James Madison's Montpelier We The People Fall 2017 WTP_fall 2017_FINAL-rgb | Page 13

FALL 2017
INTO THE WOODS WITH JAMES MADISON
We don’t often think of James Madison as an
environmentalist, but when the retired president
addressed the Agricultural Society of Albemarle
in 1818, he was speaking as both an agriculturist
and as one of America’s early conservationists.
Madison argued that farmers should restore
the fertility of worn-out land, and plow their
fields using methods that would prevent erosion
and rainwater runoff. Rather than cutting trees
wastefully, farmers should carefully manage and
renew their woodlands.
Madison warned that “of all the errors in our
rural economy,” the most regrettable was “the
injudicious and excessive destruction of timber
and fire wood. It seems never to have occurred
that the fund was not inexhaustible, and that a
crop of trees could not be raised as quickly as one
of wheat or corn.” Madison noted that “when
our ancestors arrived, they found the trees of the
forest the great obstacle to their settlement, and
cultivation.” These early settlers, he observed,
destroyed trees even when they could have
provided shade, comfort, and beauty.
“It is high time for many farmers,” Madison
advised, “...to economize what remains of wood
land; to foster the second growths where taking
place in convenient spots; and to commence, when
necessary, plantations of the trees recommended
by their utility and quickness of growth.”
Madison followed his own advice, taking “great
pains to preserve some fine trees on his estate,”
according to British visitor John Finch in 1824:
Finch and Madison “rode some distance in
the woods that I might see and admire” several
particularly large chestnut trees. Madison had
trees planted in former agricultural fields as early
as 1790, when he directed his enslaved overseer
Sawney to plant an orchard of 200 apple trees
“in the little field on the top of the Mountain:
beginning with the Tobacco ground, & going on
to the best part of the old field adjoining.”
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