ed,
many farmers in Virginia persisted in traditional ways. "Book
farming," as the new methods were called, was decried in favor of the
familiar ways of cultivating which were passed from father to son.
This skepticism was strengthened, also, when experiments failed--as
they did in many cases--and when Virginia agriculture suffered from
economic depression along with the rest of the nation--as it did in
the years following the War of 1812.[29]

While Virginia agriculture had an equivocal or only moderately
successful record of growth from 1750 to 1830, the proponents of
scientific farming could and did argue that its value was measured in
political as well as economic terms. Men like Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, John Taylor, James Garnett, and others sincerely believed
that the survival of their way of life and that which they sought for
Virginia depended on restoring the farmer to preeminence. One
historian has described their philosophy thus:

The sincerity of their belief in the corruption of urban and the
virtue of rural living is unquestionable. They practiced as they
preached. And as they looked about them, at the long line of
Virginia leaders of the early republic and at their own modest
pleasant way of life, which some of them believed extended all the
way down to their slaves, they felt they had incontestable
evidence of the rightness of their convictions. As their soil
became depleted, the hold of their state on preeminence in
everything was weakening. Restore the soil and Virginia would be
restored to her rightful preeminence. Simple, primitive, noble,
limited yet grand, thus went the conception.[30]

THE MOSS FAMILY AS FARMERS. Whether John Moss and his descendants who
inherited and worked Green Spring Farm were "scientific farmers"
according to the standards of the time is not certain. Presumably they
were aware of the organizations which espoused this cause since they
were active in the public life of their state and community. They may
well have read the writings of some of the scientific farming leaders
of the time, such as John Taylor, who wrote under the pseudonym,
"Arator," and whose articles on agriculture were published in a
Georgetown newspaper commencing in 1810.[31]

An inventory of the personal property of William Moss, made in
connection with an auction to settle up his estate in 1835, offers
indirect evidence of the farming methods of the Moss family. (A copy