Tobacco came first. John Rolfe, one of the early Jamestown colonists and the husband of Pocahontas, was the first to to recognize the potential for growing tobacco in the Chesapeake tidewater and to attempt its cultivation. He reported on his endeavor with seeds brought from the Caribbean in a 1616 report on the status of the colony. The activities involved in growing tobacco were largely unchanged over the nearly two centuries the crop was at the heart of the Chesapeake economy. Not even the clearing of land was a one time activity given that tobacco quickly depleted the soil of necessary nutrients. New land had to be cleared regularly. Descriptions from the Rev. Hugh Jones and Thomas Glover from around 1700 give a sense of the nearly year around work involved. Notice the need for nearly continuous labor from the time the seed was planted in early winter to the time for transport to the wharf in the fall for shipment to England.

The work required on a scale that sustained a commercial tobacco enterprise was more than a single planter and his family could manage. Indentured servants were originally contracted to live and work with planters for periods of up to seven years. They would work off the cost of their indenture in virtual slavery in return for the promise of a parcel of land at the end of their service. Gradually, though, over the course of the 17th century as the tobacco economy grew, planters turned to slavery as both a more economical and a more stable source of labor.

Slave ownership in colonial Virginia and Maryland was limited by economic reality. The reality involved a market for slaves that extended from New England to Brazil and a market in which the American colonists were small players. The relatively low demand for slaves from the colonies meant higher prices and meant that significant credit with slave merchants was required to engage in the trade. An interesting way of looking at the financial requirements of prospective slave owners is through probate records of the of various planters at the time of their deaths. As you can see in looking at these three estate records from around 1700, there were distinct differences between those who owned slaves and those who held contracts for indentured servants and those who had neither.