From the Bethany Beach Wave@delawareonline.com
By Molly Murray • The News Journal • October 6, 2008
SEAFORD — For a moment, forget the houses, the barges and the signs of the 21st century on the Nanticoke River.
Instead, look at the thick woods, the bald eagles flying overhead, the deer running through the dense vegetation. See the wide sweep of marsh and the great blue heron as it snares a fish.
It is this world that Capt. John Smith saw in 1608 when he and a crew of 14 set sail from Jamestown, Va., in a 30-foot-long shallop to explore the Chesapeake Bay and some of its tributaries.
Of all the places Smith explored during that 2,500-mile journey, the two places that have changed the least since then are the Pocomoke and Nanticoke rivers, said Jim Rapp, executive director of the Delmarva Low Impact Tourism Experiences, an organization that is working to expand low-impact ecotourism on the Delmarva Peninsula.
Now local groups, individuals and municipal and state officials in Delaware and Maryland are working with the National Park Service as the federal agency plans the new Capt. John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail. Once completed, the trail will be the nation's first national water trail.
Rapp believes it could do for the Chesapeake watershed what the Appalachian Trail did for the vast mountain range that stretches from Maine to Georgia.
Last week, National Park Service officials started a series of meetings to get people throughout the region involved and to outline what they are looking at as they develop a comprehensive management plan for the John Smith trail.
The first of those meetings was held in Seaford. Although Smith never made it as far as modern-day Seaford when he came up the Nanticoke, he made a brief foray into Delaware when he meandered off the Nanticoke into Broad Creek and landed at what is now Phillips Landing.
Seaford could play an important role in the development of tourism-based activities linked to the trail, Rapp said.
John Maounis, superintendent of the John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, said work on the plan is just beginning.
"We really want to hear from everybody," he said.
What parks officials are looking for now is public input on several fronts. First, Maounis said, they want to know how people anticipate using the trail. Will they paddle or boat along Smith's routes? Are they interested in organized boat tours? Will they visit sites on land by following an overland route that closely matches the places Smith explored during his journey? Will they bike or walk some overland link to the water trail?
"One of our quandaries," Maounis said, "is there are so many opportunities."
Park officials know some visitors want to connect with an earlier time and are looking to see a world much like the one Smith encountered. That experience isn't very likely along some of the routes Smith took, but along the Pocomoke and Nanticoke, the landscape in some areas is less changed than along other tributaries, Rapp said.
Some trail users might be most interested in the American Indians that Smith encountered on his journey. The Algonquin Indians, led by the great chief Powhatan, had a complex society. Smith also encountered the Nanticoke Indians and was told of "a great nation called Massawomeck."
Essentially, parks officials are looking at three broad themes: where Smith went, American Indian life at the time and how the Chesapeake has changed. Sometime next spring, parks officials hope to have a series of options and will host another round of public meetings to get input, Maounis said.
Delaware and Maryland officials already worked together to produce a map aimed at attracting trail-based tourism to the Nanticoke.
The map, called "The Nanticoke River, Explorers Welcome," highlights natural areas such as the Ellis Bay Wildlife Management Area in Maryland and the Nanticoke Wildlife Area in Delaware, pinpoints public boat launching areas along the river and highlights many of the places visitors could see -- from Seaford and Bethel to Mardela Springs.
There are already dozens of attractions, from museums to parks, that people could visit, Rapp said.
The weak link is in the infrastructure to support the trail -- inns, camping and other accommodations and the transportation network that would get people in boats, canoes or kayaks from the water trail to points of interest or accommodations on land.
Rapp said there are several models local residents could explore to keep private land off limits or to allow some public access.
And there will likely be opportunities for good outfitters and historical interpreters or guides, Rapp said.
"You can't PowerPoint this stuff," he said. "There are all these rich stories."
mmurray@delawareonline.com
302-856-7372
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 9
The Virginia Diaspora: Jamestown’s Legacy of
America’s Great Westward Migration
(continued)
The personal initiative and ambition that propelled the Jamestown explorers from England to America was also the singular force that drove their Virginian descendants farther to seek land, new prospects and lives. Their confidence and resolve to do so sprang from their security in their capacity to gain title to their own property and ability to freely buy and sell it, both confirmed by their ancient planter ancestors.
Just as meaningful for today’s Americans is those Virginian pioneers’ legacy of the great westward migration that spread a new American nation to the far edge of the continent. In Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, Fischer and Kelly describe exactly how the Virginia Diaspora of the 18th and 19th centuries became the American westward pioneering movement. The settlement of America’s west had many of the same adventuring characteristics as those of the founding of Jamestown in seventeenth century.
