THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE LOST.
Three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, sailed from London on December 20, 1606, carrying 144 passengers and crew, bound for Virginia. After being held off the coast of England for six weeks by contrary winds, they crossed the Atlantic by a southerly route, reprovisioned in the West Indies, then headed north, expecting landfall in the third week of April 1607. Instead they found themselves in a tempest. For four days they sounded, seeking offshore shallows in vain. Then, at four o’clock in the morning of April 26, they saw land. The ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay and found, in the words of one voyager, “fair meddowes and goodly tall Trees, with such fresh waters running through the woods, as I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof.”1 They picked an island in a river for a settlement and named it for their king, James.
The English were latecomers to the New World. Although their sailors had explored the western Atlantic for more than a hundred years, the home country, preoccupied by the upheavals of the Reformation and the feral family politics of the Tudors, had followed none of its discoveries with colonies; efforts to settle Newfoundland and North Carolina sputtered out. (Spain, by contrast, built an empire from its colonies spanning two continents, ornamented with cathedrals and universities.)
At the turn of the seventeenth century, however, England was ready to try colonization in earnest. A group of merchant investors, salted with noblemen, called the London Company received a charter from King James I allowing them to develop a swath of the North American coast named Virginia, after his late unmarried predecessor, Elizabeth I.
The promoters of the scheme expected economic benefits. A transatlantic colony would be a haven and a workshop for England’s surplus poor. As Richard Hakluyt, England’s premier geographer, put it, “Valiant youths rusting [from] lack of employment” would find it building a life for themselves overseas. The crops they would grow and the items they would make, Hakluyt went on, could be sold back home, “yield[ing] unto us all the commodities of Europe, Africa and Asia”—the entire rest of the world, no less.2 With luck, the valiant youths might strike it rich. Spain had discovered mother lodes of precious metals in its colonies; why not England? A 1605 comic play, Eastward Ho!, described Virginia colonists using golden chamber pots.
God would be served as well as mammon. Spain was shepherding its indigenous overseas populations into Roman Catholicism (hence its colonial cathedrals). England could convert native Virginians to the true—Anglican—faith.
What the Jamestown colonists found, however, was hardship. In their first year, they took their drinking water from the James River, which resulted in many succumbing to typhoid, dysentery, and (since the stream was tidal) salt poisoning. Once they had dug a well, they were able to drink safely, but growing enough edibles was another trial. Modern studies of tree rings preserved in old logs show that during the first seven years of the colony’s existence, the Chesapeake Bay area was baked by a drought, making gardening and farming virtually impossible. This left the English dependent on bartering for supplies with local natives, whose own stores were depleted. Settlers who died of starvation or disease had to be replaced by new settlers from England, who arrived once or twice a year (the pioneers had been heavily male, but the newcomers increasingly included women).
The colonists were capable of hard work. One month after landing, they built a palisade to protect themselves from possible attack. Over nineteen hot June days, they cut and split more than six hundred trees weighing four hundred to eight hundred pounds each and set them in a triangular trench three football fields long and two and a half feet deep. Four hundred years later, the makers of a Hollywood film about Jamestown built a replica of the fort in about the same amount of time—using power tools.
But forts were not an exportable product. The settlers found a few semiprecious stones—garnets, amethysts, quartz crystals—but no silver or gold. One resupply ship brought German and Polish glassmakers, meant to generate local manufacturing; most of them ran off to live with the natives.
Relations between the settlers and local natives were the most significant variable in Jamestown’s early history. The western Chesapeake was ruled by Wahunsonacock, chief of the Powhatan. He was an expansionist, no less than James I, having brought thirty local tribes under his sway in an empire of fifteen thousand people. Capt. John Smith, one of the early leaders of the Jamestown colony, described Wahunsonacock’s royal state: “He sat covered with a great robe, made of raccoon skins, and all the tails hanging by,” flanked by “two rows of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red.”3 The settlers hoped to make him a tributary of their king; conversely, Wahunsonacock hoped to make the settlers his allies. Sometimes they fought (hence the palisade); sometimes they traded. Wahunsonacock wanted the copper the settlers offered in exchange for food, and he very much wanted their swords and firearms: muzzle-loaded long guns, their charges ignited by matchlocks—clumsy and dangerous to use but deadly, especially when fired in volleys.
