July 5, 1976
Tobacco's Roots Deep
In American History
[Editor’s note: Throughout North
Carolina’s history, tobacco has been an
important industry and is still the largest
in the state. Financial Times farm editor
BUI Humphries traces its early history],
by BILL HUMPHRIES
Financial Times Contributor
In 1776, Gen. George Washington's
tattered military forces suffered a serious
setback in the war for independence. They
lost New York to the British.
Appealing to his countrymen for
support for the American forces, Wash
ington said: “I say, if you can’t send
money, send tobacco.”
During the early period of U.S.
involvement in World War I, general John
J. Pershing sent a message to his fellow
Americans back home: “You ask me what
we need to win this war. I answer tobacco
as much as bullets.”
Aristocrat William Byrd of colonial
Virginia described the tobacco plant as
“that bewitching vegetable.” On the other
hand, poet G.L. Hemminger wrote:
“Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
“It satisfies no normal need. I like it.”
American Indians were using tobacco
for social, ceremonial and even medicinal
purposes long before Columbus discover
ed the New World. In time, first for the
Spanish and later for the English, tobacco
became a highly valuable commodity in
world trade.
Sir Walter Raleigh, a confirmed pipe
smoker, did so much to popularize tobacco
usage in his country that one literary
figure (James M. Barrie) later suggested
England should have changed its name in
his honor.
But when King James I ascended the
British throne in the early 17th century,
he issued a pamphlet, “A Counterblaste to
Tobacco,” for the avowed purpose of
shaming the English into giving up “the
vile use (or rather abuse) of taking
tobacco.”
It was John Rolfe, known in history as
the English settler who married the Indian
maiden Pocahontas, who was the first
Virginia colonist to realize the potential of
tobacco as an export commodity to the
mother country. Without tobacco, the
survival of the colony would have been in
grave doubt.
Rolfe planted his first commercial crop
in 1612 and shipped it to England the next
year. It was an immediate success because
he produced a mild, pleasant-tasting type
of leaf, known in scientific circles today as
“Nicotiana tabacum,” whose seed he
somehow obtained from the West Indies.
The long and colorful history of tobacco
reflects to a large degree the history of
America. It is a commodity that has
affected our political development, our
social customs, our economic growth and
even our educational and religious history.
In colonial times tobacco was a
commodity money, the standard medium
of exchange. By statute it was acceptable
in payment of debts, taxes and other
obligations, including church tithes.
When the first shipment of prospective
brides arrived at Jamestown in 1619, a
settler who wanted one of the maids for a
wife was required to pay for her passage
across the Atlantic with 120 pounds of
good-quality leaf.
A court case involving tobacco
fame to Patrick Henry. Two short crops in
the 1750 s caused the price of tobacco in
Virginia to rise sharply. The colonial
Assembly passed a law providing that for
one year, debts and tithes payable in
tobacco could be paid off in money at the
rate of two pennies per pound of leaf owed.
Clergymen of the established church
objected vigorously. They wanted to be
paid in high-priced tobacco at the set rate
of 16,000 pounds a year.
One minister sued to collect damages
from his parishioners. Henry defended the
tobacco growers. He charged that the
clergy were greedy and would “snatch
from the hearth of their honest parishioner
his last hoe-cake, from the widow and her
orphan children their last milk cow! the
last bed, nay the last blanket from the
lying-in woman!”
After Henry’s impassioned plea, the
jury awarded the suing minister exactly
one penny in damages! More importantly,
perhaps, the young lawyer had discovered
his talents as an orator and sharpened his
belief in opposition to the British Crown
and in independence for America.
Down through the years tobacco has
been used in various ways—snuffing,
chewing, smoking pipe, cigar or cigarette,
and perhaps in other forms. Snuffing was
highly popular in Europe for decades.
Chewing reached its peak in the United
States in the 1890 s, when there were
thousands of brands of plug and twist on
the market.
An event near Yanceyville in Caswell
County in 1839 set the stage for
emergence of the cigarette.
A young slave named Stephen, on the
Abisha Slade farm, was curing tobacco
with open wood fires on the dirt floor of
the barn when he fell asleep and let the
fires die out. Upon awakening, he
frantically rushed to a nearby blacksmith
pit, fetched some smdldering charcoal
logs, and used them to finish out the cure.
The tobacco cured out to a sparkling
lemon-yellow color unlike any ever before
seen.
In time, curing with flameless charcoal
to produce Bright tobacco became
widespread. Later, flues were added to
barns, to remove undesirable fumes and
smoke during the curing process.
The first modern blended cigarette,
using Bright or flue-cured tobacco as its
main ingredient, was placed on the market
by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in 1913. A
few years later, American Tobacco Co.
came out with its Lucky Strike brand and
Liggett & Myers produced Chesterfield.
These three brands dominated the
cigarette market for many years.
James Albert Bonsack, a young
Virginian invented a cigarette making
machine which was quickly placed in
operation in the factory of Washington
Duke and sons in Durham. That was in
1884. A year later, U.S. cigarette
manufacture passed the one billion mark
for the first time.
By 1921, cigarette smoking had become
the dominant form of tobacco usage in the
United States. Today, factories in
Durham, Greensboro, Reidsville and
Winston-Salem produce about 55% of the
650 billion smokes manufactured in this
country each year. North Carolina farmers
grow two-thirds of the nation’s flue-cured
<*rop.
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