become evident to Washington by the time he assumed direction of his own agricultural estate.
Washington’s family moved when he was three years old from the farm where he was born in Westmoreland County to the later site of Mount Vernon, further up the Potomac. When he was six the family moved again, to a farm in King George County across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg. With each move, Washington’s father, Augustine, worked to increase the value of his investment in the land. Washington’s earliest memories of farming were probably from the lands along the Rappahannock, where his father relied on enslaved laborers to cultivate tobacco and grains. Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, managed the farm during her husband’s two trips to England, and again following Augustine’s death in 1743, when the eleven-year-old Washington inherited the property. Mary Washington controlled enough enslaved laborers to employ a white overseer, and under their management, one of the enslaved workers served as foreman of field hands as they continued to grow tobacco. For much of Washington’s youth, his family faced a precarious economic position but was always attentive to new prospects. Through his parents’ connections with far wealthier planter families and in the formative time spent with his older brother Lawrence at the expanding Mount Vernon plantation, the young Washington absorbed his first lessons in the successful management of an agricultural estate in Virginia.3
Washington came of age surrounded by the great planters of the Northern Neck, the area of Virginia lying between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, and from those wealthy families he learned about emerging opportunities for Virginians with sufficient resources to invest. The Northern Neck was the colony’s only proprietary grant, held by the time of Washington’s birth by the Fairfax family, and the generous terms of the proprietors encouraged individuals to claim vast tracts of land. Even by the standards of land-hungry colonial Virginia, the large planters of the Northern Neck stood out in their zeal for land speculation, especially in the regions west of the Blue Ridge, as far as the Ohio River and its tributaries. Under the patronage of the Fairfax family, Washington received his first job as a surveyor on western lands recently added to the proprietary, and at sixteen he saw the potential for the expansion of commercial agriculture into the region.
The Northern Neck provided Washington with a distinctive perspective looking east toward Great Britain, as well. The Potomac was the most distant from London of the four great rivers of Tidewater Virginia, making commerce between those places more time-consuming and more expensive. Although most of the area’s large planters remained involved in the tobacco trade, the tobacco they cultivated was never prized on London markets like that grown along York River to the south, and planters in the Northern Neck were more likely to explore grain cultivation and other investments, like the ironworks in which Washington’s father was involved. Military service during the French and Indian War further convinced Washington of the commercial potential of the West, especially at the headwaters of the Potomac River where he spent much of his time as colonel of the Virginia Regiment. By the time he returned to manage farming at Mount Vernon, Washington had much broader experience than most Virginia planters and was eager to explore opportunities outside the traditional investments of the colonial Virginia gentry.4
The view from Mount Vernon provided its own broad horizons along the Potomac River that connected the estate to markets throughout the Atlantic and inland toward the western territory that Washington was convinced might enrich a new kind of empire, with the Northern Neck at its center. The agricultural possibilities of the estate were never far from Washington’s mind, even during the several long absences necessitated by military service and public office. Washington took possession of Mount Vernon in 1754, but spent most of the next four years away in military service. He became a full-time farmer in 1759 following his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis, and over the next decade and a half he dedicated himself to diversified agriculture and the acquisition of additional land and slaves. While serving as commanding general of the Continental Army from June 1775 to December 1783, he made only one brief visit to Mount Vernon and relied on correspondence with his estate manager in a largely vain effort to keep the farms operating, but during the five years following the Revolutionary War, he restructured the entire estate and put in place his most ambitious plan of farming. His duties as president of the United States again removed Washington from the day-to-day supervision of his farms beginning in April 1789. In March 1797, he resumed his close management of agricultural experiments and initiated new enterprises, including a distillery. At the time of his death in December 1799, Washington was in the midst of another reorganization of his farms, with new cycles of crop rotations intended to increase productivity and ensure the fertility of the soil. He remained the innovative farmer throughout his forty-five years at Mount Vernon.
On his final retirement in 1797, Washington lamented the long absences that had kept him from his preferred life as a farmer. Yet, on each return from public service he had brought a sharper vision for the reinvention of the traditional Virginia plantation through experiments for the improvement of agriculture and the demonstration of the public benefits of enlightened farming. In the 1760s he offered his fellow Virginia planters a model of diversified cultivation that would open commercial opportunities outside the confines of the British Empire. Following the Revolutionary War, Washington expected his innovations in farming to be among his most important contributions to the growth of the new nation. In his final and never realized plans for Mount Vernon, Washington at the close of his presidency hoped to prove that a landed estate in Virginia could prosper without reliance on enslaved labor.
