A Small Planter's Profits: The Cole Estate and the Growth of the Early Chesapeake Economy

Abstract

M i ~ OST historians now agree that small plantations predominated on the tobacco coast during the seventeenth century, but few have studied them closely. Basic questions are still unanswered. Did small planters grow most of the food their families consumed? What surpluses did they produce besides tobacco? How did they spend their income? What proportion went to wages, rent, clothing, tools, or taxes? Were nearly all their earnings exported or was a substantial proportion spent locally, in the domestic economy? How profitable were their operations? Was income merely adequate to keep a planter afloat, or did small plantations afford opportunities for tenants to become landowners and yeoman farmers to join the local gentry? How did small planters cope with the recurring depressions in the Chesapeake economy, with the secular decline of tobacco prices, and with the gradual increase in the costs of land and labor? One result of the ongoing renaissance of Chesapeake studies has been the accumulation of a considerable body of knowledge concerning the lives of small planters. Much work remains to be done, but we know a good deal about their opportunities, their demographic characteristics, their familial structure, and their changing position in politics and society.'