Buxton Books is honored to be the booksellers for Charleston Library Society. Please join us in celebrating Bruce A. Ragsdale’s newest book, Washington at the Plow.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

“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 supervision of the enslaved. 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.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bruce A. Ragsdale served for twenty years as director of the Federal Judicial History Office at the Federal Judicial Center. The author of A Planters’ Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia, he has been a fellow at the Washington Library at Mount Vernon and the International Center for Jefferson Studies.

Tickets for this in-person event are $10 for CLS members and $15 for CLS Guests, and can be purchased here or by calling 843-723-9912.
Purchase your copy of Washington at the Plow today!