Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and his first wife were enslaved in the watershed region, and it includes many battlegrounds of the Civil War, as well as places of notable activism in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. (They had been carried on a Portuguese slave ship sailing from Angola to Veracruz, Mexico. In colonial times, tobacco was the mainstay of the economies of Maryland and Virginia. The abundance of tobacco plantations in Maryland resulted in a lack of towns. Throughout the 17th century, tobacco plantations spread along natural Tobacco was the mainstay of the Virginia and Maryland economies. Plantations were often located along the Chesapeake’s rivers, where soil quality was better and tobacco could be transported via local waterways. Many of the workers at tobacco plantations were slaves or indentured servants from Africa. Cotton slavery was a lucrative industry. The first Africans in English America are brought to the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Plantations were established by riverbanks for the good soil and to ensure ease of transportation. Demand for slave labor rises sharply with the growth of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake region of North America. What isn’t known about the 400-year history of African Americans and the Chesapeake region could fill the Bay itself to overflowing. What forces transformed the institution of slavery the early seventeenth century to the nineteenth century? By the mid-18th century, most enslaved people were African Americans, native-born in the Chesapeake region. As the English increasingly used tobacco products, tobacco in the American colonies became a significant economic force, especially in the tidewater region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay. In 1634, the new Colony of Maryland was established. Beginning in 1619 the General Assembly put in place requirements for the inspection of tobacco … ... they toiled anonymously on tobacco plantations. The majority lived and worked on tobacco plantations, although some were “industrial slaves” working at iron forges and others were hired out to work in gristmills and other industries. Chesapeake Consignment System. Main Article Primary Sources (1) William Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851) My father and mother were left on the plantation; but I was taken to the city of Richmond, to work in a tobacco manufactory, owned by my old master's son William, who had received a special charge from his father to take good care of me, and which charge my new master endeavoured to perform. In the nineteenth century, the institution of slavery peaked economically and politically. Chesapeake society and economy. August 1619. Over the next 160 years, tobacco production spread from the Tidewater area to the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially dominating the agriculture of the Chesapeake region. Vast plantations were built along the rivers of Virginia, and social/economic systems developed to grow and distribute this cash crop. Because wealthy planters built their own wharves on the Chesapeake to ship their crop to England, town development was slow. Compare and contrast the experience of slaves on tobacco plantations in the early seventeenth-century Chesapeake region with that of slaves on nineteenth-century cotton plantations in the Deep South. The inlets, creeks, coves, and river mouths allowed for ships to come directly to plantation wharfs to trade English goods for tobacco (or corn, another widely-grown crop in Maryland). Compare and contrast the experience of slaves on tobacco plantations in the early seventeenth-century Chesapeake region with that of slaves on nineteenth-century cotton plantations in the Deep South. 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