Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  The Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the minister who had labored for Pocahontas’s conversion, had drowned in a boating accident in Virginia the same month that she died in Gravesend. Pocahontas’s former husband, meanwhile, was in good health and seemingly in good spirits. By 1619, John Rolfe had married, or was about to marry, his third wife; his bride, Jane Pierce, was the daughter of one of Rolfe’s fellow colonists. Rolfe’s financial health was on the upswing, as well. His tobacco experiments, which introduced more palatable West Indian varieties to Virginia soil, had yielded him an increasingly lucrative export—one that could displace Spanish tobacco in the English market.

  Other colonists were now emulating Rolfe’s path to success. One man, with his own hands, had raised £200 worth of tobacco in one year; another, with the help of six servants, had raised £1,000 worth— mouthwatering sums that led to a local gold rush. Indeed, a newcomer to the colony in 1619 would have found little else growing. “All our riches for the present doe consist in tobacco,” a colonist reported. From the first four barrels of tobacco leaf that Rolfe sent to England in March 1614, the Virginia tobacco trade had grown (according to customs records) to 2,300 pounds in 1616, 18,839 pounds in 1617, and 49,528 pounds in 1618. 1

  The tobacco mania led to worries in London. It was easy to see the risks in the one-crop economy, not the least of which was a renewed dependence on the natives for corn. King James’s opposition to tobacco prompted him to take a rare personal interest in the colony during this time: he could not afford to ban the trade outright—he needed the revenues from the customs duties—but he encouraged the colonists to plant vineyards and to raise silkworms instead. Neither of these alternatives to tobacco farming took hold; they do not appear to have been seriously tried.

  A new governor, Sir George Yeardley, came to Virginia in April 1619 and was alarmed by the situation he found. (Samuel Argall’s tenure as deputy governor had ended with recriminations and accusations against him of financial self-dealing; he had sailed away shortly before Yeardley’s arrival.) Yeardley sent word back to the company that he intended to curb the ubiquitous tobacco planting, and the company’s governing council applauded that intention:

  We have with great joy understood of your arrival in Virginia [the council wrote to him], and of your firm resolution to reforme those errors which have formerly been committed. One chiefe whereof hath been the excessive applying of tobacco, and the neglect to plant corne which of all other things is most necessarie for the increase of that plantation. Wee therefore . . . earnestly pray you that nothing whatsoever may divert you from that worthy course.2

  It was no use fighting greed, however. Tobacco farming continued to grow despite Yeardley’s efforts; by 1628, exports had increased tenfold to a half million pounds. John Smith, watching the colony’s progress from afar in England, concluded that the company had been on the wrong track all along. It was trying to overcome human nature when it should have been harnessing it. The former bead trader and Lincolnshire farm boy identified the real culprit as price controls that depressed the profitability of corn crops:

  Because corne was stinted at [had a price ceiling of] two shillings six pence the bushell, and tobacco at three shillings the pound, and they value a mans labour a year worth fifty or threescore pound, but in corne not worth ten pound, presuming tobacco will furnish them all things; now make a mans labour in corne worth threescore pound, and in tobacco but ten pound a man, then shall they have corne sufficient to entertaine all commers, and keepe their people in health to doe any thing, but till then, there will be little or nothing to any purpose [accomplished].3

  Although the company did not succeed in reducing the colony’s dependence on tobacco, Yeardley’s administration brought two other innovations that would take hold for the ages. At the company’s direction, he carried out the first broad-based assignment of private land ownership in English America. Colonists who had arrived before the spring of 1616 (that is, during Sir Thomas Dale’s administration or earlier) would receive one hundred acres apiece, “to be held by them and their heirs and assigns forever.” Those who arrived later would receive fifty acres. Tradesmen who chose to practice their trade rather than farm would receive four acres and a house.

  Some colonists were still working off an obligation of indentured servitude, the quid pro quo for their ocean passage; they would receive their allotments when their service was completed. In the meantime, they could opt to live as tenants on company property and keep half of the profits from their farming.

