The Greate Charter Dissected: an Intro
The Greate Charter formalized and institutionalized an economic development settlement-workforce-cluster-building strategy nexus and incentive “package”. That strategy and incentive package in some form and degree became an universal colonial economic development cornerstone approach, strategy nexus, that in aggregate “grew” English North America. The French and Spanish in particular did not embrace the headright system with the commitment and persistence displayed by the British. Consequently, the latter did not enjoy the population expansion that in the end, the 1755-1763 French and India War, gave England its victory as the North American hegemon. It also doomed, over the long term, the maintenance of Native American sovereignty, and seriously constrained its potential for successful opposition.
Collapsed into the label, “the headright system”, the strategy nexus formed the basis, the foundation, of Virginia settlement through the seventeenth century (especially). A brutally simple policy, with a lot of moving parts, when applied to a hostile wilderness yielded consistent, if spasmodic at times, economic growth–with incredible, mostly unplanned, if not unanticipated political consequences, that would also set the foundation for much of Virginia’s future political development. While our larger history will discover many planned, or partially planned strategy nexi (plural), Virginia, our first example of an English North American nexus, was overwhelmingly unplanned, and even out of control of the Virginia Company. Events and the flow of dynamics carried the day in 1619, and for all practical purpose for the next two decades or so.
A “strategy nexus” is a mélange, a collection, of economic development-related strategies that become linked (planned or by default) in the pursuit of a series of fundamental goals as determined by the relevant policy makers/structures of the policy system/community. By the nature of its multiple involved strategies, a strategy nexus serves one, two or so chief goals; it also incorporates a variety of other goals associated with prevalent dynamics or actors that are secondary to its chief purposes. The linked strategies needed not be coordinated or managed by anyone or anything, but may evolve their linkages by association and relevance to the chief goals pursued by actors and their strategies. In this case, it seems, a rolling stone does gather moss.
Thus a nexus can be far-ranging in its internal composition yet reasonably focused in its defining goals and purpose. Because of the variety of strategies and potential actors and their initiatives, a strategy nexus can be quite flexible and adaptable to changing times. To the extent it can help a variety of constituencies, sometimes at counter with desired ends of the nexus, a nexus is not without its internal tensions. The variation in a strategy nexus across policy systems (colonies in this history) can therefore be considerable, not the least because each policy system may pursue different goals, or even the same goals in different priority. Like a cluster a strategy nexus has considerable utility as a conceptual agglomeration, while practitioners and policy-makers, deeply nested in the forest of strategies, can lose sight of the more simple goals of the nexus itself.
Headright Nexus Described–Simply put, the Virginia Company headright nexus moved “people” across a three thousand mile ocean and used the labor of these people to settle/defend the colony, serve as the workforce for its emerging economic base, at the expense of the “servant” who entered into contracted indenture and/or his/her sponsor, an investor who assumed the costs of logistics and made some commitment to sustenance and tools. To offset this cost and encourage and facilitate these involved, the policy system/Virginia Company, provides a land grant, often a tax abatement (quitrent relief of some sort) for a period of time. in a location as directed by the policy system and suitable to the investor-homesteader.
The specifics of these terms vary over time, and perceived need, and after a period of time, the strategy nexus can be built into the normal business of the policy system, as part of the way things are done or the normal cost of doing business. In the case of the Virginia Company, the headright nexus evolved over five or six years as the original business plan of the Company deteriorated and substitutes had to be devised, with land as an incentive because land was one resource the Company had available at no cost, and land was desired by many as a means to their personal ends [999].
The original recipients, former indentured servants and company officials/shareholders, were each grant a share of land as a replacement for a dividend (in the 1609 charter) in return for their service for a period of time: Dale’s Gift. After 1614, the headright was extended to all company shareholders, and in the Greate Charter made available to those who either settled in Virginia, or whose travel and sustenance were contracted by an investor, who may, or may not, have resided in Virginia. Fundamental to the headright nexus was its (1) people and (2) workforce attraction goal, which promoted the (3) permanent settlement of the colony. These three goals, and the strategies associated with their achievement, were the primary purposes of the headright nexus.
Land grants were also provided to an individual who purchased land at his expense, and to him and to other “landlord’s or “undertakers” as they were then called, who contracted servants to perform work in the investor venture, and arranged their travel to Virginia. The more the servants, the larger the land grant–at least in theory. Too many potential indentured servants the indenture contract served as an apprenticeship in tobacco farming and plantation ownership, and this was often included as part of the promotional pitch to recruit servants. That the reality of Virginia indentured servants departed from this pitch was, in fairness, usually known by potential English servants, it still touched a hope and a desperation inherent at that time.
… each investor, as well as pioneer [ancient settler] would be entitled to a share of the land … and use it for his own purposes. [When expanded beyond the Company shareholder] rights to land [grants] continued to be based on the transportation of workers to till the land …, for example in 1618 ‘an adventurer’ was one who subscribed a share in the company, and transported a tenant for his share; [while] ‘a planter’ was one who merely transported a tenant. Each was entitled to a share of land for every tenant transported, but since adventurers had subscribed money to the company as well, they were to have larger shares or to hold them in more advantageous terms. … Even after the Company had been extinguished [after 1624], the grants of land in Virginia continued, down to the end of the seventeenth century, to be related to the transport of colonists by the so-called headright system. Everybody that brought himself, a member of his family, or a servant into the colony was entitled to so much land per head, and this was the principal–indeed almost the only–means by which land could be obtained. [99] Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters (Cambridge, 1960), p. 7
Another form of grant which appeared at this time [included in Greate Charter] and played an important part in the development of Virginia … after the dissolution of the company was the sub-patent issued to private societies. The earliest of these were issued in 1618 when several gentlemen of the company in order to strengthen the colony united into societies and offered to establish plantations at their own cost. By combining their shares or purchasing additional ones, the associations thus formed entitled themselves to very large grants of land … and to a corresponding increase of those on later divisions [sub-patents or land sales]. It was the intention of the [Virginia] Company that the grantees should settle and improve the tracts [land grants] in person, or send tenants and servants for the purpose. In come cases, but not in all, this was done. [99] Osgood, Vol 1., p. 84
Strategies, besides people-attraction, associated with the Virginia headright nexus were several–despite the rather simple exchange of land for an individual’s settlement and participation in Virginia’s workforce/defense. Settlement, for instance, included establishing a residence in a desired/approved location; it could involve what we call town-building, militia duty, and draft labor to construct community infrastructure as required–and in in the Greate Charter the planting of staples for household consumption (self-sufficiency). Quitrent abatement for period of time applied to many of the recipients as well.
In regards to economic base-building, the Company’s formal actions provided for a relatively huge diversification of the base–beyond tobacco and even agriculture. Infrastructure in the form of a college was a signature project. Cluster-building initiatives which included serious import of key skills and workforce–and allocation of scarce Company capital was made in the first two years especially. A number of clusters were specified, and cluster diversification was a major priority. Tobacco itself was not specifically included–yet that was the sector that took off during this period. Structural institutionalization, aside from the Assembly, was minimal-although the hundreds assumed more functions,
There was some reorganization of the Magazine–a new entity was in theory formed; the Magazine failed so quickly, 1621, that it is safe to say reorganization did not take hold, likely a casualty of the war between Smythe and Sandys. Dispersal of population and defacto formation of very small settlements did occur, but there is little to no evidence that the Company or its officers had any real influence over day-to-day life and decisions at the local level. The fledgling rotating circuit court was the best lever the Company had.
What was evident from the start, and it deeply affected the use of the headright system, was the conflicting actions of domestic company officials, and an acknowledgement in London of their preference for managing their private estates and projects. Yeardley would carry this perception throughout his long career in Virginia politics. From hindsight we can see even the Cape Merchant assembling his own estates, and the recruitment of new protege’s and favoring them with contracts and even headright incentives created a network of entrepreneurs with access to the headright and company decision preferences. It would be this network that would fill the vacuum as the Company disintegrated after 1622.
[999] The intention was that the land grant included title to the land-but as we shall see that issue became quite complex, and its resolution lingered on until the King provided such assurances in 1634. Many servants worked on company-owned, or land granted to company officials for their salary or land share. Their land grant at the end of the contract would be approved by the governor, specific to a parcel at a location determined by the company. [999]
Obviously, the grant extended to agricultural uses, either large scale plantation-hundreds, or household homestead, and to business endeavors such as fishing, mining, iron, silk, and merchant-trading (with Indians} and artisan-skill based shops (cluster-agglomeration development). As such the grant served as an incentive to entrepreneurship, and the balanced or diversified growth of the colony’s economic base.
