“Makaya! Makaya!”
You can almost hear Anthony’s excited murmurs to Isabella; almost see him gaze off to one side, as the pair marched at the point of matchlock muskets through the fields of Captain William Tucker’s Elizabeth City plantation, leading to his home. Around them, rows of the broadleaf green plants with thick stems shot from the ground, swayed under the oppressive humidity. In the distance, wooden racks held giant leaves turning golden brown in the late August sun. Here, in Kalunga’s kingdom, the Land of the Dead, the surprise of finding a plant so familiar surely evoked long twinges of sadness mixed with short paroxysms of joy for a homeland they were torn from, a country they’d now left far behind. Makaya, it appeared, had made the journey into this underworld of death and white devils before them.
Into what kind of world had they been thrust? This new world where a black earth gave birth to the familiar, while White men bore guns and ships and chains.
Anthony and Isabella knew tobacco (makaya); the leaf formed a part of their Angola-Congo culture for a century before their birth, and, yet, here they were meeting these plants again, in Virginia, after their capture and perilous journey across the Atlantic. They did not know that tobacco had made the transatlantic passage many times, but usually in the opposite direction, from west to east.
Upon succeeding his father, James, to the English throne in 1625, King Charles I proclaimed that only tobacco from his American colonies should be imported into his kingdom, while also lamenting that Virginia was a colony “wholly built on smoke that would easily turn to air.” Beneath Charles’s turn of phrase, befitting of William Shakespeare, lay an understanding of tobacco as Virginia’s “cash crop,” and further that the cultivation of tobacco was tenuous—both labor and land intensive.
Slavery won out over indentured servitude in colonial Virginia for the very reason that it supplied colonial planters with lifetime labor, and did not require of them relinquishing valuable land in the form of freedom dues to servants who’d worked off their indentures. Agriculture was the first institution of power and wealth in colonial America, which Black labor built directly without receiving a share of either that power or that wealth.
Tobacco is a nightshade, in the same family as potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. In the wild, it apparently started growing eighteen thousand years ago. Natives of the South American Andes range began cultivating tobacco some six thousand to eight thousand years ago, their domestication of the genus Nicotiana perhaps predating and even forming the basis of their farming of other food crops such as maize.1, 2, 3
Tobacco use spread throughout North American indigenous populations for thousands of years prior to Columbus’s arrival. On October 15, 1492, Columbus first reported seeing “dried leaves”4 among the items carried by a Taino canoeist. Though he knew they “must be a thing highly valued,”5 Columbus did not immediately grasp how and why tobacco was used, so returned the leaves to the native, sending him on his way. That quickly changed when a month later a landing party, while searching for the king of Japan6 on what was in reality the island of Cuba, returned to Columbus with reports of “men and women with a half-burnt weed in the hands, being the herbs they are accustomed to smoke.”7
Legend tells of Rodrigo de Jerez, one of the crew members who went ashore in Cuba, returning to Spain with tobacco seeds and leaves, then walking the streets of his hometown, Ayamonte, smoking cigars, before being arrested and thrown in jail.8 Whatever the truth of this story, in the years after Columbus’s return, Spain started tobacco plantations throughout Central and South America, where they enslaved indigenous people; and the coffers of monarchies filled from taxing a highly addictive pastime that spread rapidly throughout Europe.
The West African coast, the East African coast, the Middle East, India, China, Japan: in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Portuguese explorers left tobacco leaves and the use of tobacco with native populations wherever their ships came to anchor, like animal carriers of disease leaving a new pestilence in their wake. In less than a hundred years, a crop native to the mountains of Peru and Ecuador had infused the far corners of the earth. Tobacco scurried past Christian sanctions, so that Jesuits, among many Catholic sects, ran tobacco plantations and exploited slave labor in South America.9 Not explicitly listed in the Quran as haram (“forbidden”), fatwas (religious edicts) against tobacco have been issued since the beginning of the seventeenth century, but many Muslims simply ignored the mufti’s pronouncements.10 Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, reportedly smoked a pipe throughout the day.11
The cultures tobacco spread from and to developed spiritual systems and mythologies around its use. For natives of the Americas, where it originated and first spread, tobacco was incorporated into sacred practices often associated with shamans and individual or collective healing.12 Once tobacco was introduced into China, Chinese medicine and philosophy developed around its potent ability to disrupt, and sometimes restore, the balance of yin and yang in the body.13
In the Congo and Angola, tobacco was an important part of minkisi, sacred medicinal and healing techniques practiced only by nganga, the healer-priests of this region.14 Anthropologist Emil Torday has pointed to evidence that tobacco was incorporated into foundational myths of the people along the Kasai River, tributary of the Congo, which begins in central Angola. A version of one such myth, reported by tobacconist and entrepreneur Alfred Dunhill, has a prodigal son of the Bushongo, Lusana Lumunbala, returning home from a long absence to extol the virtues of smoking tobacco.15
Whether as medicine or myth, Anthony and Isabella knew tobacco. It was grown and smoked around them. Tobacco was introduced to the Angola-Congo region either directly by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century, along with other agricultural crops such as maize and coffee,16 or indirectly by Arab Trans-Saharan traders who themselves had been introduced to it by the Portuguese.17 In either case, tobacco was well established by the time that Imbangala warriors, working on behalf of the Portuguese, captured Ndongo slaves.
