by Andrea Wulf
To Franklin’s regret, the boycott did not pressure Parliament into relinquishing authority over the colonies. Nothing was achieved, and in May 1771 Franklin wrote that “the seeds [are] sown of a total disunion of the two countries,” while at the same time urging patience in order to postpone “this catastrophe.”
Franklin continued to plead for moderation, but it became clear that Britain would never accept an empire that would give the colonial assemblies the same rights as Parliament. As the clashes between Britain and her colonies escalated, Franklin became the voice of American rights in Britain and the scapegoat for the troubles. At the end of January 1774, six weeks after a group of colonists dumped more than three hundred chests of tea into Boston’s harbor in protest against the tax on tea—known as the Boston Tea Party—Franklin was questioned and attacked in the Privy Council about the colonial affairs. As the abuse was hurled at him, the sixty-eight-year-old Franklin, dressed in a blue suit made of Manchester velvet, stood motionless and with his head held high before the British accusers.
Three days later he wrote to his son William that “my Office of Deputy-Postmaster is taken from me.” The British government had stripped him of the post that he had held for almost twenty years, severing their connection with Franklin. In this briefest of letters, Franklin then advised William, who was the royal governor of New Jersey, to give up his position in order to become a farmer: “I wish you were well settled in your Farm. ’Tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent Employment.” It was a turning point for Franklin, who for so long had clung to the idea that Britain would recognize the rights of the colonists. Farmers, he now believed, held the key to America’s future because they, not the henchmen of the British empire, would create a new nation.
For one more year Franklin tried to facilitate a compromise, but then he realized that it was time to return home. With no reason to stay any longer in “this old rotten State,” he boarded an American ship in March 1775, never to return to Britain. When he arrived in Philadelphia a little more than six weeks later, the Second Continental Congress was convening and the following day Franklin was made a delegate. “We should be prepared to repel force by force, which I think, united, we are well able to do,” Franklin wrote to a gardening friend shortly after his arrival. He described the atmosphere in Philadelphia as one of mounting belligerence, containing “all Ranks of People in Arms.” The next day George Washington, with his military uniform packed in his trunks, arrived in the city. The colonists were preparing to fight the British.
Franklin believed firmly in America’s ability to survive. America would rise, Franklin wrote to an old friend in Britain in September 1775, because “it will itself by its Fertility enable us to defend it. Agriculture is the great Source of Wealth and Plenty. By cutting off our Trade you have thrown us to the Earth, whence like Antaeus we shall rise yearly with fresh Strength and Vigour.”
The other founding fathers shared his belief. Agriculture and the independent small-scale farmer were, in their eyes, the building blocks of the new nation. Ploughing, planting and vegetable gardening were more than profitable and enjoyable occupations: they were political acts, bringing freedom and independence. When, after the War of Independence in 1783, the former colonies had to mature from being a war alliance to being a united nation, nature also became a unifying force. It was the Constitution that welded them together politically, legally and economically, but it was nature that provided a transcendent feeling of nationhood. America’s endless horizons, fertile soil and floral abundance became the perfect articulation of a distinct national identity—of a country that was young and strong.
The founding fathers’ passion for nature and plants can still be seen today for it shaped America in all its contradictions—from the rise of industrial agriculture in the Midwest to the protected wilderness in the national parks. America’s most revered patriotic songs revel in images drawn from nature: the “amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!” in “America the Beautiful”; in “God Bless America,” “From the mountains, to the prairies, / To the oceans, white with foam”; and in Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” with its chorus of “From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters / This land was made for you and me.” Today’s slowly changing attitude toward local produce, home-grown vegetables and inner-city gardening in the United States are part of the same endeavor. The new “food movements” (accompanied by a flurry of books and initiatives)—ranging from the promotion of urban agriculture to the preservation of farmland, from the first lady’s vegetable garden at the White House to the returning interest of native species in ornamental gardens—can be placed in the context of the founding fathers’ legacy.
For me, one of the greatest surprises was that the cradle of the environmental movement did not lie in the mid-nineteenth century with men like Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, but that it could be traced back to the birth of the nation and the founding fathers. The protection of the environment, James Madison had already said in a widely circulated speech in 1818, was essential for the survival of the United States. The founding fathers might not have romanticized nature as later generations did, but they were equally passionate about it. Madison did not suggest living in misty-eyed harmony with nature but living off it in the long term. He condemned the Virginians for their ruthless exploitation of the soil and the forests, fearing that nature’s equilibrium would be unbalanced. Humankind, Madison said, could not expect nature to be “made subservient to the use of man.” Man, he believed, has to find a place within the “symmetry of nature” without destroying it—words that remain as important today as they were when he spoke them.