In 1803, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other settlers’ descendants managed the greatest expansion of our new country with the Louisiana Purchase, to the distress of many New Englanders and other Americans who felt that America was then big enough. One reason, economic historians Gary Walton and Hugh Rockoff tell us, was that, “In New England, immigration virtually halted after 1640, and natural causes became the source of population growth after 1650.” The halt was caused, Hinderaker and Mancall add, by “…the English Civil War; rather than emigrate to America, English Puritans stayed home and supported the revolutionary regime of Oliver Cromwell and the protectorate government.”
Fischer and Kelly also inform us, “The Jeffersons, Randolphs, Merriweathers, Lewises and Clarks had been part of Virginia’s westward movement…for as many as five generations before 1803.” Virginians Lewis and Clark (who was a descendant of Jamestown early settlers) then led their famous exploration of the nation’s new acquisition to help open the way for settlement of the lands in the vast Mississippi, Missouri and Columbia River basins. Fischer and Kelley go on to say, “The Louisiana expedition of 1804-6 was the culmination of a long historical process of expansion in Virginia”.
They also tell how we have taken the Jamestown colonists’ intrepid vision to the far corners of our continent in pursuit of land, opportunity and fortune. Their descendants moved on to create new states and governments modeled on what their ancestors had devised and established, and, joined by immigrants from other states, lands and cultures, they merged diverse traditions and customs to seek economic and social betterment. Historian William Shade tells us, “By 1850 nearly 400,000 Virginians had been attracted to more fertile soils and opportunities in other states”. That year, the Commonwealth’s population was just over 1.4 million, including almost a half million slaves.
The economic motivations and goals of the Jamestown settlers have continued to resonate across four centuries in the migrants and homesteaders that pushed out America’s frontiers, generation by generation, first from Virginia to the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, to Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, and then on to Illinois, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, and, finally, California.
The headrights’ legacy was once again evident in the 1862 Homestead Act that would accelerate the settlement of the new American West with land grants for individual farms and ranches. It was the same economic incentive principle innovated by the Virginia Company, expanded on a monumental scale. By 1934, over 1.6 million homestead applications had been processed and more than 270 million acres – 10 percent of all U.S. lands – passed into private individual ownership.
In Bound Away, Fischer and Kelly also tell us that a significant number of California’s own pioneers, 1840-1860, were native Virginians. Several (and probably many more) had ancestors who were among the Colony’s ancient planters and early settlers. Virginians and their descendants among other southerners had extraordinary influence on California politics and government during those years, and they nearly succeeded in splitting the state in two in 1860.
Countless thousands among the California settlers that followed during the next five to ten decades undoubtedly carried that same ancestry and initiative. As Fischer and Kelly also say, “Thus the ghosts of Virginians past also migrated to California and took up residence on the Pacific Coast.”
Jamestown’s Most Important Legacy
Viewing Jamestown through a 21st century California prism, one might also see that the 1849 Gold Rush probably was, ironically, the ultimate and successful, albeit belated, achievement of an early major goal that was set for the Virginia Company’s explorers and settlers. However, the most important of their legacies was their determination to succeed. With that fortitude, they and their descendants also forged the unique and enduring element of our American culture: a persistent striving for the freedom to better ourselves with property, innovation and enterprise.
This is the Jamestown legacy that has become our American credo and is the real meaning of its founding. Its first seeds were sown there over 400 years ago and today all Americans enjoy its fruits. This is why Jamestown remains relevant and significant for each and every one of us, and we should forever remember its founding as the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities for the economic and political innovations and enterprise that have made our nation what it is.
Our American heritage of initiative and improvement has come down to us from that Jamestown adventure. It is where a new people – who many of us (and more than most of us realize) have as ancestors – learned to govern themselves and determine their (and our) destiny. We should appreciate its lessons and legacies and that many of our personal and national aspirations for independence, private property, self-governance and empowerment were formed there during its nine decades of existence.
This is the ninth and final part
Copyright 2008
These are some of sources and references used for Beyond Its Beginning:
Billings, Warren M.:
A Little Parliament; The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century; (Richmond, The Library of Virginia, in partnership with Jamestown 2007/Jamestown Yorktown Foundation. 2004)
Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia; (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press 2004)
Jamestown and the Founding of the Nation; (Gettysburg, Thomas Publications, for the Colonial National Historical Park and Eastern National Park & Monument Association 1991);
Editor: The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century; A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700, Revised Edition; (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, 2007.)
Sir William Berkeley; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/billings_essay.html)
Dorman, John Frederick (Editor):
Adventurers of Purse and Person Virginia 1607-1624/5; Fourth Edition; 3 v. (Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Company, 2004-7).
