The Taste of Independence
The English Civil War and succeeding eight years of rule without a royal governor had an important effect on Jamestown’s and, subsequently, our history in two ways. According to historian Henry William Elson, “For the first and only time during the colonial period Virginia enjoyed absolute self-government. Not only the assembly [sic], but the governor and council were elective for the time, and the people never forgot this taste of practical independence.” This memory is a thread that continued in the increasingly contentious political disputes among the colonies and factions in the British government and establishment from the late 17th and on through the first three quarters of the 18th centuries, when the colonies famously rebelled for our independence.
Elson continued, “The other respect in which the triumph of the Roundheads in England affected Virginia was that it caused an exodus of Cavaliers from England to the colony, similar to the great Puritan migration to Massachusetts…twenty years before.” These new aristocratic immigrants – while a fraction of the number of Puritans – exacerbated social stratification, for the “Cavaliers …were of a far better class than were those who had first settled the colony.” Their incursion began to harden the colony’s societal structure into a new form of American aristocracy. It also began to marginalize some descendants of early settlers who had come on either the strength of their hopes for better economic prospects or to flee the arbitrary class constraints that their offspring now saw emerging to hinder their own upward mobility and freedom.
Billings further says, “For ordinary Virginians, hard times started with the restoration of King Charles II in 1660. The king, his brother, James, Duke of York [later, James II], and their underlings came back to England determined to mold Virginia to their conceptions of empire. They presupposed an imperial system grounded in social order, political obedience, military security and the exclusion of the Dutch from the Virginia trade. [The Dutch, one of the colony’s major trading partners, were soon to be evicted from New York, née New Amsterdam.] Achieving the vision meant limiting [Virginia’s] independence. ”
Meanwhile, the unique and extraordinary opportunity for land ownership by the private citizen had materialized as a reward for indentured servitude in raising tobacco and other forms of labor. This inducement drew shiploads of opportunity seekers from throughout economically distressed and overpopulated England, plus many from Europe. The result of this new wealth creation was that by the second half of the 17th century, “more than 40 percent of members of the House of Burgesses had previously been servants.”
The Bitter Legacy
The first group of “20. and Odd” Africans is known to have been landed at Jamestown in late August 1619 in an unknown state of bondage. They joined a number who were already there, which would gradually increase from between thirty and fifty to the low hundreds during the colony’s first half century, while the English influx grew by tens of thousands. They are thought to have been initially bound to agricultural labor and service under terms similar to the contracts or indentures for specified numbers of years with which many English immigrants had paid for their passage, as “no such condition of lifetime servitude was recognized in English or Virginia law at that time.” An indeterminate number achieved their freedom and the capacity to acquire land and property of their own, but others later found themselves bound by what proved to be indefinite terms.
These were the beginnings of the form of chattel slavery that ultimately became a bitter and divisive social legacy for the new American nation. In the 1640s, following the leads of the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies, the Virginia Assembly began enacting policies and laws that fated almost all Africans and African Americans in the colony to a permanent underclass and involuntary servitude.
In 1661, the new Commonwealth began institutionalizing racially based slavery, "making it de jure". With the emergence of the new elite ruling class during Berkeley’s governorship came an attitude among its members toward the lower classes, particularly Africans and African-Americans, that reflected much less humanity and tolerance, and a facility to arbitrarily relegate them to an inferior or the lowest position in society.
Virginia’s tobacco labor force was predominately composed of English indentured servants until the 1670s, when that immigration flow slowed to a trickle and increasing numbers of laborers were needed to work the colony’s tobacco fields. Historian Martha W. McCartney wrote that, “It is estimated that 75,000 whites emigrated from the British Isles to the Chesapeake colonies between 1630 and 1680, when tobacco consumption was on the rise. Half-to-three-quarters of these people were indentured servants, many of who were poor, unskilled youths. Planters were especially eager to procure male workers to work in their tobacco fields and during the 1630s six times as many men as women became indentured servants”. However, she also tells us that for several decades onward, “…approximately four out of five newly arrived immigrants still perished”.
As economic conditions in the mother country improved in the last third of the century, the attraction of the servitude arrangement faded and it became more difficult to recruit this form of labor. The options of a slave-based work force became more interesting and were enhanced by a new source of supply, as restrictions on the slave trade disappeared and ships under numerous flags, including Boston, brought confined and constrained Africans to Virginia. Almost three generations after the Africans’ first landing, the appalling legacy of racially based slavery took hold as part of Virginia’s economic foundation in the 1660s, and slaves had become dominant in the work force by the mid-1680s. By 1705, relatively few English indentured servants were arriving in Virginia, and chattel slavery was fully institutionalized, so to remain for another 160 years. Its vestiges would remain well into the 20th century.
According to McCartney, “One of the reasons that the history of the seventeenth century continues to command so much of our attention is that, through the first three quarters of that century, alternative, less deplorable, outcomes appear to have been possible”. Jamestown’s legacies, thorns and all, would soon spread beyond Virginia.
This is the sixth of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 5
A New Dominant Culture
The English immigration surge that began in the 1620s established a new dominant culture as the colonists began to outnumber the Algonquians by the 1630s. Dr. Fausz tells us of the March 1622 Algonquian attack, “That terrible, traumatic ’Flood of Blood,’ as John Donne so graphically described it, was immediately recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as a major watershed event, different from anything that English citizens had ever experienced”.
It provoked a sea change in the colonists’ attitudes and treatment of their indigenous neighbors; it also stimulated their “…measured, tempered military campaign that was neither ideological nor genocidal in intent or result. They quickly learned to coexist with their Indian enemies by forging enlightened alliances with Indian friends—and by repudiating both Christian conversion and Christian crusades as dysfunctional and dangerous practices”. Conflict between natives and colonists continued for another decade after 1622. It was then rekindled with another major raid in 1644, led by the Powhatans’ then elderly chief, with the loss of over 400 colonists’ lives. He was captured, but murdered, and another and seemingly final peace treaty was negotiated in 1646, which also established America’s first Indian reservations.
However, the pressures created by the English settlements became irresistible as their numbers spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater and Eastern Shore and into Maryland by 1650. Professor Peter C. Mancall estimates that more than 160,000 English emigrated to the American colonies in the 17th century, of whom 116,000 went to the Chesapeake region. Historian James P. Horn also estimates that “During the 1630s and 1640s the immigration averaged about 8,000-9,000 per decade, but in 1650 to 1680, 16,000-20,000 entered the Chesapeake each decade—the equivalent of England’s second city, Bristol.” Still, the mortality rate for the new immigrants remained at well over 70 percent.
The Virginia Indian tribes were overwhelmed by this, the first wave of the one of the largest mass migrations of the history of humankind. They were also decimated by new European diseases and fought a protracted and futile war against the never-ending influx of immigrants. The second half of the 17th century brought their increasing subjugation, relocation and banishment.
As more and more new settlers arrived and the century wore on, they moved incessantly inland and upland, and displaced native tribes reacted with responses ranging from accommodation and coexistence to resistance and violence during the 1660s and 1670s. The newest settlers especially would often also react with retribution for the violence and include those accommodating tribes among their targets for extirpation. Historians Eric Hinderaker and Mancall estimate that, “Of …twenty thousand Indians who inhabited the Chesapeake on the eve of English settlement, some two thousand were left by the 1670s. The colony’s population, meanwhile, had grown to more than forty thousand”. Anthony Parent also estimates that this Indian population was “an 85 percent decline from the first contact with the English at Jamestown”. Thus, the legacy of over 200 years of devastation of American Indian culture and life began at Jamestown during the latter half of the 17th century.
The Berkeley Era’s Legacies
Billings also tells us, “Rendering an assessment of all [the colony’s governors] is difficult because an absence of records all but obscures their abilities and the individual marks they put upon the colony.” Most of Jamestown’s governmental records were destroyed at Richmond’s destruction during our Civil War, yet there is enough left to know that the colony’s growth took on new dimensions and energy with Charles I’s appointment of Sir William Berkeley as governor in 1641.
