On Tobacco and Slaves

This is a really ambitious book and the amount of material Kulikoff juggles here makes it a bit difficult to assess. Basically, Kulikoff argues that an observer of late eighteenth century Virginia would have found late seventeenth century Virginia to be all but unrecognizable. Ultimately, Kulikoff finds that the transformation of Southern society was the result of transformations in family, class, and racial relations, which had much deeper roots.

The challenge of seventeenth century Virginia was, at its core, one of labor. Large numbers of both white indentured servants and black slaves entered the colony as migrants, but the death toll was incredibly high (there were far more deaths than births in the region) and there was an enormous disparity in the ratio between men and women. In order for planters to maintain their position, they had to import laborers from overseas, who could hardly be expected to survive the seven-year span of time contracted by an indentured servant. Although tobacco was profitable, maintaining the source of labor necessary to produce it was a challenge and, in the late seventeenth century, the price of tobacco dived making it even harder for planters. As a result of this set of circumstances, the number of slaves was low (they were 3x more expensive than indentured servants without any increased chance of them outliving those same servants), families were more egalitarian, and many men were left without opportunity.

However, in the late seventeenth century, the picture began to shift. Thanks to the small number of steadily reproducing families, the birth rate increased for the first time to exceed the death rate. Moreover, new migrants were more likely to survive the hardships of Virginia. With the increase in natural birth rate, the male-female ratio began to stabilize. This seemingly simple shift had enormous consequences. First, Virginians began to import much larger numbers of black slaves, who for the first time became profitable because they could live longer lives. Second, due to the increase in slave labor and large number of childbirths, women no longer needed to be so active in agriculture, and this transformed the family structure—the white Virginian family became increasingly patriarchal. Third, two white classes emerged: the first, yeomen, were planters of small, self-sustaining plots more similar to that of New England; the second, the gentry, had enormous plots of land, held many slaves, and took an active role in Virginian governance. Because they were able to accumulate so much property and influence the state, they pushed yeomen out of positions of power and essentially came to dominate the economy of the Chesapeake.

The picture for black slaves, however, was very different. While Virginia did have a free black population in the seventeenth century, that quickly collapsed, and by the end of the eighteenth century, nearly all black people in the colony were enslaved. Moreover, because both men and women were forced to labor, families maintained a more egalitarian character. Yet, the status of their families was precarious, as there was no such thing as “legal marriage” for slaves (who were not seen as people, but as property). As a result, families could be dispersed across large amounts of space, especially with the buying and selling of slave children. The collapse of the tobacco market in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries meant that most slaves were instead cultivating foodstuffs over cash crops by 1800.

While quasi-Marxist in outlook, I find this to be a useful book for examining the origins of Southern social structures. I think Kulikoff gives a bit too much weight to modes of production, but he makes it clear that economic structure is fundamentally important to the construction of social structures.