That tobacco was in 1619 the only crop whose demand supported its export, intended or not by the Company, the grant also supported the export to England, as desired by the King/Crown–and the Company shareholders–from any receipt of profits derived from sale of tobacco, and which was a major contributor to the Company finances. It is worth note that the importation of settlers was one leg of a trade system whose other leg, the return voyage, was to transport tobacco back to England (or smuggled to the West Indies).
In this sense, the headright nexus supported a trade and shipping cluster, and the development of a merchant finance system that provided investment into the economic development and export financing of the colony (relieving the company of that obligation). As such it supported the Company trade “Magazine” the agent of the Company’s monopoly of Virginia trade and export. But left to last, but far from least important, we see that the headright system injected steroids into the spread of tobacco and its steamroller dynamic that created a monoculture economic base.
In an agricultural economic base, the realities of a particular crop varied, and the impact in the colony differed as a consequence. It may be further asserted that another export crop, for example wheat/grains, might well have become a monoculture in 1619 Virginia–but likely one with fewer negative implications. Wheat lent itself to a homesteading household not necessarily a plantation, required a level of urbanization for milling and storage, and because it was not desired by the mother country, which had plenty of its own homegrown staples, England would have been more relaxed in its trade policy; and also less attractive to an English merchant-financier-shipping cluster that, in Virginia, where tobacco was highly prized in England, was lucrative and was able to crush the development of a home-based finance-merchant class..
Summary
Simply, the Virginia Company headright system moved “people” across a three thousand mile ocean and used the labor of these people to settle/defend the colony, serve as the workforce for its emerging economic base, and those “people”, the different groups among them, brought with them their innovation, their hopes, their past-existent experiences and beliefs, that interacted with the hostile wilderness to drive future colonial American development. Political and economic systems were transported, almost like a commodity, in the holds of English ships, and dumped on American shores and port cities. That the system, as evolved, continued through to the American Revolution–in fact the last of its “people”, the Scots-Irish, may well have brought the Revolution from the backburner to the oven.
Its lesson to any economic developer, and any reader of whatever persuasion, is that if you want to bring about political and economic change “move people”. That it can achieve continental change has been suggested by Frederick Jackson Turner, in his “the Significance of the Frontier in American History” [99] (American Historical Association, 1894). If people migration undermines empires and political systems, it also grows nations and economies. It is a rather blunt instrument, not unlike a nuclear bomb and warfare; but drop a nuclear bomb, and whether you want them or not, you get both results and consequences. Beware! Neither can be planned or anticipated.
That the origin of the headright system rested on the needs of a pretty much bankrupted early English joint stock corporation that found itself unable to implement, in fact even define its mission with anything approaching an organization-wide consensus. From the start in 1619, the Greate Charter displayed a rather remarkable bimodal effect: (1) the focus on estate publique economic diversification on company-owned lands, and (2), an out of control preference of its colonists, when given the choice or capacity, to gravitate to tobacco planting and set up in an uncontrolled dispersal through the James and its river tributaries. A permanent settlement was taking shape, to be sure, but investment in the estate publique required time to mature, while tobacco planting and plantation expansion into the hinterland did not. Had time permitted the former to take hold–who knows? But time was not to be had.
to establish a permanent settlement, colonization, of its colony. No small measure of that lack of capacity were the restrictions placed upon that corporation (by government and beliefs of many of its shareholders) that colonialization, logically, ought to benefit the mother country (and themselves as well); but “benefit” was defined in 1607 as establishing an export-based colony economic base that produced goods and commodities that served its mercantile, self-defense and consumer ends. In 1619 that meant tobacco plantations–whether the company or the king liked it or not.
Like all economic development “tools”, programs, and strategies, the headright system served the needs, purposes, and futures of those who directed its design and implementation. Perhaps that is why “immigration” as I write these sentences, is so hotly polarized a strategy, with contending factions seeking to shape and instill policy direction to its emerging 21st century headright system. Therefore it is to understanding the “meaning”, the purpose that was injected into the neutral tool we call “headright” that we now must turn.
That this was without any doubt a “pre-capitalist” era, we are lost for any scapegoat to blame. Blame for its injustices, inefficiencies, and adverse consequences must be diffused among a number of culprits.
What a miserable and unsatisfying situation that is!
Nevertheless, the beauty and the beast of the Virginia Company’s headright nexus was that it came together, its various strategies linked, in a most unplanned fashion. The Company may have provided the incentive, but the remaining elements were, for the most part, considerably autonomous of the Company–even when a shareholder. That the Company “hollowed out” is own ability to control Virginia’s destiny, it also created the foundation for individuals and their economic venture to develop their own enterprise, homestead, and to resolve on their own what services, from whom they wished. If the Virginia Company was never a “government” in the pure sense of the term, it laid a foundation for an autonomous private sector that a future government that be hard pressed to subdue and use for its own purposes. That will become even more apparent as we consider the “political” aspect of the Greate Charter.
By relying so much on private autonomous action, as early as 1616, the Greate Charter Virginia Company was not in the drivers’ seat–in fact, so much so that its efforts to diversity the economy away from tobacco toward staples, a college, artisan-based, and fishing and fur trading were not simply frustrated, but overwhelmed. In this dynamic the autonomous participants made their own choices (and that included company officials in regards to their own private land) and that meant the economic base was founded on individualized decisions made by greed, ambition, status, and sheer opportunity–lending a zero-sum character with those with access to resources and sufficient wealth were able to secure advantage first, leaving the scraps to others, and/or setting the terms by which those who followed would have to conform.
In this hollowed out vacuum which the Company created, the strategies of those who inhabited the lowest level of the company hierarchy–the dispersed and isolated local level–came to the fore. This set the stage for a “bottoms up driven” policy-making system. Sheer gravity and magnetism seem to pull in the strategies cooked up by the dominating force at the lower level, the larger plantation owners and company officials owning private plantations.
It was they who plugged in their own strategies, seizure/raids on Indian lands for example, development of their own sources of investment and export, finance other than the Magazine/Company ships, use of the militia, and subordination of small craft artisans and renter-subsistence sharecroppers. Even freeholder homesteaders, had to make their peace with the decisions of the larger and more affluent neighbor, for purchase of seed and tools, export, and self-defense. Indeed, each plantation could make itself as its own “port”, stripping Jamestown, the initial port city of Virginia of its growth, and frustrating future attempts to create a Charleston, or a Baltimore, never mind a Salem-Boston, New York City or Philadelphia. As the Great Charter headright nexus bent the Virginia twig, so would the tree develop.
Without any conscious effort or intention the Company had left the battle for Virginia’s future economy and policy system to the owners of large plantations. The plantation had been transformed into the driving institution of economic and political development in Virginia as early as 1619-20. It was these plantation owners that drew most advantage from the headright strategy nexus, and it was their associated strategies and goals that were reinforced through its practice over the following years. That, as we shall discover, the Company hierarchical level, the province, was dominated by a “shareholder” Assembly, we can understand how local priorities, strategies and approaches were taken up by its representative institution, and a royal governor who was “one of them” large plantation owners.
Dale’s Gift to the Greate Charter: Economic Self-Sufficiency
The obvious antidote to the “starving times” is more plentiful food supplies. True the horrendous rates of deaths by disease certainly decreased production and productivity of food production, while increasing the dependence of those who were malnutrition and/or ill on company stores and the work of others. Notorious, of course, was the military-barracks-work gang-community sharing Company policy of owning all land itself, and harnessing company employees to plant, harvest, share whatever was gleaned from fields under constant threat of Indian attack. With rare exceptions, Rolfe for example, there was no private use of property for most of the first five years of Jamestown–and no private ownership of land. Virginia was owned by the Company.
Having said all this, one might also understand an annual doubling of the population risked failure in developing the capacity of Virginia to feed itself–through self-sufficiency of foods, staples, and tools especially. The huge number Sandys sent over in 1619 and 1620 have come under some attack by historians, chief among them Edmund S. Morgan”
Modern scholarship has placed the blame for the failure of the Virginia Company on the shoulders of Sir Edwin Sandys, who poured men [women and children] into Virginia faster than the colony could absorb and support them. Without the capital to equip them properly, Sandys concentrated on getting men across the ocean, not only as tenants for the Company’s lands, but artisans of various kinds to set up production of iron, glass silk and ships. Moreover he encouraged dozens of private investors to establish particular plantations. Ship captains crowded men aboard, and dumped them in the colony by the hundreds, half-dead, and without provisions. Most of them died soon after, from malnutrition, or from disease aggravated by malnutrition.[99] Edmund S. Morgan, “the First American Boom, Virginia 1618 to 1630” (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 171. I left out the last sentence, “When the King found out what was happening, he dissolved the Company” because that tale is much more complex, and culminated more than a half-decade after. At this point in our history, it is a very disruptive tangent to bedevil the reader.
