Second-hand Smoke: Tobacco and the Lingering Seeds of the Columbian Exchange

The tobacco plant is one of the stronger transatlantic players, one which merged culture and economy for centuries. Tobacco smoking was first noted in the journals of Columbus’s men as part of their documentary on the behaviors of the Indigenous peoples of Cuba.1 Upon further expeditions in 1508, Europeans marveled at similar smoking habits in Brazil, where Amerindians smoked a dried leaf in a single shared pipe during diplomatic negotiations and medical reasons.2 Over time, the growing, curing, and smoking of tobacco gained a hold on the international market, its ash coating the walls of homes around the Atlantic world. As a heavily traded product in the Columbian exchange, the tobacco plant secured its grip as a cultural cash crop; a nonessential good which came to play an essential role in the lives of millions of individuals.

The oldest tobacco seeds of any variety, domesticated or wild, date from 387 to 205 BC.3 Oral tradition relates that the Navajo people believed that the Sky Father and Earth Mother smoked sacred tobacco, and thereby the universe was born. Aztec priests utilized tobacco to communicate with their deities, with the belief that the earth-goddess Cihuacoatl was embodied on the earth as a tobacco plant.4 Tobacco also had medical uses including treatment for asthma, fevers, and alleviating the pain of childbirth.5 It is likely that the tobacco plant was used for religious and medical reasons because its predictable and shortlived effects were more pleasant than other hallucinogens.6 In the early days of American agriculture, tobacco spread to Central and South America from what is now present-day Virginia.7

There are two main varieties of tobacco plants, nicotina tobacum, and nicotina rustica. Although n. tobacum may escape from cultivated plots in some places, it has never been found as a truly wild plant.8 A variety of n. rustica does grow naturally in the Andes from Chile to Ecuador, which has led some botanists to consider it wild. This was the tobacco variety initially grown by Indigenous peoples until it was replaced by n. tobacum. 9 The ultimate success of n. tobacum came from its adaptation to the tropical lowlands.

Initially, the close connection between Indigenous peoples and tobacco resulted in settlers considering the plant to be uncivilized and, in some cases, demonic.10 The smoking of tobacco could be regarded as a material embodiment of ‘suffocating’ Indigenous culture, as settlers also engaged in the smoking of a plant which was grown by Indigenous hands. While seemingly strange that Indigenous peoples used tobacco as

both a pain killer and hallucinogen, the French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot Villemain (from where the term nicotine originates), supported these medicinal properties, sending a sample of tobacco to Catherine de Medici, the Queen of France.11

In 1607, Virginia settlers planted their first crop of tobacco and exported it to Europe in 1613. As early as 1610, English settlers tested the first complete crop of n. rustica, but were dissatisfied with its bitterness. Instead, Virginian settler John Rolfe began growing a variety of tobacco judged “pleasant, sweet and strong” that had been traded from Trinidad or Venezuela,12 grown along the banks of the James River.13 From this initial planting of n. tobacum, tobacco growth and consumption would become heavily integrated into colonial society.

A member of the nightshade family (along with the tomato, peppers, petunias, and belladonna), tobacco is a perennial grown in temperate regions, requiring warmth to flourish.14 The word “tobacco” is derived from the Spanish term tobaco, itself derived from the Taino language of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic).15 The tobacco plant is a resilient one; a self-pollinator which does not require bees or other insects, cross-pollinating less than five percent of the time. As well, one tobacco plant is exceptionally fertile, capable of producing one million seeds, or the equivalent of twelve acres of grown plants.16 It is no surprise that this plant is second only to cotton in the global average of non-food crops,17 and swiftly found its place within early colonial agriculture.

The English favoured tobacco from Spanish America, consuming an estimated 130 000 pounds (worth £200 000 at the time) annually as early as 1605.18 As tobacco imports increased, the English monarchy upheld a generally negative view of the product, with King James I labeling American tobacco “that stinking weed,” and King Charles I encouraging the settlement of Virginia to diversify their economy rather than place all hope on “a noxious weed.”19 With similar growth in popularity in both France and Spain, the Catholic Church denounced tobacco smoking in the seventeenth century, but was forced to repeal when members of the church elite took up a smoking habit themselves.20 By 1617, the British had devoted large tracts of land for the growth of tobacco in Virginia.21 This was a puzzling choice to some as tobacco was a non-essential crop grown for personal enjoyment and consumption, and did not provide any nutritional value to the consumer.

The tobacco plantation gamble was well underway by the mid-seventeenth century. The temperate zone of the Atlantic coast of North America was well-suited to tobacco cultivation, which was traditionally carried out on small plots of land, as the plants required diligent and continuous care.22 A single planter or group assigned to the land had to oversee the whole

A Treatise on the Culture of the Tobacco Plant, Wikimedia Commons.