Berkeley succeeded a series of royal surrogates of varied quality and distinction who for almost a decade and a half had kept the colony in a state of uncertainty ranging from turmoil and emergency to stabilization, conciliation and reform. According to Billings, “Berkeley’s thirty-five year tenure marks him as one of Virginia’s most significant chief executives; he was also one of the most controversial. Berkeley stood with that handful who closely identified themselves with leading Virginians and their interests, even when those interests opposed the Crown’s…His arrival was also timely, for he governed Virginia during the crucial decades from the 1640s to the 1690s. These were the years when the General Assembly matured into a miniature parliament, and political power was divided between the provincial [i.e., colonial] and the county governments. Berkeley encouraged both developments for they comported with his political style.”
During most of its existence, and at his arrival, the Assembly consisted of the governor, twelve to sixteen councilors that he appointed, and the Burgesses that were elected by each county and Jamestown. Berkeley soon saw the need and benefits from governing the colony with a form of bicameral legislature that was to become a template, over the coming century, for our Congress and most of our state governing bodies.
His first step was to encourage the House of Burgesses to meet as a body separately from the Assembly. He also appointed Virginians to the key offices in the colony, including continuing the tradition of maintaining civilian control of the militias or military, as had been the policy since Company days. The colonial burgesses also concurrently initiated what developed into our unique congressional institution of an elected Speaker of the House (which differed significantly from the English crown-appointed version).
At the same time, English history was taking a turn that would greatly affect Jamestown. After years of political contention and violence, the monarchy and its royalist adherents (“Cavaliers”) and the Puritan-led Parliament (“Roundheads”) squared off in 1642 in the English Civil War; Berkeley had arrived just before it began. In 1646, the Roundheads began prevailing; three years later, Charles I was beheaded, and, by 1650, the interregnum commenced. England became a Commonwealth and then a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Parliament also recast Virginia as a Commonwealth.
Parliament then commissioned four Virginians to gain the colony’s obedience to the new regime, Berkeley’s resignation and interdiction of Dutch trade for the benefit of a London mercantile monopoly. In 1652, a Parliamentary enforcement fleet was sent to Jamestown and, for the first time, the colony experienced an English military force, which obliged Berkeley to step down and surrender a royalist-leaning Virginia to the new rulers. During the interregnum, the Burgesses dominated the colonial government. Councilors and governors were also elected, but were relatively passive.
On May 3, 1660, anticipating the restoration of the monarchy, the Assembly took a major step on our nation’s road to self-determination when it elected Berkeley to the governorship, who was also then reaffirmed by Charles II. He chose to retain almost all of the members of the Assembly, whether royalist or not.
This is the fifth of nine parts
Copyright 2008
The English immigration surge that began in the 1620s established a new dominant culture as the colonists began to outnumber the Algonquians by the 1630s. Dr. Fausz tells us of the March 1622 Algonquian attack, “That terrible, traumatic ’Flood of Blood,’ as John Donne so graphically described it, was immediately recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as a major watershed event, different from anything that English citizens had ever experienced”.
It provoked a sea change in the colonists’ attitudes and treatment of their indigenous neighbors; it also stimulated their “…measured, tempered military campaign that was neither ideological nor genocidal in intent or result. They quickly learned to coexist with their Indian enemies by forging enlightened alliances with Indian friends—and by repudiating both Christian conversion and Christian crusades as dysfunctional and dangerous practices”. Conflict between natives and colonists continued for another decade after 1622. It was then rekindled with another major raid in 1644, led by the Powhatans’ then elderly chief, with the loss of over 400 colonists’ lives. He was captured, but murdered, and another and seemingly final peace treaty was negotiated in 1646, which also established America’s first Indian reservations.
However, the pressures created by the English settlements became irresistible as their numbers spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater and Eastern Shore and into Maryland by 1650. Professor Peter C. Mancall estimates that more than 160,000 English emigrated to the American colonies in the 17th century, of whom 116,000 went to the Chesapeake region. Historian James P. Horn also estimates that “During the 1630s and 1640s the immigration averaged about 8,000-9,000 per decade, but in 1650 to 1680, 16,000-20,000 entered the Chesapeake each decade—the equivalent of England’s second city, Bristol.” Still, the mortality rate for the new immigrants remained at well over 70 percent.
The Virginia Indian tribes were overwhelmed by this, the first wave of the one of the largest mass migrations of the history of humankind. They were also decimated by new European diseases and fought a protracted and futile war against the never-ending influx of immigrants. The second half of the 17th century brought their increasing subjugation, relocation and banishment.
As more and more new settlers arrived and the century wore on, they moved incessantly inland and upland, and displaced native tribes reacted with responses ranging from accommodation and coexistence to resistance and violence during the 1660s and 1670s. The newest settlers especially would often also react with retribution for the violence and include those accommodating tribes among their targets for extirpation. Historians Eric Hinderaker and Mancall estimate that, “Of …twenty thousand Indians who inhabited the Chesapeake on the eve of English settlement, some two thousand were left by the 1670s. The colony’s population, meanwhile, had grown to more than forty thousand”. Anthony Parent also estimates that this Indian population was “an 85 percent decline from the first contact with the English at Jamestown”. Thus, the legacy of over 200 years of devastation of American Indian culture and life began at Jamestown during the latter half of the 17th century.
The Berkeley Era’s Legacies
Billings also tells us, “Rendering an assessment of all [the colony’s governors] is difficult because an absence of records all but obscures their abilities and the individual marks they put upon the colony.” Most of Jamestown’s governmental records were destroyed at Richmond’s destruction during our Civil War, yet there is enough left to know that the colony’s growth took on new dimensions and energy with Charles I’s appointment of Sir William Berkeley as governor in 1641.
Berkeley succeeded a series of royal surrogates of varied quality and distinction who for almost a decade and a half had kept the colony in a state of uncertainty ranging from turmoil and emergency to stabilization, conciliation and reform. According to Billings, “Berkeley’s thirty-five year tenure marks him as one of Virginia’s most significant chief executives; he was also one of the most controversial. Berkeley stood with that handful who closely identified themselves with leading Virginians and their interests, even when those interests opposed the Crown’s…His arrival was also timely, for he governed Virginia during the crucial decades from the 1640s to the 1690s. These were the years when the General Assembly matured into a miniature parliament, and political power was divided between the provincial [i.e., colonial] and the county governments. Berkeley encouraged both developments for they comported with his political style.”
During most of its existence, and at his arrival, the Assembly consisted of the governor, twelve to sixteen councilors that he appointed, and the Burgesses that were elected by each county and Jamestown. Berkeley soon saw the need and benefits from governing the colony with a form of bicameral legislature that was to become a template, over the coming century, for our Congress and most of our state governing bodies.
His first step was to encourage the House of Burgesses to meet as a body separately from the Assembly. He also appointed Virginians to the key offices in the colony, including continuing the tradition of maintaining civilian control of the militias or military, as had been the policy since Company days. The colonial burgesses also concurrently initiated what developed into our unique congressional institution of an elected Speaker of the House (which differed significantly from the English crown-appointed version).
At the same time, English history was taking a turn that would greatly affect Jamestown. After years of political contention and violence, the monarchy and its royalist adherents (“Cavaliers”) and the Puritan-led Parliament (“Roundheads”) squared off in 1642 in the English Civil War; Berkeley had arrived just before it began. In 1646, the Roundheads began prevailing; three years later, Charles I was beheaded, and, by 1650, the interregnum commenced. England became a Commonwealth and then a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Parliament also recast Virginia as a Commonwealth.
Parliament then commissioned four Virginians to gain the colony’s obedience to the new regime, Berkeley’s resignation and interdiction of Dutch trade for the benefit of a London mercantile monopoly. In 1652, a Parliamentary enforcement fleet was sent to Jamestown and, for the first time, the colony experienced an English military force, which obliged Berkeley to step down and surrender a royalist-leaning Virginia to the new rulers. During the interregnum, the Burgesses dominated the colonial government. Councilors and governors were also elected, but were relatively passive.