But when the Powhatan refused to trade for food, Jamestown’s colonists died horribly. The winter of 1609 was the “starving time.” The colonists ate horses, dogs, vermin, boot leather, even (it was said) corpses. In June 1610 the survivors staggered onto their ships and sailed into the bay, either looking for help or intending to sail home. Help came: the London Company, reorganized as the Virginia Company, had sent three resupply ships from England, which met the despairing colonists in the nick of time.
In a desperate effort to extend the life of the shattered colony, it was put under strict martial law. Men farmed in work parties supervised by overseers, for the common good. Runaways, if captured, were shot, hanged, burned, or beaten to death.
Such a ferocious regime could only be an emergency measure; if word of it got out in England, who would come willingly to live in such a place? Three changes began to improve Jamestown’s prospects.
In 1612 the colonists acquired a marketable crop when one of their number, John Rolfe, introduced seeds of Nicotiana tabacum from Spain’s colonies in South America. The Powhatan smoked a crude local weed, but South American tobacco was sweeter in the mouth; smoking it was already a craze in England. Now the home market would not have to buy from foreigners. By 1620 Jamestown was shipping almost fifty thousand pounds of tobacco across the Atlantic. Fifty years later, Virginia and Maryland, its neighboring colony, would ship fifteen million pounds.
Rolfe gave the colony another benefit—publicity—when he married one of Wahunsonacock’s daughters, Matoaka, better known to history by her childhood nickname, Pocahontas (meaning playful one). She was captured as a teenager during a bout of native-settler strife. She converted to Christianity, was baptized as Rebecca, and married Rolfe in 1614; two years later, she accompanied her husband to England, where she was depicted in a Virginia Company advertisement and presented to the king. The couple set sail for Virginia in 1617, but Rebecca died, age twenty or twenty-one, before their ship exited the Thames River.
A third substantial change was the introduction and regularization of private property. The colony could not flourish as an agricultural garrison state. Beginning in 1616, settlers who had survived there for seven years or more were awarded fifty acres; newcomers were promised fifty, plus an additional fifty for each additional person they brought with them.
What the colony most needed, though, was stable government. Since its inception it had been ruled by a shifting cast of governors, picked and sent out by the London Company (and later by the Virginia Company). Though the governors were assisted by a council of advisors, their own decisions were final, and they could pick and dismiss the members of their council at will. They were not supposed to do anything contrary to the laws of England, but that left much room for improvisation. Wide powers and uncertain tenure, combined with difficult circumstances, led to disagreement and recrimination. The typical firsthand account of early Jamestown argues that everything would have gone well if everyone besides the author had not done wrong. Acrimony in Virginia was matched by squabbles among the company’s investors back in London.
In 1618 a newly dominant faction within the Virginia Company tapped a new governor, George Yeardley, with a mandate for comprehensive reform in the colony. Yeardley was a veteran who had fought against Spain in the Netherlands, survived a shipwreck in Bermuda, and lived at Jamestown for seven years. Before taking up his new job, he had an audience with the king, who knighted him, “to grace him the more.”4 In Virginia he would be assisted by John Pory, a man whose various careers—diplomatic secretary, author, would-be silkworm breeder—included six years’ service in Parliament.
Scholars debate whether Yeardley and his council of advisors meant to liberalize the regime of the colony in the interests of the common good or simply to make it more profitable.5 Their reforms, whether intentional or otherwise, had the former effect.
By 1618 the colony was composed of two dozen settlements spread over seventy miles from the mouth of the James River on Chesapeake Bay to the fall line; Jamestown lay along the north shore about a third of the way in. Under the new dispensation, the colony was divided into four boroughs—an old English unit of government between a town and a county in size—as well as seven plantations, the estates of investors that had been granted quasi-autonomous status (how autonomous was still to be determined). This domain was to be ruled, as before, by the parent company in London, with its day-to-day operations overseen by a governor (now Yeardley).