In any event, Yeardley and Pory were not responsible for the backdrop of a lack of self-sufficiency capacity–that constrained implementation of the Greate Charter economic development plan. Still the importation of Italian, German and Polish artisans, hired to diversify the economy away from tobacco, did not go well with the locals [Sandys brother, George, who had taken residence in Jamestown, reported them as something akin to God’s vomit]. Locals could watch and react to it, but the ships came over at Sandy’s volition, and expense. Company debt would pile up, while the women, children and men died in Virginia. Even Grizzard Jr and Boyd Smith in the Jamestown Centennial edition observe “the sudden influx of thousand of ill-equipped, unseasoned new inhabitants stretched to the breaking point Virginia’s ability to absorb new colonists“[99] Grizzard, Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown: a Colony, p. slix
Morgan asserts that between three and four thousand would die between 1618 and 1624. That strongly suggests “breakthrough” population growth was never attained during the Company era, and that whatever the positives we discuss regarding the Greate Charter, it did not achieve its most basic of goals–or even come close. The best that can be said of this topic is that because of the rather low level of population in Virginia during these years, basic food self-sufficiency was able to be somewhat achieved during the period of the Greate Charter–as we will discuss shortly.
Apparently after five years, even the densest of Englishmen realized this was a hell of a way to run a colony and develop any modicum of self-sufficiency. Dependence on the supply ships for virtually everything became a way of life–and an expensive way of life for the Company. To me there is no doubt in my mind the relaxation of “martial rule” after 1611, the step-back from a military camp, was also accompanied by a realization by Company leadership that some private ownership, and private sharing of the harvest was too obvious a solution to cutting costs, and reducing the tenuous and fragile lifeline of supply ships.
To me this was the “secret sauce” responsible for the success of Dale’s early initiatives directed at “ancient planters” whose indenture had finally expired. Rather than watch these survivors return, at company expense to England, the awarding of garden plots to all, and then some form of renter-rent to own land grant killed two birds with one stone: more food production/less supply ship dependence and workforce retention and development of a permanent freeholder class in Virginia. That it addressed self-sufficiency to some degree was also core to its success–and did so by dispersing the population away from the Jamestown swamp by inserting them merely into the deserted villages and fields of Native Americans.
Accordingly, after 1614 for sure Virginia self-sufficiency was on the rise. The Argall interlude in 1617-8 was a step-back, but one of the instructions on Yeardley’s list was to correct that. By that time, the voluntary joint stock plantation was in full favor, and “particular” plantations were being created along the James and its tributaries–as were the “hundreds” and the plantations-estates of the top Company officials. Both transformed company-owned land into large scale private property ownership, and no doubt that included its own garden plots, and small workshops.
The high death rates, however, continued–possibly because the Company still sent over huge numbers of indentured company employees, who were landed in Jamestown, and who had not been properly “seasoned” in Virginia. Morgan’s observation that they arrived half-dead, and vulnerable to infection and sickness is cogent. Those indentured servants also included larger number of artisans, engaged in Greate Charter “estates publique” project like the college, churches, and extradition and shipping ventures still were more dependent on supply ships, but at least some fishing ventures did develop another local food source.
Morgan reports that the 1619-20 harvest was excellent–and that was confirmed by his rival Pory. Rolfe observed in that year that there was an “abundance of corn, and of fish brought from Newfoundland and sturgeon caught in Virginia. By 1620 there were other colonies, the Dutch in New York, Pilgrims in Massachusetts–plus Virginia Company Plymouth Corporation commercial fishing that had developed after the collapse of Sagadahoc. The latter may well have sent the fish from Newfoundland. [99] Edmund S. Morgan, “the First American Boom, Virginia 1618 to 1630” (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p.172; Morgan is by far the best single assessment of how Virginia’s economic self-sufficiency was attained. From his comments, the findings of other researchers can be dovetailed into his overall structure.
The Dutch certainly sent the occasional ship up the James, well-stocked with liquor and even women, and, by the way food stores and tools that made them into a tourist trap, casino boat, and department store rolled up into one. Tobacco was the medium of exchange. Given the small population these efforts, along with garden plots, and homestead plantations, Virginia’s hardest days seemed over. [PS, they were not] by 1620-21. “The ships that anchored in Virginia’s great rivers every summer were, as one settler observed, ‘moving taverns’, whose masters, usually private traders, got the greater part of the tobacco that should have been enriching the colonists and the shareholders of the Company. Since the Company had never been able to satisfy the needs of the colonists, it was helpless to prevent them, and by 1620 it gave up trying”. [99] Edmund S. Morgan, “the First American Boom, Virginia 1618 to 1630” (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p.181.
By that point the Virginia colonists–trapped by the vicious tobacco export cycle–found it more expedient to “trade for corn” with the Powhatans. “Trade” meant a variety of things in Virginia at this time, including trading corn for beads and the like, as well as simple appropriation of unused Indian fields, and worse came to worse, actual raids on Indian corn fields during harvest.
The expanding European settlement intruded into traditionally Indian lands, and during this period of “peace” (Powhatan and Pocahontas are dead by this time) the tender mercies of the English plantation settler did little to promote peaceful coexistence. None of this is directly tied to the Greate Charter per se–excepting, of course, that expanded settlements and the unfolding headright incentive system were core goals and key strategic initiatives. The college was a centerpiece for Sandys, an attempt to convince prospective new settlers of the charming lifestyle and opportunities Virginia offered them.
Also, to satisfy those of Christian missionary spirit–of which Sandys was one, the college could be the center for the Christianization of the Indians; he sent over a missionary, George Thorpe, a former M.P., to conduct the effort and manage the college construction [99] Grizzard, Jr., and Boyd Smith, p. l . Sandys “enlightened” Indian relations, his encouragement of limited adoption of Indians by English, use as household servants, and Christianization, however well-intentioned in their perspective, were not received by most Indians as helpful or desirable. Tensions mounted, and Indian relations deteriorated badly, and the trade with Indians for self-sufficiency was a prime cause. By 1621 the zero-sum clash of English settlement with Indian sovereignty had begun in earnest.
Greate Charter Land as People-Attraction, Settlement-Town-building/Infrastructure, Workforce, Cluster/Agglomeration-Building Strategy Nexus
Sandys Settlement Strategy: People Attraction/Land-Settlement-Town-Building, Economic Diversification, and “Shredded” Economic Base-Infrastructure
Charles Andrews provides a valuable context in the time period which the Virginia Company pivot from trading factory to permanent settlement. “… (C)oincident with the elimination of Spain and France as dangerous claimants to the territory of southern and northern Virginia [London and Plymouth Companies], came the discovery of tobacco as a marketable staple, capable of making the settlement self-supporting and financially independent. This discovery and the certainty of tobacco’s profit-making value, which was demonstrated during the next few years, came at a time when the leaders of the company–among whom [Smythe], Johnson, Sandys, and the Ferrars stand out conspicuously–were taking the first steps in carrying out an elaborate scheme for the strengthening of the company and the betterment of the colony” [99] Charles Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, Vol. 1, p. 150
Interestingly he believes that elaborate scheme was formulated in 1617 and 1618, and “brought to maturity” in 1620-21. The formal manifestation of that scheme as implemented from 1619 to the end of the Virginia Company was the Greate Charter. Culling out Sandys and the Farrar brothers from Smythe and Johnson (his son-in-law) Andrews imparts to the former as principal driving force in the mature post-1619 implementation period–as we do, of course. The economic and political development plan that constituted the core of the Greate Charter permanent settlement strategy nexus had four “important particulars”
The first was an economic and political charter of “grants and liberties”, reorganizing the administration of the colony using the model of their own corporate governance as permitted by the royal charter of 1612, and very importantly changing the character of their governance from militaristic, or “harsh and rigorous” to one more congruent to the English expectations and current lifestyle. This particular constitutes the core of this module.
The second particular was, no doubt a Sandys initiative, to develop and have approved “larger privileges and immunities” intended to attract a new, more enthusiastic grouping of subscribers-shareholders committed to a permanent settlement, a strategy of uncertain time commitment. Perhaps providing an insight whose these patient investors would be is the expectation that a confirmation of support from the Parliament would be obtained. That they wanted a new flow of subscribers like that of 1609-10, a goodly number of which were gentry and small merchant parliamentarians resident in large towns-ports other than London. That it overlapped with the 1620 new investment in the Plymouth Company that led to a new colony in Plymouth Massachusetts is likely. In any event, the confirmation by Parliament never happened–and neither did any number of enthusiastic subscribers invest.
Thirdly, the Company committed to a more robust support of the sustenance and maintenance of the colony’s settlement and self-sufficiency, a reaffirmation of a function in which they company had a more indifferent reputation–if not outright harsh as the death rate would attest. More to the point was the inclusion of “infrastructure’ such as a college, hospital, churches, and lifestyle businesses that developed and enhanced the quality of life and the prosperity and well-being of the settler. Included in this was an economic diversification which served as the foundation for a variety of entrepreneurs and opportunities and which offered considerable benefit as imports to the mother country. As we shall see the Indian Massacre of 1622 put the tomahawk to that aspiration.
