Appendix V An Analysis of Chesapeake Tobacco Prices

In testing hypotheses about tobacco productivity, demand for labor, and demand for land, this study relies heavily on historian Russell R. Menard’s annual series of tobacco prices first published in 1973. 1 There is simply no better series for testing hypotheses hypotheses about planter behavior in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. Nevertheless, since this series is drawn strictly from Maryland sources, some historians have reasonably questioned whether Maryland prices are appropriate for an analysis of Virginia‑-in particular whether a price series based on Maryland low-quality, oronoco tobacco grown for a Continental market is applicable to Virginia where higher quality and sweetscented tobacco was grown for a restricted English market. 2

Although there were undoubtedly intraregional differences in price, one can make a fairly good case for the belief that the Maryland series well captures aggregate market changes across the Chesapeake. For example, one might note that, although it is difficult to judge exactly how large a region in the Chesapeake was devoted to sweetscented or how much of total Chesapeake production was sweetscented, what evidence there is suggests the relatively small size of sweetscented to overall tobacco production. Traditionally scholars have suggested that sweetscented was restricted because it required a particular soil found only on the two peninsulas between the James and the Rappanhannock Rivers, although others believe the soil was not restricted to certain peninsulas but rather “the banks of the great rivers, the James, York, Rappanhannock, and Potomac.” 3 Based on the contemporary (circa 1700) estimate that only a third of Virginia production was sweetscented, combined with estimates that Virginia’s tithable population comprised two-thirds of the Chesapeake total and Virginia tobacco productivity was half of Maryland’s (due to Maryland’s preference for quantity over quality), we would estimate that sweetscented tobacco made up only a sixth of total Chesapeake tobacco production. 4

Furthermore, one might make a case for the interdependence of markets for different grades and varieties of tobacco on both sides of the Atlantic. Although there is a universal consensus that before the 1720s sweetscented earned a higher price, there is little evidence to suggest that prices for the two varieties followed different tracks. Planters did regularly make the distinction between oronoco and sweetscented on their hogsheads and “tobacco notes” and in their ship manifests and correspondence and, when consigning their tobacco to European factors, did sometimes remark on distinct oronoco and sweetscented markets. But rarely in their laments over tobacco did planters note that farm prices for one type of tobacco were prospering at the expense of the other. 5 Indeed, the clear correspondence between Menard’s price series and comments by William Fitzhugh and William Byrd I in the 1680s suggests similar price fluctuations across the Chesapeake. 6 The meager statistical evidence available on trends in Virginia sweetscented and European tobacco prices supports this conclusion. 7Perhaps rather than thinking in terms of two distinct markets–oronoco and sweetscented–we might better conceptualize the Chesapeake tobacco supply as a continuum of tobacco varieties or grades, dependent on many factors including soil, rainfall, temperature, expertise, honesty, and good fortune in tending, curing, and packing. 8

A quantity-quality continuum hardly suggests two distinct markets: English demand for higher quality, sweetscented Virginia tobacco and Continental demand for lower quality, oronoco Maryland tobacco. Instead, markets in England and the Continent existed for‑-and merchants in Virginia, except perhaps in years of the worst gluts, were known to purchase‑-every kind of tobacco produced in the Chesapeake from the worst trash to the choicest grades. 9 In 1735 a London merchant noted on sweetscented that “there is but little of this sort used in proportion to to the whole Consumption, and the Tobacconists find among the common Tobacco…some as good as the most celebrated crops.” Eighteenth-century merchants substituted oronoco for sweetscented with little complaint. 10 Throughout the seventeenth century, planters and merchants on both sides of the Atlantic alternately complained about or defended the competition from lower-quality tobacco, which, whether legal or illegal, Englishmen seemed to consume in great quantities. 11 Indeed, if the Maryland and Virginia markets were really so distinct and demand for Virginia tobacco was so specialized, one would wonder why Virginians constantly abandoned efforts to restrict tobacco production because of Maryland’s refusal to cooperate. 12

In their tobacco consumption Englishmen were no different from other Europeans who may have preferred a particular variety or grade for whatever reason but in weighing price against quality showed an acceptance of a wide range of tobacco quality. 13 While the English market perhaps showed a preference for higher grades of tobacco, neither in England nor the continent were the markets for different grades completely independent. Perhaps more accurate is Jerome Brooks’s conclusion that, in the eighteenth century, “the only Anglo‑American planters unaffected by foreign competition were the specialists in the finer types of Virginia ‘sweet scented’ and producers of the best grades of ‘Oronoko’ from Maryland,” undoubtedly a minority of both planters and tobacco production. 14

Cite this article as: Baird, Bruce C. "Appendix V An Analysis of Chesapeake Tobacco Prices." Dr. Baird Online. July 10, 2017. Web. May 7, 2024. <https://www.drbairdonline.com/necessity-the-perpetual-mother/appendices/appendix-v-an-analysis-of-chesapeake-tobacco-prices/>.

