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

Abstract

The powerful mythos of George Washington as a virtuous and honorable man who, in his youth, chopped down a cherry tree only to confess his transgression immediately, continues to shape popular public perception of the American Cincinnatus. Modern historians have worked to deconstruct this hagiographic image of Washington, and Bruce Ragsdale further contributes to these efforts with Washington at the Plow. Ragsdale not only focuses on the founding father's identity as a farmer and an enslaver, but he also examines how Washington navigated a complicated tension between his public reputation and his private interests in a changing Atlantic World.The main thrust of Ragsdale's work focuses on Washington's life as a Virginia planter during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods. Despite his many absences from Mount Vernon and his other properties during his tenure as leader of the Continental Army and, later, as president, Washington maintained a vested interest in capitalizing on the agricultural output of his estates. Indeed, his near obsession with British farmers and the New Husbandry movement greatly informed the various experiments Washington implemented on his plantations to increase both the efficiency of enslaved labor and crop production in the late eighteenth century. For example, on his Virginia plantations Washington adopted British models of crop rotation that skillfully adjusted for the different ecological factors of the Eastern Seaboard. He also made changes to the layout of Mount Vernon's landscape, including the construction of new buildings, after being inspired by the improvement projects made to Britain's large estates. However, as Ragsdale demonstrates, Washington's personal desire to capitalize on the economic independence of his farms often conflicted with the founding father's efforts to uphold his popular reputation.Throughout his work, Ragsdale demonstrates the many ways in which Washington maintained a public persona that often contradicted the lived reality of those whom the Cincinnatus enslaved. For example, Washington's letters claim that he opposed the separation of enslaved families and that he abhorred the practice of selling enslaved persons; however, Ragsdale reveals that Washington often engaged in these practices. He accepted enslaved peoples as payment for loans or purchased enslaved peoples with specific skills, such as the enslaved bricklayer named Neptune, to use in new farming experiments on his plantations (146). Ragsdale also emphasizes how Washington's participation in the amelioration movement—brought on by the rise of gradual abolition at the turn of the century—only served to obscure the violence inherent in the institution of American chattel slavery, although not explicitly. As Washington encouraged overseers and white laborers to increase the surveillance of enslaved peoples on his many estates, he kept a detailed record of their movements and demanded increasingly high rates of productivity and efficiency that disrupted enslaved communities. Other works, such as Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told (2015), clearly highlight how technological advances in both agriculture and commerce only intensified the violence and brutality of enslavement. Although examples of violence against the enslaved men and women on Washington's estates are only briefly addressed, including the physical trauma and abuse that resulted from Washington's increasingly complicated agricultural demands, Ragsdale is careful to acknowledge Washington's willful exclusion of violent punishments in the archival record as well as the manipulation of any language used to describe these occurrences.Although one of Washington's main goals was to serve as an example of the farming and husbandry enterprises the new nation needed to operate as a sovereign economic and political institution in an increasingly globalized world, by the end of his presidency, he failed to make any considerable changes. Other than his participation in the Philadelphia Agricultural Society or the organized visitations to Mount Vernon, the many farming or management changes Washington made to his estates had little impact on the broader population of either Virginia or Pennsylvania farmers. Even so, students and scholars interested in the transmission and transformation of agricultural knowledge and farming practices in the Atlantic World will find Ragsdale's work helpful, especially the many examples of Washington's successes and failures as a farmer. Scholars of slavery may also find useful information concerning the organization of Washington's enslaved labor and the examples of Washington implementing British plantation models from the Caribbean for increasing productivity at Mount Vernon. More importantly, however, Bruce Ragsdale's focus on how Washington navigated the changing national debates on slavery following the American Revolution in both his public and personal life highlights the complicated role Washington himself played in the creation of his own legend.