How did the Portuguese pay the Imbangala for Anthony and Isabella? The Imbangla were not only fearsome mercenaries, they were also fearsome merchants who controlled the trade running through their territory near Kasanje.18 They traded tobacco for slaves often through Brazilian merchants in Luanda. These Brazilian merchants, in turn, were frequently creoles—that is to say, mixed-race children of Africans previously brought to Brazil as slaves to work on tobacco plantations for their Portuguese colonizers. They were born in Brazil but returned back to Africa to work for the Portuguese in the tobacco and slave trades.19
Convoluted. Complex. Compelling. And maybe worth recapitulating. Anthony and Isabella were most likely sold in exchange for tobacco by a merchant who himself was the child of a slave brought to Brazil from Angola to grow tobacco, only to return to Angola to barter tobacco for them. Anthony and Isabella were originally captured for transport to Spanish colonies in the New World, where they would, more than likely, be put to work as slaves on a tobacco plantation. Instead, they were seized as booty by Englishmen, and sold or bartered in Virginia. Then, they were taken ashore in shackles and chains to step onto a strange, foreign land where the first crop they were greeted by was tobacco, the source of fond memories of their homeland but also the source of great pain. Like a python curling around its victim, or blue smoke curling around the head of a smoker, tobacco curled around the lives of Africans in the sixteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic.
* * *
Terror and confusion reign aboard a ship in the throes of a powerful storm.
The helmsman cries out, “Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her two courses off to sea again, lay her off.”
Mariners drenched from the storm reply, “All lost! To prayers! All lost!”
“A most dreadfull Tempest (the manifold deaths whereof are here to the life described) . . .”
Shakespeare’s The Tempest? The first two lines.
John Rolfe’s actual life? The last.
In May 1609, Sir John Rolfe set out from England for Virginia on Sea Venture, with his wife, Sarah Hacker. Newly constructed, Sea Venture was the flagship of the Virginia Company sent on a third supply run to a desperate colony. In the early morning of July 25, 1609, William Strachey, aboard Sea Venture, tells us they experienced “the cloudes gathering thicke upon vs, and the windes singing, and whistling most vnusually.”20 The storm, probably a hurricane, battered Sea Venture for four days, until Sir George Somers, captain of the ailing craft, cried, “Land!”
Without an anchor, and leaking badly, Somers ran the ship aground, stranding all of the 150 people aboard on an island now part of Bermuda. In the nine months they were on the island, the survivors constructed two smaller ships, the Patience and the Deliverance, which they sailed to Jamestown in the spring of 1610. While still in Bermuda, Rolfe’s wife gave birth to a daughter, Bermuda, who subsequently died. Rolfe’s wife passed away not long after.
Colonial Virginia, at the time of Rolfe’s arrival, was surrounded by Indian nations who cultivated tobacco. Like many English smokers, Rolfe, a dedicated smoker himself, felt the variety of tobacco cultivated by the Indians, Nicotiana rustica, was “poore and weake, and of a byting tast.”21 Using Nicotiana tabacum seeds, from plants grown by the Spanish in Trinidad and the Orinoco Valley of Venezuela, Rolfe experimented with growing, harvesting, drying, and curing his crop. He also enlisted other colonists in the enterprise, like William Tucker of Elizabeth City, master of Anthony and Isabella. In 1617, twenty thousand pounds of Virginia tobacco were shipped to England. In 1618, forty thousand pounds. And by 1629, with 1.5 million pounds, Virginia tobacco dominated the English market.22
A tobacco seed is miniscule. Depending upon the variety, there are about 300,000 to 500,000 seeds per ounce.23 Imagine tobacco planter Captain William Tucker standing outside his garrison, on the banks above the James River, awaiting the arrival of the São João Bautista, with Anthony and Isabella aboard, holding an ounce of the seed. If each seed represented one person, he would have in his hand as many seeds as there were Black men and women in this country, slave and free, 150 years later, about the time of the American Revolution. With a pound of the seed, he would be holding about as many seeds as there were Blacks in the country 250 years later, before the Emancipation Proclamation.