Notes:

  1. Russell R. Menard, “Farm Prices of Maryland Tobacco, 1659-1710,” Maryland Historical Magazine 68 (1973): 80-5; Russell R. Menard, “A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618-1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 84 (1976): 401-10; Russell R. Menard, “The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617-1730: An Interpretation,” Research in Economic History 5 (1980): 110-3, 157-61, 163; Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York: Garland, 1985) 439-51. ↩
  2. Menard, “Farm Prices” 84n17; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Explicatus (New York: Norton, 1984) 3-7; Anita H. Rutman, “Still Planting the Seeds of Hope: The Recent Literature of the Early Chesapeake Region,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95 (1987): 6. For contemporary observations of the distinction, see Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1895; New York: Peter Smith, 1935) 1: 435-42; Jerome E. Brooks, The Mighty Leaf: Tobacco Through the Centuries (Boston: Little, 1952) 165; Arthur Pierce Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (Newport News, VA: Mariners’ Museum, 1953) 97-101, 115-7, 123, 127-9, 377n21. ↩
  3. Middleton, Tobacco Coast 97. ↩
  4. See Middleton, Tobacco Coast 117. ↩
  5. William Fitzhugh, when consigning his tobacco during the war years of the 1690s, often spoke of distinct oronoco and sweetscented markets whose prices could be moving in opposite directions. However, overall these price movements appeared fairly random, dependent on particular tobacco quality, merchants, and ports rather than general price trends and his long-run decision to concentrate on sweetscented depended on the more certain advantages of the greater density of sweetscented that would help reduce shipping charges and spoilage. See, e.g., William Fitzhugh, William Fitzhugh and his Chesapeake World 1676-1701: The Fitzhugh Letters and Other Documents, ed. Richard Beale Davis (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1963) 87n, 257, 322-3, 331, 338, 340, 357-8. Cf. Susan E. Hillier, “The Trade of the Virginia Colony 1606 to 1660,” diss., U of Liverpool, 1971, 280. More importantly, when speaking of tobacco in general in the Chesapeake, Fitzhugh regularly failed to make any distinction between oronoco and sweetscented. See Fitzhugh, William Fitzhugh and his Chesapeake World 126, 214, 220-1. The question arises to what degree the distinction between the two markets only affected consigning planters who were never more than a minority in the late seventeenth century. ↩
  6. Fitzhugh, William Fitzhugh and his Chesapeake World 83, 86, 125, 138-9, 161, 166, 193, 204, 214, 220-1, 225-6, 229-30, 239, 256-7; William Byrd, The Correspondence of The Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia 1684‑1776, 2 vols., ed. Marion Tinling (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1977) 1: 24, 30-1, 48, 67; Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 138-9. Suggestions by the Rutmans that sweetscented and oronoco prices diverged in the 1680s lack qualitative and quantitative foundation, resting on insufficient observations of sweetscented prices. See Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time: Explicatus 5-6; A. Rutman, “Still Planting the Seeds of Hope” 6. ↩
  7. Comparing Menard’s oronoco farm series with a series of sweetscented farm prices for the years 1659-1707 drawn from York County (raw data provided by Lorena S. Walsh) and Middlesex County (raw data provided by the Rutmans), along with Dutch prices for Virginia tobacco for the same years developed by Jacob M. Price, Menard’s series explains far more of the variance of sweetscented farm prices (29.9%) than Dutch prices (10.3%) with sweetscented prices rising or falling about 1.2 penny for every penny rise or fall in the oronoco price, although the data on sweetscented prices hardly prove sufficient in number to generate a reliable time series. A multiple regression analysis yields the results:

