"Indeed, without tobacco it is doubtful whether the Virginia colony could have survived at all. Initially all the authorities, at home and abroad, were against tobacco farming, largely because King James I hated the “weed,” thinking it “tending to general and new Corruption both of Men’s Bodies and Manners.” Governor Dale actually legislated against it in 1616, ordering that only one acre could be laid down to tobacco for every two of corn. It proved impossible to enforce. By the next year tobacco was being laid down even in Jamestown itself, in the streets and market-place. Men reckoned that, for the same amount of labor, tobacco yielded six times as much as any other crop. It was grown close to the banks of many little rivers, such as the James, the York, and the Rappahannock. Every small plantation had its own riverside wharf and boat to get the crop to a transatlantic packet. Roads were not necessary. Land would yield tobacco only for three years: then a fresh set of fields had to be planted. But the real problem was labor—hence slavery. The increasing supply of cheap, high-quality slave-labor from Africa came (as the planters would say and believe) as a Godsend to America’s infant tobacco industry. So it flourished mightily. James I himself signaled his capitulation as early as 1619 when he laid a tax of a shilling in the pound (5 percent) on tobacco imports to England, though he limited the total (from Bermuda as well as Virginia) to 55,000 lb a year. But soon all such quantitative restrictions were lifted and tobacco became the first great economic fact of life in the new English-speaking civilization growing up across the Atlantic. It continued to be counted as a blessing over four centuries until, in the fullness of time, President Bill Clinton brought the wheel back full circle to the days of James I, and in August 1996 declared tobacco an addictive drug."