Ashes to Ashes (4 page)

In sum, those who took their tobacco in pipes or cigars (the latter mostly made of the dark, highly alkaline tobacco from Caribbean plantations and Connecticut River Valley farms) or by chewing it or putting it up their noses derived gradual, low-level doses of nicotine, but none of these forms of smoking proved to be intensely addicting. The drugging dependency invited by nicotine and the effects of its suspect partners in pathology were not prominently evident until the full flowering of Bright leaf and, with it, the arrival of the readily inhaled cigarette.

II

BEFORE
the white man’s arrival in the New World, tobacco was grown, used, and revered there from Brazil to the St. Lawrence River. Typically its dried leaves were crumbled and chewed or smoked in pipes, while in the more tropical regions smaller leaves were wrapped within larger ones or with corn husks and consumed as an early and doubtless potent form of cigar. Each tribe or nation of the native peoples likely evolved its own uses and blends, improving the flavor of the imperfectly cured leaf with pungent herbs and such additives as sumac leaves and dogwood bark. And how better to enhance the efficacy of their prayers than to send up tobacco’s aromatic vapors into the great void where the Spirit of Manitou dwelled and might be persuaded to bless the efforts of warriors and hunters and make the earth and tribal loins fruitful. No object was more sacred among the Indians of North America than
the calumet, the shared pipe of peace and greeting, and no substance served so well as tobacco smoke for a magical palliative or a cloak for the medicine man’s illusory arts. More profanely, it was chewed and smoked as a narcotic in an age lean on diversions beyond sex and blood sport.

Within a week of their landfall, Columbus and his crews took notice of the natives’ fondness for chewing the aromatic dried leaves or drinking their smoke through a Y-shaped pipe the Indians called the
toboca
or, possibly,
tobaga
, commonly claimed by etymologists to be the origin of the name of the plant. In short order, his sailors were sharing in the local custom, and in a foreshadowing of both the delight and danger attributable to the plant, Columbus scolded his men for sinking to the level of the savages by partaking of the smoky pastime, only to discover, as he was reported to have said, “it was not within their power to refrain from indulging in the habit.”

Within a century and a quarter, for better or worse, tobacco was spread throughout the globe, eventually recognized along with coffee, chocolate, and cane sugar as one of the treasured and unanticipated gifts of the New World to the Old.

The Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian sailors who manned the early transatlantic voyages were eager bearers of the exotic leaf to their home ports, where its use took hold in the demimonde as a notorious heathen import, then followed the trade routes east to the Levant and on to Araby, Persia, and India. Dutch and Portuguese mariners are credited with extending the leafs sway to China, Japan, and the East Indies, where it took root. Turkish soil was also soon found hospitable, and a regional variant won ready consumers despite the strictures of Islam against its use as a denier of body and soul. In Western Europe, tobacco quickly gained astounding acceptance among the better classes, thanks in no small measure to its two most eminent patrons, the Frenchman Jean Nicot and the English courtier Walter Raleigh. As ambassador to Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century, Nicot learned that the court physicians prized the Indian leaf for its healing powers, and when a tobacco poultice was credited with curing the chronic ulcer of a relative of one of his aides, Nicot wrote home to Paris rhapsodizing about its curative powers and sending seed samples from his own garden in Lisbon to acquaintances at the royal court, thereby assuring its prompt fame in France. Within two generations, tobacco smoke was widely accepted as an antitoxin and disinfectant, a panacea reportedly so versatile that it could fend off the plague, cure gonorrhea, and serve potently as an unguent, a laxative, a styptic, a gargle, and even as a dentifrice in the form of its ashes, said to be a superior whitener of teeth. Only a bit less persuasive was the claim for tobacco’s psychic powers; its smoke was said to drive off melancholy and other foul humours and improve the memory. Little wonder Nicot’s name has passed down to posterity linked to the narcotic substance unique to his beloved plant. In comparable fashion later in the sixteenth century,
Raleigh became fixated with the leaf that the sea marauder Francis Drake brought home to Elizabethan England as booty from Spanish holds and so avidly encouraged its enjoyment and cultivation that he was said to have persuaded the queen herself to try a smoke. Courtiers and lesser dandies followed, regarding tobacco’s alleged medicinal uses as a ready rationale, and despite the almost prohibitive cost of the leaf, its smoke was soon rising everywhere from Cheapside alehouses to the soaring interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral during the liturgy.

