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2. GETTING STARTED IN AMERICA

ESTALISHING AN ENGLISH SETTLEMENT IN VIRGINIA

CONTENTS

The "Lost Colony" at Roanoke

The Virginia Colony at Jamestown

Some social-political reforms

Troubles with the Indians

Feudal Virginia

Christian Virginia

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 48-53.
THE "LOST COLONY" AT ROANOKE

And of course the English had a similar interest in laying claim to territory in the New World.  Thus an Elizabethan courtier Sir Walter Raleigh petitioned the Queen to authorize a settlement of English families at a point along what would eventually become North Carolina, in order to enter an English territorial claim to North America.  A Roanoke colony of 116 men, women and children was thus settled at this point in 1587 – with promises of continuing support from England.  But support did not come immediately – because of the English naval battle with the Spanish Armada the following year.  But when a supply ship was able finally to return to the colony, the colony's members were found to be missing.  And there were no signs of what might have happened to them.  This shock brought to a halt further English thoughts of colonizing America – until a generation later when the irresistible idea of gold lured forth new attempts at planting an English foothold in America.

THE VIRGINIA COLONY AT JAMESTOWN

Thus in 1607 another attempt to secure an English position along the North American coast took place, as a English party of three ships and their men (no women this time) – financed by a group of London "Adventurers" (investors) constituting the Virginia Company – arrived in America to begin the search for America's fabled gold.  They immediately built a wooden fort on a small island upriver along the banks of one of the wide rivers feeding into the Chesapeake Bay, honoring their English King James by naming the fort Jamestown and the river the James River.

"Gentlemen just do not dirty their hands in common labor."  But they had made no plans to work together as a community beyond the building of the fort.  Instead they headed out to look for the gold that would make them rich (and status-worthy).  Thankfully they had enough food supplies brought with them (or stolen from the local Powhatan tribe) for them to survive the first winter's rigors.  But with the arrival of the next summer, no effort was made on their part to grow the food they would need to get through another winter – for, like the conquistadors of Mexico and Peru, they were busy looking for the wealth in gold that would allow them to purchase land rights, which in turn would bring them into the status as "gentlemen."  And besides, English gentlemen just simply did not debase themselves by dirtying their hands in common labor.  So, no one bothered to grow the food the colony would need to survive.

A big part of the problem was that the colony lacked true leadership, the kind that could get these Englishmen to work together.  Captain John Smith led the Council briefly, though he preferred adventure (and gold-hunting) over administrative work, and anyway was wounded and had to return to England in 1609 – returning the colony to a leaderless existence.

Consequently, by the third winter of 1609-1610, they nearly all starved to death (420 of the 480 colonists died).  In fact the 60 survivors were in the process of abandoning the Jamestown project when they were intercepted in their departure by the arrival of a new shipment of 150 men and more supplies.  The colony survived at that point – only by coming under the discipline of a new director, Lord De La Warr (Delaware).

Indenture.  More men (and eventually women) were subsequently brought in – as indentured workers. These were common laborers obliged for seven years to do the physical labor required to support community life, as payment for their passage to America and for the tools and a small allotment of land they would need to get their own lives started up in America when the term of indenture was completed.  Finally, under this new dynamic, the Virginia colony began to grow.

Tobacco.  Also, it was soon discovered that although no serious amount of gold was to be found in the colony of Virginia, tobacco, brought to Virginia by the enterprising John Rolfe, proved to be a huge seller back in England.[1]     Considerable wealth could be secured simply by growing and shipping back to England this valuable drug.  Thus vast acres of land were cleared to make way for this single crop – one vital to the growing Virginia economy.

John& Rolfe. Rolfe's passage to America had not been easy.  His ship was hit and destroyed by a hurricane, leaving Rolfe, his wife and baby stranded in Bermuda (where both wife and child died).  It was here that Rolf discovered the tobacco seed that the Virginia economy would eventually be based on.  Finally having a new ship constructed from the wreckage, he made his way to Virginia.  Here he met and in 1614 married Chief Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas, bringing some degree of peace between the English and the Powhatan Indians.  But two years later in a special trip the two of them made to England to publicize the Virginia venture, Pocahontas died, and Rolfe had to return alone to Virginia.  And Rolf would live on only for a half-dozen more years, possibly killed in the Indian uprising of 1622.

[1]Sugar was, at the time, an even vastly more valuable commodity, produced mostly in the Caribbean.  But the Virginia climate was too cool for sugarcane to thrive there.

SOME SOCIAL-POLITICAL REFORMS

Despite the economic boom that came to Virginia, complements of the tobacco trade, changes were needed to attract more settlers to the colony.  In 1617 the Company ended its monopoly on land ownership, allowing private ownership.

By 1619 there were ten major plantations in Virginia, mostly along the wide James River.  In that year Virginia received a new governor (Lord Delaware had died on another trip to America) and a new colonial legislative assembly.  As part of the plan to encourage settlers to come to Virginia, this assembly was set up to give the settlers their own voice through two elected representatives sent to Jamestown from each of the ten plantations, plus Jamestown itself.  Thus in Virginia the idea of representative democracy was first born in America.

