Prologue
Let’s get to the point early. There is much at stake in this module.
At stake in the module is its discussion of events, programmatic initiatives and development dynamics that will significantly shape (1) the future Virginia sub-state/provincial policy and jurisdictional system; (2) resulting in a decentralized bias/tilt within Virginia’s policy system, empowering the sub-provincial level that rested on local private elites, who controlled, not merely dominated, both the local economic base and its associated governance (church and state); (3) in so doing, when combined with the tobacco monoculture, created a “shredded” provincial policy system composed of many small, but also powerful larger plantations, that inhibited the creation of larger towns and cities, including a competitive port city for export. Colonial Virginia never developed a large city–which was unique to the other colonies; (4)
Underlying these dynamics was the establishment of an economic base, centered on dispersed and constantly expanding tobacco plantations (both large and homestead-subsistence) that exported their annual production to England, and in so doing linked their investment and export-financing to English investors and factors, a relationship that over time not only chained the Virginian economy, but put at financial risk the plantation and their owners.
In short, I argue that in the twelve years that followed its third charter revision by King James, the London-based Virginia Company set in motion the structures, elites, economic base, and, as we shall see the political institutions that became central to the Virginia colonial experience. These structures and institutions, as they evolved, were imported into America’s First Republic the Articles of Confederation, and then incorporated in the Second, Early Republic. This module that lays the foundation for our defense of that assertion.
Through the remainder of this module series, I interweave two distinct perspectives: the “big picture” and the “on the ground” perspective. Each has their merits and limitations. In this module I start with the introduction of the “big picture”. In the next three modules that follow, I discuss what happened “on the ground” in Virginia. Then I return to the “Fall of the Company” which updates the “big picture” and then outlines the key factors and dynamics that constituted some of the “big picture” for the administration of Charles I up to the Civil War in 1642. From there we will begin another module series that concentrates on that period.
The Big Picture
To understand how Virginia got started we necessarily have to remind the reader, it was and by definition of its being in colonial America, was a colony of England (English), later in the early 18th century, the United Kingdom (British). While at certain points the colony, the tail, did wag the dog (the mother country), for the most part it was the reverse. James I subcontracted his colony development and mercantilist trade, to the English “merchant and military” communities who joined forces in particular joint stock corporations like out Virginia Company.
That joint stock corporations, led and managed by these sorts of folk, created bends in our colonial twigs that hardened into distinct, somewhat unique, twists in the colony future path toward American statehood, on its face, is not an unrealistic proposition. But it is one that needs to be documented. In this sense it is not sufficient to focus exclusively on what happened “on the ground” in Virginia, but to expand one’s scope to include what’s happening to and within the joint stock corporation in process of establishing and growing the Virginia colony. The Virginia Company is the concrete instrument of mercantilism of that period, and most important, it was the Virginia Company that pioneered the first, the very first successful permanent settlement/colony in North America. It wrote the instruction manual for those that followed.
In the module series thus far, we have given a broad outline of the big picture and the on the ground from the formation of the Virginia Company, its mercantilist legacy, to its initial settlement in 1606 of Jamestown. We describe the detail of the composition and goals of that first settlement and introduced its forced pivot from a trading factory strategy to a permanent settlement orientation. In 1610, the Virginia Company did not really have a permanent settlement strategy, and were very rudimentary in their conception of one. And then we discussed the first “starving time” period, John Smith, that nearly killed the project, saved only by the proverbial white men on a white ship: Baron De La Warr, Thomas Gates and Thomas Dale.
The tobacco monoculture required a shredded, isolated but stable local policy system, which served the needs of the landed tobacco elite that operated its large scale-exporters. In this group, London investors disinvesting from the Virginia Company, found a new path to wealth that met the needs to found a permanent economic base from which they could form long-lasting source of profit. Rather than investing though a third party corporation, they took equity positions in the land and tobacco of this young former Virginia Company elite, as it too disinvested from the Virginia Company.
This was no homestead program in the sense contemporary readers might associate with the 1862 homestead movement. With some exceptions nearly all who were freeholders and could participate in these land grants were company-related, or had the skill and the luck to move into resident company elites economic circle. It was only after 1616 when Dale and Yeardley opened up the program–and when Governor Argall [999] suspended the regulation in 1617 the mobility of former company servants diminished considerably until restored by Yeardley in 1619’s Greate Charter reforms.
[999] Argall remained through April 1619, when he was replaced by Yeardley who would serve for three years as the full governor of the colony. Argall, a hardened soul if there ever was one, may be best known for his kidnapping of Pocahontas from her father in 1613. Peace with the Indians was restored after this venture when John Rolfe married her. Argall in 1616 commanded the ship that took her and Rolfe to England—where she became a celebrity, took sick and died.
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Through use of these early land/workforce incentives company officials (their proteges/families, merchants, and all sorts of tag-along associates who emigrated from England) captured first advantage of the benefits. The Company used the Company Magazine to grab ahold of tobacco export, in what would be a futile effort to pay their bills and provide funds for the inevitable infrastructure that an economic base would require. And as important as the headright, they used it to import indentured company servants into the swamp-infested tobacco grinder.
If company elites used tobacco as a short term solution to their provincial and corporate woes, they also sent over all sorts of artisans to diversify the economy. The company elite sincerely and earnestly attempted to diversify the Virginia economy–and prevent, or at least slow down (through regulation), the tobacco boom that distorted every initiative they devised. Sandys, and those around him, did not inhale their product, and in a perfect world most wanted it to go away. Like a steam roller or a gold rush, the tobacco boom, the TINA of Virginia (there is no alternative), crushed all in its path.
The Fifth Dynamic Meets the Tobacco Boom
Transition of “Plantation as a Colony” Conducted by a Joint Stock Corporation into an Economic Development Strategy for Private Profit
Up to the point the English tackled the difficult project of colonializing North America and the West Indies, “plantation” was the English term for what we call a colony. But it was a distinctive style of colonization, not that of royal decree, management, with the Crown granting and taking away of privileges, land, trading monopolies, but a colonialization conducted by by a privately managed, royally chartered joint stock corporation. That conceptualization seemingly worked well enough in the Far East, Levant, Russia, and even for the Flanders on the Continent. But when the first North American-focused English joint stock corporation attempted to create a “plantation-colony” in the New World, its numerous ventures fell on rough times immediately.
This was not the first time that a joint stock colony-plantation had rough times and several failures. The Plantation as a colony-level strategy had failed in Ireland for over a half-century before the Jamestown and the Virginia Company. Plantation as a strategy had two approaches. First it created a public private partnership of sorts, designed to supplement English Crown military conquests, chiefly in Ireland, but also in West Indies. Conversely, the plantation strategy in the form of a “trading factory:, an established outpost for trade with an established native civilization and government(s). For this section we are interested in the former. As we shall see the plantation-conquest-colonialization strategy had demonstrated, over the past thirty years before the Virginia Company an indifferent track record that did not include merchant profits, and had generated considerable tension within the public private dynamic.
When Virginia and Ireland reached a fork in the road around 1609-1612, a short, but bold attempt was made by the private sector to update and upgrade the notion of plantation away from macro colony-building toward profit-making economic development for its investors and for the Throne as well. The “rubber had hit the road”, exposing the ill-defined and conflicting goals of the parties involved. It raised the question as to whether the joint stock corporation, as previously defined and practiced, could be successful in macro colony building. That the government under Elizabeth had exerted considerable pressure requiring private participation in the plantation-colonialization-conquest approach, it was hoped the onset of a new King, James might be more open and less coercive.
Underlying this short period of reform, we can see the initial incorporation and financing of the Virginia-London companies in 1606-7, and the exceedingly rapid collapse of the Maine plantation and the equally striking near collapse of the Virginia Jamestown plantation. Simultaneous the English king was debating the formation of a new “Ulster Plantation” in Ireland. The private sector had greeted with some interest the Virginia Company mixed trading factory-colonialization of North America strategies, and in 1606 fifty-six private companies, and guilds, had participated in the initial financing. At the same time, advocated for a restructure of the Crown plantation/colonialization model, including Sir Francis Bacon, advocated new terms more likely to yield profits, but also significantly reduce risks, and hence also reduce the element of Crown coercion and insensitivity in administration of the enterprise.
Within the private sector Joint stock corporation the hope was to avoid entirely an participation in a new Crown Ulster Plantation, but if not possible, develop more favorable terms and elements. Accordingly there was an obvious tension between the merchant-investor who wanted out of the deal, what the King wanted. Off to the side, the Virginia Company was requesting a new charter (in 1609), and in 1612 another new charter. The latter was clearly trying to figure out how to square its mixed trading factory and colonialization settlement strategies; the reality of a establishing a permanent colony in in North America demanded a radically different approach, that that moved away from quick profits and short term lending.
These tensions fragmented the Virginia Company, and led by its management (Smythe, Sandys) seized the initiative sort of piggyback into the Ulster Plantation reform and restructure its relationship with the Crown, and to rejigger its role in creating a resilient economic base from which private return on investment could be achieved. Lost in both reform debates was a definition of what was required to establish a permanent settlement in either Ireland or Virginia. The matter at hand in this 1606-12 period was to free the colonization-plantation strategy of its Crown dominance, coercion, insensitivity, and to open the enterprise by emphasizing initiatives that could bring profit to the private parties, and yield tangible benefit to the Crown–and of course result in a permanent settlement in the territories.
