TOBACCO CULTURE T". Mentality oft". Great Tidewater Plante,·s on the Eve of Revolution Whh. N~I"'f." T. H. BREEN Tobacco Culture This page intentionally left blank TOBACCO CUL TURE_/> The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution * With a new preface by the author T.R.BREEN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 1985 by Princeton University Press Publisbed by Princeton University Press, 41 TVilliam Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved First paperback edition, 1987 Ninth printing, and second paperback edition, with a new prefoce, 2001 Library of Congress Catllioging-in-Publication Datil Breen, T. H. Tobacco culture: the mentality of the great Tidewater planters on the eve of revolution / T. H. Bl·een ; with a new preface by the author. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-08914-0 (alk. paper) 1. Virginia-History-Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. 2. Plantation owners-Virginia-History-18th century. 3. Plantation life-Virginia­ History-18th century. 4. Tobacco industry-Virginia-History-18th century. 5. Virginia-History-Revolution, 1775-1783-Causes-Case studies. 6. United States-History-Revolution, 1775-1783-Causes­ Case studies. I. Title. F229.B8 2001 975.5'02-dc21 2001019854 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Linotron Janson Printed on acid-free pape,·. CtO www.pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States ofAmerica 9 11 13 15 17 16 14 12 10 For Susan This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix PREFACE TO THE SECOND PAPERBACK EDITION xi PREFACE XXV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XXIX I. An Agrarian Context for Radical Ideas 3 II. Tobacco Mentality 40 III. Planters and Merchants: A Kind of Friendship 84 IV. Loss of Independence 124 V. Politicizing the Discourse: Tobacco, Debt and the Coming of Revolution 160 EPILOGUE: A New Beginning 204 INDEX 211 This page intentionally left blank LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS I. William Byrd's Westover viewed from the James River (Reproduced by permission of Dementi Studio, Richmond, Virginia) 5 II. Title page from Jonathan Carver's A Treatise on the Culture of the Tobacco Plant (London, 1779) (Courtesy Arents Collections, New York Public Library) 18-19 III. Map of late eighteenth-century Tidewater Virginia (Courtesy of the University of North Carolina Press and Gregg Roeber) 33 IV. Five-dollar bill printed by Hall and Sellars, 1778 (Courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Audiovisual Library) 42 V. Stages in the production of Virginia tobacco, from William Tatham, An Historical and Practical Essay on the Culture of Tobacco (London, 1800) (Courtesy Arents Collections, New York Public Library) 52 VI. Ways of transporting tobacco to the public warehouses, from .William Tatham, An Historical and Practical Essay on the Culture of Tobacco (Courtesy Arents Collections, New York Public Library) 54 VII. A Tobacco Note issued in 1743 (Courtesy Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, College of William and Mary) 63 VIII. Eighteenth-century tobacco marks from Fairfax County (Courtesy of Beth Mitchell and the Office of Heritage Resources, Fairfax County, Virginia) 66 x ILLUSTRA TIO;-.JS IX. Eighteenth-century Tobacco Label (Courtesy Arents Collections, New York Public Library) 68 X. Portrait of Landon Carter (Courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Audiovisual Library) 77 XI. Landon Carter's Sabine Hall (Reproduced by permission of Dementi Studio, Richmond, Virginia) 87 XII. Charles Willson Peale's 1772 Portrait of George Washington (Reproduced by permission of Washington and Lee University) 99 XIII. Cartouche from Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson map of Virginia and Maryland, 1751 (Courtesy Arents Collections, New York Public Library) 109 XIV. Bill of Exchange, John Stuart to John Norton and Son, pay to John Graham and Co., 1 October 1770 (Courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Audiovisual Library) 114-15 XV. The Alternative of Williams-Burg (Courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Audiovisual Library) 202 PREFACE TO THE SECOND PAPERBACK EDITION The release of a new edition of Tobacco Culture provides a welcome opportunity to acknowledge a personal intellectual debt to Landon Carter. This delayed tribute may strike an odd note. After all, Carter was a somewhat truculent eighteenth-century Virginia planter. But, as I now have come to appreciate more fully than I did when the book first ap­ peared, Carter taught me something fundamental about writ­ ing social and cultural history. We should start with the man himself. No one in late colo­ nial Virginia questioned Landon Carter's high standing among the region's great planters, least