Tobacco, Patrick Henry, And The Struggle For Freedom

Picture this: in eighteenth-century Virginia, a common form of payment, in lieu of paper money, was tobacco.

After all, it was easy to sell, the basis of the economy of the South (and to some extent of the entire so-called New World, at least the sections that had been forcibly occupied and colonized by white people), and--in effect--as good as paper money. So why not use it as such?

So people did. Folks bought food and clothes with nothing other than leaves of tobacco. It was especially common for workers in the several professions--in particular, for the payment of ministers, lawyers, and doctors. This practice became so common in the Virginia colony that food shortages became a problem--everybody was neglecting other crops in order to grow, essentially, their own money--and laws had to be passed forcing planters to, for example, devote some part of their fields to corn. Even after that, tobacco remained a common form of payment for ministers.

But that was about to change--as much else had already begun to do. During the 1750s increased immigration from Scotland to Virginia and surrounding states meant that the area's many small farmers, who had previously been dependent on the most powerful plantation owners, now had access to credit from the new Scottish arrivals, many of whom became storekeepers. This access to credit spurred economic development and left the smallish Virginia farmers holding more of the power. Able to make deals with the Scottish small-store owners, these farmers were less at the mercy of the richest families. Elections to the House of Burgesses (the colony's Congress) began to be more hotly contested, and religious dissent grew. And soon tobacco would be at the center of a debate that touched on all of these issues: economics, politics, religion.

Things came to a head in 1755. In that year the Virginia House of Burgesses passed the first Two-Penny Act, partly at the behest of the smaller farmers who had begun to enjoy more political power. What the Two-Penny Act did was to fix the currency value of tobacco at exactly two pennies a pound. The actual price of tobacco was rising much higher than this, and so the effect of the law was to punish those folks who were most used to being paid in tobacco: creditors and Church of England ministers, both of which groups were part of the old order that predated the rise of the smaller farmers. The "little guy," by and large, supported the Two-Penny Act for exactly these reasons. The price of tobacco was at the center of an American power struggle--the first of many.

No one would today remember the Two-Penny Acts (a second followed in 1758), perhaps, if they hadn't led directly in their turn to another, more significant power struggle. The British crown, seeing its own national Church's ministers punished by a bunch of dissenting small-farmer upstarts (many of whom had turned away from the Anglican Church and considered its clergy generally incompetent), moved to repeal the Two-Penny Act. The ministers, influenced no doubt by the spirit of Christian charity, moved to retaliate, suing for the wages that they'd lost during the period of the Two-Penny Act.

And this is where Patrick Henry steps in--the same famous American patriot who was influential in the founding of the country. He defended Virginia planters against the Anglican ministers' suit, and, in so doing, he established (almost without seeming to think about it) a precedent that would have important consequences over the next 13 years. In this 1763 case, Patrick Henry asserted, in effect, that the King of England had had no right to repeal a law passed in due course by the Virginia legislature, and that his veto of the law had made him "a Tyrant." As a tyrant, he no longer deserved his subjects' automatic obedience.

Henry had lain a bit of the intellectual groundwork for the colonists' rebellion against Great Britain in 1776. It was, after all, King George's tyranny that gave the legal and moral justification (argued Thomas Jefferson and others) for a declaration of independence. From tobacco farming to the Declaration of Independence is thus a shorter step than might be expected.

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