e 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 o