Elson, Henry William, and Leigh, Kathy (editor);
History of the United States of America; (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1904.) as adapted for History of the USA:
Fausz, J. Frederick:
The First Act of Terrorism in English America; (History News Network, January 16, 2006) –
Jamestown at 400: Caught Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope; (History News Network, May 7, 2007) –
Fischer, David Hackett:
Albion's Seed; Four British Folkways in America; (Oxford and New York, The Oxford University Press; 1989)
Fischer, David Hackett, and Kelly, James C.:
Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement; (Charlottesville, The University Press of Virginia; 2001.)
Greene, Jack P.:
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788; the Richard B. Russell Lectures, Number Two. (Athens, Georgia, The University of Georgia Press, 1986).
Roundtable: Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem.
The William and Mary Quarterly 64.2 (2007):
29 pars. 1 Mar. 2008.
The Quest for Power; The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies 1689-1776; (Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, 1963.)
Heinemann, Ronald L., Kolp, John G., Parent, Anthony S. and Shade, William G.:
Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007; (Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2007.)
Hinderaker, Eric and Mancall, Peter:
At the Edge of Empire; The Backcountry in British North America; (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2003)
Horn, James P. P:
Leaving England: The Social Background of Indentured Servants in the Seventeenth Century; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/horn_essay.html)
Howard, Jennifer:
Artifacts Rewrite Jamestown's History, (Chronicle of Higher Education May 4, 2007)
Kelso, William M.:
Jamestown; The Buried Truth; (Charlottesville, The University Press of Virginia; 2006.)
Kluger, Richard:
Seizing Destiny; How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea; (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.)
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl:
The Jamestown Project; (Cambridge MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.)
America's Founding Fictions; Washington Post, Sunday, May 13, 2007;
(Editor); Major Problems in American Colonial History (2nd edition), (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000)
Captain John Smith; A Select Edition of His Writings; (Chapel Hill and London, UNC Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg; 1988.)
Mancall, Peter C.:
(Editor) The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624; An anthology of essays from an international conference entitled “The Atlantic World and Virginia 1550-1624”, held at Williamsburg, Va., Mar. 4-7, 2004 (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2007).
Hakluyt’s Promise; An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America; (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007)
(Editor) Envisioning America; English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580-1640; (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. 1995.).
Mapp, Alf J., Jr.:
The Virginia Experiment: The Old Dominion’s Role in the Making of America; 1607-1781; 3rd Edition (Lanham, MD, Hamilton Press. 1987 – Reprinted as 4th Edition, Lincoln, Nebraska, An Authors Guild Backprint.com Edition, iUniverse, 2006)
McCartney, Martha W.:
Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607-1635: A Biographical Dictionary;(Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Company. 2007)
A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Spring, 1619-1803; (Williamsburg, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation – prepared for the Colonial National Historical Park, National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Cooperative Agreement CA-4000-2-1017; 2003.)
Morgan, Edmund S.:
The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630; The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1971), pp. 170-198; Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1917308
Nugent, Nell Marion:
Cavaliers and pioneers; abstracts of Virginia land patents and grants, v. 1: 1623-1666; (Baltimore, Genealogical Pub. Co., 1969)
Richards, Leonard K.:
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War; (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Richter, Daniel K.:
Facing East from Indian County; A Native History of Early America; (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001)
Smith, John (author), and Barbour, Philip L. (editor):
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith; at Shifflett, Crandall: (Virtual Jamestown; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Research Project, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy) 2007.
Whittenburg, James P.:
After the Fort: Jamestown, circa. 1620-1699; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/whittenburg_essay.html)
For further information and details on these and other citations, contact jhmccall1@gmail.com
America’s Great Westward Migration
(continued)
The personal initiative and ambition that propelled the Jamestown explorers from England to America was also the singular force that drove their Virginian descendants farther to seek land, new prospects and lives. Their confidence and resolve to do so sprang from their security in their capacity to gain title to their own property and ability to freely buy and sell it, both confirmed by their ancient planter ancestors.
Just as meaningful for today’s Americans is those Virginian pioneers’ legacy of the great westward migration that spread a new American nation to the far edge of the continent. In Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, Fischer and Kelly describe exactly how the Virginia Diaspora of the 18th and 19th centuries became the American westward pioneering movement. The settlement of America’s west had many of the same adventuring characteristics as those of the founding of Jamestown in seventeenth century.
In 1803, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other settlers’ descendants managed the greatest expansion of our new country with the Louisiana Purchase, to the distress of many New Englanders and other Americans who felt that America was then big enough. One reason, economic historians Gary Walton and Hugh Rockoff tell us, was that, “In New England, immigration virtually halted after 1640, and natural causes became the source of population growth after 1650.” The halt was caused, Hinderaker and Mancall add, by “…the English Civil War; rather than emigrate to America, English Puritans stayed home and supported the revolutionary regime of Oliver Cromwell and the protectorate government.”
