In contrast to Thomas Jefferson's yeoman myth, Sarson's groundbreaking analysis of the early national Upper South, Thomas Jefferson's own home region, uncovers extensive inequality, landlessness, and poverty, and often antagonistic relationships between planters, yeoman, artisans, tenants, wage-workers, indentured servants, slaves, and free blacks. With detailed analysis of particular localities, this book explores economic and social life across a region encompassing the tobacco-planting regions of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. It simultaneously takes a cis-Atlantic approach, examining the impacts on local life of the Revolutionary War, non-intercourse and embargoes, the War of 1812, and the structure of the international tobacco trade.

A look at the extensive inequality and individualism in Prince George's County, Maryland, and the wider tobacco south, this book draws on colonial historiography to take a groundbreaking approach and examines the profound impacts of the structure of the international tobacco trade on local life.