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 Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by James Horn

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Horn, James P. P., author.
Title: 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy /
James Horn.
Other titles: One thousand six hundred nineteen | Sixteen nineteen |
Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy
Description: First edition. | New York: Basic Books, [2018] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001108| ISBN 9780465064694 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781541698802 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Jamestown (Va.)—History—17th century. |
Jamestown (Va.)—Politics and government—17th century. |
Colonists—Virginia—Jamestown—History—17th century. | African
Americans—Virginia—Jamestown—History—17th century. | Slavery
—Virginia—History—17th century. | Democracy—United States—
History.
Classification: LCC F234.J3 H65 2018 | DDC 975.5/425102—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001108

ISBNs: 978-0-465-06469-4 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-9880-2 (ebook)

E3-20180828-JV-NF
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note

INTRODUCTION 1619
ONE Jamestown
TWO The Great Reforms
THREE First Africans
FOUR Commonwealth
FIVE Tumult and Liberty
SIX Inequality and Freedom
EPILOGUE After 1619

Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Index
For Sally, Liz, Ben, and Alice, with love
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what
never was and never will be.
—Thomas Jefferson
 FRONTISPIECE—The General Assembly was the first representative
governing body in America, convened at Jamestown, July 30–August 4,
1619. John Pory’s Report of the Proceedings of the General Assembly.
Permission from the National Archives, UK.
 Author’s Note

FOR THE CONVENIENCE OF THE READER, I HAVE ALTERED THE spelling and
punctuation of historical passages to make them conform to modern
conventions but have retained original capitalization to offer an
impression of the original sources. No substantive changes of any
sort have been made to direct quotations.
 Introduction

1619

ALONG THE BANKS OF THE JAMES RIVER, VIRGINIA, during an oppressively

hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within
a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course
of history. Convened with little fanfare or formality, the first
gathering of a representative governing body anywhere in the
Americas, the General Assembly, met from July 30 to August 4 in the
choir of the newly built church at Jamestown. Following instructions
from the Virginia Company of London, the colony’s financial backers,
the meeting’s principal purpose was to introduce “just Laws for the
happy guiding and governing of the people.” The assembly sat as a
single body and was made up of the governor, Sir George Yeardley,
his four councilors, and twenty-two burgesses chosen by the free,
white, male inhabitants of every town, corporation, and large
plantation throughout the colony.1
A few weeks later, a battered English privateer, the White Lion,
entered the Chesapeake Bay and anchored off Point Comfort, a small
but thriving maritime community at the mouth of the James River
that was the first port of call for oceangoing ships. While roving in
the Caribbean, the ship, together with its companion, the Treasurer,
had been involved in a fierce battle with a Portuguese slaver bound
for Veracruz. Victorious, the two privateers pillaged the Portuguese
vessel and sailed away northward carrying dozens of enslaved
Africans. Running short of water and provisions, they headed for the
nearest English haven, Virginia, where a couple of weeks later the
prominent planter John Rolfe reported that the White Lion had
“brought not anything but 20. and odd Negroes,” who were “bought”
(my italics) for food supplies. The Treasurer entered the James River
a few days later but opted to leave quickly, possibly after
clandestinely selling some of the African captives on board. Forcibly
transported from West Central Africa (modern-day Angola), they
were the first Africans to arrive in mainland English America.2
No one in Virginia in 1619 or in the years following could have
possibly grasped the importance of what had occurred. Settlers
understood that the assembly allowed them to have a hand in
governing themselves, but they were motivated more by
opportunities to approve laws sent by the Virginia Company from
London and to propose their own legislation rather than by abstract
concepts of self-government or subjects’ rights and liberties. Equally,
no documented discussion took place in the colony about the
morality of owning and enslaving Africans. Deliberations in future
general assemblies at Jamestown, as mirrored later in colonial
legislatures across English America, focused far more on policing
measures against Africans and protecting the rights of masters than
on the rights of the enslaved or ethical considerations. Slavery,
African and Indian, together with a broad spectrum of white non-
freedom—apprenticeships, convict labor, and serfdom—were simply
taken for granted in the emerging Atlantic world of the time and
elicited little comment.3
Yet the coincidence of the meeting of the first representative
government and arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the summer
of 1619 was portentous. Historians have argued that the rise of
liberty and equality in America, America’s democratic experiment,
was shadowed from its beginning by its dark obverse: slavery and
racism. Slavery in the midst of freedom, Edmund Morgan writes, was
the central paradox of the birth of America. The rapid expansion of
opportunities for Europeans was made possible only by the
enslavement and exploitation of African and Indian peoples. Non-
Europeans were consigned to a permanent underclass excluded from
the benefits of white society, while Europeans profited enormously
from the fruits of the labors of those they oppressed. Arguably, then,
1619 marks the inception of the most important political
development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the
emergence of what would in time become one of the nation’s
greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial stereotypes that
continues to afflict our society today.4