* * *
Anthony clawed at the hard earth with a hoe.
She is a strange woman, he thought. Her body goes cold, and hardens. And it is then, when she is still cold and hard and barely starting to soften, these White men tear at her body using their wooden sticks with iron claws, mixing their seed with sand before pressing it into her. And when she is warmer, softer, and her seeds have begun to grow, when her green babies rise, we rip them from her and plant them in the body of her sister. This is not how we would treat the earth back home, where her body is warm and soft and moist and ready for our seed at any time.
Anthony had lived through five hardenings and softenings of the earth. He recalled a time three hardenings ago, when just as the earth was starting to soften, and they were pressing sand and seed into her, then, the men with darker skins came, grabbing the same tools used to tear into the earth. Some had guns. He thought they must be a band of Imbangala coming after him and Isabella once again. But, instead, they used the tools and clubs and guns on the men and women and children with White skins. One of these “Brown Imbangala,” as Anthony called them, with his face painted, as the Imbangala back home had painted theirs, ran with a club raised high. All around him, people were screaming. Blood flowing. There was no place to run, to hide.
Anthony stood there, leaning on his hoe. Calm. Serene. He remembered thinking if this is how he was to leave the Kalunga-ngombe, the Land of the Dead, he was ready, tired of the time and toil under the hand and whip of the White men, ready to go home. Screaming, the Brown Imbangala ran up to him, stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes. Anthony dropped his hoe and raised his arms palms up, waiting for the fatal blow to land.
The Brown Imbangala reached out. He rubbed his hand against Anthony’s cheek as if trying to rub off his skin. Then he turned, screaming, and ran away. He was not at all like the Imbangala whom Anthony knew from home.
A stab in his back from a blunt instrument, and a screaming voice, startled Anthony from his musings. Still not fully understanding this strange new tongue, two words the White man spoke he’d come to know well, work and Negar. They always came as evil twins to Anthony’s ears.
He shook his head then snapped back to hoeing the plot where the earth would then be seeded. Just a little over forty paces in each direction. Stakes marked the corners. Trees groaned, then cracked, then snapped. The ground beneath his feet rumbled as trees hit with a resounding thud. Smoke rose one hundred yards away. As he scraped away at his plot of earth, Anthony turned in the direction of the rising plumes of smoke above red-hot fires as other White men also toiled hard, clearing more forty-by-forty-paced plots of earth that he would have to hoe. Although he could not explain it, it pleased him to know that some White men made other White men work just as hard as he worked.
Anthony knew how to farm tobacco. Even if these White men did it differently from how his village did it back home. There, these tasks were the exclusive work of women, which only seemed right since women knew the body of another woman well. The thought of women cultivating crops reminded him to turn slightly to his left. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his Isabella also with a hoe, working a forty-by-forty-paced plot.
Five hardenings and softenings, that’s the count of how many cycles he’d been through. In a few days, after the earth’s body was broken, and neatly furrowed, a mixture of seed and sand would be lightly salted along each furrow. A blanket of pine boughs would be laid atop the seeded earth for warmth and protection. If it did not get to where his breath came out as smoke, and if the rains came, in a month, small green babies would sprout. If the rains did not come, he and Isabella might be forced to carry water from the river to pour over the beds. How strange, there was no rainy season here, as he had known back home.
Hundreds of seedlings poking through the pine needles meant thousands of tiny plants in each bed, which brought on “thinning time.” Master Tucker had said that Master Rolfe, before his death, had advised separating each tiny shoot at least a hand’s width apart, which meant each bed had ten rows of ten shoots each—a “hundred bed” was the phrase Anthony remembered hearing.
Thinning time meant hard work. What was that phrase the White men used? Anthony chuckled sarcastically to himself. “From can see, to can’t see.” Pine boughs must be lifted gently, so as not to damage the small shoots. Sometimes when Anthony was down on his hands and knees, his fingers would ache from plucking unwanted shoots. After thinning time came “bugging time,” when he’d be back down on his knees inspecting each growing sprout, crushing the small brown beetles that loved the leaves as well. So much care given to tobacco, it felt like White men, like Master Tucker, loved the plant more so than he loved his children or his wife. That thought, Anthony would never dare share.
Sometime after checking for beetles in the morning, Anthony would spend the afternoon preparing hundreds and hundreds of knee-high mounds three to four feet apart. The White men called it “hilling.” Ocimu24 is the word Anthony thought they’d use at home. For these small mounds reminded him of anthills. This, too, was hard work. Even working as fast as possible he could prepare no more than a few hundred such hills a day, when thousands were needed.
