Plantations

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Plantations

Tobacco has been one of the major plantation crops of the Americas. It has been especially important in North America and at different times in other parts of the Americas, including Cuba and Venezuela. In contrast to other plantation crops, especially sugar, tobacco plantations tended to be relatively small; tobacco was also grown on smaller holdings as well. While enslaved Africans and Amerindians were used as workers on tobacco plantations and farms, they often worked alongside their masters, indentured workers, and others. The crop required careful tending of the tobacco leaves and thus close supervision.

Europeans had acquired their knowledge of tobacco cultivation from Amerindians. This apprenticeship was rapid and short, and in places like Trinidad and Venezuela it seems that both groups worked side by side. Tobacco was often raised in fields that were separate from other crops. In some fishing and hunting communities, tobacco was the only crop actually cultivated. Very quickly, however, tobacco was transformed into a European commodity. In the region of the Chesapeake, for example, Amerindian ties with tobacco were undermined, and even the memory of an association was erased from the traditions. At the same time, European settlers transformed production as they began to supply European tobacco and smoking devices, such as clay pipes, to the native population.

Expansion of output essentially required knowledge of the crop, suitable land, and sufficient labor, which did not necessarily mean that the crop would be grown on plantations. Unlike sugar and some other crops, the differences in productivity on relatively large holdings were not dramatically different from production on small holdings, but there were nonetheless some economies of scale. In fact, during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, tobacco was grown in Europe, with production almost exclusively confined to peasants and small farmers. Similarly, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch tried unsuccessfully to introduce this style of peasant production in their South American colonies.

Despite these isolated examples, the plantation model for production, as adopted in the Tidewater region of the Chesapeake, became the model for the Americas, with little variation among European colonies. There, as in many other places where the combination of open land and the lack of free labor defined the possibilities of expansion, bonded labor, whether under indenture or as slaves, became the basis of labor supply. In North America, for example, the Virginia Company sponsored the migration of indentured workers, both men and women, who were expected to work off the price of their passage across the Atlantic and other debts that had been accumulated through a system of quasicoerced labor. Normally, such indentures lasted from four to seven years, after which the workers were free to establish themselves as independent farmers or otherwise work on their own account. Hence indentured labor eased the early stages of production during the clearing of land and the expansion in production, but such labor was inadequate as a long-term source of labor. Once the indenture was finished, there was little reason for individuals to continue to work for their masters; with the wide availability of land, it was more usual for people to become independent producers themselves or find other employment. The use of slave labor, particularly enslaved Africans, was a response to this labor shortage.

Culture and Methods of Cultivation

The cultivation and care of tobacco involved a well-defined sequence of steps from seed to market. Successful production depended on the management of the interaction between human activity and the natural conditions. Tobacco cultivation required a constant input of different skills through each stage, each one requiring a great deal of care.

In the first stage, the seed was planted in a seedbed. This method was common practice, the persistence of which to the present shows its superiority over planting in the open field. The seedbed increased the survival opportunities for the young plants, allowing for more careful use of fertilizers. Careful scientific study has determined that the act of transplanting has the beneficial side effect of enhancing growth. Apparently, Chesapeake planters had come to understand this effect, although the extent of experimentation needed to reach these results is unknown. However, the use of seedbeds marked an important difference between the way tobacco had been cultivated by Amerindians and on plantations.

The seedbed stage was not onerous in work, but the transplanting to the open fields was labor-intensive. Furthermore, determining when transplanting should take place was a crucial decision of management. The shift had to be done in favorable conditions, usually after a heavy rain. The complete operation of transplanting usually took many weeks. This stage demanded a lot of people at the precise time, because the field needed to be prepared and the transplanting performed quickly in order to prevent the plants from drying out; each plant had to be transplanted individually. It is likely that some of the biggest Virginian planters cultivated more than 100,000 plants, with several thousand per acre.

In the next stage, weeding, the fields were cleaned of any growth that menaced the development the tobacco plants. Weeding required a great deal of time and energy. As the plants grew, they had to be topped, which prevented the plant from producing flowers and thus permitted the growth of the leaves. Secondary branches were trimmed in order to allow the plant to concentrate all growth in the principal leaves. This selective action was called suckering and was done plant by plant. Suckering and topping were crucial for the final quality of the leaves and hence to the yield. However, when the plants became mature, the most difficult decision of the planters was to choose the exact time to cut. In the end, the attention shifted from the plant itself to the individual leaves, which could be easily damaged.

