Tobacco Saved The Virginia Colony Essay

Certain colonial products, like Virginian tobacco, were

The Virginia Colony’s trade and exports included cotton, livestock, grains, tobacco, vegetables, and fruits. Its natural resources were forests, fish, agriculture lands, coastal plains, valleys, and mountains. The Virginia Colony was one of Great Britain's colonies, and was made a royal colony in 1624. It declared its independence from Great

In Virginia, people mostly focused on growing of staples and exotic crops for cash. The crops that they grew in their colony were rice, indigo, and tobacco. But in Virginia, tobacco was the crop that they focused on, in fact, tobacco was the first most famous staple crop grown and became their economic foundation. As far as working in the fields, Virginia started off with indentured servants to perform the labor, but as they became expensive they shifted to purchasing slaves. Mortality rates were higher because of diseases that many of them came in contact with, men were expected to live to forty and women weren’t expected to live past their thirties.

According to the African American Odyssey after the war ended in 1793, people in the north and the Chesapeake were in support of the emancipation. Economic change evangelical Christianity and revolutionary ethos were among the many factors that allowed for African Americans to buy slavery. It also allowed them to buy their families back as well. After the war in the north slavery was no longer economically essential.

Tobacco was the basis of economic life and a motivation for settling down in Jamestown. This helped result in an increase of settlers. The English expansion sparked war in 1622 led by Opechancanough. This war resulted in a tragic death of about a third of the nation. Particularly, the English inhabitants seized Indian’s land and food, cornering the Indian citizens towards limiting possibilities; needless to say they ended up dispersing.

These colonies came across numerous hardships with war, famine, and political turmoil, in the 1600’s. These colonies worked for commercial purposes and neglected the need for relationship building with natives, safety, and resource gathering, so much so that they lost many early settlers. Working as an indentured servant was brutal in these colonies. Growing, storing, and packaging tobacco was very labor intensive work. Though indentured servants maintained contracts providing them with food, housing, and clothing, often times terms of service were lengthened.

Times were much simpler, yet worse, in March 1610 as there were only about sixty of us colonial men left standing and we were lucky to even still be alive due to the high mortality rate. Fast forward forty years later, and now families have been shipping in by the thousands, although some do not last long due to lingering diseases. I have made an assumption that the water we have been drinking may be a cause of all the disease that is continuously being spread amongst the people, but people seem to be more focused on tobacco and the natives. However, priorities were not always based on tobacco, because before John Rolfe blessed the colony with his discoveries there was the issue of maintaining a stable society on this

In 1607, the first wave of colonial settlers arrived in Virginia and began to establish Jamestown. Many of the new settlers came from wealthy families never performing a day of manual labor. With agricultural farming, being the revenue source of the new colonial settlers there would soon be a great demand for labor. Contracts of indentures were expiring and with much devastation in England, there was a shortage of English servants.

But the majority of the young white males who came to Jamestown were poor, uneducated, and unskilled. They had no families and no means of supporting themselves, which meant that they caused a potential problem to the political and economic challenge for stability. Since these men had no skills, they would become indentured servants, trading their labor for free passage to the colonies. Elite landowners used this unfree labor to their advantage by growing cash crops like tobacco and exporting their agricultural products, eventuating establishing Jamestown as a boomtown. Once the colony had become stabilized, the first representative legislature general assembly met in the Jamestown church in 1619.

Those in Massachusetts were puritans and looking for a place where they would be free from religious persecution. Wealthy people who could afford the boat journey and did not have to become indentured slaves went for a more settled life. In 1616 John Rolfe imported tobacco seeds to Virginia, as the plants needed long and hot humid seasons. The first people who were granted the right of possessing land authorized the people to cultivate worn out land and grow better crops, as tobacco depletes minerals and nutrients from the ground.

The song “Tobaccos but an Indian Weed” is about the Puritans views on Tobacco. We already know that tobacco turns into a booming cash crop that saved colonies from extinction, however in this song they are frowning upon smoking it and calling it “sinful”. How long after this song is written do they discover that tobacco might actually be beneficial to them? The line of the song used over and over is “Think on this when you smoke tobacco”, this to me sounds as though they are trying to convince someone to contemplate wisely about what they are doing, but essentially trying to persuade them not to do it. This song shows a lot about their morals too.

The Virginia colony intended to reproduce into an English society when they settled. With tobacco becoming a huge crop in Virginia, they invested heavily in servants to help with the plantations, “Our principal wealth…. consisteth in servants.” (Takaki 53). Whites

Though the British Proclamation Act of 1763—prohibiting settlement beyond the Alleghenies—irritated him and he opposed the Stamp Act of 1765, Washington did not take a leading role in the growing colonial resistance against the British until the widespread protest of the Townshend Acts in 1767. His letters of this period indicate he was totally opposed to the colonies declaring independence. However, by 1767, he wasn't opposed to resisting what he believed were fundamental violations by the Crown of the rights of Englishmen. In 1769, Washington introduced a resolution to the House of Burgesses calling for Virginia to boycott British goods until the Acts were repealed.

The kinks slowly worked themselves out and we began growing tobacco. I know, I know; it causes Cancer but we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into nor did our two doctors even know what Cancer was at that time. I would of been alright not knowning what Malaria and dysentery were either as it periodically raged through the community due to the lack of fresh water. Tobacco was easy to grow and we made so much money off of it.

In the 16th and 17th century the New World was a rapidly changing and growing. There was many reasons that a lot of people had migrated to the new world from England. One of the main reasons was the protestant Reformation, which had forced so many Catholics to move to the new world. The English civil was a major result to cause people to migrate to the new world. As the war was coming to an end King Charles was beheaded and the puritans had took over.