THE TOBACCO COLONIES
The purposes of the Virginia Company of London and of the English public
which gave it sanction were profit for the investors and aggrandizement
for the nation, along with the reduction of pauperism at home and the
conversion of the heathen abroad. For income the original promoters looked
mainly toward a South Sea passage, gold mines, fisheries, Indian trade, and
the production of silk, wine and naval stores. But from the first they were
on the alert for unexpected opportunities to be exploited. The following of
the line of least resistance led before long to the dominance of tobacco
culture, then of the plantation system, and eventually of negro slavery. At
the outset, however, these developments were utterly unforeseen. In short,
Virginia was launched with varied hopes and vague expectations. The project
was on the knees of the gods, which for a time proved a place of extreme
discomfort and peril.
The first comers in the spring of 1607, numbering a bare hundred men and
no women, were moved by the spirit of adventure. With a cumbrous and
oppressive government over them, and with no private ownership of land nor
other encouragement for steadygoing thrift, the only chance for personal
gain was through a stroke of discovery. No wonder the loss of time and
strength in futile excursions. No wonder the disheartening reaction in the
malaria-stricken camp of Jamestown.
A second hundred men arriving early in 1608 found but forty of the first
alive. The combined forces after lading the ships with "gilded dirt" and
cedar logs, were left facing the battle with Indians and disease. The dirt
when it reached London proved valueless, and the cedar, of course, worth
little. The company that summer sent further recruits including two women
and several Poles and Germans to make soap-ashes, glass and pitch--"skilled
workmen from foraine parts which may teach and set ours in the way where we
may set thousands a work in these such like services."[1] At the same time
it instructed the captain of the ship to explore and find either a lump of
gold, the South Sea passage, or some of Raleigh's lost colonists, and it
sent the officials at Jamestown peremptory notice that unless the £2000
spent on the present supply be met by the proceeds of the ship's return
cargo, the settlers need expect no further aid. The shrewd and redoubtable
Captain John Smith, now president in the colony, opposed the vain
explorings, and sent the council in London a characteristic "rude letter."
The ship, said he, kept nearly all the victuals for its crew, while the
settlers, "the one halfe sicke, the other little better," had as their diet
"a little meale and water, and not sufficient of that." The foreign experts
had been set at their assigned labors; but "it were better to give five
hundred pound a tun for those grosse commodities in Denmarke than send for
them hither till more necessary things be provided. For in over-toyling our
weake and unskilfull bodies to satisfie this desire of present profit we
can scarce ever recover ourselves from one supply to another.... As yet you
must not looke for any profitable returnes."[2]
[Footnote 1: Alexander Brown, _The First Republic in America_ (Boston,
1898), p. 68.]
[Footnote 2: Capt. John Smith, _Works_, Arber ed. (Birmingham, 1884), pp.
442-445. Smith's book, it should be said, is the sole source for this
letter.]
This unwelcome advice while daunting all mercenary promoters gave spur to
strong-hearted patriots. The prospect of profits was gone; the hope of
an overseas empire survived. The London Company, with a greatly improved
charter, appealed to the public through sermons, broadsides, pamphlets,
and personal canvassing, with such success that subscriptions to its stock
poured in from "lords, knights, gentlemen and others," including the trade
guilds and the town corporations. In lieu of cash dividends the company
promised that after a period of seven years, during which the settlers were
to work on the company's account and any surplus earnings were to be spent
on the colony or funded, a dividend in land would be issued. In this the
settlers were to be embraced as if instead of emigrating each of them had
invested £12 10s. in a share of stock. Several hundred recruits were sent
in 1609, and many more in the following years; but from the successive
governors at Jamestown came continued reports of disease, famine and
prostration, and pleas ever for more men and supplies. The company, bravely
keeping up its race with the death rate, met all demands as best it could.