  There were ways for the new landowners to build up their allotments. Colonists who had bought shares of the Virginia Company received an additional allotment of fifty acres or one hundred acres per share, depending on how long the colonist had been in Virginia. To promote immigration, the company also promised that anyone who paid the cost of passage to Virginia for new colonists would receive fifty acres for each person transported.

  The company’s orders defined four “cities or burroughs,” namely, Jamestown (the capital), Henrico (formerly Henricus), Kiccowtan (meaning Kecoughtan), and Charles City (formerly Bermuda City). In addition, the company invited groups of investors in England to band together and create their own companies to operate separate farm communities, known as “particular plantations,” which would consist of large landholdings outside the four population centers. These companies would receive acreage in return for investing in the Virginia Company and sponsoring voyagers to settle on their plantations.

  At the time of the general land distribution of 1619, a handful of these plantations already existed through special charters; two of the earliest were Smythe’s Hundred—owned by a venture known as the Society of Smythe’s Hundred, and named for the Virginia Company’s treasurer at the time, Sir Thomas Smythe—and Martin’s Hundred, owned by the Society of Martin’s Hundred, and named for Virginia Company attorney Richard Martin. Both men were leading investors in the respective companies. Whether it was on account of the insider status of Smythe and Martin, or some other reason, these plantations enjoyed huge land grants of around 80,000 acres each; other plantations tended to encompass between a few hundred and a few thousand acres—far smaller, though still substantial.

  The introduction of private property for the common citizen had a salubrious effect on the owners’ sense of initiative, as John Rolfe would observe. By the end of 1619, he reported, the “ancient” (or longtime) colonists had chosen their allotments, “which giveth all great content, for now knowing their owne lande, they strive and are prepared to build houses and to cleare their grounds ready to plant, which giveth . . . greate incouragement, and the greatest hope to make the colony florrish that ever yet happened to them.”4

  The other major liberalization of 1619 sprang from the company’s desire for “a forme of government there as may bee to the greatest benifitt and comfort of the people, and wherby all injustice grevance and oppression may be prevented.” That form of government would be English America’s first representative legislature. Sir Thomas Dale’s authoritarian “Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall” would be superseded by enactments of a locally elected body, to be known as the General Assembly.

  The plan to introduce self-government reflected the growing influence of one Sir Edwin Sandys within the company’s governing council in London. His ascent had culminated in his election as treasurer in April 1619. (“Treasurer” was the equivalent, confusingly, of today’s “chief executive officer.”) Although the plan was adopted by the council in late 1618, before Sandys’s elevation, it bore the unmistakable stamp of his maverick philosophy.

  Sandys, the son of an archbishop, had entered Oxford at age fifteen, received his BA two years later, and emerged with a fluent command of Latin and Greek. He began serving as a member of Parliament at twenty-eight, and became involved in the Virginia Company in his mid-forties. He wore the trim, pointed beard of an aristocrat, but his notions of government were antiroyalist—as far as they could be without causing the separation of his head f
rom his neck. In Parliament, he had dared to advocate the abolition of all vestiges of the king’s feudal rights; he claimed that a monarch’s legitimacy rested on the consent of the governed. Even more remarkably for the era, he framed his arguments within a doctrine of natural rights, that is, rights that individuals possess innately, independent of any grant by a sovereign.

  On the face of it, the creation of the General Assembly simply gave the colonists a measure of the rights enjoyed by their counterparts in England. In Sandys’s own time, however, the new body was seen by some as the kernel of something more radical. A contemporary of his wrote that “there was not any man in the world that carried a more malitious hart to the government of a monarchie than Sir Edwin Sandys did: for Capt. Bargrave [John Bargrave, an acquaintance of Sandys] had heard him say that if ever God from Heaven did constitute and direct a form of government, it was that of Geneva”—the city-state of Geneva being conspicuously without a monarch.

