NEW REPORT SHINES SPOTLIGHT ON TOBACCO PRODUCTION
Poplar Forest Newsletter, Fall 2004

Thomas Jefferson described tobacco as “a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.”

The crop sapped the soil of strength, required intensive labor, and its economic benefit, he believed, did not outweigh its considerable drawbacks. Yet Jefferson continued to depend upon tobacco as a cash crop, especially at his Poplar Forest plantation. 

A new research monograph by Poplar Forest volunteer Ronald Giese, professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides insight into the cultivation conundrum that bedeviled Jefferson throughout his farming career.

Jefferson had hoped to drop tobacco altogether from his Albemarle holdings and reduce its growth at Poplar Forest. To do so meant bucking the considerable tradition set by the first viable English colony in Virginia whose success stemmed from tobacco.  The Old World craved Virginian tobacco, and by 1626 the leaves substituted for money.

Even 150 years later, Jefferson and his contemporaries continued to use tobacco as currency. Craftsmen and overseers were paid in tobacco. In 1780, Jefferson’s records show he bought linen in exchange for a hogshead of Poplar Forest tobacco. Jefferson’s 1780 gubernatorial salary was paid in tobacco (60,000 pounds).

Jefferson noted in 1785 that “The European nations can do well without all our commodities except tobacco.” In short, the Virginia economy depended on the tobacco trade.

In turn, Jefferson in good part depended on Poplar Forest harvests for his income. Jefferson wrote that “I have usually set apart my Bedford funds for paying debts, building mills & other improvements of my estate … my Albemarle revenue sufficing for the expenses of my house, raising eatables & clothing independently of what I call my revenue."

Current research shows that Poplar Forest had six tobacco houses on the property in different places, three each at two different dates. These houses were used to cure the plant. Additionally, there was a prize barn that was the hub of the tobacco operation. Enslaved men and women raised the tobacco and collected the cured leaf at the prize barn, where they pressed it into barrels with a lever known as a prize. In 2001, the Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest rescued the property on which the prize barn was located with a timely purchase that saved it from development.

Despite Jefferson’s reliance on the tobacco crop, he still disliked it. He concluded that tobacco impoverished the soil twice as much as corn, requiring fields to lay fallow much longer. As for labor, it took on average 18 months to bring a crop to market. Seeds were planted in special beds early in the year. Seedlings were transplanted into hills in May or June. As the plants grew, the tops were pinched and the lower leaves and buds removed. Throughout the growing season, enslaved workers had to check plants for insects. Finally, they harvested the stalks and laid them on the ground to wilt for four hours, then hung them on sticks in a tobacco house to cure.

Cured leaves were stripped from their stalks, a process that required a moist day in order to avoid breaking the plants. Stripped leaves were bundled and pressed into a hogshead for shipment. At Poplar Forest, that meant transporting the barrels into Lynchburg. The crop usually was sold in Lynchburg itself, or shipped down the James River to sell in Richmond. Occasionally, Jefferson tried selling the crop in Philadelphia or Europe.

Despite demand, tobacco was not a surefire profit-maker. War, inflation, insects, and weather challenged the grower. The quality of the leaves or negligence in packing them could devalue the crop’s worth. Then there was the system of consigning tobacco shipments to British merchants to sell them, a legacy of the colonial era.

The merchants extended farmers credit in anticipation of their harvest. Jefferson believed merchants initially gave farmers good prices and credit to get the growers in debt. Then the merchants “reduced the prices given for his tobacco so that let his shipments be ever so great, and his demand of necessities ever so economical, they never permitted him to clear his debt.” He added that “these debts had become hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.”

Jefferson participated in the merchant system before the Revolution, by which time he had acquired a debt of £1,400.

Jefferson considered wheat a good substitute for tobacco as a cash crop. “The cultivation of wheat is the reverse (of tobacco) in every circumstance … We find it easier to make an hundred bushels of wheat then a thousand weight of tobacco, and they are worth more when made.”

At Poplar Forest, while wheat was long grown for domestic consumption, it became a main cash crop along with tobacco in Jefferson’s later years. However, while Jefferson was able periodically to drop tobacco as a crop in Albemarle, that was never the case in Bedford, where he stated in several letters that soil conditions favored tobacco more than at his Albemarle holdings. The Poplar Forest soil may have been better because, according to records, it had not been used for as long a period of time to grow the nutrient-depleting tobacco.

As Jefferson’s debts mounted, he fell back on tobacco to solve his problems. He wrote in 1810 “... the next year I shall be able to … increase my tobacco crop from 40 to 60 [acres]. In a couple of years more I shall be able to clear out all the difficulties I brought on myself in Washington.”

Jefferson’s projections of what he could expect from his Bedford tobacco lands between 1814 and 1823 fell short because of weather, market variations, and other factors over which he had no control. In the end, Jefferson’s dependence on the wretched crop could not stave off financial disaster, leaving him to die in debt. 

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This article is based on research compiled by Poplar Forest volunteer Ronald L. Giese, who is  chair and professor emeritus of forestry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.