To establish a firmer control, Sir Thomas Dale was sent out in 1611 as high
marshal along with Sir Thomas Gates as governor. Both of these were men
of military training, and they carried with them a set of stringent
regulations quite in keeping with their personal proclivities. These rulers
properly regarded their functions as more industrial than political. They
for the first time distributed the colonists into a series of settlements
up and down the river for farming and live-stock tending; they spurred the
willing workers by assigning them three-acre private gardens; and they
mercilessly coerced the laggard. They transformed the colony from a
distraught camp into a group of severely disciplined farms, owned by the
London Company, administered by its officials, and operated partly by its
servants, partly by its tenants who paid rent in the form of labor. That is
to say, Virginia was put upon a schedule of plantation routine, producing
its own food supply and wanting for the beginning of prosperity only a
marketable crop. This was promptly supplied through John Rolfe's experiment
in 1612 in raising tobacco. The English people were then buying annually
some £200,000 worth of that commodity, mainly from the Spanish West Indies,
at prices which might be halved or quartered and yet pay the freight and
yield substantial earnings; and so rapid was the resort to the staple in
Virginia that soon the very market place in Jamestown was planted in it.
The government in fact had to safeguard the food supply by forbidding
anyone to plant tobacco until he had put two acres in grain.
When the Gates-Dale administration ended, the seven year period from 1609
was on the point of expiry; but the temptation of earnings from tobacco
persuaded the authorities to delay the land dividend. Samuel Argall, the
new governor, while continuing the stringent discipline, robbed the company
for his own profit; and the news of his misdeeds reaching London in 1618
discredited the faction in the company which had supported his régime. The
capture of control by the liberal element among the stockholders, led
by Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton, was promptly signalized by
measures for converting Virginia into a commonwealth. A land distribution
was provided on a generous scale, and Sir George Yeardley was dispatched as
governor with instructions to call a representative assembly of the people
to share in the making of laws. The land warrants were issued at the rate
of a hundred acres on each share of stock and a similar amount to each
colonist of the time, to be followed in either case by the grant of a
second hundred acres upon proof that the first had been improved; and fifty
acres additional in reward for the future importation of every laborer.
While the company continued as before to send colonists on its own account,
notably craftsmen, indigent London children, and young women to become
wives for the bachelor settlers, it now offered special stimulus to its
members to supplement its exertions. To this end it provided that groups
of its stockholders upon organizing themselves into sub-companies or
partnerships might consolidate their several grants into large units called
particular plantations; and it ordered that "such captaines or leaders of
perticulerr plantations that shall goe there to inhabite by vertue of their
graunts and plant themselves, their tenants and servants in Virginia,
shall have liberty till a forme of government be here settled for them,
associatinge unto them divers of the gravest and discreetes of their
companies, to make orders, ordinances and constitutions for the better
orderinge and dyrectinge of their servants and buisines, provided they be
not repugnant to the lawes of England."[3]
[Footnote 3: _Records of the Virginia Company of London_, Kingsbury ed.
(Washington, 1906), I, 303.]
To embrace this opportunity some fifty grants for particular plantations
were taken out during the remaining life of the London Company. Among them
were Southampton Hundred and Martin's Hundred, to each of which two or
three hundred settlers were sent prior to 1620,[4] and Berkeley Hundred
whose records alone are available. The grant for this last was issued
in February, 1619, to a missionary enthusiast, George Thorpe, and his
partners, whose collective holdings of London Company stock amounted to
thirty-five shares. To them was given and promised land in proportion to
stock and settlers, together with a bonus of 1500 acres in view of their
project for converting the Indians. Their agent in residence was as usual
vested with public authority over the dwellers on the domain, limited
only by the control of the Virginia government in military matters and in
judicial cases on appeal.[5] After delays from bad weather, the initial
expedition set sail in September comprising John Woodleaf as captain and
thirty-four other men of diverse trades bound to service for terms ranging
from three to eight years at varying rates of compensation. Several of
these were designated respectively as officers of the guard, keeper of the
stores, caretaker of arms and implements, usher of the hall, and clerk
of the kitchen. Supplies of provisions and equipment were carried, and
instructions in detail for the building of houses, the fencing of land,
the keeping of watch, and the observances of religion. Next spring the
settlement, which had been planted near the mouth of the Appomattox River,
was joined by Thorpe himself, and in the following autumn by William Tracy
who had entered the partnership and now carried his own family together
with a preacher and some forty servants. Among these were nine women and
the two children of a man who had gone over the year before. As giving
light upon indented servitude in the period it may be noted that many of
those sent to Berkeley Hundred were described as "gentlemen," and that five
of them within the first year besought their masters to send them each
two indented servants for their use and at their expense. Tracy's vessel
however was too small to carry all whom it was desired to send. It was in
fact so crowded with plantation supplies that Tracy wrote on the eve of
sailing: "I have throw out mani things of my own yet is ye midill and upper
extre[m]li pestered so that ouer men will not lie like men and ye mareners
hath not rome to stir God is abel in ye gretest weknes to helpe we will
trust to marsi for he must help be yond hope." Fair winds appear to have
carried the vessel to port, whereupon Tracy and Thorpe jointly took
charge of the plantation, displacing Woodleaf whose services had given
dissatisfaction. Beyond this point the records are extremely scant; but
it may be gathered that the plantation was wrecked and most of its
inhabitants, including Thorpe, slain in the great Indian massacre of 1622.
