plowing. Its real foundation, though, was grass and cattle manure. The
most blessed of Englishmen, to paraphrase Galsworthy, were farmers who
multiplied grasses. Grasses grow best in rich land maintained by carefully
prescribed applications of cured cow manure. Cattle eat grass, and the ali-
mentary cycle ensures the miracle of permanence.
Great planters of Maryland and Virginia absorbed the gospel and be-
came devoted practitioners. Before the Revolution, most had wisely de-
cided to forsake tobacco culture in favor of grains, both maize and wheat,
huge surpluses of which were readily marketed in the Caribbean. The
Chesapeake countryside, meanwhile, became overrun with cattle, not so
much for beef as for their manure. Colonel Landon Carter, prince of Sabine
Hall on the Northern Neck and vast holdings to the west, was arguably
the king of Chesapeake cattlemen. A close reader of English agronomy, he
raised clover, already a known restorer of tobacco and corn land, and care-
fully herded cattle in order to use their droppings. Carter (and apparently
many other tidewater planters) devised movable pens, or corrals, to contain
and concentrate cattle where their manure production was required. Some
of his slaves were full-time herdsmen and -women; others filled farm carts
with manure for storage and application to fields. Carter himself was con-
sumed with record keeping—as must be any modern farmer—especially
the tallying of his carts of manure.^6
Then came the Revolutionary War and American independence from
the British Empire and its protected markets. Grain-exporting businesses
such as Carter’s and George Washington’s were thrown into protracted dis-
array. This was John Taylor’s world of stress, worsened for him and other
tidewater planters, doubtlessly, by the utter shift of still-profitable tobacco
culture to the piedmont. By comparison, commercial grain culture seemed
indeed to be in dreary decline. Thus to Taylor’s analysis and prescriptions.
According to Taylor, between and about , settlers in the Chesa-
peake tidewater had managed to remove three-quarters of the region’s
vegetative cover. Chemical reactions between soil and atmosphere had be-
come impoverished. Late in this era of vast crop field formation, applica-
tions of dung had been ameliorative, to be sure, but obviously inadequate.
Taylor hardly entertained reforestation as a logical solution. Instead, he rea-
soned that farmers needed desperately to produce enormous quantities of
corn, especially, but also clover and other green crops and, instead of pro-
cessing them through animals, return ‘‘green manure’’ (or ‘‘offal’’) to the
soil. Cattle, indeed, must be ‘‘inclosed’’—‘‘Inclosing’’ was the title of four
consecutive essays inArator—to prevent them from consuming invaluable