Long Green: The Rise and Fall of Tobacco in South Carolina

Notes

Notes introduction 1. The ‘‘colonial economy’’ thesis was set forth by C. Vann Woodward in Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). A more recent treatment is Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). The debate is reviewed in C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 66–81. 2. See Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 81–139. Elkins reviews the ‘‘Sambo’’ myth in the historiography of American slavery. chapter one: Tobacco Doth Here Grow Very Well, 1670–1810 1. On the operation of market forces in the economy of colonial South Carolina, see Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 53–58. 2. See Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1983), 141–42; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); on citrus, wine, and olives, see ibid., 150–51; on silk, see ibid., 162–64. It was believed the Carolina climate was too cold for cotton. See Governor West to Lord Ashley, 21 March 1671, and Joseph Dalton to Lord Ashley, 20 January 1672, in Langdon Cheves, ed., ‘‘The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records Relating to Carolina and the First Settlement on the Ashley River Prior to the Year 1676,’’ in Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, vol. 5 (Richmond: William E. Jones, 1897), 297, 376. Hereafter cited as ‘‘Shaftesbury Papers.’’ 3. Proprietors to Governor and Council at Charles Town in W. Noel Sainsbury et al., transcribers, Records in the British Public Records Office Relating to South Carolina, 1663–1684, 5 vols. (Columbia: Crowson-Stone, 1928–46), 1:55. Thesetranscripts were made in London in the 1890s by Sainsbury and his staff. Microfilm copies of the entire series are available at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Volumes 1–5 were published in facsimile editions by the Historical Commission between 1928 and 1946 and are available from the University of South Carolina Library System. 4. On tobacco as a temporary staple in Barbados, see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (New York: Norton, 1972), 49–54, 59–61. Apparently Barbadian leaf was of poor quality. 207 John Winthrop described his son’s tobacco crop as ‘‘fowle, full of stalkes, and evill colored.’’ An English merchant wrote the epitaph for Barbadian weed in 1637: ‘‘Your tobacco of Barbados of all the tobacco that cometh to England is accompted the worst.’’ 5. Lewis C. Gray, The History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols., consecutively paginated (1932; rpt. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958), 264–65. 6. Maurice Williams to Lord Ashley, 30 August 1671, ‘‘Shaftesbury Papers,’’ 334. See also Gray, History of Agriculture, 53–54. Cf. Linda Marie Pett, ‘‘Changing Spatial Patterns of Tobacco Production in South Carolina’’ (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1976), 14–17. 7. See Ashley, Craven, Carterette, and Colleton to Captain Mathias Halstead, 1 May 1671, ‘‘Shaftesbury Papers,’’ 321. See also Mary Parramore, ‘‘PreservationPlan for Historic Tobacco Related Resources,’’ State Historic Preservation Office, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, 1990. 8. ‘‘Shaftesbury Papers,’’ 349, from a summary of correspondence to the Lords Proprietors abstracted by John Locke, executive assistant and secretary to Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. See also Parramore, ‘‘PreservationPlan’’; cf. Andrew Browning, ed., English Historical Documents, 1660–1714, vol. 8 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 537–38. Farmers in several English counties were growing tobacco. English leaf was said to be of fair quality but did not cure well. See David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 74–75. 9. On tobacco prices in the mid-1670s, see Gray, History of Agriculture, 1:265; ‘‘Shaftesbury Papers,’’ 309. See ‘‘An Account of the Province of Carolina by Samuel Wilson, 1682,’’ in Alexander S. Salley, comp. and ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–1708 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 175. 10. Governor West to Lord Ashley, 21 March 1671, ‘‘Shaftesbury Papers,’’ 300...