On May 3, 1660, anticipating the restoration of the monarchy, the Assembly took a major step on our nation’s road to self-determination when it elected Berkeley to the governorship, who was also then reaffirmed by Charles II. He chose to retain almost all of the members of the Assembly, whether royalist or not.
This is the fifth of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning; Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 4
Jamestown’s Earliest Legacies
To spur colonial agriculture, the Company introduced a policy of granting 100 acres (known as “headrights”) to each of those settlers who had arrived before 1616, paid their own passage and remained for three years (known as “ancient planters”); they were also granted another 50 acres for each person for whom they paid passage. Later settlers and colonial landowners received 50 acres’ headrights as incentives for underwriting the immigration of more laborers and settlers. The Company also made similar grants to its investors in lieu of a dividend that it was unable to pay from profits. These became the New World’s first land patents (or deeds in our modern vernacular) owned by common citizens, instead of by the crown, aristocracy or Church, as had been the time immemorial practice in Europe and England. By 1623 – only 16 years after the first Jamestown settlers had arrived – all landholdings were converted to private ownership.
The Company also succumbed to the inefficiencies of its policy of centralizing the trading of needed commodities, imports and exports solely through its “magazines” (conceptually similar to company-owned stores). In 1620, it freed the colonists to seek and trade for their own needs with whomever they desired, giving birth to the free enterprise system.
By then, they also had started our real estate industry, as land ownership, investing and transactions among common citizens became one of the essential elements and basic drivers of the colony’s and what would be our future nation’s economy. This would become an important pool of capital for future American economic independence.
After seven years of tension, rapprochement and frequent violence, a tentative peace between the settlers and the Powhatans (the Algonquian Tidewater tribal federation) stemmed from the abduction and 1614 marriage between the renowned native princess Matoaka (“Pocahontas”) and John Rolfe, the creator of the new Virginia tobacco blend, who were literally the parents of the new tobacco industry.
The Algonquian culture included successful tobacco farming and it seems certain that the Powhatans assisted the colonists in securing Jamestown’s economic survival and assuring Virginia’s permanence. The promise of success of this new industry encouraged the Company to send more settlers, including the first groups of women, which gave the colony a new foundation of families for its long-term continuity and growth.
At the same time, Jamestown’s remote governance – at least a six to ten weeks’ voyage from London – was proving unfeasible. In 1619, the Company authorized the colony to elect a representative legislature – the General Assembly – that would enable the settlers to manage their local affairs and finances and govern themselves more effectively and expeditiously. It was composed of “burgesses” elected by each of the colony’s settlements, the Company’s royally appointed governor and a council of state (appointed councillors, or advisors). Almost all male colonists (“every free man and company tenant”) were enfranchised from the Assembly’s creation in 1619 until 1670, when property ownership became a voting qualification (and would remain so, in Virginia, for almost another two hundred years).
1622 and the following two years brought matters to a head and set the stage for a major change in the colony’s status and structure. There had been major dissatisfaction with the Virginia Company’s policies and lack of business success and profits for some time. The potential for Virginia’s opportunities was also apparently beginning to dawn on the crown and the rest of the English establishment, despite James I’s abhorrence of tobacco.
In March 1622, the Powhatans and their allies mounted a well-planned and coordinated surprise attack throughout the colony to drive the English from their ancestral homelands that shattered the tenuous eight-year peace and left over a quarter of the settlers dead. The score of outlying plantations were decimated but warnings spared Jamestown itself.
The effect of the assault on the colony was not unlike that of the terrorists’ plane crashes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon almost four centuries later. The news of this catastrophe was one of the final blows for its private backers. New settlers who then arrived on the Abigail from London in spring 1623 introduced a virulent epidemic that killed more settlers than the Powhatan raids, which helped to precipitate the Virginia Company’s demise. There was a realization that less than one of six had survived of about 7,000 of those who had emigrated to establish Virginia.
The End of the Beginning
These were chief among the factors that brought about the commission of a royal inquiry, the revocation of the Company’s charter and its dissolution in 1624. James I died in March 1625 without resolving the colony’s status and was succeeded by his son, Charles I, who made Virginia a crown province. The Virginia Company’s investors were wiped out with a loss estimated at over £200,000 (as valued at the time, or the 2007 equivalent of over $27,000,000). The new monarch soon reaffirmed the colonists’ land ownership rights, but not their elected legislature, creating uncertainty for it. The crown’s governors then ruled Virginia for the next one hundred fifty one years, except for two brief spans.
Jamestown was followed by the English settlements and colonies in Massachusetts in 1620 and Maryland in 1634. The Dutch also had established New Amsterdam in 1624 (which, about forty years later, became New York). Free enterprise began to thrive as Virginians were shipping 300,000 pounds of tobacco annually by 1627 and soon were establishing active trade relations with those settlements, England and Europe.
Jamestown remained the colonial capital after 1624, but the life of the colony began flowing out into the ever-growing tobacco plantations owned by increasingly wealthy settler families, who began to be joined slowly by English aristocracy who saw new fortunes in the Tidewater. The agrarian form of Virginia’s economy did not foster the growth of towns and cities, as in New England, but efforts to further the development of Jamestown continued. A new colonial administration resolved to center trade there in 1631–32, but other attempts to centralize economic and local governmental functions would not succeed because of the population dispersion throughout the plantations.
The Assembly, in the absence of royal direction, soon resumed managing local fiscal policies and law making, administration and adjudication, filling a political vacuum that neither the governor nor his councilors could. This concept of local governance was adopted by other colonies for similar reasons and set a precedent for their own lawmaking and fiscal capacities, enabling them to be self-reliant. These capacities would become the touchstone for their mutual independence with Virginia in the following century.
The Assembly also created local governing bodies (that would become counties) and, in 1634, they adapted the English county court system to more effectively and locally administer law, which evolved into a major feature of the American jurisprudence structure. In addition, the concept of geographical legislative representation also appeared as the colonial government matured, for “Here was a custom created by local magistrates aiming to control local affairs that fostered a later American idea of the representative as a person whose personal obligation lay with the voters of the district. Such an accidental development diverged from the seventeenth century English understanding”.
Charles I finally reaffirmed the Assembly in 1639, which legitimated and began the ascendancy of an elected representative legislative body that would breed a major feature of our own new constitution almost fifteen decades later. Also, by 1639, Virginia-born councillors had also exerted their influence to oust an unpopular governor, which “opened the door to the rise of the colony’s ruling classes…Their achievements typified the emergence of a native ruling class that in some ways resembled England’s.”
The newly minted crown province or dominion continued to expand and develop. Within a generation, though, its social structure began to change into a more highly stratified class system. Some colonists found that it offered opportunities for economic and class betterment that were unavailable to them in England and furthered the new arrangement, but others found it too similar to the one they had escaped.
This is the fourth of nine parts
Copyright 2008
To spur colonial agriculture, the Company introduced a policy of granting 100 acres (known as “headrights”) to each of those settlers who had arrived before 1616, paid their own passage and remained for three years (known as “ancient planters”); they were also granted another 50 acres for each person for whom they paid passage. Later settlers and colonial landowners received 50 acres’ headrights as incentives for underwriting the immigration of more laborers and settlers. The Company also made similar grants to its investors in lieu of a dividend that it was unable to pay from profits. These became the New World’s first land patents (or deeds in our modern vernacular) owned by common citizens, instead of by the crown, aristocracy or Church, as had been the time immemorial practice in Europe and England. By 1623 – only 16 years after the first Jamestown settlers had arrived – all landholdings were converted to private ownership.
The Company also succumbed to the inefficiencies of its policy of centralizing the trading of needed commodities, imports and exports solely through its “magazines” (conceptually similar to company-owned stores). In 1620, it freed the colonists to seek and trade for their own needs with whomever they desired, giving birth to the free enterprise system.
By then, they also had started our real estate industry, as land ownership, investing and transactions among common citizens became one of the essential elements and basic drivers of the colony’s and what would be our future nation’s economy. This would become an important pool of capital for future American economic independence.
