Give Me Liberty

chapter one

MINUTES OF THE JAMESTOWN GENERAL ASSEMBLY

Self-Government

THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE LOST.

Three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, sailed from London on December 20, 1606, carrying 144 passengers and crew, bound for Virginia. After being held off the coast of England for six weeks by contrary winds, they crossed the Atlantic by a southerly route, reprovisioned in the West Indies, then headed north, expecting landfall in the third week of April 1607. Instead they found themselves in a tempest. For four days they sounded, seeking offshore shallows in vain. Then, at four o’clock in the morning of April 26, they saw land. The ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay and found, in the words of one voyager, “fair meddowes and goodly tall Trees, with such fresh waters running through the woods, as I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof.”¹ They picked an island in a river for a settlement and named it for their king, James.

The English were latecomers to the New World. Although their sailors had explored the western Atlantic for more than a hundred years, the home country, preoccupied by the upheavals of the Reformation and the feral family politics of the Tudors, had followed none of its discoveries with colonies; efforts to settle Newfoundland and North Carolina sputtered out. (Spain, by contrast, built an empire from its colonies spanning two continents, ornamented with cathedrals and universities.)

At the turn of the seventeenth century, however, England was ready to try colonization in earnest. A group of merchant investors, salted with noblemen, called the London Company received a charter from King James I allowing them to develop a swath of the North American coast named Virginia, after his late unmarried predecessor, Elizabeth I.

The promoters of the scheme expected economic benefits. A transatlantic colony would be a haven and a workshop for England’s surplus poor. As Richard Hakluyt, England’s premier geographer, put it, “Valiant youths rusting [from] lack of employment” would find it building a life for themselves overseas. The crops they would grow and the items they would make, Hakluyt went on, could be sold back home, “yield[ing] unto us all the commodities of Europe, Africa and Asia”—the entire rest of the world, no less.² With luck, the valiant youths might strike it rich. Spain had discovered mother lodes of precious metals in its colonies; why not England? A 1605 comic play, Eastward Ho!, described Virginia colonists using golden chamber pots.

God would be served as well as mammon. Spain was shepherding its indigenous overseas populations into Roman Catholicism (hence its colonial cathedrals). England could convert native Virginians to the true—Anglican—faith.

What the Jamestown colonists found, however, was hardship. In their first year, they took their drinking water from the James River, which resulted in many succumbing to typhoid, dysentery, and (since the stream was tidal) salt poisoning. Once they had dug a well, they were able to drink safely, but growing enough edibles was another trial. Modern studies of tree rings preserved in old logs show that during the first seven years of the colony’s existence, the Chesapeake Bay area was baked by a drought, making gardening and farming virtually impossible. This left the English dependent on bartering for supplies with local natives, whose own stores were depleted. Settlers who died of starvation or disease had to be replaced by new settlers from England, who arrived once or twice a year (the pioneers had been heavily male, but the newcomers increasingly included women).

The colonists were capable of hard work. One month after landing, they built a palisade to protect themselves from possible attack. Over nineteen hot June days, they cut and split more than six hundred trees weighing four hundred to eight hundred pounds each and set them in a triangular trench three football fields long and two and a half feet deep. Four hundred years later, the makers of a Hollywood film about Jamestown built a replica of the fort in about the same amount of time—using power tools.

But forts were not an exportable product. The settlers found a few semiprecious stones—garnets, amethysts, quartz crystals—but no silver or gold. One resupply ship brought German and Polish glassmakers, meant to generate local manufacturing; most of them ran off to live with the natives.

Relations between the settlers and local natives were the most significant variable in Jamestown’s early history. The western Chesapeake was ruled by Wahunsonacock, chief of the Powhatan. He was an expansionist, no less than James I, having brought thirty local tribes under his sway in an empire of fifteen thousand people. Capt. John Smith, one of the early leaders of the Jamestown colony, described Wahunsonacock’s royal state: “He sat covered with a great robe, made of raccoon skins, and all the tails hanging by,” flanked by “two rows of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red.”³ The settlers hoped to make him a tributary of their king; conversely, Wahunsonacock hoped to make the settlers his allies. Sometimes they fought (hence the palisade); sometimes they traded. Wahunsonacock wanted the copper the settlers offered in exchange for food, and he very much wanted their swords and firearms: muzzle-loaded long guns, their charges ignited by matchlocks—clumsy and dangerous to use but deadly, especially when fired in volleys.

But when the Powhatan refused to trade for food, Jamestown’s colonists died horribly. The winter of 1609 was the “starving time.” The colonists ate horses, dogs, vermin, boot leather, even (it was said) corpses. In June 1610 the survivors staggered onto their ships and sailed into the bay, either looking for help or intending to sail home. Help came: the London Company, reorganized as the Virginia Company, had sent three resupply ships from England, which met the despairing colonists in the nick of time.

In a desperate effort to extend the life of the shattered colony, it was put under strict martial law. Men farmed in work parties supervised by overseers, for the common good. Runaways, if captured, were shot, hanged, burned, or beaten to death.

Such a ferocious regime could only be an emergency measure; if word of it got out in England, who would come willingly to live in such a place? Three changes began to improve Jamestown’s prospects.

In 1612 the colonists acquired a marketable crop when one of their number, John Rolfe, introduced seeds of Nicotiana tabacum from Spain’s colonies in South America. The Powhatan smoked a crude local weed, but South American tobacco was sweeter in the mouth; smoking it was already a craze in England. Now the home market would not have to buy from foreigners. By 1620 Jamestown was shipping almost fifty thousand pounds of tobacco across the Atlantic. Fifty years later, Virginia and Maryland, its neighboring colony, would ship fifteen million pounds.