Fischer and Kelly also inform us, “The Jeffersons, Randolphs, Merriweathers, Lewises and Clarks had been part of Virginia’s westward movement…for as many as five generations before 1803.” Virginians Lewis and Clark (who was a descendant of Jamestown early settlers) then led their famous exploration of the nation’s new acquisition to help open the way for settlement of the lands in the vast Mississippi, Missouri and Columbia River basins. Fischer and Kelley go on to say, “The Louisiana expedition of 1804-6 was the culmination of a long historical process of expansion in Virginia”.
They also tell how we have taken the Jamestown colonists’ intrepid vision to the far corners of our continent in pursuit of land, opportunity and fortune. Their descendants moved on to create new states and governments modeled on what their ancestors had devised and established, and, joined by immigrants from other states, lands and cultures, they merged diverse traditions and customs to seek economic and social betterment. Historian William Shade tells us, “By 1850 nearly 400,000 Virginians had been attracted to more fertile soils and opportunities in other states”. That year, the Commonwealth’s population was just over 1.4 million, including almost a half million slaves.
The economic motivations and goals of the Jamestown settlers have continued to resonate across four centuries in the migrants and homesteaders that pushed out America’s frontiers, generation by generation, first from Virginia to the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, to Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, and then on to Illinois, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, and, finally, California.
The headrights’ legacy was once again evident in the 1862 Homestead Act that would accelerate the settlement of the new American West with land grants for individual farms and ranches. It was the same economic incentive principle innovated by the Virginia Company, expanded on a monumental scale. By 1934, over 1.6 million homestead applications had been processed and more than 270 million acres – 10 percent of all U.S. lands – passed into private individual ownership.
In Bound Away, Fischer and Kelly also tell us that a significant number of California’s own pioneers, 1840-1860, were native Virginians. Several (and probably many more) had ancestors who were among the Colony’s ancient planters and early settlers. Virginians and their descendants among other southerners had extraordinary influence on California politics and government during those years, and they nearly succeeded in splitting the state in two in 1860.
Countless thousands among the California settlers that followed during the next five to ten decades undoubtedly carried that same ancestry and initiative. As Fischer and Kelly also say, “Thus the ghosts of Virginians past also migrated to California and took up residence on the Pacific Coast.”
Jamestown’s Most Important Legacy
Viewing Jamestown through a 21st century California prism, one might also see that the 1849 Gold Rush probably was, ironically, the ultimate and successful, albeit belated, achievement of an early major goal that was set for the Virginia Company’s explorers and settlers. However, the most important of their legacies was their determination to succeed. With that fortitude, they and their descendants also forged the unique and enduring element of our American culture: a persistent striving for the freedom to better ourselves with property, innovation and enterprise.
This is the Jamestown legacy that has become our American credo and is the real meaning of its founding. Its first seeds were sown there over 400 years ago and today all Americans enjoy its fruits. This is why Jamestown remains relevant and significant for each and every one of us, and we should forever remember its founding as the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities for the economic and political innovations and enterprise that have made our nation what it is.
Our American heritage of initiative and improvement has come down to us from that Jamestown adventure. It is where a new people – who many of us (and more than most of us realize) have as ancestors – learned to govern themselves and determine their (and our) destiny. We should appreciate its lessons and legacies and that many of our personal and national aspirations for independence, private property, self-governance and empowerment were formed there during its nine decades of existence.
This is the ninth and final part
Copyright 2008
These are some of sources and references used for Beyond Its Beginning:
Billings, Warren M.:
A Little Parliament; The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century; (Richmond, The Library of Virginia, in partnership with Jamestown 2007/Jamestown Yorktown Foundation. 2004)
Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia; (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press 2004)
Jamestown and the Founding of the Nation; (Gettysburg, Thomas Publications, for the Colonial National Historical Park and Eastern National Park & Monument Association 1991);
Editor: The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century; A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700, Revised Edition; (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, 2007.)
Sir William Berkeley; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/billings_essay.html)
Dorman, John Frederick (Editor):
Adventurers of Purse and Person Virginia 1607-1624/5; Fourth Edition; 3 v. (Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Company, 2004-7).
Elson, Henry William, and Leigh, Kathy (editor);
History of the United States of America; (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1904.) as adapted for History of the USA:
Fausz, J. Frederick:
The First Act of Terrorism in English America; (History News Network, January 16, 2006) –
Jamestown at 400: Caught Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope; (History News Network, May 7, 2007) –
Fischer, David Hackett:
Albion's Seed; Four British Folkways in America; (Oxford and New York, The Oxford University Press; 1989)
Fischer, David Hackett, and Kelly, James C.:
Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement; (Charlottesville, The University Press of Virginia; 2001.)