DESPITE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 1619 AND SURROUNDING years, this period is

almost entirely unknown to the public. Insofar as any attention has
been given to early Virginia, the dominant narrative portrays
Jamestown as an unqualified disaster, little more than a “dismal and
fraught” precursor of the successful godly settlements in New
England where, so it goes, America’s story really begins. For the
nation at large, Plymouth in 1620 or the founding of the Puritan
colony of Massachusetts a decade later exerts a far greater influence
on our collective historical memory than the founding of Virginia in
1607 or the events of 1619. This is especially perplexing considering
that what took place in early Jamestown had far-reaching
implications for all English colonies that followed in Virginia’s wake,
as well as eventually on the creation of the United States itself.5
Owing to numerous setbacks, the Virginia colony struggled in its
early years, leading the Company to introduce wholesale reforms in
an effort to save the colony from collapse. Still largely an
experimental period in England’s empire-building trajectory, the
import of 1619 derives from the consequential philosophical and
political assumptions that guided the reforms, though they in turn
led to unforeseen and tragic outcomes that ultimately brought an
end to the project. Instigated by the highly respected
parliamentarian and leader of the Virginia Company, Sir Edwin
Sandys (pronounced Sands), propertied white males in the colony
were granted remarkable political freedoms as well as opportunities
to share in the running of their own affairs. In addition, plans were
put in place to promote a harmonious society where diverse peoples
and religious groups would live together side by side in peace to
their mutual benefit. Because so many influential parliamentary
leaders were involved with the Company, proposals for Virginia were
informed by the wide-ranging political debates taking place
simultaneously at James I’s court and in Parliament, which linked
developments in the fledgling colony to domestic and international
issues of momentous consequence. By 1619, the Virginia Company
was recognized by many in high political circles as a laboratory for
some of the most advanced constitutional thinking of the age.
Company leaders grounded their efforts to establish a godly and
equitable society in the philosophical theory of the commonwealth.
The term commonwealth, or the “common weal,” emerged in Europe
in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and brought together a
variety of political and economic precepts that highlighted the
common good of the people. Particular emphasis was given to the
importance of wise and noble rulers and mixed government—a
salutary balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—as well
as Christian morality, prosperity, and social well-being. Linked to
Renaissance humanist ideas, statesmen and intellectuals believed
that the application of rational approaches to government and social
and economic organization would encourage the improvement of
societies and the human condition. Where better to test these ideals
than the New World? In Virginia, commonwealth theory guided the
leadership’s approach to every facet of the emerging colony,
including government, the rule of law, protections for private
property, the organization of the local economy, and relations with
the Powhatans, the Indian peoples whose territories surrounded
English settlements. The great reforms introduced in 1619,
therefore, were all-encompassing, not directed simply toward the
creation of a legislative body.6
Embracing diversity was also integral to the Virginia Company’s
plans. “Multitudes” of settlers were to be drawn from all ranks of
society and from all parts of the country. England’s first mass Atlantic
migration, which was initiated by the Company, underlined the
Company’s desire to translate large sections of English society to the
growing colony. But settlement of the colony would not only depend
on immigrants from England; Sandys and his supporters were
committed also to incorporating Indian peoples into their newly
reformed commonwealth as full members of society, an ambition
without precedent in the New World. Symbolized by the conversion
of Pocahontas, daughter of the Powhatan chieftain, to Anglicanism
and her marriage to gentleman-planter John Rolfe at Jamestown,
the Company aspired to bring the entire Powhatan people to
Protestantism and the Church of England—a necessary precondition
for their conversion to English ways and absorption into English
Virginia.
Enslaved Africans, however, were not part of Sandys’s plans for
the colony. The rapid spread of tobacco husbandry in the colony
after 1614 dismayed Company leaders, who promoted a mixed
economy based on a wide variety of natural commodities and
manufactured goods that they anticipated would offer plenty of work
for settlers and create broad-based economic equality across the
colony. Slaves would be unnecessary. Instead, white workers and
converted Indian peoples would provide the workforce as self-
sufficient and equal members of their communities, thereby
strengthening relations between the English and Powhatans.7

