At a stroke many of the colonists' gains since 1616 were swept away. Nearly a quarter of the colony's total population of 1,500 people had been killed. Several major plantations were destroyed, notably Martin's Hundred and Charles City, with its precious iron works. War with the Indians now resumed in earnest, and would continue for another decade, with bloody reprisals on both sides. The delicate balance between self-sufficiency and starvation was upset, and lethal epidemics swept through the population. The image of the colony as a death trap was once more raised in the minds of potential settlers back home.
The attack placed the final nail in the coffin of the Virginia Company, and a reorganization of its government was now inevitable. In April 1623 the Privy Council appointed a seven-man commission under Sir William Jones to inquire into the state of the colony, and at the same time ordered the company to send help. Being bankrupt, it declined to do so, and thus stood in breach of its obligations under the charter of 1612. The Privy Council ordered the attorney general to begin legal proceedings to annul the charter. By May 1624 the Virginia Company was no more.12 The demise of the company coincided with the death of James I and a year passed before his successor had time to decide how to reorganize the colony. Eventually Charles I simply affirmed by proclamation through the Privy Council the original intent that the colony had been established “for the propagation of Christian Religion, the increase of trade, and the enlarging of his Royal empire.” Virginia would henceforth be administered by a governor and royal council answerable to the king.
Although Virginia now became a royal colony, Charles's proclamation neither disrupted its economic development nor ended the Crown's essentially hands-off policy towards its empire. The proclamation assured the colonists that the annulment of the charter was “not intended to take away or impeach the particular interest of any private planter or adventurer.” Their property rights would be protected. Moreover the declaration made no mention of the assembly, whose existence the Privy Council most likely overlooked. No ban was placed on its meeting, indicating that the king's main concern was to end the bitter altercations within the company and perhaps in time to produce some revenue. Beyond that aim he had no plans.
5 Growth and Consolidation, 1625–1660
The imposition of royal government in 1625 was hardly a cause for celebration, since the colonists were uncertain what it would mean. It might merely lead to the re-establishment of the company, for during the next few years Sandys made several attempts to regain the charter. But in retrospect the removal of the company was seen to have been a blessing. The imposition of royal control actually sped the development of the kinds of policies already begun by 1619, policies which gave immigrants a stake in the colony's future by enabling them to acquire land, earn profits, form families to some extent, and participate in their own self-government. These policies, in the long run, helped to spur continued rapid migration from England and the development of a profitable tobacco export economy. England's colony in Virginia would endure and gradually become more stable (though in the future these same policies would also generate destructive forces with tragic human costs).
In 1625, the colonists themselves had two main political concerns: one was to avoid the imposition of a contract for the marketing of their tobacco; the other was to prevent the reimposition of martial law and to keep their assembly. To this end they sent various petitions and passed an ordinance declaring that “the governor shall not lay any taxes or impositions upon the colony, their lands or commodities other than by the authority of the general assembly.” On the matter of an assembly, the Crown remained obstinately quiet.
As a practical matter, though, both Sir Francis Wyatt, the first royal governor, and his successor regularly summoned meetings to sound out colonists' opinions on matters of special importance. Although the governors had plenipotentiary powers, once in Virginia they found their authority limited by the absence of soldiers or a bureaucracy. Ultimately they were able to govern only with the consent of the colonists. Although for many years Charles I did not grant the assembly formal recognition, in 1639 he conceded the crucial point that the assembly “together with the governor and council shall have power to make acts and laws for the government of that plantation, correspondent as near as may be to the laws of England.” Governor Wyatt was authorized to summon the burgesses “as formerly once a year or oftener, if urgent occasion shall require.”
Regarding the tobacco contract, Charles I eventually settled for a customs duty of one shilling, leaving the colonists to market it themselves. Such a policy ultimately facilitated the growth of tobacco production and exports, and the creation of a commercial agricultural economy and society. Also, the removal of the company further opened the settlement of the land to private individuals. Although the Crown retained some interest, it was only too happy to encourage such settlement in return for a small quitrent. The colony was still an unhealthy destination for immigrants, many of whom perished during their first year or two in the colony, a period known as the “seasoning.” Still, they continued to arrive in large numbers, lured by the prospect of making money growing tobacco. Indeed the potential profits to be gained from growing tobacco allowed even tenant farmers to earn enough to buy land of their own. Freed servants could likewise earn high enough wages during these early decades that they could buy land of their own within a few years of finishing their indentures.
