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Loading... Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slaveryby Bruce A. Ragsdale
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  Quollden | Jul 6, 2023 |  no reviews | add a review
Biography & Autobiography.
History.
Nonfiction.
George Washington spent more of his working life farming than he did at war or in political office. For over forty years, he devoted himself to the improvement of agriculture. Washington at the Plow depicts the "first farmer of America" as a leading practitioner of the New Husbandry, a transatlantic movement that spearheaded advancements in crop rotation. A tireless experimentalist, Washington pulled up his tobacco and switched to wheat production, leading the way for the rest of the country. He filled his library with the latest agricultural treatises and pioneered land-management techniques that he hoped would guide small farmers, strengthen agrarian society, and ensure the prosperity of the nation. He saw enslaved field workers and artisans as means of agricultural development and tried repeatedly to adapt slave labor to new kinds of farming. But Washington eventually found that forced labor could not achieve the productivity he desired. His inability to reconcile ideals of scientific farming and rural order with race-based slavery led him to reconsider the traditional foundations of the Virginia plantation. As Bruce Ragsdale shows, it was the inefficacy of chattel slavery, as much as moral revulsion at the practice, that informed Washington's famous decision to free his slaves after his death. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)306.3Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Economic institutionsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3)
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Wikipedia in English
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‘Washington at the Plow’ is very thorough. VERY. This book is kindof like somebody went through all the primary sources (letters, journals, financial records etc.) and extracted every single thing that was farming-related (and related to his enslaved farm workers). I mean every single one. Every. One. (It feels like.) It’s a body of research, I mean. It’s a five-star collection of research. It’s a great source for people writing their final dissertation for a history degree. However. For the average bookstore browser who just has a hobby-level or idle interest in Washington… it’s a middle-satisfactory three-star read because - while it has no major faults - it’s too dry to be truly enjoyable. I think it’s about twice what you need. It’s a 400 page book and it would have been a lot more palatable (for this casual reader) if it were 200 pages. Probably half of every page could have been removed. (Unless you want the satisfaction of seeing every, every, every letter he wrote about crops and hedges.) So depending on what kind of reader you are, this is either a 5-star or a 3-star book.
….Unless you want practical, everyday, nuts-and-bolts antique farming information, such as what the normal practices were. That’s not here. It’s very much a history of what Washington SAID about farming, not a history of farming, or even an examination of how farming was carried out. The biggest example is that Washington keeps saying ‘improve agriculture’ and ‘American farmers don’t know how to farm’ but… why? What were they doing? Or what needed to be improved? Improvements like ‘drill plows’ and ‘honey locust trees’ are mentioned, but that means nothing unless you explain why those are different or better than whatever he already had. If you want to know how a plantation could be ‘self-sufficient,’ (a goal Washington talks about several times) this book doesn’t really tell you how that works. (