The cutting of the leaves was the point at which the tobacco was transformed from a botanical item into a salable commodity. After cutting, the leaves had to be cured, which entailed allowing the tobacco stalks with their leaves to dry out naturally in barns specially built for this purpose. After the tobacco was cured, the leaves were stripped from the stalks, and the main stem of each leaf was removed. Depending on the number of plants, stalking and stemming could be done in twenty-four hours. Once finished, the leaves were packed into barrels in a process called prizing. By the time prizing was completed, the seedbeds for the next calendar year needed to be underway and the production cycle begun anew.

However, time was not the only aspect of the Chesapeake culture that was influenced by the rhythms of the tobacco plant. The human and material geography of the region were also shaped by the demands of the plantations. In North America, the combination of open land and short labor force necessary to supply the necessities of the farming developed a decentralized spatial organization. From the settlements on the James River, the English colonies extended to the north, where rivers like the York, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac created rich wetlands could be brought into production at low cost. The spread of tobacco cultivation was also favored by the fact that the Chesapeake Bay region is a myriad of rivers, inlets, and tributaries penetrating the maritime plain. And this water system was deep enough to allow the entrance of the largest vessels of the colonial trade.

In fact, the river system was the usual means of transportation within this region. The river system enabled planters to move tobacco to market and ultimately to England without major expense or risk. Moreover, because of the geography of the region, people lived in rural areas, scattered along the rivers. Until the first quarter of the eighteenth century, despite legislation passed by the Virginia and Maryland Assemblies to encourage settlement in towns and villages, there were fewer than ten small villages containing between fifty and a hundred residents in the region.

In the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake colonies remained essentially European, and the number of Africans remained small. Despite changes in the organization of labor, tobacco defined the particular expressions of Chesapeake culture. Until the second half of the seventeenth century, most of the tobacco farms were small properties and often had no more than one bound worker. On the larger estates, five workers were able to take care of ninety or a hundred acres planted in tobacco. Nevertheless, this age of the small planter lasted only until the end of the seventeenth century.

After 1680, Chesapeake society was completely transformed. The labor regime changed from indentured servitude to slavery and from a European to an African base. The social hierarchy, which had been characterized by relatively minor class differences, became an elitist system based on wealth, race, and power.

The population of the Chesapeake colonies increased dramatically in the eighteenth century. Although the black population at the end of the seventeenth century was small in comparison to the white population, the number of blacks increased rapidly, both absolutely and relatively. Whereas blacks accounted for only 13 per cent of the population in 1700, by the end of the century the figure reached 40 per cent in a total population of almost 800,000 people. Tobacco farms were transformed into tobacco plantations. Planters turned to slave labor instead of servant labor, and wealth became measured by the number of slaves on the plantation. Among several alterations introduced in the organization of tobacco cultivation, the most important were the increasing size of the unit and the growing complexity of administration on the plantations. This process led to the formation of a gentry, a new class of planters. For them, the combination of slavery and tobacco cemented a social system of dominance that came to shape their material welfare and the symbols of power.

At the same time that the plantations grew in size, the slave labor force expanded, and the demand for supervision increased, the gentry became the repository of the almost mystical understanding of the tobacco business. If the possession of slaves became the measure of wealth, the quality of the tobacco was a measure of self-esteem. The techniques of harvesting became a well-kept secret passed from father to son. Some of these rich men were obsessed by tobacco. It was the basis of their culture of debt, which linked them with the English merchants in a consignment system that allowed them to accumulate manufactured goods and European foodstuffs.

Plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil

With the exception of Jamaica, tobacco was the first or one of the first crops grown in the British and French Caribbean. As was the case in the Chesapeake, the islands initially relied on indentured European labor rather than enslaved Africans. During the seventeenth century approximately 60 per cent of the British emigration was bound for the Caribbean.

The mortality rate was huge among the European population in all of the British-controlled islands. The initial rise in the white population and the subsequent, equally dramatic decline occurred in tandem with the growth and collapse of tobacco cultivation. In many aspects, what happened on the English Caribbean islands also happened in the French Antilles. The decline in the white population was in both cases was related to the abandonment of tobacco as a major crop, by the shift to cheaper African slave labor, and by the consolidation of landholdings.

In Brazil, tobacco cultivation was concentrated in Bahia, in the northeast of the country. The production cycle in Brazil was shorter than it was in the Chesapeake. In addition, the Bahia fields did not entail a long-fallow system, since fallowing there was combined with a routine application of animal manure. In both regions, however, the economies of scale in tobacco cultivation were limited. The expansion of production depended primarily upon a proportionate increase in inputs. In Brazil, by the seventeenth century, most of the labor force was made up African slaves, in part because Brazil was not settled with indentured servants and in part because the Bahian region developed an important sugar industry supported by a slave system in the late sixteenth century. Furthermore, much of the Bahian tobacco was used to buy slaves on the West African shores rather than to satisfy a European market.

See Also Labor.

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