Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slaveryby Bruce A. Ragsdale– Copyright 2021 – ISBN9780674246386–Hardcover.
Winner of the 2022 George Washington Prize
The George Washington Prizeis one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards.
A fresh, original look at George Washington as an innovative land manager whose singular passion for farming would unexpectedly lead him to reject slavery.
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, which he saw as the means by which the American people would attain the “respectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.”
Washington at the Plowdepicts 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.
Slavery was a key part of Washington’s pursuits. He saw enslaved field workers and artisans as means of agricultural development and tried repeatedly to adapt slave labor to new kinds of farming. To this end, he devised an original and exacting system of slave supervision. 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.
Includes a Mount Vernon bookplate signed by the author

How To Make a Cherry Pie
Eliza Hamilton
George Washington: The Political Rise of America's Founding Father (Softcover)
The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
Washington's Farewell Warning : The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations
George Washington, Pioneer Farmer
His Excellency: George Washington
George Washington's Leadership Lessons
American Whiskey Bourbon & Rye
The South's Best Butts Cookbook
Best of the Best from Virginia Cookbook
The Book of Corn Cookery
The Red Truck Bakery Farmhouse Cookbook: Sweet and Savory Comfort Food from America's Favorite Rural Bakery
Red Truck Bakery Cookbook
The Birds of America
The Trees of North America
The New Heirloom Garden
Stuff Every Gardener Should Know
Founding Gardeners
The Gardner's Planner & Logbook
100 Plants That Heal
An American Triumph By Tom Hand
American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
Washington's Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775-1777 by Jason Q. Bohm
Riding with George
Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution
Female Genius
The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783
Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution
Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution
George Washington and the Irish
The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution
The Permanent Resident: Excavations and Explorations of George Washington’s Life
First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America
To Rescue The Constitution By Bret Baier 












Reviews
There are no reviews yet.