Finally, a fourth particular, which will be developed more fully in the concluding section of this module, the Company leadership wanted to work out with the Crown a commitment to what was Virginia’s only export product sufficient in volume and price to support the Company and provide revenues and taxes to the King, while offering value to the ordinary English (smoking) population. Specifically, the Virginia Company wanted a monopoly of tobacco import to England. How this was to mesh with a diversified economy, and still reward the Virginia planter or the merchant investor {Smythe’s faction] was no doubt part of the process by which “the tobacco contract” would be fabricated. More on that latter.
Sandys and likely Smythe had come to view this tobacco land stampede/gold rush as a double-edged sword, with one edge clearly weakening the authority of the Company over its colony and its own decision-making. “As the [land] policy tended to absorb rapidly the available land, and also to destroy the unity of the province, it was viewed with some distrust by the Company” and in Osgood’s eyes land owners granted such lands “occupied a position within the colony similar to that of manors, and bore a similar relation to the development of its local institutions”, the consequence of which the land owners could “run a too independent course in trade or promote faction in the colony” [99] Osgood, Vol. 1, pp. 54-5. As we have insisted throughout this module series, neither Smythe, Sandys, nor the King wanted a tobacco monoculture–but the Virginia Company was a financial wreck of the Hesperus and tobacco was the only obvious lifeboat to be seen.
In essence one might see many of the fears I presented in the “shredded community” and the opening in investment tobacco and its export financing that Bruchey believed led to the decentralization of economic and political decision-making at the local or sub-provincial level became evident during the Greate Charter period. These, I assert, are the most important aspects of the Greate Charter. During its period–into 1622–the Tidewater was being settled, with population dispersed into isolated plantation-based areas, with day-to-day well outside of the influence of London-based Company officials, and largely supported by domestic Company officials whose own participation in this dispersal and economic decentralization was also very evident to the London officials. If the Company was hollowing out, the Tidewater plantation region was not. If you don’t believe me, ask the Powhatans.
There is a reason, I suspect, that Company officials in Virginia turned more of their attention toward their private holdings than Sandys estate publique–the company owned lands, and the servants attached to their production. Morgan, having demonstrated that English Virginia as an aggregate had largely achieved reasonable self-sufficiency through the ways we previously described, but not so the company servants on the estates publique. “… at a time when the colony was reporting an unprecedented abundance, suggest that the problem was not altogether one of whether supplies existed. It was a question of who had them, and who could pay for them. … The great shortage of supplies, to which we attribute the failure of the Sandys program, was not an absolute shortage in which all Virginians shared and suffered alike. It was a shortage that afflicted the Company and its dependents, but it furnished larger opportunities for private entrepreneurs, and larger ones for Company officials [in Virginia] who knew who to turn public distress to private profit“.[99] Edmund S. Morgan, “the First American Boom, Virginia 1618 to 1630” (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 175
In essence, Sandys had put his scarce Virginia Company funds to use in sending ships laden with new immigrants over to serve as the workforce for his initiatives and new direction. He had, however, insufficient funds remaining to send them the necessary sustenance supplies in supply ships that followed. In a crudely expressed phrase, Sandys had “stuck it to the domestic Virginia Company” officials, and left it to their devices to overcome any supply deficiency. That domestic Company officials diverted their attentions, shifted production away from the company-owned lands, is no accident. To a certain extent, it was Sandys own mismanagement or mistaken priorities that, in its way, opened up a chasm between his London-based Company and the Company-officials in Virginia. It may be little surprise that the local company officials began after 1621-2 to distance themselves from the affairs of the London Company–particularly with all the dramas and scandals which were to follow in the the “tobacco contract” conflict.
[In 1620] Governor Yeardley wrote plaintively to the Company, urging them to send subsequent ships with more provisions, adding that ‘if such numbers of people come upon me unexpected, and that at an unhealthful season and to late to sett Corne, I cannott then be able to feed them owt of others labors”
With the revenues of the lottery absent (1621) after 1621, Sandys and the Company authorized a large body of “subordinate and voluntary joint stock corporation on a scale larger than ever before”. More precisely, after 1622, was headed into bankruptcy, and it had to find sufficient revenues to support itself and the colony. To be sure, the Indian Massacre of 1622 was without doubt the coup de grace for the Virginia Company, but even before the Indian War commenced, there were signs the Greate Charter had exhausted the funds available to the Company, and that some of what we will see in the next two years will be London Company officials trying to postpone the inevitable while grabbing what they could before the ship sank.
Headright, Workforce: Indenture is not Apprenticeship to Tobacco Plantation Ownership but it opened a path for entrepreneurs
Specifically ,the Greate Charter headright system offered fifty acres of land for each person who paid for his travel to Virginia (or for the travel of his replacement). For this fifty acres the new owner agreed to pay a “quitrent” (essentially an annual land tax/fee) of one shilling per each fifty acres) to be used to pay expenses of the colony. To further defray encourage use of the headright the Company offered to the landowner/joint stock corporation a corresponding land grant for each worker, slave, or indentured servant who would work those lands. For example, the governor received 3,000 acres and 100 tenants, the treasurer (Sandys) 1500 acres and 50 tenants [99] Intedhttps://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-company-of-london/ ).
Arguably, the most innovative initiative included in the Greate Charter headright system was its formal extension of land grants-headrights to joint stock corporations owned by or formed by the company’s investor-members which in turn could be subdivided and sold to individuals or more like to non-company member voluntary joint stock corporations. This, in reality, was not a bold new innovation, but rather a version of the “undertaker” function that dominated English plantation strategy/administration that was ongoing in the Irish Ulster Plantation. In essence, English entrepreneurs could raise capital in England, establish a (voluntary) joint stock corporation, and apply to the Company for headright land and incentive credits. The Virginia Company was simply adapting it to its charter, and the different political arrangement between itself and the Crown, and its different assortment of joint venture corporations.
Headright as “the seed for a future harvest”—Hidden right in front of our eyes is that headright contains the seeds for its own destruction. The Virginia Company was turning to headright to escape its fiscal and political destruction as a joint stock corporation (proprietary) colony. Essentially, the headright system allowed the Virginia Company to pass on its fiscal burden and political consequences (risks) to another joint stock corporation. Somebody else’s supply ships and investment capital was at stake. That meant a new set of actors had entered into the decision-making regarding the development of Virginia’s economic base. In effect, apart from hollowing out of the Company’s authority, the headright nexus spun of a new type of businessman-entrepreneur, a grouping that would evolve into a new local elite that would be the hallmark of the First Migration period. Bluntly, without the headright nexus, there would have been no such elite. Bluntly, that elite was fostered, if not created by favoritism and illegalities associated with the headright nexus that narrowed access to insiders and proteges, while offering comparatively small allotments to former servants.
That an incentive system–a strategy nexus– could develop its own entrepreneur and business class is almost logical, and to an extent maybe inevitable. But the nexus grew and was incorporated into being the spine of future Virginia economic development in large measure due to the failures of the Virginia Company to install a viable provincial administrative structure and monitoring system that could manage and use the headright to larger purposes of Virginia, purposes which could include a measure of honesty and accountability. The Headright was administered from its start, loosely, corruptly, and to the detriment of its principal client (the indentured servant), whose numbers far exceeded any private freeholder recipient.
Wesley Frank Craven developed a critique of the headright and presented it in different forms in several of his books. I have used here, White, Black and Red, in which he cogently tackles what is an economic development nightmare that encumbered itself into the fabric of English colonial America. Warren explicitly asserted that historian treatment of the headright in effect transforming an individual-household into an economic commodity, property instead of humanity-“an exchange of tobacco for labor”, and a cargo of people to compliment a cargo of tobacco. Historians he senses have entered into this transformation is its description and analysis of what will become a “class” of people, who, for the most part, will be marginalized, politically, and economically into isolated, dependent subsistence tobacco growers and laborers.
Left out of my history, and that of most American historians, is the telling of why so many English (Scots and Irish, also Germans and Huguenots) were willing to leave their traditional homes and villages, split from their families, and travel to America. Religious persecution/discrimination is generally cited as primary–which it was–but that was not front and center in the Virginia Company era. Economic desperation, recruitment from jails and orphanages, and the dubious use of females as marriage bait strongly suggest Virginia’s earliest servants and non-aristocratic-merchant-gentry settlers came from the lower economic class. Virginia would develop a reputation for recruitment by dubious means of these unfortunates-a reputation that diminished over time, but still exceeded that of the other colonies that followed.
