The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
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But in their desperate struggles with the Indians the English came to fear that they might be descending into the debased state of their enemies. The fear of a decline into barbarism, as the savagery increased, haunted them, and the more thoughtful among them sought to alleviate their fears. They were not bloodthirsty brutes like the Spanish, whose barbarism they knew from recent translations of Bartolomé de Las Casas—avaricious, murdering looters butchering their way through peaceful civil societies. Even Dale, in the midst of his most punitive raids, felt the need to distinguish his English warriors from Spanish predators and to keep his people free from the charge of hypocrisy, which would “give cause of laughter to the Papists who desire their ruin.” However fierce their attacks, as humane Englishmen they were benefactors and parental guides to the benighted. Their aim was ultimately to bring these savage people out of darkness into light, to Christianize them for their own good, and to do this by force if need be. Force itself was not an evil, William Strachey, who witnessed the bloodshed of 1610–11, wrote in his Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania. A father is not barbarous if he beats his child “to bringe him to goodnes.” What would have happened to the people of Britain, he asked, people as savage in their origins as the bloody Picts, if the Romans had not violently forced upon them civilized ways? “We might yet have lyved overgrowne Satyrs, rude and untutred, wandring in the woodes, and dwelling in Caves, and hunting for our dynners … prostituting our daughters to straungers, sacrificing our Children to our Idolls.” So a civilizing end justified barbarous means.22
The need for some such rationale grew with the escalation of conflict. Analysis of the five-year war Gates and Dale pursued reveals twenty distinct encounters—skirmishes, ambushes, sieges, raids, and direct confrontations—in which at least 350 Englishmen were killed (a number equivalent to almost 20 percent of all the immigrants between 1607 and 1614) and 250 Indians. The settlers’ strike force of well-equipped combat veterans began by attacking the least militant and weakest tribes within a twenty-mile radius of Jamestown. Dale first sent an invincible contingent of veteran musketeers east against the Nansemonds to secure access to the James River once and for all. They decimated the band of native warriors that opposed them and again ravaged the land. He then sent an even larger force once more to the west, this time finally to command beyond dispute the area around Henrico and to penetrate past that point, to the villages of the Appomattocs, whose fertile tribal lands seemed right for seizure. The troops in the west were constantly beset by bands of bowmen, but the “faceless mass of steel-coated musketeers moving methodically against most targets at will” demoralized the natives and evoked ever more direct appeals for spiritual and magical aid. One of their warriors, whom the English called “Jack-of-the-Feathers,” went into combat not with the usual red and black body paint but in his own unique protective armor, which his people believed made him “shot-free”: “all Covered over w[i]th feathers and Swans wings fastened unto his showlders as thowghe he meante to flye.” His luck, for the moment, held, but there was no flight from the steady advances of the English.23
Having succeeded, however, in gaining these major goals and in creating terror among the Indians, Dale drew back in 1612–13 to secure his victories and develop a strategy for the next moves. The English received an unexpected advantage when, in March 1613, they captured Pocahontas and found her susceptible both to conversion to Christianity and to John Rolfe’s romantic, and missionary, interest. Meanwhile Dale and the other leaders mobilized their forces for a conclusive invasion of Powhatan’s heartland. In March 1614 an English flotilla sailed up the York River directly into the core of Powhatan’s “empire” and were poised to confront several hundred warriors protecting the inner home territory. The two forces faced each other, menaced each other, and were at the edge of attack when Dale drew back, confident that he had shown an intimidating force and willing to defer an actual battle until the significance of Pocahontas’s pending conversion to Christianity and her possible marriage to Rolfe played themselves out. A truce was arranged when the marriage actually took place, and it held, in the months that followed, well enough to constitute an apparent peace.
