Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison. We know these men as the Founding Fathers, the guiding spirits of the revolution that liberated America through compelling rhetoric, weapons and the recognition of a mutual necessity. (America could not thrive as the plundered minion of an island kingdom; England could not afford to support a country that treated her as an indulgent parent, always last in line for repayment.)
Missing from this familiar picture, as Andrea Wulf points out in a wonderfully illuminating and readable book, is a sense of the role of the first four presidents as “landholders” – often on a considerable scale. (The autocratic term “landowners” was never used.)
Wulf’s title, while catchy, is a bit of a misnomer. Granted, the first presidents were enthusiastic about their gardens. Endeavouring to offer models for a newly independent land, they planted (thanks to slave labour) their English-style shrubberies with American species: hemlock, white pine, magnolias, dogwood.
They took pains to exploit these domestic spaces to make political points. Two striking examples offered by Wulf are President Madison’s decision to place an untypically appealing group of slave homes in full view of his houseguests, and President Washington’s snub to the English passion for urns and obelisks: a garden temple that doubled as a urinal.
Gardens – and soaring above them all, the terraced masterpiece created for Thomas Jefferson on the hillsides of Monticello – played a significant role in the lives of the presidents. Not for nothing had this band of enlightened home-grown aristocrats studied the classics; presidential references to Cincinnatus – a politician who had made a point of his preference for tilling the soil – were frequent.
Wulf’s book (titled to echo its splendid predecessor, The Brother Gardeners) could more frankly have been named “The Founding Farmers”. Agriculture lay at the root of America’s struggle to become an independent country. The early presidents knew that and so did the hard-working men to whom they represented themselves as toilers in the fields of the New World. The image-making was deliberate and a bit dishonest. Jefferson, while presenting himself as “entirely a Farmer, Soul and Body”, was equally at ease playing the diplomat in Paris, or strolling through an English manicured park.
For the most part, however, the interest of the presidents in land cultivation was both sincere and intense. When Thomas Jefferson smuggled home handfuls of Italian rice (“as much as my coat and surtout pockets would hold”), he knowingly risked imprisonment.
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