Greene, Jack P.:
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788; the Richard B. Russell Lectures, Number Two. (Athens, Georgia, The University of Georgia Press, 1986).
Roundtable: Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem.
The William and Mary Quarterly 64.2 (2007):
29 pars. 1 Mar. 2008
The Quest for Power; The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies 1689-1776; (Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, 1963.)
Heinemann, Ronald L., Kolp, John G., Parent, Anthony S. and Shade, William G.:
Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007; (Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2007.)
Hinderaker, Eric and Mancall, Peter:
At the Edge of Empire; The Backcountry in British North America; (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2003)
Horn, James P. P:
Leaving England: The Social Background of Indentured Servants in the Seventeenth Century; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/horn_essay.html)
Howard, Jennifer:
Artifacts Rewrite Jamestown's History, (Chronicle of Higher Education May 4, 2007)
Kelso, William M.:
Jamestown; The Buried Truth; (Charlottesville, The University Press of Virginia; 2006.)
Kluger, Richard:
Seizing Destiny; How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea; (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.)
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl:
The Jamestown Project; (Cambridge MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.)
America's Founding Fictions; Washington Post, Sunday, May 13, 2007;
(Editor); Major Problems in American Colonial History (2nd edition), (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000)
Captain John Smith; A Select Edition of His Writings; (Chapel Hill and London, UNC Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg; 1988.)
Mancall, Peter C.:
(Editor) The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624; An anthology of essays from an international conference entitled “The Atlantic World and Virginia 1550-1624”, held at Williamsburg, Va., Mar. 4-7, 2004 (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2007).
Hakluyt’s Promise; An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America; (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007)
(Editor) Envisioning America; English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580-1640; (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. 1995.).
Mapp, Alf J., Jr.:
The Virginia Experiment: The Old Dominion’s Role in the Making of America; 1607-1781; 3rd Edition (Lanham, MD, Hamilton Press. 1987 – Reprinted as 4th Edition, Lincoln, Nebraska, An Authors Guild Backprint.com Edition, iUniverse, 2006)
McCartney, Martha W.:
Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607-1635: A Biographical Dictionary;(Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Company. 2007)
A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Spring, 1619-1803; (Williamsburg, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation – prepared for the Colonial National Historical Park, National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Cooperative Agreement CA-4000-2-1017; 2003.)
Morgan, Edmund S.:
The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630; The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1971), pp. 170-198; Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1917308
Nugent, Nell Marion:
Cavaliers and pioneers; abstracts of Virginia land patents and grants, v. 1: 1623-1666; (Baltimore, Genealogical Pub. Co., 1969)
Richards, Leonard K.:
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War; (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Richter, Daniel K.:
Facing East from Indian County; A Native History of Early America; (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001)
Smith, John (author), and Barbour, Philip L. (editor):
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith; at Shifflett, Crandall: (Virtual Jamestown; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Research Project, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy) 2007.
Whittenburg, James P.:
After the Fort: Jamestown, circa. 1620-1699; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/whittenburg_essay.html)
For further information and details on these and other citations, contact jhmccall1@gmail.com
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 8
The Virginia Diaspora: Jamestown’s Legacy of
America’s Great Westward Migration
One lesser-known legacy was the lessons learned from the experiences, losses and mistakes in launching Jamestown. John Smith went on to use them and others’ reports of settlers’ “seasoning” and travails to make and promote recommendations for the organization and conduct of future model colonies for those who also would want to emigrate to America for any of several reasons, such as the religious persecution suffered by the Pilgrims.
This legacy then gave succeeding English and British colonization efforts, first in Massachusetts and Maryland, and then elsewhere in America and around the world, more realistic direction, instructions and expectations that had better results. Smith was its most articulate and effective advocate, and it served to help establish the British Empire. It also went on to later serve in our own nation’s vast expansion and settlement.
By 1640, the first generation of descendants of Jamestown’s ancient planters and other early settlers began searching for new lands to settle north and west of Jamestown in the upper Chesapeake and the uplands and foothills – away from the Tidewater. Other colonists soon were joining them, and also started an incessant quest even farther; a few were encouraged by Berkeley’s efforts and promotions to settle Carolina during Jamestown’s third and fourth decades, which also was named for and chartered as a new (albeit West Indies-based) colony by Charles II in 1663.
The changed social structure and class and economic pressures that had been evolving since the 1630s also impelled marginal farmers and new landowners (who had fulfilled their servitude obligations) to the extremities of the settled colony, where they faced displaced native tribes and the many other challenges of pioneering settlers. The 1670 disenfranchisement of small landowners and tenants also likely added to the nascent wave. Dr. Horn tells us, “…increasingly after 1675 [there was] a significant movement of people out of the region” that included “thousands of ex-servants for whom the Chesapeake held no future”.