WITHIN A FEW YEARS, SANDYS’S DREAM OF A MODEL AMERICAN commonwealth

had been shattered. A series of disasters, including a massive attack
by Powhatan warriors that killed hundreds of settlers, political
intrigue involving the king and his ministers, and deep divisions
among Company leaders in London, ultimately led to the Company’s
collapse. The colony survived, however, which attested to the
commercial success of preceding years, but after 1625 in the
absence of Company rule, a quite different society emerged from
that promoted by Sandys. A commonwealth was founded on the
well-being of the people as a whole, not the few; this was a
fundamental principle emphasized by classical philosophers of
Greece and Rome as well as by leading statesmen of the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Sandys and other Company officers
adopted initiatives they believed would stimulate prosperity for
broad sections of society and sought to prevent wealthy planters
from gaining excessive influence in the colony. These measures
involved limitations on the powers of the governor and his
councilors, an emphasis on the rule of law, and the founding of the
General Assembly, which was created specifically to represent the
majority of settlers, not only the rich. The Company’s wholehearted
support of reformed Anglicanism and Christian morality encouraged
neighborly support and care for others as well as individual piety and
moral discipline.
Following the Company’s demise, efforts and legislation put in
place to encourage the common good and a widespread equality of
interests were quickly abandoned. Even before the collapse of the
Company, conspicuous disparities in wealth had begun to surface.
Soon after tobacco became established as the colony’s principal
commodity, a boom in the price of tobacco leaf on the London
market enabled a small group of planters and government officials to
become extremely rich by steadily amassing land and laborers. After
the Powhatan attack of 1622 that nearly destroyed the colony, racial
stereotypes demonizing the Indians were quickly adopted by settlers
to justify the slaughter of Indian peoples and appropriation of their
territory. Huge areas of prime agricultural lands were taken up by
settlers, creating the first English land rush in America. Some
Powhatan captives were enslaved and joined Africans in bondage;
other Indian peoples moved out of the region beyond the reach of
settlers.8
The Company’s commonwealth project was also condemned by
critics for being dangerously egalitarian. Captain John Bargrave, a
prominent merchant-planter, wrote forcefully that the “mouth of
equal liberty must needs be stopped,” denouncing what he saw as
the overt populist tendencies among Company leaders, including
Sandys. “Extreme liberty,” he warned, was more perilous to the
political and social order than “extreme tyranny.” Political leadership,
lauded among the responsible, propertied classes, was not deemed
suitable for the poor and landless who comprised the vast majority
of people in early modern society. It was axiomatic among the upper
classes that poor people’s lack of independence, property, and
education disqualified them from prominent roles in society. In
Virginia, where poor workers made up a far higher percentage of the
total population than in England, political power rapidly became
concentrated in the hands of small groups of wealthy planters who,
largely autonomous in their own localities and insulated from close
oversight by English government officials three and a half thousand
miles away, became accustomed to a freedom of action unthinkable
at home.
While Virginia and the American colonies were attractive to
countless middle-class British immigrants and other Europeans
during the seventeenth century precisely because of the perceived
benefits of political and economic liberty, those very freedoms
permitted the wholesale and largely unchecked exploitation of lower-
class whites, Africans, and Indians. For most poor English settlers,
crossing the Atlantic to Virginia or other colonies was a gamble of
heroic proportions whereby a fortunate few might succeed in vastly
improving their material condition through luck, hard work, and
timing, but the great majority did not. For the mass of Indian and
African peoples, of course, even the faintest glimmer of hope of
personal improvement was denied them. Slavery and inequality thus
arose as synchronic opposites of liberty and opportunity, products of
the same political and economic forces.