In politics, the founding fathers have been evoked by almost every politician across a wide spectrum. This book offers a window into a new and important aspect of the lives of the founding fathers. It is significant that the old elm in Boston, from which the effigy of the loathed stamp distributor had dangled, was renamed the Liberty Tree. America’s landscape, soil and plants played a crucial role in the creation of the nation and became steeped with political ideology but also with hope for the future. Jefferson, for example, crafted the grounds at Monticello as carefully as his words—it became a living tapestry of the themes that made America after the revolution. Every time I visit Monticello now, I go first to the vegetable terrace. Each time, no matter how often I see it, the contrast between the breathtaking view and the orderly rows of vegetables stirs me. I pick up a handful of the red soil and let it run through my fingers and I feel a visceral connection to the founding fathers and to their vision for this country.
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1 The term “founding fathers” describes a group with a fluctuating membership. When I refer to the four main protagonists of this book as a group—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison—I have taken the liberty of using the term “founding fathers.”
2 The Seven Years’ War was a global war in which Britain fought for dominance over India, sugar production in the West Indies and the slave trade in West Africa, as well as battling French power in North America.
3 Franklin dispatched the wrong “vegetables,” because he sent “Chinese caravances,” which most certainly were chickpeas (also called “garbanzos”). The process for making tofu was correct, but it is of course made of soybeans.
4 The wax of the seeds of the tallow tree was used in China to make candles.
1
“THE CINCINNATUS OF THE WEST”
GEORGE WASHINGTON’S AMERICAN GARDEN AT MOUNT VERNON
BY THE SUMMER of 1776, Manhattan had been transformed into an armed camp. American soldiers drilled in the wide tree-lined streets and troops took over the elegant brick mansions normally occupied by the New York elite. Huge wooden barricades were erected where fashionable women had promenaded only weeks earlier, and forts were built around the tiny hamlet of Brooklyn to defend the city. New York faced 32,000 British troops�
�more than one and a half times the city’s entire peacetime population and the largest enemy fleet ever to reach American shores. The prospects of victory were slim. The commander-in-chief, General George Washington, had less than half the manpower, with his numbers declining even further as smallpox spread through the camps. Many of his officers had yet to experience the field of battle; those who had, had certainly never seen warships as menacing as those that approached New York—the combined firepower of just five of these was enough to outgun all the American cannons onshore. On the first day alone, more than one hundred enemy vessels had anchored in a bay south of the city, turning the water into a forest of looming masts.
New York was “in commotion” one observer said, as the frightened inhabitants of Manhattan fled. Over the next few weeks seventy-three British warships and almost 400 transport vessels sailed into the bay. Washington inspected the forts, observed the enemy movements as they encamped on Staten Island and rallied his men, reminding them that they were “Freemen, fighting for the blessings of Liberty.” Then, as the British troops were preparing their ferocious onslaught, Washington brushed aside his generals and his military maps, sat in the flicker of candlelight with his quill and wrote a long letter to his estate manager and cousin Lund Washington at Mount Vernon, his plantation in Virginia. As the city braced itself, Washington pondered the voluptuous blossom of rhododendron, the sculptural flowers of mountain laurel and the perfect pink of crab apple. These “clever kind[s] of Trees (especially flowering ones),” he instructed, should be planted in two groves by either side of his house.
It may seem baffling that amid this unprecedented crisis the commander-in-chief was designing new ornamental groves for his pleasure ground. But his horticultural letter is perhaps easier to understand when we consider the trees Washington was insisting be planted: soaring white pines and tulip poplars, glorious alabaster dogwood and stately red cedars. Only American natives should be used, he instructed, and all could be transplanted from the forests of Mount Vernon. As the young nation faced its first military confrontation in the name of liberty, Washington decided that Mount Vernon was to be an American garden where English trees were not allowed.
As the war intensified in the months and years that followed the battle of New York, Washington’s dedication to his garden and plants did not abate. Sometimes new planting schemes seemed to occupy his thoughts more than the desperate situation of his country and men. In December 1776 he wrote, “I tremble for Philadelphia,” but a few lines later in the same letter, “it runs in my head that I have heard of some objection to the Sycamore.” Washington always longed for his estate manager’s “infinitely amusing” letters because they included detailed horticultural reports on how his grounds were progressing, from digging up some flowerbeds to descriptions of the groves. Even during the terrible winter at Valley Forge two years later, when his army was hungry and sick, Washington urged Lund to continue work on his estate because such improvements were the “principal objects I have in view during these troubles.” It was almost as if Washington escaped from the trials of war by imagining fields of healthy corn swaying in the wind and thinking of the promises of spring when “the Buds of every kind of tree & Shrub are swelling.”