Unfortunately for them, they were also soon followed and challenged for the land by Virginia’s new elite. Cultural historians David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly tell us, “During the late seventeenth century, …former servants moved into the piedmont and settled as squatters on the land. They were quickly pushed aside by the grandees of the tidewater who acquired title to the best soil through their access to power”. Together, though, they expanded the colony ever farther as the displaced settlers moved onward.
The new century also brought a new and unprecedented immigration flow from the politically volatile border regions of England and Scotland, Ulster (northern Ireland) and Germany that also brought new customs, architecture and religious beliefs to the growing colony. By then, according to business historian Richard Tedlow, “Great Britain boasted the most advanced advertising. …Among the items being sold, few if any caused more excitement than the New World itself. Signs and handbills touting its wonders were so ubiquitous in London that [historian] Richard Hofstadter has observed that America was conceived amidst ‘one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world.’ Daniel J. Boorstin [Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987] believes that such promotion may have had a significant impact on the speed of emigration and has wondered about the impact on American civilization of the fact that ‘there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe advertising’”.
Virginia’s piedmont, Southside and backcountry frontiers and beyond were the ultimate destinations for many of these new immigrants, plus Americans from other colonies. There, they joined the settlers who were already on those outskirts seeking new opportunities, land and independence from the planter aristocracy of the Tidewater and Northern Neck.
By the 18th century’s third quarter, Virginians began moving over the Appalachians and westward along the banks of the Ohio River. “Along with ‘Plenty of good land,’ Adam Smith wrote in his section on the ‘Causes of Prosperity in New Colonies’ in the Wealth of Nations, ‘liberty to manage their own affairs [in] their own way’ was one of the ‘two great causes of the prosperity’ of the British colonies in America”.
Within two decades, Virginia would give its Revolutionary War veterans warrants for bounties of potential farmland in the Commonwealth. The infant nation had no other resources but land to compensate them (similar to the Virginia Company’s impecunious position at the end of the colony’s first decade). These bounties took the settler veterans farther into its hinterlands; they soon were in western Virginia and the future states of Kentucky and Ohio and as far as Illinois along the Mississippi. The legacy of land ownership by the common citizen that had been established at early Jamestown (with the headrights system) manifested itself with these bounty claims as our nation’s early history unfolded.
This is the eighth of nine parts; next: The Virginia Diaspora continues and Jamestown’s Most Important Legacy.
Copyright 2008
America’s Great Westward Migration
One lesser-known legacy was the lessons learned from the experiences, losses and mistakes in launching Jamestown. John Smith went on to use them and others’ reports of settlers’ “seasoning” and travails to make and promote recommendations for the organization and conduct of future model colonies for those who also would want to emigrate to America for any of several reasons, such as the religious persecution suffered by the Pilgrims.
This legacy then gave succeeding English and British colonization efforts, first in Massachusetts and Maryland, and then elsewhere in America and around the world, more realistic direction, instructions and expectations that had better results. Smith was its most articulate and effective advocate, and it served to help establish the British Empire. It also went on to later serve in our own nation’s vast expansion and settlement.
By 1640, the first generation of descendants of Jamestown’s ancient planters and other early settlers began searching for new lands to settle north and west of Jamestown in the upper Chesapeake and the uplands and foothills – away from the Tidewater. Other colonists soon were joining them, and also started an incessant quest even farther; a few were encouraged by Berkeley’s efforts and promotions to settle Carolina during Jamestown’s third and fourth decades, which also was named for and chartered as a new (albeit West Indies-based) colony by Charles II in 1663.
The changed social structure and class and economic pressures that had been evolving since the 1630s also impelled marginal farmers and new landowners (who had fulfilled their servitude obligations) to the extremities of the settled colony, where they faced displaced native tribes and the many other challenges of pioneering settlers. The 1670 disenfranchisement of small landowners and tenants also likely added to the nascent wave. Dr. Horn tells us, “…increasingly after 1675 [there was] a significant movement of people out of the region” that included “thousands of ex-servants for whom the Chesapeake held no future”.
Unfortunately for them, they were also soon followed and challenged for the land by Virginia’s new elite. Cultural historians David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly tell us, “During the late seventeenth century, …former servants moved into the piedmont and settled as squatters on the land. They were quickly pushed aside by the grandees of the tidewater who acquired title to the best soil through their access to power”. Together, though, they expanded the colony ever farther as the displaced settlers moved onward.
