and happy,’’ he declared, if treated kindly and firmly. Plantation overseers
were essential to labor management, yet planters’ management of over-
seers led inevitably to degradation of soils. Everywhere, planters offered
overseers incentives to wring the most profit from plantations; then, having
exhausted crop fields (and probably mistreated labor), successful overseers
gained reputations that tempted envious neighboring planters to lure them
to their own estates with higher salaries. Taylor also decried ‘‘the three shift
system’’ of rotation—‘‘Indian corn, wheat, pasture’’—which amounted to
‘‘the massacre of the earth’’ (). Grains large and small depleted far more
nutrients from soils than might be restored by farm animals’ scattered
droppings in one season. Taylor dedicated no fewer than six essays to
proper drainage of farmlands, and others dealt with various crops suited
to an improved rotation system. He advised readers on animal husbandry
and orchards. The fragmentation ofArator’s sixty-four essays nonetheless
offered a grand scheme for the resurrection of the Chesapeake tidewater.
This was ‘‘green manure.’’
By the time John Taylor was born, his father’s generation of Chesapeake
planters had happily married their fortunes to manure of another color.
Cattle and hogs had been introduced to the countryside long before. Most
ranged free and thrived in forests, marshes, and swamps. The English ob-
served that swine multiplied rapidly while feeding upon heavy masts (nuts,
seeds, tender shoots, and roots) in mixed hardwood and pine woods, and
that cattle grew fat upon the reeds and grasses of expansive wetlands. For
a long time, then, while European settlers and a small African population
cleared forests and farmed tobacco chiefly with hoes—plows being virtu-
ally impossible to use in stump- and root-infested crop fields—‘‘agronomy’’
and ‘‘improvement’’ through manuring were irrelevant. Trees were the bar-
rier to civilization and to wealth, useful mainly in the construction of fences
to protect crops from foraging cattle and hogs.
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, great planters had cleared
enough land thoroughly and acquired sufficient African slaves (now ap-
proaching half the total population in Virginia) that they sought at last to
farm like the most progressive Europeans. Their fields would be made per-
manent, with excellent fences (permanent ones, if possible); their animals
would be placed under stricter control, so they might contribute more di-
rectly to farming’s permanence. The ambition, techniques, and language of
permanence came largely from the English southeast—East Anglia, espe-
cially the county of Norfolk. The Norfolk ‘‘system’’ included a five-part crop/
land-use rotation that usually included turnips but also better and deeper