# Founding Gardeners  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Andrea Wulf]] - Full Title:: Founding Gardeners - Category: #books ## Highlights > In his “Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth,” Franklin listed in 1769 the three ways by which a nation might acquire wealth, and gave his opinion on each: “The first is by War … This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way.” ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=116)) > “I wish it may be found of Use with us,” he told one correspondent when he forwarded seeds for a new crop, and when he heard of tofu, it so excited his curiosity, he said, that he procured a recipe from China, dispatching it together with chickpeas to a friend in Philadelphia.3 These dried seeds carried the possibility of a new world and political freedom. In the coming years he sent upland rice and tallow tree4 from China and seeds of “useful Plants” from India and Turkey, as well as introducing kohlrabi and Scottish kale, among many others, to America. ([Location 174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=174)) > head held high before the British accusers. Three days later he wrote to his son William that “my Office of Deputy-Postmaster is taken from me.” The British government had stripped him of the post that he had held for almost twenty years, severing their connection with Franklin. In this briefest of letters, Franklin then advised William, who was the royal governor of New Jersey, to give up his position in order to become a farmer: “I wish you were well settled in your Farm. ’Tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent Employment.” It was a turning point for Franklin, who for so long had clung to the idea that Britain would recognize the rights of the colonists. Farmers, he now believed, held the key to America’s future because they, not the henchmen of the British empire, would create a new nation. For one more year Franklin tried to facilitate a compromise, ([Location 197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=197)) > Franklin believed firmly in America’s ability to survive. America would rise, Franklin wrote to an old friend in Britain in September 1775, because “it will itself by its Fertility enable us to defend it. Agriculture is the great Source of Wealth and Plenty. By cutting off our Trade you have thrown us to the Earth, whence like Antaeus we shall rise yearly with fresh Strength and Vigour.” ([Location 210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=210)) > Ploughing, planting and vegetable gardening were more than profitable and enjoyable occupations: they were political acts, bringing freedom and independence. ([Location 215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=215)) > For me, one of the greatest surprises was that the cradle of the environmental movement did not lie in the mid-nineteenth century with men like Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, but that it could be traced back to the birth of the nation and the founding fathers. The protection of the environment, James Madison had already said in a widely circulated speech in 1818, was essential for the survival of the United States. The founding fathers might not have romanticized nature as later generations did, but they were equally passionate about it. Madison did not suggest living in misty-eyed harmony with nature but living off it in the long term. He condemned the Virginians for their ruthless exploitation of the soil and the forests, fearing that nature’s equilibrium would be unbalanced. Humankind, Madison said, could not expect nature to be “made subservient to the use of man.” Man, he believed, has to find a place within the “symmetry of nature” without destroying it—words that remain as important today as they were when he spoke them. ([Location 229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=229)) > It is significant that the old elm in Boston, from which the effigy of the loathed stamp distributor had dangled, was renamed the Liberty Tree. ([Location 239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=239)) > 3 Franklin dispatched the wrong “vegetables,” because he sent “Chinese caravances,” which most certainly were chickpeas (also called “garbanzos”). The process for making tofu was correct, but it is of course made of soybeans. ([Location 251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=251)) > The commander-in-chief saw the future of America as a country peopled not by soldiers but by farmers—an agrarian society that would be industrious and happy, where “our Swords and Spears have given place to the plough share and pruning hook.” ([Location 321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=321)) > In refusing the continued lure of power he followed the model of the Roman hero Cincinnatus, summoned from his plough to save his country. After his victory, Cincinnatus had relinquished the offer of dictatorship in order to return to his farm. With his retirement to Mount Vernon, Washington advertised his own lack of interest in power—it was a sign of his true republican character. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=340)) > Agriculture and planting, Washington was hopeful, were to be his only occupations until his death: “I wish most devoutly to glide silently and unnoticed through the remainder of life.” ([Location 681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=681)) > Adams had met him several times and had gone to great lengths to please him, smoking a two-meter-long pipe “in aweful Pomp, reciprocating Whiff for Whiff” so perfectly that he had been praised: “Monsieur, votes etes un Turk.” But ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=838)) > Adams had been right to be anxious about his new post: the British hated the Americans. “This People cannot look me in the Face,” he wrote after attending a ball—“there is a conscious Guilt and Shame in their Countenances.” Everybody, Jefferson agreed, was pugnacious toward the Americans—the king, the newspapers, and the courtiers. ([Location 846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=846)) > Putting forward a slightly eccentric theory, Jefferson mused if it was “the quantity of animal food” consumed by the British that “renders their character insusceptible of civilisation.” ([Location 849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=849)) > The irregularity of nature had become a symbol of liberty, or, as