Jamestown: Inventing America

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Relations between white and red men were the most variable factor in Jamestown's early history. The western Chesapeake was ruled by Wahunsonacock, chief of the Powhatan. He was an expansionist, no less than the English, having brought 30 local tribes under his sway, an empire of 15,000 people. In December 1607, Smith described his royal state: "He sat covered with a great robe, made of raccoon skins, and all the tails hanging by," flanked by "two rows of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red." The settlers hoped to make the chief a tributary to James I; he hoped to make them allies of his. Sometimes they fought; sometimes they traded. Wahunsonacock wanted the copper the settlers offered in exchange for food, and he very much wanted their swords and firearms.

But when the Indians refused to trade for food, the colonists died horribly. The winter of 1609 became the "starving time." The colonists ate horses, dogs, cats, vermin, even (it was said) corpses. In June 1610 the survivors staggered onto their ships and sailed into the bay, either looking for help or intending to sail home. Help came with the arrival of three ships from England and new settlers. The shattered colony was put under strict martial law. The penalties for running away included shooting, hanging, burning and being broken on the wheel.

Military discipline was a stopgap; serious reform, with long-reaching consequences, was already under way. The London Co. had reorganized itself as the Virginia Co. of London in 1609, and over the next dozen years settlers and backers alike realized the colony could not be run as an overseas mining company or an armed camp. Success would depend on large numbers of people and the steady production of exportable goods. That meant the incentives for living in Jamestown had to be modified.

One prophetic idea was to recruit religious outcasts--Englishmen who longed to put an ocean between them and the established Anglican Church. Some radical Protestants, known as Dissenters, had already fled to Holland. The Virginia Co. lured some Dissenters over and opened negotiations with others. One boatload of Pilgrims, blown north, landed in Plymouth, Mass., in 1620. Religious pluralism in British North America would suffer many backtracks and false starts (Virginia would develop its own Anglican establishment as time passed), but the first step was taken in Jamestown.

Jamestown also was the first place to find a cash cow and an economic system for exploiting it. The Powhatan smoked a crude indigenous species of tobacco. But in 1612, John Rolfe imported seeds of Nicotiana tabacum, the Spanish-American weed that was already a craze in England. By 1620 the colony had shipped almost 50,000 lbs. home. Fifty years later, Virginia and Maryland would ship 15 million lbs. Tobacco and foodstuffs were grown on privately owned farms. Beginning in 1618, old settlers were offered 100 acres of land, and newcomers who paid their way were given 50 acres, plus 50 more for every additional person they brought.

Many of those additional people were indentured servants who, in return for their transatlantic passage, bound themselves to labor for seven years. In 1619 the White Lion, a privateer, brought a new labor source--"20 and odd negroes" from Angola. Our original sin was not very original--Spain and Portugal had already brought 200,000 African slaves to the Americas--and the colony was slow to exploit the practice. Slaves did not outnumber indentured servants in Virginia until the 1670s. Once acquired, however, the habit of bondage would prove addicting--economic and social nicotine.

But the need to keep these newly successful tobacco growers in line led to Jamestown's most far-reaching innovation, representative government. In 1618 the Virginia Co. created a general assembly to advise the Governor--including "burgesses," or representatives, elected by property owners--on the theory that "every man will more willingly obey laws to which he has yielded his consent." The general assembly first met for five days in the summer of 1619. It discussed Indian relations, church attendance, gambling, drunkenness and the price of tobacco. It sounds like the Iowa caucuses: war and peace, social issues, bread and butter. From this seed would grow the House of Burgesses, the elective house of Virginia's colonial legislature and the political academy of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In their rough-and-ready way, the Jamestown settlers had planted the seeds of a dynamic system, democratic capitalism, along with an institution that would pervert it, chattel slavery, and a force that would supply the cure, the goal of liberty.

As the colony flourished, its Powhatan neighbors became alarmed. Trading posts were one thing, permanent farms another. On March 22, 1622, the new leader of the Powhatan, Opechancanough, launched dawn raids on 28 plantations and settlements along the James River, killing 347 colonists, a quarter of the total population. Jamestown itself escaped, warned by an Indian boy who had converted to Christianity. "Besides them they killed," a survivor lamented, "they burst the heart of all the rest." Dispirited and disorganized, hundreds more colonists died the following winter, the second "starving time."

The attack was a brilliant tactical stroke, but it sealed the fate of the attackers. The survivors responded with all-out war. In July 1624, some 800 Indian warriors risked a two-day battle with 60 armored and well-armed colonists and lost. Twenty years later, Opechancanough, nearly a century old, was captured and shot in the back in a Jamestown jail. This too set a pattern: of conflict and expulsion, which lasted until the last Indians were beaten and settled on reservations in the late 19th century.

Back home, the Virginia Co. sputtered in wrath at the imprudence of the colonists in allowing themselves to be killed. A royal commission found the colony to be "weak and miserable," and the company's charter was revoked in 1624. From then on, its Governors would be appointed by the King.

Jamestown left a record of spite, want and death, to say nothing of the long-range problems, from racism to lung cancer, of which the colonists were unaware. Yet they survived. Key aspects of the Jamestown template--chiefly the lures of religious liberty, private ownership and a measure of self-rule--guaranteed that British North America would be populous enough to withstand challenges from France and Holland and, finally, the power grabs of the mother country.

The settlers came with ideas they had to junk. Some of their brightest hopes were false. They worked hard and got other people to do their work for them. They were foolish, fierce and surprisingly stubborn. When one thing failed, they tried another. We are their descendants.