Sometimes a White man would appear in the fields and other White men would gather around him, happy, slapping each other on the back. Usually, the man had a paper he pulled from his pocket. Usually, the others pointed excitedly to this paper. Surely, these White people have strange customs, Anthony thought. But they spoke a word that Anthony came to understand because after this ritual gathering the man would no longer be seen in the fields. He might visit the others but he would not be under the whip or the hand of the overseer. He would not be forced to work the tobacco. The White men also spoke of something they called “freedom” and Anthony knew it meant the same as omonamani25 in his native tongue. He and Isabella had no papers. He feared he might never see the day when men slapped him on the back.
If there was not too much “smoke breath” and not too much damage from the beetles, when the earth was supple, and a few weeks before days and nights were equal, babies were taken from one mother and given to many others, as he worked to carefully dig out the shoots, now two hands high, and replant them in the bellies of the thousands of small hills. Several shoots were always left in the beds, particularly those planted last. Sometimes the earth-mother bellies did not take the babies, who would die. Then, the hills would need to be given new babies.
As they grew, the children needed constant attention. Cutworms crawled out overnight, feeding on the leaves, ready to hatch as moths. Anthony pinched the pale worms between his fingers, flicked them to the ground before crushing them beneath his feet. After hours of bending over to pluck weeds, his back ached.
Anthony tended to these green children daily for about two months, when “priming” and “topping” began. On each plant, several leaves closest to the bottom were cut away with a knife, while at the same time he removed a small, tightly growing bunch of leaves at the top of the plant, which would have yielded a bright yellow flower containing thousands of seeds.
After topping, the children reached higher than Anthony’s chest, and still daily he moved through row after row removing sickly leaves, delicately cutting away the small shoots that grew from the wounds of topping, lest smaller leaves develop in their place.
It seemed Anthony’s work was never done. If not topping or priming, then he was inspecting each leaf for the crawling worms called hornworms, picking them off and also crushing them under his feet. When plants had grown almost twice his height, and ladders were the only way to reach the leaves, harvesttime had arrived. By that time, light and dark slowly balanced in the sky.
Now, Master Tucker seemed more agitated than usual. Anthony, Isabella, even the other White servants had learned to stay as far away from him as they could during this time. Each morning he paced through the tobacco fields, peering through the plants, patting them down, squeezing them between his fingers.
“Cut this row now, Anthony!”
“Leave this one for tomorrow, Anthony!”
“Not ready for a few more days, Anthony!”
It was dangerous work. Sharp knives were used to cut the plants. Some of the White men working alongside him simply leaned over and struck a blow between the bottom leaves and the ground. The first year he worked Master Tucker’s tobacco fields, Anthony showed them a method he remembered from the women of his home. Grab the bottom of the stalk, between the leaves and the ground, pull it out of the ground slightly to expose a bright white area of the root, then cut it with a swift, decisive blow there. The White men shook their heads and walked off. Anthony continued using his method. When it came time to cure the leaves, Master Tucker saw that his were easier to hang. After that, Master Tucker insisted that everyone use Anthony’s method of cutting.
After cutting the plants, if it wasn’t raining, Anthony left them on the ground for a few hours to wilt. The leaves, it seemed, got heavier and moister that way. They used to hang the cut plants, called “hands,” outside on lines or sticks or fences. But this year, Master Tucker had them doing something new. Over the time when the earth was too cold and hard for planting, they’d built two new buildings, in which the leaves would be hung on lines or sticks like clothes. That took another four to six weeks, during which Anthony found himself constantly checking for mold, notifying Master Tucker if any was found.
Finally, Anthony was ready to “sweat” the tobacco, removing the leaves from the lines or sticks and laying them on the barn’s floor. Particularly, if it got colder than they’d expected, they used logs to press the tobacco and increase the temperature of the leaves, but when they did that, Anthony would be on duty at least twice a day, looking for mold.
You might think that by now, they’d be through with this year’s crop, but they weren’t. Sorting came after sweating, and the phrase the White men used when examining the greenish-yellow to light tan leaves was “in case,” which seemed to mean that a batch of five to fourteen leaves, which they tied together into a “hand,” was just right—not too damp, or they would rot once they got inside the wooden shipping barrels, but not to dry, or they would crumble and turn to dust. Anthony laid out the hands to sweat.
He shook his head. How strange. By now, the tobacco leaves had spent nearly as much time out of the ground as they had in the ground, and still they were not ready to go to market. For the first crops, Anthony removed the leaves from their lines a final time, then twisted them into ropes, and wound the ropes into balls, some of which weighed almost as much as a man.