one of the most influential garden writers would tell Washington a few years later, it “opposes a kind of systematic despotism.” Whig gardeners literally liberated the garden, and in so doing, “Freedom was given to the forms of trees,” Horace Walpole—Britain’s first garden historian—wrote in 1780. ([Location 948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=948)) > Stowe was particularly explicit in its political posturing, as Cobham had in the 1730s turned parts of it into a denunciation of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of Britain. Cobham turned against the centralized power around the court and government, accusing Walpole of corruption and debauchery. In line with this, Cobham’s garden told a story of the choices between virtue and vice, between reason and passion and between civic duty and vanity. His intention was to distance himself from the immorality and flaws associated with Walpole and the court. ([Location 954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=954)) > Not surprisingly he preferred the garden of virtue. This part of the garden had been inspired by a famous essay that both Adams and Jefferson had read. Written by Joseph Addison, an English Whig, it described a dream set in an ideal garden presided over by the Goddess of Liberty herself. Addison’s imaginary garden was an allegory of honor and virtue, values that the revolutionary generation held dear. ([Location 964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=964)) > On a grass mound and enveloped in evergreen laurel, just as Addison had described it, stood the flawless classical Temple of Ancient Virtue housing Greek philosophers, lawgivers and thinkers that embodied wisdom, virtue and moderation. Opposite it and within sight—as if engaged in a political dialogue—was the Temple of Modern Virtue. Cobham had deliberately built it as a ruin to illustrate the moral decline caused by the prime minister’s corruption and political hold over Parliament. ([Location 970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=970)) > “My dear Country men! how shall I perswade you, to avoid the Plague of Europe?,” Adams wrote home, as if the vice of Europe was somehow infectious. ([Location 986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=986)) > Young men and women were particularly susceptible to the seductions of the Old World. It was wrong to send them to England and France for their education, Jefferson warned, because “There is a great deal of ill to be learnt here.” Luxury had “bewitching Charms,” Adams echoed, declaring that if he had the power he would banish from America “all Gold, silver, precious stones, Alabaster, Marble, Silk, Velvet and Lace.” ([Location 987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=987)) > Americans should lead a simpler life away from the hedonistic excesses of Europe and follow a path of civic duty, not individual gratification. The indulgence in luxury made people weak and effeminate, thereby corrupting a society, while public virtue, Adams insisted, was “the only Foundation of Republics.” ([Location 990](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=990)) > Jefferson, with his passion for Enlightenment thinking and science, realized that this kind of monument to leaders and thinkers was exactly what he wanted for Monticello: a pantheon of heroes who stood for liberty and virtue as well as lauding the advances of science, political philosophy and exploration. ([Location 999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=999)) > A few months after the visit to Stowe, Jefferson began to compile his own collection. Like Cobham, he acquired Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke (“my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,” Jefferson said), as well as William Shakespeare, seventeenth-century parliamentarian John Hampden and explorer Walter Raleigh. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1003)) > To Raleigh he would later add Columbus, Magellan, Vespucci and Cortez, as “our country should not be without the portraits of its first discoverers.” And because he would celebrate America’s revolutionaries instead of princes and kings, Jefferson asked Adams for his portrait “to add it to those of other principal American characters which I have or shall have.” ([Location 1006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1006)) > Continuing their tour of Stowe, Adams and Jefferson found yet more inspiration when they came across sheep which seemed to be grazing in the midst of the garden. Only when they came closer did they see how these pastures had been separated from the pleasure grounds by a deep ditch that encircled the entire garden. This was a ha-ha,6 the most revolutionary gardening device of the eighteenth century. ([Location 1012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1012)) > Jefferson, the obsessive list maker, noted how many gardeners and laborers were needed in order “to estimate the expence of making and maintaining a garden in that style,” while Adams just enjoyed the pleasure of walking through the gardens, thinking that they “were the highest Entertainment.” ([Location 1027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1027)) > For most tourists, however, the most popular attraction in the Midlands was Matthew Boulton’s famous Soho factory in Birmingham and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. They came from around the world to see Boulton’s assembly-line production of toys, candlesticks and other metal objects as well Josiah Wedgwood’s labor-saving manufacture at the pottery works Etruria in Stoke-on-Trent. ([Location 1032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1032)) > After almost two weeks of waiting for a response from Carmarthen, Jefferson had done all his shopping and seen all the gardens he had wanted to see. “6 weeks have elapsed,” he wrote in frustration, “without one scrip of a pen, or one word from a minister.” Yet although this particular political mission was futile, for Jefferson it ultimately didn’t matter, because “We are young, and can survive them; but their rotten machine must crush under the trial.” ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1100)) > But his appearance belied an iron will and a legislative genius. “Never have I seen so much mind in so little matter,” one observer marveled, and his wife, Dolley, would later call him “great little Madison.” ([Location 1219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1219)) > As Franklin wrote to Jefferson in Paris, failure to revise the Articles of Confederation “will show that we have not Wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves.” ([Location 1350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1350)) > Adams had already carved it into the constitution of Massachusetts, and many of the delegates, if not all, were reading Adams’s A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which had been published in London in January 1787 and had just arrived to the booksellers in Philadelphia. The Defence advocated a system of checks and balances to keep the forces of power in equilibrium—a notion that had its roots in nature and physics. ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1354)) - Note: But the balance is over the long time, weeds overrun before the Gia's come in. > Tellingly, the epigraph that Adams chose for the title page of the book was a quote from Alexander Pope: “All Nature’s difference keeps all Nature’s peace.” ([Location 1357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1357)) > More often than not they failed to germinate, but Jefferson never gave up, understanding that “Botany is the school for patience.” ([Location 1767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1767)) > “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather-bed,” Jefferson mused, certain that other countries in Europe would soon follow suit with the United States of America as the model for all these new republics. ([Location 1809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1809)) > This was how most white Americans lived—on farms spread across the United States. Only one in twenty of the population lived in towns. No city was larger than 50,000 people and, except for New York and Philadelphia, no city had more than 25,000 inhabitants. “Each man,” one foreigner remarked, “owns the house he lives in and the lands which he cultivates, and every one appears to be in a happy state of mediocrity.” The scenery was one of “meadows, newly snatched from uncultivated nature,” and a “mixture of romantic wilderness and cultivated beauty.” ([Location 1896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1896)) > American sugar maple orchards chimed with Jefferson’s and Madison’s vision of a country of small farmers, because the tree had the potential to rid America of its dependence on British West Indies sugarcane. It was an ideal crop for small-scale home production because it didn’t require large plantations and slave labor as sugarcane did. Instead the tree’s sap could easily be harvested by the wives and children of American farmers during the weeks when not much work could be done on the fields. ([Location 1928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1928)) > Jefferson’s were in the least impressive state, ravaged by overseers and suffering from a decade of neglect while he had been in office. While Jefferson blamed his long absences from home for the losses, Washington had successfully managed to run his plantation from the same distance. Every Sunday without fail during his eight years as president he wrote explicit instructions to his estate manager—the longest of all his letters during this period. Washington’s innovative farming techniques had gained him the reputation as “best Farmer in the State,” while the cerebral Jefferson was regarded as something of a failure because his agricultural knowledge was based too much on theory rather than practice. ([Location 2368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2368)) > people is the best” and the Romans had elevated the farmer as the most virtuous kind of citizen, imbuing the hardworking peasant at his plough with patriotic pride. Virgil’s poem Georgics had been admired as a celebration of virtuous country life, while Cicero had written that “of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman.”9 This emphasis on farmers as the foundation of a free society had its origin in the belief that republics were the most fragile form of government. With the removal of the monarchy, the traditional control mechanisms of society—which were based on fear and force—had to be replaced by self-control, moral integrity and industry. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Franklin had written, “as nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” As such the strength of a republic—the people—was also its weakness. People’s selfishness, ambition, avarice and vanity in America posed such a threat that Adams worried “whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic.” ([Location 2391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2391)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > To put the common good before one’s private interests, the founding fathers believed, was the foundation of a nontyrannical and nonmonarchical government (again a notion lifted from classical literature), and the only basis on which a republic could be founded. Closely linked to the concept of “public virtue” was that of “private virtue,” described as being frugal, temperate and uncorrupted—traits that the founding fathers ascribed to farmers. “Cultivators of the earth,” Jefferson wrote, “are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous.” ([Location 2400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2400)) > With the elevation of the small farmer as the guardian of liberty, seemingly mundane tasks such as collecting manure, planting seeds and devising crop rotations became elemental parts of nation-building, and the founding fathers’ political rhetoric became ever more infused with agricultural imagery. ([Location 2426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2426)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Mundane as it seems, manure was of the greatest concern to all four of them, for one of the reasons why yields in the United States of America were declining so drastically was the lack of manuring. Since the first settlers had arrived in the early seventeenth century, American farmers had let their livestock roam freely in the forests, where they scattered their manure miles away from the fields. ([Location 2468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2468)) > That June, Jefferson—reluctant to accept Hamilton’s plan but convinced that “a mutual sacrifice … [was] the duty of every one” invited Madison and Hamilton