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about seeding the West with religious sects or from his grandiloquent boast to Lafayette that Congress had “opened the fertile plains of the Ohio to the poor, the needy, and the oppressed of the earth.”16 After his first meeting with the Reed family, Washington noted sarcastically their effort “to discover all the flaws they could in my deed and to establish a fair and upright intention in themselves.”17 At their next meeting the tone turned even more confrontational. To settle the controversy, the Reeds offered to buy the land but balked at the steep price quoted by Washington. The standoff ended acrimoniously; the family decided to sue him, and Washington threatened to evict them. Reed family legend contended that a tetchy Washington responded “with dignity and some warmth, asserting that they had been forewarned by his agent, and the nature of his claim fully made known; that there could be no doubt of its validity, and rising from his seat and holding a red silk handkerchief by one corner, he said, ‘Gentlemen, I will have this land just as surely as I now have this handkerchief.’”18 The lawsuit wound bitterly through the courts for two years before Washington emerged victorious. Conciliatory in victory, he permitted the squatters to lease the property instead of evicting them.

By October 4 Washington had completed his 680-mile trip, which proved his last visit to the Ohio Country. While the dispiriting journey had failed to satisfy his economic objectives, it sharpened his views of policies needed to develop the region. He saw how fickle were the loyalties of the western settlers and how easily they might be lured someday by a designing foreign power. Since Spain had obstructed American commerce on the Mississippi River, Washington thought the United States could cement its grip on these inhabitants by offering them navigable waterways to the eastern seaboard, preferably through Virginia, creating “a smooth way for the produce of that country to pass to our markets before the trade may get into another channel.”19 He believed that “commercial connections, of all others, are most difficult to dissolve,” which foreshadowed his faith as president in enduring commercial rather than political ties with other countries .20 He also feared that thirteen squabbling states would be powerless to act in a timely fashion as the world was being swiftly reshaped on the western frontier.

FAR MORE GRATIFYING TO WASHINGTON than bullying hardscrabble farmers was his attempt to modernize postwar agriculture at Mount Vernon. He found farming congenial to his temperament and talked about it with undisguised relish, but he sometimes sounded more like a yeoman farmer, toiling by the sweat of his brow, than the master of a vast slave plantation. In 1788 he wrote that “the life of a husbandman, of all others, is the most delectable . . . To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed.”21 Many dinner guests noted that Washington’s flagging attention perked up whenever agriculture was discussed. Farming was a safe topic for him, deflecting conversation from political controversy, but it also ranked as a genuine passion. “Indeed, I am told that he feels more animation and throws off more of his natural phlegm when conversing on that topic than on any other,” a young British diplomat later noted.22

Washington liked to affect a patrician tone about farming, as if it were merely an amusing pastime, but his livelihood depended upon it. His fascination with scientific agriculture was spurred initially by an urgent practical need: to figure out what to do with soil depleted by tobacco cultivation. He believed devoutly that American agriculture had to change and looked toward England as the model to emulate. “It may not in this place be amiss to observe to you that I still decline the growth of tobacco,” he wrote to George William Fairfax in 1785, “and to add that it is my intention to raise as little Indian corn