For Washington, the project of agricultural improvement depended on collaboration among nations, with Great Britain exercising the greatest influence. At each stage of agricultural innovation at Mount Vernon, Washington formed deeper and deeper ties with Great Britain through exchanges of practical knowledge, plant material, and new farming implements. He shared with British agricultural leaders a cultural ideal that entrusted large estate owners with a responsibility to demonstrate improved farming practices. Before the Revolutionary War, as he became a wheat farmer and broke with the colonial dependence on British tobacco merchants, Washington educated himself in the methods of cultivation that had transformed British agriculture during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. In the years immediately following a destructive war and the disruption of the empire, Washington adopted a comprehensive system of farming based on the latest models of British husbandry.
In June 1785, Washington announced that he was “desirous of entering upon a compleat course of husbandry as practiced in the best Farming Counties of England.” Washington saw no irony in his choice of an agricultural model for the independent nation. British husbandry in the second half of the eighteenth century was the ideal to which improving landowners in Europe and the United States aspired, and after 1785, Washington introduced the complicated system of crop rotations and livestock management that characterized the most advanced estates in Great Britain. His commitment to British husbandry strengthened as his disappointment with the state of farming in the United States grew. Washington’s search for an experienced English farmer to guide his new initiatives attracted the attention of the leading agriculturalists in Great Britain, who offered their support for the farming pursuits of the man most Britons previously knew only as a military commander. The prominent agricultural writer Arthur Young was “very glad to find the General is a farmer.” Washington soon became the most celebrated farmer of the age.5
Americans and Europeans alike compared Washington to Cincinnatus at the plow, recalling the Roman general who surrendered authority to return to his farm. This powerful representation of Washington’s life as a farmer gave added political significance to his innovations as he figuratively returned to his own plow, and in the years after his resignation from the Continental Army he sought to reorganize his agricultural estate in ways that would further enhance his reputation and serve as a public example for the new nation. His fame as a farmer attracted the support of European monarchs, British agriculturalists, and American proponents of improvement, who variously presented Washington with newly designed farm implements, rare seeds, new breeds of livestock, and the latest publications on agriculture. A steady stream of visitors came to Mount Vernon to view a startling, new agricultural landscape designed by Washington himself.6
Fig I.1 Sculpture of George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon, State Capitol, Richmond, Virginia. Houdon, after consulting with Jefferson, Franklin, and Benjamin West, presented his version of Washington as Cincinnatus in modern dress, beside the plow that signified his return to farming after resigning military command. Photograph by David M. Doody, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Those visitors also observed the large number of enslaved laborers who worked the land and constructed the massive farm buildings. The agricultural system that was essential to Washington’s vision for the new nation and central to his identity and reputation was at his own estate inseparable from the work of the enslaved. Throughout his life as a farmer, Washington depended almost entirely on the labor of the enslaved workers he owned or controlled, and he was at the forefront of efforts in Virginia to adapt slavery to new types of farming. In the transition from tobacco to wheat, he found additional value in and productive work for the increasing number of enslaved people under his control. Long after he first expressed a “wish to get quit of Negroes” in 1778, Washington applied enslaved laborers to the far more demanding routines of cultivation and to the various trades required of the British system of farming while he made further efforts to replace hired laborers with enslaved artisans. Washington found no model or precedent for the scale and ambition of his efforts to merge the enlightened and scientific farming of Great Britain with Virginia’s system of slavery.