to his New York house in Maiden Lane. There, over a meal cooked according to the latest French recipes and helped along by bottles of fine wine, he brokered a deal between the two opponents. By the time the dinner ended, Jefferson later claimed, Madison had agreed to stop blocking Hamilton’s fiscal plan (though he wouldn’t vote for it). In return—because “the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states”—Hamilton would support the capital’s new location on the Potomac River along the Maryland and Virginia border.2 ([Location 2689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2689)) > Lewis’s expedition was met with equally strong reservations. Congress could only be convinced to finance it if Jefferson pretended it was for commerce, the president had told the Spanish, British and French ambassadors. In reality, Jefferson assured them, this expedition would be led in the name of science. The pretense, the president explained, was necessary because the Constitution had made no provisions for such scientific ventures. And even though the Federalists believed it a waste of money, they stood no chance against the congressional Republican majority. Despite being outnumbered, they continued to voice their objections—even after Lewis had set off. “The Feds.,” Jefferson told Lewis, “treat it as philosophism, and would rejoice in it’s failure.” ([Location 3357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3357)) - Note: Use of the commerce clause as a ruse > “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” claimed the third president of the United States, who had described his final years in office as “the most tedious of my life.” ([Location 3648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3648)) > One of the reasons for winnowing out the bad from the good and the good from the superior was Jefferson’s innovative stance on selective breeding. “I am curious to select only one or two of the best species or variety of every garden vegetable,” Jefferson said, “and to reject all others from the garden to avoid the dangers of mixture & degeneracy.” ([Location 3865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3865)) - Note: No concept of genetic diversity. > “Tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener,” he wrote in August 1811, two years after his retirement. ([Location 3919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3919)) > The retired Madisons were, as Dolley’s close friend Eliza Collins Lee put it, “like Adam and eve in Paradise.” ([Location 4093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4093)) > Northerners, abolitionists and many foreigners found it difficult to accept that the revolutionaries, who had created this republic, owned fields that were worked by slaves. Madison expected large numbers of visitors to come to Montpelier during his retirement and he also knew that the slave quarters, in particular, would be scrutinized by such travelers (who often published their accounts in America and Europe). ([Location 4181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4181)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > 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.” ([Location 4185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4185)) > 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 ([Location 4226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4226)) > 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. ([Location 4240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4240)) > 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. ([Location 4259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4259)) > If nothing changed, Virginia would be drained of its independent yeomen. Jefferson’s and Madison’s foot soldiers of the republic were fleeing. ([Location 4285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4285)) > 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. ([Location 4287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4287)) > 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. ([Location 4312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4312)) > 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. ([Location 4320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4320)) > In a world where many still believed that God had created plants and animals entirely for human benefit, Madison 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. ([Location 4327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4327)) > Animals, plants and their environment were in an equilibrium, Madison realized, and brilliantly linked these ideas to Priestley’s and Ingenhousz’s theories of plant respiration. Animals respired air that was “unfitted for their further uses,” he explained, but plants reversed the process. If the “whole class of vegetables were extinguished,” Madison concluded, animals would not survive, as they were dependent upon each other. The “economy of nature,” Madison told the members of the Agricultural Society, was an “admirable arrangement” and a “beautiful feature.” Never before had an American so vividly explained how to learn from nature. ([Location 4345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4345)) > Decades before Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau called for the protection of America’s nature, Madison warned about man’s destructive force. The preservation of the environment was essential for the survival of mankind, Madison believed, not so much in order to live in romantic harmony with nature but to live off it without destroying it. The reasons were economic rather than idealistic, but the goal was the same. ([Location 4358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4358)) > As such the origin of the notion of conservation arguably lies not, as generally assumed, in the mid-nineteenth century with Henry David Thoreau or George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864)—a publication that has been hailed as the beginning of the environmental movement—but in the previous century with men like John Bartram and the founding fathers. ([Location 4381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4381)) > “Man, like the fruit he eats, has his period of ripeness,” he said. “Like that, too, if he continues longer hanging to the stem, it is but an useless and unsightly appendage.” ([Location 4516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4516)) # Founding Gardeners  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Andrea Wulf]] - Full Title:: Founding Gardeners - Category: #books ## Highlights > In his “Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth,” Franklin listed in 1769 the three ways by which a nation might acquire wealth, and gave his opinion on each: “The first is by War … This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way.” ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=116)) > “I wish it may be found of Use with us,” he told one correspondent when he forwarded seeds for a new crop, and when he heard of tofu, it so excited his curiosity, he said, that he procured a recipe from China, dispatching it together with chickpeas to a friend in Philadelphia.3 These dried seeds carried the possibility of a new world and political freedom. In the coming years he sent upland rice and tallow tree4 from China and seeds of “useful Plants” from India and Turkey, as well as introducing kohlrabi and Scottish kale, among many others, to America. ([Location 174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=174)) > head held high before the British accusers. Three days later he wrote to his son William that “my Office of Deputy-Postmaster is taken from me.” The British government had stripped him of the post that he had held for almost twenty years, severing their connection with Franklin. In this briefest of letters, Franklin then advised William, who was the royal governor of New Jersey, to give up his position in order to become a farmer: “I wish you were well settled in your Farm. ’Tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent Employment.” It was a turning point for Franklin, who for so long had clung to the idea that Britain would recognize the rights of the colonists. Farmers, he now believed, held the key to America’s future because they, not the henchmen of the British empire, would create a new nation. For one more year Franklin tried to facilitate a compromise, ([Location 197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=197)) > Franklin believed firmly in America’s ability to survive. America would rise, Franklin wrote to an old friend in Britain in September 1775, because “it will itself by its Fertility enable us to defend it. Agriculture is the great Source of Wealth and Plenty. By cutting off our Trade you have thrown us to the Earth, whence like Antaeus we shall rise yearly with fresh Strength and Vigour.” ([Location 210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=210)) > Ploughing, planting and vegetable gardening were more than profitable and enjoyable occupations: they were political acts, bringing freedom and independence. ([Location 215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=215)) > For me, one of the greatest surprises was that the cradle of the environmental movement did not lie in the mid-nineteenth century with men like Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, but that it could be traced back to the birth of the nation and the founding fathers. The protection of the environment, James Madison had already said in a widely circulated speech in 1818, was essential for the survival of the United States. The founding fathers might not have romanticized nature as later generations did, but they were equally passionate about it. Madison did not suggest living in misty-eyed harmony with nature but living off it in the long term. He condemned the Virginians for their ruthless exploitation of the soil and the forests, fearing that nature’s equilibrium would be unbalanced. Humankind, Madison said, could not expect nature to be “made subservient to the use of man.” Man, he believed, has to find a place within the “symmetry of nature” without destroying it—words that remain as important today as they were when he spoke them. ([Location 229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=229)) > It is significant that the old elm in Boston, from which the effigy of the loathed stamp distributor had dangled, was renamed the Liberty Tree. ([Location 239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=239)) > 3 Franklin dispatched the wrong “vegetables,” because he sent “Chinese caravances,” which most certainly were chickpeas (also called “garbanzos”). The process for making tofu was correct, but it is of course made of soybeans. ([Location 251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=251)) > The commander-in-chief saw the future of America as a country peopled not by soldiers but by farmers—an agrarian society that would be industrious and happy, where “our Swords and Spears have given place to the plough share and pruning hook.” ([Location 321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=321)) > In refusing the continued lure of power he followed the model of the Roman hero Cincinnatus, summoned from his plough to save his country. After his victory, Cincinnatus had relinquished the offer of dictatorship in order to return to his farm. With his retirement to Mount Vernon, Washington advertised his own lack of interest in power—it was a sign of his true republican character. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=340)) > Agriculture and planting, Washington was hopeful, were to be his only occupations until his death: “I wish most devoutly to glide silently and unnoticed through the remainder of life.” ([Location 681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=681)) > Adams had met him several times and had gone to great lengths to please him, smoking a two-meter-long pipe “in aweful Pomp, reciprocating Whiff for Whiff” so perfectly that he had been praised: “Monsieur, votes etes un Turk.” But ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=838)) > Adams had been right to be anxious about his new post: the British hated the Americans. “This People cannot look me in the Face,” he wrote after attending a ball—“there is a conscious Guilt and Shame in their Countenances.” Everybody, Jefferson agreed, was pugnacious toward the Americans—the king, the newspapers, and the courtiers. ([Location 846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=846)) > Putting forward a slightly eccentric theory, Jefferson mused if it was “the quantity of animal food” consumed by the British that “renders their character insusceptible of civilisation.” ([Location 849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=849)) > The irregularity of nature had become a symbol of liberty, or, as one