Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

17
Virginia Tobacco
The tobacco planters of Virginia continued, in the eighteenth century, to
get into periods of economic difficulty, and the secular trend was ominous.
The price that planters had to pay for slaves rose with the increased demand
for slaves on South Carolina rice and indigo plantations. Thus, the common
price of slaves rose from thirty pounds per head in 1741 to forty-six pounds
in 1750 to fifty-eight pounds in the 1770s. Soil exhaustion also lowered the
productivity of the tobacco plantations.
The tobacco planters continued to try to escape their dwindling fortunes on
the market by seeking special privilege. A favorite device was a compulsory
cartel, imposed by the state, to restrict tobacco production. Production quotas
were then imposed on each plantation. But these restrictions did not have the
desired effect of raising the price of a commodity that was grown on an international
market; and curtailment in one area provided a lively inducement for
other farmers to fill the gap by increasing their output. Moreover, the cartel's
schemes worked the greatest hardship on the small planter; tobacco was the
major monetary medium in Virginia and Maryland and the small planter was
forced to pay fixed sums—in tobacco—for governmental fees, taxes, and quitrents.
Hence, forced restriction on the amount of tobacco grown was a great
.hardship on the small planter, whose fixed fees loomed larger in proportion
to his total output. Thus, a Virginia-Maryland tobacco cartel scheme in the
late 1720s fell through because the small farmers of Maryland would not
comply unless Lord Baltimore reduced the quantity of tobacco levied for quitrents.
When Lord Baltimore refused to agree, the scheme had to be abandoned.
The Virginia planters also tried to escape their difficulties by exploiting the
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