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In Southside Virginia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, flue-cured “brightleaf” tobacco was the most widely grown agricultural cash crop and farm tenancy was one of the most common labor arrangements. Farm tenants produced a commodity for long-distance exchange and were thus connected to international markets, but for much of this period many seem to have participated in market exchange to a fairly limited extent. Rather, tenant families produced enough tobacco to make the money they needed but also devoted time directly to their own maintenance, producing food and other items that could be made at home.
I use a combination of documentary and archaeological evidence to examine patterns of production and exchange during this period, tracing the changing relationship between farm tenants and money. I ground this discussion in a detailed regional history and, drawing on David Graeber's ideas about debt and Anna Tsing's notion of “salvage” accumulation, argue that tenants in the Southside can be usefully understood as a peasantry who engaged imperfectly with the market. In order to better understand those decisions made by past people, I develop a philosophical consideration of perception, arguing that approaching the experiences of past people requires a serious attempt to understand what they perceived about their situation and what they believed about the past and future. That discussion draws heavily from Tim Ingold, Mark Nuttall, Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight, and Theodore Schatzki.
I then examine the evidence from original work with primary documents and archaeological fieldwork associated with two properties: Spring Bank in Lunenburg County and Belle Visa in Mecklenburg County. Both had been elite plantation residences in the antebellum period but were later operated as tenant farms. Tobacco production can be observed both through direct evidence like farm infrastructure as well as through evidence for the off-farm purchases that tobacco sales made possible, while home provisioning can be observed through evidence for at-home food and tool production. I correlate the observed trends with historic tobacco prices, and find that high tobacco prices did not always translate into more evidence for tobacco production or into more off-farm purchases. I argue that tenants in the late nineteenth century did not yet have a consumer mindset, but rather had a partial and negotiated relationship with capitalism. Like peasants everywhere, they grew a money crop, but only as much of it as they needed. Some Southside residents maintained this strategy at least through the early twentieth century, when modern advertising, mail-order catalogs, and the greater availability of manufactured goods changed the relationship that they had with money.