As Virginia became a settler society devoted to commercial agriculture, the old effort to assimilate the Indians into English society by converting them to Christianity was abandoned and a new policy towards the Indians began to emerge instead. After the massacre of 1622, the colony's leaders struck out furiously, hoping to destroy all the Native American settlements in the vicinity of Jamestown and the lower peninsula in order to claim the land for themselves. “Our first work is the expulsion of the Salvages to gain the free range of the country for increase of cattle, swine &c,” wrote Governor Wyatt. “It is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thorns in our sides, than to be at peace and league with them.” For the next decade expeditions were sent out three times a year to kill the enemy, seize their crops, and prevent their return. No tactics were too cruel. One detachment talked with the Potomac Indians in 1623 as a ruse to poison 200 of them, including their chief. Peace was achieved only in the early 1630s, when the two sides agreed to maintain a strict separation by a line across the Jamestown peninsula, with only limited contacts for trade.13 Unlike the Spanish, who made extraordinary efforts to assimilate and “civilize” the Indians, the English in Virginia would henceforth work to exclude the Indians altogether.
The agreement reached in 1632 was at best an uneasy truce, and another major conflict was almost unavoidable. That conflict came in 1644–6 in a war that was fought for the same reasons as before. This time the colonists were more numerous than the Indians, even though Opechancanough began hostilities with another surprise attack, in which 500 settlers were killed. The settlers no longer needed the Indians, except for a handful of fur traders. What they wanted was the Indians' land, and the war provided a convenient excuse for ridding the area of its native inhabitants. After two years of fighting, Opechancanough was captured and brought to Jamestown, where he was murdered by his guards. The result was the final destruction of the Powhatan Confederacy. Under the terms of the peace treaty of 1646 the Indians were banned from the Jamestown peninsula under pain of death, and had to acknowledge the king of England as their sovereign. Even their remaining lands on the north side of the York River were not exempt from colonization.
This gruesome turn in Anglo-Indian relations would often be repeated elsewhere over the next two and a half centuries. The initial pattern was for local Indians to form trading relationships with their vastly outnumbered new English neighbors. Over time, as the settlers' numbers increased and they became more confident, their eyes turned to the Indians' land. Conflicts over incompatible land uses resulted in intermittent warfare. Onc
e a sufficient number of local Indians had left the region so that the remainder were outnumbered, the settlers launched full-scale attacks. In the end the remnants of the indigenous inhabitants were either enslaved or confined to reservations, where they could be controlled for the convenience of the colonists. Even then Indian peoples were not safe, for although sporadic attempts were made to protect them from the excesses of their white neighbors, these were rarely effective.
As new land was opened for the colonists to exploit, the cultivation of tobacco became increasingly widespread. Admittedly the Crown, like the Virginia Company before it, continued to cherish delusions of a more diversified economy. On his arrival in 1641, Governor Sir William Berkeley was ordered “to cause the people there to apply themselves to the raising of more Staple Comodities as Hemp and Flax, Rape Seed, Pitch and Tarr, for the Tanning of Hydes and leather.” To no avail. Although the price of tobacco plunged more than 90 percent, from three shillings to threepence a pound, in the 1630s, the crop still produced a good profit for most planters. Equally fruitless were Berkeley's attempts to induce the inhabitants to live in towns so as to make the settlements more defensible. All planters wanted a riverside jetty where they could load their produce. Towns simply did not suit a plantation system, and Chesapeake society would remain predominantly rural. The assembly created eight English-style counties in 1635, each with justices, a recorder, a sheriff, constables, and a coroner.
Now that the basic requirements of settlement had been learned, the population at last began to grow. A steady stream of persons continued to come to Virginia, encouraged by the demand for tobacco. By 1640 the population had reached 8,000. Those who brought enough capital to set up on their own purchased land so they could grow tobacco. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop, meaning that a planter who wished to expand his production had to find a way to purchase extra hands. Slaves from overseas were hard to come by and prohibitively expensive, while the indigenous inhabitants made poor workers, since they tended either to escape or to die in captivity. Impoverished English teenagers ready to try their fortunes in the New World, on the other hand, were plentiful and cheap, providing an abundant supply of indentured servants. They were the prime reason for the steady growth in both the population and the economy, with the production of tobacco reaching one million pounds by 1640.
The system of indentured labor shaped the development of the society. Planters' preferences for young male servants, who could produce more tobacco than young women, produced a society that was overwhelmingly male. The lack of a traditional family life meant that early Virginian society would produce few children, and could sustain its population only if it attracted a constant supply of immigrants. Most planters, accordingly, had to console themselves with the thought that, once they had made their fortune, they could go home for a wife to England. For most, Virginia was only a temporary residence.
