women the like within their spheres, except some who are the posterity of old planters and have great numbers of slaves who understand most handicraft.  Men are generally carpenters, joiners, wheelwrights, coopers, butchers, tanners, shoemakers, tallow-chandlers, watermen and what not; women, soap-makers, starch-makers, dyers, etc.  He or she that cannot do all these things, or hath not slaves that can, over and above all the common occupations of both sexes, will have but a bad time of it; for help is not to be had at any rate, every one having business enough of his own.  This makes tradesmen turn planters, and these become tradesmen.  No society one with another, but all study to live by their own hands, of their own produce; and what they can spare goes for foreign goods.  Nay, many live on a slender diet to buy rum, sugar and molasses, with other such like necessaries, which are sold at such a rate that the planter here is but a slave to raise a provision for other colonies, and dare not allow himself to partake of his own creatures, except it be the corn of the country in hominy bread."[21] Some of the farmers and probably all the planters raised tobacco according to the methods prevalent in Virginia.  Some also made tar for sale from the abounding pine timber; but with most of the families intercourse with markets must have been at an irreducible minimum.

[Footnote 21:  Letter of Rev. John Urmstone, July 7, 1711, to the secretary of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, printed in F.L.  Hawks, History of North Carolina (Fayetteville, N.C., 1857, 1858), II, 215, 216.]

Tobacco culture, while requiring severe exertion only at a few crises, involved a long painstaking routine because of the delicacy of the plant and the difficulty of producing leaf of good quality, whether of the original varieties, oronoko and sweet-scented, or of the many others later developed.  The seed must be sown in late winter or early spring in a special bed of deep forest mold dressed with wood ashes; and the fields must be broken and laid off by shallow furrows into hills three or four feet apart by the time the seedlings were grown to a finger’s length.  Then came the first crisis.  During or just after an April, May or June rain the young plants must be drawn carefully from their beds, distributed in the fields, and each plant set in its hill.  Able-bodied, expert hands could set them at the rate of thousands a day; and every nerve must be strained for the task’s completion before the ground became dry enough to endanger the seedlings’ lives.  Then began a steady repetition of hoeings and plowings, broken by the rush after a rain to replant the hills whose first plants had died or grown twisted.  Then came also several operations of special tedium.  Each plant at the time of forming its flower bud must be topped at a height to leave a specified number of leaves growing on the stalk, and each stalk must have the suckers growing at the base of the leaf-stems pulled