AT THE DAWN OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN AMERICA, IT WAS unclear how

colonies would evolve. Would they be little more than “pirate nests,”
as feared by successive Spanish ambassadors in London, or develop
as fishing stations and trading posts such as those founded in
Newfoundland by different nations or along the Hudson River by the
Dutch? Or would they become stable and prosperous British
settlements that would eventually spread across the entire northern
continent?
Virginia was the first of England’s settlements in America to
persist and ultimately flourish. The great reforms of 1619 that took
place at Jamestown had an enduring influence on the development
of Virginia and British America and heralded the opening of an
extended Anglo-American examination of sovereignty, individual
rights, liberty, and constitutionalism that would influence all Britain’s
colonies. Representative government spread outward across the
continent, beginning the vital democratic experiment that has
characterized American society down to our own times. Concurrently,
Virginia’s early adoption of slavery and dispossession of Indian
peoples reflected and reinforced racial attitudes that began the
highly discriminatory processes that have stigmatized society ever
since. Such were the conflicted origins of modern America.9
 One

Jamestown

We hope to plant a nation,

Where none before hath stood.
—Richard Rich (1610)

That no man blaspheme God’s holy name upon pain of

death, or use unlawful oaths, taking the name of God in
vain… upon pain of severe punishment for the first offense
so committed, and for the second to have a bodkin thrust
through his tongue.
—Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial (1609–1611)

