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Powhatan tribe was a weak, bitter, and otherwise inferior variety of the Spanish staple, and so John Rolfe, one of the leaders of the Jamestown settlement and surely better known to history for his second marriage, to the Powhatan princess Pocahontas, managed to acquire tobacco seed from Spain’s New World colonies, probably from Trinidad, and at a stroke laid the economic base for the Virginia colony. The strong, dark leaf Rolfe had introduced was soon contending with its Spanish progenitor for the home English market and a foothold in the continental competition with Dutch and Turkish leaf as well.
    Unhappy at seeing its silver siphoned off by imported Spanish leaf, the British crown encouraged its fledgling colony, with an ideal climate and soil for the plant, to grow as much tobacco as it could manage. Generous land grants were offered to gentry and yeomen willing to brave the wilds; ocean passage was available on easy terms, and London merchants gladly provided credit for supplies. Soon English farmers were prohibited from growing the leaf in the home country, punitive duties were imposed against tobacco imported from elsewhere than Virginia, and in time the American colonies were granted a monopoly on all leaf shipped to England. As the seventeenth century lengthened, every jetty and dockside in the Maryland and Virginia tidewater clattered and rumbled with half-ton hogsheads of the prized leaf being rolled aboard British ships bearing them back to a nation stricken with tobaccomania. Virginia flowered, and tobacco became the mainstay of nearly every phase of the colonists’ lives: wages were paid in it, goods bartered for it, wives purchased with it—120 pounds of cured leaf was the going rate for a healthy spouse from the mother country. The only problem was the shortage of hands to tend the demanding crop, and so the African slave trade grew under Dutch transport, the dark cargo purchased mostly with the lush harvests of the leaf.
    In return for Virginia’s privileged status as tobacco supplier to Great Britain, the colonial crop could be shipped nowhere else and only on craft flying the British flag; the growing continental demand for Virginia leaf was gladly satisfied by London merchants who reshipped the leaf at a healthy markup. Still, colonial growers felt sufficiently compensated to expand their tobacco crop at a steady pace—and to the exclusion of any other crop beyond what was needed for their subsistence. Thus, their dependency on the exclusively British tobacco market deepened, and with it, their indebtedness to English merchants who supplied them on terms deemed ever harsher by the colonists. In time, it grew painfully clear to the American growers that theywere captives of the crown and its domineering mercantile policies. Virginians were saddled with lower prices for their leaf, higher shipping charges, steeper duties, and more onerous credit arrangements than would have prevailed if the colonies had enjoyed access to the world market. The growers’ reflexive response to this dilemma was to plant more tobacco, buy more slaves, ask for more credit, and hope for the best. But this single-mindedness in time resulted in a chronic excess of tobacco and an increasingly irritable colonial mentality. “Our thriving is our undoing, and our purchase of negroes, by increasing the supply of tobacco, has greatly contributed thereto,” observed Virginia’s Governor Thomas Culpepper late in the seventeenth century.
    The tobacco boom also brought with it political patterns and social values that contrasted markedly with those prevailing in New England and other Northern colonies. The proliferating tobacco plantations and farms caused the still sparse population to be widely dispersed; few towns larger than crossroads hamlets existed; and the expansive use of slave labor helped promote aristocratic pretensions, even in the least lordly of masters. The agrarian paradise being built by the planter class was only