This page needs to be proofread.
followed by a direct address to his Majesty on the part of the Assembly, called together by Lord Culpeper, praying for a cessation of planting in 1681 as the only means of affording relief. Secretary Spencer, who was familiar with every feature of the situation, in a letter to Lord Coventry, declared that it was no longer possible under the conditions then prevailing for the people to support themselves by tobacco, and that the crop of one year would not return an amount sufficient for the purchase of even the clothes which they needed. So intense was the desire for relief that it was admitted in this letter that the system of isolated estates had grown unpopular, and that there was now a universal wish that towns should be established in all of the counties where imported goods might be landed, and that other industries besides planting should spring up, and thus furnish the colonists with a new means of earning the subsistence which they had formerly secured from the cultivation of their only staple.[1]
The pathetic appeal of the authorities of the Colony for a cessation was refused by the Commissioners of Customs in London, on the ground that if approved, the area of the plantations in the Spanish, Dutch, and French possessions would be sufficiently enlarged to supply the people of the continent of Europe with tobacco, and the trade of Virginia would be proportionately diminished. The speciousness of this argument was disclosed in the improbability that a change in the tastes of the inhabitants of these countries would have been caused by so brief a period of non-production, but also in the fact that
- ↑ Nicholas Spencer to Secretary Coventry, British State Papers, Colonial Entry Book, No. 80, pp. 381-385; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1680, p. 74, Va. State Library.
State Papers, Colonial Entry Book, No. 80, p. 410; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1680, p. 46, Va. State Library.