    SSPRC = -4.850 +1.201*TOBPRC -0.077 WAR +0.003 YEAR
    .                  (0.6)    (4.3)                   (0.9)              (0.7)
    .
    R2 = 0.453   D.W. = 1.548   N=48
     .
    and
     .
    DUTCHVA = -3.013* +0.152 TOBPRC +0.032 WAR +0.003*YEAR
    .                       (3.0)      (1.9)                    (1.5)              (3.1)
    .
    R2 = 0.365   D.W. = 0.942*   N=34
    .
    where
    .
    SSPRC = farm price of Virginia sweetscented tobacco
    .                 (pence sterling per lb.)
    .
    DUTCHVA = price of Virginia tobacco in Amsterdam
    .                      (guilders per Dutch lb.)
    .
    TOBPRC = farm price of Maryland oronoco tobacco
    .                   (pence sterling per lb.)
    .
    WAR = 1, if war disrupted Atlantic trade over the course of the market year
    .         = 0, if otherwise
    .
    YEAR = annual time trend
    .
    * denotes statistical significance at the 5% level of significance
    .
    Note: Absolute value of t-statistics are in parentheses. See further Appendix IV.
    .

    For Dutch prices, see Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674-1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1973) 2: 852. On war years, see Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962) 133-58. This evidence suggests that Jacob M. Price, the leading student on European tobacco markets, who has traditionally stressed that farm prices closely followed metropolitan prices (at least in peacetime), has perhaps overplayed the impact of divergent English and Continental price trends on the Chesapeake economy. See Jacob M. Price, The Tobacco Adventure to Russia: Enterprise, Politics, and Diplomacy in the Quest for a Northern Market for English Colonial Tobacco, 1676‑1722 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961) 9, 16, 87; Jacob M. Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615‑1753 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992) 49. Cf. Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650‑1720 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982) 23. ↩