Lately, Master Tucker had insisted on a new system with them as well, which the captains of the tobacco vessels seemed to prefer. During the cold season, he and the other men would spend many hours building barrels from oak trees felled while clearing tobacco land the previous year. So, after sweating, Anthony “pressed” or “prized” the leaves into these large barrels, which the White men called “hogsheads.” A hogshead full of tobacco weighed as much as six men. It was extremely dangerous work rolling a hogshead off a wagon, down to the dock for loading onto a ship. It made Anthony wonder how strong the men on the other side of the ocean must have been to unload them and cart them away.
Another cycle of tobacco growing was beginning and Anthony did not look forward to all the hard work he’d just run through in his mind. His muscles would ache. His back would hurt. He would get little sleep. In a short time, the sharp, pungent, sweet smell of sweating tobacco would seem never to leave him. Occasionally, on a Sunday afternoon, Isabella would fill a tub with warm water for him to soak in. Afterward, the water was rusty brown, and it, too, smelled like tobacco.
But there was one thing he did look forward to, one thing that gave him hope. Isabella was fertile, like the earth he knew from home. And soon she would give birth.
* * *
As far as William Tucker’s eye could see, row after row of green tobacco leaves swayed in the gentle summer breeze. An idyllic image of Virginian tranquility and freedom. Before leaving, Sir George Yeardley had seen to it that the Assembly passed laws favorable to planters like him. The new governor, Francis Wyatt, had continued in that spirit, though there were rumors that, within a year, Wyatt might be gone, and Yeardley, now under service of the Crown rather than the Company, placed back in.
Tucker studied the pamphlet in his hand, which his good friend, John Rolfe, had given him shortly before his death, “An Advice Hovv To Plant Tobacco In England, And How To Bring It To The Colovr And Perfection, To Whom It May Bee Profitable, And To Whom Harmefull.” Some thought the mysterious author, known only as “C.T.,” might be none other than Rolfe himself, though he denied it. More important than the pamphlet were Rolfe’s notes on adapting C.T.’s advice to planting and growing tobacco in Virginia. In search of a sweeter, more palatable smoke, he’d done everything Rolfe suggested, from leaving leaves on the ground right after cutting to curing them inside to using hogsheads instead of tobacco balls.
While a part of Tucker knew he should be happy, another part felt nothing but a pervasive sense of dread. Would there be an infestation of cutworms or hornworms this year? More than his servants could handle? Would he judge the cutting of the leaves correctly? Perhaps he’d cut them too soon last year, and that’s why his tobacco garnered a slightly reduced price than the year before? Should he use logs? Would there be heat? What about the new hogsheads, how would he get them down to the riverside wharf? A thousand questions faced him farming tobacco. But many planters like him faced such questions, too.
He had a lovely wife, Mary, and a beautiful daughter, Elizabeth. So, why was it that he also felt an overwhelming sense of dread?
He looked out on the servants working in his fields, White, Black, native. If each man eventually worked through the term of his indenture, and was granted not only freedom but also his freedom dues, including land, that would mean the steady growth of small tobacco farmers, competing with him for available labor and land.
He shook his head. Where would they go? Already land was growing scarcer by the year. And what kind of world would they create for young Elizabeth? All these men, without enough women for wives? Wouldn’t they be prone to promiscuity? Wouldn’t they lure women like his Elizabeth, when she came of age, into dangerous liaisons instead of a Christian family life? Already, he and many of his friends feared that unwed pregnancies were on the rise in the colony and those bastard children would end up as wards of the colony, draining precious resources for their care. He sighed.
Then there was the question of land itself. Or maybe it was the question of too little land. He let his fist pound his thigh. Wasn’t that the real reason Opechancanough had attacked and killed so many three years ago? Land. The Weroance said the White men had broken a promise to leave; they’d overstayed their visit and the welcome of the Indians who’d helped them survive the early brutal winters. And, Opechancanough said the English came more and more every year. Sure, we pushed him and other Indians off their land, Tucker mused, but we’re Christian tobacco farmers. Our crops are only good for two or three years in a field. After that the soil is depleted. So, we must obtain more land, then clear it to plant more tobacco. Opechancanough, the Pamunkey, the Susquehannock, they do not understand the ways of the English, Tucker thought, which is why, as the colony’s appointed commander, it fell to him to bring the war to savages, forcing them to cede more land.
He knew his friends, the other ancient planters, agreed. They’d said as much in Jamestown after the General Assembly met last. Sitting on benches, between sessions, overlooking the James River, puffs of pipe smoke punctuating serious deliberations, all talk was of their future and their tobacco.
