Virginia Colony

“ The Virginia planters were intending to make further discoveries to the south and west. A colony of Swedes had made a settlement on the banks of the Delaware River, within the limits of Virginia, and were carrying on a profitable traffic in furs. The Dutch had also planted a colony on the Hudson River, within the Virginia territory, and their trade in furs amounted to ten thousand pounds per annum. Cape Cod was then looked upon as the point of demarcation between Virginia and New England. Cattle, corn, and other commodities were shipped from Virginia to New England. ”

“ Some years before the Revolutionary war, the colony of Virginia had become restless under British dominion. There had been, here and there, open expressions of discontent, and a growing resentment, if not positive hostility, against the mother country. In fact, nowhere more than in Virginia, and especially in this section, had the spirit of independence more steadily grown; and when the time came for decision and concert of action by the colonies, public opinion here was ripe to break down the old barriers, and to resist, with force, the power of England. ”

“ There are indications that many of the servants had been prompted to leave England by extravagant representations of the ease and comfort of the life which they would be able to lead in the Colony, and the contrast, not necessarily very great, between the conditions which they expected and the conditions which they found, threw many into a state of dejection in which they soon succumbed to the lurking miasma of the marshes and the newly exposed soil of the clearings. ”

“ In July, 1620, the population of the colony was estimated at four thousand. One hundred "disorderly persons" or convicts, sent over during the previous year by the king's order, were employed as servants. [147:A] For a brief interval the Virginia Company had enjoyed freedom of trade with the Low Countries, where they sold their tobacco; but in October, 1621, this was prohibited by an order in council; and from this time England claimed a monopoly of the trade of her plantations, and this principle was gradually adopted by all the European powers as they acquired transatlantic settlements. ”

“ All freemen were bound to muster monthly in their own counties; the force of the colony amounted to upwards of eight thousand horsemen. There were five forts: two on the James, and one on each of the three rivers, Rappahannock, York, and Potomac; the number of cannon was thirty. His majesty, during the late Dutch war, had sent over thirty more, but the most of them were lost at sea. The Indians were in perfect subjection. The eastern boundary of Virginia, on the sea-coast, had been reduced from ten degrees to half of one [272] degree. Tobacco was the only commodity of any great value ”

“ The number of colonists was at this period about two hundred; the stock of provisions sufficient for ten months, and the Indians peaceable and friendly. Before Lord Delaware reached England, the Virginia Council, discouraged by so many disasters and disappointments, were at a loss to decide whether they should use any further efforts to sustain the ill-fated colony, or should abandon the enterprise, and recall the settlers from Virginia. ”

“ If there be any great underlying principles which explain all, they have yet to be discovered.
Thus it would be folly in the study of colonial Virginia to blind ourselves to the importance of various non-economic factors, the love of freedom which the settlers brought with them from England, their affection for the mother country, the influence of the Anglican church. Yet it is obvious that we cannot understand the colony, its social structure, its history, its development unless we have a clear insight into the economic forces which operated upon it. ”

“ This colony was greatly settled, in the latter part of Charles the First's time and during the usurpation, by the zealous churchmen, and that spirit which was then brought in has ever since continued, so that, except a few Quakers, we have no dissenters. But what has been the consequence? We have increased by slow degrees, except negroes and convicts, while our neighboring colonies, whose natural advantages are greatly inferior to ours, have become populous." [454:A] He also wrote to Governor Dinwiddie, then in England, to the same effect. ”

“ But for the introduction of the indented servant into the Colony upon the threshold of its settlement, its progress would have been slow. Virginia, without laborers from England and without slaves, would have become a community of peasant proprietors, each clearing and working his ground with his own hands and with the aid of his immediate family. ”

“ But, with all this beauty and richness of the interior country, the obstacles presented at the coast turned the first great wave of English colonization into Virginia; and thereafter the settlement of North Carolina was determined largely, and by no means to its advantage, by the social conditions of the older colony.
Unkempt life.
In its early days North Carolina was simply a portion of Virginia’s frontier; and to this wild frontier the shiftless people who could not make a place for themselves in Virginia society, including many of the “mean whites,” flocked in large numbers. ”

“ This list makes it crystal clear that supplying Virginia was both a costly and time consuming operation. It is clear, too, that [Pg 118] supplies were of the nature that encouraged permanent colonization and residence in Virginia. Those Englishmen who founded the Colony took as much of the English way of life with them as was possible be it personal or political rights and freedom, books, food, clothing, utensils, or working tools. ”

“ The Virginia thus designated was to be open for colonization by two joint-stock companies, of which the immediate members and such as should participate with them in the enterprise should be called respectively the First Colony and the Second Colony. The First Colony was permitted to occupy the territory between the 34th and the 41st parallels, while the Second Colony was permitted to occupy the territory between the 38th and the 45th parallels. ”

“ All men fit to bear arms were required to bring their pieces to the church on occasion of public worship. No person within the colony, upon any rumor of supposed change and alteration, was to presume to be disobedient to the present government, nor servants to their private officers, masters, and overseers, at their uttermost peril. No boats were permitted to go and trade to Canada or elsewhere that be not of the burthen of ten tons, and have a flush deck, or fitted with a grating and a tarpauling, excepting such as be permitted for discovery by a special license from the governor. ”

