Washington At The Plow: The Founding Farmer And The Question Of Slavery ~ SIGNED

New in new dust jacket. Signed by author. Brand new, never read. SIGNED FIRST EDITION FIRST PRINTING Hardcover: new. Dust jacket: new. Personally signed by the author to a "George Washington's Mount Vernon" bookplate affixed to the half title page. Not a tip in. First edition, first printing stated, full number line. Dust jacket hand covered in protective archival grade Mylar for years of worry free reading/collecting! Photos available upon request. Winner of the George Washington Prize 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 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.