They thanked him for his efforts, and wanted to hear again the story of him handing poisoned wine to the Powhatan at what the Indians presumed were peace talks. The ancient planters laughed and agreed that after the Massacre of ’22 the Indians deserved whatever came their way. “The savages know well the challenges of growing tobacco,” Nathaniel Bass said, “and yet they don’t take well to being servants or slaves. And now, with the success of our war against them, their numbers are steadily falling.”
“Nathaniel,” Tucker recalled saying. “I’m sorry your wife and children were slain in the massacre. I’m glad you were away in England. But I’m also afraid there’s another side to the story that none of us want to face.”
Bass pulled out his pipe. “Seems pretty simple to me. Less Indians, more land. William, what would that other side be?” He waved the pipestem at Tucker.
“Less Indians, more land, more men needed in our fields.”
“We’ve got the headright system for that,” Henry Watkins said. “We pay the Company the costs of bringing them over, and get fifty acres for each person in return.”
“And look who we get,” Tucker said. “The poor. The wicked. Thieves. Criminals. Women of ill repute. They’re not from our stations, not of our class. Then what? In seven years, we’re going to pay them to be free only to compete with us in tobacco or to swell the ranks of the poor. Worse yet, give them back land? The system’s broken. I can see it coming and it doesn’t look good.”
“So, what’s the solution, William?” Watkins asked. “The Irish?”
Tucker remembered how they chuckled, and how at that point he, too, raised his pipe to his lips and took a long draw. “As if they’re any better.” He let out a thin blue stream of smoke. “May give them a longer term but eventually they’ll be free.”
To a man, their heads turned down, and a long silence befell them.
Nathaniel Bass broke the silence. “William, I do not like where this is heading . . .
“Neggars!” Bass whispered that dreaded word.
“Slaves?” another murmured.
“Also a problem,” Watkins said. “Can you imagine if our White workers, and our Indians, and our Negroes got together? Decided it was time to throw off their indentures and their chains? Who’d be in trouble then?” He pointed around the circle. “All of us here.”
“Slaves! I’m tellin’ you,” Bass said, “that’s where this is all heading. Only solution I can see. Like it or not, gentlemen, all of us, or at least our children and their children, are going to have to buy ’em if we ever expect to turn a profit on the weed.”
“And keep a profit in our families,” Edward Blany said.
At that moment, Tucker recollected looking up to the cross above the church steeple, then lowering his head, through a cloud of smoke.
“Nathaniel’s right,” Tucker said. He jabbed the air with his pipe. “That’s where this is all heading, mark my words. And that’s where I’ll be, bartering tobacco for slaves. Bet many a sea captain or merchant’d go for that trade.”
“Bet many already have,” Blany added.
“And, that, gentlemen, is why we’re here,” Tucker said.
“To buy slaves?” Bass asked. “There’s none to buy. Though if there were, I might pick up a few.”
The men chuckled.
“No, gentlemen, not to buy slaves,” Tucker answered. “But to set this country on a firm tobacco footing.”
“Build a house on smoke?” Bass asked. “You sound like the king, William, trying to blow smoke up our arses.”
Smoke belched from the men and the laughter seemed to know no end.
Tucker also laughed, and that brought him back from sitting with the planters along the James. He walked over to one of his many plants. He reached out to grab a leaf. Then, he pinched it, folded it between his fingers.
“Anthony,” he bellowed. He couldn’t see him. “Anthony,” he hollered again. “Time to cut this row.”
* * *
Colonial planters sold their tobacco, in bulk, to English merchants, who, in turn, repackaged and sold tobacco to consumers, often through grocers, for use in pipes, as snuff, or in cigars. To market their tobacco, grocers hired engravers to create “tobacco cards,” similar to modern-day business cards, they could hand out to potential customers.
There’s a surviving tobacco card from London during the reign of King George, the iconography of which captures well the relationship among tobacco, the planters, and the English. Above the name band of the card and to the right there is a White planter, sitting on a hogshead puffing a pipe, while behind him, and to his right, lies a tobacco curing barn. In his left hand the planter holds a cane, or stick, in contact with another hogshead tipped toward him by a diminutive dark figure who appears to be wearing a headdress. Three such dark figures stand interspersed between the rows of tobacco plants, two with obvious feathered headdresses. Of those two, one is holding a smoking pipe out and over a tobacco plant, its bowl facing down. The third dark man appears to emerge from a hogshead holding tobacco leaves in each hand. Above the figures lie four hogsheads, and arising from them a dual-headed dragon, holding tobacco leaves in each mouth, one head pointing to a vessel coming into port, the other to a vessel that is leaving. The inbound ship, at the right, is flying the Cross of St. Patrick, a precursor of the British Union Jack.
