University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER IV
THE TOBACCO COLONIES

THE purposes of the Virginia Company of London and of
I 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]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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 country 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]

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]

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.

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, leaseholders,
"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 generall
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 501. 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 1001, 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]

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.

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, tallowchandlers,
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.

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]

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.

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. Cary, 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.