After seven years of tension, rapprochement and frequent violence, a tentative peace between the settlers and the Powhatans (the Algonquian Tidewater tribal federation) stemmed from the abduction and 1614 marriage between the renowned native princess Matoaka (“Pocahontas”) and John Rolfe, the creator of the new Virginia tobacco blend, who were literally the parents of the new tobacco industry.
The Algonquian culture included successful tobacco farming and it seems certain that the Powhatans assisted the colonists in securing Jamestown’s economic survival and assuring Virginia’s permanence. The promise of success of this new industry encouraged the Company to send more settlers, including the first groups of women, which gave the colony a new foundation of families for its long-term continuity and growth.
At the same time, Jamestown’s remote governance – at least a six to ten weeks’ voyage from London – was proving unfeasible. In 1619, the Company authorized the colony to elect a representative legislature – the General Assembly – that would enable the settlers to manage their local affairs and finances and govern themselves more effectively and expeditiously. It was composed of “burgesses” elected by each of the colony’s settlements, the Company’s royally appointed governor and a council of state (appointed councillors, or advisors). Almost all male colonists (“every free man and company tenant”) were enfranchised from the Assembly’s creation in 1619 until 1670, when property ownership became a voting qualification (and would remain so, in Virginia, for almost another two hundred years).
1622 and the following two years brought matters to a head and set the stage for a major change in the colony’s status and structure. There had been major dissatisfaction with the Virginia Company’s policies and lack of business success and profits for some time. The potential for Virginia’s opportunities was also apparently beginning to dawn on the crown and the rest of the English establishment, despite James I’s abhorrence of tobacco.
In March 1622, the Powhatans and their allies mounted a well-planned and coordinated surprise attack throughout the colony to drive the English from their ancestral homelands that shattered the tenuous eight-year peace and left over a quarter of the settlers dead. The score of outlying plantations were decimated but warnings spared Jamestown itself.
The effect of the assault on the colony was not unlike that of the terrorists’ plane crashes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon almost four centuries later. The news of this catastrophe was one of the final blows for its private backers. New settlers who then arrived on the Abigail from London in spring 1623 introduced a virulent epidemic that killed more settlers than the Powhatan raids, which helped to precipitate the Virginia Company’s demise. There was a realization that less than one of six had survived of about 7,000 of those who had emigrated to establish Virginia.
The End of the Beginning
These were chief among the factors that brought about the commission of a royal inquiry, the revocation of the Company’s charter and its dissolution in 1624. James I died in March 1625 without resolving the colony’s status and was succeeded by his son, Charles I, who made Virginia a crown province. The Virginia Company’s investors were wiped out with a loss estimated at over £200,000 (as valued at the time, or the 2007 equivalent of over $27,000,000). The new monarch soon reaffirmed the colonists’ land ownership rights, but not their elected legislature, creating uncertainty for it. The crown’s governors then ruled Virginia for the next one hundred fifty one years, except for two brief spans.
Jamestown was followed by the English settlements and colonies in Massachusetts in 1620 and Maryland in 1634. The Dutch also had established New Amsterdam in 1624 (which, about forty years later, became New York). Free enterprise began to thrive as Virginians were shipping 300,000 pounds of tobacco annually by 1627 and soon were establishing active trade relations with those settlements, England and Europe.
Jamestown remained the colonial capital after 1624, but the life of the colony began flowing out into the ever-growing tobacco plantations owned by increasingly wealthy settler families, who began to be joined slowly by English aristocracy who saw new fortunes in the Tidewater. The agrarian form of Virginia’s economy did not foster the growth of towns and cities, as in New England, but efforts to further the development of Jamestown continued. A new colonial administration resolved to center trade there in 1631–32, but other attempts to centralize economic and local governmental functions would not succeed because of the population dispersion throughout the plantations.
The Assembly, in the absence of royal direction, soon resumed managing local fiscal policies and law making, administration and adjudication, filling a political vacuum that neither the governor nor his councilors could. This concept of local governance was adopted by other colonies for similar reasons and set a precedent for their own lawmaking and fiscal capacities, enabling them to be self-reliant. These capacities would become the touchstone for their mutual independence with Virginia in the following century.
The Assembly also created local governing bodies (that would become counties) and, in 1634, they adapted the English county court system to more effectively and locally administer law, which evolved into a major feature of the American jurisprudence structure. In addition, the concept of geographical legislative representation also appeared as the colonial government matured, for “Here was a custom created by local magistrates aiming to control local affairs that fostered a later American idea of the representative as a person whose personal obligation lay with the voters of the district. Such an accidental development diverged from the seventeenth century English understanding”.
Charles I finally reaffirmed the Assembly in 1639, which legitimated and began the ascendancy of an elected representative legislative body that would breed a major feature of our own new constitution almost fifteen decades later. Also, by 1639, Virginia-born councillors had also exerted their influence to oust an unpopular governor, which “opened the door to the rise of the colony’s ruling classes…Their achievements typified the emergence of a native ruling class that in some ways resembled England’s.”
The newly minted crown province or dominion continued to expand and develop. Within a generation, though, its social structure began to change into a more highly stratified class system. Some colonists found that it offered opportunities for economic and class betterment that were unavailable to them in England and furthered the new arrangement, but others found it too similar to the one they had escaped.
This is the fourth of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning; Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 3
Jamestown’s Historical Context
Jamestown is better understood in the context of what was happening in England and the entire Atlantic community during its planning, establishment and existence, and what we are learning about the environment in the then New World and its native communities and societies.
English history at the close of the 16th and in the 17th centuries was complex. It was the Era of Religious Discord and economic times were difficult. The English economy was depressed by major agricultural changes, as the new wool-growing practices of “enclosures” by the great landowners drove thousands of small farmers and their families and laborers from rural land tenancy into urban poverty and starvation, plus increased crime and a surplus and overcrowded population, which doubled (from 2.3 to 4.8 million) between 1520 and 1630.
England was also suffering from the lingering effects of the extended series of wars for religious supremacy with Spain, which ended only after “the pacifically inclined James VI of Scotland” succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603. The nation had been nearly bankrupted and Spain was.
The desperate societal conditions drove more than a few to risk health and life to seek any hopeful prospect of fleeing the economic deprivations and dislocations, oppressive class stratification, urban distress, religious turmoil and tedious years of war. Determined promoters and advocates for English colonization and global trade, especially cleric and scholar Richard Hakluyt, inspired the mercantile or entrepreneurial class to search for new economic opportunities outside of England, which included 16th century trading ventures sent to Muscovy (Russia), the Levant (eastern Mediterranean) and newly named Virginia in the New World (Roanoke), and, at the opening of the 17th, another to East India (India, Malaya and the East Indies).
The entrepreneurs who organized and financed those venture companies saw profit opportunities in solving the country’s economic problems but received little or no support from either Elizabeth’s or James’s virtually insolvent crown treasuries. The latter also distanced himself from the Virginia venture because he did not want to risk jeopardizing his recently concluded a peace agreement with Spain by openly sponsoring a settlement in what the Spanish claimed as their territory by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.
Within three years of his coronation, though, he decided to generate new income for his depleted coffers by chartering a new private trading monopoly in the New World, the Virginia Company, to exploit the opportunities that its proponents were seeking. The new venture was also given a religious objective: to plant the Protestant Anglican religion in the New World and proselytize the indigenous people for Christianity. Hakluyt and other investors saw this as a strategy to help thwart Spanish and French expansion of Roman Catholicism in North America and included it in the Virginia Company’s patent.
Its organizers had learned from Hakluyt, plus reports from over a century of explorers’ and English fishermen’s experiences, English Caribbean ventures and the attempted Roanoke colonization in the late 1580s, that the mid-Atlantic New World promised astonishing new resources. However, one important eyewitness told them that precious jewels and gold probably did not abound there from what the indigenous people displayed, unlike what the Spanish had found in Mexico and South America.
Nevertheless, they needed to entice and recruit investors, soldiers and explorers to see what could be found to exploit the resources, generate new commerce and profits and open a new sea route to the trading riches of the East Indies and Asia. Despite the lack of empirical evidence, stories of the promise of Virginia gold were widely circulated, enough so as to have become legend, which was extended to the goals that were set for the Company’s privately backed expedition.