Yeardley would not rule alone. He was seconded by a Council of State, appointed not by him but by the company. He had another body of helpers too, whose composition marked an epoch in American history.
In June 1619 Yeardley, newly arrived in Virginia from visiting the king, called on the colony’s freemen to elect “by a pluralitie of voices” two burgesses from each borough and plantation. They were to join with him and the Council of State in a “general Assemblie” which would have “free power to treat, consult & conclude… all emergent occasions concerning the publique weale.”6
Since the burgesses would establish such an important precedent, let us record their names.
The four boroughs sent eight burgesses.
(James City, the borough of Jamestown) Capt. William Powell, Ensign William Spense
(Charles City) Samuel Sharpe, Samuel Jordan
(Henricus City) Thomas Dowse, John Polentine
(Kiccowtan) Capt. William Tucker, William Capp
Seven plantations sent fourteen.
(Martin Brandon) Mr. Thomas Davis, Mr. Robert Stacy
(Smythe’s Hundred—not a numeral but an English geographical term) Capt. Thomas Graves, Mr. Walter Shelley
(Martin’s Hundred) Mr. John Boys, John Jackson
(Argall’s Gift) Mr. Pawlett, Mr. Gourgainy
(Flowerdew Hundred) Ensign Roffingham, Mr. Jefferson
(Capt. Lawne’s Plantation) Capt. Christopher Lawne, Ensign Washer
(Capt. Warde’s Plantation) Capt. John Warde, Lt. Gibbes
The first meeting of the General Assembly convened on July 30, 1619, in Jamestown’s church, a wooden building fifty by twenty feet, with plastered walls and a roof of wood or thatch. (Only the foundation survives; the seventeenth-century brick church tower that stands at Jamestown today is the remnant of a later construction.) Yeardley and his Council of State sat in the chancel, the portion of the church nearest the altar. Pory sat in front of them, acting as Speaker or secretary. A sergeant at arms stood by, ready to maintain order. The burgesses sat alongside the chancel in the choir. The Rev. Richard Buck, the cleric who had married Rolfe and Rebecca/Pocahontas, said a prayer (since, as Pory wrote, “men’s affaires doe little prosper where God’s service is neglected”).7 The burgesses were then asked to step into the nave, or body of the church, to swear their loyalty, one by one, to James I. This done, they returned to their seats in the choir, and the General Assembly turned to business.
The business of the first legislature in America began with disputes over credentials. Capt. John Warde was a burgess from his own plantation, fifteen miles upriver. He had, however, settled in the colony without the permission of the Virginia Company; should he be allowed a role in the deliberations of a body that the company had created? Another controversy concerned the two burgesses representing Martin’s Hundred, a plantation ten miles east of Jamestown. But the patent or charter issued to Capt. John Martin, the plantation’s absent master, exempted him and his hundred from the colony’s laws. Governor Yeardley himself objected to the presence of Martin’s burgesses. There was another problem with Martin: a boatload of his men stood accused of stopping Indians in a canoe on the bay and seizing their corn. The settlers had given trinkets in return, but the Indians had not been willing sellers. Relations with the Powhatan had been peaceful since Rolfe’s wedding, but this was not the way to maintain them.
The General Assembly seated Captain Warde on the grounds that he had behaved as a model settler, with the understanding that he procure a commission from the company as soon as possible, which he promised to do. A message addressed to “our very loving friend” Captain Martin ordered him to come to Jamestown to explain himself.
The assembly next formed into committees. Pory explained their business. They were to examine all the instructions that the company had sent to the colony and decide which should become laws (“putt on the habite [clothing] of lawes” was how Pory phrased it). They were also to make their own suggestions for legislation (“what lawes might issue out of the private conceipte [thought] of any of the Burgesses”).8
On July 31 the assembly drew up petitions to send back to the company in London: they wanted more settlers; they wanted a school (“a University and colledge”); they wanted the easternmost borough, Kiccowtan, to change its Indian name to something not “savage” (it would be renamed Elizabeth City); they wanted quit-rents—a fee of twelve pence a year that landowners paid to the company—to be payable in goods, not cash, of which the colonists had little. Most important, they wanted to be sure that any land awarded Governor Yeardley and his councilors as payment for their services not be carved from land that settlers already possessed. “After so much labor and coste, and so many years habitation,” wrote Pory, “no man [should] suffer any wrong in this kinde.”9
They also set the price of tobacco. They summoned Abraham Piersey, keeper of the company’s warehouse, and instructed him to pay three shillings a pound for the best quality and half that (eighteen pence a pound) for second best.
