off; and the under side of every leaf must be examined twice at least for the destruction of the horn-worms.  These came each year in two successive armies or “gluts,” the one when the plants were half grown, the other when they were nearly ready for harvest.  When the crop began to turn yellow the stalks must be cut off close to the ground, and after wilting carried to a well ventilated tobacco house and there hung speedily for curing.  Each stalk must hang at a proper distance from its neighbor, attached to laths laid in tiers on the joists.  There the crop must stay for some months, with the windows open in dry weather and closed in wet.  Finally came the striking, sorting and prizing in weather moist enough to make the leaves pliable.  Part of the gang would lower the stalks to the floor, where the rest working in trios would strip them, the first stripper taking the culls, the second the bright leaves, the third the remaining ones of dull color.  Each would bind his takings into “hands” of about a quarter of a pound each and throw them into assorted piles.  In the packing or “prizing” a barefoot man inside the hogshead would lay the bundles in courses, tramping them cautiously but heavily.  Then a second hogshead, without a bottom, would be set atop the first and likewise filled, and then perhaps a third, when the whole stack would be put under blocks and levers compressing the contents into the one hogshead at the bottom, which when headed up was ready for market.  Oftentimes a crop was not cured enough for prizing until the next crop had been planted.  Meanwhile the spare time of the gang was employed in clearing new fields, tending the subsidiary crops, mending fences, and performing many other incidental tasks.  With some exaggeration an essayist wrote, “The whole circle of the year is one scene of bustle and toil, in which tobacco claims a constant and chief share."[22]

[Footnote 22:  C.W.  Gooch, “Prize Essay on Agriculture in Virginia,” in the Lynchburg Virginian, July 14, 1833.  More detailed is W.W.  Bowie, “Prize Essay on the Cultivation and Management of Tobacco,” in the U.S.  Patent Office Report, 1849-1850, pp. 318-324.  E.R.  Billings, Tobacco (Hartford, 1875) is a good general treatise.]

The general scale of slaveholdings in the tobacco districts cannot be determined prior to the close of the American Revolution; but the statistics then available may be taken as fairly representative for the eighteenth century at large.  A state census taken in certain Virginia counties in 1782-1783[23] permits the following analysis for eight of them selected for their large proportions of slaves.  These counties, Amelia, Hanover, Lancaster, Middlesex, New Kent, Richmond, Surry and Warwick, are scattered through the Tidewater and the lower Piedmont.  For each one of their citizens, fifteen altogether, who held upwards of one hundred slaves, there were approximately three who had from 50 to 99; seven with from 30 to 49; thirteen