of all himself. A per­ son of wealth and power, his world turned on the production of tobacco. What distinguished Carter from most of his peers was an extraordinary diary, a massive accounting of the daily challenges confronting him at Sabine Hall, a Carter planta­ tion situated on the Rappahannock River. The detailed en­ tries over almost a quarter century document a continuing struggle. Within a cycle of routine agricultural chores-seed­ ing, transplanting, weeding, hoeing, topping, suckering, cut­ ting, curing, and prizing-Carter depicted a personal contest against an uncooperative human and physical environment that frequently defied his own best efforts. At the height of the growing season in July 1766, for exam­ ple, Carter attempted to estimate the size of the coming har­ vest. With a flourish of mathematical precision barely disguis­ ing the crudeness of his calculations, Carter stated, "Tobacco I tend at least 280,000." He assumed that if "15 plants in the present way will make 1 pound of tobacco, then 280,000 will neat [yield] but 18,638 pounds of tobacco." Numbers of this sort demanded careful scrutiny. Did the figures represent a proper return on the investment of time and labor? Perhaps Carter had misjudged the crop, been too smart by half. He wondered if he should have thinned the fields. Perhaps he XII PREFACE, SECOND PAPERBACK EDITION should have allowed five plants to the pound. Each year the diary recorded similar problems. Sometimes it was too much rain; sometimes slaves failed to carry out his precise instruc­ tions. \¥hatever his experience, the arrival of spring always signaled for Carter a renewed confrontation with the forces of nature. \¥hen initially attempting to reconstruct the mentality of the great planters of Virginia, I found documents such as Carter's diary frustrating, often to the point of irritation. For all their prosaic detail about the production and marketing of tobacco, these materials never seemed to speak directly to my immediate research concerns. I wanted to know more about the political values of Carter's generation, a worthy project in my estimation. After all, this group of men behaved in a quite unexpected manner. The Virginia gentry encouraged a com­ plex provincial society, one deeply divided by antipathies of class and race, to take up arms against the most powerful mil­ itary empire the world had ever seen. The risks were extraor­ dinary. Each act of corporate resistance raised new, frequently unwelcome possibilities within Virginia of wider participation in the political process. During the run-up to independence no one in the colony fully comprehended what it would mean to establish a genuinely republican government. I had assumed that the personal papers of the great planters would contain extensive discussions of topics such as the limits of parliamentary sovereignty, natural rights and human equality, political virtue and corruption, liberty and a bal­ anced constitution. But surviving records refused to cooperate with the project. Instead of chronicling the evolution of re­ publican thought, the archives spoke more passionately about making tobacco than about sustaining a colonial rebellion. To be sure, some Virginia planters such as Richard Bland au­ thored important pamphlets and newspaper essays, but links between the personal experience of the great planters and their political ideology at a moment of profound imperial crisis remained obscure. Research for Tobacco Culture was well advanced before Car­ ter and his friends persuaded me that I was not making very productive use of my time. My error-one not all that rare PREFACE, SECOND PAPERBACK EDITION xiii among contemporary historians of political ideas-was as­ suming that social context has very little effect upon the char­ acter of basic values such as freedom and liberty. But, as I discovered rapidly enough, context cannot be so easily dis­ missed. My misstep resulted from a stubborn insistence that the great planters speak to me across the centuries about my own analytic concerns in a form and language that I could readily comprehend. Not surprisingly, I transformed the leaders of Revolutionary Virginia into enlightened gentlemen, well-read, broadly philosophical, in other words, reflective people who possessed the leisure and intellect to explore for­ mal political thought as if they were participants in a modem academic seminar. From this point of view, it made sense for me to ferret out discussions of liberty, equality, and indepen­ dence. In time, however, I learned how to listen more attentively to what Landon Carter and other members of the Virginia ruling class were actually trying to communicate about the structure of their lives. These were most certainly not men of leisure. They had obligations