How did Virginia become part of the global economy? English merchants served as the middlemen, acquiring goods from around the world to send to Virginia in exchange for tobacco. What two things were required in order for tobacco growing to become profitable? Land and labor. What were some long-term effects of tobacco growing as it related to these factors? Land ownership, indentured servitude, and enslavement of Africans.
Step 2: After students have read the articles, have them share their responses to the above questions, making certain they understand the correct answers. This discussion will lay the foundation for their role-playing activity which follows. As part of the class discussion, have students give examples of the economic terms they came across in their group readings: consumer, resource, human resources, profit, production, economic specialization, cash crop.
Step 3: By this time, students will have learned about the success of tobacco as a cash crop for Virginia.
Have students read each except and determine the argument being made against the use of tobacco. It is the responsibility of these two students to be prepared to represent the viewpoints of these two men.
Divide the remainder of the class into groups of no more than five each. Students in each of these groups will prepare questions, on behalf of their newspaper, for John Rolfe and King James. One student in each group will play the role of a news reporter using the questions developed by the group. Set up the activity by providing the following scenarios:. Scenario for Groups: You are a news reporter for the Jamestown Journal.
You are very fortunate in that King James has agreed to grant you an audience. Your questions to the King and to John Rolfe should center on such issues as: Why do you think tobacco should be exported from Jamestown to London? What are the advantages and disadvantages? If not, tobacco, what else could take its place?
You believe that tobacco has great possibilities as the product that might save the colony. You have granted this news reporter from Jamestown an interview because you feel so strongly about the ill effects of tobacco.
Be prepared to defend your belief while at the same time, sharing your interest in seeing the Jamestown colony succeed. Have students conduct the interviews. Review the pros and cons of growing and marketing tobacco. Have the class discuss who they feel had the better argument and why. Hall, Donald. Ox-Cart Man. Ox-Cart Man is a craft book which traces the natural resources of a farming family through their transformation into goods and ultimately their trip to the market.
This new settler observed the Powhatan Indians growing N. An English pamphlet of the time reported that:. The people in the South parts of Virginia esteeme it [tobacco] exceedingly. Rolfe, however, was not impressed with the quality of N. Perhaps, however, the crop of the Powhatans gave Rolfe the idea of trying to grow N.
How Rolfe came by fine Trinadad tobacco seed is not known, but he was growing it experimentally by in Virginia. Rolfe's agricultural attempt was an unqualified success. By , Ralph Hamor, a secretary of the Colony, reported:.
Tobacco, whose goodnesse mine own experience and triall induces me to be such, that no country under the Sunne, may, or doth affoord more pleasant, sweet and strong Tobacco, then I have tasted. I doubt not, [we] will make and returne such Tobacco this yeere, that even England shall acknowledge the goodnesse thereof. Although Sir Thomas Dale, deputy-governor of Virginia, initially limited tobacco cultivation in the fear that the settlers would neglect basic survival needs in their eagerness to finally get rich, 2, pounds of tobacco were exported to the Mother Country in True, this was a paltry amount compared with the over 50, pounds imported from Spain in the same period, but it was a start.
In , Rolfe visited England with his new wife Pocohontas and presented James I with a pamphlet in which the Virginian modestly revealed tobacco as "the principall commoditie the colony for the present yieldeth.
Little did Rolfe guess how important his tobacco crop would become to the economic survival of Virginia. Initially, the settlers went overboard, with predictable results. A description of Jamestown in paints a bleak picture:. Conditions eventually stabilized, thanks to tight governmental controls. Virginia economy flourished. By , the annual import of Virginia tobacco in England was not less than half a million pounds.
By , London was receiving nearly a million and a half pounds a year. Virginia tobacco was acknowledged as equal, if not superior, in quality to the Spanish weed.
Soon English tobacconists were extolling the virtues of Virginia tobacco with labels bearing such verses as:. Life is a smoke! Tobacco was and is a controversial crop. For Virginians at the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, James I's "noxious weed" would ensure economic survival of the colony by becoming the Golden Weed of Virginia. Berkeley, Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, editors. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, Dickson, Sarah Augusta.
Herndon, Melvin. James I. A Counterblaste to Tobacco. London: R. Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves. Mackinzie, Compton. Sublime Tobacco. Ray, Oakley. Drugs, Society and Human Behavior. Saint Louis, Missouri: The C. Rolfe brought seeds from the more desirable South American species, Nicotiana Tabacum , to Jamestown.
No one knows where he got such seeds. Spain controlled Central and South America and had declared a penalty of death to anyone selling such seeds to a non-Spaniard. Perhaps Rolfe obtained them while shipwrecked on Bermuda for 10 months before making his way to Jamestown in the spring of with other survivors.
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