JAMESTOWN WAS UNASHAMEDLY A COMMERCIAL VENTURE. Founded by royal

charter in April 1606, the Virginia Company was the latest of a
number of trading companies that had blossomed during the
previous half century, evidence of the growing wealth and global
reach of English, especially London’s, merchants. “All Kingdoms,” an
anonymous writer pointed out to the secretary of state, Robert Cecil,
Earl of Salisbury, “are maintained by Rents or Traffic [trade], but
especially by the latter, which in maritime places most flourish by
means of Navigation.” Companies enabled sovereigns to promote
overseas expansion and commerce while at the same time adopting
the convenient fiction that they had little direct involvement in the
creation of empire.1
Led by some of the ablest merchants and statesmen of the day
and inspired by a generation of promoters of American colonies, the
Virginia Company set out to create a burgeoning transatlantic trade
by the establishment of permanent settlements in the Chesapeake
Bay and New England regions. Company leaders, including Cecil,
were confident that thriving industries could be established in
America and products exported back to England, thereby lessening
the country’s dependence on imports from Europe and elsewhere. To
ensure they had the best possible workers, the Company recruited
skilled artisans from England and overseas: Italian glassworkers;
Polish and German experts in the production of industrial
commodities and valuable minerals; vignerons from Languedoc,
France, to cultivate the colony’s vines that had been recently
imported from the Canaries. The men were said to be skilled also in
the manufacture of silk. John Pory, writing from Jamestown to Sir
Edwin Sandys, treasurer and chief promoter of the Company, was
especially enthusiastic about the colony’s potential for producing
wine (he was reputed to be a heavy drinker). Once vineyards were
established, he believed Virginia would yield enough wine to “lade all
the ships that come” with vintages as good as those of France and
Spain.2
John Pory was a perceptive man. Educated at Gonville and Caius
College, Cambridge, and connected to the highest ranks of English
society, he combined a gift for languages with a taste for travel and
diplomacy, having spent several years in Europe and the Levant. As
the recently appointed secretary of Virginia, he painted a vivid
picture of Jamestown’s fledgling society for Company leaders in
London. English plows and cattle, he remarked at the end of
September 1619, would soon bring the “Colony to perfection.” The
land was marvelously fertile and once tilled would support both a
plentiful crop of wheat and abundant Indian corn in a single year.
The planting of mulberry trees would lead to a thriving silk industry,
while cattle and other livestock were increasing quickly and would be
a steady source of income for planters. By adapting English
husbandry practices to the new conditions, Pory had no doubt that
settlers would “produce miracles out of this earth,” which in turn
would supply ample provisions for the hundreds of new arrivals the
Company was sending over.3
Already, considerable fortunes were being made. Tobacco
cultivation had spread rapidly over the previous five years as a
growing number of colonists took up prime lands along the James
River valley and discovered the benefit of the lucrative cash crop. “All
our riches for the present do consist in tobacco,” Pory commented
wryly, so that even “our Cow-keeper here of James City on Sundays
goes accoutered [dressed] all in fresh flaming silks, and a wife of
one that in England had professed the black art not of a scholar but
of a collier of Croydon, wears her rough beaver hat with a fair pearl
hatband and a silken suit.” With tobacco commanding high prices in
London, one man had made a profit of £200 in a year from just his
own labor. Planters with the help of their field-workers could make
much more; a man with six servants had earned £1,000 from one
crop, an extraordinary sum considering that a common day laborer
in England might earn only £12 annually. Although such returns were
unusual, they were nevertheless possible. Here, seemingly, were
opportunities for ordinary people to get rich by their own hard work
and for the wealthy and well placed to become richer still. No better
example could be found than the new governor himself. Sir George
Yeardley had first arrived in the colony a decade earlier with little
more than his sword, Pory commented, but when in London shortly
before returning to Jamestown, he and his lady had spent a small
fortune to furnish his forthcoming voyage. It would not be long
before the governorship of Virginia, he wrote, would be worth as
much as the highly lucrative office of lord deputy of Ireland.4
The colony was changing dramatically. Several years earlier,
Virginia could count only a few hundred settlers living in a half dozen
small English settlements, but by the spring of 1620, more than two
dozen communities had been established from the mouth of the
James River to the falls a hundred miles upriver, and the settler
population had quadrupled. Tens of thousands of acres had been
taken up by private investors who—with the Company’s blessing—
were encouraged to transport their own laborers to the colony,
thereby adding to the flow of new arrivals and rapid expansion of
settlement. As a consequence of new initiatives introduced by
Company leader Edwin Sandys, the country was flourishing, the
English were at peace with local Indian peoples, the Powhatans, and
Virginia appeared destined for a period of prolonged stability and
prosperity.5
The abundance and prosperity described by Pory were a far cry
from the disasters that had blighted Jamestown’s first decade.
Among these were the heavy loss of life, lengthy hostilities against
the Powhatans, and a desperate lack of profitable returns to
investors. Jamestown might well have become another “lost colony”
alongside Roanoke had not the immensely influential Earl of
Salisbury, the London merchant prince Sir Thomas Smythe, and
other prominent leaders, including Sandys, decided to intervene and
thoroughly overhaul the organization of the Company and colony in
1608–1609. This first phase of reform was in some respects a
foreshadowing of their later attempts to build a true commonwealth
—for example, in their emphasis on converting the Indians to the
Church of England—but was completely different in regard to
