80 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The British were disturbed by the growing French
presence in the Ohio Valley during the 1740s, and
particularly concerned by the vulnerability of western
Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 1748 the British Board of
Trade and Plantations solicited new and more detailed
maps in order to secure those regions. To that end,
the governor of Virginia commissioned the surveyors
Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson—father of Thomas
Jefferson—to develop a new and detailed topographic
map of the colony. Fry and Jefferson delivered their
original draft to London in 1752; geographical errors
near Lake Erie led to the substantially revised edition
of 1755 that is reproduced here and on the next page.
By that time, tensions between the French and British
had led to war.
The power of this map lay primarily in its detailed
depiction of the entire river system of Virginia, much
of which is shown at right. For the first time, the four
principal rivers as well as their tributaries were shown
together, creating a larger picture of a colony that
was at the height of its success in tobacco cultivation.
Virginia was home to more extensive and navigable
rivers than any other colony on the seaboard, leading
one contemporary to remark that most every tobacco
farmer had “a river at his door.” The James, York,
Rappahannock, and Potomac rivers brought ships
into the heart of the colony, and directly connected
many of these tobacco planters to European markets.
Tobacco grew quickly in the Virginia colony with
the corresponding growth of slavery. From the early
TOBACCO AND VIRGINIA
Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, “A Map
of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia
containing the whole Province of
Maryland with Part of Pensilvania,
New Jersey and North Carolina,” 1755
settlements near Jamestown, the crop expanded
north across the York and Rappahannock until it
dominated the Chesapeake. By 1750 tobacco was
North America’s most valuable export, enriching
the colony and making it the population center of
British America. The region covered by this map
was home to 400,000 by 1740 (the population of
Virginia alone was 260,000). Fully one-quarter of
those were slaves. The profits from tobacco and
slavery enabled Virginia to replicate the English
model of a rural gentry and a landed elite. This in turn
fostered a social, economic, and political hierarchy
that profoundly influenced everything from the
institutionalization of slavery to emerging colonial
notions of liberty.
The artistic cartouche at lower right on the next
page exemplifies the influence of tobacco farming
in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. Created by two
noted London artists, it features the commercial
exchange around tobacco: in the foreground two
planters negotiate with a ship’s captain, while to the
right an accountant with his back turned carefully
records the profits. The four slaves, minimally
dressed, each undertake a different aspect of the
labor required for the success of tobacco.
That commerce would decline considerably
during the Revolution. A credit crisis in 1772 fueled
discontent among planters and traders. Once the
war for independence began, tobacco cultivation
dropped sharply, forcing Virginians to diversify into
foodstuffs and other products. Virginia remained the
pre-eminent British colony, and its gentry became
the leaders of the Revolution and the early national
period. The irony here is crucial, for it was the
slaveholding elite that embraced the revolutionary
spirit of liberty, no doubt in part because those
men understood firsthand how fragile this liberty
really was.
The Fry–Jefferson map was reprinted in eight
states, and remained the most authoritative picture
of Virginia and the adjacent area for forty years.