by Andrea Wulf
By placing a spotless and well-designed village at the center of his garden, Madison presented himself as a slave owner whose slaves were happy and cared for. They were not “whipped all day,” Madison told a visitor, who was astounded to see “his negroes go to church … gayly dressed” (even carrying umbrellas). On the contrary, Madison insisted that the conditions at Montpelier were “beyond comparison” with what slaves had experienced during colonial times—his slaves were “better fed, better clad, better lodged, and better treated in every respect.”
Over the past decades, many Virginia plantation owners had become increasingly concerned about the living conditions of their slaves. One of the reasons had been the successful slave rebellion in Haiti in the early 1790s, which led to their declaration of independence in 1804, and the fear of similar uprisings in the United States. “It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes,” Jefferson had warned, “which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (South of Patowmac) have to wade through.” These worries were further stoked by changing demographics. In 1790 the white population of Virginia had outnumbered the black, but only a decade later the proportions were reversed. The slave population “increases far faster than the white,” Madison said, and the prospect unsettled many Virginians, who dreaded the thought of being “dammed up in a land of slaves.” In the first decade of the nineteenth century, just before Madison had built his slave quarters, these anxieties were confirmed when Virginia was rocked by the Gabriel conspiracy, which had to be suppressed by the militia, and the subsequent Easter slave revolt (which also failed).
In some respects the Virginians’ worries were similar to those of the large landowners in Britain who had feared that the French Revolution would sweep across the channel. Uvedale Price, a best-selling English garden writer (who had written to Washington about the connection between landscape gardening and politics) had warned in 1797 that the “total revolution of property in France has created very just apprehensions.” It was important, Price said, to give an “increased attention” to the laborers who would otherwise be driven to take up arms.5
By the end of the eighteenth century many British landowners, who like Madison and the other founding fathers were involved in innovative agricultural experiments, had become interested in model cottages for their workmen—small sturdy buildings that provided good housing for the families that worked on the estates. Such cottages, British land agent and agricultural writer Nathaniel Kent had written, would be “a real credit to every gentleman’s residence” because everybody could see how benevolent the landowner was. By contrast, he warned, “nothing can reflect greater disgrace upon him, than a shattered miserable hovel … unfit for human creatures to inhabit.”
One of these progressive farmers was Thomas Coke of Holkham in Norfolk, a man whom Madison much admired for his innovative crop rotation and animal breeding and whose “great agricultural merits,” he wrote, “have made his name familiar to this Country.” In the 1790s Coke had constructed fourteen stone cottages to provide housing for his laborers and their families. As landowners across Britain began to build rows of neat cottages, they advertised their paternalism but also beautified their estates. Old villages were razed or moved and replaced with tidy houses that pleased the eye.
The trend for model villages was spread by a flurry of pattern books that provided floor plans, elevations and information on building materials and construction, often reprinted in agricultural magazines and newspapers—many of which were available in the United States. The first volume of the prestigious Communications of the Board of Agriculture (1797), in particular, had sparked interest—a book that John Sinclair, the director of the Board of Agriculture, had sent to Washington, Jefferson, Adams and probably to Madison. Even if Madison did not receive it directly from Sinclair, he would have read it, because Washington had previously lent him the publications of the Board of Agriculture and Jefferson’s library was always open to him.
The similarities between the slave village at Montpelier and the advice in the Communications are striking: double cottages, laid out in regular rows, with raised floors, comfortable, quality building materials and a small garden.6 It was as if Madison ticked off all the suggestions made. By placing his neat slave quarters on his lawn, Madison took an idea that had been discussed for more than two decades in Britain and applied it, for the very first time, to an American context.
Double cottage in the Communications of the Board of Agriculture, 1797 (Illustration credit 9.1)
Much of the discussion in Britain had happened under the pretext of paternalistic care, but model cottages were also a form of social control. Gardens next to the cottages would keep laborers “sober, industrious, and healthy,” one contributor to the Communications insisted, since those without a garden were “often drunken, lazy, vicious, and frequently diseased.” At Montpelier the location of the village, squarely in the middle of the huge lawn, deprived the slaves of the little privacy they traditionally had. Madison placed his slaves on a stage, a living scene of a bucolic idyll. Instead of being able to withdraw to their own separated community spaces after their long days of arduous work, these slaves were in constant view of the house, the family and their guests.
