Tobacco Plantation This engraving of a West Indian tobacco plantation illustrates both similarities with and differences from Chesapeake tobacco production in the seventeenth century. As in the Chesapeake, tobacco plants were planted in individual mounds that required careful tending by hand. In the Chesapeake, however, most of the laborers were white servants until the last third of the seventeenth century, not slaves as shown here. Chesapeake producers commonly packed tobacco in barrels rather than winding it into rope-like twists as shown in the open-sided huts here.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.