On Tobacco Culture

This is a short text that speaks to the mentalités of tobacco cultivators leading up to the American Revolution. Although it is packaged as a book, it reads almost more as an interpretive essay.

In the text, Breen argues that, although the culture of tobacco (it’s in the title, I know) did not cause Virginians to become revolutionaries, it did prime many of them for the cause. While historians generally see the great eighteenth-century Virginian statesmen as diplomats, politicians, generals, and even land speculators, it is important to see them as tobacco planters first (although they weren’t the ones really doing the planting). In fact, their lives were consumed with the economics of tobacco cultivation and, as part of that, they were nearly perpetually in debt. This is not because they were necessarily bad producers, but because they sold their tobacco on consignment and would often use the bulk of their revenue to better the property—whether it be to buy more slaves, tobacco seed, improve their aristocratic manors, etc. However, given the nature of plantation business, day-to-day goods and services were purchased on credit. As with Caribbean sugar lords and the cotton-based slaveholders of the Mississippi River Valley, they were rich in capital but poor in liquid money.

Yet, they expected that they could live like this forever. They saw debt as a mutual agreement between friends and expected that their honor would be enough to account for the debt. But, in the upheaval of the 1760s, especially with regard to increased rates of taxation and a dive in business for the third-party vendors that they sold tobacco to, British merchants tried to cash in on their debts. This infuriated tobacco planters, who developed a language about the need for autonomy and self-reliance while simultaneously (because of their debt) remaining dependent on outsiders. Their newfound language allowed them to think through larger issues, but they continued to keep ideas of politics and economics separate. In fact, some planters kept the these ideas separate throughout the entire American Revolution, but many came to combine them, developing a language for revolution very much based off of their grievances about debt. Breen goes as far as to argue that the events of the 1760s so soured planters on debt that these concerns continued into the early republic and, by degrees, to the present. It was for this reason that Jefferson hated Hamilton. Hamilton recognized that the US government needed credit and, to build it, the country would have to indebt itself. Jefferson, though, approached the topic after having remarkably negative experiences.

It’s a good book, easy to skim through in an hour and illuminating, but I’d like to have seen more primary source rigor here.