320 EARLY CULTURE OF TOBACCO. 



In speaking of the early tobacco culture of Virginia, he 

 says : 



The light, rich mould resting on the sandy soil of Eastern 

 Virginia was exactly suited to the cultivation of tobacco, and 

 no better climate for this plant was to be found on the globe. 

 This had just been sufficiently proved, and a suitable method 

 of culture learned experimentally, when the land was offered 

 to individual proprietors by the king, (James I.) Very little 

 else was to be obtained from the soil which would be of value 

 to send to Europe, without an application to it of a higher 

 degree of art than the slaves, or stupid, careless servants of 

 the proprietors could readily be forced to use. Although 

 tobacco had been introduced into England but a few years, 

 an enormous number of persons had initiated themselves in 

 the appreciation of its mysterious value. 



" The king, having taken a violent prejudice against it, 

 though he saw no harm in the distillation of grain, had for- 

 bidden that it should be cultivated in England. Virginia, 

 therefore, had every advantage to supply the demand. Mer- 

 chants and the super-cargoes of ships, arriving with slaves 

 from Africa, or manufactured goods, spirits, or other luxuries 

 from England, very gladly bartered them with the planters 

 for tobacco, but for nothing else. Tobacco, therefore, stood 

 for money, and the passion for raising it, to the exclusion of 

 everything else, became a mania, like the l California fever ' 

 of 1849. 



"The culture being once established, there were many 

 reasons growing out of the social structure of the colony, 

 which, for more than a century, kept the industry of the 

 Virginians confined to this one staple. These reasons were 

 chiefly the difficulty of breaking the slaves, or training the 

 bond-servants to new methods of labor, the want of enterprise 

 or ingenuity of the proprietors to contrive other profitable 

 occupations for them, and the difficulty or expense of dis- 

 tributing the guard or oversight, without which it was impos- 

 sible to get any work done at all, if the laborers were separated, 

 or worked in any other way than side by side, in gangs, as 

 in the tobacco-fields. 



" Owing to these causes the planters kept on raising tobacco 

 with hardly sufficient intermission to provide sustenance, 

 though often, by reason of the excessive quantity raised, 

 scarcely anything could be got for it. Tobacco is not now 

 considered peculiarly and excessively exhaustive ; in a judi- 

 cious rotation, especially as a preparation for wheat, it 'is an 



