by Adam Winkler
The largest stockholder was Sir Thomas West, an English nobleman whose lineage could be traced back to a signer of the Magna Carta, adopted in 1215 as England’s first constitution limiting the power of the Crown. Said to be a “man of the highest social position and character,” West served in Parliament, was a member of the powerful Privy Council, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, James’s immediate predecessor, in 1599. Although few Americans know him today, West, whose aristocratic title was Lord De La Warr, had such an influence on the colonial era that one of the original thirteen states, Delaware, was named after him.8
ONE OF AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS, SIR THOMAS WEST, THE LORD DE LA WARR.
West was still back home in England when the Discovery, the Godspeed, and the Susan Constant, the first trio of ships sent by the Virginia Company’s “council”—its board of directors—landed in the New World in April of 1607 with more than one hundred colonists. From the council’s perspective, the colonists were mostly employees. Other than a handful of gentlemen sent to maintain order, most of these voyagers were servants indentured to the company or to individual investors for periods of four to seven years. All were under the direction of the company and the council in London, which sent with the colonists detailed work instructions. The settlers were directed to establish camp on “some navigable river . . . such as one as runneth furthest into the land.” Most importantly, they were to expeditiously organize a team to begin searching for precious metals, such as gold and silver, or a passage to the South Seas. (The directors were certain America was just a thin isthmus like present-day Panama and expected to find an easy route to the Pacific Ocean.) Because such discoveries were the company’s best hope to make money, the board commanded a full third of the settlers to begin searching immediately.9
The colonists dutifully followed orders, to their considerable misfortune. They selected a site for the settlement that satisfied the company’s demands but that turned out to be a deathtrap. They set up amidst bogs and marshes with stagnant water and, as a result, the colonists unknowingly drank water polluted with their own waste; disease—typhoid, scurvy, dysentery, pellagra, beriberi—ran rampant. Because the company had sent such a large contingent of men out to explore for valuable commodities or a passage to the Pacific, the land was not cleared in time for planting. Moreover, the colonists did not have enough supplies to make it through a winter that would be more brutally cold than any of them had previously experienced in England.10
The Virginia Company was a first mover, with all the unforeseen risks that typically confront a pioneering firm opening up a new market. One risk the company had not considered was drought. According to historical archeologists, who have studied tree rings to determine rainfall in the area at the time of the first settlement, the seven years beginning in 1606 brought the worst drought to that region since the 1200s. Conditions were so bad that when the Virginia Company’s first supply ships arrived in January of 1608, nine months after the initial landing, only 38 of the original 108 colonists had survived.11
In the vast expanse of North America, there was but one lone corporation, and it was barely holding on. The company sent several hundred additional settlers, but they too suffered from the harsh conditions—and from the company’s unreliable supply chain. In 1609, one of the company’s supply ships, the Sea Venture, encountered a tempest and was shipwrecked on Bermuda. The council in London did not discover what had happened for months, so the company had not sent additional supplies. The Sea Venture’s fate, once publicized in England, inspired an aging writer to author one of his last plays, a story about a group of sailors caught in a storm and marooned on a faraway island in the New World. Shakespeare called his play The Tempest.12
If the first few years were not difficult enough, the bitter winter of 1609–1610 nearly put the Virginia Company out of business. Relations with the local native tribe, the Paspahegh, had already turned violent, largely due to competition for the supplies of food diminished by the drought. The colonists refused to leave their small fort out of fear of ambush; inside, however, they had not nearly enough food. The colonists reported having to eat “dogs, cats, rats, and mice,” and some boiled and ate their own shoes. Eventually, we know now, they turned to cannibalism. Archaeologists studying a trash deposit at the Jamestown site discovered a human skull with scores of knife marks from where the meat was cut away. (“They were clearly interested in cheek meat, muscles of the face, tongue, and brain,” reported a researcher who examined the remains.) This period, referred to as the “starving time,” saw only sixty—of the more than five hundred settlers who by then had come to Virginia—survive.13
In early 1610, after supply ships returned to London with reports on the “sick and miserable estate” of the colonists, Sir Thomas West decided it was time for him to come to America. With a considerable portion of his wealth invested in the venture, he thought it necessary to become more personally involved in the day-to-day operations of the colonial enterprise. Leaving behind his wife, young children, and all the comforts of his aristocratic life, West was not only motivated by money. He was seeking personal redemption. Although a nobleman, West had been imprisoned in 1601 on suspicion of conspiring to overthrow Elizabeth, the queen who had knighted him. He was exonerated, but his reputation was nonetheless unavoidably tarnished. If he could save Jamestown, he would impress his peers and prove his loyalty to the Crown. Like many who would come to America after him, West was seeking a second chance.14