Caught in this was the term plantation which over the next decade transitioned from colony-building to an “private-public” economic development strategy compatible with tobacco export combined to finance the colony-building strategy. The word “plantation” seemingly coexisted at two different levels, both imprecisely understood or defined. At some level, which was more pronounced in the debate about the Irish Ulster Plantation, what was in essence a redefinition of the Crown’s role in colony-building, and the merchant-investor desired limited participation in those areas it deemed suitable to its capacities and its goal to make profit. In Virginia, a less obvious need in 1609 was what did it take to build a permanent economic base “from scratch” in a hostile North American wilderness, a three-thousand mile ocean away from England.
With two revisions of its charter under its belt, the King having seemingly granted most of what was asked for by the private sector, the Virginia Company, having seemingly stabilized its Jamestown settlement, haltingly made its first attempt to build a colony economic base in 1613. Plantation was the first instrument used in Virginia in 1613 for the purpose of installing a small-scale privately “owned” commercial homestead whose production was intended to be sold by a provincial-level monopoly export agency called the Magazine. Profits were intended to flow to both the private plantation and the colony-level monopoly and magically micro level economic base-building (and self-sufficiency) and macro level sustainability and even profits were to result.
Neither the Irish Ulster Plantation, nor the Virginia Company restructure yield the early success its advocates wanted, and in the Virginia Company, badly needed. It turns out that the resolution of the terms associated with the Ulster Companies were mixed, and the Crown was determined to require private participation in the new Ulster Plantation nevertheless. While James made significant concessions in the sensitivity to private profit-making, it did not provide the resources to live up to its commitment to defend the territory from attacks by the Irish, not did it live up to iits commitment to remove and resettle the Irish from the Plantation redevelopment areas.
What was probably not expected was the reaction of the private companies to their being required to join in the Ulster Plantation incorporation and financing. The reaction probably made it inevitable the Virginia Company would eventually fail in its colonialization-settlement initiative. To set the stage, we first tackle the events and mechanics of the incorporation of the Ulster Plantation.
Plantation as a Background—
Depending on when you start counting, the British conquest of Ireland commenced with Henry II in 1169 and the 1070’s. Henry cut out his piece of the old sod, but the invasion really got hot under the Tudors, especially Elizabeth, and was then inherited by the Stuarts. The invasion climaxed with Cromwell in the 1650’s (not in the chronology of this module series) but it is clear we are talking about a sustained conquest/reconquest of Ireland, by England.; overall the invasion persisted for the better part of eight centuries.
The motivations behind the invasion varied by period of time and the King/Queen . In this module we focus on the so-called “plantation strategy” period under Elizabeth and the Stuarts. It may be some surprise but the Irish plantation period overlapped with the Virginia settlement by the Virginia Company. The purpose of this case study is to demonstrate that English colonialist ambitions/projects did not start with Virginia and the Virginia Company, but rather the Virginia Company, and the Virginia Company model of colony-building was a dramatic departure from the established style of England’s colonial settlement of non-English territories.
In reality, Irish plantation strategy was less a strategy to conquer Ireland than a strategy-framework to maintain England’s hold on the territory it controlled in Ireland. The general idea behind the Irish plantation strategy, as least as it was seen from the Crown’s perspective, was to bring in the English merchant/investor/landlord private sector into the structure and process of England’s conquest-colonialization effort. Besides taking a financial load of the Crown, the private corporate plantation would conduct day-to-day management of the territory, implement a new upgraded agricultural and trade modernization, import reliable settlers to secure holdings, and establish small urban settlements for defense and trade.
The English Crown, i.e. the King, government or public sector, was leading the effort. Governmental bodies, usually called commissions, assumed much of the governance function, and the military, there in large numbers, the police and self-defense of acquired lands. Accordingly, one could expect some overlap with England’s turn to colonization of North America (then perceived primarily as a defense against Spanish aggression and dominance). Elizabeth, in effect, compelled the emerging English trading and investment community into financing and “governing” its acquired Irish territories. Forming joint stock companies, different groupings of English investors would incorporate a “plantation”, a colony in other words, over specified Irish areas.
Plantations were devised by Elizabeth, partly as a means to invite-compel the English private sectors, its guilds and merchant community for example, to finance the resettlement of the seized land; the government promised to evict the Irish from these areas as a critical prerequisite to effective economic base building ” and “segregation” as it was called constitute the core pillar of Irish plantation pacification. The private joint stock corporation was to manage the repopulation of these areas by sub-contracting with “undertakers”, wealthy English and Scot lower nobility and gentry, who had been tasked to stock the plantation with new settlers from their estates in England/Scotland. Once in Ireland, these resettled Scots and English would be set up in farm households around villages, settlements and trading posts, useful for self-defense, trade, and self-sufficiency of the new population.
Whether of not the plantation “pacification strategy” (that is what it would have been called in the Boer or Vietnam War) would have “worked” is a matter of debate, in large measure because the Irish natives were none too happy about it, and resistance from active rebellion, to guerilla war, to sabotage, and peaceful non cooperation made plantation governance and economic base-building a dubious enterprise in the extreme. In any event since the 1570’s, private-public plantations litter the Irish countryside, much like roadkill litters the highway.
From the English private sector’s point of view, they wanted little to nothing to do with them. Typical was one quote from a London company: “It would be very foolish to entermeddle in this busynesse, for it will be exceading chargeable [i.e. expensive]” or as Professor James Curt observed it would be “troublesome and a bottomless pit as far as money was concerned”. [99] Jahttps://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/index.shtmlmes, Stevens Curt, “London Companies” in BBC’s Wars & Conflict: the Plantation of Ulster.
As might be expected the private sector, when first “asked” to join into a plantation strategy resisted, and only when Elizabeth found a strong and loyal ally, Sir Arthur Chichester to lead the effort was she able to gain a foothold. Chichester, appointed as Viceroy of Ireland developed a plan , designed from his mind to appeal to private companies and investors. This plan, however, was unable to secure a sufficient corps of participants, and so Elizabeth stepped in, jailed several foremost private leaders, fined them, and then sent a strong letter to follow letting other potential investors know they were next. Persuasive as she always was, the London Companies joined in and a series of plantation initiatives followed over the next thirty years.
Elizabeth had authorized these undertakers to be granted 3000 hectares of Irish land in return for the immigration and resettlement of 48 adult males (20 families)–here one might see the underlying skeleton of Virginia’s future headright incentive system. The primary task of the plantation was, bluntly, to replace the Irish Gaelic population–who would be removed from the area–and replace it with a “British” population, Protestant, and English-speaking. It was labeled a civilizing strategy, as the English held the Irish in great contempt, not only for their religion, but their way of life and culture.
Resettlement was only the first phase of a long-term town-building and agricultural “farming” economic base, along with (depending on the plantation) diversification into artisan ventures such as wine-making and other pre-capitalist occupations. As such the plantation was by no means simply a royal travel bureau, but an agent of economic development. Northern Ireland was held to be an allegedly underpopulated region whose principal sector was cattle-raising. A second competing task was defense of the new communities, with fortifications, and the creation of a militia (muster) for self defense. All this was costly and long-term, and so Elizabeth’s plantation was her form of an early public-private partnership which brought in the private sector to manage and finance the “settlement” of Ireland.
In that year, Bacon wrote a little known essay on the Irish plantation, when he was England’s deputy solicitor general (whose boss in John Popham, above). This 1609 essay, however, is NOT the more known and widely published “On Plantations” which was written in 1625 after his experience as James’s Chancellor of England) and saliently after the 1622 Massacre by the Powhatans. The gap between the two, in terms of the goals intended of plantation and specifics of how to do it, are huge, and they suggest how the Virginia experience radically developed the concept as perceived by a major, and supportive colonization, settlement, and plantation supporter.
Bacon’s 1609 “Certain Considerations touching the [Ulster] Plantation in Ireland: Another Britain” essay was written for the Irish Commission and had a significant influence on the development of the “Ulster Plantation”, and for our purposes clearly reveals what he believed to the the ultimate benefit, and hence ultimate purpose behind colonization as people movement for national defense, and for the pursuit of private prosperity that could generate the revenues necessary for that purpose. He advocated the plantation, or any plantation, was valuable that made it possible for many families to receive sustentation and fortunes, and for England to discharge from her own bounds and from Scotland so many people that were they to remain they might be the cause of future trouble.