The Virginia Company raised the investment capital to undertake its trading mission from “adventurers,” ranging from trade and artisan guilds and other London organizations to individuals – including a diversity that included gentry and wealthy merchants plus carpenters and other ordinary citizens – and ran a public lottery. This private capital was Jamestown’s sole funding for its first seventeen years’ existence. It took about ten years to transform it from a trading outpost into a colony, when it finally began to develop its economic viability from a burgeoning demand for a new Virginia blend of tobacco.
This transformation came at a horrifying cost in colonists’ lives that is all too well known and remembered. However, according to historian Edmund S. Morgan, “Because of the chances for such profits, Jamestown in the last years of the Virginia Company, while a charnel house, was also the first American boom town.”
This is the third of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Jamestown is better understood in the context of what was happening in England and the entire Atlantic community during its planning, establishment and existence, and what we are learning about the environment in the then New World and its native communities and societies.
English history at the close of the 16th and in the 17th centuries was complex. It was the Era of Religious Discord and economic times were difficult. The English economy was depressed by major agricultural changes, as the new wool-growing practices of “enclosures” by the great landowners drove thousands of small farmers and their families and laborers from rural land tenancy into urban poverty and starvation, plus increased crime and a surplus and overcrowded population, which doubled (from 2.3 to 4.8 million) between 1520 and 1630.
England was also suffering from the lingering effects of the extended series of wars for religious supremacy with Spain, which ended only after “the pacifically inclined James VI of Scotland” succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603. The nation had been nearly bankrupted and Spain was.
The desperate societal conditions drove more than a few to risk health and life to seek any hopeful prospect of fleeing the economic deprivations and dislocations, oppressive class stratification, urban distress, religious turmoil and tedious years of war. Determined promoters and advocates for English colonization and global trade, especially cleric and scholar Richard Hakluyt, inspired the mercantile or entrepreneurial class to search for new economic opportunities outside of England, which included 16th century trading ventures sent to Muscovy (Russia), the Levant (eastern Mediterranean) and newly named Virginia in the New World (Roanoke), and, at the opening of the 17th, another to East India (India, Malaya and the East Indies).
The entrepreneurs who organized and financed those venture companies saw profit opportunities in solving the country’s economic problems but received little or no support from either Elizabeth’s or James’s virtually insolvent crown treasuries. The latter also distanced himself from the Virginia venture because he did not want to risk jeopardizing his recently concluded a peace agreement with Spain by openly sponsoring a settlement in what the Spanish claimed as their territory by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.
Within three years of his coronation, though, he decided to generate new income for his depleted coffers by chartering a new private trading monopoly in the New World, the Virginia Company, to exploit the opportunities that its proponents were seeking. The new venture was also given a religious objective: to plant the Protestant Anglican religion in the New World and proselytize the indigenous people for Christianity. Hakluyt and other investors saw this as a strategy to help thwart Spanish and French expansion of Roman Catholicism in North America and included it in the Virginia Company’s patent.
Its organizers had learned from Hakluyt, plus reports from over a century of explorers’ and English fishermen’s experiences, English Caribbean ventures and the attempted Roanoke colonization in the late 1580s, that the mid-Atlantic New World promised astonishing new resources. However, one important eyewitness told them that precious jewels and gold probably did not abound there from what the indigenous people displayed, unlike what the Spanish had found in Mexico and South America.
Nevertheless, they needed to entice and recruit investors, soldiers and explorers to see what could be found to exploit the resources, generate new commerce and profits and open a new sea route to the trading riches of the East Indies and Asia. Despite the lack of empirical evidence, stories of the promise of Virginia gold were widely circulated, enough so as to have become legend, which was extended to the goals that were set for the Company’s privately backed expedition.
The Virginia Company raised the investment capital to undertake its trading mission from “adventurers,” ranging from trade and artisan guilds and other London organizations to individuals – including a diversity that included gentry and wealthy merchants plus carpenters and other ordinary citizens – and ran a public lottery. This private capital was Jamestown’s sole funding for its first seventeen years’ existence. It took about ten years to transform it from a trading outpost into a colony, when it finally began to develop its economic viability from a burgeoning demand for a new Virginia blend of tobacco.
This transformation came at a horrifying cost in colonists’ lives that is all too well known and remembered. However, according to historian Edmund S. Morgan, “Because of the chances for such profits, Jamestown in the last years of the Virginia Company, while a charnel house, was also the first American boom town.”
This is the third of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning; Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 2
In the Shadows of American History
We must also realize why Jamestown disappeared from our national consciousness and into the shadows of our history. To paraphrase another observer, most 19th and 20th century chroniclers of early American colonial history treated Jamestown as almost a side issue. They attached no long-term importance to it, but saw it only as a trivia “first” and not essential to the “creation of the American nation” and its culture. To this must be added, more significantly, they failed to look at what it has really meant for subsequent generations of Americans, including our own.
He also said, “This dismissive treatment of Jamestown has a long record, and one not helped by the veterans of the colony itself, most importantly John Smith. Smith is generally recognized as the most important influence on the earliest years of Jamestown, for reasons we…have all heard many times. He also, however, was the earliest chronicler and for an important moment, the sole chronicler of what happened those first few years. Therefore, [much of] what we know of early Jamestown and its obstacles and internal strife is seen through the eyes of Smith, who we now better understand was perhaps not the most objective observer. In his own fury and self-protection after being replaced as leader of the colony, Smith painted the expedition as one bungled by fortune seekers often unable or unwilling to help themselves and saved only by his own disciplined leadership and resourcefulness.
“For decades, and partly because of the [propaganda] of men like Smith, the Jamestown adventure was seen as a kind of get rich scheme – colonization for all the wrong reasons. This view held that Jamestown and its participants had only themselves to blame for the difficulties they encountered”.
“The Pilgrim story,” Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman adds, “took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘Scarlet Letter’), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.
“This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.”
However, their motivations and examples of determination are what have been driving our nation’s development ever since, and better reflect who we are today. The innovative tenets that were conceived at Jamestown are equally significant as the desire for freedom from religious intolerance that took the Mayflower passengers to Plymouth or inspired their Mayflower Compact.
While many recent books report on research into newly discovered archives and relics, Professor J. Frederick Fausz laments that too many historians continue to repeat factual errors and debunked legends about Jamestown, and their continuing “reliance on and reprinting of old, obsolete books that are readable but not reliable…Why does the general public continue to embrace such flawed, dated information when it would be unthinkable to rely on medical advice from the 1920s?” Few of those venerable sources relate the whole cloth of Jamestown and its far-reaching effect on our nation’s foundation and emergence.
That Jamestown was abandoned and disappeared in the 18th century was for a long time unfortunate for the historical understanding of all of the origins of our nation. That it was is now also fortunate, because its preserved artifacts are now giving us new facts and proof of its settlers’ determination to succeed. Archaeologist William Kelso’s recent discoveries at that site of the first James Fort and better, modern methods of research into the situation, condition and environment of the settlement and its region, as are being used by him, Fausz, Kupperman, James Horn, Seth Mallios and others, are forcing “a few historians to re-examine what they thought they knew about Jamestown’s earliest years, and reconsider what really was happening there in the larger context of our colonial history”.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jennifer Howard tells us, “What Mr. Kelso and his team have found is rewriting the history that began with the 104 men and boys who landed on this swampy bit of land on May 14, 1607. Historians have dismissed the colonists as inept, lazy, feckless, or unprepared. But they hung on by the skin of their teeth, until the European consumer craze for tobacco threw them an economic lifeline. The new archaeological finds have begun to reveal how they weathered those first hard years and decades.
“But the artifacts, the graves of settlers, and even the discarded oyster shells that have emerged have done more than begin to recast the narrative. Specialists in 17th-century material culture and environmental scientists who study the Chesapeake Bay have been reaping the benefits of Mr. Kelso's work. Their analyses, in turn, have provided new fodder for historians of the wider Atlantic world”.
