OPINION:
By Philip Levy
University of West Virginia Press, $79.99 (e-book $22.99), 224 pages
Lyndon Johnson used to amuse audiences by reminiscing about growing up in a humble Texas cottage where an outhouse hung over the banks of the Perdernales River. On a dare by his brother Sam, young LBJ one day toppled the privy over the bank and down to the river. Later he was seized by his irate father who demanded to know if he had done the prank.
“I spoke right up,” Johnson would recall, “And said, Father, I cannot tell a lie. I pushed the outhouse into the river.” Whereupon his father took off his belt and gave the boy a sound whipping.
“But, Father you always told me that when George Washington ’fessed-up to chopping down the cherry tree his father praised him,” the boy protested.
“Washington’s father wasn’t sitting in the damned cherry tree,” the father retorted and whacked him some more for good measure.
What Johnson’s yarn confirms is the hagiographic fantasy concocted by Parson Mason Locke Weems in the early 19th century has remained one of the most durable of our Founding myths. So it is appropriate that author Philip Levy use the cherry tree story as the peg for his broader, readable offering of a new way of thinking about Washington — and thereby all the early Founders of America — and the land they sought to master. In so doing, Mr. Levy argues, they set in motion a new relationship between man and nature that has led us to the environmental conflict that hangs over us today.
There was never any evidence that Weems’ cherry tree ever existed at young George’s boyhood home at the Ferry Farm that his father, Augustine Washington, had across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg.
But Mr. Levy, a University of South Florida historian knows the place full well. He co-directed the National Geographic Society project to excavate Ferry Farms and document its historic artifacts after Wal-Mart in 1996 provoked public outcry over a plan to build a mall on the site.
Out of that experience Mr. Levy has come to a reappraisal of the myths we all cherish about what drove our Founders to create this miracle republic on the far side of the Atlantic and what it says about us. As the book’s full title suggests, perhaps the greatest single motive that drove them all was the vast promise of the land they were subduing. All of the Founders were avid land speculators — Washington, Jefferson and even Ben Franklin dreamed of moving west into the fecund wildernesses of the Ohio Valley. Indeed what we know as the French and Indian War was driven by that hunger to push past the French outpost at what is now Pittsburgh and move away from the now anemic soil and social burdens of the seaboard plantations.
Washington is an appropriate focus for Mr. Levy’s musings. A hundred and fifty years of biographical idolatry have portrayed his youth as one of the carefree outdoors testing a young gentleman, fitting himself out for leadership. Life at Ferry Farm was hardly poverty-stricken but after his father’s death in 1743, leaving nine children, young George — fifth in line — faced having to prosper on his own if he wanted into the top ranks of Virginia society. Owning land far greater than Ferry Farm was the only way to do it. He took the two most likely avenues, one of which was to marry a widow with sizable property.
But first, he went to Williamsburg and obtained the training and certificate to set himself up as a land surveyor — one of the high technology crafts of the day. For more than a century, the early settlers became increasingly dependent on precise measurements of distances and in the fixed dimensions of the land they bought or traded in. A sturdy outdoorsman, Washington took to surveying with zeal and skill. He acquired noble patrons, including Lord Fairfax, and prospered enough that he could install his mother, the acerbic nag Mary, in some comfort at Ferry Farm.
In addition to measuring the boundaries of the lands of the rich, Washington traveled into the far regions of Virginia and Pennsylvania’s frontier, and bought and traded properties for the rest of his life. He conducted his last land measurement a month before he died in 1799. More important for Mr. Levy, Washington straddled that environmental dividing line that marks the start of what he calls the “Anthropocene” ecological era.
Previously, Augustine Washington and his like could build iron furnaces that needed deforesting supplies of wood without altering nature much.
In the Anthropocene era of today, Mr. Levy argues, “Human kind has moved from being one of many forms of life on the planet to being one whose actions and consequences reconditioned the prospect of life itself.” Washington’s life as witness and participant in crossing that ecological dividing line makes a thought-provoking read, and Mr. Levy tells the story well.
• James Srodes is the author of the 2000 prize-winning “Franklin, the Essential Founding Father” (Regnery).
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