Virginia: Child Of Tabaco

John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, became father of the tobacco industry and an economic savior of the Virginia colony.

By 1612 he had per fected methods of raising and curing the pungent weed, eliminating much of the bitter tang.

Soon the European demand for tobacco was nearly insatiable. A tobacco rush swept over Virginia, as crops were planted in the streets of Jamestown and even between the numerous graves.

So exclusively did the colonists concentrate on planting the yellow leaf that at first they had to import some of their foodstuffs.

Colonists who had once hungered for food now hungered for land, ever more land on which to plant ever more tobacco.

Relentlessly, they pressed the frontier of settlement up the river valleys to the west, abrasively edging against the Indians.

Virginia's prosperity was finally built on tobacco smoke. This "bewitching weed" played a vital role in putting the colony on firm economic foundations.

But tobacco-King Nicotine-was something of a tyrant. It was ruinous to the soil when greedily planted in successive years, and it enchained the fortunes of Virginia to the fluctuating price of a single crop.

Fatefully, tobacco also promoted the broad-acred plantation system and with it a brisk demand for fresh labor.

In 1619, the year before the Plymouth Pilgrims landed in New England, what was described as a Dutch warship appeared off Jamestown and sold some twenty Africans.

The scanty record does not reveal whether they were purchased as lifelong slaves or as servants committed to limited years of servitude.

How ever it transpired, this simple commercial transaction planted the seeds of the North American slave system. Yet blacks were too costly for most of the hard-pinched white colonists to acquire, and for decades few were brought to Virginia.

In 1650 Virginia counted but three hundred blacks, although by the end of the century blacks, most of them enslaved, made up approximately 14% of the colony's population.

Representative self-government was also born in primitive Virginia, in the same cradle with slavery and in the same year-1619. The Virginia Company autho rized the settlers to summon an assembly, known as the House of Burgesses.

A momentous precedent was thus feebly established, for this assemblage was the first of many miniature parliaments to flourish in the soil of America.

As time passed, James I grew increasingly hostile to Virginia. He detested tobacco, and he distrusted the representative House of Burgesses, which he branded a "seminary of sedition." In 1624 he revoked the charter of the bankrupt and beleaguered Virginia Company, thus making Virginia a royal colony directly under his control.