governing and leadership. What was required, the Company
believed, was the enforcement of law and order by an authoritarian
government in Virginia led by an all-powerful lord governor and
captain general.
In retrospect, a military regime and martial law proved necessary
to sustain the colony through the coming years of war and the
immediate aftermath, yet it was not at all conducive to the
development of an expansive civilian society necessary for growth
and prosperity in postwar Virginia. The formidable challenges of the
first ten years played a key role in shaping the comprehensive
reforms launched by Sir Edwin Sandys and his supporters in 1619.
IN THE WINTER OF 1606, THE LEADERS OF THE FIRST EXPEDITION to Virginia
received a series of detailed instructions, which illustrate the high
hopes of the Company on the eve of the venture. The colony was to
be governed by a small council of prominent settlers appointed by
the Company. Once they arrived in Virginia, they would elect a
“president” from among their own number who would oversee the
colony for up to a year. The leaders of the expedition were ordered
to ensure their initial settlement was located on a prominent river
about a hundred miles from the ocean, a precaution to reduce the
risk of attack from the sea by a hostile enemy, notably Spain, and to
position settlers close to the mountains inland, where the discovery
of a passage might lead them through the North American landmass
to the Pacific Ocean, believed to be only a few hundred miles from
the Atlantic coast. Settlers were also instructed to take advantage of
trade with Indian peoples from surrounding regions and to search
for any existing gold or silver mines.6
In the context of the times, these aspirations were quite realistic.
The belief that North America had vast riches yet to be discovered
was commonplace in Europe by the mid-sixteenth century.
Spectacular Spanish discoveries and the pillaging of Indian peoples
in the Caribbean, Middle America, and South America had confirmed
the existence of enormous wealth in new lands (new to Europeans).
A century earlier, the English had been among the first European
nations to cross the Atlantic but missed the opportunity to capitalize
on their discoveries of the North American mainland, much to the
exasperation of early promoters such as Richard Eden. Had we not
lacked “manly courage,” he complained, “it might happily have come
to pass that that rich treasury called Perularia (which is now in Spain
in the city of Seville, and so named for that in it is kept the infinite
riches brought thither from the newfound land of Peru) might long
since had been in the Tower of London, to the king’s great honor
and wealth of this his realm.”
During the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers and then the
French and English had eagerly turned their gaze upon the northern
continent, convinced that just as Mexico and Peru had yielded great
treasures, so in time would North America. The Spanish had
searched in vain for riches in the southeast and southwest, the
French in Florida and the far north, and the English in mid-Atlantic
and northern lands. In the 1570s, Martin Frobisher had prospected
for gold on Meta Incognita (southern shore of Baffin Island) in the
Arctic Ocean, and in the 1580s Sir Walter Ralegh had sponsored
three large-scale voyages to the island of Roanoke and adjacent
lands on the coast of North Carolina. These efforts had come to
nothing. Fifteen years later, at the beginning of the new century, the
Virginia Company was determined to try again, this time searching
along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and inland.7
Despite seemingly promising beginnings, Jamestown settlers
were unable to find a passage to the Pacific Ocean, gold or silver in
the mountains, or wealth of any kind other than the natural produce
of the country. Within days in August 1607, following the return to
London of one of the expedition’s leaders, Captain Christopher
Newport, rumors that gold had been discovered in Virginia spread
like wildfire around the city, only to be followed just as rapidly by
news that the samples of ore brought back by Newport were
worthless. “Silver and gold they have none,” a well-placed
commentator noted simply.8
Disappointing as the news was for the Company, information that
arrived in the spring of 1608 indicated the colony was on the brink
of collapse. Disease had carried off the majority of the original 104
men and boys during the previous summer and fall, and the
leadership had splintered into bitterly divided factions. Tensions had
been high ever since the original voyage to the colony when, a few
months after departing England, Captain John Smith, one of the
principal leaders, was arrested for challenging the authority of other
officers and attempting to make himself “king.” He was cast into the
brig and confined below decks for much of the voyage. Following
further disruption, he narrowly avoided being hanged when the
expedition made landfall on the island of Nevis in the West Indies.9
 Seven months later at Jamestown, another mutiny occurred. The
first president of the colony, Captain Edward Maria Wingfield, a
veteran of wars in Ireland and the Netherlands, was overthrown by
three members of the council on the grounds that he was unworthy
to serve and an atheist. In turn, he accused those who had plotted
against him of forsaking “His Majesty’s Government” and of planning
to establish a “Parliament” (my italics), evidently believing his
ousters sought to convene a popular government wherein even the
lowliest would have a voice—a most dangerous leveling precedent.
Wingfield alleged that the new president, John Ratcliffe, and his
supporters, including Smith, had overthrown the legitimate authority
and imposed a brutal regime of arbitrary rule, threatening and
beating anyone who opposed them. By way of an example, he
reported that James Read, a blacksmith, who had been condemned
to be hanged for striking Ratcliffe, saved himself from the gallows by
accusing Captain George Kendall, also recently deposed from the
council, of treason. Despite little evidence to prove his guilt, Kendall
was convicted a few days later and summarily shot to death. If “this
whipping, lawing, beating, and hanging in Virginia” was known in
England, Wingfield protested, referring to the breakdown of any
semblance of law and order, “I fear it would drive many well-affected
minds from this honorable action.”10

