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select clientele that he had the cleanest factory and used the best paper, the purest aromatic tobaccos, and the finest cork tipping to keep the cigarette from sticking to the lips, Philip Morris helped lend to the product a cachet it had not previously enjoyed. He called his brands Oxford and Cambridge Blues, later adding Oxford Ovals, and thus attracting as customers the young elite attending those preeminent universities and holding on to them afterward when they went off to run the empire and wrote to Bond Street to have their favorite smoke forwarded to them. Buteven for a merchant as successful as Morris, cigarettes remained a cottage industry. The most skillful rollers could not turn out more than 1,500 or 2,000 units in a ten- or twelve-hour day.
    The pipe had been the most common way to consume tobacco as the United States began to beat back the wilderness and shape a continental nation. Virginia and locally grown leaf were abundant; and in a frontier society, pipes were made from whatever was at hand—wood, clay, stone, bone, corncob, or metal—and often worked into wondrous shapes during long winter nights. In certain patrician and mercantile circles, Americans aped the grand manner of European swells in their fondness for snuff. Rather than employing it as nostril candy in a ceaseless quest for the perfect sneeze, American snuffers preferred the moist dip, using a twig or stick to bring it to the mouth for chewing or depositing a pinch in the cheek, where it would slowly dissolve. Far more popular, if still less sanitary, was chewing tobacco. Since Columbus’s day, the chew was a great favorite with sailors who would otherwise have had the wind and dread of shipboard fires to contend with in taking their tobacco pleasures. The smokeless chewing variety was widely adopted by the less exalted sector of American society that wanted to enjoy tobacco while at work in occupations unconducive to the pipe, cigar, or snuff. It was splendidly suited to the outdoor life and immune from such vagaries of nature as the raking prairie winds. At first the untreated dried leaf was sold loose in bulky bags, but then, especially with the wider cultivation of Burley tobacco, the chew was moistened with a variety of sweeteners and molded into lumps more convenient for pocket-carrying. A veritable stream of tobacco juice filled the American air throughout much of the nineteenth century, targeted at thé ubiquitous cuspidor but at least as frequently darkening carpets, walls, draperies, and trousers, demonstrating to foreign visitors that they were among a slovenly people.
    The cigar did not seriously awaken American smoking tastes until after the war against Mexico (1846–48), with its exposure to that strong form of tobacco preferred by Latin cultures. By the midpoint of the nineteenth century, cigars were a goodly manufacturing business in New York and Philadelphia, another 100 million of them a year were being imported from Cuba, and among those sturdy pioneers trailblazing westward, foot-long cigars called “stogies” after the Conestoga wagons in which they rode were a prized time killer. As for the cigarette, it was scarcely more than an American curio at mid-century, and while it began to show up occasionally on the streets of New York in the ensuing decade as travelers abroad brought the custom home with them, the little smokes did not begin to exert any real appeal until the Civil War.
    It remains to be said that in the 369 years between Columbus’s discovery of tobacco and the war, the sentiment against smoking never remotely approached the level of scientific coherence. The early assaults were couchedlargely in moral, xenophobic, and economic terms. Of all those semi-hysterical admonishments against smoking in its pre-cigarette era, none was more passionate, or would be more often cited by posterity, than the treatise by the Scottish-rigid British monarch James I, published in 1604. In A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco ,