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The Tobacco Lords were a group of Scottish merchants active during the Georgian era who made substantial sums of money via their participation in the triangular trade, primarily through dealing in slave-produced tobacco that was grown in the Thirteen Colonies. Concentrated in the port city of Glasgow, these merchants utilised their fortunes, which were also partly made via the direct ownership of slaves, to construct numerous townhouses, churches and other buildings in Scotland.
The tobacco trade was part of broader trade that linked exports of consumer and manufactured goods from Europe with the North American and Caribbean colonies. Operated on plantation economies fuelled by slave labour, these colonies supplied products that found a ready market in Europe. The triangle involved merchants carrying manufactured goods from Europe to West Africa to sell or exchange for slaves which they transported to America and the Caribbean. On the third leg back to Europe they carried tobacco, rum, cotton, sugar and the like.
From 1710, Glasgow became the centre of an economic boom which lasted nearly fifty years. The Tobacco Lords personified this boom and were the nouveau riche of the mid-eighteenth century. Arguably the most successful of these merchants was either Andrew Buchanan of Drumpellier or John Glassford. Glassford entered the tobacco trade in 1750 and soon acquired a fleet of vessels and many tobacco stores across New England. Celebrated in his lifetime, Glassford was the most extensive ship owner of his generation in Scotland and one of the four merchants who laid the foundation of the commercial greatness of Glasgow through the tobacco trade. Tobias Smollett wrote of a meeting with Glassford in 1771:
Some idea of the grandeur of the Tobacco Lords' houses - which often dramatically punctuated the ends of the streets named after them – can be had in the original core of Glasgow. The Gallery of Modern Art, which today occupies the (greatly expanded and embellished by later reconstruction as the Exchange) mansion built for William Cunninghame in 1780, at a cost of £10,000 (equivalent to £ in ). A more modest Tobacco Merchant's House (by James Craig, 1775) is being restored at 42 Miller Street.
St Andrew's Parish Church in St Andrew's Square, built 1739–1756 by Alan Dreghorn was the Tobacco Lords' ostentatious parish church. In the same area was the grand house of Alexander Speirs.
St Andrew's in the Square still survives today and is considered one of the finest classical churches in Britain, Today it is Glasgow's Centre for Scottish Culture, promoting Scottish music, song and dance. The church is located in St Andrew's Square, near Glasgow Cross and Glasgow Green, on the edge of the City's East End. The church, inspired by St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, was built between 1739 and 1756 by Master Mason Mungo Naismith. It was the first Presbyterian church built after the Reformation, and was commissioned by the city's Tobacco Lords as a demonstration of their wealth and power.
Prior to 1740, the Tobacco Lords were responsible for the import of less than 10% of America's tobacco crop, but by the 1750s Glasgow handled more of the trade than the rest of Britain's ports combined. Heavily capitalised, and taking great personal risks, these men made immense fortunes from the "Clockwork Operation" of fast ships coupled with ruthless dealmaking and the manipulation of credit.Oliver, p.341 Planters in Maryland and Virginia were offered easy credit by the Tobacco Lords, enabling them to buy European consumer goods and other luxuries before harvest time gave them the ready cash to do so. But when the time came to sell the crop, the indebted growers found themselves forced by the traders to accept low prices for their harvest in order to stave off bankruptcy.Oliver, p342 At his Mount Vernon slave plantation, future President of the United States George Washington saw his liabilities swell to nearly £2,000 by the late 1760s (equivalent to £ in ).Randall, Willard Sterne. George Washington a Life. New York: Henry Holt &, 1998. Thomas Jefferson, on the verge of losing his own slave plantation Monticello, accused British-based merchants of unfairly depressing tobacco prices and forcing Virginia planters to take on unsustainable debt loads. In 1786, he remarked:
A powerful engine for this mercantile was the giving of good prices and credit to the planter till they got him more immersed in debt than he could pay without selling lands or slaves. They then reduced the prices given for his tobacco so that…they never permitted him to clear off his debt.Breen, T. H. Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985.After the war, few of the enormous debts owed by American colonists would ever be repaid. Despite these setbacks, after the war the Tobacco Lords switched their attention to other profitable parts of the triangular trade, particularly cotton in the British West Indies.
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