Crop Masters
Daniel Aaron, 19 January 1989
Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution
by T.H. Breen.
Princeton, 216 pp., $9.95, February 1988,0 691 04729 4 Show More
by T.H. Breen.
Princeton, 216 pp., $9.95, February 1988,
“... Some hoped to become solvent by moving to fresh lands in the Piedmont. Others, like George Washington, switched from tobacco to wheat, thereby transforming themselves from ‘planters’ to ‘farmers’. ‘New crops generated new symbols,’ as Breen observes, and although wheat, Virginia’s second staple by the 1770s, did not displace ... ”