Tobacco: the crop that built Virginia and Havana

Where did tobacco come from?

Tobacco is a plant of the Americas. People in South America were using it thousands of years ago, and it spread through the Caribbean to North America, where it was smoked in ceremonies and to seal agreements between nations.

The Powhatan peoples of Virginia grew their own kind of tobacco, but English smokers found it harsh. In about 1612 the Jamestown colonist John Rolfe planted seed of the milder tobacco grown in Spain’s colonies, and the first of his leaf reached England in 1613. Within a few years Virginia was shipping tens of thousands of pounds a year. By 1700 England imported nearly 40 million pounds of tobacco, almost all of it from Virginia and Maryland.

How was tobacco grown in Virginia and Maryland?

A tobacco crop took most of the year:

• Seedbeds. Seeds were sown in late winter under pine branches to keep off the frost.
• Planting. In May the seedlings went into small hills of earth, a few feet apart.
• Tending. All summer, workers hoed weeds, snapped off the tops and side shoots so the leaves grew big, and picked hornworms off by hand.
• Cutting and curing. In late summer the plants, now taller than a man, were cut and hung in barns for four to six weeks to dry.
• Packing. The cured leaves were sorted, tied in bundles and pressed into barrels called hogsheads.

Tobacco grew best in freshly cleared ground, so clearing new land took up much of the rest of the year.

Who did the work on tobacco plantations?

At first most of the work was done by indentured servants: mostly English men and women who agreed to work for four to seven years in return for their passage. Between 1630 and 1680 about 50,000 of them came to the Chesapeake.

Then fewer English people chose to come, and richer planters turned to buying enslaved Africans, who were held for life, along with their children. By 1700 enslaved Africans outnumbered white servants in Virginia, and Virginia’s 1705 law on “Servants and Slaves” set the new order down in writing. Historians estimate that 80,000 to 100,000 Africans were brought to Virginia between 1698 and 1774. They still debate exactly why the change happened: some link it to planters’ fear of poor white rebels after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, while others see a slower shift as the slave trade grew.

Enslaved people resisted. In the autumn of 1730 word spread that the king had ordered baptised Christians to be freed. A few hundred enslaved people in Princess Anne County, Virginia, met, chose their own leaders and demanded their freedom. The rising was crushed, and some escaped into the Great Dismal Swamp. No one knows for sure where the rumour began.

What was a hogshead, and what was the Tobacco Inspection Act?

A hogshead was a large barrel, made by hand, that held on average about 1,000 pounds of tobacco, or half a ton. Teams of horses rolled the hogsheads along “rolling roads” to riverside warehouses.

In the early 1700s tobacco prices stayed low for years. To raise the quality of the leaf, and its price, Virginia passed the Tobacco Inspection Act in May 1730, after years of argument. It came after the game’s opening years. All tobacco now had to go through public warehouses, where two inspectors checked it, burned trash and bad leaf, and stamped each good hogshead. The planter received a paper “tobacco note” that people used as money. Many small planters hated the law, but prices rose. Maryland passed a similar law in 1747.

Why did Chesapeake tobacco have to go to Britain first?

England’s Navigation Act of 1660 put tobacco on a list of “enumerated” goods, along with sugar, cotton and dyes. From 1661 these could only be shipped to England or another English colony, or ship and cargo could be seized. When Scotland joined England in 1707, Scottish ports could take part too.

Once landed, the tobacco paid a duty, but most of it was paid back if the tobacco was sent abroad again. Merchants sold much of it on to Amsterdam, France and northern Europe, where pipe smoking was common and, as the 1700s went on, snuff became fashionable. France, like Spain, made tobacco a royal monopoly, and its buyers took large amounts of Chesapeake leaf.

Glasgow grew fast after 1707. In 1721–22 merchants in Bristol, Liverpool and Whitehaven complained to the government that Glasgow traders were undercutting them by cheating on customs weights. Glasgow’s famous “Tobacco Lords” ruled the trade later, in the 1750s to 1770s.

Today we know that tobacco causes cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, and it kills more than 7 million people a year.

What happened to Cuban tobacco after 1717?

Tobacco from the farms around Havana was famous for its quality. In 1717 the Spanish crown made it a royal monopoly, called the estanco. The small growers, known as vegueros, had to sell their whole crop to a royal buying office, the Factoría in Havana, at prices the crown set. The governor announced the rules in July 1717.

The growers fought back three times:

• 1717. Several hundred armed growers marched into Havana in August, shouting “Long live Philip V, down with bad government”. The governor fled on a galleon.
• 1720. Growers burned the crops of farmers who sold to the crown and cut off food to the city. The crown made concessions.
• 1723. When the growers rose again in February, the new governor sent soldiers. Eleven prisoners were executed without trial, and the king later rebuked the governor for it.

The monopoly went through many changes and was brought back in 1760 in much its old form. Monopolies like this one, in Spain and France, made smuggling profitable across the Atlantic world.

Where else did tobacco go?

Tobacco was also a trade good in Africa. Portuguese Brazil grew tobacco in Bahia, and a French traveller in 1717 noted that slave traders from Bahia used it to buy captives on the West African coast, where ports such as Whydah were busy slave-trading centres.