Soe shall Your Majesty in this work have double commoditiye in the avoidance of people here [in England] and in the making of use of them there’. He lays stress on the fact that Ireland was a weak spot in England’s defense, and was needed for England’s safety, and that under English control, it would be sure to become a source of profit to the realm. He urges that [the Ulster Plantation] ‘undertakers be encouraged and wishes a closer correspondency between the {Ulster Plantation] Commission in Ireland and the Counsell of Plantations in England, wherein I warrant myself by the [precedent] of a like Counsell of Plantations for Virginia, an enterprise differing as much from this [of Ireland] … [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Settlements, Vol 1 (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964), Footnote 1, p. 72
To clarify Bacon’s words a bit, he is arguing for an empowered joint stock corporation engaged in a public partnership with the Crown. That corporations be delegated responsibility for the management of a colony, as a permanent settlement. He is focused on an empowered joint stock corporation, but not with the requirements and the obligations that were incumbent on the founding of a permanent settlement. In 1609 when the needs of a permanent colony in North America was being advocated, the primary need, at least in Bacon’s mind, was that the Virginia Plantation (the colony itself) were placed in the hands of the Virginia Company in partnership with England, but he did not address what the implications of that task meant for the Company. That was a subject for another day, if in fact, he gave that issue any notice at all at that time.
How did the Ulster Plantation Strategy Play Out
The Irish Ulster Plantation strategy, a curious mix of simple conquest, resettlement of populations loyal to the English/British Crown in a rather brutal and blunt form of colonization, the active involvement of the English/Scots private sector, and a veneer of economic development designed to upgrade Irish agricultural economic base, and as w shall see build some urban centers/port for trade. The Ulster plantation strategy was a reaction to the fifty years previous during which several iterations of plantations had been attempted, established since the 1570’s. The general Irish plantation strategy had accumulated an indifferent track record, but one that was sufficient to provide a vehicle for incremental English success on the battlefield.
The private sector wanted the Crown to step and pay for more than it wanted, and it wanted to administer more of the economic development initiatives, particularly people-attraction/resettlement so that it more directly led to economic base-building, trade and therefore profits–a return on their investment.
Importing loyal, Protestant Scots and English, eviction of the Irish from specified lands, and a resettlement of these imported population on the lands was a centerpiece of this economic base-building and urbanization effort injected a measure of stability and a workforce into these areas, on which economic modernization could be more effectively implement, and would presumably yield greater profits.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/planters/es04.shtml
Virginia Plantation’s Business Plan as Restructured after 1612 Charter
So Plantation was not an indifferent name or term chosen for Dale/Sandy’s pivot. Plantation was a “concept” that was in active use in the war-resettlement of Ireland by the Tudors, and after 1603 by James I. about by Elizabethan and Stuart colonial officials and policy makers. Plantation was the geographical administrative unit employed by Elizabeth I in her campaign to conquer and re-settle Gaelic Ireland, replacing its native independent and anti-English Catholic population with a more loyal population imported from England and the Scottish borderlands.
During Elizabeth’s era the Irish plantation campaign was structured as a private-public initiative in which the Crown dominated the governance of the plantation corporation, but the day-to-day finance and management largely left to the private investors/intermediaries. The Crown contributed its army to hack out the territory of the Plantation and it was supposed to keep order, and secure the sites of settlement within the plantation. That model of “colony as plantation” did not correspond at all with Virginia, if only because the English military presence was non-existent. Instead of a Crown-dominated Commission that administered the Ulster Plantation, was a seemingly empowered private Virginia Company corporation. Smythe and Sandys were attempting a reform that England had not tried before. Ireland, also restructured, was seemingly going down a different path.
The Virginia Company was being set up according to traditional joint-stocks principles. By the charters of 1609 and 1612, the company received a monopoly of the trade [within the defined boundaries of Virginia, and] … control of land allocation and utilization. There was, in fact, little in its formal organization to differentiate the Virginia Company from the East India Company, chartered nine years earlier, or any of the other joint-stock commercial companies. Nevertheless, the growth of English commerce with Virginia presupposed the creation of a permanent export-producing colony. The fact that productive plantations [the micro plantation] were a prerequisite for commerce crucially distinguished the project of the Virginia Company from those of the purely trading ventures of the era. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), p. 93
Certainly for us, the key observation in the above quote was charter reform had not meaningfully redefined the goal of Virginia’s economic base. nor the means by which the Company would ultimately secure resources with which to retire its debt and pay dividends to its investors. Whether or not its economic base was a trading factory, or a permanent settlement/colony, the economic base was to be geared toward export to England. It was assumed that meant the discovery of an export crop or mineral/natural resource, or one hell of a fur-trading enterprise.
Quoting Charles Andrews:
Men prominent in official and mercantile life began to seek, early in the seventeenth century, new opportunities for the employment of capital, and saw in the West [north America] a field of commercial profit, rivaling and supplementing the advantages of the East. Through the influences of such important personages as Sir John Popham, lord chief justice, and the King’s bench, Sir Thomas Smith, head of the East India Company and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor at the fort of Plymouth [England]–all leaders in many public and private enterprises–attention was called for the first time to the possibility of utilizing [private] capital for the plantations in America as well as in Ireland …
Men of the Popham-Smith type, with the example of the great trading companies before them, saw the value of employing a similar form of organization–the legal chartered company-for the purpose of advancing settlement as well as trade. To them private parties were ‘cowld compfortes to adventures’ [cold comfort to investors] and had been ‘fownde [found] fatall to all interprices hitherto undertaken. … This statement … was an appeal for funds in the form of a joint-stock [corporation] and for the enlistment of organized capital and the organized company in colonizing enterprise under the control of the state” [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Settlements, Vol 1 (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964), pp. 73-74
The first five years of Jamestown did little to suggest fur-trading, export of minerals/timber, or manufactures would offer not any quick solutions of the export requirement, and since, as we shall see in the next module, the first Virginia Company ED initiatives were based on the chief resource within its control (land), and that land would produce (miracle crops) that would yield fast profits to retire short-term bonds and pay-as-you-go costs, for sale in the English market principally was anticipated by the Company. I would assume, since Rolfe was one of their members, and was two years down the road in his experiments, they had tobacco in the back of their mind. If this supposition is substantially accurate the Company knew what type of economic base it had better establish, and that they had better do it fast.
Their base-building did start over the next year (1613), and it rested on the micro plantation, in their thinking a private colony within the Company colony. The micro privately owned/managed, but made possible by Company land grants and tax abatements (not to mention seizure from the Indian tribes–no purchase of land was ever contemplated) was the key economic unit. The Company rested its hopes for revenues by using its authority to control trade (a right to a monopoly) through an export/import “agency”, the previously mentioned company store–the Magazine to import and sell products to residents, and then sell the produce from the plantations to England (or elsewhere). I think that was the Virginia Company business plan in 1612-13.
As Brenner also points out, the Company assumed risks that it could accomplish this, and simultaneously deliver agricultural produce sufficient to sustain the population, while increasing the population (and necessarily the workforce) to produce sufficient volumes of the export product to pay its bills and keep everyone happy.
The chartering of the Virginia Company in 1609 [1612] was accompanied by the full reassessment the Colony’s potential. The stockholders relinquished earlier hopes of quick windfalls through the discovery of precious metals or trade with the Indians. Facing the hard reality that nothing substantial could be gained without the production of staple crops, they initiated a full-scale effort at [permanent] colonization. The Company took complete charge of production, which was carried out on company land by indentured servants sent and supplied at company expense … As sole proprietor the company collected what was produced; as monopoly merchant, it carried out all colonial marketing functions” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), pp. 93-4
In the remaining modules of this module series, the reader will see my version of what happened after 1612, and how and why the Virginia Company engaged in an economic base-building enterprise based on its conception of “plantation” (colony-building) strategy (i.e. a private colony (micro plantation) within the colony-level plantation). In so doing, it pioneered a set of economic development tools and programs that, however, inadequate to solve the company’s fiscal crisis, did advance colony-settlement building in North America.
These economic development tools and programs were to be the first in our toolbox, would be replicated in other English colonies, Finally, the Company’s development of a MICRO plantation, the private colony within the provincial Company colony, as the key economic development unit, set a model for other colonizers who sought to create an export-based agriculture economic base–which, unknown at the time, of course, set the English North American colonial hegemony off into two quite different economic bases, which in essence set the Mason-Dixon line, with all that entailed.
Why this is very important to our history is, as we shall see , that not only did that entail a predetermined economic base for Virginia, but indirectly caused the development of a shredded community, non urban, form of local governance that lent itself to capture by its micro plantation elites. Not only that, as we shall further see, events forced the Company to construct private/corporate forms of governance (the Greate Charter), on the fly almost, instead of what were customarily public institutions and structures ; that these structures would be incorporated into Virginia governance after the fall of the Company and would be converted into public government structures/institutions further leads us to recognize the legacy of the Virginia Company on Virginia’s future government and policy systems.
The reader should be reminded that other colonies did not start from this context, hence will likely develop along different paths. In short from 1612 on, Virginia was headed down a singular path into the future United States.
Finally, as Brenner observes, and I concur, the Company’s 1612 decision to go forward and build a colony by assuming such huge, and largely unknown risks, with finances based on short-term debt, held by investors fundamentally uncommitted to the business plan nor the permanent settlement goal, was going to lead, as close to inevitably as one might get, to failure and collapse.
