Author: chiron99 | Total views: 26 Comments: 0
Word Count: 636 Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 3:29 AM

Smoke A Cigar For Jeffersonian Democracy

History is often taught as if people didn't have bodies. As a contest between ideas, some successful and some not, or between Great Persons (perhaps too many of them men), or even between forces: economic, political, ideological, or otherwise.

But much of history turns upon almost embarrassingly un-grandiose things: a fad, a ruler's personal preference, a crop.

The tobacco crop, for example, had a determining effect on the early history of America, influencing not only its contemporary politics and economics but also creating social patterns that would leave their mark on the formation of American political philosophy itself. Specifically, it helped make the Virginia colony what it was--and Virginia left a stamp on the all-important ideas of Thomas Jefferson.

By the time white settlers arrived in Virginia in 1607, sent by the Virginia Company of London, tobacco had already been cultivated for hundreds if not thousands of years. (The area we know as Virginia was, by the way, named after Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen; it was during her reign that explorer Sir Walter Raleigh had sought, and obtained, a charter to begin a colony north of Florida.) The area's Native American peoples--including the Algonquians, Siouan, and Iroquois, among others--regarded tobacco as a gift, one with almost magical powers: it was tossed into the air to end drought and burned to ward off evil spirits, for example. (Such customs, read in the light of well-established stereotypes, have too often caused Native Americans to be regarded by historians and casual readers alike as primitive. But consider: at around the same time, some Europeans thought tobacco offered a cure for syphilis! And their reasoning wasn't much different.)

In 1612 John Rolfe instituted the systematic cultivation of tobacco by the Virginia Company settlers; it was, so to speak, an instant hit. Soon it was the dominant crop--a somewhat awkward situation, granted, given that the reigning King of England, James I had written A Counterblaste to Tobacco, a furious anti-smoking polemic. James is known to have hated smoking, though some writers have speculated (with little evidence) that this anti-smoking passion was merely an aftereffect of his well-documented hatred for Walter Raleigh, the favorite of Elizabeth and introducer of smoking to wealthy Englishmen everywhere.

Because tobacco grows well on soil that's never been planted or used before, the tobacco farmers of Virginia--not to mention the many new settlers who came to the colony expressly for the sake of making fortunes in, you guessed it, tobacco farming--needed the biggest farms possible. People sought tracts of land partly covered in virgin forest, so that exhausted land could be retired for the moment and new plots clearcut.

Thus in contrast to cosmopolitan Massachusetts or New York, life in Virginia was pastoral--farm-oriented, countrified, and independent. While those Calvinist East Coast colonies developed a social life based on ideas of shared struggle and social improvement--a city, as John Winthrop famously stated, on a hill--the Virginians lionized rural life and the dream of self-sufficiency that goes along with it - albeit.

It was this ideal of Virginia and, in the end, the United States of America as a society of self-sufficient agricultural freeholders, managing their own affairs without interference from the Crown, that fired the imagination of Thomas Jefferson, and led to his unique contributions to American political philosophy. In Jefferson's works, it is the so-called "yeoman farmer" (the hard-working small farmer) who makes a country great, and government policy should benefit such people. Whatever the limits of this philosophy, activist working toward this Jeffersonian ideal helped ensure that a Bill of Rights would be added to the Constitution, and their admiration of the small, independent Virginian tobacco farmer (as he existed in real life and in their imaginations) helped influence political philosophy.

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