Since the next day, August 1, fell on a Sunday, the assembly did not meet. They lost a member: Walter Shelley, burgess from Smith’s Hundred, died. The cause of death was not recorded, but the heat, which was intense, may have sped his passing. (What made the heat of a Virginia summer even worse was that the colonists made little effort to adjust their dress to it; they continued to wear padded doublets as if they were in Devon or Kent.10)
On August 2 Captain Martin appeared. He promised that his sailors on the bay would behave better toward Indians, but he would not surrender the privileges he had been granted in his patent; as a result, his burgesses were refused seats on the assembly. He would not play by the rules, so he lost his say.
A number of the company’s instructions were given the form of laws. Colonists were forbidden to provoke the Indians; Indians were allowed to live among them, but no more than six per settlement (“though some amongst them… may prove good, they are a treacherous people”).11 The cultivation of wheat, mulberry trees, flax, hemp, and vines was encouraged; tobacco was Virginia’s bonanza, but the company stubbornly insisted on diversification. Tobacco was subjected to quality control. Any leaves that were brought to the company warehouse damp, and thus liable to rot, were to be “burnt before the owner’s face.”12 Contracts made with servants in England were guaranteed in Virginia; the usual form was an indenture, an agreement by one person to serve another for a given time, usually seven years. Crossing the ocean could not cancel an obligation. Idleness, gambling, and drunkenness were penalized.
On August 3, the assembly heard a petition from Capt. William Powell, burgess for Jamestown, complaining of a “lewde and treacherous servante.” The man, Thomas Garnett, had “committed wantonness” with another female servant and accused his master of drunkenness and theft.13 The assembly ruled that Garnett should be whipped and have his ears nailed to the public pillory four days running. (Martial law had been suspended, but ordinary punishments of the seventeenth century were harsh enough.) The assembly also heard a reading of the proposed laws that had issued from the burgesses’ thoughts.
On August 4, Governor Yeardley announced that because of the “extream heat,” which had made him ill, this would be the final meeting of the session.14 The assembly approved the laws proposed by the burgesses: Settlers could offer goods to the Indians in trade, except for large hoes, English dogs, and armaments or ammunition of any kind (the penalty for violating the last prohibition was hanging). The secretary of the colony had to be provided with lists of christenings, burials, marriages, and newly arrived servants. Swearing and whoredom were forbidden, as were stealing boats and slaughtering cattle. Church attendance was required. Colonists who wanted to trade in the bay needed a license. Maids and servant girls who wanted to marry needed parental consent.
There was one potentially ominous development: Wahunsonacock, the Powhatan chief, had died the year before. His place in the Indian empire was taken by a brother or half brother, Opechancanough, a wily leader who may have lived among the Spaniards as a young man. The assembly now heard from Robert Poole, an interpreter who dealt directly with the Indians, who accused another interpreter, Capt. Henry Spelman, of bad-mouthing Governor Yeardley to the new Powhatan ruler, bringing him and the colony “in much disrespect.”15 Captain Spelman defended himself grudgingly and angrily, but he was stripped of his rank and sentenced to labor for the company for seven years, though that would not undo the damage he had done.
Pory’s record of the proceedings ended with an apology for “break[ing] up so abruptly,” which he blamed on the “intemperature of the weather.”16 The next session of the assembly was called for the following March.
Once we get past the premodern language and the odd (and occasionally awful) customs—quit-rents, ear nailing—the deliberations of that first five-day session of the General Assembly have a familiar ring: the sweltering Virginians discussed economic self-interest, regulation of morals, and foreign relations (the Powhatan were an alien state, however near and—for now—friendly). Every legislative body deals with the first two subjects; every national one also considers the third. Anyone who has watched a political convention is familiar with credentials fights.