The fact remains that the Virginia Company’s [micro] plantations required a good deal of time to reach a level of development sufficient to produce the staple exports required to yield profits. As a result from the start the company faced a crisis of investment … Without fresh investment the Company found itself paralyzed, but it never came close to solving the problem. The consequence of the Virginia Company’s failure to finance itself was a fundamental change in the nature of colonial enterprise [i.e. English plantation colony building] under the company’s auspices, and eventually the company’s dissolution altogether [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), p. 94
Also as the plods through the remaining modules of this module series, the reader can see how the Virginia Company etched in its failures how not to colony-build, what risks cannot be ignored, what economic strategies (i.e. self-sufficiency) need be taken seriously and immediately. That all of this led to one lesson above all–that colony-macro plantation building required the development of a series of economic development tools, initiatives, projects–programs (an economic developer’s toolbox) which when combined into a programmatic nexus constitute what we will call a settlement strategy.
Accordingly, we see the London Company in 1609 two separate joint stock corporations, the Virginia Company renegotiating its 1606 charter, and establishing a new colony in Ireland, specifically in Ireland’s Derry County. The Irish venture, located in an area we now know as Londonderry, was to be venture in a new Ulster Plantation which had just been formed to manage and repopulate a new area in northern Ireland that had just expelled the Irish leadership and was beginning its resettlement, town-building and economic development efforts.
It was the Irish experience that was applied to Virginia when the Virginia Company made its pivot, not the other way around.
In that vacuum, he and likely the Board of the Virginia Company, saw themselves more as the “undertakers” (the irony of that term) than economic developers. What a permanent settlement would require in a policy system and an economic base–not to ignore fiscal and economic sustainability of its population–would be learned through actual experience over the next decade.
Ireland did not compare to Virginia one might think, but if we substitute Native Americans for the Irish who were in process of being conquered by the English in 1607-8 the distinctions diminish. Plantations had been created (and destroyed) in Ireland over the previous decades. What is a key distinction is its geographical, cultural, and religious closeness of Ireland to England, and the role it had played in England history. Ireland’s natives were in the English mind not comparable to Native Americans, but instead were viewed as long-time adversaries who practiced a hated religion.
The point of this being, the Ulster Plantation was a strategy to colonize Ireland so that a new population be imported to secure the conquered territories and England’s hold on a hostile population. By way of full disclosure, Bacon was born in Ireland and raised there until a teenager. He was not an advocate for the Irish, but very much the opposite. What he does in his essay is propose the plantation be so constructed that it will facilitate a more peaceful union of Ireland with England and a possession of its Tudor-Stuart monarchs.
We can discern from Bacon’s 1609 essay that the plantation concept as applied to Ireland at the time of the Virginia Company settlement was infused by notions of political and military conquest, and served as its arguably chief goal the political union of the two geographies to be accomplished by a systematic process of importing new “loyal population” of Scots primarily into Ireland, removing native Irish from the affected territory, and repositioning the immigrant Scots into land-owning and renter parcels of land. In terms of the mechanics of how it was accomplished, it amazingly does not deviate from what was practiced in Virginia during this period.
When the economic opportunity of the New World began to be considered it naturally was in terms of a commercial policy and the trading factory. But in a new situation, the history of this policy was quite different from the history of the Orient for the New World was thinly populated with a people whose economic wants and trading habits were relatively undeveloped [as thought by the Europeans].
This fact could mean only one thing, that the exploitation of the resources of the New World would require a new and settled population who knew the value of these resources, and who were willing to work or could be forced to work in order to make these resources available to the European market. ;;; The term plantation, in the original, and especially English sense, had reference not to a landed estate [a manor], but this whole process of migration and occupation.[I would add entrepreneurship] …
It was a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital, and looked for profitable return from capital. A plantation of people in the New World would have to be supported and cared for for a few years … before it would begin to yield a profit, but the expectation of profit was basic to the idea of a plantation” [99] Edgar T. Thompson, “Population Expansion and the Plantation System” (American Journal of Sociology, (Vol 41., No. 3, 1935), p. 318.
This meant that land was the instrument of production, and that to produce a new population had to be imported. .. “a migration which became an army of occupation” (p. 318).
In short plantation was an economic development strategy, a conscious creation of a unit of production that required people attraction, migration (workforce development), and the funds necessary to sustain it for a period of time). As indicated in the quote, I believed if it was to work successfully it also required on-site entrepreneurism. It was this conception of the plantation strategy that served as a womb for Sandys future headright system and his so-called Greate Charter institutionalization.
First, and foremost, discussing plantation in Virginia is fraught with the reader’s import of a conception of an economic unit that did not exist in England in 1600. The word itself carried at the time the flavor of what today we call a “farm”. It was NOT the inglorious Virginia plantation of its “golden age’ after 1725, nor its evolution leading into the Civil War.
As we shall explain below, even the largest of the period were very small, by anyone’s standards, and the estate house mirrored the reduced size and glamour. Slavery was NOT a major feature of the sixteenth century Virginia plantation, although there were slaves, they tended to be Native Americans. The workforce was imported indentured servants, and the smaller plantations were staffed by the family, and hired workers. Plantations in Virginia were little more than cleared fields and a core scattering of rudimentary buildings that tended over time to grown into the plantation’s “downtown”.
Its “suburbs” were likely to be a hodge-podge of cleared fields and truly basic, non brick structures that housed the sharecroppers, and homestead freeholders that clustered nearby to take advantage of the downtown and advantages of working with, and through, the larger plantations owners (exporting/importing/lending). If there was a town in this period, it lacked formal and legal status as one, and it was a more a crossing of several roads that led to a port-warehouses for tobacco storage awaiting export (a pier or anchorage/beach). The entire plantation ensemble created a metro area that was anything but impressive or prosperous.
At the time what was the “thinking” that underlie plantation grants as a viable strategy for economic development? these patents were thought of and referred to as “colonies” and the patent holders were treated as the local governance of these entities. These patents were larger in size, more complex in their activities, and contained subunits, i.e. Hundreds could include individual household land grants, plantation land grants, and even voluntary joint stock corporation land grants. If it is helpful, one can think of a Hundred as a non-governmental “county” within which a number of different jurisdictions cohabit. Unfortunately in the post-1613 Virginia the functions of the Hundreds were not fleshed out, and that meant the powers of the sub-entities had to exercise governmental powers until that could be done sometime in the future
[P]owers ranted, according to the form of patent drawn up in 1620, were almost those of an independent colony. The [Virginia] company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who should ‘go to Virginia to inhabit ‘by vertue of their Graunts’ and should ‘plant themselves, their tenants and servants’ might have liberty ‘til a form of government is here settled over them’ to make orders, ordinances and constitutions ‘associatinge unto them divers of the greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and businesses, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 128-29
When one enlarges upon this by recognizing the formation within these areas of local militia-essential to self-defense and policing which was simultaneous to any plantation settlement, we can see a fusion of private and public that ran through the establishment of plantations during the years of the Virginia Company. Each of these plantation land patents generated owners that in the best way they could developed a self-sufficiency as they could, creating both a decentralized hinterland governance, defense, and local economy.
To drive a nail in this argument, James’s chancellor (the most powerful position in the King’s court) at that time, was a shareholder of the Virginia Company, a certain Francis Bacon, who in 1625 published his thoughts on the matter ,“On Plantations”, in which amazingly he applies to Virginia and offers his thoughts on how that strategy was to be implemented. Bacon’s position and his closeness with the Virginia Company enterprise in a period in which the King had suspended Parliament. Bacon was a participant in the process of Virginia Company oversight and he had an investment in it. De La Warr (and his father, the Second Baron) had been a loyalist to Essex—the Queen’s lover—at a time in which Bacon was Essex’s protégé. The two knew each other for decades.
That such a noted intellectual, and in this period a powerful royalist policy maker was aware of the “plantation” as a tool for James’s colonial expansion into the New World and that he willingly allowed the Company to go forward with it, suggests the Shirley Plantation was intended to be more than a simple land grant of four hundred and fifty acres. The key to that assertion is to ask and answer who is this “Sherley” who got the grant.
In the plantation we see a fusion of private production and local government, the foundation of Virginia’s sub-state policy system. As the Virginia tobacco plantation replaced the town in New England, and township in Pennsylvania-New Jersey, it’s planter elite replaced the more diverse elites that developed from an economically diverse economic base in the latter colonies. The implosion of the Company and the diminishing effectiveness of its governance until its dissolution in 1624 meant this mélange of dynamics and elements established itself throughout 1620’s Virginia, and almost on auto-pilot laid the foundations for that colony’s economic base and established the fundamental of its future policy system as well.
Module 16
A Deeper Look into Dale’s 1612-17 Reforms
Dales’ Land Reforms: Employee and New Settler Provided a Path to Private Landowner
After 1613, the Company embraced a series of reforms, most of which revolved around land grants. Dale, it appears relaxed his communal militaristic trading factory practices which were so obviously counterproductive. The communal lifestyle and shared facilities were initially used because they were embedded in the terms of debt issuance and the prospectus that 1606 investors bought into; these practices were closely associated with a trading factory-military post mentality which, before Virginia, was the experience of the Elizabethan period.
