Chapter 4: In Tobacco We Trust. Although religion played a major role in the founding of some American colonies, most of the colonies were established for economic profit. Investment companies financed nearly all of the initial settlements, including those of the Jamestown settlers, the Pilgrims, and the Puritans. The Virginia Company, an investment group, bankrolled the establishment of Jamestown in 1607, the first permanent English settlement in America.
Many Americans today don't realize how expensive it was to establish a colony in the New World. Chartering a ship and paying its crew to transport settlers to America was not cheap. Furthermore, the investors had to supply the ship with enough provisions to sustain the colonists both during the long voyage across the Atlantic and for the first six months or more until the settlement became self-sustaining. Not only was it expensive to finance a new settlement, it also was extremely risky.
An investor could easily lose his entire investment. As a result, in the beginning, no single individual, not even the king, was willing to finance such a venture all on his own. So groups of investors formed companies to finance the first colonies. By investing in a company or corporation, investors limited their liability and spread the risk among many persons in case the venture proved an economic disaster.
Why They Came As I've mentioned, the Virginia Charter declared evangelism to be one of the main purposes of the colony. Nevertheless, when the Virginia Company transported settlers to Jamestown under the authority and permission of King James, the company was hoping to make a handsome profit for its investors. Similarly, the settlers themselves came to Virginia primarily for material benefits. Some hoped to find their fortunes in America.
Many came to escape the overcrowding and misery of the English cities and towns. Only in America could such settlers hope to own their own land and have an opportunity for a better economic future. Regardless of their reasons for coming, they all believed they had the absolute right to settle in America. The Indians had to make room for them. The settlers were not going to make room for the Indians. Fortunately, for a number of years, the Jamestown settlers were able to maintain a fragile peace with the Indians.
Although the Indians definitely posed a threat to the settlers, and vice versa, an even greater threat to Jamestown was economic failure. In fact, at one point, the financiers were planning to abandon the entire venture because it was losing money. But just when things looked the darkest, Jamestown was saved by, guess what, tobacco. John Rolfe and Tobacco In 1610, John Rolfe and his family were on their way to Jamestown from England when an Atlantic storm wrecked their ship off the coast of Bermuda.
While in Bermuda, the ship's crew worked to construct a new ship to finish taking the passengers to Jamestown. Sadly, John Rolfe's wife and child died of disease during their time in Bermuda. Despite the loss of his family, when the crew finished building a new ship, John Rolfe continued on to Jamestown. Now, the initial Jamestown settlers had already tried growing the native tobacco for export. However, Europeans didn't like the harsh taste of this indigenous Virginia tobacco.
Instead, they were fond of the milder tobacco that came from the Caribbean. John Rolfe apparently had obtained tobacco seeds from one of the Caribbean islands. From these seeds, he developed a variety of sweet-scented tobacco that thrived in the Virginia soil and which the English liked to smoke. In the end, John Rolfe made a fortune exporting his new variety of tobacco to Europe. Soon, the other Virginia settlers joined Rolfe in growing this new variety of tobacco, and the colony prospered.
In the end, tobacco ended up saving Jamestown, and with it, the future of America. Had Jamestown failed, few, if any, investors would have wanted to sponsor any new English settlements in America. Is Growing Tobacco a Sin? I think most committed Christians today see some real spiritual issues with raising tobacco. Tobacco farmers grow something they know will shorten the lives of most people who smoke it.
They also know that tobacco is addictive, and this addiction causes people to spend money on tobacco even when they can ill afford it. Furthermore, smoking in the presence of others is both rude and even harmful to them. But did anyone know about those issues back in 1610? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Columbus and his sailors were the first Europeans to become acquainted with tobacco. More than a century before Jamestown was founded, the Spanish brought tobacco back to Spain, where it soon became an addiction.
From Spain, it spread throughout Western Europe, including England. In 1602, an English doctor wrote a work entitled Chimney Sweepers or A Warning for Tobacconists, in which he correctly asserted that tobacco carries health risks. In 1604, King James himself wrote a tract against the use of tobacco. In it, he asserted that the use of tobacco is a sin by which persons harm their bodies, waste money, and inconsiderately impose on others.
He wrote that smoking is "loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, and dangerous to the lungs." He pointed out that tobacco is highly addictive. To illustrate this, King James noted that smokers in his day could travel only a few miles without having to stop at the house of a complete stranger to ask for a live coal to light their pipes. Modern matches weren't invented until 1805. Furthermore, King James remarked that some men were spending 300 to 400 British pounds a year on their tobacco habit.
