inquiries, because agriculture had already there arrived to its lowest state
of degradation....Theland owners in this are, with a few exceptions, in low
circumstances; the inferior rank of them wretched in the extreme.’’^5 Later
European and Yankee sojourners in the rural South would be hardly less im-
pressed than Strickland, but what may be more surprising, in Strickland’s
own time, is the receptivity of an American reader no less than Colonel John
Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, father, one could say, of American land-
scape Jeremiahs.
Born in near the falls of the Rappahannock, Taylor represented the
fourth American generation of a distinguished, well-connected family. As
a youth he studied at a private academy, the College of William and Mary,
and in the law office of a famous uncle, Edmund Pendleton. Taylor’s early
adulthood, however, was given to soldiering and politicking on behalf of
the Revolution. He rose to the rank of major in George Washington’s Conti-
nental Army, served briefly in Virginia’s wartime House of Delegates, then
returned to the army (now as lieutenant-colonel) to defend Virginia against
Hessian invaders and, finally, Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. Taylor’s patri-
otic service was rewarded by large grants of widowed land in Kentucky, yet
Taylor himself was never an immigrant. He married, practiced law, and ac-
quired more lands not far from his home estate, Hazelwood; he also served
three unexpired terms in the U.S. Senate. Principally, though, after about
Taylor’s life was devoted to home, to legendary but unpretentious
hospitality, to agronomic experimentation, and to political writing on be-
half of agrarian interests threatened by a dozen years of Federalist rule in
the nation’s capitals. Alexander Hamilton’s fateful economic plan in-
cluded erection of protective tariffs to promote domestic industry at the
expense, as it were, of agricultural commodity exporters. The Federalists
never achieved Hamiltonian tariffs. Irony of ironies, it was the administra-
tion of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican heir, James Madison, that turned its
back on Taylor and other aging ‘‘conservative’’ Jeffersonians and adopted
protection.
InArator, his classic agrarian tract, first published in book form in
, Taylor took notice of Strickland’s pamphlet early on. As an American
(not to mention Virginian) patriot, he was obliged to express indignation.
An Englishman, after all—a farmer but still an Englishman and a crea-
ture of the evil empire of manufacturing and mercantilism—had profaned
with his presence and insults the very shores his government had attacked
twenty years before. ‘‘Has Mr. Strickland forgotten,’’ Taylor fumed, ‘‘that we
agriculturalists had the sagacity to discover, that the English system of cre-