When a friend asked for advice about an investment in slaves, Washington in 1794 confided that with regard to that “species of property,” “I do not like even to think, much less talk of it.” Washington’s written comments on the institution of slavery were infrequent and terse, but, in fact, he thought almost continuously about the management of enslaved labor and about the work of enslaved individuals. In the various records of farming at Mount Vernon, Washington left the most detailed documentation of his engagement with slavery and his conflicted attitudes toward the institution. The record of labor management at Mount Vernon, probably the most detailed for any Chesapeake estate in the second half of the eighteenth century, also describes Washington’s frequent interaction with individual laborers. His agricultural ambitions defined the daily work and much about the personal lives of the enslaved at Mount Vernon, and his records of farming and labor offer the most complete, if always imperfect, portrait of enslaved individuals on the estate.7
Washington’s successive schemes for agricultural improvement anticipated widespread efforts of slaveholders to apply enslaved labor to diversified farming as tobacco markets declined following Independence and again when demand for American grain soared in the 1790s. His adaptation of enslaved labor to new crops and crafts occurred during a period of relative stability in the enslaved population following the closing of the slave trade from Africa and before the rise of an organized internal slave trade forced many enslaved laborers in Virginia to the states to the southwest. During Washington’s management of his estate, the enslaved population throughout the Chesapeake grew by natural increase, and the enslaved, including those at Mount Vernon, were able to establish remarkably strong families. As the agricultural economy shifted, enslaved laborers in the Chesapeake became skilled in an increasing variety of tasks.8
The Revolution profoundly changed slavery in ways that went far beyond the eclipse of Virginia’s colonial agricultural economy. During the war, the incursion of British troops offered thousands of enslaved people in Virginia the opportunity to escape bondage, and the many more who remained enslaved at plantations learned of a language of freedom and examples of resistance. By the time Washington returned to Mount Vernon after his resignation from the Continental Army, he had witnessed the rise of an antislavery movement that called for the extension of the revolutionary principles of liberty to the enslaved. Even in Virginia, where antislavery sentiment was relatively weak, the assembly prohibited the external slave trade and enacted the first law permitting individual acts of manumission.9
While he relied more extensively on enslaved labor after the Revolutionary War, Washington implicitly acknowledged the new critique of slavery and the inherent contradiction between a British ideal of farming intended to usher in an era of peaceful prosperity and a system of labor that rested on coercion and a denial of individual freedom. As he presented his farms as a public example, Washington introduced protections for the minimal welfare of the enslaved in an attempt to reconcile his reliance on forced labor with his pursuit of improved agriculture and his aspiration to be recognized as an enlightened and humane estate owner. His efforts to balance those ultimately irresolvable tensions explain much about Washington’s conflicted attitude toward slavery during the same years in which he privately offered his first support for the principle of gradual abolition.
An exploration of Washington’s lifelong experience as a manager of agricultural labor and a focus on his efforts to apply enslaved labor to the course of British husbandry after 1785 offer a new perspective on Washington’s eventual decision to free by the terms of his will the slaves under his ownership. Among the founders, Washington was the only large slaveholder to provide for the freedom of all the slaves he owned, but he offered no explanation of his motives or of his expectations. As several historians have recognized, Washington experienced or at least acknowledged no single turning point or revelation leading to his decision to free the slaves, and even after writing his will, he continued to search for new ways to organize enslaved labor more productively. At his death, he was planning to transfer a large number of laborers to cultivate his lands in the West. The path to emancipation was never direct, and it never met the expectations of either the antislavery advocates who appealed directly for Washington’s support or of later generations who searched for the moral or humanitarian basis of his decision. Washington’s criticisms of the institution of slavery were always complicated by his continuing demands for the labor of the enslaved in support of his agricultural vision.10
During the same years in which Washington implemented the full system of British husbandry and designed an ostensibly more rational and humane management of enslaved labor, he faced persistent calls to free the slaves he owned and to endorse a general emancipation as a fulfillment of his role as the champion of American liberty. Following the Revolutionary War, abolitionists in the United States, Great Britain, and France directly appealed to Washington to use his influence and example to advocate for the extension of personal freedom to the enslaved. Whether the entreaties came from close friends, like Lafayette, or antislavery leaders who approached him for the first time, Washington could not escape the implication that his ownership of slaves violated many of the fundamental principles of the American Revolution on which his reputation rested, just as his reliance on coerced labor challenged his identity as an enlightened estate owner, esteemed by British agriculturalists. Among the founders, Washington was the unique object of these antislavery appeals, and their coincidence with significant changes in his management of agricultural labor suggest the many ways in which Washington’s concern for reputation drove his decisions about the ownership of slaves.