These analyses and interpretations have begun to dispel many myths, such as that of Jamestown’s lazy and self-indulgent “gentlemen” playing in the settlement’s streets and romantic legends about precocious Powhatan princesses. They belie the long and widely held popular assumptions that Jamestown was merely an historical footnote and unmitigated disaster; they also put a new light on the native Algonquians’ culture and mores and offer sound reasons for their unexpected hostility when the English landed.
This is the second of nine parts
Copyright 2008
We must also realize why Jamestown disappeared from our national consciousness and into the shadows of our history. To paraphrase another observer, most 19th and 20th century chroniclers of early American colonial history treated Jamestown as almost a side issue. They attached no long-term importance to it, but saw it only as a trivia “first” and not essential to the “creation of the American nation” and its culture. To this must be added, more significantly, they failed to look at what it has really meant for subsequent generations of Americans, including our own.
He also said, “This dismissive treatment of Jamestown has a long record, and one not helped by the veterans of the colony itself, most importantly John Smith. Smith is generally recognized as the most important influence on the earliest years of Jamestown, for reasons we…have all heard many times. He also, however, was the earliest chronicler and for an important moment, the sole chronicler of what happened those first few years. Therefore, [much of] what we know of early Jamestown and its obstacles and internal strife is seen through the eyes of Smith, who we now better understand was perhaps not the most objective observer. In his own fury and self-protection after being replaced as leader of the colony, Smith painted the expedition as one bungled by fortune seekers often unable or unwilling to help themselves and saved only by his own disciplined leadership and resourcefulness.
“For decades, and partly because of the [propaganda] of men like Smith, the Jamestown adventure was seen as a kind of get rich scheme – colonization for all the wrong reasons. This view held that Jamestown and its participants had only themselves to blame for the difficulties they encountered”.
“The Pilgrim story,” Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman adds, “took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘Scarlet Letter’), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.
“This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.”
However, their motivations and examples of determination are what have been driving our nation’s development ever since, and better reflect who we are today. The innovative tenets that were conceived at Jamestown are equally significant as the desire for freedom from religious intolerance that took the Mayflower passengers to Plymouth or inspired their Mayflower Compact.
While many recent books report on research into newly discovered archives and relics, Professor J. Frederick Fausz laments that too many historians continue to repeat factual errors and debunked legends about Jamestown, and their continuing “reliance on and reprinting of old, obsolete books that are readable but not reliable…Why does the general public continue to embrace such flawed, dated information when it would be unthinkable to rely on medical advice from the 1920s?” Few of those venerable sources relate the whole cloth of Jamestown and its far-reaching effect on our nation’s foundation and emergence.
That Jamestown was abandoned and disappeared in the 18th century was for a long time unfortunate for the historical understanding of all of the origins of our nation. That it was is now also fortunate, because its preserved artifacts are now giving us new facts and proof of its settlers’ determination to succeed. Archaeologist William Kelso’s recent discoveries at that site of the first James Fort and better, modern methods of research into the situation, condition and environment of the settlement and its region, as are being used by him, Fausz, Kupperman, James Horn, Seth Mallios and others, are forcing “a few historians to re-examine what they thought they knew about Jamestown’s earliest years, and reconsider what really was happening there in the larger context of our colonial history”.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jennifer Howard tells us, “What Mr. Kelso and his team have found is rewriting the history that began with the 104 men and boys who landed on this swampy bit of land on May 14, 1607. Historians have dismissed the colonists as inept, lazy, feckless, or unprepared. But they hung on by the skin of their teeth, until the European consumer craze for tobacco threw them an economic lifeline. The new archaeological finds have begun to reveal how they weathered those first hard years and decades.
“But the artifacts, the graves of settlers, and even the discarded oyster shells that have emerged have done more than begin to recast the narrative. Specialists in 17th-century material culture and environmental scientists who study the Chesapeake Bay have been reaping the benefits of Mr. Kelso's work. Their analyses, in turn, have provided new fodder for historians of the wider Atlantic world”.
These analyses and interpretations have begun to dispel many myths, such as that of Jamestown’s lazy and self-indulgent “gentlemen” playing in the settlement’s streets and romantic legends about precocious Powhatan princesses. They belie the long and widely held popular assumptions that Jamestown was merely an historical footnote and unmitigated disaster; they also put a new light on the native Algonquians’ culture and mores and offer sound reasons for their unexpected hostility when the English landed.
This is the second of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 1
(This the first of nine parts)
Jamestown’s Meaning
Now that Jamestown’s Quatercentenary is history, let’s explore how the first permanent English settlement in America contributed to our national heritage. The past three years brought us a spate of new books and articles that not only reacquaint us with the mid-May 1607 landing and the tribulations of the first permanent English settlement in America, but also offer new evidence of the determination of those settlers to succeed.
Most of these historians’ and popular accounts have told us only the beginning of its story; there has been little mention that it was where some of our nation’s fundamental rights and constitutional principles were conceived and how those early colonists’ consequential actions helped to shape its development, economy and culture. Those rights and principles were nurtured during Jamestown’s nine decades to become among the key beliefs and values on which our nation was founded and has flourished. They remain among our most cherished ideals and ideologies, but how they were established has been generally overlooked.
Understandably, the essays, articles, books and television programs that commemorated Jamestown’s 400th anniversary focused the colony’s beginning years. Some reported on new evidence of the settlers’ lives, diets, attitudes, habits and possessions from the treasure trove of 17th century artifacts that are being unearthed from the archaeological digs of the first James Fort and nearby English and Algonquian settlements. Others described and expanded on American Indians’ customs, practices, polities and mores and their interactions with and among English and Europeans. More has become known about how they, Europeans and Africans also contributed to our nation’s initial history.
Jamestown’s founding, however, has a much deeper meaning than merely being one of our national origins. It was the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities to innovate many profound social, political, and economic tenets that have come down to us through our history. Their lasting effect is what has differentiated Jamestown from other preceding or contemporary English and European settlements in America. It is also where significant ecological impacts were introduced from the British Isles and Europe and the germs of our nation’s most heinous social maladies were incubated, such as institutionalized chattel slavery and the devastation of American Indian life and customs.
Looking Beyond the Beginning
While historians have thoroughly chronicled Jamestown’s first seventeen years, most of them have given us only a glimpse of what was accomplished there. To fully understand that deeper meaning, we need to look beyond that beginning, for, as Professor Warren Billings argues, “…the significance of Jamestown lies beyond [those years]. To be sure, things such as the start of the tobacco economy, the founding of the General Assembly, and the transformation of the colony from a [trading and] military outpost to an agricultural settlement trace their origins to that period, [but] it was in the decades after 1624 that the social, political, and economic implications of those developments played out, and Virginia became a place quite unlike anything the [colony’s] backers envisioned, even in their wildest dreams.” With few exceptions, such as Billings, those chroniclers have almost ignored the extraordinary consequences that the Jamestown settlers fostered for America’s economic and political evolution.
When we look over its nine decades, we realize Jamestown’s crucial place in our history, its contributions to our constitutional republic and how major threads of our heritage were first spun there to be woven into our national fabric. As Professor Jack P. Greene observed, “No longer can scholars think of colonial [history] as something exclusively prenational. Rather historians must recognize that this process has been fundamental to…state building and that it continued long after the initial formation of national states”.
Novel concepts for independence, private property, self-governance and empowerment were devised and established at Jamestown during nearly seventy years of benign neglect of Virginia by England’s rulers, who were focused on their own persistent domestic crises for much of the 17th century. Those concepts’ development was merely slowed by the constraints of new royal policies imposed near the end of that century. They would mature over the following decades to entwine with complementing ideals and visions from New England and other colonies to become embodied in our Constitution.
Jamestown’s Most Important Lesson
So, of what long-term importance is Jamestown as a transformational event in our nation’s history? What legacies has it left us? Why should we care about it, 400-plus years later?