Apparent, at best: it was an unstable arrangement of fragile compromises and basic misunderstandings. The English assumed that Powhatan’s momentary willingness to tolerate the presence of a few hundred ruthless soldier-settlers constituted a willing subordination to and acceptance of future English immigration and the expansion of settlement. And they saw in Pocahontas’s acceptance of Christianity the harbinger of mass conversion. The Indians believed that Dale’s withdrawal was a significant victory for them; that they remained undefeated, their superiority maintained despite the slaughter of their people and the ravaging of their fields and villages; and that the “gift” of Powhatan’s daughter to the English and their acceptance of her were, in a very traditional sense, a seal of agreement and a sign of peaceful intentions.24
Some kind of reciprocity had been achieved. But the Indians saw it as the end of a process; the English saw it as a beginning.
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For the company in London, intent on populating their American estate to make it profitable, news of what appeared to be a victorious end of hostilities came when it was most needed. While Gates and Dale were clamping a rigorous work routine on the colony’s settlers and while their “hammerours” were bringing devastation and terror to the Powhatans, the company’s fortunes at home had badly declined. The embattled settlers had managed to send back some useful products—furs, timber, sassafras, soap ashes, silk grass—but only in small quantities and with no indication that a truly lucrative staple would be forthcoming that would satisfy investors. Stockholders, therefore, reluctant to send good money after bad, increasingly failed to pay the installments of their subscriptions, and new investors were hard to find.
By 1612 the company was in serious financial trouble and began to cast about for new departures to keep the enterprise afloat. At the same time, by a systematic evolution, a significant and permanent change was emerging from within the confusion of the settlements on the James. These new developments, in London and Virginia, converged to determine much of the future population history of the first permanent English colony in America.
In London, to stimulate the languishing finances of the company, Thomas Smith and his leadership group decided to take drastic measures. They would sue for the unpaid subscriptions, seek a public lottery to raise funds, and reorganize the company’s structure to give more power, hence encouragement, to the ordinary stockholders. The organizational change was formalized, in 1612, in a third company charter, which extended the company’s boundaries east into the Atlantic to include the Bermuda islands, whose value had been assessed by the part of the fleet of 1609 that had been shipwrecked there. To manage that part of the company’s property a separately financed joint stock, subsidiary to the company’s main stock fund, was formed from among the company’s investors.
But the company continued to find it almost impossible to replenish the main stock fund. Lawsuits failed to force subscribers to pay their installments, and the yields of the lotteries were disappointing, as were the results of various experiments undertaken in the colony (to grow grapes, oranges, pineapples, silkworms, and tobacco and to produce iron). Therefore Smith and his closest allies, especially his son-in-law, the powerful London alderman Robert Johnson, having created the Bermuda group, formed another subsidiary company that was virtually failure-proof. The colonists had to eat and be clothed, armed, and otherwise equipped, and they would pay anything for those supplies. Therefore a separate joint stock company for the sole purpose of supplying the colonists, in exchange for a monopoly of whatever trading goods were returned, would surely turn a profit. The Magazine, as it was called, hiving off from the parent company for the benefit of its separate investors but still legally within the parent company, proved to be a model for a broad range of ad hoc subsidiaries—especially small partnerships able to send o
ver workers to develop the investors’ “private plantations”—that could flourish even while the company itself floundered. In this way the “publique” character of the company as a controlling, quasi-governmental body similar to the East India Company eroded, while small private enterprises within the colony multiplied.
The process of privatization on the English side would in the end dovetail with a major development in the colony itself. In 1614 the seven-year labor contracts of the initial settlers of 1607 came to an end. Freed from their obligations, some of the surviving workers immediately returned to England, but most remained and received from Dale small individual plots of land to be held as tenant farms. By 1615 there were said to be eighty-one such farms in the colony—as yet primitive clearings in the first, crude stages of cultivation—and the numbers were destined to grow as in successive years other laborers reached the end of their contracted terms. Since it was increasingly difficult for the company to finance further recruitment and emigration to the colony, the number of laborers working for the “publique” dwindled until by 1618 they had all but disappeared. And this process of distributing company land to private groups and individuals was intensified when in 1616 the company’s seven-year joint stock of 1609 was terminated. Lacking funds to issue as dividends, the company gave stockholders fifty acres of Virginia land per share for their personal, private development, with the prospect of more for future investments. At the same time independent planters in the colony would also receive fifty acres for having committed themselves personally to developing the colony.
