washington the farmer --5/19/25

19 May 2025

washington the farmer --5/19/25

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Today's selection-- from Washington at the Plow by Bruce A. Ragsdale. After leading his armies to victory in one of history’s most resounding revolutions, General George Washington returned to the quiet life of his plantation:

“In April 1784, less than four months following Washington's resignation from command of the Continental Army and his return to Mount Vernon, the French Minister to the United States, the Chevalier de La Luzerne, visited Washington at his estate and noted that the general ‘dresses in a gray coat like a Virginia farmer, and nothing about him recalls the recollections of the important part he played’ in the Revolutionary War. Over the next five years and again following Washington's retirement from the presidency in 1797, hundreds of other visitors, friends as well as strangers, came to pay their respects to the hero of the Revolution. Like La Luzerne, many of those seeking the general would find the farmer, greeting them in ‘bespattered boots,’ eager to display his experimental crops, his gristmill, or his design for a drill plow made by the enslaved carpenters. Those who were willing accompanied Washington on his daily visit to his plantations, riding the half-day circuit. When Benjamin Henry Latrobe visited Mount Vernon in 1796, Washington held the British-born architect in conversation for hours, well into the dark of a summer evening, discussing the condition of crops in Virginia, the relative merits of various English plows, and problems of soil exhaustion related to corn crops. A visitor from Poland noted that Washington ‘answered with kindness all questions I put to him on the Revolution,’ but ‘his favorite subject is agriculture.’ Another noted of Washington that ‘his greatest pride now is to be thought the first farmer of America.’

Mount Vernon with the Washington family on the terrace, a 1796 portrait by Benjamin Henry Latrobe

“Washington had quickly become ‘quite a Cincinnatus,’ as many visitors remarked in the 1780s. Cincinnatus was known to the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world through the writings of Livy, Cicero, and Cato, who held up the image of ‘Cincinnatus at the Plow’ as a model of republican virtue. The representation of Washington as Cincinnatus became for the new republic a symbol of disinterested leadership and the refusal of arbitrary power, and Washington's life as a farmer made the symbolism all the more compelling. Dedication to agricultural improvement blended with military valor and public service to define the civic virtues of Washington.

“On his return to Mount Vernon, Washington fostered the image of his rural life detached from political contest and military conflict. To his close friend, the Marquis de Chastellux, Washington, with reference to a favorite phrase from Joseph Addison's Cato, announced that, ‘free from the bustle of a camp & the intrigues of a Court, I shall view the busy world, “in the calm lights of mild philosophy.”’ Washington described himself to Chastellux and his other French comrades, Lafayette and Rochambeau, as ‘a private Citizen on the banks of the Potomack,’ free from the burdens of public service. That rural life, however, attracted widespread public interest in the agricultural pursuits of the new Cincinnatus. Washington the farmer was celebrated in his own country and in much of Europe, and his figurative return to the plow became a metaphor for the dreams of a new order among nations. At his estate, Washington displayed his experiments and improvements before visitors, known and unknown, in a demonstration of a public example and his personal virtue. His deepening personal connections with European and American advocates of agricultural improvement and scientific investigation shaped Washington's perspective on how the United States might engage the world and how he might participate in an enlightened community that sought to establish a new foundation for peace.”