Emily Jones Salmon and John Salmon, “Tobacco in Colonial Virginia,” Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities, July 1, 1612), Fair use. operation through from planting to harvesting; the entire plant itself was the end product. Whereas minimal damage to an orchard tree’s bark may not affect its fruit, injury to any part of the growing tobacco plant compromised end profit. The majority of cash crops require concentrated planting and harvest seasons, which are separated by a period of minimal activity. Tending to tobacco, by contrast, occurs over most of the calendar year.23 Due to the high volume of seeds a single tobacco plant produces, one individual could produce their own plantation, complete with a full growth to harvest cycle in only a few years.

Once these new plantations produced their first crop (taking approximately one year), they maintained a steady, replicable harvest cycle. Unfortunately, they did not last long. Tobacco was notorious for exhausting soils, forcing farmers who planted it in monoculture to relocate in as few as three to five years, and the old land often needed to lie fallow for as long as twenty years before replanting tobacco.24 Although planters could preserve the quality of their soils by rotating tobacco with staple crops (and simultaneously ensuring a degree of food self-sufficiency) as recommended by emerging American agricultural literature, most tobacco farmers were doing the opposite. This led one observer to remark that “agriculture in the South does not consist so much in cultivating lands as in killing it.”25

With the European mentality of millions of acres of the Americas being ripe for the taking, the limitation of available soil was a relatively minimal concern at the time. Congruent with the colonial mentality, tobacco was a crop which was quickly attached to an image of financial prosperity. In 1621 a shipment of young European women sent to be wives for Virginian colonists arrived. Each colonist who desired to marry one of these women had to pay 120 pounds of “best leaf tobacco” for her transportation charges.26 Quickly, beginning a personal tobacco plantation became appealing to many young men. Despite being the “poor relative” of sugar, or” an early starter and an early loser,”27 tobacco quickly became the temperate Atlantic power crop, rivaling cotton production and promising its consumers lower prices than Caribbean sugar.

Biles men in tobacco, Christopher Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange: Stories of Biological and Economic Transfer in World History. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 454. Fair use. Tobacco hornworm, Wikimedia Commons.

Amidst a growing Virginian settler population, soil exhaustion and plantation relocation soon caused a decline in available land. In 1632 the General Assembly passed a law which restricted the number of tobacco plants each settler could grow to 1500. In response, settlers registered fields under different family names, or relocated to just outside their county, to ensure virgin land free of legal restraints. A particularly devastating flood in Virginia in 1771 resulted in the loss of more than 2.3 million pounds of tobacco, with damage estimates amounting up to £2 million (£325 million today), along with 150 fatalities.28 While land can be drained and crops replanted, tobacco plantations were also subject to pests. The green hornworm and “tobacco worm” were problematic, with claims these were “the only animal, save man, which is life proof against the deadly nicotine of this cultivated poison.”29

In response, farmers would often allow guinea fowl or turkeys into fields to eat the worms, but in turn were tasked with fowl management. Therefore, a tobacco farmer’s knowledge rested on experience, patience, and skill passed from one generation of successful plantation owners to the next. The Virginia tobacco manual declared “it is difficult to convey an idea of ripe tobacco by description. It can only be learnt by observation and experience.”30 The colony of Virginia existed within the confines of North America, yet the knowledge required for a successful tobacco crop flowed freely amidst trade routes across the Atlantic. Similar to Virginia, settlers in Cuba took advantage of the international marketplace and demand for tobacco, with their personal plantations quickly occupying a large percentage of the island’s available agricultural land.31

While tobacco production may have linked together settlers from the island of Cuba and the English colony of Virginia, slavery remained the common denominator of the Atlantic cash crop system. In 1625, France acquired the Caribbean island of Saint Christopher, first utilized to grow tobacco before its transition to sugarcane in the 1640s.32 In 1619, Virginian colonists imported slaves into British North America, to work the newly developed tobacco farms in both Maryland and Virginia.33 These slaves, which were brought across the Atlantic by a Dutch ship, were paid for in pounds of tobacco.34 Due to falling tobacco prices and a decline in white immigration, there was an increase in slave labour in the late seventeenth century. In 1650, slaves made up only three percent of the town of Chesapeake’s population, but had increased to fifteen percent in 1690.35

Further, the number of slaves recorded on the Virginian state census more than doubled from 1755 to 1790, with just under half of the purchased slaves belonging to members of Piedmont County.36 The need for slave labour in Harvesting tobacco plants. Wikimedia Commons. tobacco production for export was consistent with other plantation crops.37 Significantly, the transition of tobacco from a crop of the first Indigenous horticulturalist, to the European farmer, to the European-owned slave, divorced the sacred image of tobacco from the Indigenous world. For Europeans, tobacco’s role in the Columbian Exchange was solely for recreational purposes.

Due to the nature of tobacco production, there remained little technological expansion or sophistication of existent technology, nor did it require much in the realm of agricultural change.38 Compared to sugar cane, the plant required little processing, and slave labour remained sufficient for its production. Planting, tending to fields, harvesting, and hauling could all be maintained with slaves, although the curing process proved the most labour intensive. A skilled tobacco planter could observe the change in plants’ colour and the turn of the leaves, indicating it was time to

harvest. In this short period, planters gambled between harvesting the plants and storing them in the safety of the barn, or waiting for the plants to reach their maximum point of maturity. Leaving plants to grow for an extra day could result in a heavier harvest and higher profit,39 assuming that the plants did not attain great damage from heavy rains or a sudden cold snap, which could cause the loss of entire fields of tobacco plants overnight.