Dale, the Deputy Governor in residence. naturally became the focal point in implementation of these initiatives. Of note his deputy George Yeardley was also deeply involved with these reforms—and he was destined to become the interim deputy governor when Dale left Virginia late in 1616. Remarkably, one can read Sir Thomas Dale’s “Plan for Revitalizing the Colony”, sent in 1611 to Lord Salisbury, and see the seeds of much of what lie ahead. [99] Warren M. Billings, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 1606-1689 (Ed), (Institute for American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 33-6
Until 1614 most settlers who went to Virginia were either “gentlemen” or “servants”, i.e. employees of the Company who paid their expenses through service of seven years [99] “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, p. 11. As Dale began to break that communal pattern and initiate the first land grants to these servants, he had set in motion a fundamental change in the Company’s relations with its “servants” and employees.
Besides the original 1606 debt obligations, another set of 1606 (and following) contract was also terminating—the seven year contract between the Company and its settlers which converted the latter into employees, very close to, but not indentured servants. Accordingly, in 1613-4 these employee agreements were expiring and accommodations had to be made. As a contract expired Dale rented out three acres to each former servant in return “for a month’s service and a donation of corn for the common store”.
At the same time, for new settlers Dale offered twelve acres of improved land, rent free for one year. Dale extended upon that by also making land grants (between 12 and 50 acres of cleared land with one year quitrent abatement) to new settlers immigrating into the colony. Say it another way, Dale is institutionalizing the private ownership of land in Virginia—for the first time in North America.
George Yeardley as Deputy Governor in 1617 made his final adjustment to the expiration of servant contracts ending as Osgood puts it “the system of joint management as applied to land (or company owned land tilled by renter contracts) which dominated the lower settlements and Henrico. A great deficiency in this land transfer was that land titles were unclear, and land ownership was a personalized relationship between Dale and the settler which implied more renter than owner in the behavior of the “owner”.
So, within several years, the Company converted these contracts to ownership rights. Renter or owner, these former servants were now mostly free laborers, and to the extent their contract with Dale allowed, they were able to do what they wanted with the land and their households. They had rights as English citizens, and held some autonomy to pursue economic and personal aspirations. In effect, land had become “capital” for the Company to use to pay off its obligations to the Jamestown settler community—and from the Company’s perspective, the employee had been converted into a “corporate citizens” complete with English civil and property liberties.
Through these new institutions the Company could secure the implementation of its initiatives, and exercise its powers of land and the economy. As Billings asserted: “The clear intent of the new program was to transplant as much of tradition English social [and economic order as the Virginia wilderness and the colonists particular circumstances would allow.] [99] “The Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, p. 11.
The numbers of individuals were not large; most ancient settlers rested in the cemetery rotting in their own company land grant. But it did create a free-booting domestic land owner able to settle at his own volition, and do with his private land as he shall. It was hoped and intended by the Company that the private landowner would assume the obligation to support himself and any household he had. But that meant the individual may disturb peace with Native Americans or even worse not plant crops which he could eat, but plant tobacco for export—leaving the Company with obligation of feeding him. To Dale’s (and his successor Yeardley) this did not work out; instead of corn needed for self-sufficiency, these free laborers planted tobacco.
Our focus in this module is on the land-based reform initiatives, but there were others. The Company store, its Magazine, was in effect a key EDO of the Virginia Company. It handled both import and export trade for the colony; its chief merchant was easily the single most powerful ED official. Through the Magazine not only did the Company provide for the domestic needs of its settlers, but it was the vehicle the Company looked to for its profits and revenues to pay off its debts. As one would suspect, the Magazine pleased no one, and captured more than its fair share of the blame for the failure of the colony to produce profits for the investors. In any event, the addition of tobacco exports went through this office—at least into 1617, and it certainly played a major role in the spread of tobacco planting; in that period the Magazine enjoyed a monopoly.
In 1616 the Company created a sort of EDO-like entity it called “Society for Particular Adventurers for Traffique with Virginia”, located in London, which imported goods into Virginia, and accepted exports from Virginia for sale in England (early tobacco went through it); called a “magazine’, it was more a transatlantic “company store” that held a terrible reputation in Virginia, but being a monopoly people made do. In 1621 it went bankrupt.
Over the following pages the reader will see much asserting the prominent role of Sir Edwin Sandys in the liberalization, revitalization, and reform of the Company’s post 1616 period. Much of Sandy’s reform principles and his so-labeled Greate Charter rested upon the principles and practices that Dale designed and implemented during his tenure as Deputy Governor. No doubt as Treasurer of the Company Sandys was a powerful force for the approval and implementation of the post 1619 reforms, but lurking in the background, I think, is a former Deputy Governor who designed and set the stage for Sandys reforms.
By the time of the Greate Charter, Dale, now an fleet commander for the British East Indies Company had engaged in, and won, a series of naval battles against a Dutch fleet, and secured the relief of key ports in Dutch Indonesia. During and after these engagements, Dale contracted an illness, ironically very similar to the Jamestown “summer seasoning”—and died in August 1619. On the other side of the world, Yeardley and Sandys’ were engaged in implementing that Greate Charter. Whatever his faults, and he did have them (Indian relations), Sir Thomas Dale is my unsung chief economic developer of the early Jamestown colony.
Perversely, the threat of a tobacco monoculture overwhelming a diversified Virginia economic base was ultimately what prompted Sandys’s creation of a Company General Assembly. The General Assembly would create a representative institution through which the Company could secure the cooperation and compliance of its new corporate citizen.
If this was to be democracy, it was to be a corporate democracy similar in function to the investor membership’s Annual Meeting and representative committees and board. The Company General Assembly could make enactments that functioned as government laws, and hence regulate the private citizen to conform to the general good (defined by the Company, but agreed to by the settler). The same General Assembly could function in the same manner for entities created by the other post-1613 land grant initiatives.
the Changing Nature of People Attraction Strategies in a Permanent Settlement Strategy
Another set of initiatives involved people recruitment. Certainly by 1613 the Company was well aware of the deficiencies in the quality of its non-gentlemen settler. In a trading factory, this element was composed of today’s “rough-necks” who could serve as a common laborer, a sort of rough and ready militia, and was capable of enduring savage conditions such as trading in the wilderness and digging mines, and rudimentary construction. They were impossible to manage, and this is why the Company relied on its military style and its early governors, including Dale, Yeardley and Argall were military commanders
Artisans on the other hand were obviously needed for a settlement community, and the Company slowly filled its supply ships with more of them as the years went by. The horrific death rate, however, combined with its trading factory military image did nothing to motivate the farmer or the artisan for that matter. There was nothing about a totally male community that added to the attraction magnet. The image was a company dictatorship in a horrible death factory developed.
Until 1618 the Company did not directly challenge that image and so even in that year, a large number of new settlers were sent over at Company expense that continued the old motif. Ninety young prisoners’ from London jails were sent over in 1618, and in the same year a number of convicts were also sent. The “summer seasoning” wreaked havoc among these folk, and all the survivors did was further transform Jamestown in particular into a wild west, Dodge City, atmosphere.
All this is why the land reform initiatives were key in the 1613-1619 period—and why the 1619 Greate Charter centered around their implementation. In the remainder of this module we will describe and assess the implications of each of the following land-based initiatives:
(1) he granted 50 acres to new settlers under terms very close to land ownership that carried generation to generation. But the heart of the Company’s post 1613 incentive program was
(2) its granting of special transfers to specific individuals—usually high-placed, and often within Virginia’s leadership community. These transfers, called “Gifts” established a tobacco-planting plantation as the core unit of Virginia’s agricultural economic base, created the Hundreds, as the basic unit of its sub-provincial system, and diffused the Jamestown population among the new Hundreds;
(3) there were also a number of land grants to voluntary, speculative joint stock “associations” that sought opportunities from plantations to mining, or fishing, but the more successful were “societies of adventurers” that developed plantations and individual manors;
(4) the last initiative which transformed employees of the Company into non employee, at first renter, and then near-owner of private land released the death-grip of communal living and sharing of facilities and common planting of the community garden was in several ways the most fundamental and transformative.
Dale’s chief personal innovation, an important one, was his limited allowance to well-behaved existing settlers (ancient settlers they were called) of autonomy from communal life and a homestead property of their own which except for certain annual requirements relieved them of communal labor obligations. This was very successful from its start, and over the next few years more former Company employees were able to set up their own farms apart from the two formal settlements. As regards to members of Jamestown’s gentlemen elite, like John Rolfe, Dale would make grants sufficient to develop a small farm or estate. In this manner Dale cemented his influence over this group—Rolfe named his son with Rebecca (Pocahontas) “Thomas”.
This innovation would catch Deputy Treasurer Sandys’ eye, and he would press hard for its expansion. Herein lies the seeds of what would evolve to be a serious issue in setting up Virginia’s future sub-provincial governance. Accordingly the next section discusses Dale’s “personal” land reform initiatives which he extended to the former employees of the Company and those new settlers who came over, or who were associated with voluntary joint stock corporations that were beginning to send over settlers at their expense (tobacco played a big role in this voluntary joint stock activity, but so did fishing, mining and Indian trade)
the Hundreds, Land Ownership
When Dale introduced his Plantation and Hundreds initiative in 1613-14 he linked these homestead plots to each of the Hundreds, and therefore broke up the Jamestown population and diffused a good number into the hinterland on their own homesteads. Tobacco was booming, its price high and so, as discussed, the new homeowners chiefly planted tobacco in their plot.. The upper settlements were converted to renter three year contracts, and the remainder in the lower settlements to grants of land in fee simple—i.e. land ownership [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1 (Forgotten Books, 2021, reprint of the MacMillan Company, 1904), pp. 76-7; I would add the population statistics do not include women and children, and they are drawn from a letter written by Rolfe to the Earl of Warwick (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eighth Report II, no. 208).