WHETHER OR NOT THE COMPANY’S LEADERS BELIEVED WINGFIELD’S self-

justifications, they recognized that within less than a year the colony
had degenerated into a half-starved mutinous rabble and the
enterprise was in grave danger of foundering. They determined that
the colony needed to be thoroughly remodeled. To that end,
Company leaders petitioned the king, James I, to grant them
extensive new powers.11 Their first charter of 1606, which had
established the Company, was superseded by a new charter of May
1609, that reorganized the Company as “the Treasurer and Company
of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First
Colony in Virginia.” Henceforth, the enterprise was to be governed
by a treasurer, who was the leading officer, a ruling council, and
ordinary members (called adventurers) who would convene regularly
in weekly and quarterly meetings. Sir Thomas Smythe, a powerful
London merchant and statesman who had played a prominent role in
the Virginia venture since its inception, was appointed treasurer, the
foremost officer of the Company. Members nominated candidates
from among their own ranks to form a new council, which together
with the treasurer comprised the standing administration of the
Company. Endowed with authority to establish “all manner of laws,
directions, instructions, forms and ceremonies of government and
magistracy” necessary for the colony, the Company council’s
jurisdiction was limited, in theory, only by the important caveat that
such ordinances should “as near as conveniently may be, be
agreeable to the laws, statutes, government and policy of this our
realm of England.”12
Policy and general oversight of the colony remained firmly located
in London under the authority of the Company, but to ensure that
Virginia was governed effectively and law and order restored, the
Company created a new position, an “absolute Governor,” who would
rule in the colony. Sir Thomas West, twelfth Baron De La Warr, a
high-ranking nobleman and soldier, was appointed the colony’s first
lord governor and captain general, supported by Sir Thomas Gates,
another veteran of the wars in Ireland and Europe, who would serve
as lieutenant governor. Although the governor would be assisted by
an advisory council in the colony of his own choosing, the Company
made it clear that he could not be overruled or removed by it.
Under the new regime, the governor or his deputy were given
extensive civil and military powers, including authority to enforce
martial law and to supplement, revise, or interpret any laws in force
in the colony at their own discretion. Mindful of the frequent
challenges to former leaders at Jamestown, governors were
instructed to deploy a strong personal guard both to “beget
reverence to [for] your authority” and to remind colonists to “obey
the gravity of those laws under which they were born.” In matters of
civil justice, he was advised to act more like a chancellor than a
judge, “rather upon the natural right and equity than upon the
niceness and letter of the law which [might be] perplexing in this
tender body.” The Company encouraged him to “discreetly” combine
“a summary and arbitrary way of justice” with more traditional forms
of magistracy as is best suited “for you and that place.”13
The outcome was the colony’s first legal code, the Laws Divine,
Moral, and Martial, drafted by William Strachey, the newly appointed
secretary of the colony, and expanded by Gates and then his
successor Sir Thomas Dale. It laid out in plain language the duties of
settlers and soldiers and itemized punishments for transgressions.
The “Divine” and “Moral” components of the code emphasized
obedience to God and church. Settlers were to attend services twice
daily, in the morning and evening, summoned by the tolling of the
church bells. Anyone who did not attend divine service or
persistently blasphemed God’s holy name or called into question the
reputation of a preacher or minister would be punished by whipping,
having their tongues bored through with a bodkin (a long, blunt
needle), or by death. With regard to serious crimes—treason,
murder, the rape of English or Indian women, theft, embezzlement
of Company property, trading with the Indians without permission,
or running away to the Indians—the punishment was also death.
Measures aimed at regulating relationships with the Indians were
a reflection of the Company’s continuing hope to convert the
Powhatans to Christianity and English ways. Other transgressions
such as slandering the Company or its leaders, killing livestock, and
fornication carried the penalties of whippings, branding, loss of ears,
galley service, which meant serving at the oars of longboats, and
pleas for forgiveness in front of the congregation assembled in
church. Additional sections set out the martial laws, pertaining to