Washington found in the British system of farming an additional standard by which to measure the effectiveness of enslaved labor, and his assessment of that labor ultimately reinforced the arguments of the abolitionists who appealed to him. However many provisions Washington made to protect the families and physical well-being of the enslaved, slavery at Mount Vernon remained a harsh labor system from which he never eliminated violent punishment, and the complicated routines of farming introduced after 1785 slowly convinced Washington of the inflexibility and inadequacy of a labor system that rested on coercion and was destructive of trust and collaboration. As early as the fall of 1793, he privately resolved to find some way to free the slaves under his ownership, and by the close of his second presidential term, Washington acknowledged that slavery was antithetical to the kind of agricultural improvement that he believed would be a foundation of commercial prosperity and a demonstration of his own enlightened management. His newfound commitment to emancipation would be evident only in the extraordinary plans to reorganize his farms in ways that would make his estate more nearly like those of the great improving landowners of Great Britain. In this final and most improbable plan of agricultural improvement, Washington imagined a plantation without enslaved laborers.
Washington brought a more rational system to the management of his estate, beginning with the original and often unique designs of his farming and financial records. Like many of his British counterparts, he searched for more regular ways to document the seasonal routines of farming from year to year. He relied on his ledgers and account books to monitor networks of exchange in the local community and trade with commercial centers throughout the Atlantic world. He applied the forms of accounting and bookkeeping to the supervision of enslaved laborers and the distribution of their provisions. With his scrupulous accounts of every kind of transaction, Washington created an unmatched record of the conduct of business in Virginia during the last third of the eighteenth century as he turned away from a colonial dependence on tobacco exports and produced commodities for sale on markets throughout the Atlantic world.
In accounts that measured days worked and others that assigned a monetary value to the labor of the enslaved, Washington devised the kind of records that would enable later slaveholders to adapt the labor force to the demands of highly competitive markets. Many historians have recently emphasized the degree to which slavery as organized in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century accommodated and even facilitated the transition to a capitalist economy that depended on the rational calculation of costs and productivity and the uniform measurement of labor. Washington recognized the advantages of regularizing his accounts of labor, and he relied on his labor records to monitor and accelerate the pace of work, especially among enslaved artisans and at harvest time. In the anonymous enumeration of field laborers in his weekly work reports, Washington reduced the enslaved individuals to quantifiable units of production, as would the sophisticated accounting records adopted by large-scale cotton planters in the nineteenth century. Washington relied on the record of days worked to determine the most efficient allocation of enslaved laborers in the increasingly complicated tasks required of the British model of farming.11
In other ways, the accounts of labor reflected the personal relationships between the enslaved and the enslaver that characterized slavery in the Chesapeake during the late-eighteenth century. The weekly work reports designed by Washington were records of supervision rather than measures of the productivity of enslaved field laborers, and they reflected his definition of personal obligations that he tried to impose on the enslaved. Washington relied on the reports, with their credit and balance ledgers based on the number of laborers, to enforce his notion of the presumed “duty” of enslaved laborers to work six days a week, from sunrise to sunset. In the record of work completed each week on his several farms, Washington measured the days spent on tasks and recorded the reasons for individual absences from labor, but the reports seldom included any calculation of either the quantity or value of crops cultivated by the enslaved laborers. Washington rarely compared the costs of provisioning and housing the enslaved laborers with the revenue to be extracted from their work. Two years after introducing his weekly accounts of labor, Washington acknowledged to Arthur Young that he was “not able to give you the price of labour as the land is cultivated here wholly by Slaves.” Correspondence from Young and other British agriculturalists informed Washington about the more careful calculations of labor costs and productivity on British farms, but the knowledge served primarily to distinguish further the labor systems of Great Britain and Virginia.12
Washington always sought to balance his pursuit of enlightened management and his idealized vision of a landed estate with the profitability that would make any system of farming viable, but profit alone was seldom the primary consideration in his decisions about crop rotations or the allocation of labor, particularly after 1785. As he reminded several farm managers, “immediate profit is not so much an object with me,” preferring that they focus on the restoration of the land, the planting of new meadows and live hedges, and aesthetic refinement of the grounds of the Mansion House. Fields were to be configured “as well for appearance as profit.” Like some of the wealthiest improving estate owners in Great Britain, Washington deferred short-term profits in his effort to demonstrate a viable and replicable system of farming, and like his associates among the agricultural improvement society in Philadelphia, he understood that the introduction of the British system of husbandry required a significant expenditure of capital. Despite chronic shortages of cash, Washington remained a very wealthy individual with no encumbering debts, and he willingly accepted the costs of the lengthy experiments he deemed essential to innovation.13