Nor was this love for gardens and nature restricted to Mount Vernon. In his General Orders, for example, Washington recommended that the troops make “regimental Gardens” in order to produce vegetables for army rations and also because he believed it would be healthy and comforting for his men—what we would call therapeutic. If the soldiers gardened, Washington was sure, “it will become a matter of amusement and of emulation.” Even as his army trudged through blizzards and deep snow, he remained open to the allure of nature. Only days after describing how the men struggled through conditions so severe they “exceeded anything of the kind that had ever been experienced in this climate before,” Washington reflected not on the hardship of this icicled embrace but noted in his diary that “the Trees and Earth being glazed looked beautiful.”
For Washington, trees were both a glorious expression of America’s beauty and a political trope. It was a tree that had become the most striking emblem of the revolution—the Liberty Tree, which, as Thomas Paine wrote in his eponymous poem, was the “temple” of the revolutionaries. So significant was the old elm in Boston that many old specimens in towns across America had been designated as Liberty Trees. Similarly, during the early years of the war, the schooners with which Washington defended Boston against the British carried flags that depicted a green pine tree with the inscription “An Appeal to Heaven.” And when Washington described his lack of funds to pay his soldiers as “an Ax at the Tree of our Safety Interest & Liberty,” he used trees as metaphors in the struggle for independence. Later, in August 1777, he roused his army by ordering every soldier to march through Philadelphia with “their heads adorned with green branches” as a sign of hope.
BY THE END of the war Washington had become, for many, the greatest of heroes, a man who had led his men across the icy Delaware to surprise the British army in a daring attack and who sat upright on his horse as bullets whizzed past him. Washington, however, did not think of himself in such a heroic way. The war had been a long-drawn-out ordeal. His soldiers starved, were regularly forced to serve without pay and had walked barefoot through snow. More men died of disease than at the hands of the enemy. Washington himself spent the whole war in the field with his army, waiving his pay and wrestling with Congress for supplies. He was tired after so many years away from his fields and garden. He had walked over the broken earth of battlefields and seen his army almost extinguished by the British. Instead of the young green of Indian corn pushing through the furrows of Mount Vernon’s freshly ploughed fields, he had seen the blood of wounded soldiers staining America’s soil.
The only time he saw his beloved Mount Vernon during the whole eight years was on a short stopover on the way to the last, decisive battle in Yorktown in October 1781. But even after this victory he could not go home. Two years later, frustrated and impatient to “quit the walks of public life,” Washington was still waiting for the official end of the war, first in Princeton, New Jersey, where Congress had convened, and later at West Point (Garrison, New York). It wasn’t until November 1783 that he at last received the news he had so longed for: the Treaty of Paris had been signed, and the British troops had ended their seven-year occupation of New York and Long Island. The war was officially over. Washington, exhausted but elated, had achieved the unthinkable, leading the thirteen colonies to victory and securing the birth of a new nation.
Washington the soldier had done his duty and delivered victory, but this was not the only legacy he wished to leave his country. The commander-in-chief saw the future of America as a country peopled not by soldiers but by farmers—an agrarian society that would be industrious and happy, where “our Swords and Spears have given place to the plough share and pruning hook.” The general who had defeated the British army idealized not the military tactician or the political revolutionary, but the farmer. “The life of a Husbandman of all others,” he believed, “is the most delectable,” both “honorable” and “amusing.” Again and again he had written of his wish to sit “under my own Vine & my own Fig tree”—using metaphors that the prophet Micah had invoked when referring to the messianic kingdom of peace.
This biblical image of peaceful rural retirement after the ravages of war appealed to Washington, but not all of his officers shared his vision. Rather than a tearful farewell and comradely embraces, they wanted to bow before their general and put a crown on his head. During the war, as supply chains of food, ammunition, clothes, tents and money collapsed, there had been calls to invest Washington “with dictatorial power” and to appoint him “sole Dictator of America” to bring order to the chaos. One officer wrote that he believed that postwar America needed to be ruled by Washington with “the title of king.” Washington, though, was shocked when he heard that “such ideas exist in the Army,” believin
g them to be “the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country.”
Washington chose the plough instead of command. He dreamed of a “whole world in peace” and wished to “clip the wings of some of [the] young soldiers who are soaring after glory.” For most military leaders victory would have meant power and authority, but for Washington it meant a simple yet fulfilled life as a farmer and plantsman. “I can truly say I had rather be at Mount Vernon,” he said, “than to be attended at the Seat of Government by the Officers of State and the Representatives of every Power in Europe.”
The general was to become known as much for the surrender of power as for its execution. Unlike Caesar and Alexander the Great, who had been “wading to the conquest of the world through seas of blood,” one of his admirers commented, Washington was “pure and virtuous.” In refusing the continued lure of power he followed the model of the Roman hero Cincinnatus, summoned from his plough to save his country. After his victory, Cincinnatus had relinquished the offer of dictatorship in order to return to his farm. With his retirement to Mount Vernon, Washington advertised his own lack of interest in power—it was a sign of his true republican character.