The restoration of the enterprise was contemplated in an after year, but
eventually the land was sold to other persons.
[Footnote 4: _Records of the Virginia Company of London_, Kingsbury ed.
(Washington, 1906), I, 350.]
[Footnote 5: The records of this enterprise (the Smyth of Nibley papers)
have been printed in the New York Public Library _Bulletin_, III, 160-171,
208-233, 248-258, 276-295.]
The fate of Berkeley Hundred was at the same time the fate of most others
of the same sort; and the extinction of the London Company in 1624 ended
the granting of patents on that plan. The owners of the few surviving
particular plantations, furthermore, found before long that ownership by
groups of absentees was poorly suited to the needs of the case, and that
the exercise of public jurisdiction was of more trouble than it was worth.
The particular plantation system proved accordingly but an episode, yet it
furnished a transition, which otherwise might not readily have been found,
from Virginia the plantation of the London Company, to Virginia the colony
of private plantations and farms. When settlement expanded afresh after the
Indians were driven away many private estates gradually arose to follow the
industrial routine of those which had been called particular.
The private plantations were hampered in their development by dearth of
capital and labor and by the extremely low prices of tobacco which began at
the end of the sixteen-twenties as a consequence of overproduction. But
by dint of good management and the diversification of their industry the
exceptional men led the way to prosperity and the dignity which it carried.
Of Captain Samuel Matthews, for example, "an old Planter of above thirty
years standing," whose establishment was at Blunt Point on the lower James,
it was written in 1648: "He hath a fine house and all things answerable to
it; he sowes yeerly store of hempe and flax, and causes it to be spun; he
keeps weavers, and hath a tan-house, causes leather to be dressed, hath
eight shoemakers employed in this trade, hath forty negroe servants, brings
them up to trades in his house: he yeerly sowes abundance of wheat, barley,
etc. The wheat he selleth at four shillings the bushell; kills store of
beeves, and sells them to victuall the ships when they come thither; hath
abundance of kine, a brave dairy, swine great store, and poltery. He
married the daughter of Sir Tho. Hinton, and in a word, keeps a good
house, lives bravely, and a true lover of Virginia. He is worthy of much
honour."[6] Many other planters were thriving more modestly, most of them
giving nearly all their attention to the one crop. The tobacco output was
of course increasing prodigiously. The export from Virginia in 1619 had
amounted to twenty thousand pounds; that from Virginia and Maryland in 1664
aggregated fifty thousand hogsheads of about five hundred pounds each.[7]
[Footnote 6: _A Perfect Description of Virginia_ (London, 1649), reprinted
in Peter Force _Tracts_, vol. II.]
[Footnote 7: Bruce, _Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth
Century_ (New York, 1896), I, 391.]
The labor problem was almost wholly that of getting and managing bondsmen.
Land in the colony was virtually to be had for the taking; and in general
no freemen arriving in the colony would engage for such wages as employers
could afford to pay. Workers must be imported. Many in England were willing
to come, and more could be persuaded or coerced, if their passage were paid
and employment assured. To this end indentured servitude had already been
inaugurated by the London Company as a modification of the long used system
of apprenticeship. And following that plan, ship captains brought hundreds,
then thousands of laborers a year and sold their indentures to the planters
either directly or through dealers in such merchandize. The courts took
the occasion to lessen the work of the hangman by sentencing convicts to
deportation in servitude; the government rid itself of political prisoners
during the civil war by the same method; and when servant prices rose the
supply was further swelled by the agency of professional kidnappers.
