Tobacco, Soil, and the People Who Worked It

Maryland was tobacco from almost the beginning. The colony's first successful export crop was planted in the sixteen thirties on the Western Shore, the broad peninsula between the Potomac and the Chesapeake, and within a generation it had transformed the ecology and the economy of the entire tidewater region. Tobacco was not a forgiving crop. It exhausted soil within a few years, which meant the tobacco economy was always moving, always clearing new ground, always demanding more land and more labor.

The labor came in phases. The first phase was indentured servitude, mostly young English men who signed away four to seven years of their freedom for passage to the colony and the promise of land and tools at the end. Over the seventeenth century, tens of thousands of indentured servants came to the Chesapeake colonies. Many of them died before their indentures ended. Those who survived found that the best land was already claimed and the tobacco market was flooding. The promise of opportunity had narrowed to almost nothing.

The second phase began in the sixteen sixties and accelerated sharply after Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in sixteen seventy-six alarmed planters across the region. The solution the planter class chose was to replace the unstable, potentially rebellious supply of poor white labor with enslaved Africans, who could be held in perpetual bondage and whose children could be born into that bondage by law. Maryland codified hereditary slavery in sixteen sixty-four. By the middle of the eighteenth century, enslaved people made up a large share of Maryland's population, by some counts around a third or more.

The tobacco they grew built the great houses of the Western Shore, funded the legal careers and political ambitions of the men who drafted the republic's founding documents, and funded the importation of more enslaved people to grow more tobacco on more exhausted ground. The cycle ate the land and the people on it simultaneously. Some tidewater counties were already declining in soil productivity before the Revolution. The human cost is not in the soil surveys.