From the construction of a merchant mill to the establishment of a distillery, Washington risked investments in experimental enterprises and mechanical improvements, but almost always with the goal of increasing the value of his agricultural produce or making his estate more self-sufficient in the provisioning of the enslaved laborers. He encouraged the establishment of a mercantile community in the Potomac region, but his own commercial ventures were rare and short-lived. When he promoted corporate schemes for economic improvement, such as opening Virginia’s rivers to navigation, it was in support of expanding commercial agriculture into the West, which he expected to advance his private interests as well as the political order of the region. Washington’s most important investments beyond Mount Vernon were in the purchase and settlement of western lands, from which he hoped to derive income based on leases to a large number of tenants who would support an even more ambitious and British-inspired model of landed wealth. For all of his innovations and experiments, Washington approached opportunity as an eighteenth-century landed gentleman rather than a nineteenth-century entrepreneur.14
For as long as Washington managed farming at Mount Vernon, he was dedicated to experiment and to the exchange of agricultural knowledge with improving landowners throughout much of the Atlantic world, and in his agricultural innovations, Washington emerged most clearly as a figure of the Enlightenment. Through his extensive reading in agricultural treatises and his adoption of new methods of cultivation, Washington entered a community of agricultural improvement in Great Britain and established himself at the forefront of new farming in the United States. He participated in a steadily expanding network for the exchange of plant materials and livestock and benefited from the findings of naturalists spread throughout the British Empire. Agriculture remained the most powerful component of a broader cultural authority that Washington ascribed to Great Britain, and his deference to British custom shaped his perspective on the new nation’s relations with Great Britain long after the sovereignty of the United States was secured.15
Washington discovered in the British definition of agricultural improvement, with its emphasis on private property and the decisive influence of knowledgeable gentry farmers, a new and professedly public-spirited role for the owner of a large landed estate in the United States. Before and after the Revolutionary War, Washington expected wealthy landowners like himself to accept the financial risks required for experiment and innovation, and he believed that only those with sufficient resources and access to books and learned correspondence would be able to offer smaller farmers a model for the reversal of ruinous methods of cultivation. He presented himself as a different kind of Virginia planter, committed to innovation and conversant in the principles of British husbandry, with its promise of steady gains in productivity and increased land values. Like the advocates of improvement in Great Britain, Washington offered his agricultural knowledge and innovation as a kind of civic responsibility. Throughout his life, he adhered to this explicitly elitist model of agricultural improvement, and his assertion of agricultural influence reinforced his deeply held preference for leading through example rather than persuasion or public advocacy.16
Washington’s example of improvement and his emphasis on the civic benefits of his innovations found a striking parallel in the contemporaneous agricultural projects of George III. The king’s early interest in farming provoked biting satire of “Farmer George,” but George III initiated public-spirited efforts, including an experimental course of husbandry very similar to that pursued by Washington. Soon after he gained control of Windsor Great Park, with its nearly 4,500 acres of pleasure gardens, hunting grounds, and isolated farms, the king converted much of the land to experimental farms, and he hired an innovative firm of estate managers to introduce the most recent advances in crop rotations, livestock management, and the design of farm buildings. He encouraged the managers to focus on the larger social goals of the agricultural experiments, such as creating useful labor for “the industrious poor,” and “trying experiments in Agriculture, to excite imitation where success might encourage it.” George III actively directed many of the improvements and drew on his own considerable knowledge, much of it gained from the same agricultural treatises Washington read. Arthur Young was a favorite of both, and they concluded from their reading of Young that farming was the appropriate responsibility of a leader who wished to promote the economic prosperity and social order of a nation.17
Fig I.2 “The Farm Yard.” Print by Henry Kingsbury, 1786. The agricultural improvements of George III were met with satire and derision of “Farmer George,” frequently presented with Queen Charlotte as they carried out common farm chores, here in view of Windsor Castle. The many caricatures of the king offered no indication of his agricultural learning and his intent to demonstrate the national benefits of improved farming. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum.