It should have come as scant surprise, however, when a plant of such storied curative and prophylactic qualities but of no known nutritional value soon ran afoul of the authorities, both temporal and ecclesiastical. Smoking officially became “the Indian vice,” a barbaric custom offensive to God, the pope, and the Koran; an invitation to debauchery; a peril to the public safety at a time when fire was a constant threat to crowded and closely built cities; and a usurper of cropland that would better have been devoted to grain or other nutrients than to tobacco, the idler’s plaything. It was denounced in Europe as a form of pagan savagery and in the Levant and the Orient as a wanton and seductive visitation of Christianity. Repressive steps shortly followed. Among the least of them, King James I of England raised the import duty on tobacco brought in Spanish galleons by 4,000 percent, the papacy banned smoking in its basilicas, and the czar of all the Russias exiled users of the illicit substance to Siberia. Deeper into the seventeenth century, more rigorous measures were employed: the Mogul emperor of Hindustan ordered smokers’ lips split; in China, traffickers in tobacco were executed; and in Turkey, Sultan Murad IV, greatly perturbed that Constantinople had gone up in flames and convinced that careless smoking was the cause, conducted a rudimentary sting operation on the streets of his empire—those he seduced with tobacco were made an example of by having a pipe driven through their noses, either immediately before or after their beheading.

And yet the custom thrived, like all forbidden fruit. In England, the better-heeled taverngoer had his favorite long “churchwarden” pipe or short “nose warmer” awaiting his arrival. In France, nicotine-cravers began joyfully exploring their nostrils as a suitable venue for the pleasure. In Turkey, wary minstrels covertly sang of tobacco as one of “the four cushions of the couch of pleasure,” and in China, with exquisite understatement, poets referred to the plant as the “smoke-blossom”. What most of all spared tobacco from the scourges of xenophobia and righteousness, though, was the discovery by rulers in all lands that the commodity, beyond suppression now, could greatly enrich their treasuries with serious taxes on its import and sale. And nowhere was this more so than in England, whose North American colonies had become one of the world’s two prime suppliers.

The influence of tobacco on prerevolutionary America and particularly on
its largest and wealthiest colony, Virginia, cannot be overstated. The leaf grown in the new Spanish colonies of Mexico, Cuba, and the West Indies was of a high quality and fine flavor that won it a flourishing European market in the sixteenth century before English colonists settled in the New World. It was only natural, then, that early in the seventeenth century, the colony at Jamestown should turn to tobacco as its savior. The leaf grown there by the Powhatan tribe was a weak, bitter, and otherwise inferior variety of the Spanish staple, and so John Rolfe, one of the leaders of the Jamestown settlement and surely better known to history for his second marriage, to the Powhatan princess Pocahontas, managed to acquire tobacco seed from Spain’s New World colonies, probably from Trinidad, and at a stroke laid the economic base for the Virginia colony. The strong, dark leaf Rolfe had introduced was soon contending with its Spanish progenitor for the home English market and a foothold in the continental competition with Dutch and Turkish leaf as well.

Unhappy at seeing its silver siphoned off by imported Spanish leaf, the British crown encouraged its fledgling colony, with an ideal climate and soil for the plant, to grow as much tobacco as it could manage. Generous land grants were offered to gentry and yeomen willing to brave the wilds; ocean passage was available on easy terms, and London merchants gladly provided credit for supplies. Soon English farmers were prohibited from growing the leaf in the home country, punitive duties were imposed against tobacco imported from elsewhere than Virginia, and in time the American colonies were granted a monopoly on all leaf shipped to England. As the seventeenth century lengthened, every jetty and dockside in the Maryland and Virginia tidewater clattered and rumbled with half-ton hogsheads of the prized leaf being rolled aboard British ships bearing them back to a nation stricken with tobaccomania. Virginia flowered, and tobacco became the mainstay of nearly every phase of the colonists’ lives: wages were paid in it, goods bartered for it, wives purchased with it—120 pounds of cured leaf was the going rate for a healthy spouse from the mother country. The only problem was the shortage of hands to tend the demanding crop, and so the African slave trade grew under Dutch transport, the dark cargo purchased mostly with the lush harvests of the leaf.

