14 EXPORT AND MANUFACTURING TOBACCOS. 
from year to year throughout the whole colonial period, the produc-_ 
tion always tending to expand rapidly, as the average of a series of 
years, attended with chronic dissatisfaction from low prices. The 
lowest recorded price was 1.52 cents a pound in 1730, when exporta- 
tions were 36,000,000 pounds. 
All iach ans early period tobacco was a constant source of legis- 
lation, particularly in the Virginia Assembly, in the effort to control 
production and keep up the price, but the effort usually met with 
little or at best only temporary success. Laws limiting the number 
of plants grown by each planter, limiting the number of leaves to be 
harvested, providing for the total destruction of a portion of the 
stocks on hand, or eliminating a crop altogether were passed from 
time to time. On several occasions memorials were addressed to the 
King praying for relief. Several times negotiations between Virginia 
and Maryland were attempted for the purposes of limiting production 
and maintaining prices, but it usually happened that lack of unity 
would defeat the effort, and when one colony tried to limit production, 
the other would increase the acreage. Warehouses, or rolling houses 
as they were first called, were established at several points with sworn 
official inspectors. Laws were passed placing heavy penalties against 
nesting or false packing, in the hope thus to raise the price level which 
the English merchants would be willing to pay. Both Maryland and 
Virginia tried to fix artificially the price of tobacco by statute. No 
legislative device, however, seemed able permanently to overcome the 
combined influence of the natural conditions favoring the production 
of tobacco and the artificial influences of the British colonial policy — 
and navigation laws and the rapidly increasing colonial pope 
including cheap slave labor in particular. 
Production, therefore, continued to increase and low prices worried 
the colonists Ane the gulneele of the American Revolution, when the 
production in the Colonies was at its maximum.~ Exports averaged. 
about 100,000,000 pounds annually for the years 1770 to 1774. But 
the war, of course, nearly put a stop to exports. The English market, 
which had been receiving almost all the colonial tobacco, was closed 
to the Colonies and the danger from seizure by English privateers 
and gunboats was great and the war itself absorbed the attention of 
the great body of the people. The low mark for this period was 
reached in 1776, when exports were only 2,440,947 pounds of tobacco, 
and the exports for the seven years of war averaged less than 12,500,- 
000 pounds yearly.? 
1It may be of interest to note that soon after the establishment of the permanent colonies in the New 
England section attempts were made there to grow and export tobacco, but conditions were such that these 
efforts were attended with no real success. The principal cause of this failure in New England was largely 
due to its soil, which did not possess anything like the natural fertility of the rich river valleys of Virginia. 
Tobacco growing in New England never amounted to much until the introduction of the cigar-tobacco 
industry into the Connecticut Valley in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. 
244 
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