received from Indian example, especially in growing corn, 'ye manner, how to set it, and after,
how to dress & tend it.'
The importance of livestock was critical. All thrived, pigs especially. One of the earliest
exports was barrels of pork. Flocks of sheep were soon common in Massachusetts and Rhode
Island. The colonists raised hardy horses and exported them to the West Indies. They brought in
seed for turnips, carrots, buckwheat, peas, parsnips, wheat, barley, and oats-all raised with
success. New England apples were soon doing particularly well. One commentator, writing in
1642, said they now had apples, pears and quince tarts, instead of their former Pumpkin Pies.' Apples werereckoned as profitable as any other part of the Plantation."
New England farming standards were much higher than Indian ones but, by the best European
standards, wasteful. All knowledgeable observers noted how the plentiful supply of land, and the
shortage of labor, led to butchering.' One account said tillage wasweakly and insufficiently
given; worse, ploughing is nowhere to be seen, yet the farmers get tolerable crops; this is owing,
particularly in the new settlements, to the looseness and fertility of the old woodlands, which
with very bad tillage will yield excellent crops."' Another claimed that New England farmers
were the most negligent ignorant set of men in the world. Nor do I know of any country in which animals are worse treated ... they plough cart and ride [horses] to death ... all the nourishment they are like to have is to be turned loose in a wood. Visitors were making the same complaints in the mid-18th century, though by then the supply of new land to take in was running out, at least on the eastern side of the Appalachians. The New Englanders were, on the whole, much less wasteful than the Virginians. Indeed, without tobacco it is doubtful whether the Virginia colony could have survived at all. Initially all the authorities, at home and abroad, were against tobacco farming, largely because King James I hated theweed,' thinking it `tending to general and new Corruption both of Men's Bodies and
Manners.' Governor Dale actually legislated against it in 1616, ordering that only one acre could
be laid down to tobacco for every two of corn. It proved impossible to enforce. By the next year
tobacco was being laid down even in Jamestown itself, in the streets and market-place. Men
reckoned that, for the same amount of labor, tobacco yielded six times as much as any other
crop. It had a high cash value. Everything conspired to help it. It was grown close to the banks of
many little rivers, such as the James, the York, and the Rappahannock. Every small plantation
had its own riverside wharf and boat to get the crop to a transatlantic packet. Roads were not
necessary. Land would yield tobacco only for three years: then a fresh set of fields had to be
planted. But the real problem was labor-hence slavery. The increasing supply of cheap, high-
quality slave-labor from Africa came (as the planters would say and believe) as a Godsend to
America's infant tobacco industry. So it flourished mightily. James I himself signaled his
capitulation as early as 1619 when he laid a tax of a shilling in the pound (5 percent) on tobacco
imports to England, though he limited the total (from Bermuda as well as Virginia) to 55,000 lb a
year. But soon all such quantitative restrictions were lifted and tobacco became the first great
economic fact of life in the new English-speaking civilization growing up across the Atlantic. It
continued to be counted a blessing over four centuries until, in the fullness of time, President Bill
Clinton brought the wheel back full circle to the days of James I, and in August 1996 declared
tobacco an addictive drug.
New England had no such crutch as tobacco to lean on. It had to work harder, and it did. Under
John Winthrop, whose first spell as governor lasted 1630-4, it got the kind of firm, even harsh,
government a new colony needs. In effect it was a theocracy. This meant that government was