The policy quickly created its own dynamic. Shortly thereafter the company, seeking the maximum use of land for population growth, announced its willingness to grant fifty acres to every adventurer, resident or absentee, who transported an individual to the colony. In this way the “headright” system of land distribution, which would last for a century, came into being.25
At that point most of the elements of a system that would, within the next fifty years, account for the immigration to the Chesapeake lands of some seventy thousand people, had come together. What was still missing was a dynamic force in the form of a profitable commodity to drive the process forward.
The first, failing experiments that had been made in growing tobacco were not of the native, local plant known to the Indians but of a Spanish variety imported from Trinidad, for which a market was known to exist in Europe. Two years later John Rolfe’s efforts to produce the plant that grew natively in the Chesapeake region were beginning to look promising, though the quality of the tobacco shipped was still judged too poor for English consumption. It was, however, easily produced on partly cleared land, and the farmers, desperate for some kind of cash crop, persisted. The quality of the crop gradually improved, especially as a result of experiments carried on by experts sent to Bermuda, and production rose in every planting season. In 1616, a mere 1,250 pounds were shipped to England; in 1617, almost 10,000 pounds; in 1618, almost 25,000; in 1620, almost 60,000. In all, by 1621 over 100,000 pounds of Virginia tobacco were sent to England; by 1625, almost 400,000.
These large quantities of tobacco were not produced on the company’s land, and the laborers necessary to produce these crops were not, as originally planned, employees of the Virginia Company. They were contract workers, on an increasing number of “private plantations” created by the company’s new land policy, and tenant farmers of absentee landowners, assisted by indentured servants. By 1617 a model structure had emerged. Adventurers due land for their investments began to pool their grants to create larger and more efficient units of production. “Smith’s Hundred,” founded that year, which combined the land claims of leading figures in the company, became a virtual colonizing company of it own, financed by a terminable joint stock and complete with a private labor force of indentured servants and a domain of land far larger than what could then be cultivated.
But “Smith’s Hundred,” which had entitlement to some 80,000 acres north of the James, up into Chickahominy country, and in which over £6,000 would be invested, underwent a change in title that reflected a basic transformation in the entire Virginia enterprise. That private plantation had been named for the longtime head of the Virginia Company, Sir Thomas Smith, who was also, along with Sir Edwin Sandys, its leading investor. By 1618 the company’s stockholders still had no substantial returns for their investments, the company still failed to attract new subscribers to its stock, and Smith’s leadership of the company had come under attack. After bitter factional fighting, Sandys ousted Smith from the company’s leadership, took over the enterprise with an extremely ambitious program of development, and along the way changed “Smith’s Hundred” to “Southampton’s Hundred,” to honor his patron and chief coinvestor, the Earl of Southampton, now the titular head of the company.26 At that point the company entered its final phase, which for a few short years seemed to be leading to the brilliant success so long delayed. But it was a false dawn that led to another dark passage of bloodshed and terror—which might have been predicted.