English planters in Virginia did not object to purchasing African slaves, although the Africans brought here before 1660 were small in number. In 1634 there were perhaps 200, at a time when the settlers numbered 7,500. Meanwhile the status of these Africans was relatively fluid. In part this was due to the lack of a legal definition for African servants, for slavery had disappeared as an institution in England before the Norman Conquest and English colonizers had no reason to codify a law of slavery when they first arrived in Virginia. As a result of their ambiguous legal status, African servants were not sharply differentiated from European servants before 1660. Many lived together, not infrequently absconded together, and even intermarried. A number of Africans were provided for in wills. In cases of sexual misconduct, Africans were not necessarily punished more severely than European offenders, for racial attitudes had not yet hardened.14 Virginia was still a “society with slaves” rather than a fully developed “slave society.”15
The fluidity of slavery in early Virginia was a product of the experiences and choices not only of the English settlers but of enslaved Africans themselves. Many Africans who were brought to Virginia before 1660 or so were “Atlantic creoles” who had high levels of sophistication and exposure to European cultures before they arrived. For example, the first known group of 20 Africans to be brought to Virginia on a board a passing Dutch ship in 1619 had been seized from a Portuguese vessel supplying slaves from the Portuguese colony of Angola to the Spanish port of Vera Cruz in Mexico.16 A number of these Africans were Christians with Portuguese surnames, suggesting that they were coastal people who had worked closely with the Portuguese in slave trading enclaves along the African Atlantic coast before being enslaved. The knowledge and cultural savvy they had acquired while living with Europeans enabled some of these individuals to better their situations once they arrived in Virginia.
The most famous of these “Atlantic Creoles” was an African man named Anthony Johnson, who arrived in Virginia around 1621. First known by the English as “Antonio a Negro,” he had probably lived and worked with Portuguese traders in Brazil or West Africa, and knew how to work the system. Antonio made with an agreement with his master that in return for a period of diligent service he would be freed like an indentured servant. Having secured his own freedom, he anglicized his name to Anthony Johnson, then purchased the freedom of his family before acquiring several slaves himself, together with a substantial farm. On at least one occasion he successfully sued a white neighbor for the recovery of a slave, receiving damages in the process. His son John had even more success than Anthony, acquiring an estate of at least 450 acres later in the century.17
Anthony Johnson was probably more the exception than the rule, since Africans typically remained firmly at the bottom of the colonial social and economic order. If they were indentured, their period of service might last up to 28 years, and unlike white servants they were rarely given formal contracts. In wills, Africans were usually placed after other servants, next to the livestock, and were recorded only by their first names. Nonetheless some Africans achieved their freedom during these early years, created families, and began building communities and ascending the social ladder. The system of slavery had not yet solidified, nor was there any reason to believe it would take root in North American soil.
For persons of European descent, the path to success was more straightforward. Extra labor would result in more crops, which could then finance the purchase of more land and servants in a growing spiral of production and wealth. In this spiral, men who began with larger amounts of capital had an advantage, for they were able to amass more land and more servants than ordinary men or ex-servants. The possibilities had been demonstrated in the late 1620s by Yeardley himself, as well as George Sandys and Abraham Piercy, all of whom had a mixed labor force of nearly 40 servants cultivating several hundred acres. Others like Yeardley, Sandys, and Piercy arrived during subsequent decades. They were minor gentry or substantial yeoman families like the Washingtons, who brought some capital and were keen to profit from the tobacco boom. Often they were younger sons of gentlemen, or members of families who first came to Virginia as traders and stayed to become planters. They had the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes of the first generation. It was no coincidence that the history of Virginia was to be dominated by the progeny of this second generation, whose names included Washington, Carter, Harrison, Lee, Beverley, and Byrd.
By the 1640s, then, Virginia was on its way to becoming a functioning, prosperous society. The suspicion and antagonism of the Powhatan people had placed the survival of the colony in question for more than 15 years after the founding of Jamestown. In the face of Indian hostility the English were forced to raise their own food and to import their own laborers instead of relying on the Indian traders to supply them with corn. Eventually the Virginia colony was able to stabilize itself and begin to prosper because it developed mechanisms for recruiting large numbers of English settlers to occupy the land and servants to work it. Though the Virginia Company had been disappointed in its expectations of finding gold, precious metals, and a rout
e to the Pacific, the colony was growing and had the potential to develop into a substantial exporter of tobacco, a profitable commercial commodity. It was a colonial model worth emulating elsewhere. Indeed, another group of Englishmen further to the north, in New England, was already having considerable success building several new colonies organized along similar lines.
In the end, Virginia's success as a commercial farming colony doomed the Virginia colonizers' original hopes of living peacefully with the Indians. The mechansms that enabled the colony to prosper depended on clearing and cultivating thousands of acres of land owned by the Indians, a type of land use that was incompatible with the Indians' mixed hunting and farming economy. It remained to be seen whether the conflicts which had emerged between English settlers and Native Americans in Virginia would inevitably emerge in other colonies, as well.
1. James Horn proposes the connection between Paquiquineo and the people of the Chesapeake Bay region in A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York, 2005).
2. James Horn, A Land as God Made It, 52.
3. The argument about salt poisoning is advanced by Carville V. Earle, “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds, The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979), 96–122. Malaria struck periodically in the early years, and by the 1650s became endemic, which meant that some settlers lived with recurring outbreaks of the disease throughout their lives. See Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (1976), 31–60, and James Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Baltimore, 2009), 130–4.
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