military service and therefore the great majority of men, which
carried equally severe punishments. By these means, Gates and Dale
determined not only to restore order but also to bring about the
moral reform of their men and settlers generally. Jamestown and
other garrisons to be established along the James River were to be
ruled by military laws as well as strict religious principles.14
To achieve their plans, Smythe and his advisors completely
overhauled the Company’s financial organization and created a joint
stock enterprise whereby anyone prepared to invest in the general
stock or to put themselves forward to go to the colony in person was
eligible to join the venture. Company’s leaders cast their recruitment
campaign far and wide throughout England. In the spring, they
issued a newssheet to be distributed in London that encouraged
skilled artisans and tradesmen to join them. Even at this early stage,
the Company promoted a range of skills to create a productive and
diversified economy in Virginia. Efforts were made to attract men
and women as well as foreign workers “of whatever craft they may
be,” who were instructed to make their way to Smythe’s city house
to register for the voyage. In return for signing up, prospective
settlers were promised dwelling houses, vegetable gardens and
orchards, as well as food and clothing at the Company’s expense,
together with a share in the division of land after seven years.
Appeals for financial support were forwarded to city and
merchant leaders around England. Contrary to the true state of
affairs, letters sent by the Company to merchants throughout the
country in early 1609 described in rosy hues the achievements of
early settlers in creating a firm foundation for the colony’s future
prosperity. They had discovered a bounteous country that was “safe
from any danger of the Savages or other ruin that may threaten us.”
Letters listed examples of the many valuable commodities available
in Virginia and potential industries that would be established, and
expressed “no improbable hope” of finding rich mines.
The success of the campaign can be measured by the alacrity
with which members of the aristocracy and gentry, merchants, and
ordinary working men and women joined the venture. By the time
the Company received royal approval for its new charter, 55 London
mercantile and guild companies and 619 individuals had invested in
the Company, thousands of pounds had been raised, and hundreds
of colonists had been recruited. Fundamental organizational and
financial reforms had been put in place that would persist
throughout the Company’s management of the colony.15
Company leaders summarized their objectives to Lieutenant
Governor Sir Thomas Gates shortly before he left for Jamestown.
Four major priorities were identified that they believed would lead to
continuing investment and commercial success: (1) the discovery of
either “the south seas or royal [valuable] mines”; (2) trading with
Indian peoples near and far who were accessible by water; (3)
tribute from local Indians; and (4) the production of natural
commodities. The governor was instructed to select a new site for
the colony’s capital away from major navigable rivers and therefore
safe from attack by Spanish warships. The Company believed
Jamestown was poorly located and vulnerable to Spanish attack and
had therefore decided to reduce it to a small garrison. Three Indian
towns—one at the falls of the James River (possibly the village of
Powhatan in present-day Richmond), and Ohonahorn and
Ocanahowan to the south in what is now North Carolina—were to be
occupied and developed as major new settlements instead. They
would be the destination for the hundreds of settlers who were
gathering in London and elsewhere waiting to board ships that
would carry them to a new life in Virginia.16
As well as strengthening their political and financial powers,
Company leaders acted to transform the entire scale of the Virginia
enterprise. No longer seen as a private commercial venture, in the
latter half of 1608 and early months of 1609 Sir Thomas Smythe and
his advisors expanded Company efforts into a national undertaking
of, as they saw it, immense consequence to England’s honor, virtue,
and future success. Their vision was articulated in the opening
months of 1609 by Robert Johnson, an important London merchant
and deputy treasurer of the Company, and represented a first major
phase of reform that anticipated some of Sandys’s initiatives
introduced ten years later.
In an influential promotional tract entitled Nova Britannia,
Johnson exclaimed that the land the English had “searched out, is a
very good land” and “if the Lord love us, he will bring our people to
it, and will give it us for a possession.” He lavished fulsome praise on
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