A Leaf From the History of America

It’s hard to overstate tobacco’s historical importance to the United States and to the South, even if the crop has been criticized from the very beginning.

Without tobacco, the Virginia colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America, might have faced financial ruin in its infancy.

The economic vitality it provided helped stir sentiment for independence from Britain in the 1770s, and the labor-intensive crop even was a factor in Southern secession at the time of the Civil War.

To the Virginia colony, tobacco was “like oil is to Saudi Arabia,” said Alan Williams, a professor of colonial history at the University of Virginia.

It was Christopher Columbus who introduced Europe to the leaf that American Indians used ceremonially.

The English had become recreational users of Spanish and Dutch tobacco by the early 1600s, and almost immediately the criticism that has shadowed tobacco began. King James I called it “loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain.”

But in 1612, just five years after the English arrived in Virginia, colonist John Rolfe introduced a Spanish blend of tobacco here, and it was an immediate success.

The king’s distaste faded as his countrymen stopped buying imported tobacco and began paying duties on the colonial trade.

“All of a sudden, Virginia was able to produce this commodity that created a tobacco boom,” said Tom Davidson, chief curator of the Jamestown Settlement historical attraction. “There seemed to be an unlimited market.”

“Becoming the rage almost overnight, tobacco captivated the colonists’ imaginations like precious metal during a gold rush,” wrote Arthur Pierce Middleton in “Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era.”

In 1622, planters exported 60,000 pounds; by 1628, 500,000 pounds; by 1639, 1.5 million pounds. Tobacco was virtually the only colonial export.

“It was quick money, something that wasn’t produced elsewhere in the British trading system. When you came to Virginia, you just learned to grow tobacco,” Williams said.

By 1775, on the eve of the war for independence, more than 100 million pounds of tobacco sailed for England from Virginia and Maryland. Tobacco was reshipped to countries throughout Europe, even into Russia.

But as prices fell because of a glut, many planters went into debt to the London merchants who had their consignments, Middleton wrote. That led to mutual distrust and was a factor in the growing move in the colonies for self-government.

The war was the beginning of a long period of restricted exports. Planters began relying more on a growing domestic market as the country expanded westward. Some tobacco went to the northern colonies, but in New England the Puritan settlers believed it was a dangerous drug.

Tobacco also helped tie the fortunes of Viriginia to the Confederate cause in the Civil War.

“Tobacco stimulated the need for slaves,” Davidson said, because it required intensive labor to cultivate. “The planters preferred indentured servants because slaves cost more, but the demand for labor couldn’t keep up” without slavery, he said.