When he resigned as commander in chief of Britain’s Virginia forces in the French and Indian War in 1758, the 26-year-old George Washington put aside his military ambitions and returned to his Mount Vernon plantation for good. (Or so he thought.) Naturally enough, the young man started out as a traditional slaveholding Southern tobacco planter like his father and grandfathers before him. Yet in the decades that followed, a remarkable transformation took place. By the time he died in 1799, Washington had turned his back on the whole ethos of Southern agrarianism that was so dear to fellow Virginians like Thomas Jefferson....
