6. Rolfe’s success led to a boom for the Virginia Colony
In 1622, the year John Rolfe died (his wife, Pocahontas, whom he called Rebecca, had died in 1617) all of British North America was called Virginia by most Englishmen. The tiny English colony was subject to the predations of the Spanish, French, Dutch, and the natives, as well as the pirates which roamed the seas. The fact the colony survived, and succeeded, can be attributed to one product. That product was Rolfe’s tobacco, which merged Spanish seeds and Virginia’s soil and climate. Settlers swarmed the Virginia lands along its tidal rivers, the James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac. Plantations stretched from the riverbanks inland, planted in the gold of the Virginia Colony, tobacco. As the fields expanded, so did the need for more hands to plant the crops, nurse them, harvest them, and cure and ship the leaf. Until 1619 that labor came primarily from indentured servants.
The Portuguese initiated African slavery in the New World, purchasing enslaved people in Africa and transporting them to their sugar colonies in Brazil. The French soon followed suit, as did the British, resorting to African slave labor for their colonies on the Caribbean Islands. In 1619 the first slave ship arrived at Jamestown, an event noted by Rolfe in his diary. Whether Rolfe purchased any of the enslaved Africans is uncertain, he recorded that “20 and odd Negroes” had been purchased in exchange for what he called “victuals”. Virginia’s booming tobacco industry led the colony into the transatlantic slave trade, an eventual Civil War, and over four centuries of racial inequality in what became the United States. That same year more than 40,000 pounds of Virginia leaf were shipped to England. Within twelve years the tobacco shipped from the Virginia plantations exceeded 1.5 million pounds.