Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800
Encyclopedia
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800, is a book written by historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 Allan Kulikoff. Published in 1986, it is the first major study that synthesizes the historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...

 of the colonial Chesapeake
Chesapeake Bay
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. It lies off the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Maryland and Virginia. The Chesapeake Bay's drainage basin covers in the District of Columbia and parts of six states: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West...

 region of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Tobacco and Slaves is a neo-Marxist
Neo-Marxism
Neo-Marxism is a loose term for various twentieth-century approaches that amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, usually by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions, such as: critical theory, psychoanalysis or Existentialism .Erik Olin Wright's theory of contradictory class...

 study that explains the creation of a racial caste system
Caste
Caste is an elaborate and complex social system that combines elements of endogamy, occupation, culture, social class, tribal affiliation and political power. It should not be confused with race or social class, e.g. members of different castes in one society may belong to the same race, as in India...

 in the tobacco
Tobacco
Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It can be consumed, used as a pesticide and, in the form of nicotine tartrate, used in some medicines...

-growing regions of Maryland
Province of Maryland
The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America that existed from 1632 until 1776, when it joined the other twelve of the Thirteen Colonies in rebellion against Great Britain and became the U.S...

 and Virginia and the origins of southern
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...

 slave society. Kulikoff uses statistics compiled from colonial court and church records, tobacco sales, and land surveys to conclude that economic, political, and social developments in the [18th-century Chesapeake established the foundations of economics, politics, and society in the 19th-century South.

Historiographic background

During the early 20th century, the historiography of the Chesapeake colonies was dominated by the Cavalier myth. Studies focused exclusively on the white planter
Plantation
A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...

 elite
Gentry
Gentry denotes "well-born and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past....

 who were portrayed as both the descendants of English Cavaliers
Cavalier
Cavalier was the name used by Parliamentarians for a Royalist supporter of King Charles I and son Charles II during the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration...

 and the progenitors of the Virginia dynasty
Virginia Dynasty
The Virginia dynasty is a term sometimes used to describe the fact that four of the first five Presidents of the United States were from Virginia. The term sometimes excludes George Washington, who, though a Virginia planter, was closely aligned with the policies of the Federalist Party, and was...

 that controlled the first fifty years of post-Revolutionary
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...

 American politics. Much attention was given to the families of prominent Virginian statesmen George Washington
George Washington
George Washington was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, and presided over the writing of...

, Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...

, and James Madison
James Madison
James Madison, Jr. was an American statesman and political theorist. He was the fourth President of the United States and is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for being the primary author of the United States Constitution and at first an opponent of, and then a key author of the United...

. Challenges to the Cavalier myth and its influence on the historiography appeared in Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker's Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon's Rebellion and Its Leaders (1940), Wesley Frank Craven's The Southern Colonies in the Seventheenth Century, 1607–1689 (1949), and Carl Bridenbaugh
Carl Bridenbaugh
Carl Bridenbaugh was an American historian of Colonial America. He had an illustrious career, writing fourteen books and editing or co-editing five more, and he was acclaimed as a historian and teacher.-Career:...

's Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (1952).

Despite revision of the traditional historiography, African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

 slaves and women remained in the periphery of studies of the Chesapeake until the 1960s. Winthrop D. Jordan
Winthrop Jordan
Winthrop Donaldson Jordan was a professor of history and renowned writer on the history of slavery and the origins of racism in the United States....

's White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) offered the first interpretation of the roles of women and slaves in the Chesapeake colonies. Since the 1960s, scholars have produced broad examinations of colonial Chesapeake society. Gerald W. Mullin's Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (1972), Edmund S. Morgan
Edmund Morgan
Edmund Sears Morgan , an eminent authority on early American history, is Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986.-Life:...

's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), Lois G. Carr and Lorena S. Walsh's article "The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland" (1977) printed in the William and Mary Quarterly, Rhys Isaac
Rhys L. Isaac
Rhys Llywelyn Isaac was a South African-born Australian historian, who also worked in the United States.Isaac and his twin brother Glynn were born in Cape Town, South Africa, to William Edwyn Isaac and Frances Leighton Isaac. Rhys Isaac was the 1959 Cape Province Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College...

's The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982), and Jan Lewis's The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (1983) and Kathleen D. Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) offer analyses of women, slaves, and poorer whites in the Chesapeake.

Along with social and cultural histories, historians of the Chesapeake continued to study the relationships between politics and the economy that drew the Chesapeake colonies into the Revolution. Ronald Hoffman's A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (1973), Paul G. E. Clemens's The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (1980), Gloria L. Main's Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (1982), and Isaac's Transformation of Virginia forward diverse interpretations of the connections between politics, economy, and revolution and the changes they ellicited. Out of this historiographic milieu, Allan Kulikoff produced Tobacco and Slaves in an attempt to synthesize the disparate interpretations and analyses with his own research of the Chesapeake.

Kulikoff's argument

In Tobacco and Slaves, Kulikoff states that there have been two tendencies among modern historians of the Chesapeake. Scholars either stress the importance of economic and demographic patterns of development in the 17th century or the political and cultural transformations in the 18th century. "Both goups," asserts Kulikoff, "tend to slight the significance of the half-century before the Revolution." "In contrast," insists Kulikoff, "the kind of familial, class, and race relations found in the antebellum South first developed in the Chesapeake region between 1720 and 1770." In this period, Kulikoff argues that three structural changes led to the creation of a racial caste system: a decline in opportunity for social mobility for whites, the beginnings of natural increase
Rate of natural increase
In demographics, the rate of natural increase is the crude birth rate minus the crude death rate of a population. If we neglect the migration, then a positive RNI number means that the population increases and a negative number means that the population decreases.When looking at countries, it...

 among whites, and the rise of chattel slavery
Personal property
Personal property, roughly speaking, is private property that is moveable, as opposed to real property or real estate. In the common law systems personal property may also be called chattels or personalty. In the civil law systems personal property is often called movable property or movables - any...

. These changes encouraged the formation of classes through efforts by the gentry to "mak[e] slaves efficient workers and devis[e] a ruling class ideology."

Kulikoff analyzes the consequences of these structural shifts for white and black residents of the Chesapeake. White inhabitants experienced the creation of patriarchial families
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...

, the evolution of kinship networks
Kinship
Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. And descent groups, lineages, etc. are treated in their own subsections....

, and the formation of the gentry and yeoman classes. Slaves, on the other hand, witnessed the development of black communities, the creation of extended families and eventually kinship networks, and finally the development of a new racial etiquette that governed the relationship between master and slave.

See The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism by Kulikoff also

External links

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