Craven also observed that from the beginning the headright indenture was confused and conflated with the more established and somewhat more honorable guild apprentice system. From the beginning, he further observes, it was never that in practice. Nevertheless, the various joint stock companies in particular, like timeshare hustlers, asserted the relationship in their recruitment of indentured service. Certainly, Virginia’s reputation as a death trap, and the Virginia Company’s PR perception among the English as a monopolist and dominated by affluent London traders-merchants ought to have served as some counter, but desperation breeds risk-taking, and faint hope as it was, indenture as a form of tobacco apprenticeship no doubt justified the risk-taking.
Since land, including that stolen from the Powhatan, was relatively plentiful, Virginia’s great need, great economic development crisis, was for labor. The price of tobacco in this period, while less than Spanish tobacco, was more than sufficient to foster high wage levels for the prospective new settler. “Despite the fact that bound servants had to be fed, cloth and housed, Virginians could not get enough of them. Everybody wanted servants. Even tenants who had been unable to pay their own passage to the colony wanted servants … Indeed as John Pory put it, ‘our principall wealth … consisteth in servants’… If a planter could secure labor the tobacco produced from the field would yield more profit than anything comparable in England during this period. “Because of the chances for such profits, Jamestown in the last years of the Virginia Company … was also the first American boom town … If he could stay alive and somehow get control of a few servants, and keep them alive, he could make more in a year than he was likely to make in several in England. And if he could get a large number of servants, he might indeed make a fortune” [99] Edmund S. Morgan, “the First American Boom, Virginia 1618 to 1630” (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 177-9
It is here, with access to acquiring indentured servants that domestic Virginia Company officials had the best opportunity to establish landed plantations, quickly clear and cultivate them, and send the produce off for export and sale to England. Here is the core “first advantage” that was to secure for the domestic company elite and their protégé the resources that established them as the First Elite of the First Migration. It was the indentured servant, secured through the headright system, that provided the dynamism and profit that made Tidewater Virginia a tobacco monoculture before 1625. It seems the Tidewater rushed past cluster and agglomeration-building, heading straight for and achieving near exclusive dominance of seventeenth century Virginia’s entire economic base.
Probably, as or even more impactful to indentureship was the role sea captains and ship owners played in adopting indentureship. Indenture was first incurred in England, as the price contract for providing transportation to Virginia. The agreement was between the ship owners and the servant, which was administered by the captain of the ship, or a specific owner representative attendant on ship. The owners intention was to sell the indenture to a planter or investor upon arrival in Virginia. Auction blocks did exist and a regular process for disembarking of servants developed. Very early in the Virginia Company era an independent ship-driven indenture logistical cluster developed alongside the Virginia Company recruitment. constituting yet another bypass of the Company. Recruiting and first investment in Virginia’s workforce devolved to private intermediaries and took place on the piers of England and Virginia. [99] Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters (Cambridge, 1960), p.7.
Perhaps we would have understood the character of the migration into Virginia in the seventeenth century more readily had the institution of apprenticeship taken firmer root than it did in our society, for indentured service in the colonies was a direct development of that institution. Service as an apprentice was for the seventeenth century Englishman, a familiar way into a number of trades and crafts, as also into certain professions, and some of the greatest trading companies of that day. To become an apprentice to a Virginia planter, at a time when it was commonly understood that every occupation had its own mysteries, and that they were best learned through the instruction of those who previously had been initiated, was a natural decision to make” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, White, Black and Red: the Seventeenth Century Virginian (W. W. Norton Company, 1971), p. 8. As late as 1659 he cites an indenture contract with this promotional association. With I am sure rate exceptions, the headright indenture experience was not an apprenticeship; it was bound labor pure and simple. As a workforce policy it was flawed, and deeply so, from its start.
The reader no doubt has noticed the minimal attention paid in the Jamestown series to the affairs of the indentured. Their fate in the first half-decade was to be placed in a work environment many historians have called “the communistic” or “communal” period–with no private property, nearly total dependence on the Company supply ship, and living under martial-military discipline enforced by professional military officers. That half of them would die off each year through disease and misadventure, and daily life would be an adventure in malnutrition, further inhibited their ability to demand some better treatment.
By 1612, however, both Gates and Dale had begun the pivot–a pivot that continued into the Greate Charter period. The early years of the pivot and the Greate Charter witnessed many of these ancient planters getting some form of land ownership, in the hundreds the company and private investors were creating. Tobacco and plantations were the great opportunity. Many followed the larger plantations of their Company officials, and were incorporated into the settlements that were founded along the James and its tributaries.
Some became laborers, other subsistence planters, growing stapes, but putting their most effort into tobacco–which wound up being being tied to the larger volumes of tobacco produced by the large plantations. A cycle of dependency began for them during the years of the Greate Charter. The Second Powhatan War that began in 1622 only worsened their condition, and without doubt brought out their “worse angels”. While there were by this time women and families in Virginia, the settlers were still predominately male, and whatever benefits civilization and prosperity bring, lay still in the future. Virginia was a harsh frontier area, and the images we have of our “wild west” were poor reproductions of the reality of early seventeenth century Virginia.
In these years, and the next half-century, however, the plantation workforce was mostly indentured servants whose trip was paid for by their employer in return for up to seven years of labor–which few survived. At termination of contract, specified acreage was transferred to the new “freeholder” and that was the attraction, liberated from his contract the freed former indentured servant could start his own plantation. That was the theory; reality had other ideas.
Freeholder plots were too small for competitive tobacco production, which was the only agriculture the former indentured servant knew. In short order the freeman work force transformed themselves into sharecroppers and day laborers–an agricultural lumpen proletariat wandering about, employed and ruled by hardscrabble plantation land lords—or failing that they attempted some level of autonomy by setting up subsistence plots in the most isolated hinterlands. The latter were to become the most desperate and brutalized of all the former indentured servants. From its start, Virginia was a bastion of inequality.
That “freeholder” who was to rise from the ashes of an indenture contract had to survive the contract, many, maybe most in these earliest of years, did not. The expiration of the term of the contract, particularly, as time went on, did not live up to the contract, nor to the letter of the law because, as we shall find, the law was amended. Consequently, future ex-indentured freeholders became just another rung on the ladder of inequality in Virginia. But to be fair, this was not understood, or necessarily envisioned, by those who started this off in 1619 [99] See Osgood, Vol. 1, pp. 87-8 for a compressed elaboration of that time period]. Subsequent modules will deal with this topic—and outline the political culture which underlay it.
The converse of this headright system was the elite that rose from its use. In the beginning one can use “entrepreneur” to characterize those who assumed ownership of these early plantation. They risked literally life and limb, not just their investment. The beautiful mansions and architecture we associated with these plantations would take the better part of a hundred years before they appeared. I would venture, without hesitation, these entrepreneurs faced hardships considerably in excess of those associated with our trans-Mississippi West. The men, wives, and children they produced, the society which developed (isolated in shredded communities as it was) were, substantially derivatives of tobacco, the tobacco plantation and the headright system.
If ever an economic base dominated all around it, and above it, the mono-tobacco would be its finest example. When the time came, and the Civil War appeared on the horizon, defending a “way of life” was indeed at stake because that is precisely what commenced in 1619.
The Political Dimension of the Greate Charter: Late medieval Corporate Democracy, The General Assembly, Gatekeeper of Virginia’s Future Decentralized Policy System
Sandys in his “instructions” to his new governor required Yeardley to call into session a “Council of State” comprised of appointed (by the governor) influential/large local landowners, all by definition company shareholders that had benefited from his post-1616 joint stock-hundreds land grants. The Council would serve as an advisory body to the governor. Sandys also ordered a provincial-level election to elect twenty burgesses, each of which “represented” a local district which overlapped the system of hundreds, and city corporations that had evolved since 1613. Both bodies (Governor’s Council and Burgesses), along with the Governor himself, were to be convened as soon as possible, and” when convened were referred to as the “General Assembly”.
The General Assembly was ordinarily to meet no more than twice each year, unless some compelling emergency required otherwise. That corresponded to the Company’s annual shareholder meetings, and was also known as the company’s General Assembly. The relationship of the English shareholder annual meeting, known as the General Assembly, with the Virginia General Assembly, required some stipulation on the rights of each, and procedures addressing disputes between the two Assemblies were included in the original instructions as best we can determine. London was finding a way to share its power with its Virginia settlers-shareholders.
The voting franchise fabricated it seems by Yeardley, included “the inhabitants of the colony” and that overlapped with the extension and definition of “free libertie … given to all men to make choice of their dividends of land, and, as their abilities and means [would]” . Burgesses was quite “democratic”, exceptional for its day and age—exceeding that of England itself in which the individual’s right to vote was not yet attained. Andrews asserts that “the word’ inhabitants’ was construed very liberally” including in his estimation freeholders, householders, and former servants whose term had expired “servants still under indenture were included also”. No age limits were specified, but it is likely women, children and apprentices [under 17] did not take part in the election [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, pp. 183-4.