While we can never know for certain the minds of “Rogers, London,” the grocer, or the engraver, from comparison to many other, similar tobacco cards of the era a few motifs stand out. First, there is the dominance or power of the well-dressed tobacco planter over the smaller, scantily clad dark men through his stick or cane, which may, in reality, have been used to guide the rolling of the hogshead to a wharf, but here also serves the purpose of a baton of commanding authority (bâton de commandement).
One is then tempted to say the figures commanded by the White planter are Indians in headdress, who first cultivated tobacco in North America, but that assertion would be wrong. The figures are actually African slaves in Indian headdress, a common conflated image in England at the time, which may represent how Black and Indian slaves cultivated tobacco for wealthy White planters, or how British merchants attempted to “romanticize” tobacco production and “exoticize” or “sexualize” tobacco consumption for their clientele. Black men’s bodies, in this case, were the stereotypical icons of sexuality, devoid of any hint of the brutality of the slave system that gave rise to the product in the first place. “Indeed the specific brand of tobacco that the white man presumably smokes,” says historian Catherine Molineux, in studying these cards, “is an extension of the black man’s body.”26
Rising from the hogsheads at the top center of the image is a double-headed dragon, which is often called an amphisbaena. Though the amphisbaena originates in Chinese mythology, where dragons are benevolent signs of prosperity and health, in Western mythologies dragons are the guardians of virgins and wealth. Both virgin (Virginia) and wealth (tobacco) are appropriate to this scene. But this bicephalic dragon appears to be staring at both the inbound and outbound vessels; hence, it is also a guardian of trade. In this respect, the dragon represents royal proclamations that only tobacco from English colonies should be imported into England, and that colonial-grown tobacco should be traded nowhere else.
King James I, author of the famous A Counterblaste to Tobacco, hated the “golden weed,” but also recognized how it plumped his royal coffers. In 1625, just weeks before his death he issued “A Proclamation for the utter prohibiting the importation and use of all Tobacco, which is not of the proper growth of the Colonies of Virginia and the Summer Islands.”27 The year before, the king had dissolved the Virginia Company, giving him direct control over the colony, and a monopoly over Virginian tobacco. Charles I, James’s son and successor, who inherited his father’s dislike for tobacco, complained that the Virginia colony was “wholly built on smoke.” Though Charles continued to extract tobacco revenue in the form of taxes from the British colonies, and expanded his father’s restrictions on the tobacco trade, forbidding any other country from trading directly with Virginia. From the late seventeenth century up to the Revolutionary War, a series of Navigation Acts, passed by the British Parliament, and agreed to by the monarchs, imposed further British control on the tobacco trade with the colonies. The king, here, taking on the role of a two-headed dragon guarding his lair of gold.
Whether this symbolism was intended by design, or buried deep within the English psyche, one interpretation of this tobacco card is clear: it depicts a White man’s power, wealth, and freedom based on the Black men he enslaves.
The fears and hopes of ancient planters prevailed. Virginia was an appendage of England, even more so after James I took over direct control of the colony from the bankrupt Virginia Company in 1625. A simple system was in play: Virginia supplied England with raw materials. English industries turned those raw materials into finished products. Those finished products were then marketed to the rest of the world. By royal decree, only tobacco from Virginia could be imported into England, with a tax, of course, for the royal coffers. With Virginia, and the other American colonies, prevented from directly manufacturing or trading outside of this system, tobacco soon became not only a commodity but a currency in and of itself. Colonists, or rather Black slave labor, literally grew money.
Goods and merchandise were paid for with tobacco. “[A]ll goods and marchandise imported into this colony which shall be sould for tobacco shall be only sould and bartered at James Citty,” the Virginia General Assembly decreed in 1633.28
So were slaves: “He figures in the Talbot record in an agreement, dated May 20, 1671, with certain Boston merchants, to purchase five male and five female negro slaves for 3,680 pounds of tobacco each, to be delivered to him in Wye River.”29
Debts were made, and settled, with tobacco, “being once payable and due, of what valew soever, either in money or tobaccoe the debt shall be.”30
Taxes were levied with tobacco: “It is therefore thought fittinge that there shall be levyed uppon every tithable person sixty-fowre pounds of tobacco.”31
Fines were paid with tobacco: “Ministers, and others, joining in Marriage any Negro whatsoever, or Mulatto Slave, with any White Person, forfeit 5000 lb. Tobacco.”32
And human worth and property value were calculated in terms of tobacco: “one Negro Woman appraised at Six Thousand five hundred pounds of Tobacco and one pair of Cart Wheels appraised at Six hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco by Joseph Bullet.”33
In colonial America, tobacco was not just a means to wealth, tobacco was wealth; wealth created by the labor of Black men and women.
