The Tobacco-plantation South in the Early American Atlantic World

by Sarson, Steven

• ISBN13: 9780230111899
• ISBN10: 0230111890
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-01-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

"Republican" writing and its historians portray the early republic in broadly egalitarian, communalistic, pre-market terms. Yet this book shows that census, tax, probate, land, court, and planters' records reveal vigorous markets and extensive inequality and individualism in Prince George's County, Maryland, and the wider tobacco south. Landownership, for example, was limited to 25 percent of free households by 1820, and the book explores complex relations between planters, yeomen, artisans, tenants, wage-workers, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and men and women on a uniquely detailed local level. Yet it also draws on colonial historiography to take (for early national studies) a groundbreaking cis-Atlantic approach, examining the profound impacts on local life of the Revolutionary War, non-intercourse and embargoes, the War of 1812, and the structure of the international tobacco trade.

Author Biography

Steven Sarson is a senior lecturer in Department of History at Swansea University (UK). He is the author of British America: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire, 1500-1800.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A “chosen people”: Thomas Jefferson and the Yeoman Myth * Prologue: “The Interest of the County”: Prince George’s County Levy Court and Local Politics, Economy, and Society * “To live splendidly”: The Planters * “I Don’t Stand to the Will”: Yeomen Farmers and Smallholders * “To have liberty”: Tenant Farmers and Artisans * “The torment with the servants”: Wage Workers, Servants, and Slaves * “Objects of Distress”: The Poor and the Destitute * A Statistical Analysis: Wealth Distribution and Mobility in Prince George’s County, Maryland, 1800-1820