Tobacco and Virginia Economy
Tobacco production is labor intensive and required thousands of slaves. The wealth and influence of the so-called "tuckahoe" Virginia settlers depended on tobacco. The production of tobacco spread down the James, York, Rappahannock, and the Potomac rivers. To ensure a modicum of quality, Virginia set up a system of inspection warehouses in the tidewater region (see Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730) and mandated that tobacco only be exported in hogsheads that had been inspected at one of these stations.
Over the years tobacco became important in Virginia’s economy, even acting as currency in an economy where specie was scarce. An independent currency allowed the colonies to gain power and slowly break away from the British economically and culturally. In the year 1758 Virginia exported 70,000 hogsheads of tobacco. The production of tobacco in colonial times required much toil. The plants had to be grown from seeds in a cold frame, set out, weeded, tasseled, harvested, and cured. All of this work was done by man and beast. Each acre produced about 5,000 plants that required hand care over and over again. But, with slave labor, profits exceeded any other plant that could be grown.
Many of the wealthy and influential men in Colonial Virginia were tobacco plantation owners. A number of America's first presidents owned slaves. They owned numerous plantations, each with large numbers of slaves.
Read more about this topic: Plantation Economy
Famous quotes containing the words tobacco and, tobacco, virginia and/or economy:
“Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dying for a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
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—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)