Paving Tobacco Road

Agriculture is a place where history and science meet, and Barbara Hahn displays a command of both disciplines in this challenging book. Hahn rolls out her thesis early: the so-called varieties of tobacco such as Burley and Bright have little to do with genetics. Rather, they resulted from different methods of cultivation, harvesting, curing, and readying for market. Further, these husbandry variations were themselves responses to markets, government policies, and technology.

From the early days of tobacco culture in the colonies, Virginia growers gradually worked out a complex of tasks that typically resulted in a product buyers liked. Seeking to enhance the reputation and value of their crop, Virginia established official inspection stations to enforce quality standards. Inspectors assigned grades based on adherence to established cultivation practices and destroyed tobacco that failed to meet them. This tended to settle work routines into durable patterns and created a steady demand for labor that helped fasten slavery to tobacco culture in Virginia and Maryland. For a century before the Civil War, the tobacco business in the United States was less formal than it later came to be. The lines between processing and manufacturing were often blurred, as were branding and retailing.

The Civil War set the stage for a new political economy for tobacco. Of course, the most obvious change was from bond labor to free. But the entire structure of the industry was shaken as well. Richmond lost its former leadership of the tobacco business, and many venerable antebellum firms failed during the war even as others prospered. A powerful new force in the postbellum tobacco business was taxation. Congress began raising taxes on tobacco products during the war and afterwards to service the enormous federal debt. But where and how to levy taxes along the chain from production to consumption? Rates varied between the method of manufacture and the intended use of the product. And taxes were assessed on value as well. For example, should a five-cent stogie bear the same tax as a corona costing a half-dollar? High taxes and licenses were especially burdensome to small operators, and many were forced out of business. Thus, tax laws had the unintended consequence of driving consolidation of the tobacco industry into ever-larger units, even as the foundations of monopoly were laid.

The quest for yellow tobacco began in earnest after the war. As cigarette smoking grew in popularity, so did demand for milder, more inhalable tobaccos. Leaf harvesting and flue-curing provided it. Tobacco leaves ripen in sequence from the bottommost leaves, called “lugs,” to the uppermost, called “tips.” Traditional harvest methods dictated that the entire stalk be cut down after the tips had ripened, but doing so ensured lower and mid-stalk leaves were overripe. Such leaves were darker and stronger. Harvesting the leaves a few at a time as they ripened ensured that every leaf was picked at the peak of mildness. Moreover, curing with artificial heat took only a few days rather than several weeks for air-curing. By the twentieth century, this work routine had become commonplace. It was well suited to family labor and compatible with sharecropping and tenantry as well.

As demand for mild, aromatic flue-cured tobacco increased, Bright Leaf culture spread from the Old Belt of the piedmont into the New Belt of eastern North Carolina and across the Border Belt into the Palmetto State. Each new cultivation area could claim that its particular soil and climate produced a uniquely fine and valuable leaf. Indeed, without employing the term, the author makes a case for tobacco terroirs concurrent with the spread of Bright Leaf. Thus, perhaps without intending to, farmers helped set tobacco type designations based on place of origin, cultivation (especially harvesting and curing), and market purposes.

The volume features a well-written summary of the rise and fall of the Agrarian movement in the tobacco country as well as tobacco-specific eruptions such as the Black Patch...