The bondage varied as to its terms, with two years apparently the minimum.
The compensation varied also from mere transportation and sustenance to a
payment in advance and a stipulation for outfit in clothing, foodstuffs
and diverse equipment at the end of service. The quality of redemptioners
varied from the very dregs of society to well-to-do apprentice planters;
but the general run was doubtless fairly representative of the English
working classes. Even the convicts under the terrible laws of that century
were far from all being depraved. This labor in all its grades, however,
had serious drawbacks. Its first cost was fairly heavy; it was liable to an
acclimating fever with a high death rate; its term generally expired not
long after its adjustment and training were completed; and no sooner was
its service over than it set up for itself, often in tobacco production, to
compete with its former employers and depress the price of produce. If the
plantation system were to be perpetuated an entirely different labor supply
must be had.
"About the last of August came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty
negars." Thus wrote John Rolfe in a report of happenings in 1619;[8] and
thus, after much antiquarian dispute, the matter seems to stand as to the
first bringing of negroes to Virginia. The man-of-war, or more accurately
the privateer, had taken them from a captured slaver, and it seems to have
sold them to the colonial government itself, which in turn sold them to
private settlers. At the beginning of 1625, when a census of the colony was
made,[9] the negroes, then increased to twenty-three in a total population
of 1232 of which about one-half were white servants, were distributed in
seven localities along the James River. In 1630 a second captured cargo was
sold in the colony, and from 1635 onward small lots were imported nearly
every year.[10] Part of these came from England, part from New Netherland
and most of the remainder doubtless from the West Indies. In 1649 Virginia
was reckoned to have some three hundred negroes mingled with its fifteen
thousand whites.[11] After two decades of a somewhat more rapid importation
Governor Berkeley estimated the gross population in 1671 at forty thousand,
including six thousand white servants and two thousand negro slaves.[12]
Ere this there was also a small number of free negroes. But not until
near the end of the century, when the English government had restricted
kidnapping, when the Virginia assembly had forbidden the bringing in of
convicts, and when the direct trade from Guinea had reached considerable
dimensions, did the negroes begin to form the bulk of the Virginia
plantation gangs.
[Footnote 8: John Smith _Works_, Arber ed., p. 541.]
[Footnote 9: Tabulated in the _Virginia Magazine_, VII, 364-367.]
[Footnote 10: Bruce, _Economic History of Virginia_, II, 72-77.]
[Footnote 11: _A New Description of Virginia_ (London, 1649).]
[Footnote 12: W.W. Hening, _Statutes at Large of Virginia_, II, 515.]
Thus for two generations the negroes were few, they were employed alongside
the white servants, and in many cases were members of their masters'
households. They had by far the best opportunity which any of their race
had been given in America to learn the white men's ways and to adjust
the lines of their bondage into as pleasant places as might be. Their
importation was, for the time, on but an experimental scale, and even their
legal status was during the early decades indefinite.
The first comers were slaves in the hands of their maritime sellers; but
they were not fully slaves in the hands of their Virginian buyers, for
there was neither law nor custom then establishing the institution of
slavery in the colony. The documents of the times point clearly to a vague
tenure. In the county court records prior to 1661 the negroes are called
negro servants or merely negroes--never, it appears, definitely slaves. A
few were expressly described as servants for terms of years, and others
were conceded property rights of a sort incompatible with the institution
of slavery as elaborated in later times. Some of the blacks were in fact
liberated by the courts as having served out the terms fixed either by
their indentures or by the custom of the country. By the middle of the
century several had become free landowners, and at least one of them owned
a negro servant who went to court for his freedom but was denied it because
he could not produce the indenture which he claimed to have possessed.
Nevertheless as early as the sixteen-forties the holders of negroes were
falling into the custom of considering them, and on occasion selling them
along with the issue of the females, as servants for life and perpetuity.
The fact that negroes not bound for a term were coming to be appraised as
high as £30, while the most valuable white redemptioners were worth not
above £15 shows also the tendency toward the crystallization of slavery
before any statutory enactments declared its existence.[13]
[Footnote 13: The substance of this paragraph is drawn mainly from the
illuminating discussion of J.H. Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_
(Johns Hopkins University _Studies_, XXXI, no. 3, Baltimore, 1913), pp.
