History of Marijuana
Hemp Facts
HEMP REVOLUTION
Contentious as the commercial competition over hemp and finished goods
had been, by the time of the American Revolution the British no longer
needed America's hemp. What they needed was a share of the profits it
produced, to pay off their war debts. By 1760, the British had secured
control of both Ireland and India, which provided all the hemp they needed.
Their relatively wealthy America cousins were still restricted from .selling
or shipping hemp either as a raw material or as naval stores to anyone
but the British, but the colonies were using most of their hemp domestically,
anyway. On the other hand, the British Crown had invested a great deal
of time, effort, and money colonizing and protecting America and they
expected a return on their investment, which is why the British began
imposing taxes on commodities like sugar, stamps, and tea that the colonists
used every day.
HEMP USE WAR
The Revolutionary War ended on September 19, 1781 when Washington defeated
Comwallis at Yorktown. The Tories disappeared and even many British .soldiers
shed their red coats and blended in, as life in the colonies was far better
than life at the bottom of the heap in England. And the value of hemp
plummeted.
As the jubilation wore off, the idea of independence lost a little of
its shine when everyone settled down enough to consider the fact that
England was the marketplace of the world. The British had defeated their
competitors — the Dutch, Spanish, and the French — either
militarily or economically, and there was only a limited market for the
products America produced. The French were in the throes of their own
revolution. Domestically, the need for hemp dropped dramatically after
the war.
But the influx of hopeful new immigrants went on unabated. Between tire
end of the Revolutionary War and 1810 the population almost doubled, and
by 1830 the population approached 1} million. The inflows of people and
investment enabled America to continue growing at an extremely rapid rate.
Meanwhile, both the textile and paper industries were looking for cheaper
alternatives. Before Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, which
mechanically cleaned the cotton and prepared it for spinning, cotton was
insignificant — it accounted for less than 5% of all the fabrics
produced on this side of the Atlantic. The rest was mainly from hemp,
which produced warmer, softer, more durable fabric. Suddenly, cotton had
a technological and economic advantage.
Preparing hemp for spinning required separating the fibers from the hemp
stalks, an onerous and time-consuming task. Raising and harvesting cotton
was more difficult, but with the advantage of slave labor the South kept
costs low. Most of the hemp was grown in the Northern states, where slaves
were few. America's textile industry made a strictly economic decision
when it decided to make cotton the industry standard. Of course, it made
the Southern plantation owners enormously wealthy, and that is why in
the South they call it "King Cotton."
In 1790, the South was producing a thousand tons of cotton per year.
By 1860, it was a million tons. In the same period, 500,000 slaves increased
to 4,000,000.27
It was also strictly an economic decision when the paper industry switched
from hemp to wood. Trees, from the new land's plentiful forests, were
essentially free for the taking. The quality of the paper wasn't as good,
nor did it last as long as hemp-based paper; but it was so much cheaper
to produce that the benefits outweighed the disadvantages.
The loss of the textile and paper markets was a blow to hemp farmers,
and it did affect the fortunes of many Americans, probably including Thomas
Jefferson. Like most wealthy American farmers, his income was primarily
derived from the cultivation of hemp. Jefferson's many years in France
and in government no doubt contributed to the deterioration of his farming
operations, and with the dwindling hemp market he could not recover. He
was only able to hold onto Monticello because his creditors respected
him so much they hesitated to throw him out.
However, the major market for hemp was still the shipbuilding and outfitting
trade. As late as 1850, hemp was holding on as America's third most important
agriculture crop, yielding only to cotton and tobacco, with more than
8,000 farms actively engaged in the cultivation of hemp.
And so it went until 1862. Some thirty years after Jefferson's death.
In a certain sense, hemp was killed in the Civil War. When the sailing
ship was dramatically outclassed by the new Ironclads, the Monitor and
Merrimac, hemp became obsolete overnight.
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