Tobacco South Quotations

"In their corn fields [the Indians] build as it were a scaffolde where on they set a cottage like to a round chair, wherein they place one to watch for there are such number of fowls, and beasts, that unless they keep the better watch, they would soon devour all their corn. . . . They sow their corn with a certain distance . . . otherwise one stalk would choke the growth of another and the corn would not come into its ripening. For the leaves thereof are large, like unto the leaves of great reeds." Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1590, with illustrations by John White.

"The valuable commodity tobacco, so much prized in England, which every man may plant and tend with a small part of his labor, will earn him both clothing and other necessities. . . . No country under the sun can or does produce more pleasant, sweet, and strong tobacco than I have tasted there from my own planting." Raphe Hamor the yonger, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia, 1614.

"We must explain the stunning, even awesome success of European agriculture, that is, the European way of manipulating the environment in the Lands of the Demographic Takeover. . . . The vast expanses of forests, savannahs, and steppes . . . were inundated by animals from the Old World, chiefly from Europe. Horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs have for hundreds of years been among the most numerous of the quadrupeds of these lands, which were completely lacking in these species at the time of first contact with the Europeans." From Alfred W. Crosby, "Ecological Imperialism," The Texas Quarterly (Spring 1978): 10-22.

"In six weeks . . . the tobacco is at its full growth, being then from four and a half to seven feet high: during all the time, the negroes are employed twice a week in pruning off the suckers, clearing the hillocks from weeds, and attending to the worms, which are a great enemy to the plant; when the tobacco changes its colour, turning brown, it is ripe and they then cut it down, and lay it close in heaps in the field to sweat one night; the next day they are carried in bunches by the negroes to a building called the tobacco house, where every plant is hung up separate to dry." Anonymous, American Husbandry, 1775, pp. 222-3.

"The story of young James Buchanan ("Buck") Duke's going with his father at the close of the [Civil] war to peddle his "Pro Bono Publico" tobacco from a wagon in order to gain supplies to last through the winter, and of this same Buck Duke's becoming, within thirty years, a multimillionaire and the head of one of America's most powerful trusts, sounds as if it might have come from the pages of Horatio Alger. . . . In 1865 Washington Duke began the manufacture of tobacco on his farm in Orange (now Durham) County, but in 1874 he moved his business to Durham. . . . Starting with practically nothing, he and his three sons, Brodie, Buck, and Ben, built up one of the greatest tobacco industries in the world. . . . Duke expanded the American Tobacco Company to a gigantic $274,000,000-business in 1904, controlling an estimated three-fourths of the tobacco industry of the United States." Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: The History of a Southern State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), pp. 480-2.