24-35.]
Until after the middle of the century the laws did not discriminate in any
way between the races. The tax laws were an index of the situation. The
act of 1649, for example, confined the poll tax to male inhabitants of all
sorts above sixteen years old. But the act of 1658 added imported female
negroes, along with Indian female servants; and this rating of negro
women as men for tax purposes was continued thenceforward as a permanent
practice. A special act of 1668, indeed, gave sharp assertion to the policy
of using taxation as a token of race distinction: "Whereas some doubts have
arisen whether negro women set free were still to be accompted tithable
according to a former act, it is declared by this grand assembly that
negro women, though permitted to enjoy their freedome yet ought not in all
respects to be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities
of the English, and are still liable to the payment of taxes."[14]
[Footnote 14: W.W. Hening, _Statutes at Large of Virginia_, I, 361, 454;
II, 267.]
As to slavery itself, the earliest laws giving it mention did not establish
the institution but merely recognized it, first indirectly then directly,
as in existence by force of custom. The initial act of this series, passed
in 1656, promised the Indian tribes that when they sent hostages the
Virginians would not "use them as slaves."[15] The next, an act of
1660, removing impediments to trade by the Dutch and other foreigners,
contemplated specifically their bringing in of "negro slaves."[16] The
third, in the following year, enacted that if any white servants ran away
in company with "any negroes who are incapable of making satisfaction by
addition of time," the white fugitives must serve for the time of the
negroes' absence in addition to suffering the usual penalties on their own
score.[17] A negro whose time of service could not be extended must needs
have been a servant for life--in other words a slave. Then in 1662 it was
enacted that "whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any
Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, ... all children born
in this colony shall be bond or free only according to the condition of the
mother."[18] Thus within six years from the first mention of slaves in the
Virginia laws, slavery was definitely recognized and established as the
hereditary legal status of such negroes and mulattoes as might be held
therein. Eighteen years more elapsed before a distinctive police law for
slaves was enacted; but from 1680 onward the laws for their control were as
definite and for the time being virtually as stringent as those which in
the same period were being enacted in Barbados and Jamaica.
[Footnote 15: _Ibid_., I, 396.]
[Footnote 16: _Ibid_., 540.]
[Footnote 17: T Hening, II, 26.]
[Footnote 18: _Ibid_., 170.]
In the first decade or two after the London Company's end the plantation
and farm clearings broke the Virginian wilderness only in a narrow line on
either bank of the James River from its mouth to near the present site of
Richmond, and in a small district on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake.
Virtually all the settlers were then raising tobacco, all dwelt at the
edge of navigable water, and all were neighbors to the Indians. As further
decades passed the similar shores of the parallel rivers to the northward,
the York, then the Rappahannock and the Potomac, were occupied in a similar
way, though with an increasing predominance of large landholdings. This
broadened the colony and gave it a shape conducive to more easy frontier
defence. It also led the way to an eventual segregation of industrial
pursuits, for the tidewater peninsulas were gradually occupied more or less
completely by the planters; while the farmers of less estate, weaned from
tobacco by its fall in price, tended to move west and south to new areas on
the mainland, where they dwelt in self-sufficing democratic neighborhoods,
and formed incidentally a buffer between the plantations on the seaboard
and the Indians round about.
With the lapse of years the number of planters increased, partly through
the division of estates, partly through the immigration of propertied
Englishmen, and partly through the rise of exceptional yeomen to the
planting estate. The farmers increased with still greater speed; for the
planters in recruiting their gangs of indented laborers were serving
constantly as immigration agents and as constantly the redemptioners upon
completing their terms were becoming yeomen, marrying and multiplying.
Meanwhile the expansion of Maryland was extending an identical régime of
planters and farmers from the northern bank of the Potomac round the head
of the Chesapeake all the way to the eastern shore settlements of Virginia.