Familiarity must not blind us to the newness of this happening in North America in 1619. The General Assembly was not a fully formed legislature yet: there was no distribution of power among executives, aristocracy, and people; the governor, his appointed advisors, and elected burgesses sat mixed together. Their deliberations—how to punish Thomas Garnett, for example—were sometimes those of a court rather than a lawmaking body. Sticking the burgesses in the choir, while the governor and his council sat in the center of the chancel, was a spatial mark of subordination. (The business of a church service is not done in the choir; sermons are not preached nor sacraments administered there.)
Still, the General Assembly had some of the most important qualities of a legislature. The model naturally was England’s Parliament. Proposed laws were read three times, a parliamentary practice designed to ensure clarity and understanding and to prevent sleight of hand. John Pory was called (likely at his own suggestion) Speaker, the title of the presiding officer of the House of Commons, although he was effectively the assembly’s clerk.
The language of the assembly’s deliberations was mild, even timid—until you looked closely. Pory inserted into his record of the first day, July 30, a question: Why had the assembly assigned committees to discuss instructions that the Virginia Company “had already resolved to be perfecte, and did expect nothing but our assente thereunto”? The real power in the company was in England, not Virginia; why hadn’t the Virginians simply rubber-stamped whatever directions they were given? Pory answered modestly: “We did it not to the ende to correcte or controll anything” but to petition for redress. The Virginians were only asking their transatlantic masters to change their instructions wherever necessary.
But when was change necessary? Pory’s instances, mentioned in passing, were quite extensive: the assembly would suggest changing any of the company’s instructions that did not “perfectly squar[e]… with the state of this Colony” or “any lawe which did presse or binde too harde.”17 In other words, the assembly might ask to change anything that did not fit their assessment of conditions on the ground or that struck them as onerous—which could be almost anything they disagreed with or disliked. The assembly was presuming the principle of local control, or home rule.
Its discussion of tobacco price-setting on July 30 had the same character. Abraham Piersey, warehouse manager, agreed to offer the three shilling/eighteen pence per pound price schedule if “the Governor and Assembly,” acting on the instructions of the company, “layd their commandment upon him.”18 The prices had been proposed in London, but it was the government in Jamestown that made them stick.
The last motion of the assembly on August 4 was simultaneously humble and assertive. It was up to the company, the Virginians admitted, “to allowe or to abrogate any lawes which we shall here make.” Yet they requested that “these lawes which we have now brought to light… be of force” until they learned the company’s pleasure.19 The company could veto, but the assembly legislated. Since the company’s disapproval could be rendered and received only after two transatlantic voyages—each perhaps as long as the four months it had taken the first ships to arrive—the assembly was claiming considerable leeway. The company knew it and rejected this request.
Another notable feature of the assembly concerned its decisions. They were to be made the same way the burgesses were picked: by vote. “All matters shall be decided, determined & ordered by the greater part of the voices then present” (the governor was allowed a veto).20 The governor’s council sat in the chancel, the burgesses in the choir. But when it came time to decide, all assemblymen were equal.
Under this new regime, more settlers came—over thirty-five hundred in forty-two ships—between 1619 and 1621. Disease and death decimated them (the winter of 1622 was a second starving time), but still the population grew. Yeardley, who retired from the governorship in 1621, moved to a plantation called Flowerdew, where he built a windmill. A watermill was being built near Jamestown; upriver there was an ironworks. It was all too much for Opechancanough. The Virginians, it seemed to him, were not auxiliary newcomers who might be occasional allies or sources of copper but permanent neighbors bound to become rivals. On March 22, 1622, he launched a massive, well-planned strike on twenty-eight plantations and settlements, killing 347 men, women, and children—a quarter to a third of the colony’s population. As the survivors fled outlying settlements, huddling together for safety, the Indians destroyed their abandoned property. William Capp of Elizabeth City had been one of the first burgesses. “God forgive me,” he now wrote, “I think the last massacre killed all our Country, besides them they killed, they burst the heart of all the rest.”21
The colony responded heartlessly. No more biracial weddings or hopes of trade and conversion. The settlers’ counterattack on the Powhatan was sustained and implacable. Technology and discipline overwhelmed numbers. In July 1624, eight hundred Indian warriors risked a two-day battle with sixty well-armed colonists and lost. Twenty years later, Opechancanough, nearly a century old, was captured and shot in the back in a Jamestown jail.
