Free Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar Page B

horses in the woods to escape marauding Union troops—he was a creature of the emerging New South: less agrarian and more entrepreneurial, less rooted and more restless. The day he rode into town, Reynolds had big plans. He knew the flue-cured leaves in the nearby fields were increasingly popular with tobacco chewers. He knew the town had an auction house that would give him access to supply. And he knew a railroad line there could connect him with markets. Within days he bought a plot of land from the Moravian church for $388, and began building a factory. A year later, in 1875, the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co. was in business, along with its share of competitors: In this bustling town of 2,500, there were already fifteen tobacco companies.
    Even in this crowded field, R. J. Reynolds distinguished himself. He innovated, becoming the first to devise a way to make chewing tobacco sweeter, by blending in saccharin. He expanded aggressively, always keeping the capacity of his factory well ahead of current production, and heworked hard, for years living above the factory floor. He played hard, too, drinking deeply, gambling heavily, squiring around different women. He literally drove himself hard, making his way through the countryside with a double team of horses for extra speed. (At an 1890 meeting of the Reynolds board, directors authorized spending $240 a year for Reynolds’s horse team, the equivalent of today’s corporate jet.) The only thing R. J. Reynolds did slowly was speak, in an effort to overcome a lifelong stutter.
    The combination of Mr. RJ’s business acumen with the area’s tenacious Moravian work ethic laid the foundation of the Reynolds corporate culture for decades to come. The Moravians had arrived here in 1753 to settle 100,000 acres of land they bought from Lord Granville of England. These Czechoslovakian immigrants sought not only religious freedom, in the Piedmont region of central Carolina, but also economic self-sufficiency. They were a stubborn, industrious people, skilled at manufacturing and trading and making do. They made Salem important enough that by the 1800s a railroad line ran westward to it from the larger town of Raleigh.
    To a great extent, the policies of Reynolds Tobacco mirrored strong Moravian values. The Moravians believed in the individual subsuming himself for the good of the community, in being conservative in personal bearing as well as in finances. They founded a solid bank called Wachovia, named after a region in the old country, and, when the two towns merged a few years later, gave Winston-Salem a feeling unlike that of other Bible Belt towns. It was more progressive, for the Moravians were great believers in education. They established Salem Female Academy, the first women’s college in the region. R. J. Reynolds and his Moravian workers made a great team, and by the 1890s their company was the clear leader among the area’s many tobacco companies.
    In fact, Reynolds Tobacco grew fast enough that it came to be coveted, as it would a century later, by a ravenous Northern suitor. The 1890s saw the rise of James B. (“Buck”) Duke’s national tobacco trust, which grew by gobbling up regional tobacco companies like RJ Reynolds. Buck Duke’s roots were down the road in Durham, North Carolina, but he had moved his American Tobacco Company to New York to develop the financial contacts that would enable him to expand nationwide. As he became more successful, Duke modeled his tobacco trust after John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and soon effectively controlled the nation’s fledgling cigarettemarket. Buck Duke then turned his attention to taking over the chewing-tobacco business.
    R. J. Reynolds saw the threat and vowed to fight. “If Buck Duke tries to swallow me he will have the bellyache the balance of his life,” he vowed. Then, inexplicably, Mr. RJ made a secret trip to New York in 1899 and cut a deal that gave Duke’s trust a two-thirds stake in Reynolds Tobacco for