Tobacco Culture

 T.H. Breen. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985

Breen's classic work on the 'mental world of the great Tidewater planters the mid-eighteenth century Virginia" (p. xi) challenged the dichotomy which had evolved regarding the motivations of the Revolutionary elite. In previous generations, patriotic hagiographies about 'the Founders' were replaced by Progressive interpretations grounded in economics--that generation of historians looked at the massive personal debts that these planters had assumed, and rather cynically concluded that a desire to escape that debt lay at the very heart of their eventual drive for independence. Later historians would reject that argument, finding instead a clear-eyed commitment to Republican ideology. 

Breen argued that both sides had seen part of the mental world of the planters but missed the actual dynamic. And the reason they missed it, in his telling, was because they paid no mind to the lived realities these men experienced. They really were obsessed with debt, but what mattered less was a balance sheet-centered credits-and-debits reckoning, than their perception of debt and the ramifications of personal debt to their sense of self and their place in colonial Virginia society. At the same time, their adaptation of country-Whig ideology was not an abstract intellectual exercise; rather, their experience with the economics of being tobacco planters led them to an interpretive framework within which the extreme rhetoric of country Whig polemics (which was largely marginalized in the British society they were formulated in) resonated and made sense.

In threading this conceptual needle, Breen not only found a new way to understand the process that brought much of Virginia's planter elite to revolutionary activism; he also found a way to look at the relation between work and daily life to ideology and intellectual life. Breen notes that while historians of past generations presented the Virginia gentry as enlightened philosopher-Republicans, they were in fact agriculturalists who spent most of their waking hours attending to--and thinking about--their yearly tobacco crops. The work of being a planter was all-consuming, and scholars who ignore this have missed the context in which their political and ideological thinking occured.

Breen concludes that, while colonial discourse was moving into conflict with the British government even before the French and Indian War exacerbated previously untested areas of tension, it wasn't until 1772 that the Tidewater planters were fully brought to the conceptual point of overt conflict not just with the merchants they were indebted to, but Parliament and eventually the Crown. This shift in mentality was not a mindlessly materialist process, but the erosion of the traditional tobacco culture led the planters to uncomfortable conclusions which made it easier to consider breaking with the past.