This little appreciated reform introduced by Dale represents one of the most significant initiatives of the Virginia Company. Dale is making the transition from settlers who were essentially employees under contract to the Company, into individual landowners, or renter in process to become landowners on lands formerly owned by the Company and given in payment for service to the Company by these employees.
After 1614, therefore I assert, land, the economic base, the policy system, and settlers’ individual rights had become fused and interwoven within the various separate initiatives of what is now known as the Greate Charter. The fusion begins with the departure of Dale in 1616 for London. When he left Osgood estimates the population of the entire colony was 381, with about 200 in the “upper settlements” (Henrico, and the several Hundreds) and the remainder in Jamestown and its adjacent settlements.
Plantations and Hundreds
Starting in 1614, tobacco planting spread to properties held by the Company’s Virginia elite. First, along the James River, then to the West and Shirley Hundreds, and finally moved east to Point Comfort—a 140 mile expanse that marked the birthplace of Virginia’s tobacco economy and culture [99] The spread was remarkably quick. Given that Dale’s land reform was in its infancy in 1614, the numbers small until 1616, small household planters followed the profits of the Company elite as they acquired their land. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/tobacco-in-colonial-virginia/.
From this period of special plantation land grant patents, areas today that are referred to as “hundreds” we can see the earliest manifestation of a Virginia pattern of decentralization in government and the economy—and their privatization of government, indeed its fusion, handled and conducted by private elites. To my best knowledge Virginia’s first plantation, in 1613, was the “Shirley Plantation”. Located along the James, upriver from Jamestown, it was cleared for operation in 1614—and planted tobacco. [999] At the same time (see Dale’s Gift below) a series of Hundreds were created and within them still more private plantations were granted. The first of these of which we have record (Smith’s Hundred-1617, Martin’s Hundred, 1618, or Martin’s Brandan (plantation of 7,000 acres in 1617; between 1619 and 1623 forty four of these patents were issued [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 130-1.
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the Early First Generation Virginia Plantations and their Role in Settlement-Economic Base Making
[999] The reader is reminded that “plantations” of this period should not be thought of as described in later periods of Virginia’s colonial history. Much smaller in size and workforce, they were rough-hewn out of the unforgiving Virginia hinterland; “any grant [in the seventeenth century], whether it constituted twenty-five acres or a thousand was called a plantation … a man could clear only a few acres of land a year. To have more than five or ten acres under cultivation during the middle of the seventeenth century was rare. [99] Clarence Ver Steeg, the Formative Years, 1607-1763 (Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 57.
So the most likely reason for tobacco’s rapid diffusion is that it was embraced by the local Virginia Company officials (and their friends and compatriots) who enjoyed, through the Governor, rights to make land grants for themselves. That is how Rolfe likely acquired Varina in 1611-2 (although at that time it was not labeled as a plantation). During these initial years, the plantation-tobacco strategy was able to venture into Virginia hinterlands so quickly because Indian relations [because of the marriage of Rolfe to Pocahontas and her father Powhattan was alive] were relatively peaceful; that couldn’t be said after 1622.
The irony in regards to Indian relations is this “invasion of the hinterland into Indian territory” is what triggered the 1622 Massacre. Logically, the Indian attack and the ones that followed over the next half-decade crippled, if not destroyed many a small plantation and killed planter entrepreneurs. This harsh environment elevated self-defense and militia concerns in the plantation-Hundreds territory. Plantation owners were forced to assume a leadership role in self-defense and that in turn only added another dimension in the solidification of local elite dominance..
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We do not have copies of these grants, and so we rely on the “patents” (land transfer grant) used after the Greate Charter (1618) as a reference. These later patents apply to the first three types of land grants, the aggregate of which most certainly produced the greatest diffusion of land ownership in the colony, and had the most impact on the formation of the economic base, and future society of colonial Virginia. These patents invested the private land-owning corporation with governmental powers, and included special privileges over the tenants and services of those who settled within its boundaries.
The First Plantation–Called the “Sherley Hundred” for the acres it included, the plantation was to be the Virginia Company’s first experiment in a settlement program. Sherley was the new wife, Cicely Sherley, of Sir Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, the Virginia Company’s Governor for life and Captain General of Virginia. He granted the land to himself, and within a year had commenced a tobacco plantation
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West was at that time an absentee Governor, living in England. AKA Lord Delaware, West imparted his name to a river, an Indian tribe, and eventually. a U.S. state). It was Baron De La Warr that saved the Jamestown colony in its “starving time” [999]. De La Warr’s grant to found the Sherley plantation was one of a series of land grants previous to 1617 that marked the company’s first formal efforts to diffuse the population from its two settlements (Jamestown and Henrico) into the surrounding James River territory. As such it is an unambiguous commitment to a permanent settlement, and a serious effort to reverse the stagnation, if not decline, of the colony.
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[999] Arriving in Jamestown (1610) in the nick of time he diverted the fleeing Jamestown residents back to Jamestown. In 1611, he caught malaria/scurvy and was forced to return to England on a ship captained by a future Governor, Samuel Argall. A prominent raiser of fund for the Virginia Company in England, it was West and his wife who introduced Rolfe and Pocahontas (Rebecca) to English society (or was it English investors). De La Warr once again ventured back to Virginia in 1618, to investigate complaints he had received regarding Governor Argall—he died enroute. De La Warr was in the inner circle of Virginia Company leadership, of noble derivative, and a policy-maker firmly committed to the Company and the colony.
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Where does Plantation fit into the “scheme” envisioned at the time of its initial implementation? I see the “plantation” preceded both the Greate Charter and its headright system-by five years. To be precise in my meaning, it was the Company’s adoption of the plantation (and its associated administrative unit, the Hundreds) that was the core strategy and unit of settlement that fathered the 1618 headright program included in the Greate Charter [999]. The plantation strategy underlie the creation of “hundreds” as a unit of geography and representation, and the crop that was chosen to be exported was tobacco. It was the plantation strategy that infused the sub-state/provincial local government system that evolved during the early 1620’s.
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[999] It is also worth note that both tobacco and the plantation were instituted in Bermuda, which by this time were under the auspices of a second subsidiary Virginia Company company. Smythe was Treasurer in both, although Bermuda in this present period of discussion is heavily trouble with the rivalry of Smythe and Warwick, which as we shall see drew in Sandys as well. I have not yet ascertained the method by which Bermuda produced tobacco—no reference is made to a plantation or Hundreds in its literature. Nevertheless is very clear that Rolfe, who may well have gotten some of his seeds in Bermuda when he was marooned there in 1610, remained closely aware and involved in the extension of tobacco there. From 1613 Bermuda also was planting tobacco, and until 1617-8 it made more exports to England than Virginia. http://www.bermuda-online.org/history1505to1799.htm. In that the advance of tobacco in both colonies was overlapping one might assume the same process occurred, and that neither was the model for the other.[99] Andrews, Vol 1, p. 120 “Though legally the equal of and distinct from the parent company, the Bermuda corporation was in practice closely interjoined with the other”
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Dales’ Gift
Shortly after Sherley’s Plantation (1613), in the same year, Deputy Governor Dale made grants to himself. Titled at the time as “Dale’s Gift”, the provisions of which created a number of “Hundreds” (Osgood posits six), the first being adjacent to his new capitol city, Henrico, and others that followed along the length of the James. “Dale established at least five settlements by early in the 1610’s, located from the present-day Richmond area to the Eastern Shore. Because no ecclesiastical courts existed in the colony, the Governor and his Council proved and recorded wills and settled the estates of people who died. They also tried criminals and attended to all other business conducted by the various courts in England” [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/county-formation-during-the-colonial-period/.
The Hundreds, a common term in England as a geographic administrative unit intended for a new settlement holding about 100 persons-households, implied its function was “governmental”, although the failure to impart any powers, suggested it was geographical territory within which land grants could be made by Dale to others. This is exactly what happened over the next three years. It also left unclear whether the Virginia Company had anything resembling a vision as to how that territory would be administered. The decision to assign the common tasks of a local government to the provincial level council meant Virginia enjoyed no meaningful formal sub-provincial system, saving perhaps the Anglican parish.
Perhaps the most important of these Hundreds was the “Bermuda Hundreds” founded by Dale in 1613, as a port town to serve James River exporters (i.e. Virginia) as well and fishing village. According to Osgood, “At Dale’s Gift salt was made and fishing carried on. The production of tobacco had already begun … but special care was taken … to encourage the raising of articles of food, ample in amount to support the inhabitants of the colony”. Dale, as mentioned earlier, extended his land reforms to Company employees whose term of service had expired. [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 76
The Bermuda Hundreds (as well as the five other Hundreds) were clearly a major Company initiative to diffuse the population from Jamestown and Henrico into the hinterland, and to make available for settlement considerable land in strategic locations along the James River and its tributaries. Dale, , quickly annexed hundreds of acres to the original grant as territory to be used for plantation and household homesteads.. “Bermuda”, the name, was chosen because of the role Bermuda played in the fateful 1610 saving of the Jamestown settlement.
