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Updated: May 26, 2025
"Finish it now." "The boy," went on Deb, using now her own and now Jacqueline's remembered words, "the boy did not want to work all his life long in the tobacco-fields, working from morning to night, with his hands, at the thing he hated. He wanted books, he wanted to learn, and to work with his mind in the world beyond the Three-Notched Road. The older he grew the more he wanted it.
During the vicissitudes of government in Virginia the colony continued to increase in wealth and population, and in 1634 eight counties were created; while an official census in April, 1635, showed nearly five thousand people, to which number sixteen hundred were added in 1636. The new-comers during Harvey's time were principally servants who came to work the tobacco-fields.
These engages were in all respects treated as slaves, especially when bound to agricultural service. Their master left them to the mercies of an overseer, who whistled them up at daybreak for wood-cutting or labor in the tobacco-fields, and went about among them with a stout stick, which he used freely to bring the lagging up to their work.
Up to Sunday, the twenty-first of August, 1831, there was nothing to distinguish it from any other rural, lethargic, slipshod Virginia neighborhood, with the due allotment of mansion-houses and log-huts, tobacco-fields and "old-fields", horses, dogs, negroes, "poor white folks", so called, and other white folks, poor without being called so.
To be sold to Virginia was a standard threat to New England slaves, as work in Southern tobacco-fields was thought much more severe than in northern cornfields. Slavery lingered in New England until after Revolutionary days. It is said that its death blow was dealt in Worcester, Mass., in 1783, when a citizen was tried for assaulting and beating his negro servant.
The mortality still continued frightful, and "during the months of June, July, and August, the people died like cats and dogs," a statement especially true of the servants, of whom hardly one in five survived the first year's hardships in the malarial tobacco-fields along the creeks and rivers.
The oil-cake forms a valuable manure, and is of course carefully used for this purpose in China, where so very great regard is paid to the collecting of manures. This kind is particularly used for enriching tobacco-fields, its powerful qualities recommending it for such a scourging crop.
He thought of how often as a boy, working under the glare of the sun, in the shadeless tobacco-fields, he had dreamed of the poplars of Fontenoy, the cool porches, the cool rooms, the rest from labour, and the books, of all that the little girl named Jacqueline had told him, sitting under the apple tree beside the stream that flowed between a large and a small farm on the Three-Notched Road.
Sometimes the emotions excited by her solitary walks gave the young girl greater pain than happiness yet it was a pain she would not have been spared, for she knew, though the knowledge was never formulated in her thought, that in some precious, intimate way her suffering set her apart and above the villagers and farming people about her those whose placid, contented eyes never strayed from the potato-patch to the distant hills, or lifted themselves from the goodly tobacco-fields to the wide blue heavens.
To the Federalists his progress from the tobacco-fields to the Elysian Heights of office was but another burning sign of the degeneracy of the times and the tendencies of Jefferson. On the other hand, the Republicans quoted the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence, and made the name of Lewis Rand as symbolic as a liberty pole. He was bon enfant, bon Républicain.
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