Once harvested, tobacco leaves could be cured in two different ways: air curing (in which the barn is opened during the day to allow natural air flow to dry the hanging leaves), or fire curing (the barn is made air tight and slowly heated from an outside fire).40 According to a popular legend in a local newspaper The Piedmont Press, a slave named Stephen working on the Caswell County Farm of Captain Slade in 1839 accidentally discovered the efficacy of the charcoal curing process. Stephen fell asleep while tending the fire and when he awoke to the last embers dying, in haste he attempted to rekindle the flames with charcoal logs. This method ultimately produced the best cured leaves ever seen.41 The story spread through the surrounding towns, upon which most local farmers adopted this new method.

Slavery remained essential to tobacco production, and after the American Civil Facts for Farmers; also for the Family Circle. A Compost of War, white residents of the tobacco belt viewed Rich Materials for all Landowners, about Domestic Animals the future of their plantations with trepidation, fearing that freedmen would depart and the and Domestic Economy; Farm Buildings; Gardens, Orchids, and Vineyards ..., via Wikimedia Commons. region would be left without most of its labour supply.42 However, tobacco served as a means of extra income for some slave families. Slaves often grew their own tobacco plants in personal gardens to serve in both recreational consumption, as well as excess supply to sell to European men for cash and the opportunity for slaves to enhance their quality of life.43 Masters allowed slaves to take smoking breaks in the belief that it increased their stamina,44 as well as commitment to crop production. African American labourers transferred the “hands” (bushels) of tobacco from field wagons into the curing warehouses under the eyes of white supervisors, and provided prominent labour roles after the harvests’ yearly tobacco auction.45 Black men transferred the tobacco to factories known as “stemmeries” or “priseries” located near the curing warehouses, where they sat on long benches and manually ripped the stems away from the tobacco leaves.46 Despite some efforts at autotomizing this process, black women and children continued to be employed to do this

task well into the middle of the twentieth century.47 It was believed that exposure to both sunlight and fresh air would damage the tobacco, so stemmeries most often had both closed and covered windows, leading to suffocating conditions.48 One labourer, William Batts, recalls his experience farming in the spring and summer months, while his wife worked in the stemmery: “I don’t like the work in the warehouse…the scent of the tobacco was so strong that it made me sick, even if I was raised with it, and I’ve spent my whole life around here and you can imagine I’m used to the stuff.”49 Wages at the stemmery were low, such as the case of W.H. Etheridge, a stemmery worker in Wilson who worked full time during tobacco season and only earned approximately $600.50

Tobacco and the development of society would remain closely intertwined, as commented

the priest, the lawyer, the doctor, the businessman, the landowner and his juniors, the women (with the exception of the ladies of the highest rank), children from age seven or ten years of age, city slaves, and the free people of colour…smoke and make smoking a serious business with between ten and up to twelve cigars [tabacos] a day.51

on by Irish doctor Richard R. Madden: As tobacco increasingly became associated with recreational use in taverns, meetings, and brothels,52 group tobacco consumption allowed members of seemingly disparate groups to interact with one another, which led Richard H. Dana Jr. to remark the “cigar [is] a great leveler. Any man may stop another for a light, and go on – all as a matter of course.”53

The evolution of tobacco from religious ritual to secular addiction has lived on as one of the most enduring products of the Columbian exchange. While historical focus tends to pause on the negative impact of syphilis from the western Atlantic, the morbidity and mortality of illnesses from tobacco products swiftly exceeded the toll of other diseases and infections.54 Within Indigenous societies, tobacco was regarded as a source of great spiritual power and danger, confined to specific ritual and medical settings, minimizing the health consequences of traditional tobacco use.55 While Europeans recounted Indigenous peoples portraying signs of addiction through excessive smoking, snuffing, chewing, and even drinking tobacco, the real danger of recreational tobacco use emerged as it was separated from its religious roots and engaged in a world of commercial exploitation through international trade.56 Tobacco would see its revenge in the eventual death of hundreds of thousands of Europeans through various health ailments over the next century.57 Ultimately, once tobacco products reached European markets, the desire of the individual to consume tobacco usually overrode preferences of where it came from or how it was produced.

Tobacco therefore, remains an actor within a wider transatlantic context. Not immune to forces outside of the local plantation, the tobacco trade ebbed and flowed throughout Atlantic history due to frequent conflicts among European nations. A strong player in the history of African American slavery, the plant led to wide changes in culture, society, levels of governmental control, and varying economic conditions. Scientific studies have continued on the chemical nature of tobacco plants,58 and contemporary popularity for tobacco products, specifically the Cuban cigar, reflect a continued impact of this portion of the Columbian exchange.

Janina Pulfer Ritzen

MAIH (History stream)

D I S R U P T I O N S