I counter that all, in accordance with Dale’s Gift company policy, indentured servants were either actual shareholders, or potential shareholders on termination of their servant contract. Finally, we are not talking about a large colony with a diverse population–only about 1,000 total, and nearly all had acquired shares to become eligible for the headright because the Company had led the people-recruitment process, and the colony in its first half-decade were for all practical purposes Company servants, officials or shareholders.
Andrews concluded by stating that the General Assembly, “a system of popular control that was undoubtedly copied from the [internal] practice of the [Virginia] company itself in quarterly gatherings of the generality [membership]. He asserts it was written in November 1618 when Smythe was still Treasurer, and Sandys and Warwick were in [a short term] alliance—and nobody voiced any objections to its creation at that time. That suggests Andrews as most historians including myself recognize the popular assembly, the entity called the General Assembly was in practice if not in thought a hybrid creature of the Virginia Company. The Burgesses was clearly “popular”, but popular in 1619 Virginia was a population that in one form or another were shareholders of the Company. That might not be true a decade or so later–but in 1619, Virginia was still a predominately shareholder venture.
Before we go any further with this political structure, we need to grapple with the question of whether the Council of State, Burgesses and Governor–which in aggregate in session was defined as the General Assembly–was a government or a private entity set up to administer the affairs of a private joint stock company, whose shareholders included those who lived in England-London, and those who dwelled three thousand miles away. To demonstrate our decisiveness on this question, I firmly answer “Yes”, maybe? Perhaps, indeed likely, it was both. Probably, but otherwise No.
There is a definite lack of basic documents on the matter, and with what is available historians have made the case for either. The specific intent of the parties is not known. It is also not known to what extent Smythe was involved in at least earlier versions of the Greate Charter. or even in opposition to Sandys and Warwick found some reason for compromise on its contents, or finally to what extent it was Sandys and Farrar’s somewhat pure approach to the permanent settlement pivot. The Greate Charter is a jigsaw puzzle with key pieces lost.
Possibly, Smythe, Sandys and Farrar, never thought in those zero-sum terms (government vs private), because to do so was not relevant to those times or to the Virginia Company colony project. Sandys who knew better than most just what Parliament was, wasn’t, and what it aspired to be, also knew the Virginia Company was not setting up a “government” in Virginia. It was administering its own private colony, operating under the requirements of a charter issued by the King. If Sandys was doing anything concrete he was extending the rights as part owner of the Virginia Company to shareholders who lived in Virginia. That “democratization of the company” would have been consistent with his long-held view that trading companies were monopolies controlled by a board whose voting membership was limited and tightly controlled by a few. It is quite possible the Virginia General Assembly opened up participation in company decision-making to those shareholders resident in Virginia, especially former indentured servants through the Burgesses.
The issues with which the new structure would have to deal, would certainly include law and order, civil liberties, and administrative efficiency, effectiveness and accountability, which to some extent are more governmental in nature. This was inescapable, and the subject matter the General Assembly tackled would, in England, have been governmentally determined. But lacking the power to create an English government, the Company was clarifying how the shareholders and residents in this private colony were to enjoy those rights afforded to an Englishman in that day and age. It also was intended to send a firm signal to all that the days of “martial order” were over, and the corporation was intending to extent the corporate democracy enjoyed by shareholders in England, to those who lived in Virginia.
Finally, and importantly, it was clear to all by 1619 that the land grant policy, a policy that had made hundreds land grant to private individuals granting them powers intended for a government at some point in the future (a colony within a colony” had to be incorporated into a hierarchical system in which the Company could make macro Virginia policy that would extent to these sub-colonies, and also create some order as to whom and when these private entities needed to conform to more fundamental regulations for the good of the colony and company. In several ways, the Council of State could be a partial solution to that issue, involving these large landholders, and major local powers in the hundreds, to have their say in gubernatorial decision-making, and then as shareholders in the General Assembly.
Osgood cites 1618 Company records stating that among the intentions of the Company in regards to the list of instructions sent by Sandys was “there should be an equal and uniform government in the colony consisting of ‘two supreme councils’. One of these was the governor and [presumably Council of State], chosen 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 from each ‘town, hundred, or other particular plantation’ in Virginia. In this there is no mention of the House of Burgesses as an entity, and interestingly, no mention of the Governor.
What confused matter was the Burgesses which was elected not just by shareholders in the Company (although in fact most were undoubtedly such), but to male freeholder residents who lived in the district. Likely, that was Yeardley’s interpretation of what Sandys meant in his now-lost instructions. If so, that still leave open what Sandys’s intentions were. London, in any event, never dealt with that issue–despite the fact the King was quite vocal in his displeasure at the time ( ‘popularness’ and ‘democraticall’); no doubt the General Assembly Burgesses election process was part of his final decision to terminate the Company charter
That insecurity regarding the role of the General Assembly as to what the king would tolerate was a major issue when the King terminated the charter and installed a royal administration headed by a governor he appointed. It matter little in 1625 and after what the members of the Virginia General Assembly thought of that matter; the final decision as to what the General Assembly was or wasn’t, was always the King’s–as was the ultimate title to the land. That decision was not forthcoming until the mid/end of the 1630’s.
But in 1619 It is clear to me that Sandys and his supporters did not intend to democratize Virginia and set up an elective government institution-legislature. Whatever this Burgesses was to become a half-century or more later, in 1620 it was neither a government institution, nor a legislature elected by “the people” until much later in Virginia history. It was a co-General Assembly with a legitimate role in the making of Company policy regarding Virginia. As to the specifics as to whether London General Assembly was to be first among equals, or there needed some more precise definition as to how both could share and make policy in combination was to be addressed, imperfectly, in the immediate years that followed.
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.
What We Do Know; The First Session, 1619, of the Virginia General Assembly
Upon his arrival Governor Yardley formed the Council of State (with six members), called for and implemented elections, and convened the General Assembly. John Pory, Sandy’s Secretary of the Colony, was to preside over its activities. The Assembly did met for the first time in 1619,.
It met for the first time in a church in Jamestown on July 30, 1619. In a five day session that followed, the General Assembly organized itself, elected its leadership, approved various items in Sandys instructions regarding his Greate Charter, made recommendations to the company for further actions, suggested revisions of the Great Charter itself, and enacted several laws, with Indian relations and the price of tobacco among its enactments. In attendance besides Pory, were Governor Yeardley, the six members of the Council of State, and twenty Burgesses. With several of its members becoming sick (one died) in the summer Jamestown climate, the Assembly, after five days of deliberations, was forced to adjourn its session and reschedule its next meeting for March, 1620. We have no firm records of that meeting, although there are references that it might have met.
In any event, the initial General Assembly instructed the governor to fix a price for which the “cape merchant” (the chief Company in-resident export-trade official) should accept tobacco for export, and further limiting the profits of that trade to 25%, while requiring all tobacco produced in Virginia be shipped by the cape merchants (thereby establishing a company monopoly over the trade), and implicitly instructing the cape merchant to ship such quantities “that the price be ‘upheld the better’. [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1946), p. 19.
Also the Assembly approved the formalization of Virginia sub-provincial hierarchy “It divided the James River area into four corporate boroughs straddling the river, beginning with Henrico at the falls, then Charles City, James City [Jamestown] and Kecoughtan at the bay (renamed Elizabeth City by the 1619 General Assembly). In each borough the Company reserved 3,000 acres for its own enterprises [the estate publique], run by half-share tenants sent at company expense. To pay the cost of local government, it set aside 1,500 acres in each borough for the use of borough officials, …. the governor occupied a 3,000 acre tract near Jamestown in lieu of his salary. Each parish minister would have a 100 acre farm (called a glebe] and an assurance that he could earn additional income equal to his annual salary of 200 pounds. Finally, the company undertook to meet its initial promise to educate and Christianize the Indians. It established an ‘Indian’ college’ at Henrico, on Farrar’s island, to be supported by income from 10,000 acres of College lands worked by half-share tenants [estate publique]. [99] Grizzard, Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown a Colony, p. xlv
Notable effort was made to “reform” the land patents of several hundreds. The terms of the patent were clarified and expressed to the owners of the hundreds-plantation, and accommodation to the will of the Assembly were approved. What emerged after the Assembly was the Council of State did continue to meet at the bequest of Yeardley, and that body in which Yeardley had a veto–which I can find no instance one was issued–seems to have become the major policy-maker in Virginia.
To that extent then, the power of the governor had been reduced, and as a practical matter the lower of the larger plantation owners represented on the Council, increased-and legitimized. In the exchanges between the Yeardley and the central London company officials, the latter, after some commentary, conceded that London could not make Company determinations with effect on Virginia without concurrence by the Virginia Company General Assembly: “No orders of our Court [London General Assembly} afterwarde shall bind [the] colony unles they bee ratified in like manner in ther generall Assembly“. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 135.