Interestingly, a contingent of those former employees were transferred to the Bermuda Hundred Once there. They petitioned Dale for a special land tenure arrangement that provided an extra week of for the tenant-owner to plant and harvest (on top of the month already permitted by Dale in the original contract). Also each man with a family got a house with four rooms, with a year’s rent forbearance. Twelve acres per household were permitted for cultivation by the ancient settlers, and they were “supposedly” provided with livestock, tools, provisions for a “twelvemonth” [I suspect from comments that this was a hit or miss affair] [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 76
Apparently, this concession fostered population growth as by 1616 about 119 settlers called it home. By that time several other Hundreds (including Sherley’s plantation) had been established. Rolfe lived there, as did Yeardley, and the territory had been a prolific corn-growing area for Powhattan and his tribe, which lived in the neighborhood. An Anglican parish, probably established at its creation, married Rolfe and Pocahontas. By 1620 the population grew to 184, including 30 women and another 31 children/teenagers. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bermuda-hundred-during-the-colonial-period/
After Dale left in 1616, his Deputy (George Yeardley) took over until the next Deputy Governor arrived on the scene. Yeardley had been involved with Dales’ Gift and the Bermuda Hundreds, and in the interim in 1617, granted the tenants of the Bermuda Hundred rent free tenancy, providing them near-ownership possession of their land. This should be considered an extension of the land reforms, the likely intention of the Company being to create a private ownership of the land for former-employee residents. [99] Osgood. Vol 1, pp. 77
Dale’s 1616 departure from Virginia, and employment by the Virginia Company (subsequent adventurer status with the British East India as a naval commander) and the immediate assumption of governance by Yeardley is strong evidence that in no way was “Dale’s Gift” to imply personal ownership—the Hundred was a company entity, to be managed by the Company’s provincial governance entities. Rather, we are seeing a rather crude formation of a Virginia Company land development “entity”, whose purpose was to settle a defined geography for the benefit of Virginia and the colony itself, the governance of which was to be determined at a latter time.
That raises the question of who was to handle local matters, and coordinate such activities as arose in daily life? That issue explains why the owner of the properties within the Hundred were entrusted with responsibilities and rights over servants and residents until future governmental entities were created. Even in 1613 , it was within the charter power of the Virginia Company to create such entities as it deemed fit—as Penn did in Pennsylvania seventy years or so later—it consciously chose not to do so. In these early years, as population growth suggest, the Company also created Hundreds intended for sale to private owners-voluntary joint stock corporations. Such owners agreed to pay an annual quitrent to the Company.
Larger and more populated plantations were as Andrews alludes “in the nature of private jurisdictions” (p. 129, Vol 1), and the powers and immunities afforded to the plantation owners “almost an independent colony”. “The Company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who shuld go themselves to Virginia to inhabit ‘by virtue of their Graunts (grants), and should plant themselves their Tenants and servants” might have liberty ‘till a form of government is here and settled over them”, to make orders, ordinances, and constitutions, ‘associatinge unto them divers of the ‘greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and business, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England” (p. 129, Vol 1). At minimum one might argue these empowerments allowed the plantation to form what later would be labeled a “company town”.
It gave the associations liberty to carry their commodities to whatever market they pleased—at the company had [at that point] no intention of controlling their tobacco or other output—and it allowed them to reap what reward they could from their own efforts. The idea of these colonies “or hundreds” as they were frequently called, was not so much to help the company on the commercial side as to replenish the colonial population in as short a time as possible “with good multitudes of people”. These societies remained in England, directing each particular “colony” [or hundreds] from a distance just as the company was doing [99] Andrews, Vol 1, p.130
Several of these early volunteer joint stock corporations were not agricultural, but Indian tradin entities, while others engaged in the development of fishing, and artisan tradesmen enterprises.
In short, Dale and his successor, Yeardley, from 1613 until April 1617 had initiated a major economic development program, consisting of tobacco production lodged in plantations located in an administrative unit the Hundreds, diversification of the economic base by voluntary joint stock corporations, and most critically the development of a small mostly agricultural workforce composes of former indentured servants/employees of the Virginia Company whose term of indenture had expired.
Andrews asserts these [sub] colonies or larger plantations and the hundreds were later included in the Greate Charter reforms (including the General Assembly as elective districts), were primarily intended by Sandys to be people-attraction vehicles, and also to facilitate attainment of non agricultural diversification of the economic base, critical in its view to overall economic self-sufficiency. In this manner, Sandys was entrusting privately owned and managed corporations to serve as the basic unit of a diversified economic base, and were the equivalent of plantations in the agricultural enterprise. There were forty-four such patents issued under the terms of the Greate Charter between 1619 and 1623. [99] Andrews, Vol 1, p.130
The manifest intent of a patent such as this was that the plantations should be separate, economically self-contained units in themselves, and possessing each its own local government, yet the fact they were subject to taxation, answerable for impositions, burdens and restrains imposed by consent of the whole, and liable to be called into public service … [and] though they might be scattered they were to be near enough together to form a single fairly compact settlement under a common authority [99] Andrews, Vol 1, p.133
Perhaps intended—but likely not–something big and fundamental is happening, developing under the noses of Company officials whose land transfer programs as well as the Great Charter reforms were principally initiatives to save their company (and their investments). The governance of any permanent settlement as still off in the future at this point.
Instead the Company chose to rely on the entrepreneur-land owner to handle local matters, contenting the provincial level to judicial decision-making and administrative record-keeping. The reality of self-defense against the Indian tribes became a serious issue, especially after Powhattan died in 1619, and that certainly meant the larger landlords with servants/tenants and surrounding smaller households had to play a major coordinative leadership function.
The autonomy and decentralization without doubt began a tradition of local independent action, and by its nature fostered an inequality in political leadership as well as economic. Aside from elections to the House of Burgesses, the 1619 Great Charter did not advance local government or local elective leadership. Stuart Bruchey posits that the tobacco planter organized in plantations, Hundreds, and voluntary joint stock corporations, over the following decades developed autonomy and capacity incrementally developing into a cutting edge, and the core unit of production for Virginia’s future economic base-policy system. These isolated entities that populated the lower reaches of the James River were meant to be self-sufficient, to assume burdens the Company could not carry, chief among them being investment capital and the importation of entrepreneurs into Virginia:
Great quasi-public trading companies, privileged, chartered and joint-stock, had served as the initial funnels through which English capital funds and labor sought to exploit the new-world opportunities opened by voyages of discovery and exploration. Overwhelmed by heavy costs of settlement and blinded by fools-gold schemes of easy wealth, they had failed to return profits to their investors. So too had failed the subsidiary colonizing associations which in some instances grew out of them. [So] the private plantation, a method of uniting English capital, the labor of indentured servant, or slave, and the resident management of the planter emerged from these early failures. ‘Venture and capital’ previously united in the person of an English absentee investor [the Virginia Company] split off from each other: the venture now came in person to America to manage his enterprises, and draw upon English capital in the form of mercantile credit. [99] Stuart Bruchey, the Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861 (Harper Torch Books, 1965) p. 32
I will add to this by suggesting that for the better part of a decade the Virginia Company had laid a solid sub-state foundation for its provincial economic base. Virginia was on the path to develop evolved into a rather decentralized economy and bottoms-up policy system.
Stuart Bruchey posits that the tobacco planter organized in plantations, Hundreds, and voluntary joint stock corporations, over the following decades developed autonomy and capacity incrementally developing into a cutting edge, and the core unit of production for Virginia’s future economic base-policy system. These isolated entities that populated the lower reaches of the James River were meant to be self-sufficient, to assume burdens the Company could not carry, chief among them being investment capital and the importation of entrepreneurs into Virginia:
Great quasi-public trading companies, privileged, chartered and joint-stock, had served as the initial funnels through which English capital funds and labor sought to exploit the new-world opportunities opened by voyages of discovery and exploration. Overwhelmed by heavy costs of settlement and blinded by fools-gold schemes of easy wealth, they had failed to return profits to their investors. So too had failed the subsidiary colonizing associations which in some instances grew out of them. [So] the private plantation, a method of uniting English capital, the labor of indentured servant, or slave, and the resident management of the planter emerged from these early failures. ‘Venture and capital’ previously united in the person of an English absentee investor [the Virginia Company] split off from each other: the venture now came in person to America to manage his enterprises, and draw upon English capital in the form of mercantile credit. [99] Stuart Bruchey, the Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861 (Harper Torch Books, 1965) p. 32
Plantations, the Shredded Community
Anticipating the political vacuum that will follow the Company’s termination, these larger plantation owners dominated local affairs within their Hundred for an extended period, thereby creating what has since been called “the shredded community”: a “dispersed rural population on small subsistence farms orbiting around plantations relied for community services on crossroad churches, courthouses and markets. These constituted a kind of “shredded community” as scattered focal points for farming, trading, politics and religion” David Russo, American Towns (Ivan R. Dee, 2001) p.11
The shredded community reinforced Privatist individual self-sufficiency, and sustained it through county-level services that provided minimal governance as possible. That was just as well, the Virginia colony-level policy system until William Berkeley’s arrival in 1642 was more or less overwhelmed, and while it attempted to establish a colony-level governance centered in the Jamestown, later Williamsburg, capitol, it had few resources with which to do so. Royal Governors more or less hacked out a minimal sense of direction, certainly retained a formal approval over the colony’s policy output, but their governance was arguably more reactive than proactive. The Council of State and House of Burgesses, not to mention the Virginia Anglican Church were outside the royal governor’s effective sphere of control.