Back in London, the Virginia Company sputtered in wrath at the imprudence of the colonists in allowing themselves to be massacred. But the company itself was on the block for the apparent mismanagement of its colony; a royal commission deemed it “weak and miserable.” In 1624 James I dissolved the company. After he died the following year, he was succeeded by his son, Charles I, who announced that the government of Virginia would henceforth “depend upon Our Self.”22
Charles I was distracted, however, by foreign policy and domestic politics. In the shadow of royal inattention, Virginia’s governors continued to convene the General Assembly, including elected burgesses. In 1639 the status quo was formalized in royal instructions. “Once a year or oftner if urgent occasion shall require,” governor, council, and burgesses were to meet in a “Grand Assembly… to make Acts and laws for the Government” of Virginia.23
The paper trail for the first meeting of the General Assembly is fainter than we would like, considering the momentousness of the occasion. A fire in Richmond, Virginia, at the end of the Civil War consumed most of the colonial archives. Patient scholars found copies of documents in British archives and private collections (including Thomas Jefferson’s) that restitched the record, but there are still gaps. When Yeardley arrived in Jamestown to become governor, he carried a great charter of instructions from the company; it said nothing about convening a General Assembly, but a separate commission to him, mentioned in a 1621 document, evidently did. (This is the telltale phrase: the governor shall have a veto “att any Generall Assembly according to a former commission granted.”24) Another 1621 document, An Ordinance and Constitution for Council and Assembly in Virginia, describes the election of burgesses. John Pory’s official transcript of the first session of the General Assembly is lost; a copy of a report he made based on the official transcript was found in London in the 1850s.25
Practice made real what the paper trail sketches. Crises shook the political world on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the seventeenth century. England was wracked by a civil war, in which one king (Charles I) was executed, and a Glorious Revolution, in which another (James II) was deposed. In Virginia an army of frontiersman, led by a disaffected burgess, Nathaniel Bacon, and inflamed by the corruption of a governor and hatred of Indians, burned Jamestown to the ground in 1676. Still, the assembly marched on. In 1643 the House of Burgesses became an independent body, meeting separately from the governor’s council. Its meeting place moved inland from the unhealthy coast to Williamsburg in 1699.
Other colonies in British North America, and England’s New World empire generally, would have their own assemblies with elected representatives—Bermuda’s first met in 1620—but the example of Virginia was important due to its size as well as its seniority: at the time of the American Revolution, one in five Americans was a Virginian.
Representation is a means by which rulers engineer the consensus of the ruled. As the Somers Isles Company, which ran Bermuda, put it, “Every man will more willingly obey laws to which he hath yielded his consent.”26 So it was in the seventeenth century, and so it remains today. But consent inevitably shades into agency. The representatives who do not presume to correct or control eventually—soon—aspire to control quite a bit. If you give men a portion of rule, they will in time rule themselves, and they will see themselves as worthy to do so. The sense of worthiness belongs both to the people’s representatives and to those who choose them. Just as all matters in the assembly were decided by the greater part of the voices present, so burgesses were picked by a plurality of voices in the boroughs or plantations they represented. Elections were decided and laws approved by adding votes to votes, because no voter (except the governor wielding his veto) was more important or better than any other.
The burgesses were encased in a world of rank, much of it determined by heredity (the king, the House of Lords). Over time the burgesses themselves would fall prey to disorder, power grabs, corruption—the ills of governments everywhere, with and without legislatures. But the Virginia colony would not be ruled entirely from the imperial metropolis or by its onsite administrators. Self-rule in America began, however haltingly, at Jamestown. So did equality.