Introduction: The life of a husbandman -- The experiments of a Virginia planter -- The agricultural foundations of Independence -- Mount Vernon in wartime -- New farming in a new nation -- Enslaved agricultural labor at Mount Vernon -- Cincinnatus and the world of improvement -- The farmer president -- Agriculture and the path to emancipation -- Epilogue: The reputation of a farmer

"George Washington spent most of his time farming, often employing experimental methods. Washington saw slave-powered scientific agriculture as the key to the nation's prosperity. Bruce Ragsdale argues that it was slave labor's inefficiency as much as its inhumanity that finally convinced Washington to emancipate the men and women bonded to him"--