West was determined that Jamestown would avoid the fate of previous efforts to colonize North America. The first European attempt had occurred fifty years earlier, when the Spanish conquistador Tristan de Luna y Arellano landed in what is now Pensacola, Florida, only to have his nascent settlement destroyed by a hurricane. Spain had more success with a base further east in St. Augustine. However, all the previous English efforts had ended in failure. The explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, for example, organized an expedition that left over one hundred settlers on Roanoke Island off North Carolina in 1587. Due to hostilities with Spain, however, the first resupply ship did not return for three years. By then, the settlement was deserted; none of the colonists were ever seen again and their fate remains a mystery to this day.15
In the spring of 1610, West set sail in a fleet of three ships with four hundred new colonists and a year’s worth of supplies. He also came with new powers. The board believed the colony had suffered from a lack of clear authority. In Jamestown, “no man would acknowledge a superior,” the company admitted, “nor could from this headless and unbridled multitude, be anything expected but disorder and riot.” The settlers needed a boss. West was appointed “Lord Governor and Captain General” of the colony, with “full and absolute power and authority to correct, punish, pardon, govern, and rule.” The company expected that the mere presence of an all-powerful boss who hailed from the aristocracy would make the settlers fall into line. Should that fail, however, West brought with him a contingent of military men to enforce discipline. He came to Jamestown to bring order, not liberty.16
During his two-month voyage, conditions in Jamestown continued to deteriorate. Desperate, the surviving settlers decided to disregard the Virginia Company’s orders and return home. They packed up the ships and were about to set fire to the fort until someone objected that it was not really theirs to destroy. The fort and the other structures were the rightful property of the corporation. Leaving behind the Virginia Company’s fixed assets, the settlers departed for England. Jamestown was abandoned.17
England’s colonial enterprise might have ended right there had it not been for West’s uncanny timing. As the ships carrying the settlers who had quit Jamestown made their way down the James River on June 7, 1610, they encountered a longboat from West’s fleet coming in the opposite direction. West immediately ordered the settlers to turn around and return to Jamestown. Had West left England a few days later or been delayed even just a bit longer at sea, the ships would have missed each other.
West would have landed at Jamestown to find a fort but no one left there for him to govern. Instead, the colony and the company, and perhaps even the American experiment itself, were saved.
ON JUNE 7, 1610, THE JAMESTOWN COLONY WAS SAVED BY THE ARRIVAL OF SIR THOMAS WEST, A LEADING STOCKHOLDER IN THE VIRGINIA COMPANY.
Under West’s rigid system of discipline in the colony, settlers were to rise at 6 a.m. and attend morning services at the church. Failure meant the loss of a week’s food allowance for the first offense; for the third, the punishment was death. Indeed, capital punishment was threatened for a variety of misdeeds, including profaning God’s Word, unauthorized trading with the Indians, and fleeing the colony. If someone robbed the common store of food, they would be bound to a tree to starve. All the settlers’ guns were gathered up and declared to be part of the common arsenal. This was ostensibly to make them available if needed to fight the Indians but had the added benefit of making it harder for any colonists who chafed at West’s harsh rule to revolt.18
West’s reign in Jamestown finally put the colony on a stable footing. Although he returned to England before long due to illness, contemporaries credited him with rescuing the colony. As Richard Martin, a lawyer for the Virginia Company, reportedly told the House of Commons in 1614, “Since Lord De la Warr became Governor, Virginia had become a settled plantation, and all it now needed was the fostering care of England.” According to Alexander Brown, an influential nineteenth-century historian, West “planted an English nation, where none before had stood.” Indeed, Brown went so far as to say that if “any one man can be called the founder of . . . this country,” Sir Thomas West “is that man.”19
While Brown’s view has much to commend it, the story of Jamestown points to another contender for the honorific title of America’s founder: a legal person, a corporation, known as the Virginia Company.
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ALTHOUGH THE STRICT SYSTEM of discipline instituted by West stabilized the fledgling colony at its most precarious moment, within a few years those same rules became a hindrance to recruiting settlers from England, which in turn scared away investors. To make Jamestown more attractive to both groups, the Virginia Company board instituted major changes in land ownership and governance beginning in 1616. These corporate reforms, designed to maximize the company’s profits, brought the earliest measures of democracy to America.
