Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution

A noted historian explores how Colonial Virginia's tobacco businessmen became revolutionaries against the British monarchy.

The great Tidewater planters of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were fathers of the American Revolution. Perhaps first and foremost, they were also anxious tobacco farmers, harried by a demanding planting cycle, trans-Atlantic shipping risks, and their uneasy relations with English agents. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries lived in a world th...