Throughout the colonial and antebellum periods, Virginia's tobacco
producers exploited slave labor to ensure the profitability of
their agricultural enterprises. In the wake of the Civil War,
however, the abolition of slavery, combined with changed market
conditions, sparked a breakdown of traditional tobacco culture.
Focusing on the transformation of social relations between former
slaves and former masters, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie traces the
trajectory of this breakdown from the advent of emancipation to the
stirrings of African American migration at the turn of the
twentieth century.
Drawing upon a rich array of sources, Kerr-Ritchie situates the
struggles of newly freed people within the shifting parameters of
an older slave world, examines the prolonged agricultural
depression and structural transformation the tobacco economy
underwent between the 1870s and 1890s, and surveys the effects of
these various changes on former masters as well as former slaves.
While the number of older freedpeople who owned small parcels of
land increased phenomenally during this period, he notes, so too
did the number of freedom's younger generation who deserted the
region's farms and plantations for Virginia's towns and cities.
Both these processes contributed to the gradual transformation of
the tobacco region in particular and the state in general.