TROUBLES WITH THE INDIANS

English settlement on what the Indians knew to be their hunting lands had come to anger the Indians greatly.  Finally in 1622, the new chief Opechancanough (younger brother of Chief Powhatan) struck the English settlements hard, killing 300 to 400 settlers in a single day[2], although Jamestown was spared destruction because of a warning issued by an Indian boy to the inhabitants of the town.  But after a year of constant struggle, both sides arrived at a peace agreement (never fully respected by either side however).

Even at the high death rate of the English settlers, the Indians succeeded in killing off only about a third of the English population.  And although the Indian loss was numerically lower, that loss represented an even higher percentage of the smaller Indian population.

Then another Indian rebellion broke out in 1644 when Opechancanough struck again, killing another 500 English settlers this time.  But Opechancanough was captured and killed, and the Indian rebellion collapsed.  In fact the whole episode ended up breaking Indian power throughout the entire Tidewater region.

But the Indians located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the west were more determined than ever to stop the spread of the English into their lands.

[2]One of the myths perpetrated today for various ideological reasons is that of the "gentle Indian."  The Indians were warriors, their men used to the rigors of battle over the scarce hunting lands that sustained their tribes.  The American Indians could be very cruel, in that they had no use for defeated enemies – who would be just additional mouths to feed should they let them live on (even as slaves) after defeat in battle.  Mostly, enemies were killed on the spot.  Worse, many of the Indians took great delight in watching a captured foe be put through a torturous death.  And women and children were not spared, because their battles were always over the matter of which tribe had the right to the land, an all-or-nothing (men, women, children) affair.

FEUDAL VIRGINIA

Despite the ongoing problems with the Indians over land ownership, enterprising Virginians began to purchase more land with their tobacco profits – until some of the widely scattered tobacco estates were proving to be quite immense, worked by multitudes of indentured[3] laborers, especially those family estates that lined the wide Rappahannock, York and James Rivers of the Virginia Tidewater region.  For instance, the estate of William Byrd II reached 180,000 acres in size by the early 1700s!  These plantations now began to look quite like the great manorial estates back in England.  And thus a Virginia aristocracy was beginning to be formed – modeled closely on England's feudal or class-based culture.

The governorship of Sir William Berkeley.   Presiding over all this was Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley (first period of service, 1642-1652), the exception to the rule that royal-appointed governors were always anxious to move on to better assignments.  Berkeley actually made himself at home in Virginia, developing a plantation there of his own (Green Springs), where he conducted experiments in raising new crops – in an attempt to move Virginia past its one-crop tobacco economy.  He also encouraged the members of the Virginia Assembly to act more independently of the royal government in London. And his role in putting down the 1644 Indian uprising gave him strong support among the Virginians.

But with the overthrow of the Stuart Dynasty back in England, he was ultimately removed from service (1653), until the Restoration in 1660, when he was returned to his position as Virginia governor.  But at that point the dynamic had changed, with Berkeley now overextended in his duties (he was also a co-proprietor of the new Carolina colony) and not able to deal with the growing problem with the Indians in a way that satisfied the Virginia frontiersmen located to the West where thick forest, rocky soil and, most of all, angry Indians made life extremely tough and unrewarding.

Rural Virginia.  Virginia early on would develop essentially as a rural colony, with no real towns developing there – the sole exception being the colony's political capital at Jamestown (later replaced by Williamsburg), where the royal governor had his residence – but which came alive only when a general meeting of the House of Burgesses was being held.  Beyond that, there were no business centers or commercial towns needed for the Virginia colony, as each of the major plantations was quite able to conduct all of its shipping business with its customers back in England right there from the plantation's docks along these wide and deep rivers.  Urban life thus was not an important feature of southern society.

[3]Their indenture involved seven years of service to their masters – who had paid for their passage to America and were obliged to teach their servants a trade, usually tobacco farming.  At the end of their tenure, the servants were then free to set up their own lives elsewhere, although in Virginia once the prime lands along the major Tidewater rivers were taken up by the huge plantations, there was little opportunity for doing well in the mountainous and Indian-defended land to the West.

CHRISTIAN VIRGINIA

To be sure, there developed in Virginia a typical "Christian" character about the society – for that went right along with being English.  Much like in the Catholic Spanish colonies, in Virginia the King's own Church of England was expected to be established as part of the (feudal) political order there.  Parishes were laid out as part of the natural ordering of Virginia and attendance at church service was the law of the land – although the law was not really enforced, in part because there were few Anglican (Episcopal) priests sent on assignment to Virginia and in part because the plantations were so widely scattered and sparsely settled that churches were hard to reach.  Actually, relatively few were even put in place in Virginia.  Anyway, Virginia was not really that much caught up in the religious issues that were keeping old England in constant crisis.  Virginia had other things that concerned it more:  tobacco – and the land and servants needed to work the tobacco fields, while the Virginia aristocrats conducted their necessary social rounds.



Go on to the next section:  The English Settlement in New England

  Miles H. Hodges