The Tobacco Culture
John Rolfe's Importation of Tobacco Saved Jamestown
With tobacco as a cash crop the early English colonies in America survived, multiplied, and built a culture based on its cultivation.
Nicotanus Rusticus was a tobacco native to Virginia and cultivated by the Indians. It had a sour taste, and only grew about two feet tall. The tobacco John Rolfe brought from Barbados was Nicotanus Tobaccum; commonly called Orinoco (a type of burly and an early ancestor to bright tobacco) after its place of origin on the Orinoco River, a tributary of the Amazon. This species grows about five to six feet tall, and was prized in its day as being one of the best flavored tobaccos then known. It's successful cultivation on the James River gave the colonists at Jamestown a cash crop that could be sold for enough money to provide for all of their needs.
So it was, that Virginia became a tobacco producing colony. Prices were so high and land was so plentiful that the only bottleneck on making huge profits on tobacco was labor. It didn't take long for Dutch traders to visit Virginia in an effort to sell slaves. Indentured servants were actually the first choice of most of the planters who were initially set off by the unfamiliarity of Africans. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer Englishmen could be convinced to voluntarily indenture themselves in America and the Caribbean. Over time African slavery became the default labor system of the tobacco culture, and even relatively small farmers owning about 100 acres would have on the average 1-3 slaves by the 1780s.
The lands along the James and York river valleys (commonly known as the Tidewater) began to fill up with tobacco farms. Land use and crop rotation with long periods of lying fallow became the norm. Land was still cheap, and the interior of Virginia was still largely unsettled, but the area around Jamestown was well settled with prosperous planters by the early 1700s. This is the heyday of the tobacco culture, techniques of cultivation were passed down from father to son, profits were good, and an ambitious man could build a large plantation, and great wealth. There were established methods for dealing with both the tobacco beetle, and the tobacco worm. Except in rare extreme weather conditions production was relatively predictable.
The tobacco culture thrived and spread out from its origins at Jamestown. Perhaps they were too successful, and attracted too many new farmers, because by the time America was independent of the Crown the opportunity to become wealthy from growing tobacco was mostly past. Tobacco farmers throughout the Tidewater were still making a good middle class living providing pipe tobacco and snuff to nobles back in Europe, but the price was down due to over supply and competition, and just a little more production would drive many farmers to seek new crops (George Washington did this at his Mt. Vernon early on by switching to growing wheat). The invention of the cotton gin just before the turn of the century would usher in cotton as a new fiber for England's textile mills, and some in Virginia turned to this, or moved to the new cotton states of Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi.
All in all it would be fair to say that Virginia, up until just after the Revolution, was built on tobacco exports. This is a hugely interesting topic, and deserves fuller coverage of many other subordinate and related issues, but suffice it to say the cultivation of this cash crop, and the needs of its production led directly to, or strongly influenced many of the decisions of those who chose to come to Virginia and make it their home.