This was an important clarification or concession, and that action provided significant justification to the new royal government when it took power in 1624-5 that the status quo in Virginia meant the General Assembly, Council of State were an established element of Company governance, and that their recognition as such by the royal authorities translated into their transformation into a royal government policy-making structure-institution. That, however, did not in any way stipulate or clarify what powers they had, and to what extent they could exercise their powers only in conformity to those in issued in London. The response issued by Sandys dated July 24, 1621 was sufficiently explicit to be considered as the company’s “constitution’ regarding its governance of the Virginia Colony [99] See Richard Middleton, Colonial America: a History, 1565-1776 (3rd Ed) (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 57.
It is worth note that among the initial actions of the first five day session of the General Assembly was its approval of the indenture system as called for in the Great Charter. “Measures were passed to enforce servants indenture and to prevent the ‘seducing’ of servants from one plantation to another” [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1946), p. 18
More interesting to me, and especially relevant to the future development of the House of Burgesses and the Greate Charter system of government were two questions that arose from discussion in the first General Assembly, and which were sent on to London for comment and answer. During the six day first Assembly, Osgood reports it formed a committee that met to ascertain from London (1) what laws might be passed on the initiative of the assembly (i.e. its independent jurisdiction), and (2) what petitions it might send to London from this session of the Assembly.
Out of this came (1) a request the land grants received thus far from the Company and its officials, including the Hundreds, be confirmed (clear title); (2) that a sub-treasurer be sent over to collect the Company’s rents; (3) “Admitting fully the right of the Company to disallow the acts [of the General Assembly], the Assembly requested that they might be regarded as in force till the report of their rejection should come from England, AND (Mine) the Assembly might be authorized to disallow orders from the company’s court [annual member-investor meeting] as it was empowered to reject acts of the assembly. Thus early something like legislative equality with the court of the company in England was sought”. Osgood, Vol. 1., p.94. As we shall confirm later in this module, the Company, nor Sandys apparently, responded directly to either request. Some clarification seems to have been included in the list of instruction to Governor Wyatt in 1621, in which the first recommendation was agreed to, but not the co-equality of the General Assembly with the Company Court.
The reader is cautioned not to treat this entreaty by the first General Assembly casually. This request will in the future be construed as not being denied by the Company to the General Assembly, which in the General Assembly’s own deliberations meant it was so entitled. In the period between the fall of the Company (1624) and the acceptance by the King of the limited authority of the General Assembly (1639), this slender thread constituted a meaningful element in the continued governance of Virginia by the General Assembly. As the reader might expect, more of this issue will be said in future sections and modules.
The only other Assembly we can confirm held during the period of the Company Charter met in 1621. It may be others did meet, but no records exist that firmly indicate it did, who attended, and what was discussed or enacted. The last Company Assembly was in February-March 1624–when the Company’s charter was likely to be terminated by the King and Virginia officials convened it to develop its position on the matter, and to address issues that needed resolution before the Company ‘s administration was terminated. An obvious concern regarding its future, and that of the land titles/land grants issued by the company to its shareholder prompted petitions to London for clarification. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 188.
It also seems that Sandys was “on board” with the activities of the 1619 and 1620 annual meeting of the General Assembly—the only indirect reference I know of that confirms the General Assembly did meet in 1620 (there are no references in Virginia documents). Osgood reports that records of the Virginia Company during the spring and summer of 1620 reveal that acts of the General Assembly had arrived in London, Sandys had “carefully perused them and “found them in greatest part to be very well and judiciously carried out and performed”. He further commissioned a Virginia Company committee be set up “to draw [such recommendations as he received] to a head and refer them to a [Company] quarter court [quarterly meeting of the Company elected officials]. [99] Osgood, Vol.1, pp. 94-5.
Although this committee did meet, it also requested more time for its review—and Osgood’s research never confirmed that any report was ever issued. Osgood finally observes of these exchanges and actions that “it cannot be positiely affirmed that the acts of the first legislature ever received the approval of the company”. This is very important as will be demonstrated by our discussion regarding the transition to royal governor and direct control of the colony by the King in 1624-6.
On the other hand, Osgood seems to leave in tact Sandys review of the report concerning a March 1620 General Assembly. Hence, the Assembly did meet in “near the close of 1621” , but secondary records only confirm that it dealt with some business needs of the colony, and an introduction of a silk cluster and other staples into the colony. If so one might sense they dealt in part with the actions of the Company in use of its property-land reserves and took such action to diversify the economic base. Also during this period, Yeardley did issue an ordinance restricting the amount of tobacco that may be grown on each plantation. There is no evidence any effort was made to enforce this ordinance, nor whether any plantation paid attention to it.
It is also, I feel reasonable to observe, the Company records reveal no attempt to counter or reverse any actions approved or undertaken by the General Assembly. All in all, Sandys seems to have been accepting of the implementation of the Greate Charter list of instructions, and the response to them from Virginia. If the King and some of the Company’s membership were uncomfortable with them, Sandys was not.
Anyway, packed in Sir Francis’s luggage was a document that has since been called the Constitution of Virginia. Like most of the stuff in luggage, it would get lost—and we have no existing copy of it. It was either a restatement or a reiteration of the list of instructions that Sandys had sent with Yeardley. That means it either fleshed out the initial Greate Charter, or not. Lost, Governor Yeardley before he returned to England composed from his memory, what was in that inital list of instructions—which too has apparently been lost.
Andrews also refers to this constitution, in that references were made that “Ordinances & Constitution” were sent over with Wyatt when he left in July 1621. Those documents, Andrews asserts, Sandys granted the wish of the General Assembly (sent over as part of its response from the first General Assembly in 1619) that “no orders shall bind the colony unless they be ratified in the General Assembly”. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 187
An Open Question–both interesting and potentially significant was whether the wording in the so-called Constitution conceded the Company’s right to overturn the acts/ordinances of the Company. I see little evidence in the behavior of Wyatt or the Company that support that contention. The 1624 General Assembly will be considered in some detail, and its actions, and its requests did not challenge the Company’s past ordinances, but instead urged their carry over to the new administration of the King. At minimum we can believe the General Assembly was never willing to contest the authority of the King, whatever the Company may have granted.
Osgood, however, lacking any evidence that the Company ever responded to the three-pronged final request by the 1619 General Assembly, the matter seems to have been “tabled” until at the 1624 General Assembly, in anticipation of the repeal of the Virginia Company Charter, asked the Governor (Wyatt) to request the Company concur in that earlier request, so that the role and position of the General Assembly be a settled matter for any new government that followed the demise of the Company charter. Perhaps not surprisingly, nothing came of this request either [see p. 95]. Thus the “Constitution” remains an open question in the events that followed, but likely of little actual meaning to the participants.
What complicates this issue even further is the assertion in 1623/4 that it had the right to tax its residents, and that the Governor no longer “shall not lay any taxes of ympositions upon the colony, their lands, or comodities other way than by the authority of the General Assembly” [99] “the House of Burgesses”, Warren Billings, p.67. By this point the Company was in a court-ordered receivership of the Privy Council. In this sense, in the vacuum of the transition, the General Assembly simply asserted its “right” to resist a Company-appointed governor who was no longer in power. That it continued to exercise this right in the following years raises new questions and issues as to the position of the King on this matter. That will be discussed later.
The reader has no doubt caught my drift; record-keeping was not the strong suit of the colonial administration, and was not the strong suit of the Virginia Company. By example, Thomas Smythe had just stepped down as Treasurer for over twelve years. He asked for an audit of his records to determine if things were kosher. The audit proceeded for a half decade and was never completed, because not even Smythe’s enemies, and there were many, could not figure out what went where. The period under discussion in this module, 1621-25, is characterized by lost materials and primary sources that may have never existed in the first place.
The reader is warned that future historians in their quest for primary materials, found few, and wrote less about this period than any other in Virginia history—save the period that followed and last to around 1642. The records of the General Assembly, important to our purposes, don’t exist until the 1624 Assembly, and only a fragment of that is available. Still, there is referential evidence the Assembly met each year in 1619, 1620, and 1621, and that Yeardley and Wyatt did conduct governance as was normal in the colony at that time. That tobacco plantations diffused in number and acreage in this period is also correct, if only because of the patent issued and the Indians reaction to it. In short, the Greate Charter was being implemented through 1621.
the Export of Tobacco: the Magazine in the Greate Charter period
The rapid rise of tobacco export, and the amazing demand it found in England, placed the company “Magazine”, and its chief official, the Cape-Merchant, in the proverbial sweet spot. In theory—and thus far in practice—the Magazine had a near-monopoly over the colony’s exports and imports—and it was Virginia’s only department store—with its Amazon like access to English household-housing-tools supplies/goods. The Magazine, a bastion it seems of the Smythe group, took an early lead in pressing for the export of the processed product, and its sale in England.