Less obvious, but hugely impactful was the Virginia royal governor and its colony-level institutions of governance were not able to draw upon the budding urbanization, the formation of towns and settlements, that seemed naturally to occur in other colonies. Massachusetts, New England and New York would be able to form larger towns and establish ports—as did Maryland its nearby rival. Virginia in retrospect suffered from an almost non-existent urbanization dynamic. Noted by historians and economists, this lack of urbanization, in particular the weak formation of towns or formalized, incorporated settlements, meant the colony-level institutions were deprived of a meaningful local structural unit through which it could exercise its influence over the local communities scattered throughout its isolated Tidewater region.
The tobacco-plantation economic base adopted by Virginia in its earliest days did not only encourage, it required, the dispersal of its production units along the coastal lowlands. Access to rivers permitted export of tobacco directly from the plantation. Lacking a meaningful commercial function, settlements/towns could not develop acquire either momentum or population to sustain meaningful growth. Virginia in particular did not connect its plantations by land, choosing to rely on river modes. How did all this happen?
It all began with Jamestown itself, which was poorly chosen thirty miles inland on the James River in an outlet. Since the economic objectives of the London Jamestown Corporation was at its most basic to find something to export to England, its colonists/residents were primarily “land entrepreneurs”, interested in setting up their individual homesteads as soon as possible. The numerous natural river inlets were natural locations for the early plantation. With a pier tobacco could be laden onto ships and exported directly from the plantation. As late as 1765 George Washington exported and received imports directly from the wharf on his plantation on a Potomac River inlet. So it was geography and tobacco economics that set the course for Tidewater’s lack of urbanization and port cities. Neither political culture nor conscious planning had any determinant effect in that dynamic, but rather that dynamic exerted its impact on the former..
To complete the plantation as urban center picture, the plantation owner was master of his community, and the institutions of local governance, including the parish were located alongside the boundaries of his main house. Moreover, if cities were the residence of culture and hospitality elsewhere, in Virginia the manor house extended its hospitality with abundance and graciousness; what culture there was, a library, discussion and a meeting of elites, occurred in the manor house. To the town was left the tavern.
Virginia contained almost no towns and thus the sense and operation of community played out very differently [than New England]. Connections between isolated plantations or farmsteads often began with kinship networks. In the older settled Tidewater areas the average white family might be related to five other families nearby, and a household head might interact with thirty or more relatives on a regular basis. …
Small planters and families rarely ventured beyond the neighborhood, but when they did, it was normally for judicial proceedings and market days at county seats or religious services at the closest church. Some counties contained only one parish … Thus on Sunday mornings … several smaller rural neighborhoods came together not only to worship, but to exchange business documents, discuss tobacco prices, argue over the quality of horses, catch up on local gossip, and share news of the wider world … the interconnectedness of rural Virginia life makes it difficult to separate the social, economic and religious aspects from the political, House of Burgesses elections demonstrate how different layers of the county society related to the world of legislators, governors, ministers and even kings [5] . Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp. Anthony S. Parent, Jr., William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 72-4.
A System of Government?
In point of fact, Sandy’s post Greate Charter Virginia was less a repudiation of what had gone before with Dale and the Company’s Jamestown governance, than a pivot to an economic development of the colony. That pivot had been made necessary by the perfect wreck the first three or four years had made of the colony. Its failure to anticipate and properly define once appreciated both self-sufficiency and permanent settlement strategis started the colony off to its near extinction by 1610. It took two further years to stabilize affairs, before its Deputy Governor, Thomas Dale defined a strategy “on the ground” and was given authority to implement in in 1612-13. The Company meanwhile had both changed its 1606 character and its investor-membership dramatically in the effort to save its initial investment and “experiment”.
Dale’s experiment, his 1611 plan as modified in the implementation seemed to offer the foundation for a permanent settlement, and the introduction of tobacco planting a catalyst for forming a quick and profitable economic base. Dale’s Company elite took advantage of the latter and combined it with a settlement of the hinterlands strategy centered around the tobacco plantation and the Hundreds as a geographically-based economic development/land development entity which offered some future prospect as a governance unit.
In what appears almost to be a coup, Edwin Sandys took over the Company’s reins, taking advantage of the fragmenting dispute between his boss, Treasurer Thomas Smythe and his noble rival, the Earl of Warwick. What the main ring of the Company’s fractionization concerned many issues, including personal, for Sandys the central defining issue was the pivot from the early trading factory legacy of the Company to a permanent settlement strategy—which he believed was the best way to pursue the self-sufficiency strategy. The tobacco rush, of course, would prove him wrong; quick profits always beat a diversified economic base which alone could result in self-sufficiency. But in 1618-9 when he seized the Treasurer position and implemented his Greate Charter pivot, Sandys set the stage to test out his theories in Virginia.
His surrender of what had been the Company’s military-style governance with the creation of a General Assembly which included a very strong governor, an appointed Council of State that much resembled what would pass for a House of Lords with its landed elite, ad a truly representative for the times House of Burgesses to connect it to the settlers, his adjustment to the reality they were the potential backbone and key constituency of any settlement strategy.
This last entity did not go over well—it really turned off the King and made the latter Sandys foremost personal and professional enemy—it also divided the Company membership-investment and active leaders. Not an especially good move either. It certainly made a hit with historians and American exceptionalisms, but its impact on the 1619 Virginia was a mixed bag at first, and within three years was in tatters. What is amazing as the next module will suggest is that his Greate Compact political structures had better “legs” than anyone would realize—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves in 1620-1622.
As Osgood describes his sense of Sandy’s objectives and Greate Charter reforms
As a condition of further growth [the Sandys-Southampton party] favored the total abandonment of the monopolistic policy of Sir Thomas Smythe and the {Virginia Company merchant membership] with the plantation type of colony that accompanied it. It favored the establishment under due restrictions of private plantations, the encouragement of emigration to the colony on a larger scale, the granting of land under easy conditions [and] the largest possible freedom of trade.
It desired to elicit to the fullest extent the cooperation of the colonists with the company in this work. In order to secure this [the general court of the Company. i.e. its Annual Meeting of its Membership] approved] an equal and uniform government in the colony consisting of ‘two supreme councils’. One of these was the Governor and [his] counsel, chosen and appointed by the company in England. The other should be the general assembly which should consist of the Council of State and two burgesses chosen by the planters in each town, hundred, or other particular plantation in Virginia … presided over by the Secretary of the Colony.
In practice this meant this new governance was empowered to regulate the plantations previously created and to implement its policy in regards to the colony’s economic base—which as we already observed admitted to the rise of tobacco and its plantations, but also insisted upon significant development of non-tobacco diversification into a variety of other sectors and clusters deemed essential to the survival of a permanent settlement and a profitable colony for its investors. To that effect, a good deal of the July 1619 first meeting of the General Assembly had been to work through the previous land grants-plantation awards to render them congruent with company procedures and policies. One such patent was in fact restructured.
What was not evident at the time was how fundamental a challenge this new decentralized and representative governance would be (1) to the noble-gentry that dominated it, and (2) to the established mode of political-economic decision-making of the era. What was hidden in the woods of the North American wilderness, however, was that European culture and style of decision-making and governance did not travel well—or—at least did not deal with the reality of a settlement strategy combined with a self-sufficiency strategy in a geography an ocean and three months away, in a forest home to Native American tribes, whose soil had to be seized to hack out an economic base that could sustain a European adventure. That the isolation imposed on an economic base hacked out of the hinterland would create yet a new layer of political decentralization was not even fathomed at this point. Yet that proved to be Virginia’s future over the next generation—again, we get ahead of ourselves.
But that last discussion point was the second thrust of the Sandys, Greate Charter reforms. The Greate Charter confirmed the land grants issued by Dale, concurred with his decision to send colonists to the Hundreds, and in these bodies to confirm such grants as had been made by the Hundreds processes—adding to it the appointment of a sub-treasurer to collect the quitrents entailed in these grants, and setting up the processes that allowed the development of Company reserves (the college reserve for instance) to proceed.
Much of the work done by the first meeting of the General Assembly was to work out the kinks and establish general principles for this Hundred-focused settlement of the hinterlands. It would be no surprise that between 1619 and 1623 forty-four new patents, i.e. land grant/sales were issue by the new governance set up by the Greate Charter. That this would have the impact it did, however, was dimly perceived. In that first meeting the General Assembly restricted colonists contact with the Indians in the hope of preserving what appeared to be a peaceful relationship. But how that was to happen is anyone’s guess because the Greate Charter was unleashing a dynamic that placed the two nations in a zero-sum position—not to ignore the unrecognized reality that good fences make good neighbors, and settler-Indian fences were in rather poor condition.
Ron W. Coan 