Carla Occaso
The year 1791 was a busy one for founding father Thomas Jefferson (who was the third U.S. president from 1801 to 1809). But in 1791, while serving as secretary of state under President George Washington, he argued with Alexander Hamilton against the concept of a national bank, and was involved in surveying and planning a new federal district (now Washington D.C.), according to the article “1791: Jeffersons Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank” in American Battlefield Trust (author not noted).
Also that year, Jefferson and his friend, then U.S. Rep. James Madison, visited Vermont to promote using maple sugar as a means to replace cane sugar to lessen the country’s dependence on slavery, according to the article, “Thomas Jefferson and the Maple Sugar Scheme,” by Mary Mile Theobald.
Maple sugar was seen as morally superior to cane sugar, according to Theobald’s account of the teachings of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a leader of the American Enlightenment. His goal was “to lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar and thus indirectly to destroy negro [sic] slavery,” Theobald writes.
Jefferson quickly became intrigued and joined the pro-maple sugar campaign. And in May 1791, he and Madison headed to the country’s newest state of Vermont on horseback. During the trip he urged small farmers and large landowners to plant and tend maple trees as they would apple trees. “I have never seen a reason why every farmer should not have a sugar orchard, as well as an apple orchard,” Jefferson wrote, per Theobald. At the time, cane sugar was America’s largest import.
Vermonters did ultimately increase maple production, and Jefferson himself tried to cultivate a maple grove at his Virginia home called Monticello. However, the maple trees in Virginia did not produce much sugar because the temperatures did not hit the sweet spot in the spring of freezing nights coupled with warm days. Jefferson’s hopes for maple sugar to create sugar independence did not work out, but his efforts led to the creation of more maple sugar operations in the Northeast.