  No account of the rules of suffrage in 1619 Virginia has survived, but it is safe to assume they followed the practice of the mother country in excluding male indentured servants (because they were not property owners) as well as all women. The voters of each city, borough, and plantation elected two “burgesses” to represent them. There were seven plantations by mid-1619, so the burgesses included eight men from the cities and boroughs and fourteen from the plantations, or twenty-two men all together.

  The assembly resembled the modern U.S. Senate in that its burgesses represented a wildly variable number of constituents. The 34 adult residents of Charles City (from the census taken in March 1620) had the same number of representatives in the General Assembly as the 83 adults of Smythe’s Hundred, the 86 of Henrico, or the 108 of the capital. (Different reports of the census showed 921 or 928 residents in total.)5

  The new body was not a pure representative democracy by any means. Apart from the qualifications on suffrage, the democratic character of the assembly was slightly diluted by the fact that it included not only the burgesses, but also the governor’s “Council of State,” a half dozen men appointed by the company to serve as the governor’s advisers. These men were themselves colonists, and were charged with representing the colonists’ interests, but they had not been elected by anyone. The governor held a power of veto (a “negative voice”), as did the company’s council in London. Conversely, the company promised to submit its own orders for approval by the assembly. In all matters, the assembly was obliged to “imitate and followe the policy of the forme of government, lawes, custome, manners of loyall and other administration of justice used in the Realme of England as neere as may bee.”

  The first session of the General Assembly opened on Friday, July 30, 1619, in the choir of the small timber church at Jamestown. Sitting with Governor Yeardley as speaker of the assembly was John Pory, the colony’s secretary, who had come over with Yeardley in April. Pory was a witty and intelligent man, yet his appointment as speaker is puzzling; he had been a notorious drunk for years. In 1613, when Pory visited Padua as a guest of his friend Sir Dudley Carlton, the British ambassador to Italy, the ambassador was moved to write that “the poor man cannot stand, being (even while this letter was writing) brought home reeling.” When John Chamberlain met Pory in Venice in October 1618, Chamberlain found him “in such a pickle that I perceive the pot and he are so fast friends they cannot easily be parted.” After Chamberlain learned a few months later that Pory was to become secretary to the colony, he remarked, “No question but he will become there a sufficient sober man, seeing there is no wine in all that climate.”6 Perhaps that is what happened.

  The Reverend Richard Buck opened the meeting with a prayer, after which the burgesses took an oath of loyalty. The assembly debated and resolved questions as to the admittance of some of the burgesses. Then Pory presented the first substantive item on the agenda: How to deal with a complaint against John Martin, the 1607 colonist and former council member, that one of his men had seized corn from a group of natives in a canoe?

  A colonist by the name of Thomas Davis testified that Martin had sent a shallop under the command of an Ensign Harrison into the bay to trade for corn. Harrison’s men encountered natives carrying corn in their canoe, but the natives refused to trade with them. Harrison’s men, according to Davis, “entered the canoa with their armes and took it by force, measuring out of the corne with a baskett they had into the shallop and (and the said Ensigne Harrison saith) giving them satisfaction in copper, beades, and other trucking stuffe.”

  It is unclear whether Davis was an eyewitness to the incident, or had heard about it later. In either case, the representatives took the matter seriously, agreeing—according to Pory’s minutes—that “suche outrages as this might breede danger and loss of life to others in the colony which should have leave to trade in the baye hereafter.” There was a question as to the assembly’s jurisdiction over Martin and his colonists, arising from the unique patent granted to him in 1617 for his plantation, Martin’s Brandon: it gave him the right of “any Lord of the Mannor here in England,” and exempted him from any obligation of service to the colony other than military service against foreign or domestic enemies.