In Maryland the personal proprietorship of Lord Baltimore and his desire to
found a Catholic haven had no lasting effect upon the industrial and social
development. The geographical conditions were so like those in Virginia and
the adoption of her system so obviously the road to success that no other
plans were long considered. Even the few variations attempted assimilated
themselves more or less promptly to the régime of the older colony. The
career of the manor system is typical. The introduction of that medieval
régime was authorized by the charter for Maryland and was provided for in
turn by the Lord Proprietor's instructions to the governor. Every grant of
one thousand, later two thousand acres, was to be made a manor, with its
appropriate court to settle differences between lord and tenant, to adjudge
civil cases between tenants where the issues involved did not exceed the
value of two pounds sterling, and to have cognizance of misdemeanors
committed on the manor. The fines and other profits were to go to the
manorial lord.
Many of these grants were made, and in a few instances the manorial courts
duly held their sessions. For St. Clement's Manor, near the mouth of the
Potomac, for example, court records between 1659 and 1672 are extant. John
Ryves, steward of Thomas Gerard the proprietor, presided; Richard
Foster assisted as the elected bailiff; and the classified freeholders,
lease-holders, "essoines" and residents served as the "jury and homages."
Characteristic findings were "that Samuell Harris broke the peace with a
stick"; that John Mansell illegally entertained strangers; that land lines
"are at this present unperfect and very obscure"; that a Cheptico Indian
had stolen a shirt from Edward Turner's house, for which he is duly fined
"if he can be knowne"; "that the lord of the mannor hath not provided a
paire of stocks, pillory and ducking stoole--Ordered that these instruments
of justice be provided by the next court by a general contribution
throughout the manor"; that certain freeholders had failed to appear, "to
do their suit at the lord's court, wherefore they are amerced each man 50l.
of tobacco to the lord"; that Joshua Lee had injured "Jno. Hoskins his
hoggs by setting his doggs on them and tearing their eares and other hurts,
for which he is fined 100l. of tobacco and caske"; "that upon the death of
Mr. Robte Sly there is a reliefe due to the lord and that Mr. Gerard Sly is
his next heire, who hath sworne fealty accordingly,"[19]
[Footnote 19: John Johnson, _Old Maryland Manors_ (Johns Hopkins University
_Studies_, I, no, 7, Baltimore, 1883), pp. 31-38.]
St. Clement's was probably almost unique in its perseverance as a true
manor; and it probably discarded its medieval machinery not long after the
end of the existing record. In general, since public land was to be had
virtually free in reward for immigration whether in freedom or service,
most of the so-called manors doubtless procured neither leaseholders nor
essoines nor any other sort of tenants, and those of them which survived as
estates found their salvation in becoming private plantations with servant
and slave gangs tilling their tobacco fields. In short, the Maryland manors
began and ended much as the Virginia particular plantations had done before
them. Maryland on the whole assumed the features of her elder sister. Her
tobacco was of lower grade, partly because of her long delay in providing
public inspection; her people in consequence were generally less
prosperous, her plantations fewer in proportion to her farms, and her
labor supply more largely of convicts and other white servants and
correspondingly less of negroes. But aside from these variations in degree
the developments and tendencies in the one were virtually those of the
other.
Before the end of the seventeenth century William Fitzhugh of Virginia
wrote that his plantations were being worked by "fine crews" of negroes,
the majority of whom were natives of the colony. Mrs. Elizabeth Digges
owned 108 slaves, John Carter 106, Ralph Wormeley 91, Robert Beverly 42,
Nathaniel Bacon, Sr., 40, and various other proprietors proportionate
numbers.[20] The conquest of the wilderness was wellnigh complete on
tidewater, and the plantation system had reached its full type for
the Chesapeake latitudes. Broad forest stretches divided most of the
plantations from one another and often separated the several fields on
the same estate; but the cause of this was not so much the paucity of
population as the character of the land and the prevalent industry. The
sandy expanses, and the occasional belts of clay likewise, had but a
surface fertility, and the cheapness of land prevented the conservation of
the soil. Hence the fields when rapidly exhausted by successive cropping in
tobacco were as a rule abandoned to broomsedge and scrub timber while new
and still newer grounds were cleared and cropped. Each estate therefore, if
its owner expected it to last a lifetime, must comprise an area in forestry
much larger than that at any one time in tillage. The great reaches of the
bay and the deep tidal rivers, furthermore, afforded such multitudinous
places of landing for ocean-going ships that all efforts to modify the
wholly rural condition of the tobacco colonies by concentrating settlement
were thwarted. It is true that Norfolk and Baltimore grew into consequence
during the eighteenth century; but the one throve mainly on the trade of
landlocked North Carolina, and the other on that of Pennsylvania. Not
until the plantation area had spread well into the piedmont hinterland did
Richmond and her sister towns near the falls on the rivers begin to focus
Virginia and Maryland trade; and even they had little influence upon life
on the tidewater peninsulas.
