Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution

By T. H. Breen

The great Tidewater planters of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were fathers of the American Revolution. Perhaps first and foremost, they were also anxious tobacco farmers, harried by a demanding planting cycle, trans-Atlantic shipping risks, and their uneasy relations with English agents. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries lived in a world that was dominated by questions of debt from across an ocean but also one that stressed personal autonomy.


T. H. Breen's study of this tobacco culture focuses on how elite planters gave meaning to existence. He examines the value-laden relationships--found in both the fields and marketplaces--that led from tobacco to politics, from agrarian experience to political protest, and finally to a break with the political and economic system that they believed threatened both personal independence and honor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Dec 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9781400820146

T. H. Breen

T. H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. The author of several works of history, including The Marketplace of Revolution and American Insurgents, American Patriots, Breen has also written for The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Book preview

Lancelot

CHAPTER I

AN AGRARIAN CONTEXT

FOR RADICAL IDEAS

One early spring day several years ago, I visited Westover, a magnificent Georgian mansion built by William Byrd II during the eighteenth century. The house is located on the James River about twenty-five miles west of Williamsburg. To reach it, one leaves the main state highway and then follows a gravel road that cuts across several large working farms. When I arrived, men were just beginning to cultivate the fields. Some handsome cattle had been let out to pasture. It was too early in the season for the Byrd plantation to attract tourists and schoolchildren, and the grounds of Westover itself appeared deserted. After parking my car, I walked along the river bank, idly surveying places where in colonial times vessels might have docked. In such a setting, it was easy to let my imagination slip back into an agrarian world of the great eighteenth-century planters of Tidewater Virginia.

I suspect that like many other colonial historians, I had taken such ordinary agricultural sights and smells and sounds largely for granted. I had forgotten, or perhaps never even bothered to consider, that the gentry of prerevolutionary Virginia spent most of their waking hours thinking about crops and livestock. I had previously regarded these particular planters, many of whom achieved fame as founding fathers, as somehow divorced from their physical environment—indeed, from work of any sort. I had come to see these men as rural philosophes thoroughly absorbed in the writings of Enlightenment thinkers, especially the essays of John Locke, and it appeared to me, at least, that these abstracted Virginians regarded the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s largely as an intellectual problem. I could not comprehend how the experiences of everyday life fit into this traditional image of the Tidewater

Reviews for Tobacco Culture

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This brief but thoughtful book exists midway between history and anthropology, as the author seeks to explore the mindset of Virginia's Tidewater planters in the years leading up to the American Revolution. The agricultural and labor conditions under which tobacco was grown governed the lives of these men: tobacco was a labor-intensive crop to cultivate, required precise conditions to grow, and returned varying degrees of profit as prices fluctuated. These factors directly related to the use of enslaved people to tend to a planter's crops and the increased indebtedness of many planters as they struggled with declining tobacco prices. The cultural picture which emerges helps one to understand why some (but not all) of these men chose to take an active role in the American Revolution. I appreciated this insight, although I do feel there is more to be explored than covered in this book and I hope to find other historians have expanded on the topic.