Colonial Virginians were not terribly precise about the term "planter." There was no threshold they would have cited, although they themselves would have know who was who in the social pecking order. There were small, middling, large, and great planters. Depending on when and where you were in the Tobacco Coast, someone with two servants and a slave was doing pretty well, probably cultivating more like 10-12 acres and ultimately producing 3,600-6,000 pounds of tobacco worth anywhere from 7.5 to as much as 25 pounds Sterling, which by Virginia standards would have put the planter in at least the upper middle range. The real wealth disparities - and the social distinctions that went with that - came in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, which were the critical years for determining who had the capital necessary to buy slaves, to increase the scale of production, and even to diversify. By the time the antebellum period rolled around, agriculture in Virginia had diversified to an extent (especially with the advent of more intensive livestock practices) that many more Virginians probably called themselves farmers, whether they planted tobacco and corn or farmed wheat. There also was a tendency in the early national and Jacksonian eras to cast off some of the former trappings of title and to identify with the common folk in at least an outward appeal to democratic egalitarianism. The operative term there is "outward." So there definitely was an evolution in the terminology. Also, Virginia was not South Carolina; they were very different cultural realms. Comparing the two on this issue is, well, like comparing tobacco and tidewater rice cultivation. The scale of the former never approached the scale of the latter. I'm not an expert in the Low Country, but I dare say that given the labor-intensive nature of wet rice, having anything less than a couple of dozen slaves would not have been feasible. There was a very different reality in Virginia, where most agricultural operations were on a much smaller scale but nonetheless profitable in their own way.
___________________________________________
Dr. David S. Hardin
Assistant Professor of Geography
Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences
Longwood University
Farmville, Virginia 23909
Phone: (434) 395-2581
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
********************
"For as Geography without History
seemeth a carkasse without motion,
so History without Geography
wandreth as a Vagrant without a
certaine habitation."
John Smith, 1627
________________________________________
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Finkelman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 11:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: definition of a planter
if the only definition is one who planted tobacco, then someone with two
servants and a slave who planted an acre of tobacco would be a "planter"
which is silly. In fact, there were VERY FEW planters even in the
antebellum period; that is why being a planter meant something -- power
and wealth. 20 may be arbitrary, especially for the early colonial
period when there were still (mostly white) indentured servants. But
after about 1710 in VA and SC planters were those with increasing
numbers of slaves; and of course what you planted is not solely the
issue. After the revolution some planters appear to have moved into
wheat (as well as tobacco); they were still planters.
Paul Finkelman
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
and Public Policy
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, New York 12208-3494
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