of the most influential garden writers would tell Washington a few years later, it “opposes a kind of systematic despotism.” Whig gardeners literally liberated the garden, and in so doing, “Freedom was given to the forms of trees,” Horace Walpole—Britain’s first garden historian—wrote in 1780. ([Location 948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=948)) > Stowe was particularly explicit in its political posturing, as Cobham had in the 1730s turned parts of it into a denunciation of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of Britain. Cobham turned against the centralized power around the court and government, accusing Walpole of corruption and debauchery. In line with this, Cobham’s garden told a story of the choices between virtue and vice, between reason and passion and between civic duty and vanity. His intention was to distance himself from the immorality and flaws associated with Walpole and the court. ([Location 954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=954)) > Not surprisingly he preferred the garden of virtue. This part of the garden had been inspired by a famous essay that both Adams and Jefferson had read. Written by Joseph Addison, an English Whig, it described a dream set in an ideal garden presided over by the Goddess of Liberty herself. Addison’s imaginary garden was an allegory of honor and virtue, values that the revolutionary generation held dear. ([Location 964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=964)) > On a grass mound and enveloped in evergreen laurel, just as Addison had described it, stood the flawless classical Temple of Ancient Virtue housing Greek philosophers, lawgivers and thinkers that embodied wisdom, virtue and moderation. Opposite it and within sight—as if engaged in a political dialogue—was the Temple of Modern Virtue. Cobham had deliberately built it as a ruin to illustrate the moral decline caused by the prime minister’s corruption and political hold over Parliament. ([Location 970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=970)) > “My dear Country men! how shall I perswade you, to avoid the Plague of Europe?,” Adams wrote home, as if the vice of Europe was somehow infectious. ([Location 986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=986)) > Young men and women were particularly susceptible to the seductions of the Old World. It was wrong to send them to England and France for their education, Jefferson warned, because “There is a great deal of ill to be learnt here.” Luxury had “bewitching Charms,” Adams echoed, declaring that if he had the power he would banish from America “all Gold, silver, precious stones, Alabaster, Marble, Silk, Velvet and Lace.” ([Location 987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=987)) > Americans should lead a simpler life away from the hedonistic excesses of Europe and follow a path of civic duty, not individual gratification. The indulgence in luxury made people weak and effeminate, thereby corrupting a society, while public virtue, Adams insisted, was “the only Foundation of Republics.” ([Location 990](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=990)) > Jefferson, with his passion for Enlightenment thinking and science, realized that this kind of monument to leaders and thinkers was exactly what he wanted for Monticello: a pantheon of heroes who stood for liberty and virtue as well as lauding the advances of science, political philosophy and exploration. ([Location 999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=999)) > A few months after the visit to Stowe, Jefferson began to compile his own collection. Like Cobham, he acquired Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke (“my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,” Jefferson said), as well as William Shakespeare, seventeenth-century parliamentarian John Hampden and explorer Walter Raleigh. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1003)) > To Raleigh he would later add Columbus, Magellan, Vespucci and Cortez, as “our country should not be without the portraits of its first discoverers.” And because he would celebrate America’s revolutionaries instead of princes and kings, Jefferson asked Adams for his portrait “to add it to those of other principal American characters which I have or shall have.” ([Location 1006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1006)) > Continuing their tour of Stowe, Adams and Jefferson found yet more inspiration when they came across sheep which seemed to be grazing in the midst of the garden. Only when they came closer did they see how these pastures had been separated from the pleasure grounds by a deep ditch that encircled the entire garden. This was a ha-ha,6 the most revolutionary gardening device of the eighteenth century. ([Location 1012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1012)) > Jefferson, the obsessive list maker, noted how many gardeners and laborers were needed in order “to estimate the expence of making and maintaining a garden in that style,” while Adams just enjoyed the pleasure of walking through the gardens, thinking that they “were the highest Entertainment.” ([Location 1027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1027)) > For most tourists, however, the most popular attraction in the Midlands was Matthew Boulton’s famous Soho factory in Birmingham and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. They came from around the world to see Boulton’s assembly-line production of toys, candlesticks and other metal objects as well Josiah Wedgwood’s labor-saving manufacture at the pottery works Etruria in Stoke-on-Trent. ([Location 1032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1032)) > After almost two weeks of waiting for a response from Carmarthen, Jefferson had done all his shopping and seen all the gardens he had wanted to see. “6 weeks have elapsed,” he wrote in frustration, “without one scrip of a pen, or one word from a minister.” Yet although this particular political mission was futile, for Jefferson it ultimately didn’t matter, because “We are young, and can survive them; but their rotten machine must crush under the trial.” ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1100)) > But his appearance belied an iron will and a legislative genius. “Never have I seen so much mind in so little matter,” one observer marveled, and his wife, Dolley, would later call him “great little Madison.” ([Location 1219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1219)) > As Franklin wrote to Jefferson in Paris, failure to revise the Articles of Confederation “will show that we have not Wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves.” ([Location 1350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1350)) > Adams had already carved it into the constitution of Massachusetts, and many of the delegates, if not all, were reading Adams’s A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which had been published in London in January 1787 and had just arrived to the booksellers in Philadelphia. The Defence advocated a system of checks and balances to keep the forces of power in equilibrium—a notion that had its roots in nature and physics. ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1354)) - Note: But the balance is over the long time, weeds overrun before the Gia's come in. > Tellingly, the epigraph that Adams chose for the title page of the book was a quote from Alexander Pope: “All Nature’s difference keeps all Nature’s peace.” ([Location 1357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1357)) > More often than not they failed to germinate, but Jefferson never gave up, understanding that “Botany is the school for patience.” ([Location 1767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1767)) > “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather-bed,” Jefferson mused, certain that other countries in Europe would soon follow suit with the United States of America as the model for all these new republics. ([Location 1809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1809)) > This was how most white Americans lived—on farms spread across the United States. Only one in twenty of the population lived in towns. No city was larger than 50,000 people and, except for New York and Philadelphia, no city had more than 25,000 inhabitants. “Each man,” one foreigner remarked, “owns the house he lives in and the lands which he cultivates, and every one appears to be in a happy state of mediocrity.” The scenery was one of “meadows, newly snatched from uncultivated nature,” and a “mixture of romantic wilderness and cultivated beauty.” ([Location 1896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1896)) > American sugar maple orchards chimed with Jefferson’s and Madison’s vision of a country of small farmers, because the tree had the potential to rid America of its dependence on British West Indies sugarcane. It was an ideal crop for small-scale home production because it didn’t require large plantations and slave labor as sugarcane did. Instead the tree’s sap could easily be harvested by the wives and children of American farmers during the weeks when not much work could be done on the fields. ([Location 1928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=1928)) > Jefferson’s were in the least impressive state, ravaged by overseers and suffering from a decade of neglect while he had been in office. While Jefferson blamed his long absences from home for the losses, Washington had successfully managed to run his plantation from the same distance. Every Sunday without fail during his eight years as president he wrote explicit instructions to his estate manager—the longest of all his letters during this period. Washington’s innovative farming techniques had gained him the reputation as “best Farmer in the State,” while the cerebral Jefferson was regarded as something of a failure because his agricultural knowledge was based too much on theory rather than practice. ([Location 2368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2368)) > people is the best” and the Romans had elevated the farmer as the most virtuous kind of citizen, imbuing the hardworking peasant at his plough with patriotic pride. Virgil’s poem Georgics had been admired as a celebration of virtuous country life, while Cicero had written that “of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman.”9 This emphasis on farmers as the foundation of a free society had its origin in the belief that republics were the most fragile form of government. With the removal of the monarchy, the traditional control mechanisms of society—which were based on fear and force—had to be replaced by self-control, moral integrity and industry. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Franklin had written, “as nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” As such the strength of a republic—the people—was also its weakness. People’s selfishness, ambition, avarice and vanity in America posed such a threat that Adams worried “whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic.” ([Location 2391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2391)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > To put the common good before one’s private interests, the founding fathers believed, was the foundation of a nontyrannical and nonmonarchical government (again a notion lifted from classical literature), and the only basis on which a republic could be founded. Closely linked to the concept of “public virtue” was that of “private virtue,” described as being frugal, temperate and uncorrupted—traits that the founding fathers ascribed to farmers. “Cultivators of the earth,” Jefferson wrote, “are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous.” ([Location 2400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2400)) > With the elevation of the small farmer as the guardian of liberty, seemingly mundane tasks such as collecting manure, planting seeds and devising crop rotations became elemental parts of nation-building, and the founding fathers’ political rhetoric became ever more infused with agricultural imagery. ([Location 2426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2426)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Mundane as it seems, manure was of the greatest concern to all four of them, for one of the reasons why yields in the United States of America were declining so drastically was the lack of manuring. Since the first settlers had arrived in the early seventeenth century, American farmers had let their livestock roam freely in the forests, where they scattered their manure miles away from the fields. ([Location 2468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2468)) > That June, Jefferson—reluctant to accept Hamilton’s plan but convinced that “a mutual sacrifice … [was] the duty of every one” invited Madison and Hamilton to his New