Search results for ""Author Bruce A. Ragsdale""

Winner of the George Washington PrizeA 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 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.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.

Read more less

Confronted by an increasingly restrictive imperial policy and mounting debt with England, Virginians envisioned the development of an independent economy safe from the constraits of parliamentary regulation and the influence of British merchants. Throughout the revolutionary era, from the earliest resistance to imperial policy in the 1760s to the debate on ratification of the Federal Constitution in 1788, Virginians pursued a vision of economic independence that they considered a prerequisite for the liberty, security, and prosperity of their state. That vision reflected a determination to free themselves from the demands of British merchants and the restrictions of the tobacco trade while maintaining the viability of Virginia's plantation systems. Pressed by debt and a declining economy, Virginia planters formed economic associations dedicated to protecting domestic agriculture and promoting local manufactures. Independence, they understood, was as much an economic condition as a political one. In this exciting reinterpretation of Virginia's path to Revolution, Bruce Ragsdale follows one colony's efforts to break economically with England and shows how this grassroots movement to become self-sufficient solidified into the political resistance leading to war.

Read more less