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remotely related to the democratic yearnings that manifested themselves elsewhere in the colonies. Economic grievance, not political high-mindedness, was what animated tobacco country. By the eve of the American Revolution, tobacco represented some 75 percent of the total value of goods exported from Virginia and Maryland, and among the reasons least loudly but most tellingly advanced in support of the rebellion in those bellwether colonies was the expectation that victory would allow the tobacco growers to ignore the heavy debts they had incurred with exploitive British creditors.
    The long, draining war with the mother country and its chaotic aftermath produced mostly economic travail for tobacco interests. Credit vanished, currency was debased, the British market turned cool, and the Napoleonic wars and additional ongoing international tensions made the transatlantic trade increasingly problematic. Instead, the infant nation turned inward for economic development, and tobacco as an export staple receded as land and labor were increasingly given over to that new commercial star of the plant kingdom—cotton.
    III
    A FORM of tobacco smoking long practiced in the Spanish colonies of the New World grew in favor in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. Produced from the dust of the cured leaf and the sweepings of rolled cigars, the miniature smokes were wrapped with plant husks or, by the seventeenth century, crude paper and provided a cheaper and quicker pleasure than apipe or cigar. The cigarito first attained popularity in Spain, with production centered in Barcelona, where dexterous workers became adept at rolling tan paper around the shredded tobacco, twisting it at the lighting end, and folding it back neatly into a smooth cylinder. But it was time-consuming, costly work, and most smokers preferred to save money by buying the makings and rolling their own.
    In neighboring France, the cigarette was taken up during the Revolution by the antiroyalist masses as the tobacco product least like snuff, that elaborately boxed and ceremoniously taken powder so beloved by the monarchists. There was nothing fancy about French cigarettes, notorious there as elsewhere for being cheap and made from the leavings of other tobacco products—and further adulterated, it was rumored, by spit, urine, and dung. By the time the government began licensing their manufacture around 1840, cigarettes had been sufficiently improved to have a bourgeois appeal as well. A new, much whiter kind of wrapper, extracted from rice straw, was developed that did not stick to the lips the way earlier cigarette paper had, and a tasteless vegetable paste made the rolling quicker and easier. By mid-century, the prominent tobacco merchant Baron Joseph Huppmann had opened a factory in St. Petersburg and brought the cigarette in quantity to the Russian upper class and intelligentsia, always keen on French style and objets .
    The cigarette was little seen in England until after the Crimean War (1854–56), when its soldiers had been heavily exposed to the short smokes, which seemed ideally suited to wartime use, by their French and Turkish allies and were even proffered them by captured Russian officers. The English veterans of Crimea took their new yen for the cigarette home, where the product had previously been degraded as suitable mainly for the poor and so weak-tasting as to invite the suspicion that those smokers who preferred it were effeminate.
    Among those catering to the new fashion in smoking was a Bond Street tobacconist named Philip Morris, about whom little is known personally other than that he died at a relatively young age in 1873 and the business was carried on for a time by his widow, Margaret, and brother Leopold. In his early days Morris discreetly sold fine Havana “seegars” and Virginia pipe tobacco to the carriage trade, but when returning Crimean veterans began asking for cigarettes, he quickly accommodated. Stressing to his