Throughout the 1660s and 1670s tobacco prices trended lower, for many reasons, not the least of which were English taxes, Dutch competition, large American crop yields, and the plague in Europe, so severe in 1665 that no tobacco ships sailed from England to the colonies. All of which led Thomas Culpeper, governor of Virginia, in 1680 to declare to the English Crown that “the low price of tobacco staggers him notwithstanding, the continuance of it will be the fatal and speedy ruin of this noble Colony.”34
Colonial planters, bleeding money, responded by cutting their shipments with floor sweepings, leaves, and other organic refuse. While temporarily improving financial rewards, ultimately this “trash tobacco,” as it was known, led not only to lower quality but higher quantities and a further reduction in tobacco prices. To preserve wealth, and their tax base, colonial authorities stepped in.
Over the next half century, in what is the first instance of wide-scale market regulation in America, Virginia and Maryland led the way in mandating the amount of tobacco produced, standardizing the size of hogsheads, and prohibiting unregulated shipments. Most important, colonial authorities established quality-control boards with the authority to break open hogsheads, grade the leaves, burn trash tobacco, and issue notes of certification, called “crop notes,” to owners indicating the final weight and quality of the tobacco shipped.35 That soon turned the tobacco market around, as middlemen in England, and their customers, now had standards for the quality of the tobacco they purchased and smoked.
Maryland, in 1730, took this regulatory process one step further, actually creating a paper currency based on tobacco, similar to the crop note but called the “transfer note.” Loose tobacco, turned in by planters to inspection warehouses in bundles, or hands (rather than hogsheads), was graded by quality and kind. Their batch was thrown in with other loose tobacco of a similar quality and kind and they were then handed a transfer note. This note entitled the owner to the same quantity, quality, and kind of tobacco that had been turned in.
Transfer notes were then used to pay debts, fees, and taxes. They could be used to purchase goods. And the notes themselves could be sold.36 Before a gold or silver standard backed American paper currency, a tobacco standard did.
Clergy, tavern-keeps, blacksmiths, and other members of the working class grew tobacco in small lots, in their spare time, unlike large planters, who cultivated tobacco full-time and shipped their product in 1,000-pound hogsheads. Like a mountain so domineering that it creates its own weather system, tobacco created its own economic system in colonial America. Were there consumers for the product? Yes, the citizens of England and ultimately the entire world, though many countries tightly controlled the tobacco that entered.
Were there middlemen? Yes, by law, English merchants could only order tobacco from Virginia, which they did by the hogshead, then unpackaged and repackaged it for English consumers and the rest of the world.
Were there brands? One brand of graded tobacco might be indistinguishable from another. So, John Rolfe took the savvy step of fixing a brand on the Virginia product, Oronoco, and that brand, more than anything, helped to set the value of the product in the minds of English smokers who then demanded it.
Were there reliable means of getting the product from producers to the middlemen? There were. Planters like William Tucker actually owned their own ships that once a year made a regular voyage to England to unload their hogsheads and those of other planters. Ships owned by English merchants and English companies made voyages across the Atlantic to Virginia and the other colonies, where they would travel up navigable waterways, or send smaller craft, to pick up hogsheads waiting for them at docks. Together they were known as the “tobacco fleet.”
Were there producers? Absolutely. Virginia colonists recognized quickly the value of the tobacco to the point that under Crown control, James I realized the promise and the peril of a colony “wholly built on smoke.”
Were the producers able to access the capital to expand—both in terms of land and labor, servant or free? Yes, they were. Here, English bankers stepped in, lending money to colonial planters to allow them to buy the land and slaves they needed to produce more, and more, tobacco for the English market.
Was the market regulated? Yes. As we have seen, colonial authorities ultimately certified the quantity, quality, and kind of tobacco shipped to England.
Was there a speculative market? Yes. Crop notes and transfer notes, issued by colonial authorities, guaranteed the quantity, and quality, but not the price. As the value of the underlying tobacco rose, so did the value of the transfer note; as it fell, the value of the note fell with it.
Yet, beneath all of this—beneath the consumers, the middlemen, the shipping, the financing, the producers, the regulation, and the speculation—lay the labor of Black slaves. Slavery was the foundation of the tobacco economy. In all of the bizarre and complex ways we’ve examined here, and will examine in the next chapter, Black lives supplied the economies of the “Tobacco Coast” with steady labor to cultivate the crop and to sell more and more of it. Agriculture was the first institution of wealth in America. Tobacco was the first product of that institution. But the forced labor of Black men and women was the basis of it all.
Then, in 1776, tobacco, and the Black lives behind it, fueled a revolution.