Illustration of the processing of tobacco including a depiction of the tobacco plant., Plate 37 in Pierre Pomet's A compleat history of druggs, written in French by Monsieur Pomet... illustrated with above four hundred copper cutts (London: printed for R. Bonwicke, William Freeman, Timothy Goodwin, John Walthoe, Matthew Wotton [and 5 others in London], 1712), page 94, book 5 and in later editions of the same work issued in 1725, 1737 and 1748., Fels Afro-Americana Image Project.
Date
[1737]
Location
Library Company of Philadelphia | Books & Other Texts | Rare Il Pome 2177.Q plate 37., https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A2844
Engraving shows four slaves at work in a tobacco house. In the lower right-hand corner, a female slave sits on the ground and strips (?) tobacco. Behind her, another slave twists tobacco, while a third slave (to the left) puts it on a roll. Drying tobacco leaves hang upside down from the house's rafters. In the background, a woman and a child work hanging leaves., Fold-out plate in Jean Baptiste Laban's Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amerique (A Paris: rue S. Jacques, chez Pierre-François Giffart, prés la ruë Mathurins, à l'image Sainte Therese, M.DCC.XXII [1722]), vol. 4, p. 496., The key in the upper left-hand corner reads: 1. Negre qui ejambe le tabac. 2. Negre qui torque le tabac. 3. Negre qui le met en rolle. 4. Tabac a la pente., Fels Afro-Americana Image Project, Work Scenes.
Date
[1722]
Location
Library Company of Philadelphia | Books & Other Texts | Rare Am 1722 Lab 62402.D v 4 p 496, https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A2665
Illustration is included in Chapter LXI, "A Visit to Lynchburg in Virginia," and corresponds with the following passage, which clearly aims to present the tobacco factories in a positive, and even romantic light: "It [Lynchburg] has thirty-five tobacco factories, employing great numbers of negroes, men, women, and children. These negroes earn good wages, work faithfully, and turn out vast quantities of the black, ugly compound known as "plug," which has enslaved so many thousands, and promoted such a sublime disregard for the proprieties in the matter of expectoration. . . . In the maufacturies the negro is the same cheery, capricious being that one finds him in the cotton or sugar-cane fields; he sings quaintly over his toil, and seems entirely devoid of the sullen ambition which many of our Northern factory laborers exhibit. The men and women working around the tables in the basements of the Lynchburg tobacco establishments croon eccentric hymns in concert all day long; and their little children, laboring before they are hardly large enough to go alon, join in the refrains." (p. 556) Correspondingly, the engraving shows four small children stripping tobacco leaves alongside the adults., Illustration in Edward King's The Great South (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1875), p. 557., Fels Afro-Americana Image Project, Work Scenes.
Date
[1875]
Location
Library Company of Philadelphia | Books & Other Texts | Rare Am 1875 King 3379.Q p 557, https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A2828