In today's currency, that would amount to 45,000 to 60,000 dollars, a huge sum of money that could be put to much better use. He also pointed out that smokers would inconsiderately fill dining rooms with their smoke, something obnoxious to their wives and other nonsmokers. So growing tobacco wasn't some innocent enterprise that no one in the 1600s recognized as harmful.
Although they didn't have all the medical facts we have today, people in that day had enough information to discern that growing tobacco was not something Christians should be doing. But Virginia planters were making too much money from tobacco to think of the spiritual consequences. They didn't have sufficient trust in God to believe that He could sustain their colony with a different product. King Tobacco Rules It wasn't long before tobacco completely dominated colonial life in Virginia.
In 1617, Virginia planters exported 10 tons of tobacco to England despite King James' disapproval of tobacco. From there, tobacco farming mushroomed. In 1622, colonial planters shipped 30 tons of tobacco to England. Just five years later, this increased to 250 tons, and by 1639, farmers were shipping 1,500 tons a year to England. However, tobacco farming was still in its infancy. By 1688, colonial farmers exported 14,000 tons of tobacco per year to England.
By 1771, this had grown to over 52,000 tons of tobacco annually. It was one of America's primary exports. Not only that, tobacco became the principal form of currency in Virginia and Maryland. Even taxes and fines could be paid with tobacco. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the laws passed in colonial Virginia and Maryland concerned tobacco. The very first law passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses was a law setting a minimum price on the sale of tobacco.
Export duties on tobacco were the principal source of revenue in many colonies. One historian has described tobacco in this manner: "It was the staple of the Chesapeake colonies in a broader sense than any other staple the world has known. For in these colonies, all the processes of government, society, and domestic life began and ended with tobacco." As evil as tobacco was in its own right, it quickly became tied to an even greater evil: black slavery.
In 1619, a Dutch ship brought to Virginia 20 black slaves for sale. Virginia planters quickly discovered that these slaves made good workers in the tobacco fields. It wasn't long before black slaves became the chief source of labor for growing tobacco. Tobacco and the Annihilation of the Indians One agricultural disadvantage of tobacco is that it rapidly depletes the soil. Rather than organically restoring the soil, most Virginia planters simply abandoned the land once it was spent.
Land was cheap, so they just grabbed more land, destroyed the forest on it, and began the cycle all over again. The Virginia settlers treated land as though it was theirs for the taking, without any regard for the impact their greed was having on the Indian population. Before long, there wasn't enough land for both the white settlers and the Indians. This forced the Powhatan Indians to move their settlements because the English settlers were not leaving them enough land to live on.
And then, as more English settlers came, they forced the Indians to move again. Finally, the Powhatans had no place left to move. These Indians had been willing to coexist with a few hundred white settlers, but once settlers kept coming by the thousands, the Powhatans realized that they were going to be shoved out of existence if they didn't do something. So these Indians finally decided to fight back to avoid annihilation.
In 1622, a new Powhatan chief led a well-coordinated series of surprise attacks on several English settlements along a 50-mile stretch of the James River. They killed 347 colonists and kidnapped many others. Their attacks caught most of the Virginia settlements by surprise, and the Indians wiped out several entire communities. Jamestown was spared only because a friendly Indian boy warned the settlers in the nick of time, enabling the settlers to secure themselves in their fort.
How do you suppose the Christian settlers in Virginia responded? Did they turn the other cheek? Did they forgive? Not a chance. Instead, the settlers carefully planned their revenge. After agreeing on a truce with the Indians, the English colonists proposed a toast to seal the peace agreement. They knew the Indians had a strong thirst for the white man's liquor, but on this occasion, they laced the liquor with poison. After drinking the poisoned liquor, 200 Indians fell dead.
The settlers then slaughtered 50 more of them. Not content to stop there, the Virginia settlers started an organized campaign against the Powhatans. They slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands, of Powhatan men and women and captured their children for slaves. Continuing on, the settlers systematically decimated Indian villages and destroyed Indian crops. Eventually, they brought the Powhatans to the brink of extinction.
Failure to Trust in God In short, the first permanent English settlers in America failed to trust in God. They didn't think they could survive as a colony if they did things God's way. As a result, they ignored Christ's teachings, both in their commerce and in their treatment of others. And their failure to obey Christ bore evil fruit: tobacco, black slavery, and decimation of the Indians. The English settlers themselves prospered, but it was not a prosperity that came from God.
Of course, the Jamestown settlers had not come to America for spiritual reasons. So you may be thinking, surely the Pilgrims and the Puritans who settled in New England put their trust in God. Well, let's see what happened there.