CHAPTER 4
Recruitment, Expansion, and Transformation
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SIR EDWIN SANDYS, having taken control, realizing that the company faced bankruptcy and the colony itself ruin and annihilation, seized on initiatives undertaken by Smith and developed them into a comprehensive rescue campaign. He had first to convince the public at large that Virginia was not only a going concern but held enormous possibilities for the future. He had then somehow to settle the increasingly confused problem of land tenure in Virginia; get rid of Dale’s now notorious regime of martial law, yet maintain some discipline in the settlers’ lives; cut down on the colony’s growing reliance on tobacco; and force the farmers to diversify their production. Above all, most urgently and quickly, he had to find ways to increase the population—by enticements of all sorts, by coercion if necessary.1
A Declaration of the State of the Colonie was Sandys’s principal public appeal. The English colony in Virginia, the pamphlet stated, was a “noble action” for the Christian religion and the people of England. “The countrey is rich, spacious, and well watered,” temperate in climate, “very healthfull, after men are a little accustomed to it,” abounding in “all Gods naturall blessings,” and capable of producing a vast range of commodities that England is now obliged to buy, at great expense, from abroad. Everything flourishes in the colony: the cattle grow bigger than at home, “does of their deere yeelde two fawnes at a birth, and sometimes three,” the fish are as plentiful as those off Newfoundland, wheat grows wonderfully, and everything from drug plants to cotton and sugar can eventually be produced “in abundance.” As for management and the organization of public life, everything is now in order. Martial law has been eliminated, and the normal processes of English law and governance transferred to the colony. The land tenure system is regularized, with entitlements adjusted to length of service in the colony; indentured servants guaranteed half-profits during their term of service and fifty acres as freedom dues; and tradesmen promised a house and land for their contribution. Further, income from the company lands is being set aside to provide for the expenses of church, state, and education; a regular system exists for the creation of more private plantations, and the colonists are well on their way to building “publique guest houses for intertaining of new men upon their first arrivall.”2
Heralded by such propaganda, advanced by skillful promotion within London’s political and financial community, and mobilized by energetic entrepreneurship, Sandys’s campaign to rescue the faltering colony and enrich the company’s investors took off in a whirlwind of activity. It was true, the colony’s resident secretary, John Pory, wrote from Virginia in 1619, that the colony was “nowe contemptible,” its only assets being the tobacco it produced and the servants it could buy and sell, but it would soon become “a flourishing estate” because of the English crops it could produce, the vineyards it could cultivate, and the cattle it could raise. Within seven years, he was persu
aded, “the governor’s place here may be as profittable as the lord deputies in Irland.”3
A multitude of schemes appeared overnight, all of them requiring the recruitment of workers. Within a year the company drew up plans to establish three ironworks, and to produce cordage and linen, potash, soap-ash, pitch, tar, timber, silk, vines, and salt. Ironworkers—at least 150—were sent over, together with a contingent of “skilfull vignerons” expert in growing grapevines, and four “Dutch” [German] carpenters with orders to erect sawmills. In 1621 one private plantation owner imported twenty skilled ironworkers for his own projects; another, an enterprising Englishman who had settled in Ireland, joined with a friend, Captain William Newce, to bring over an advance party of fifty Irishmen and a small herd of cattle, which they sold to the Virginia Company at a good profit; they called their private plantation “New Porte Newce” (Newport News). Shortly thereafter twenty-five shipwrights were enlisted, along with a carpenter and five apprentices taken on to build the East India Company’s projected “free school” in the colony. Nine more ironworkers contracted to “make iron by a bloomery”; and a group of skilled glassworkers was hired to renew the glassworks that had been abandoned years before. The company’s original plan for “the university and colledge”—a “college for the infidels children”—was revived, and land was set aside for the project, but construction of the “fabricke” (the building) was put off until the rental of the lands granted to the college produced sufficient income for the work.4
The proliferating projects involved recruitment from all over Europe. The vignerons were French, from “Languedock”; the experts in salt manufacture came from “Rochell”; some of the wine producers were brought in from the Rhineland; “Polackers” were hired to make potash, soap, pitch, and tar; the shipbuilders and sawmill operators came from Hamburg; the glassworks were manned by Italians (one of them a murderous wife beater, George Sandys wrote, the whole lot “a more damned crew hell never vomited”); and there were Walloons (from modern Belgium), who together with a group of French made up a prospective shipment of 55 men, 41 women, and 129 children. But the overwhelming number of emigrants were English, recruited in desperation by the company from whatever sources and by whatever means available. The result was a further scattering of half-organized, socially inchoate clusters of strangers drawn disproportionately from certain segments of English society, seeking, in the crude, stump-filled tobacco farms of this subtropical lowland, to re-create a world they had known.