The experimental character of Washington’s agricultural improvements and his commitment to a commercially productive use of natural resources drew him to a particular ideal of stewardship of the land articulated by British agricultural writers and naturalists. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries in the United States, Washington placed the restoration and maintenance of soil fertility at the center of his system of farming. He saw in the gullied and depleted landscape of so many Virginia farms the destructive effects of the long dependence on tobacco and corn and a labor system that encouraged the quick exhaustion of the soil. He had no interest in the practical experience of colonial farmers who found crude but effective ways to cultivate fertile lands, nor did he acknowledge the examples of Indian farming he frequently encountered in his travels west. He relied rather on British models of soil management and the experiments of farmers in the United States who read the same British treatises and adhered to the same methods described in them. For British agriculturalists, like Arthur Young, the study of soil was the greatest responsibility of landowners, and the concept of agricultural improvement adopted by Washington presumed a civic, even moral, obligation of estate owners to make the best use of land over time. Improvement in this sense depended on control of the land by learned and cosmopolitan estate owners who understood a science of agriculture and directed farming toward the lasting production of commercial crops.18
In his expansive authority over his estate of nearly eight thousand acres and the several hundred enslaved persons who labored there during his lifetime, Washington displayed his sense of command and his insistence on control and order. He was a demanding and rarely satisfied supervisor of both enslaved and free labor, and he was seldom comfortable delegating the management of farming or business affairs. Some thought they could identify in Washington’s management of his estate the imperious habits of a military commander, with his references to labor gangs as “forces” and workers “marching & counter marching,” but the military analogies failed to recognize the degree to which Washington as a farmer attempted to exercise a mastery checked only by his own sense of responsibilities. He frequently bypassed the hierarchy of managers and overseers to communicate directly with individual enslaved laborers and to issue his own orders for the work of field laborers. No detail was too small for his attention, and no misstep of others safe from his admonishment.19
Washington’s lifelong engagement in farming offers a window on a personal self that remained a mystery for the many who observed him in public life and for subsequent generations that knew only the revered, stoic leader. As master of Mount Vernon, more than in any other aspect of his life, Washington asserted his personal will and resolve. Richard Peters, who knew him as a general, as a president, and, perhaps most closely, as a farmer, offered a retrospective character sketch that found Washington’s “victory over his natural temperament, as one of the greatest he had obtained.” In Washington’s relationship with the overseers on his farms, with the merchants who marketed his produce, and with the enslaved across the estate that victory was incomplete. The enslaved frequently met with Washington’s anger and his disparagement of their work. In business transactions and in the regulation of overseers, Washington exhibited the indignation and petulant sarcasm that he had learned to moderate in public life in the years following service in the French and Indian War. But Peters also identified in Washington’s private life a “cheerfulness, pleasantry, and disengaged conversation” unfamiliar to those who mistook Washington’s public circumspection for aloofness or indifference. Peters knew that in addition to the comforts of domestic life, Washington discovered in the routines of farming at Mount Vernon a personal gratification seen nowhere else in his life.20
After several years of closely supervising every aspect of farming at Mount Vernon, Washington found on reflection “the life of a Husbandman of all others, is the most delectable. It is honorable—It is amusing—and with Judicious management, it is profitable. To see plants rise from the Earth and flourish by the superior skill, and bounty of the labouror fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed.” Washington in the sweeping reorganization of farming on his estate attempted to realize the ideal he had absorbed from British agricultural literature, with its celebration of the active, engaged landowner on whom improvement depended. He transformed the working landscape of the farms and imposed a new regimen on the enslaved field laborers, expecting to establish a rural order born of a knowledge gained from his extensive reading and his communications with improving farmers in Great Britain and the United States. That ideal of a balanced order rooted in nature and improved by human endeavor would instead remain in conflict with the system of enslaved labor on which Washington established agriculture at Mount Vernon.21
The examination of what remains the least familiar dimension of Washington’s life deepens and complicates understanding of his public leadership and his self-identity. Farming was never just a private enterprise, and even less a gentlemanly pastime; it was for Washington a measure of his abilities and virtue similar to the tests of military command and public service, and he invested his agricultural improvements with a civic purpose that he believed would constitute an important part of his legacy. His awareness of the public audience for his agricultural innovations and the implications for his reputation established a critical context for his focus on the national benefits of improvement and, ultimately, for his decision to free the slaves on whom he had relied to carry out his agricultural vision. As a farmer, Washington responded to the pivotal opportunities that he believed would define a post-colonial economy and ensure the stature of the United States among the nations of the Atlantic world. In his determination to secure those opportunities through the example of farming at his estate and to join his efforts with those of a self-defined community of enlightened landowners, Washington would inescapably confront the fundamental contradictions of slavery and freedom in the founding era.