By 1620, or within thirteen years of their landing, Jamestown’s founders had launched several of our most valued rights and privileges. Students learn that it was the site of our first elected representative legislature and beginning of our self-rule, where the free enterprise system became the form of our American economy and English was established as the common language of the new American nation.
However, we should also teach them that it is where those early settlers also confirmed the common citizen’s right to own private property (and its personal importance to us – who are homeowners, for example – since then and today), instigated our real estate industry, validated the principle of common law as the foundation of our own legal system, established civilian control of the military, and fostered new freedoms from English and European customs and traditions that had bound many generations to their ancestors’ trades, classes and economic conditions. Those rights and privileges took root and began to blossom at Jamestown as it established itself and served as Virginia’s colonial capital for almost a century.
We should also instruct that, over its ninety-plus years, they were complemented with additional tenets and principles and the first steps toward our nation's westward expansion, which the immediate descendants of early Jamestown settlers left to us as keystones of our national heritage. Jamestown’s most important lesson is how and why a new people – Americans – learned to govern themselves and came to determine their destiny. The learning of that lesson was the creation and continued enjoyment of our Constitution.
This the first of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Jamestown’s Meaning
Now that Jamestown’s Quatercentenary is history, let’s explore how the first permanent English settlement in America contributed to our national heritage. The past three years brought us a spate of new books and articles that not only reacquaint us with the mid-May 1607 landing and the tribulations of the first permanent English settlement in America, but also offer new evidence of the determination of those settlers to succeed.
Most of these historians’ and popular accounts have told us only the beginning of its story; there has been little mention that it was where some of our nation’s fundamental rights and constitutional principles were conceived and how those early colonists’ consequential actions helped to shape its development, economy and culture. Those rights and principles were nurtured during Jamestown’s nine decades to become among the key beliefs and values on which our nation was founded and has flourished. They remain among our most cherished ideals and ideologies, but how they were established has been generally overlooked.
Understandably, the essays, articles, books and television programs that commemorated Jamestown’s 400th anniversary focused the colony’s beginning years. Some reported on new evidence of the settlers’ lives, diets, attitudes, habits and possessions from the treasure trove of 17th century artifacts that are being unearthed from the archaeological digs of the first James Fort and nearby English and Algonquian settlements. Others described and expanded on American Indians’ customs, practices, polities and mores and their interactions with and among English and Europeans. More has become known about how they, Europeans and Africans also contributed to our nation’s initial history.
Jamestown’s founding, however, has a much deeper meaning than merely being one of our national origins. It was the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities to innovate many profound social, political, and economic tenets that have come down to us through our history. Their lasting effect is what has differentiated Jamestown from other preceding or contemporary English and European settlements in America. It is also where significant ecological impacts were introduced from the British Isles and Europe and the germs of our nation’s most heinous social maladies were incubated, such as institutionalized chattel slavery and the devastation of American Indian life and customs.
Looking Beyond the Beginning
While historians have thoroughly chronicled Jamestown’s first seventeen years, most of them have given us only a glimpse of what was accomplished there. To fully understand that deeper meaning, we need to look beyond that beginning, for, as Professor Warren Billings argues, “…the significance of Jamestown lies beyond [those years]. To be sure, things such as the start of the tobacco economy, the founding of the General Assembly, and the transformation of the colony from a [trading and] military outpost to an agricultural settlement trace their origins to that period, [but] it was in the decades after 1624 that the social, political, and economic implications of those developments played out, and Virginia became a place quite unlike anything the [colony’s] backers envisioned, even in their wildest dreams.” With few exceptions, such as Billings, those chroniclers have almost ignored the extraordinary consequences that the Jamestown settlers fostered for America’s economic and political evolution.
When we look over its nine decades, we realize Jamestown’s crucial place in our history, its contributions to our constitutional republic and how major threads of our heritage were first spun there to be woven into our national fabric. As Professor Jack P. Greene observed, “No longer can scholars think of colonial [history] as something exclusively prenational. Rather historians must recognize that this process has been fundamental to…state building and that it continued long after the initial formation of national states”.
Novel concepts for independence, private property, self-governance and empowerment were devised and established at Jamestown during nearly seventy years of benign neglect of Virginia by England’s rulers, who were focused on their own persistent domestic crises for much of the 17th century. Those concepts’ development was merely slowed by the constraints of new royal policies imposed near the end of that century. They would mature over the following decades to entwine with complementing ideals and visions from New England and other colonies to become embodied in our Constitution.
Jamestown’s Most Important Lesson
So, of what long-term importance is Jamestown as a transformational event in our nation’s history? What legacies has it left us? Why should we care about it, 400-plus years later?
By 1620, or within thirteen years of their landing, Jamestown’s founders had launched several of our most valued rights and privileges. Students learn that it was the site of our first elected representative legislature and beginning of our self-rule, where the free enterprise system became the form of our American economy and English was established as the common language of the new American nation.
However, we should also teach them that it is where those early settlers also confirmed the common citizen’s right to own private property (and its personal importance to us – who are homeowners, for example – since then and today), instigated our real estate industry, validated the principle of common law as the foundation of our own legal system, established civilian control of the military, and fostered new freedoms from English and European customs and traditions that had bound many generations to their ancestors’ trades, classes and economic conditions. Those rights and privileges took root and began to blossom at Jamestown as it established itself and served as Virginia’s colonial capital for almost a century.
We should also instruct that, over its ninety-plus years, they were complemented with additional tenets and principles and the first steps toward our nation's westward expansion, which the immediate descendants of early Jamestown settlers left to us as keystones of our national heritage. Jamestown’s most important lesson is how and why a new people – Americans – learned to govern themselves and came to determine their destiny. The learning of that lesson was the creation and continued enjoyment of our Constitution.
This the first of nine parts
Copyright 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
Bermuda prepares for its 400th anniversary
From the Bermuda Sun
September 19, 2008
A yearlong celebration of Bermuda and its people
Island prepares for its 400th anniversary
An early warning to all islanders: 2009 is going to be off the hook for parties, fun and celebration.
By Helen Jardine
After all, it's not every day Bermuda gets to celebrate its 400th birthday.
To celebrate Bermuda's quad-centennial, The Bermuda 2009 Steering Committee has organized a whole calendar of events - from January to December - that celebrate who we are as a nation and how far we have come.
Chairman of the committee Conchita Ming said she "is thrilled" to be involved with such a historic event.
"It's going to be a busy year," she said. "It is really about celebrating the resilience of Bermuda. We've been able to overcome many adversities and challenges considering we are such an isolated island. For example, we have attempted to be involved in several industries that didn't work for us. We tried tobacco farming and that didn't work. Even recently we were forced to move from tourism to exempt companies. We've met the challenge and that's what we want to look at throughout 2009."
One of the things Ms Ming said she is looking forward to the most next year is their 'Walk Through History' self-guided tour, when 23 plaques will be displayed throughout the city of Hamilton to mark historic landmarks or cultural areas.
"At the corner of Victoria Street and Court Street we are going to put up a plaque to depict an area where many of the island's black doctors used to work," she said. "It's important to reflect on the past. We can use the past as a tool to look forward."
She also said that, despite our size, it is important to recognize the kind of influence Bermuda has had on the larger world.
"The Sea Venture was on its way to Virginia when it was ship-wrecked in Bermuda," she explained. "A year later they built the Deliverance and the Patience out of parts of the Sea Venture and eventually made their way to Jamestown. When they arrived, only 60 out of the 500 people that had landed in Virginia the year prior had survived. The others had all starved to death. Had those from the Deliverance and The Patience not arrived when they did and fed them, that little group would have died off completely we may have a very different United States."
Jamestown celebrated their 400th anniversary last February and Ms Ming was there.
"There were several artifacts that had come from Bermuda in some of the Jamestown exhibits," she said. "Such as cahow bones and turtle shells."
Museums in Jamestown will be sending those articles back to Bermuda to be exhibited in October.
"I'm learning so much just being involved in the committee," Ms Ming said.
One thing she has discovered is that the wreck of the Sea Venture lies only 4-500 yards off Gates' Bay (more commonly known as St. Catherine's beach).