  8. See, e.g, John Clayton, The Reverend John Clayton: A Parson with a Scientific Mind, eds. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1965) 59-63; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (1933; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958) 1: 218; Middleton, Tobacco Coast 97-8, 128-9; Melvin Herndon, Tobacco in Colonial Virginia: ‘The Sovereign Remedy’ (Williamsburg, VA; Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957) 19-22; Hillier, “Trade of the Virginia Colony” 280; Menard, “Farm Prices” 82; Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 112; Main, Tobacco Colony 35. For example, Fitzhugh recognized that York sweetscented was a higher quality and thus drew a higher price than his own sweetscented. See Fitzhugh, William Fitzhugh and his Chesapeake World 357-9. The Rutmans, Edmund S. Morgan, and Gloria L. Main, and other historians have suggested that it seems far better to envision a single tobacco production system incorporating a continuum of quantity-quality calculations rather than two distinct sets of planters and strategies. See Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975) 302; Main, Tobacco Colony 35-6; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia 1650-1750 (New York: Norton, 1984) 41; Rutman and Rutman, Explicatus 14. Cf. Middleton, Tobacco Coast 112, 120. The difference in the Middlesex and Maryland strategies are well reflected in the substantially lower productivity in Maryland after the Maryland assembly legally prohibited trash and seconds. See Carville V. Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System: All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, 1650-1783 (Chicago: U of Chicago, Dept. of Geography, 1975) 25-6; Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time: Explicatus 12-20. A strategic quantity-quality balance is further suggested by the numerous complaints in Virginia of the cultivation of trash tobacco for payments of taxes, tithes, and debts. See Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols., Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1960) 2: 423. ↩
  9. See, e.g., William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, 13 vols. (Richmond, 1809-23) 1: 488, 524; 2: 224; 3: 33-5; H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1659/60-1693 (Richmond, n.p., 1914) 322-3; L. C. Gray, “The Market Surplus Problems of Colonial Tobacco,” Agricultural History 2 (1928): 12. William Byrd I often spoke of tobacco of his own and others as “good” or “bad” when referring to its quality, but never suggested that “bad” tobacco was unmarketable. In seeking to consign only the best tobacco to the tobacco merchants Perry & Lane in 1689 he noted: “I am very confident you will find much very bad tobacco for to gett about 80 or 90 hogsheads I have been forced to looke over near 400 and I fear some of this not extraordinary. Abundance of tobacco rotten, of which I believe Mr. Paggen [another merchant] hath a large share.” See Byrd, Correspondence of The Three William Byrds 1: 29, 66, 87-8, 97, 105 (quote), 107; Fitzhugh, William Fitzhugh and his Cheasapeake World 357. Most of the top English tobacco firms in the late seventeenth century, although specializing in either Maryland or Virginia trade, sold locally as well as re-exported to the continent. See Byrd, Correspondence of The Three William Byrds 1: 29, 67; C. M. MacInnes, The Early English Tobacco Trade (London: Kegan Paul, 1926) 60-1, 188; Gray, History of Agriculture 1: 253; N. C. P. Tyack, “The Trade Relations of Bristol with Virginia during the 17th Century,” Master’s Thesis, Bristol University, 1930, 26; Middleton, Tobacco Coast 126; Jacob M. Price, The Tobacco Adventure to Russia: Enterprise, Politics, and Diplomacy in the Quest for a Northern Market for English Colonial Tobacco, 1676‑1722 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961) 5-9, 88-9; John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription To Persuasion: Manipulation of Eighteenth [Seventeenth] Century Virginia Economy (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974) 130-1; Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980) 37; Main, Tobacco Colony 22; Price, Perry of London 45-6, 159n71‑3. London price-currents often carried prices for a dozen grades and varieties of Chesapeake tobacco. See Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 167n2. ↩
  10. Middleton, Tobacco Coast 98-9. ↩
  11. On domestic production, see George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System 1578-1660 (1908; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959) 112-6, 146-7, 165-8, 190-1, 403-8; George Louis Beer, The Old Colonial System 1660-1754, 2 vols. (1913; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958) 1: 138-46; MacInnes, Early English Tobacco Trade 75-129, 153-63; Gray, “Market Surplus Problems” 8-9; Brooks, Mighty Leaf 115-20; Neville Williams, “England’s Tobacco Trade in the Reign of Charles I,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65 (1957): 408; A. R. Williams, “The Gloucestershire Tobacco Trade,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 79 (1971): 145-52; K. G. Davies, The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1974) 148. On bulk tobacco, see McIlwaine, Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1659/60-1693 322-3; Middleton, Tobacco Coast 118-20, 383-4n120. If, in the early seventeenth century, tobacconists illicitly attempted to market Virginian tobacco by blending with Spanish tobacco and labeling it the “new Spanish,” by the late seventeenth century “counterfeiters” went so far as to sell as Virginia tobacco “worthless stalks, and leaves of the forests, mixed with dyer’s liquor, starch, spike, and oil. The leaf itself was sophisticated by the addition of coal dust or whatever else seemed suitable. The general price of tobacco in a reliable shop was twelve pence the pound then, but the artificial product brought a third to a half that price.” “Treating” tobacco in England was so notorious throughout the seventeenth century that, “when it became more profitable, as was often the case, for English importers to export tobacco than to retain it for home consumption the unadulterated product was actually scarce in the major cities of England.” See Brooks, Mighty Leaf 92. See also MacInnes, Early English Tobacco Trade 63-74; Alfred Rive, “The Consumption of Tobacco since 1600,” Economic History 1 (1926): 69-70; Brooks, Mighty Leaf 54, 91-2, 104, 172; Morton, Colonial Virginia 2: 511. Indeed, one might conclude that the entire opinion that Englishmen demanded the highest quality tobacco was the result of contemporary propaganda against English domestic production in the same way that earlier merchants had argued against attempts to prohibit importation of higher-quality Spanish tobacco and the Virginia Company had sought to justify shipping lower-quality Virginia tobacco to markets outside England. Based on the estimate that, circa 1700, approximately a third of tobacco imports were retained and a sixth of total imports were sweetscented, this suggests as much oronoco as sweetscented was consumed in England even if no sweetscented was re-exported. ↩
  12. Hening, Statutes 1: 399; 2: 119, 201, 209-10. Cf. Brooks, Mighty Leaf 101; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 56. On the other hand, one might wonder to what extent the instigators of the tobacco cutting riots in 1682 purposefully chose only the sweetscented regions for destruction based on a recognition of distinct markets. See Bruce, Economic History 1: 406. ↩
  13. See, e.g., Brooks, Mighty Leaf 104, 152; Middleton, Tobacco Coast 127-9; Price, Tobacco Adventure to Russia 7-10, 52, 63, 89-90, 93-4. ↩
  14. See Brooks, Mighty Leaf 156. ↩