[Footnote 20: Bruce, _Economic History of Virginia_, II, 88.]
The third tobacco-producing colony, North Carolina, was the product of
secondary colonization. Virginia's expansion happened to send some of
her people across the boundary, where upon finding themselves under the
jurisdiction of the Lord Proprietors of Carolina they took pains to keep
that authority upon a strictly nominal basis. The first comers, about 1660,
and most of those who followed, were and continued to be small farmers; but
in the course of decades a considerable number of plantations arose in the
fertile districts about Albemarle Sound. Nearly everywhere in the lowlands,
however, the land was too barren for any distinct prosperity. The
settlements were quite isolated, the communications very poor, and the
social tone mostly that of the backwoods frontier. An Anglican missionary
when describing his own plight there in 1711 discussed the industrial
régime about him: "Men are generally of all trades and women the like
within their spheres, except some who are the posterity of old planters
and have great numbers of slaves who understand most handicraft. Men are
generally carpenters, joiners, wheelwrights, coopers, butchers, tanners,
shoemakers, tallow-chandlers, watermen and what not; women, soap-makers,
starch-makers, dyers, etc. He or she that cannot do all these things, or
hath not slaves that can, over and above all the common occupations of both
sexes, will have but a bad time of it; for help is not to be had at any
rate, every one having business enough of his own. This makes tradesmen
turn planters, and these become tradesmen. No society one with another, but
all study to live by their own hands, of their own produce; and what they
can spare goes for foreign goods. Nay, many live on a slender diet to buy
rum, sugar and molasses, with other such like necessaries, which are sold
at such a rate that the planter here is but a slave to raise a provision
for other colonies, and dare not allow himself to partake of his own
creatures, except it be the corn of the country in hominy bread."[21] Some
of the farmers and probably all the planters raised tobacco according to
the methods prevalent in Virginia. Some also made tar for sale from the
abounding pine timber; but with most of the families intercourse with
markets must have been at an irreducible minimum.
[Footnote 21: Letter of Rev. John Urmstone, July 7, 1711, to the secretary
of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, printed in F.L. Hawks, _History
of North Carolina_ (Fayetteville, N.C., 1857, 1858), II, 215, 216.]
Tobacco culture, while requiring severe exertion only at a few crises,
involved a long painstaking routine because of the delicacy of the plant
and the difficulty of producing leaf of good quality, whether of the
original varieties, oronoko and sweet-scented, or of the many others later
developed. The seed must be sown in late winter or early spring in a
special bed of deep forest mold dressed with wood ashes; and the fields
must be broken and laid off by shallow furrows into hills three or four
feet apart by the time the seedlings were grown to a finger's length. Then
came the first crisis. During or just after an April, May or June rain the
young plants must be drawn carefully from their beds, distributed in the
fields, and each plant set in its hill. Able-bodied, expert hands could set
them at the rate of thousands a day; and every nerve must be strained for
the task's completion before the ground became dry enough to endanger the
seedlings' lives. Then began a steady repetition of hoeings and plowings,
broken by the rush after a rain to replant the hills whose first plants had
died or grown twisted. Then came also several operations of special tedium.
