How Tobacco Farms Used Slavery

On this farm, tobacco was the only crop sold for cash or bartered for goods, while corn, vegetables, and animals fed the people on the plantation. If a crop failed or the tobacco barn burned during curing, the Burroughs' only valuable assets were the enslaved African workers, who might be sold or traded so the family could survive until the next year's crop. If tobacco brought a good price, enslaved Africans could hope their families would remain together for another year. Tobacco demanded labor through many stages, from planting seedbeds in February with seeds from the previous year's best plants, to pitching thousands of seedlings into fields in late spring, weeding and watering, picking pests by hand, topping flowers and removing shoots, harvesting with a tobacco knife, curing the plants in a barn with small fires, sorting leaves by quality, and hauling them to a tobacco factory to be made into pig-tail twists of chewing tobacco. Fear of punishment and violence drove this back-breaking work in hot fields, but so did the hope that hard work might keep loved ones from being sold away; harvest time was especially anxious because workers often did not know until early spring whether the crop had earned enough money to spare their families from separation.

Westlake Corner, Virginia · United States