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MODULE 2.3a The Regions of British Colonies 77

Enslaved People Working
on a Tobacco Plantation
These sample pages are distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
(c. 1750) This wood
engraving, created by
nineteenth-century English
author and engraver
Frederick W. Fairholt, was
Copyright (c) 2024 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
based on a mid-eighteenth-
century drawing. Fairholt
depicts enslaved people
Strictly for use with its products. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION.
packing tobacco leaves in
Peter Newark American Pictures/Bridgeman Images Fairholt included in this
large barrels and rolling them
to waiting ships while whites
oversee their work.
How do the items

image compare with John
Smith’s map from over a
century before (Module
2.3a)? What might explain
the differences you see?

luxury. They developed trading contacts in seaport cities on the Atlantic coast and in the
Caribbean and imported luxury goods from Europe. They also began using some enslaved
people as domestic workers to relieve white women of the strain of household labor.
Small farmers could also purchase and maintain land based on the profits from
tobacco. In 1750, two-thirds of white families farmed their own land in Virginia, a
larger percentage than in northern colonies. An even higher percentage did so in North
Carolina. Yet small farmers in the tobacco colonies became increasingly dependent on
large landowners, who controlled markets, politics, and the courts. Many artisans in
North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, too, depended on wealthy planters for their
livelihood. Artisans worked directly for planters, or for the shipping companies and mer-
chants that relied on plantation orders. And the growing number of tenant farmers in
this region relied completely on large landowners for their sustenance.
However, some people in these colonies fared far worse during the mid-eighteenth
century. One-fifth of all white southerners owned little more than the clothes on their
backs. At the same time, free Black people found their opportunities for landownership
and economic independence increasingly limited, while those who were enslaved had
little hope of gaining their freedom and held almost no property of their own.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the colonial population of Virginia, Mary-
land, and North Carolina surged. Some of the growth occurred from natural increase,
but immigration of Germans and Scots-Irish to lands in the western parts of these colo-
nies accounted for a significant portion. By the 1740s, German families created pockets
of self-contained communities above the fall line in the backcountry of North Carolina
and the Chesapeake colonies. They worshipped in German churches, read German
newspapers, and preserved German traditions. Likewise, Scots-Irish immigrants estab-
lished their own churches and communities in the areas where they settled.

REVIEW

■ Describe the economic and ethnic diversity in the Chesapeake colonies
during the middle of the eighteenth century.

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