The cottages, then, were not a real attempt to improve the lives of the slaves. When Madison retired he owned more than one hundred slaves, and most lived not near the house in the little village but in cabins by the fields of the 3,000-acre plantation. These cabins, attached to the farm operation and stables beyond the boundaries of the landscape garden, were the usual rickety structures with dirt floors. Madison also had no intention of freeing his slaves. Quite the contrary—in the second summer of their retirement, Dolley was so annoyed with her maid Sucky (whom she caught stealing) that she considered buying a new one, writing to her sister, “I would buy a maid but good ones are rare & as high as 8 & 900$—I should like to know what you gave for yours.” Madison might have abhorred the idea of slavery but never went as far as his former secretary Edward Coles, who moved to Illinois, where he freed his slaves and gave each one some land.7
Madison congratulated Coles for following the “true course,” however, writing that he wished things could be different and that his “philanthropy would compleat its object, by changing their colour as well as their legal condition.” For he believed that emancipation would only work if the freed slaves were repatriated elsewhere, away from the white citizens of the United States. In fact he was a member of the American Colonization Society, which proposed that free slaves be resettled in a newly created African country. Freed blacks were “regarded every where as a nuisance”—not because they were inferior, Madison hastened to add, but because of the prejudices white people had against them.8 This was a common view among Virginia plantation owners—Jefferson, for example, had also talked about his fear of mixing slave blood with that of white Americans. Emancipation, Jefferson told a visitor to Monticello, was only viable if the slaves were colonized somewhere far away “all at once.”9
Virginians also insisted that slaves had a better quality of life than the freed black population. Fanny Wright, a passionate abolitionist from Britain, was encouraged by a Virginia landowner to have a “Look into the cabins of our free negroes,” in order to judge for herself just how bad their living conditions were. Madison’s orderly slave quarters seemed to confirm this argument. Wright later visited Montpelier and together with Lafayette inspected Madison’s little village. Even Lafayette, who never stopped arguing with Madison and Jefferson about the question of slavery, thought that the visit to Granny Milly’s cabin was “one of the most interesting sights … in America,” with the immaculate quarters and yard providing “a pleasant walk.” Seemingly Madison’s slave quarters fulfilled his intentions—“the slaves here wore a very different aspect, from those we had before seen,” one visitor remarked during a visit some years later, while another declared Madison to be “a model of kindness to his slaves.”
AS IN BRITAIN, w
here model villages were often built by landowners who were engaged in innovative agricultural methods, Madison also ran other aspects of his plantation as a model farm, applying the lessons he had learned from the latest publications. “There is no form in which Agricultural instruction can be so successfully conveyed,” he said. He always found time to take visitors on tours of his plantation because he believed that agricultural knowledge needed to be shared. Riding on his horse Liberty, he would open the gates with a crooked stick (“without dismounting,” recalled one admiring visitor who failed to learn the trick), and explain different aspects of the farm operations, talking “sometimes didactic, sometimes scientific” about Montpelier’s agricultural methods.
Madison’s passion for agricultural innovation and education was well known, and within four weeks of his return from Washington, he had been unanimously elected as the first president of the newly founded Agricultural Society of Albemarle. In May 1817, a group of progressive Virginia farmers met and established the society in order to improve agricultural practices and the Virginia soil. Though on first sight this might seem like a parochial endeavor, it was as much a political act as an agricultural one because the goal was to stop Virginia’s economic downfall. For although the rest of the United States was thriving, Virginia—once the wealthiest and most powerful of the former colonies—was facing ruin.
Already in 1800, William Strickland, an Englishman who traveled on behalf of the British Board of Agriculture, had been struck by Virginia’s “rapid decline.” Small and large landowners across the state were feeling the effects—Jefferson was so broke that he sold his library to Congress to pay off some of his debts, and Madison would later admit that he had lived the first years of his retirement “on borrowed means.” One of the problems was that two centuries of tobacco cultivation had ravaged the once fertile soils; another was that the Hessian fly, which Jefferson and Madison had investigated during their northern tour in 1791, had traveled south, where it attacked Virginia wheat fields. After Madison brought in the first harvest of his retirement, he was left with only one third of the yield that he had expected. Nine years later, he wrote to Jefferson that “since my return to private life … I have made but one tolerable crop of Tobacco, and but one of Wheat,” adding that both had failed to sell well because of the declining markets.
In stark contrast to Virginia’s plight, the southwestern frontier had become the new Eden. After the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812 and the victories over the Native Americans in the South, huge swaths of land had opened for white settlements. As cotton prices rose from 1815 onward, increasing numbers of farmers left Virginia in search of new lands in the South and across the Appalachian Mountains to plant cotton. One agricultural writer counted the acres of farms listed for sale in Virginia newspapers and calculated in 1818 that almost 500,000 acres were advertised. The exhausted fields, another agricultural writer warned, would lead to an “exhausted country.” In the years to come, Madison would see this within his own circle: his sister and husband moved to Alabama, his nephew went to New Orleans, a cousin moved to Kentucky and his former secretary Edward Coles had left for Illinois. If nothing changed, Virginia would be drained of its independent yeomen. Jefferson’s and Madison’s foot soldiers of the republic were fleeing.
The members of the Albemarle society had not hesitated to elect Madison as their president. Known as a man who believed that agriculture was “the surest basis of our national happiness, dignity, and independence” and who declared “I am a farmer,” he was an obvious choice. Fourteen years previously he had held the same position for the short-lived national Board of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., which he had been involved in founding. He had always kept abreast of the latest agricultural methods, swapping seeds for new crops, discussing experiments and testing inventions. One friend commended him for “sweetening the evening of life with agricultural theory, experiment, and practice,” the improvement of which held the key to solving Virginia’s current crisis. Now Madison had been chosen as the “directing light” for the “agricultural fellow citizens to follow.”
