TOBACCO CULTURE

The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of RevolutionBy T. H. BREEN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08914-0

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.........................................................................ixPREFACE TO THE SECOND PAPERBACK EDITION.......................................................xiPREFACE.......................................................................................xxvACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................xxixI. An Agrarian Context for Radical Ideas......................................................3II. Tobacco Mentality.........................................................................40III. Planters and Merchants: A Kind of Friendship.............................................84IV. Loss of Independence......................................................................124V. Politicizing the Discourse: Tobacco, Debt and the Coming of Revolution.....................160EPILOGUE: A New Beginning.....................................................................204INDEX.........................................................................................211

Chapter One

AN AGRARIAN CONTEXT FOR RADICAL IDEAS

One early spring day several years ago, I visited Westover, a magnificent Georgian mansion built by William Byrd II during the eighteenth century. The house is located on the James River about twenty-five miles west of Williamsburg. To reach it, one leaves the main state highway and then follows a gravel road that cuts across several large working farms. When I arrived, men were just beginning to cultivate the fields. Some handsome cattle had been let out to pasture. It was too early in the season for the Byrd plantation to attract tourists and schoolchildren, and the grounds of Westover itself appeared deserted. After parking my car, I walked along the river bank, idly surveying places where in colonial times vessels might have docked. In such a setting, it was easy to let my imagination slip back into an agrarian world of the great eighteenth-century planters of Tidewater Virginia.

I suspect that like many other colonial historians, I had taken such ordinary agricultural sights and smells and sounds largely for granted. I had forgotten, or perhaps never even bothered to consider, that the gentry of prerevolutionary Virginia spent most of their waking hours thinking about crops and livestock. I had previously regarded these particular planters, many of whom achieved fame as founding fathers, as somehow divorced from their physical environment—indeed, from work of any sort. I had come to see these men as rural philosophes thoroughly absorbed in the writings of Enlightenment thinkers, especially the essays of John Locke, and it appeared to me, at least, that these abstracted Virginians regarded the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s largely as an intellectual problem. I could not comprehend how the experiences of everyday life fit into this traditional image of the Tidewater planters.

The problem seemed all the more curious because, as we now know, these Virginians embraced a political ideology that most contemporary Englishmen regarded as radical. For a group of wealthy, slaveowning tobacco planters to have made such a commitment required explanation. After all, they seem to have had so much to lose, so little to gain, by upsetting the traditional political order. And yet that is precisely what they did. After mid-century they stressed the importance of personal autonomy and, in language that after 1765 became increasingly strident, warned of growing corruption in Great Britain, secret plots against liberty, and betrayal of public trust.

This radical Country ideology, as it was termed, apparently struck a responsive chord in the social knowledge of a group of articulate tobacco planters. But what was the fit between ideas and experience? What elements in their daily lives predisposed Tidewater gentlemen to think of politics in these terms? No claim is made that either the experience of cultivating tobacco or the popularity of Country ideas in themselves "caused the Revolution in Virginia. The movement toward independence was obviously too complex to be reduced to a single explanation. Nevertheless, by exploring the relation between a particular agrarian experience and a set of radical political ideas, we better understand how during the 1770s radical Country thought acquired sufficient moral force to bring at least some planters to Revolution.

I

During most of the nineteenth century, historians encountered little difficulty in defining those ideas that had sparked the Revolution. Scholars such as George Bancroft regarded that great event as the inevitable result of the rise of liberty. Americans fought the British to preserve human rights and representative government. In the flowery, self-confident prose so popular in the 1850s, Bancroft explained, "In Great Britain, the house of commons had become so venal that it might be asked whether a body so chosen and so influenced was fit to legislate even within the realm.... The knell of the ages of servitude and inequality was rung; those of equality and brotherhood were to come in."

During the early decades of the twentieth century, a group of so-called Progressive historians broke with this dominant patriotic tradition. Arthur M. Schlesinger and Carl L. Becker—to cite just two prominent examples—argued that the colonists' dispute with the mother country involved little more than a clash of economic interests. Ideas such as human liberty and natural rights were mere window dressing, rationalizations for the Americans' "real" motives. Progressive scholars concluded that while the leaders of rebellion spoke eloquently of freedom and liberty, they were actually concerned with the preservation of property, which translated into a stubborn avoidance of parliamentary taxation and resistance to commercial regulations that threatened to erode profit.

Soon after World War II, the economic interpretation of the coming of the American Revolution fell into disfavor. To label this shift of focus as revisionism would be misleading, for it involved a total rejection of the basic premise of Progressive scholarship. During the 1950s historians such as Edmund S. Morgan insisted that political principles should be treated as independent variables, fully capable in themselves of sparking violent protest. Americans did not consult their pocketbooks before taking up arms. Even humble artisans and farmers viewed British policy before 1776 as an assault on cherished constitutional rights; by rioting against the Stamp Act or by throwing tea into Boston harbor, the colonists transformed these intellectual abstractions into political action. The entire process seemed remarkably rational, as if the patriot leaders were involved in an orderly philosophical debate rather than a turbulent revolutionary movement.

This idealistic approach still dominates the historiography of the American Revolution. There has, however, been a major shift in emphasis. Scholars devote less attention to the analysis of high-sounding principles. This change occurred rather suddenly in the mid-1960s; while historians such as J.G.A. Pocock, Caroline Robbins, Isaac Kramnick, Joyce Appleby, and Gordon Wood contributed to the reinterpretation, this new understanding...