This book covered SO MUCH about Washington’s plantations and farming that was just not covered in Chernow’s ‘definitive’ 800-page biography of Washington. (I read them at the same time, alternating to keep up with the chronology.) And Ragsdale manages to keep his narration sounding pretty neutral and unbiased, where Chernow does not.

‘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. ( )