Madison had long discussed the importance of an agricultural society with his friends and neighbors and Jefferson had already drafted a “Constitution” for this very purpose six years earlier. Most of Jefferson’s suggestions were incorporated into the rules and regulations of the new society. Members should answer questionnaires about crop rotation, average yields of fields, how much land they had cleared, the proportion of “worn out Land” on their farms, how much and what type of manure (if any) they applied to their fields and so on. It was also decided that the society should found a nursery in the vicinity of Charlottesville and encourage a manufacturer for “Implements of Husbandry.” These “Patriotic Societies,” as Madison called them, were the best agents in changing the state of agriculture.10
In May 1818, exactly a year after the foundation of the society, Madison rode from Montpelier to Charlottesville to one of their meetings. He was going to give a speech that would make him one of the most respected farmers in America and would place him at the vanguard of forest and soil conservation, decades before a concerted effort was made to preserve America’s nature.
Madison’s speech was the sum of all that he had learned from reading the most progressive agricultural publications over the past decades and his own observations and experiments at Montpelier, as well as a life’s worth of conversations with farmers and scientists. The speech was a lament of all that was wrong with American agriculture as well as a catalogue of measures that could rectify the problems. Most important, it was a call for change and an explanation of what Madison called the “symmetry of nature”—the interrelationship between earth and mankind.
More than thirty wealthy landowners and progressive farmers listened when Madison stood up to talk about soil erosion and the devastating effect of ploughing “up and down hilly land.” This method was fatally flawed because rain turned the furrows into channels that washed away the soil and seeds. Instead, Madison advised, farmers should plough along the lie of the land, following the contours of the hills—the horizontal ridges created by the plough would act as mini-dams, keeping the soil and seeds where they belonged. Madison acknowledged Thomas Mann Randolph—Jefferson’s son-in-law, who was also in the audience—as the inventor of this method, although he had already used a similar technique at Montpelier almost three decades earlier. He also underlined the importance of irrigation, and highlighted the need to restore the depleted soils using manure and plaster of Paris.
But Madison’s speech was more than just a list of practical advice about ploughing and manure. He wanted to change his fellow Americans’ perception of nature by putting an end to the destruction of once fertile soil and the increasing exploitation of timber resources. He knew that man’s reckless use of his environment would change only if Americans understood the broader context of agriculture, its pivotal place within the delicate balance between man and nature. When Madison began to explain what he meant, it became clear just how radical his ideas were.
Taken individually, no single argument or proposition of his speech was an entirely original one, but Madison was the first to weave together a myriad of theories from different areas, combining political ideology, soil chemistry, ecology and plant physiology into one comprehensive idea. He brought together Thomas Malthus’s theories on population growth (and decline through disease and famine), Humphry Davy’s recent writings on agricultural chemistry, Joseph Priestley’s discovery of oxygen and Jan Ingenhousz’s understanding of plant respiration, as well as practical experiments recorded by the British Board of Agriculture. Just as he had digested two hundred books on modern and ancient republics into one succinct paper in preparation for the Constitutional Convention three decades previously, he now fused the latest theories into one voice, rallying Americans to safeguard their environment.
In a world where many still believed that God had created plants and animals entirely for human benefit, Mad
ison told the members of the Agricultural Society of Albemarle that nature was not “subservient” to the use of man. Not everything could be appropriated, Madison said, for the “increase of the human part of the creation”—if it was, nature’s balance would collapse.
Plants gained their nutrition from their environment—from the atmosphere, soil and water—but they could also return it. This reciprocity, Madison pointed out, “is sufficiently seen in our forests; where the annual exuviae of the trees and plants, replace the fertility of which they deprive the earth.” Instead of exploiting nature ruthlessly as most farmers did, Madison’s conclusion was that man had to return what he took from the soil. The more those parts of the crops (digested by cattle as manure or as stalks, straw and chaff) were ploughed back into the soil, the more fully the exhausted fields would be restored—“Vegetable matter which springs from the earth,” he said, must “retur[n] to the earth.”
Madison’s theory of nature was complex and innovative. Soil chemistry, for example, was still in its infancy and scientists had yet to grasp the full implications of ecological systems such as the nitrogen and carbon cycle.11 But at least since the early 1790s Madison had been struck by the symmetry of nature, writing that the different species of flora and fauna “have a relation & proportion” to one another.
In preparation for his address, Madison had also read Diderot’s groundbreaking Encyclopédie, which had hinted at this interrelationship. If man were to eradicate the weasel (which was regarded as a pest), one entry in the Encyclopédie read, a chain of destruction would be set in motion. With no weasels, their natural prey—field mice—would multiply excessively. In turn the increased population of field mice would devour the chestnuts, acorns and beech masts that were needed for the natural regeneration of the forest. If the balance of nature is broken, the entry concluded, “we can no longer trust nature” to restore herself.