The new century also brought a new and unprecedented immigration flow from the politically volatile border regions of England and Scotland, Ulster (northern Ireland) and Germany that also brought new customs, architecture and religious beliefs to the growing colony. By then, according to business historian Richard Tedlow, “Great Britain boasted the most advanced advertising. …Among the items being sold, few if any caused more excitement than the New World itself. Signs and handbills touting its wonders were so ubiquitous in London that [historian] Richard Hofstadter has observed that America was conceived amidst ‘one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world.’ Daniel J. Boorstin [Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987] believes that such promotion may have had a significant impact on the speed of emigration and has wondered about the impact on American civilization of the fact that ‘there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe advertising’”.
Virginia’s piedmont, Southside and backcountry frontiers and beyond were the ultimate destinations for many of these new immigrants, plus Americans from other colonies. There, they joined the settlers who were already on those outskirts seeking new opportunities, land and independence from the planter aristocracy of the Tidewater and Northern Neck.
By the 18th century’s third quarter, Virginians began moving over the Appalachians and westward along the banks of the Ohio River. “Along with ‘Plenty of good land,’ Adam Smith wrote in his section on the ‘Causes of Prosperity in New Colonies’ in the Wealth of Nations, ‘liberty to manage their own affairs [in] their own way’ was one of the ‘two great causes of the prosperity’ of the British colonies in America”.
Within two decades, Virginia would give its Revolutionary War veterans warrants for bounties of potential farmland in the Commonwealth. The infant nation had no other resources but land to compensate them (similar to the Virginia Company’s impecunious position at the end of the colony’s first decade). These bounties took the settler veterans farther into its hinterlands; they soon were in western Virginia and the future states of Kentucky and Ohio and as far as Illinois along the Mississippi. The legacy of land ownership by the common citizen that had been established at early Jamestown (with the headrights system) manifested itself with these bounty claims as our nation’s early history unfolded.
This is the eighth of nine parts; next: The Virginia Diaspora continues and Jamestown’s Most Important Legacy.
Copyright 2008
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 7
Jamestown’s Final Years
The last quarter of the 17th century would prove to be Jamestown’s final years as the seat of the colonial government. Berkeley’s governance policies that fostered Virginia’s independent self-rule and his advocacy of free trade put him at odds with the increasingly restrictive imperial policies of the newly restored crown. He was aging and also found himself contending with a restive element of lesser Virginians who began to chafe under the increasing power ambitions of the great plantation owners who, being in Berkeley’s circle, dominated the Old Dominion’s politics and economy. A group of rebellious colonists led by Nathaniel Bacon, a relatively new settler, took issue with the governor’s policies for land grants and acquisition and dealing with continuing Indian raids on their settlements, which quickly degenerated into Virginia’s (and America’s) first, albeit brief, civil war, when they seized and burned Jamestown and its statehouse in 1676.
The result was a show of imperial military force from London and Berkeley’s sacking, plus increased royal control and succeeding governors who “…were determined to bend the Virginians to their sovereign’s wishes”. They were unable, however, to pressure the councilors and burgesses into restructuring the colony with urban or town centers, or move quickly to fund the reconstruction of the statehouse. Nevertheless, it was eventually rebuilt (and became “…the largest secular public building in 17th century America”), but burned again in 1698.
By 1700, Virginia’s capital was relocated to Williamsburg, about eight miles away. The change was profound, as Jamestown was the colonial capital, and, as historian Daniel Richter tells us, “Williamsburg was designed to be an imperial capital. The place actually symbolizes everything the Founding Fathers set out to replace…Its Governor’s Palace embodied royal majesty; its Capitol…symbolized the balance of aristocratic and democratic, imperial and provincial, power…These and other imperial associations were one reason the republican revolutionaries moved their government to Richmond and left Williamsburg a virtual ghost town until its twentieth century tourist rebirth”.
The major impact of the new gubernatorial regimes was a subordination of the House of Burgesses and new constraints and diminishment of its powers. Billings tells us that the Bacon-led “revolt also awakened [Virginians] to the lesser planters’ discontents and the need to ensure that such rancor would never again burst into rebellion. [That policy would be effective for almost 100 years.] All acknowledged an intrusive crown for what it was, a threat to the General Assembly and the great planters’ dominance of it”.
The colonists, retaining the memory of their taste of virtually independent self-government during the interregnum, continued stubborn but steadfast resistance to the imperial efforts to emasculate their capacity to govern themselves. The end of the Stuart reign and England’s Glorious Revolution (1688) signaled the crown’s increased efforts to tighten colonial control. However, the Crown’s vice-regents “…failed to achieve Stuart visions of empire. They hedged the General Assembly, and just as it stood at the breaking point, the downfall of James II and accession of William and Mary directed the empire builders’ attentions elsewhere. From the 1690s onward, the Assembly’s quest for power was as much a striving to recover lost ground as to claim new terrain.”
