cash crop – American History to 1877

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Chapters 7 and 11 in American Colonies focused on the English colonies to the south which included Carolina, Virginia (Chesapeake) and Georgia. As Thomas mentioned in his most recent blog post, the south focused on single cash crops instead of a variety of crops. Virginia’s crop was tobacco, and the importance placed on tobacco greatly shaped the development of the colony. Unlike England, “the Chesapeake demanded too much labor from too few colonists.” (142) What I found ironic is that at this time, the colonists believed it was more profitable to buy English indentured servants for a few years than African slaves for life. This theory would change drastically soon. In Virginia, the government became corrupt when a leader by the name of Berkeley came to power. He appointed his friends to positions of power, and created hefty taxes to benefit the wealthy. This lead to Bacon’s rebellion, a failed attempt by planters who resented his leadership.

What was interesting to me was the fact that in the Chesapeake, slavery and racism were not mixed. Before Africans were enslaved, black men in the colony had the same rights as white men. When slavery became abundant, the colonists were terrified of a rebellion, and made strict rules objectifying these people.

Carolina officially belonged to the “the Lords Proprietor” which consists of English aristocrats. (223) Carolina was created with the intent to serve as a place of religious toleration, low taxes, and large tracts of land. This attracted a lot of common colonists, but also larger planters. One way Carolina kept control was through exploitation of Indians. They created a cycle of enslavement where they supported a tribe, that tribe would capture and enslave another tribe, and then the colonists would find another tribe to enslave the first tribe. I was honestly disgusted by this constant exploitation, and even more disappointed in the Indians. The fact that they all turned on each other whenever presented a possibility just displays how desperate they were. Economically, Carolina became a hub for cash crops. Since it primarily consisted of huge plantations, it could develop crops like rice, tar, cattle and indigo in large amounts to trade in England. This made the elite in Carolina the wealthiest on the Atlantic Coast.

Georgia was created solely for a place to ship “miserable wretches and drones” in hopes that manual labor would transform them. (241) Because of this, it was the only colony that outlawed slavery, due to the fact that it was created to be many compact farms. Georgia’s cash crops consisted of hemp, flax, mulberry, and grapes. Many of the colonists were angered by the strict rules especially against slavery. They felt “unfree” without having the right to own slaves. (243) Eventually they caved and permitted slavery, which changed Georgia into a plantation society.

In the film Dazed and Confused, Ms. Stroud, a US history teacher, yells above the commotion of the year’s final bell, telling her students that, while“ [they’re] being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha,” to remember that they’re celebrating “a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males [who] didn’t want to pay their taxes.” As our exploration of early colonial history has shown, this is an overly simplistic view of America leading up to the revolution. Still, in contexts of this week’s readings, we can see that the statement carries some merit.

The readings deal with the Southern colonies in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, which Taylor shows to be markedly different from their northern counterparts thanks to, primarily, their economy. Whereas the northern colonies sowed the seeds for a diverse, industrialized economy, the southern colonies quickly developed a single cash-crop system. In the Chesapeake, this crop was tobacco while the Carolinas specialized in rice cultivation. The fact that Virginia’s assemblymen were paid in tobacco—150 pounds per day in session—highlights how valuable a crop like tobacco was there.

Since wealth and power were so closely tied to farming, land was the most important commodity in the Southern colonies. In the Chesapeake colonies of the early 17^th century, this was no problem as even indentured servants were promised substantial acreage as part of their “freedom dues.” However, as tobacco became ever more profitable and the influx of immigrants steadily grew, land quickly became scarce. Most indentured servants stopped receiving land upon freedom, and those that did found that the most fertile land been seized by ever larger plantations. As Taylor points out, “in Virginia’s Middlesex Country the richest 5 percent of the white families owned more than half of the property” by 1700 (157). Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 further highlights the growing inequality in the colonies and its resulting social unrest. Similarly, the split of Carolina into North and South Carolina in 1712 resulted from the power monopoly wealthy Carolinian planters established.

The southern colonies’ economic differences also manifested themselves in the way their treatment of Indians differed from their northern counterparts. Here, we can use Yuxi’s blog post from last week, which elucidates the interaction between the New England colonies and the various northern tribes, to clarify any similarities and differences. She points out that Natives were placed in “praying towns,” in which colonists tried to “enlighten” the Indians religiously. In the South, no such large-scale efforts were done to Christianize Natives. Rather, especially in the Carolinas, planters feared that the Indians would encourage slaves to escape, and so they commercially exploited their rivalries through the gun trade. Such manipulation was also evident in the North, as Yuxi points to the way the English presence inspired King Phillip’s War, which was the “first civil war among the Indians.”

Tag: cash crop

Going South

Plantations and the American Revolution