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 of this inventory is contained in appendix D.)