During its first decade, the Virginia Company hemorrhaged money. The colony was stable, but the company had yet to find any precious metals or a passage to the South Seas. There had been no profit to distribute to investors, who the company admitted were rewarded so far with only “fairy tales and hopes.” Seeking to turn things around, the board used the one asset it had in abundance: land. Every stockholder was offered 100 acres of land in the colony for each share held, plus additional acres for each settler the stockholder sent to Jamestown. Land was an intriguing lure to successful English merchants who, given the paucity and historical control of land in England by the aristocracy, could never expect to own real property at home. The catch was that the stockholders would also have to finance the development of their parcels themselves—just as someone who buys land today has to build on it herself. Instead of the Virginia Company financing the colonists, the stockholders were to be individually responsible for finding settlers, paying for their transportation, and furnishing their supplies.20
This new system of land ownership fundamentally changed the colony. Instead of everyone working company land on company orders for company profits, landowners now worked primarily for themselves, with the Virginia Company only taking a cut. Almost exclusively, landowners chose to grow tobacco, America’s first marketable crop. Developed for commercial trade by John Rolfe in 1614, tobacco would have an enormous influence on the course of American history, fueling demand for slave labor until the Civil War and shaping cultural attitudes ever since. Tobacco, we will see, would also play a starring role in the history of corporate rights, as tobacco companies and their allies would prove to be among the most ardent proponents of constitutional protections for corporations. Back in the Jamestown era, however, commercial tobacco was in its infancy and the colonists’ choice to focus on this crop displeased the Virginia Company board, which had wanted the development of even more profitable commodities. Still, the land reform was an unquestioned success, encouraging new settlers to come and enticing new investors for subsequent rounds of financing.21
One of the instigators of the company’s reforms was Sir Edwin Sandys. The son of the archbishop of York and a leading member of King James’s opposition in Parliament, Sandys had been an investor in the Virginia Company from early on and an active member of the board of directors. He had an independent streak that rubbed off on the corporation, which became a bit of a radical. In 1619, when Sandys was nominated for the chief executive job, James reportedly sent a message to the stockholders meeting: “Choose the Devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys.” Feeling Sandys’s renegade influence, however, the stockholders did not bow. Reading the company’s charter out loud at the stockholders meeting, with emphasis on the provisions giving them the right to freely elect corporate officers, they chose Sandys.22
THE VIRGINIA COMPANY’S CHIEF EXECUTIVE, SIR EDWIN SANDYS, INSTITUTED REFORMS THAT INCREASED PROFITS AND ALSO BROUGHT THE FIRST ELEMENTS OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY TO AMERICA.
Under Sandys’s leadership, the Virginia Company decided to give the settlers a similar measure of autonomy over their affairs. The company authorized the creation of a “General Assembly” in Jamestown, comprised of representatives of the various plantations, to promulgate rules to govern the colony. The first representative assembly in America met in July of 1619 in the Jamestown Church. Constructed of timbers, with a cobblestone foundation, the church was small—and, in the humidity of a Virginia summer, suffocatingly so; one man died during the convening. Faring better were attendees such as Rolfe, the tobacco innovator; Francis West, the younger brother of Thomas; and John Jefferson, reputed to be an ancestor of the famous Founding Father. Another was Nathaniel Powell, who came over with the first company ships. Generations later, his descendant Lewis Powell would sit on the Supreme Court and became one of the most forceful voices ever in American law for expanding the constitutional rights of corporations.23
The emergence of the first measures of self-government in Jamestown was not a reflection of Sandys’s liberal leanings. It was a corporate necessity, essential to entice men of character, disciplined and public-spirited, to move to the Chesapeake. Such men would not want to live under martial law, even if that had been necessary in the colony’s first years. Settlers would want to have some say over their day-to-day lives. As a result of Sandys’s reforms, the company recruited nearly 4,000 new colonists to come to the New World, including the Pilgrims.
Sandys had begun corresponding with the Pilgrims as early as 1617 because they were precisely the kind of dedicated, devout, and hard-working people needed to make a successful colony. Unlike the original Jamestown settlers, the Pilgrims, who were bound together by religious and kinship ties, could largely be trusted to work unselfishly. By happenstance, the Mayflower landed far to the north of its intended destination, and the Pilgrims decided to make their home in Plymouth.24
According to legend, the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest with a day of thanksgiving in 1621. Yet the first official Thanksgiving in America was actually two years earlier, and it was a corporate initiative. The Virginia Company had authorized a group of settlers, known as the Berkeley Hundred, to move to the colony. The company ordered them to establish an annual holiday to thank the almighty upon landing: “We ordain that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god.” On December 4, 1619, when the Berkeley Hundred’s ship dropped anchor in the James River, the settlers followed the company’s instructions and Thanksgiving in the New World was bor
n.25
The corporation that brought democracy and Thanksgiving to America also brought more nefarious practices, including human trafficking, even before the first African slaves arrived. The Virginia Company board was concerned that men did not want to stay long in Virginia because of the lack of women—or what the company called “the comforts without which God saw that man could not live contentedly, no not [even] in Paradise.” To rectify this problem, Sandys launched an extraordinary program to recruit women to emigrate to the colony. Investors in London put together a special fund to subsidize the shipping of young women to Jamestown. Upon arrival in the New World, the women were bartered off by the company to the highest bidder. According to Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Bernard Bailyn, “The women were snapped up by the more affluent planters, bought at such high rates, it was said, that poor men never got near them.”26
Sandys’s elaborate reorganization of the colony and recruitment of the Pilgrims and women was still not enough to make the Virginia Company profitable. Sandys himself encountered trouble just a few years after taking the company’s reins, tripped up by an issue that continues to bedevil corporate executives to this day: executive compensation. After it was publicized that Sandys had awarded himself an extravagant fee to manage the company’s tobacco dealings, investors were outraged. The Privy Council launched an investigation that humiliated Sandys, much to King James’s pleasure. Faith in the Virginia Company dissolved further when, in 1622, Indians launched a surprise attack on the settlers, killing about a third of them in what came to be known as the Virginia Massacre. The company tried to blame the settlers, but regardless of fault there was no denying the numbers: nearly 8,000 people had moved to Virginia over the first 15 years and approximately 6,800 of them had died. In 1624, Jamestown took one more life, so to speak, when the Virginia Company itself was finally shut down. With the corporation out of business, the colony was turned over to the Crown.27