In return for Virginia’s privileged status as tobacco supplier to Great Britain, the colonial crop could be shipped nowhere else and only on craft flying the British flag; the growing continental demand for Virginia leaf was gladly satisfied by London merchants who reshipped the leaf at a healthy markup. Still, colonial growers felt sufficiently compensated to expand their tobacco crop at a steady pace—and to the exclusion of any other crop beyond what was needed for their subsistence. Thus, their dependency on the exclusively British tobacco market deepened, and with it, their indebtedness to English merchants who supplied them on terms deemed ever harsher by the colonists. In time, it grew painfully clear to the American growers that they
were captives of the crown and its domineering mercantile policies. Virginians were saddled with lower prices for their leaf, higher shipping charges, steeper duties, and more onerous credit arrangements than would have prevailed if the colonies had enjoyed access to the world market. The growers’ reflexive response to this dilemma was to plant more tobacco, buy more slaves, ask for more credit, and hope for the best. But this single-mindedness in time resulted in a chronic excess of tobacco and an increasingly irritable colonial mentality. “Our thriving is our undoing, and our purchase of negroes, by increasing the supply of tobacco, has greatly contributed thereto,” observed Virginia’s Governor Thomas Culpepper late in the seventeenth century.

The tobacco boom also brought with it political patterns and social values that contrasted markedly with those prevailing in New England and other Northern colonies. The proliferating tobacco plantations and farms caused the still sparse population to be widely dispersed; few towns larger than crossroads hamlets existed; and the expansive use of slave labor helped promote aristocratic pretensions, even in the least lordly of masters. The agrarian paradise being built by the planter class was only remotely related to the democratic yearnings that manifested themselves elsewhere in the colonies. Economic grievance, not political high-mindedness, was what animated tobacco country. By the eve of the American Revolution, tobacco represented some 75 percent of the total value of goods exported from Virginia and Maryland, and among the reasons least loudly but most tellingly advanced in support of the rebellion in those bellwether colonies was the expectation that victory would allow the tobacco growers to ignore the heavy debts they had incurred with exploitive British creditors.

The long, draining war with the mother country and its chaotic aftermath produced mostly economic travail for tobacco interests. Credit vanished, currency was debased, the British market turned cool, and the Napoleonic wars and additional ongoing international tensions made the transatlantic trade increasingly problematic. Instead, the infant nation turned inward for economic development, and tobacco as an export staple receded as land and labor were increasingly given over to that new commercial star of the plant kingdom—cotton.

III

A
FORM
of tobacco smoking long practiced in the Spanish colonies of the New World grew in favor in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. Produced from the dust of the cured leaf and the sweepings of rolled cigars, the miniature smokes were wrapped with plant husks or, by the seventeenth century, crude paper and provided a cheaper and quicker pleasure than a
pipe or cigar. The
cigarito
first attained popularity in Spain, with production centered in Barcelona, where dexterous workers became adept at rolling tan paper around the shredded tobacco, twisting it at the lighting end, and folding it back neatly into a smooth cylinder. But it was time-consuming, costly work, and most smokers preferred to save money by buying the makings and rolling their own.

In neighboring France, the cigarette was taken up during the Revolution by the antiroyalist masses as the tobacco product least like snuff, that elaborately boxed and ceremoniously taken powder so beloved by the monarchists. There was nothing fancy about French cigarettes, notorious there as elsewhere for being cheap and made from the leavings of other tobacco products—and further adulterated, it was rumored, by spit, urine, and dung. By the time the government began licensing their manufacture around 1840, cigarettes had been sufficiently improved to have a bourgeois appeal as well. A new, much whiter kind of wrapper, extracted from rice straw, was developed that did not stick to the lips the way earlier cigarette paper had, and a tasteless vegetable paste made the rolling quicker and easier. By mid-century, the prominent tobacco merchant Baron Joseph Huppmann had opened a factory in St. Petersburg and brought the cigarette in quantity to the Russian upper class and intelligentsia, always keen on French style and
objets
.