Document 3.7 Enslaved Blacks Working on a Tobacco Plantation, c. 1750

Document 3.7

Enslaved Blacks Working on a Tobacco Plantation, c. 1750

This wood engraving, created by nineteenth-century English author and engraver Frederich W. Fairholt, was based on a mid-eighteenth-century drawing. Fairholt published it in his 1859 book, Tobacco, Its History and Associations. Fairholt depicts bare-chested slaves packing tobacco leaves in hogsheads and rolling them to waiting ships while well-dressed whites oversee their work. The overhead banner reminds readers that Indians introduced tobacco to the English.

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Peter Newark American Pictures/Bridgeman Images