History of Commercial Tobacco in The United States - Cigarettes Go Mainstream

Cigarettes Go Mainstream

A significant change began in the establishment of Victorian society in Europe. In an attempt to civilize anything that seemed coarse or uncivil, much of Victorian society would adapt cultural items to suit their tastes. Ironically the British adopted the paper wrapped minced tobacco. Such an item originally relegated to the poor in Spain, seemed on face value a contradiction. However, one must consider the need for human manipulation of tobacco, including, chopping it up, wrapping it in a man-made piece of paper, and then inserting it into a piece of cane for a mouth piece. One can then see that this was just another way of civilizing part of the coarser aspects of the British Empire. A feministic culture dominated smoking at this time as well as lots of tobacco, and this gave further rise to this “dainty” cigarette, bearing a feminine name.

An African slave named Stephan changed the process of curing the Bright Leaf tobacco variety (a lighter flavored tobacco leaf) by curing it with charcoal taken from a local blacksmith’s fire rather than the usual logwood. This fire burned hotter and faster and accelerated the curing process. The process was refined further to include a furnace in which heat from the charcoal was applied through flues, so that dark soot and off flavors did not come in contact with the tobacco. This changed the curing process of a lighter leaf and produced a new, lighter tobacco which was able to be inhaled. This, linked together with the British Victorian desire for cigarettes, along with the aforementioned French and other European countries, gave way to an emerging market to minced tobacco. This trend had not yet hit America for its export market.

The American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation freed the entire slave workforce of the American South. Although some slaves stayed on for pay with their prior slave owners, many left entirely to make their own lives in other parts of the country. Tobacco farmers needed to adapt. Not only had they lost their workforce, but also a shift in demand had occurred. In Europe, there was a desire for not only snuff, pipes and cigars, but cigarettes appeared as well. Cigar rolling and even the creation of pipe tobacco at the time was labor intensive and, without slave labor, innovation needed to occur.

Those farmers, that did not go out of business again, consolidated their holdings from other farmers who could not keep their lands as they had no “employees” to farm their fields. The answer to the labor problem came from the cigarette. The quality of the tobacco, although still considered, did not have to be perfect as it would be minced to be wrapped into paper. The next step to limiting labor was the process of creating the cigarette. During the 1870s a machine was invented by Albert Pease of Dayton, Ohio, which chopped up the tobacco for cigarettes. Up until the 1880s, cigarettes were still made by hand and were high in price. In 1881, James Bonsack, an avid craftsman, created a machine that revolutionized cigarette production. The machine chopped the tobacco, then dropped a certain amount of the tobacco into a long tube of paper, which the machine would then roll and push out the end where it would be sliced by the machine into individual cigarettes. This machine operated at thirteen times the speed of a human cigarette roller.

Companies began advertising the now inexpensive cigarettes to Europe and United States citizens. Many other forms of tobacco quickly dropped from production in the United States in favor of this easy to produce, easy to inhale tobacco product. Sales of cigarettes grew astronomically. In one example, American Tobacco Co., listed on the American Stock Exchange, with sales of $25,000,000 in 1890, increased its sales to $316,000,000 in 1903. After the Civil War debts were paid off, taxes were almost completely removed from cigarettes. It was at this point, that the cigarette became an integral part of American culture, which lasted until scientific revelations discovered the health consequences of smoking.