  After deliberating, the assembly handed down an order against Martin “for prevention of like violences against the Indians in time to come.” If Martin did not present himself and rebut the accusation, the assembly ruled, he must no longer trade with the natives unless he first obtained leave from the governor (as other colonists were obliged to do) and must put down some unspecified security “that his people shall comitte no such outrage any more.” Martin appeared several days later, on Monday, and agreed to the requirement of security, though he would not submit to requesting the governor’s permission.7

  The assembly’s response to the complaint highlighted the colonists’ continued hopefulness in their attitude toward the natives, as well as their apprehensions about the frailty of the peace. Yet the episode also underscored their obliviousness to another, more problematic possibility: that they might be giving offense to the natives just by being there, occupying ever-larger swaths of the riverfront. The colonists could define an isolated incident of banditry as a problem in need of a solution, but they obviously could not perceive their own presence in the same terms.

  Indeed, if a native man had been allowed to witness the proceedings on Ensign Harrison’s offense, he would have found them a strange juxtaposition. The assemblymen were intent on suppressing any “outrage” against the natives, but they were doing so as representatives of cities, boroughs, and plantations on territory the natives had once considered their own. The English, for their part, believed their occupation of those lands was consistent with the natives’ rights. The English had viewed Jamestown and Henrico as “waste ground,” open to habitation by anyone. Kiccowtan and Charles City, as they saw things, had been legitimately captured. Sir Thomas Gates had driven the Kecoughtans from their territory in 1610 in retaliation for the killing of Humphrey Blunt; Charles City was taken from the Appomattocs by Sir Thomas Dale in 1612 “to revenge the treacherous injury of those people done unto us,” as Ralph Hamor wrote—the treachery being an ambush of a boatload of explorers whom the Appomatocs had invited ashore to dine. If the Powhatans had any grievances on the subject, the English probably reasoned, those had been resolved by the peace of 1614—the peace of Pocahontas’s marriage. The English had acquired other territory from the natives by purchasing it, “and they very willingly selling it,” John Rolfe informed London.8

  It was after John Martin’s appearance that the assembly enacted its first general legislation. At Pory’s suggestion, Governor Yeardley had named a committee on its opening day to decide which of the Virginia Company’s earlier instructions to the various governors ought to be adapted to the colony’s present circumstances and made into law. The eighteen provisions that the assembly enacted on Monday dealt mainly with conduct toward the natives, the suppression of vices such as gambling and drunkenness, and the encou
ragement of crops other than tobacco. The provisions concerning the natives highlighted the colonists’ desire to keep the peace, though not to extend social equality:

  By this present General Assembly be it enacted that no injury or oppression be wrought by the English against the Indians whereby the present peace might be disturbed and antient quarrels might be revived. And farther be it ordained that the Chicohomini are not to be excepted out of this lawe; until either that suche order come out of Englande or that they doe provoke us by some newe injury. [The reference was to an event of the previous year, when a group of Chickahominies killed five Englishmen on a trading mission and looted their belongings.]

  As touching the instruction of drawing some of the better disposed of the Indians to converse with our people and to live and labour amongst them, the Assembly who know well their dispositions think it fitte to enjoin, least to counsel those of the colony, neither utterly to reject them nor yet to drawe them to come in. But in case they will of themselves come voluntarily to places well peopled, there to doe service in killing of deere, fishing, beatting of corne and other workes, that then five or six may be admitted into every such place, and no more, and that with the consente of the Governour. Provided that good guard in the night may be kept upon them for generally (though some amongst them may proove good) they are a most trecherous people and quickly gone when they have done a villainy. And it were fitt a house were built for them to lodge in aparte by themselves, and lone inhabitants by no means to entertain them.9

  The assembly members worked all day on Friday and Saturday, and resumed on the following Monday through Wednesday. After the five days of study, debate, and voting, the assembly’s first session closed prematurely on August 4 on account of the “extream heat” (typical of the region in August) and the illnesses of a number of the members. One burgess, Walter Shelley of Smythe’s Hundred, had died on Sunday of unrecorded causes. The health problems were not unusual; around three hundred people had reportedly died in the colony the previous year, most of them of typhoid, dysentery, or salt poisoning (from the salt water of the lower James). The problems may well have been worse for the assembly than for the population at large, however, given the crowded quarters of the fifty-foot-by-twenty-foot church in the summer humidity.