Rights and privileges similar to those conceived and confirmed initially at Jamestown were also adopted in other, simultaneously evolving colonial constitutions. Their pursuit and enjoyment were to create political tensions that would increase with the decades of the 18th century. The Virginia colonists saw their established and inherent rights as Englishmen, as well as those they had acquired during the ninety years of Jamestown’s existence, increasingly beleaguered; their constitutional struggles with the crown and parliament persisted as the century wore on. Those tensions and struggles, also experienced by fellow Americans in New England and other colonies, would eventually escalate into our Revolution.
By the late 17th century, Jamestown was no longer serving as Virginia’s primary port as facilities in other riverside communities were developed. With both its economic and political functions reduced, it was eventually abandoned during the 18th century and reverted to farmland, which, with the exception of a lone mid-17th century brick church tower, covered the remains, buildings and artifacts of those who had established and sustained it for nine decades.
This is the seventh of nine parts; next: The Virginia Diaspora.
Copyright 2008
The last quarter of the 17th century would prove to be Jamestown’s final years as the seat of the colonial government. Berkeley’s governance policies that fostered Virginia’s independent self-rule and his advocacy of free trade put him at odds with the increasingly restrictive imperial policies of the newly restored crown. He was aging and also found himself contending with a restive element of lesser Virginians who began to chafe under the increasing power ambitions of the great plantation owners who, being in Berkeley’s circle, dominated the Old Dominion’s politics and economy. A group of rebellious colonists led by Nathaniel Bacon, a relatively new settler, took issue with the governor’s policies for land grants and acquisition and dealing with continuing Indian raids on their settlements, which quickly degenerated into Virginia’s (and America’s) first, albeit brief, civil war, when they seized and burned Jamestown and its statehouse in 1676.
The result was a show of imperial military force from London and Berkeley’s sacking, plus increased royal control and succeeding governors who “…were determined to bend the Virginians to their sovereign’s wishes”. They were unable, however, to pressure the councilors and burgesses into restructuring the colony with urban or town centers, or move quickly to fund the reconstruction of the statehouse. Nevertheless, it was eventually rebuilt (and became “…the largest secular public building in 17th century America”), but burned again in 1698.
By 1700, Virginia’s capital was relocated to Williamsburg, about eight miles away. The change was profound, as Jamestown was the colonial capital, and, as historian Daniel Richter tells us, “Williamsburg was designed to be an imperial capital. The place actually symbolizes everything the Founding Fathers set out to replace…Its Governor’s Palace embodied royal majesty; its Capitol…symbolized the balance of aristocratic and democratic, imperial and provincial, power…These and other imperial associations were one reason the republican revolutionaries moved their government to Richmond and left Williamsburg a virtual ghost town until its twentieth century tourist rebirth”.
The major impact of the new gubernatorial regimes was a subordination of the House of Burgesses and new constraints and diminishment of its powers. Billings tells us that the Bacon-led “revolt also awakened [Virginians] to the lesser planters’ discontents and the need to ensure that such rancor would never again burst into rebellion. [That policy would be effective for almost 100 years.] All acknowledged an intrusive crown for what it was, a threat to the General Assembly and the great planters’ dominance of it”.
The colonists, retaining the memory of their taste of virtually independent self-government during the interregnum, continued stubborn but steadfast resistance to the imperial efforts to emasculate their capacity to govern themselves. The end of the Stuart reign and England’s Glorious Revolution (1688) signaled the crown’s increased efforts to tighten colonial control. However, the Crown’s vice-regents “…failed to achieve Stuart visions of empire. They hedged the General Assembly, and just as it stood at the breaking point, the downfall of James II and accession of William and Mary directed the empire builders’ attentions elsewhere. From the 1690s onward, the Assembly’s quest for power was as much a striving to recover lost ground as to claim new terrain.”
Rights and privileges similar to those conceived and confirmed initially at Jamestown were also adopted in other, simultaneously evolving colonial constitutions. Their pursuit and enjoyment were to create political tensions that would increase with the decades of the 18th century. The Virginia colonists saw their established and inherent rights as Englishmen, as well as those they had acquired during the ninety years of Jamestown’s existence, increasingly beleaguered; their constitutional struggles with the crown and parliament persisted as the century wore on. Those tensions and struggles, also experienced by fellow Americans in New England and other colonies, would eventually escalate into our Revolution.
By the late 17th century, Jamestown was no longer serving as Virginia’s primary port as facilities in other riverside communities were developed. With both its economic and political functions reduced, it was eventually abandoned during the 18th century and reverted to farmland, which, with the exception of a lone mid-17th century brick church tower, covered the remains, buildings and artifacts of those who had established and sustained it for nine decades.
This is the seventh of nine parts; next: The Virginia Diaspora.
Copyright 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