Each plant at the time of forming its flower bud must be topped at a height
to leave a specified number of leaves growing on the stalk, and each stalk
must have the suckers growing at the base of the leaf-stems pulled off;
and the under side of every leaf must be examined twice at least for the
destruction of the horn-worms. These came each year in two successive
armies or "gluts," the one when the plants were half grown, the other when
they were nearly ready for harvest. When the crop began to turn yellow the
stalks must be cut off close to the ground, and after wilting carried to
a well ventilated tobacco house and there hung speedily for curing. Each
stalk must hang at a proper distance from its neighbor, attached to laths
laid in tiers on the joists. There the crop must stay for some months,
with the windows open in dry weather and closed in wet. Finally came the
striking, sorting and prizing in weather moist enough to make the leaves
pliable. Part of the gang would lower the stalks to the floor, where the
rest working in trios would strip them, the first stripper taking the
culls, the second the bright leaves, the third the remaining ones of dull
color. Each would bind his takings into "hands" of about a quarter of a
pound each and throw them into assorted piles. In the packing or "prizing"
a barefoot man inside the hogshead would lay the bundles in courses,
tramping them cautiously but heavily. Then a second hogshead, without a
bottom, would be set atop the first and likewise filled, and then perhaps
a third, when the whole stack would be put under blocks and levers
compressing the contents into the one hogshead at the bottom, which when
headed up was ready for market. Oftentimes a crop was not cured enough for
prizing until the next crop had been planted. Meanwhile the spare time of
the gang was employed in clearing new fields, tending the subsidiary crops,
mending fences, and performing many other incidental tasks. With some
exaggeration an essayist wrote, "The whole circle of the year is one
scene of bustle and toil, in which tobacco claims a constant and chief
share."[22]
[Footnote 22: C.W. Gooch, "Prize Essay on Agriculture in Virginia," in the
_Lynchburg Virginian_, July 14, 1833. More detailed is W.W. Bowie, "Prize
Essay on the Cultivation and Management of Tobacco," in the U.S. Patent
Office _Report_, 1849-1850, pp. 318-324. E.R. Billings, _Tobacco_
(Hartford, 1875) is a good general treatise.]
The general scale of slaveholdings in the tobacco districts cannot
be determined prior to the close of the American Revolution; but the
statistics then available may be taken as fairly representative for the
eighteenth century at large. A state census taken in certain Virginia
counties in 1782-1783[23] permits the following analysis for eight of them
selected for their large proportions of slaves. These counties, Amelia,
Hanover, Lancaster, Middlesex, New Kent, Richmond, Surry and Warwick, are
scattered through the Tidewater and the lower Piedmont. For each one of
their citizens, fifteen altogether, who held upwards of one hundred slaves,
there were approximately three who had from 50 to 99; seven with from 30 to
49; thirteen with from 20 to 29; forty with from 10 to 19; forty with from
5 to 9; seventy with from 1 to 4; and sixty who had none. In the three
chief plantation counties of Maryland, viz. Ann Arundel, Charles, and
Prince George, the ratios among the slaveholdings of the several scales,
according to the United States census of 1790, were almost identical
with those just noted in the selected Virginia counties, but the
non-slaveholders were nearly twice as numerous in proportion. In all these
Virginia and Maryland counties the average holding ranged between 8.5
and 13 slaves. In the other districts in both commonwealths, where the
plantation system was not so dominant, the average slaveholding was
smaller, of course, and the non-slaveholders more abounding.
[Footnote 23: Printed in lieu of the missing returns of the first U.S.
census, in _Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States:
Virginia_ (Washington, 1908).]
The largest slaveholding in Maryland returned in the census of 1790 was
that of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, comprising 316 slaves. Among the
largest reported in Virginia in 1782-1783 were those of John Tabb, Amelia
County, 257; William Allen, Sussex County, 241; George Chewning, 224, and
Thomas Nelson, 208, in Hanover County; Wilson N. Gary, Fluvanna County,
200; and George Washington, Fairfax County, 188. Since the great planters
occasionally owned several scattered plantations it may be that the
censuses reported some of the slaves under the names of the overseers
rather than under those of the owners; but that such instances were
probably few is indicated by the fact that the holdings of Chewning and
Nelson above noted were each listed by the census takers in several
parcels, with the names of owners and overseers both given.
The great properties were usually divided, even where the lands lay in
single tracts, into several plantations for more convenient operation, each
under a separate overseer or in some cases under a slave foreman. If the
working squads of even the major proprietors were of but moderate scale,
those in the multitude of minor holdings were of course lesser still. On
the whole, indeed, slave industry was organized in smaller units by far
than most writers, whether of romance or history, would have us believe.