York house in Maiden Lane. There, over a meal cooked according to the latest French recipes and helped along by bottles of fine wine, he brokered a deal between the two opponents. By the time the dinner ended, Jefferson later claimed, Madison had agreed to stop blocking Hamilton’s fiscal plan (though he wouldn’t vote for it). In return—because “the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states”—Hamilton would support the capital’s new location on the Potomac River along the Maryland and Virginia border.2 ([Location 2689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=2689)) > Lewis’s expedition was met with equally strong reservations. Congress could only be convinced to finance it if Jefferson pretended it was for commerce, the president had told the Spanish, British and French ambassadors. In reality, Jefferson assured them, this expedition would be led in the name of science. The pretense, the president explained, was necessary because the Constitution had made no provisions for such scientific ventures. And even though the Federalists believed it a waste of money, they stood no chance against the congressional Republican majority. Despite being outnumbered, they continued to voice their objections—even after Lewis had set off. “The Feds.,” Jefferson told Lewis, “treat it as philosophism, and would rejoice in it’s failure.” ([Location 3357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3357)) - Note: Use of the commerce clause as a ruse > “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” claimed the third president of the United States, who had described his final years in office as “the most tedious of my life.” ([Location 3648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3648)) > One of the reasons for winnowing out the bad from the good and the good from the superior was Jefferson’s innovative stance on selective breeding. “I am curious to select only one or two of the best species or variety of every garden vegetable,” Jefferson said, “and to reject all others from the garden to avoid the dangers of mixture & degeneracy.” ([Location 3865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3865)) - Note: No concept of genetic diversity. > “Tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener,” he wrote in August 1811, two years after his retirement. ([Location 3919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=3919)) > The retired Madisons were, as Dolley’s close friend Eliza Collins Lee put it, “like Adam and eve in Paradise.” ([Location 4093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4093)) > Northerners, abolitionists and many foreigners found it difficult to accept that the revolutionaries, who had created this republic, owned fields that were worked by slaves. Madison expected large numbers of visitors to come to Montpelier during his retirement and he also knew that the slave quarters, in particular, would be scrutinized by such travelers (who often published their accounts in America and Europe). ([Location 4181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4181)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > 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.” ([Location 4185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4185)) > 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 ([Location 4226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4226)) > 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. ([Location 4240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4240)) > 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. ([Location 4259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4259)) > If nothing changed, Virginia would be drained of its independent yeomen. Jefferson’s and Madison’s foot soldiers of the republic were fleeing. ([Location 4285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4285)) > 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. ([Location 4287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4287)) > 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. ([Location 4312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4312)) > 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. ([Location 4320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4320)) > In a world where many still believed that God had created plants and animals entirely for human benefit, Madison 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. ([Location 4327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4327)) > Animals, plants and their environment were in an equilibrium, Madison realized, and brilliantly linked these ideas to Priestley’s and Ingenhousz’s theories of plant respiration. Animals respired air that was “unfitted for their further uses,” he explained, but plants reversed the process. If the “whole class of vegetables were extinguished,” Madison concluded, animals would not survive, as they were dependent upon each other. The “economy of nature,” Madison told the members of the Agricultural Society, was an “admirable arrangement” and a “beautiful feature.” Never before had an American so vividly explained how to learn from nature. ([Location 4345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4345)) > Decades before Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau called for the protection of America’s nature, Madison warned about man’s destructive force. The preservation of the environment was essential for the survival of mankind, Madison believed, not so much in order to live in romantic harmony with nature but to live off it without destroying it. The reasons were economic rather than idealistic, but the goal was the same. ([Location 4358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4358)) > As such the origin of the notion of conservation arguably lies not, as generally assumed, in the mid-nineteenth century with Henry David Thoreau or George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864)—a publication that has been hailed as the beginning of the environmental movement—but in the previous century with men like John Bartram and the founding fathers. ([Location 4381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4381)) > “Man, like the fruit he eats, has his period of ripeness,” he said. “Like that, too, if he continues longer hanging to the stem, it is but an useless and unsightly appendage.” ([Location 4516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004CFAZKE&location=4516))