Rolfe gave the colony another benefit—publicity—when he married one of Wahunsonacock’s daughters, Matoaka, better known to history by her childhood nickname, Pocahontas (meaning playful one). She was captured as a teenager during a bout of native-settler strife. She converted to Christianity, was baptized as Rebecca, and married Rolfe in 1614; two years later, she accompanied her husband to England, where she was depicted in a Virginia Company advertisement and presented to the king. The couple set sail for Virginia in 1617, but Rebecca died, age twenty or twenty-one, before their ship exited the Thames River.

A third substantial change was the introduction and regularization of private property. The colony could not flourish as an agricultural garrison state. Beginning in 1616, settlers who had survived there for seven years or more were awarded fifty acres; newcomers were promised fifty, plus an additional fifty for each additional person they brought with them.

What the colony most needed, though, was stable government. Since its inception it had been ruled by a shifting cast of governors, picked and sent out by the London Company (and later by the Virginia Company). Though the governors were assisted by a council of advisors, their own decisions were final, and they could pick and dismiss the members of their council at will. They were not supposed to do anything contrary to the laws of England, but that left much room for improvisation. Wide powers and uncertain tenure, combined with difficult circumstances, led to disagreement and recrimination. The typical firsthand account of early Jamestown argues that everything would have gone well if everyone besides the author had not done wrong. Acrimony in Virginia was matched by squabbles among the company’s investors back in London.

In 1618 a newly dominant faction within the Virginia Company tapped a new governor, George Yeardley, with a mandate for comprehensive reform in the colony. Yeardley was a veteran who had fought against Spain in the Netherlands, survived a shipwreck in Bermuda, and lived at Jamestown for seven years. Before taking up his new job, he had an audience with the king, who knighted him, “to grace him the more.”⁴ In Virginia he would be assisted by John Pory, a man whose various careers—diplomatic secretary, author, would-be silkworm breeder—included six years’ service in Parliament.

Scholars debate whether Yeardley and his council of advisors meant to liberalize the regime of the colony in the interests of the common good or simply to make it more profitable.⁵ Their reforms, whether intentional or otherwise, had the former effect.

By 1618 the colony was composed of two dozen settlements spread over seventy miles from the mouth of the James River on Chesapeake Bay to the fall line; Jamestown lay along the north shore about a third of the way in. Under the new dispensation, the colony was divided into four boroughs—an old English unit of government between a town and a county in size—as well as seven plantations, the estates of investors that had been granted quasi-autonomous status (how autonomous was still to be determined). This domain was to be ruled, as before, by the parent company in London, with its day-to-day operations overseen by a governor (now Yeardley).

Yeardley would not rule alone. He was seconded by a Council of State, appointed not by him but by the company. He had another body of helpers too, whose composition marked an epoch in American history.

In June 1619 Yeardley, newly arrived in Virginia from visiting the king, called on the colony’s freemen to elect “by a pluralitie of voices” two burgesses from each borough and plantation. They were to join with him and the Council of State in a “general Assemblie” which would have “free power to treat, consult & conclude… all emergent occasions concerning the publique weale.”⁶

Since the burgesses would establish such an important precedent, let us record their names.

The four boroughs sent eight burgesses.

Seven plantations sent fourteen.

The first meeting of the General Assembly convened on July 30, 1619, in Jamestown’s church, a wooden building fifty by twenty feet, with plastered walls and a roof of wood or thatch. (Only the foundation survives; the seventeenth-century brick church tower that stands at Jamestown today is the remnant of a later construction.) Yeardley and his Council of State sat in the chancel, the portion of the church nearest the altar. Pory sat in front of them, acting as Speaker or secretary. A sergeant at arms stood by, ready to maintain order. The burgesses sat alongside the chancel in the choir. The Rev. Richard Buck, the cleric who had married Rolfe and Rebecca/Pocahontas, said a prayer (since, as Pory wrote, “men’s affaires doe little prosper where God’s service is neglected”).⁷ The burgesses were then asked to step into the nave, or body of the church, to swear their loyalty, one by one, to James I. This done, they returned to their seats in the choir, and the General Assembly turned to business.

The business of the first legislature in America began with disputes over credentials. Capt. John Warde was a burgess from his own plantation, fifteen miles upriver. He had, however, settled in the colony without the permission of the Virginia Company; should he be allowed a role in the deliberations of a body that the company had created? Another controversy concerned the two burgesses representing Martin’s Hundred, a plantation ten miles east of Jamestown. But the patent or charter issued to Capt. John Martin, the plantation’s absent master, exempted him and his hundred from the colony’s laws. Governor Yeardley himself objected to the presence of Martin’s burgesses. There was another problem with Martin: a boatload of his men stood accused of stopping Indians in a canoe on the bay and seizing their corn. The settlers had given trinkets in return, but the Indians had not been willing sellers. Relations with the Powhatan had been peaceful since Rolfe’s wedding, but this was not the way to maintain them.

The General Assembly seated Captain Warde on the grounds that he had behaved as a model settler, with the understanding that he procure a commission from the company as soon as possible, which he promised to do. A message addressed to “our very loving friend” Captain Martin ordered him to come to Jamestown to explain himself.

The assembly next formed into committees. Pory explained their business. They were to examine all the instructions that the company had sent to the colony and decide which should become laws (“putt on the habite [clothing] of lawes” was how Pory phrased it). They were also to make their own suggestions for legislation (“what lawes might issue out of the private conceipte [thought] of any of the Burgesses”).⁸