The committee are hoping to install a bronze plaque at the wreck site to commemorate the Sea Venture.
However, there is contention as to when the anniversary should be celebrated.
"Some will say we should celebrate this in 2012 as that is when we became an official colony," Ms Ming said. "But we've had people living here continuously since the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609 and that is what we are celebrating - Bermuda and its people."
Kick-off celebrations begin January 3.
"Our launch party is going to be amazing," Ms Ming said. "There will be stilt-walking, fire performances, aerial performances, and Japanese drummers."
Events throughout the year include a re-enactment of the wreck of the Sea Venture, a Titanic exhibit, fish chowder competitions, Tall Ships 2009 and a Portuguese Festival.
Most events will be free.
The committee is also hoping to have a Royal visit sometime next year.
Other birthday milestones in 2009 include the 200th anniversary of Dockyard and the 50th anniversary of the Theatre Boycott.
For more information or to find out how you can be involved in the festivities go to www.bermuda2009.bm.
September 19, 2008
A yearlong celebration of Bermuda and its people
Island prepares for its 400th anniversary
An early warning to all islanders: 2009 is going to be off the hook for parties, fun and celebration.
By Helen Jardine
After all, it's not every day Bermuda gets to celebrate its 400th birthday.
To celebrate Bermuda's quad-centennial, The Bermuda 2009 Steering Committee has organized a whole calendar of events - from January to December - that celebrate who we are as a nation and how far we have come.
Chairman of the committee Conchita Ming said she "is thrilled" to be involved with such a historic event.
"It's going to be a busy year," she said. "It is really about celebrating the resilience of Bermuda. We've been able to overcome many adversities and challenges considering we are such an isolated island. For example, we have attempted to be involved in several industries that didn't work for us. We tried tobacco farming and that didn't work. Even recently we were forced to move from tourism to exempt companies. We've met the challenge and that's what we want to look at throughout 2009."
One of the things Ms Ming said she is looking forward to the most next year is their 'Walk Through History' self-guided tour, when 23 plaques will be displayed throughout the city of Hamilton to mark historic landmarks or cultural areas.
"At the corner of Victoria Street and Court Street we are going to put up a plaque to depict an area where many of the island's black doctors used to work," she said. "It's important to reflect on the past. We can use the past as a tool to look forward."
She also said that, despite our size, it is important to recognize the kind of influence Bermuda has had on the larger world.
"The Sea Venture was on its way to Virginia when it was ship-wrecked in Bermuda," she explained. "A year later they built the Deliverance and the Patience out of parts of the Sea Venture and eventually made their way to Jamestown. When they arrived, only 60 out of the 500 people that had landed in Virginia the year prior had survived. The others had all starved to death. Had those from the Deliverance and The Patience not arrived when they did and fed them, that little group would have died off completely we may have a very different United States."
Jamestown celebrated their 400th anniversary last February and Ms Ming was there.
"There were several artifacts that had come from Bermuda in some of the Jamestown exhibits," she said. "Such as cahow bones and turtle shells."
Museums in Jamestown will be sending those articles back to Bermuda to be exhibited in October.
"I'm learning so much just being involved in the committee," Ms Ming said.
One thing she has discovered is that the wreck of the Sea Venture lies only 4-500 yards off Gates' Bay (more commonly known as St. Catherine's beach).
The committee are hoping to install a bronze plaque at the wreck site to commemorate the Sea Venture.
However, there is contention as to when the anniversary should be celebrated.
"Some will say we should celebrate this in 2012 as that is when we became an official colony," Ms Ming said. "But we've had people living here continuously since the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609 and that is what we are celebrating - Bermuda and its people."
Kick-off celebrations begin January 3.
"Our launch party is going to be amazing," Ms Ming said. "There will be stilt-walking, fire performances, aerial performances, and Japanese drummers."
Events throughout the year include a re-enactment of the wreck of the Sea Venture, a Titanic exhibit, fish chowder competitions, Tall Ships 2009 and a Portuguese Festival.
Most events will be free.
The committee is also hoping to have a Royal visit sometime next year.
Other birthday milestones in 2009 include the 200th anniversary of Dockyard and the 50th anniversary of the Theatre Boycott.
For more information or to find out how you can be involved in the festivities go to www.bermuda2009.bm.
Monday, September 15, 2008
University of Virginia accepts 300,000 pieces of Flowerdew farm history
From the Charlottesville Daily Progress
By Aaron Lee
Published: September 8, 2008
Roughly 300,000 artifacts that shed light on centuries of history — including the early English settlement of North America — have been donated to the University of Virginia. The artifacts come from a farm known as Flowerdew Hundred on the south side of the James River between Hopewell and Jamestown. It was once the site of Native American villages, a fortified frontier settlement, a thriving plantation and a major Civil War encampment.
“It is one of the most significant and comprehensive collections on Virginia history,” said Hoke Perkins, director of UVa’s Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture. The late David and Mary Harrison, for whom the institute is named, purchased Flowerdew in 1967. The donated collection of artifacts comes from their children.
“Our father was determined that the important material discovered at Flowerdew would live on, and we feel like the university will prove to be a wonderful home for the collection,” said Mary Harrison Keevil, Harrison’s daughter.
UVa alumnus David Harrison, a lawyer and investment banker, was one of the university’s most generous benefactors. The field at Scott Stadium is named in his honor. He died in 2002; Mary died in 1990. Artifacts unearthed during decades of excavation at Flowerdew Hundred include stone tools estimated to be 10,000 years old.
Flowerdew became an English settlement in 1619, when Sir George Yeardley was granted 1,000 acres that he named in honor of his wife, Temperance Flowerdew. It later became the site of America’s first windmill.
During the Civil War, Union troops camped at Flowerdew for three days before the Battle of
Petersburg.
Prior to the donation of the artifact collection, fewer than 100 artifacts from the farm had been on loan to the Harrison Institute since 2004. Once the recently donated collection is catalogued it will be available to researchers and enhance the collection already on display to the public, said Perkins, director of the Harrison Institute.
The donation will also be incorporated into online research resources, Charlotte Morford, UVa Library director for communications, said. Further down the road, Perkins said, the institute would like to explore using the Flowerdew finds in collaboration with archeological collections at other cultural institutes in Virginia.
By Aaron Lee
Published: September 8, 2008
Roughly 300,000 artifacts that shed light on centuries of history — including the early English settlement of North America — have been donated to the University of Virginia. The artifacts come from a farm known as Flowerdew Hundred on the south side of the James River between Hopewell and Jamestown. It was once the site of Native American villages, a fortified frontier settlement, a thriving plantation and a major Civil War encampment.
“It is one of the most significant and comprehensive collections on Virginia history,” said Hoke Perkins, director of UVa’s Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture. The late David and Mary Harrison, for whom the institute is named, purchased Flowerdew in 1967. The donated collection of artifacts comes from their children.
“Our father was determined that the important material discovered at Flowerdew would live on, and we feel like the university will prove to be a wonderful home for the collection,” said Mary Harrison Keevil, Harrison’s daughter.
UVa alumnus David Harrison, a lawyer and investment banker, was one of the university’s most generous benefactors. The field at Scott Stadium is named in his honor. He died in 2002; Mary died in 1990. Artifacts unearthed during decades of excavation at Flowerdew Hundred include stone tools estimated to be 10,000 years old.
Flowerdew became an English settlement in 1619, when Sir George Yeardley was granted 1,000 acres that he named in honor of his wife, Temperance Flowerdew. It later became the site of America’s first windmill.
During the Civil War, Union troops camped at Flowerdew for three days before the Battle of
Petersburg.
Prior to the donation of the artifact collection, fewer than 100 artifacts from the farm had been on loan to the Harrison Institute since 2004. Once the recently donated collection is catalogued it will be available to researchers and enhance the collection already on display to the public, said Perkins, director of the Harrison Institute.
The donation will also be incorporated into online research resources, Charlotte Morford, UVa Library director for communications, said. Further down the road, Perkins said, the institute would like to explore using the Flowerdew finds in collaboration with archeological collections at other cultural institutes in Virginia.
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