“ It is not the Virginia colony alone that we have seen in the crucible. The fate of English colonization was no doubt settled by the experiments made during the first years on the James River, and the story told in this chapter is but the overture to the whole history of life in the United States. In our colonizing age a settlement might be made in the heart of Africa with a far smaller loss of life than was incurred in the first sixteen years in Virginia. From 1607 to 1623 there were landed in Virginia more than six thousand people. ”

“ The assembly refused compliance; but the regulation was subsequently established by parliament. A meditated insurrection of the blacks was discovered in the Northern Neck just in time to prevent its explosion. In November a message had been received from the Governor of New York, communicating the king's instructions to him to build forts for the defence of that colony, and the king's desire that Virginia should contribute to that object, as being for the common defence of the colonies. ”

“ In the month of August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first introduced into Virginia. Some time before this, Captain Argall sent out, at the expense of the Earl of Warwick, on a "filibustering" cruise to the West Indies, a ship called the Treasurer, manned "with the ablest men in the colony," under an old commission from the Duke of Savoy against the Spanish dominions in the western hemisphere. ”

“ The colony at Jamestown was the first swarm which, issuing from the central hive in England, established a permanent home abroad. Since the 13th of May, 1607, how many swarms have gone forth from the same hive, how vast a portion of the surface of the earth has now been populated by the same race! The same practical aspirations which in the present century have led to the formation of so many English commonwealths in the Australasian seas, influenced men of the same manly and self-reliant stock to remove to Virginia. ”

“ On May 12, a point of land at the mouth of Archer's Hope, now College Creek, a little below Jamestown, was examined in detail. From this site the ships moved directly to Jamestown, where they arrived May 13. On May 14, they landed and broke ground for the fort and the town that ultimately won the distinction of the first permanent English settlement in America and the Capital of the Virginia Colony for almost a century.
In May 1607, the days were warm; the nights, cool. Life was stirring in the wilderness and nature had been generous, the colonists thought. ”

“ A colony to which England could send her overplus population as part of a greater England was a real solution, and a better one than would be the raising of grain and foodstuff by foreign countries to feed the hungry of Great Britain. That men were thinking along this line appears from the action of certain large towns in paying the expense of the voyage of young people by the score or hundred to Virginia, and from the plan soon after the first settlement, whereby young women of reputable families were sent to Virginia to become wives of the colonists. ”

“ The children of Virginia, naturally of beautiful persons, and generally of more genius than those in England, were doomed to grow up unserviceable for any great employments in church or state. As a principal remedy for these ills, the establishment of towns in each county was recommended. It was further proposed to erect schools in the colony, and for the supply of ministers to establish, by act of parliament, Virginia fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge, with an engagement to serve the church in Virginia for seven years. ”

“ A few negroes doubtless would have been brought into the Colony in the seventeenth century even if its soil had been incapable of producing tobacco. In this respect, the history of New England would have been repeated. The enlargement of the area under cultivation in that plant in Virginia signified an enormous increase in the number of imported slaves as soon as the proper facilities for their transportation had been established ”

“ The population steadily increased, and in 1715 was 95,000, which was the same as that of Massachusetts. A half-century later, Virginia was the richest and most important of the thirteen colonies. The people lived mostly on large plantations, for land was plentiful and the Indians gave no further trouble. Most of the inhabitants were members of the Church of England, and their assemblies passed severe laws against the entrance of people of other religious beliefs into the colony. ”

“ The clearing away of the woods improved the health conditions, and men came no longer over to make tobacco, but to make homes for themselves and their families. Virginia continued to grow and improve until, at the beginning of the American Revolution, she was the leading and most powerful of all the colonies.
The priorities of Virginia may be briefly stated. As the first permanent British Colony. she may claim as her product not only the present Virginia and Southland, but all the other English colonies in America, and indeed all the colonies of the present wide-spreading British Empire. ”

“ The native-born Virginians, who for the most part had never been out of the colony, were averse to town life, and felt dissatisfied, like Daniel Boone in more modern times, whenever "the settlements became too thick." The scarcity of money was aggravated by the governor, who found it to his interest to be paid in tobacco. The current coin of the dominion of Virginia consisted of pieces of eight, the value of which was fixed by law at five shillings ”

“ He declared the colony to be a part of the empire annexed to the crown, and immediately subordinate to its jurisdiction. During the greater part of his reign, Virginia knew no other law, than the will of the sovereign, or his delegated agents; and statutes were passed and taxes imposed without the slightest effort to convene a colonial assembly. ”

“ Samuel Adams, in Massachusetts, was a patriot of the same stamp.
The danger of an outbreak of hostilities between the people of Boston and the British troops growing daily more imminent, the spirit of warlike preparation, by a sort of contagion, pervaded the colonies. It had long been a custom in Virginia to form independent military companies; and several of these now solicited Colonel Washington to review them and take command; and he consented; and in the apprehension of war, all eyes involuntarily turned to him as the first military character in the colony. ”

“ Not only did the first English colony establish itself in Virginia, and the first known tobacco come from there—a point the importance of which cannot be overstated—but the history of the Old Dominion is in every way more romantic and heroic than that of any other State. The first popular government existed there long before the Revolution, and at the time of the break with the mother country Virginia was the most wealthy and populous of the Colonies. ”