Question

Describe tobacco cultivation. Why was it so unique and labor intensive? How did tobacco cultivation/cash crops create inequality in VA? How/why did Tobacco plantation owners transition from indentured servitude to slavery? 1. 2. Why was witchcraft a real worry to Puritans? Describe witchcraft's foundation in Puritan biblical ideology How did Puritan religious views shape their treatment of Indians? Describe Puritan common ideology about land ownership? Why did Puritan preachers talk so much about the Wilderness and Exodus? Why did they consider themselves the new Israelites? Describe the first laws in Puritan New England? Why were they so strict? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. Where did the idea of rice come from? Where did it go? Describe why rice planters were Show/Hide 1 ichest people in the British empire 2.

Answer 1

• 1.Tobacco, one of the most important cash crops in American farming, is native to the North and South American continents. It first became known to the rest of the world when European explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries saw it being used as a medicine and as a hallucinogen by Native Americans.
• The explorers returned to Europe with the new-found plant and it quickly was adopted by rich and poor alike as a drug of choice. Banned at first by kings and popes, its economic effects and broad popularity forced acceptance among all cultures. It quickly spread throughout the civilized world and became a foundation for the growth of the American economy.
• It appears that tobacco’s mind-altering effects made it universally of interest to Native Americans in their religious observances and in preparing for war.
• Tobacco growing and processing dominated Virginia's economy for over three centuries, and transformed its landscape. Tobacco wears out the land, exhausting minerals and nutrients from the soil. The first Virginia colonists to acquire ownership of land were positioned to gain great wealth, permitting them to abandon old fields and plant in fresh soil that would produce great quantities of the crop.
• Tobacco farming and curing is labor intensive. As a result, the increase in the value of tobacco and its resultant popularity as a farm crop, also led to an increase in the slave trade. At first the trade ran to poor English immigrants who were indentured for a fixed period of time in return for their fare to the New World.
• Later years saw the trade turn to Africans with no guarantees of eventual freedom. Slavery first became legal in Virginia and Maryland in 1660.The lure of free labor quickly increased the trade in slaves from Africa. African slaves became the support for the new tobacco trade.
• Tobacco is an expensive crop to grow.Tobacco seeds are very, very tiny. Tobacco seedlings are grown in seedbeds of very fine soil, then transplanted to farm fields in the late spring after all danger of frost is past.
• Each slave or indentured servant working on a tobacco plantation in colonial days may have planted and weeded about two acres of cleared land with 9-10,000 plants a year, requiring bending over perhaps 50,000 times.This is why it is unique and labor intensive crop.
• Tobacco drained the soil of key nutrients, requiring labor to clear forests so tobacco could be planted in fresh soil. "Old fields" had to remain unplanted for one-two decades before soil fertility was restored naturally (unless fertilized with animal manure). The most economical way to grow tobacco was on large farms, where most of the acreage could be left unused for 20 years.
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