Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; List of Illustrations; Preface to the Second Paperback Edition; Preface; Acknowledgments; I. An Agrarian Context for Radical Ideas; II. Tobacco Mentality; III. Planters and Merchants: A Kind of Friendship; IV. Loss of Independence; V. Politicizing the Discourse: Tobacco, Debt and the Coming of Revolution; Epilogue: A New Beginning; Index
Summary
The great Tidewater planters of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were fathers of the American Revolution. Perhaps first and foremost, they were also anxious tobacco farmers, harried by a demanding planting cycle, trans-Atlantic shipping risks, and their uneasy relations with English agents. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries lived in a world that was dominated by questions of debt from across an ocean but also one that stressed personal autonomy. T.H. Breen's study of this tobacco culture focuses on how elite planters gave meaning to existence. He examines the value-l