Its central position over the Virginia domestic economy could have been the chief counter for the spread of the tobacco monoculture–except for two “buts”: (1) profits from its sale was about the only source of real income for the Company and its investors, and (2) the dispersed nature of the tobacco diffusion into the Tidewater meant considerable autonomy for tobacco growers to cut their own deal with purchasers. The no-hold fight between Sandys and Smythe was also to play a huge role in the Magazine and its reaction to export tobacco sales.
The Magazine, however, only had jurisdiction of private plantations, usually small in size, workforce and production; lands in the estate publique were handled directly by the Company itself. As earlier mentioned, private plantations established by independent by joint stock companies were treated as “colonies with a colony” and were able to sell as they pleased. Finally, left unmentioned thus far, is the “Company’s” production which was created in various “Gifts” over the five years previous to the Greate Charter. Andrews calls these plantations “Company Gardens”, although it is not clear the extent that private profit could accrue from these Company Gardens (grown on company-owned lands-theoretically at least); they were also able to market and sell their tobacco so long as they followed “sort of” the dictums contained in the King’s 1621 missive on colonial trade policy, described above. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 153.
Of little note since until 1618 or so Virginia had little to note to export, the rise of tobacco exports after that year elevated in importance a tax abatement that was included in the various King-issued charters. The first complete abatement of customs duties for the colony expired after seven years (1619) and a second abatement which applied only a 5% duty, which was a considerable benefit to Virginia exporters.
It is worth note that much of all this was unrealistic. Many ships plying the Virginia English trade at this time were Dutch-built and owned ships; Andrews reports Governor Yeardley used Dutch ships sent to Holland for his export—all of which is a hint that regulation being what it is works only in courts, newspaper land and press releases. In 1631, the King sent out another message reminding Virginia exporters of this regulation. Nevertheless we will return to this topic in many modules in this and other chapters of this book.
As for the Company Magazine, it, of course, wanted its own monopoly of tobacco export, and it appears that Smythe reorganized the Magazine to ensure in his absence as Treasurer, it would. Sandys, however—seems to have bypassed the Magazine as far as Dale’s Reforms mattered in that the plantations and exporters resident within the Hundreds were until 1619 able to do business with whomever they pleased—remember, the prevailing theory was a Hundred was a “colony within a colony”, and lacking any government system had little capacity to enforce its actions. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, pp.127-30
The method, however, by which Virginia acquired its “monopoly” was that Spanish tobacco was not “banned”, but laden with a very high tariff. That high tariff, however, did not end English consumption of Spanish tobacco; it was of higher quality and “tasted better” than an improved post-1619 Virginian product. Many English simply paid up and smoked Spanish. The Spanish competition was compounded by an excess of Spanish product imported into England, which had the effect of reducing the price of Spanish tobacco and increasing its English sales.
The Company, thinking its so-called monopoly was being bypassed, contested the matter to the King and Privy Council. There followed a series of discussions, proposals, agreements, back aways from the agreements all of which (1) sharpened the attacks of the various Company factions on the others, and (2) discredited the Company in the eyes of many, including the King and Privy Council, especially as key elements of this discussion involved profiteering by the Sandys faction then in control of the Company.
These discussions rattled around through 1622, and deep into 1623. While the discussions finally yielded no permanent agreement, they are included here to alert the reader that it was these discussion that seem to have caused the final breakdown between the Company and the King-Privy Council. Investigations were ordered pertaining to internal records and actions of various of the Company leadership, the end result was the King order revoking the Charter of the Virginia Company and all its subsidiaries. The matter is discussed in great detail by both Osgood and Andrews, to which the reader is referred, and we shall content ourselves with the simple trite goodbye to the Virginia Company.
Competitive Hierarchies set the Stage for Virginia’s Tobacco Monoculture: the Tobacco Contract
When James came to the throne, 1603, he benefited from the peace treaty in 1604 with England’s arch enemy, Spain that ended the sixteen-nineteen year Anglo-Spanish War. Resolution of that war allowed England to distance herself from a budding competitive rival, Holland, restored relations and allowed what passed for peaceful coexistence with Spain and the Hapsburg Catholic axis, and to a degree muted the French role in Catholic wars that threatened England with a restoration of Catholicism in England.
Very unpopular in England, among English elites especially, the treaty ended the nine year war in Ireland (allowing pursuit of the Ulster Plantation strategy), and opened up the Spanish West Indies to trade–a major factor in the future evolution of the North American English colonies. The more stable relations with the French also muted an aggressive French colonialization in Canada and the Mississippi. Trading, crippled by the powerful presence of the Spanish Armada and the effective privateering of English buccaneers, benefited. On the negative side, the Dutch, founded a colony in New York during this period, and their constant trading with Virginia and the West Indies, messed up London’s evolving plans for its only North American colony.
Spain could trade with England, and England could access the resource wealth of the West Indies. Spanish tobacco became the luxury brand of English tobacco, for example, and the hugely important textile trade raised the status and fortunes of the Merchant Adventurers and their exotic counterparts such as Muscovy, Levant, and East India trading Companies–did I mention the name Thomas Smythe who headed all three. The amelioration of demands on the massively fragile fiscal condition of the English monarchy, while no solution, did provide James more wiggle room to spend and engage in his pontifications, and a measure of English prosperity followed. But by the time of the Greate Charter, the good times had some clouds on the horizon; in 1618 the Thirty Years War began–what was to be the worst European War to that point–with England on the sidelines. By that time, as we noted before, James relations with his Parliament worsened considerably, and hindsight allows us to see glimpses of what will be the disruptive and polarizing issues that will climax a generation later in the English Civil War.
Encapsulated in all this are what I call the competitive economic-political hierarchies of that time: national mercantilist-trading rivalries, and fragmented English national politics which caught up the fragile Virginia colony in its turbulence. What I have described, in my effort to be cute, as Virginia Company Office Politics, spilled over into both competitive hierarchies, prompting the English foreign offices, and the Crown, to start wondering just what they expected from their colony–and future colonies–and accordingly a loose fabric that will evolve in the 1650’s-1660’s to the first serious attempts at a British colonial policy nexus: the Navigation Laws. But in the time of the Greate Charter, no less than an American historian as Charles Andrews believes we are witnessing in this period as the period in which the main pillars of that future colonial policy jell.
While not the only factor or trading commodity in play during this period, Virginia tobacco, the gazelle of English commodities took off precisely with the Greate Charter period. I’m unsure as to whether this was to Virginia’s benefit, it certainly closed the coffin lid on the Virginia Company, it is indisputable that in the policy tumult that played out between 1621 and 1625 over tobacco afforded to Virginia a monopoly in the English import of that commodity–a really big deal in stabilizing the price of the weed and while no quick path to huge fortunes did provide ample returns to investors and growers in tobacco, while supporting an intense need for the manpower-workforce to clear plantations, plant, harvest and export the product. What evolved from this period was what Andrews termed as “the tobacco contract”. As he further observed, that contract in its essentials lasted through to the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.
In short, in the competitive hierarchy background, the environment, as systems analysts like to call it, played music that encouraged the spread of tobacco through the Virginia Tidewater, implanted the tobacco plantation and its elites and budding investors as manor-like masters of its workforce. The extension of the tobacco monoculture in the Tidewater (and off to the side of our Virginia focused history, its sister colony Bermuda (Somers Company), wrecked the internal cohesion of a bankrupted company so badly the national hierarchy entered the fray and the investigations, scandals, and politics that it precipitated, resulted in the abrogation of the Virginia Company charter by James over 1624-5.
Tobacco: the Product that engendered England’s first Colonial Trade Policy
If the Virginia Company was to be surprised by all this tobacco tom-foolery, so were the politicos in the Privy Council, the English Court, and Parliament. They could smell opportunity as well as the Magazine could. They called it taxes, or in this case, customs duties. Remembering our old tale as to the Virginia Company’s overlap with London, Plymouth, Bristol city merchants, they too saw opportunities, including sale of the weed to their residents and alehouses. They wanted to make sure they got the product sent to them on favorable terms. So did English shipowners and dock warehouses. Tobacco it seems had demand side as well as supply side advocates.
Tobacco was already a source of revenue … It was also raised in England and Ireland [the Ulster Plantation] and used for medicinal purposes. Merchants were interested in its transportation and sale and colonists in its production. An increased proportion of its people [in England] and abroad were becoming its consumers. The Spanish product of superior quality commanded a high price [compared to Virginia tobacco] in the market. Interests had gathered about the product which insured the continuation of its use on a large scale, and for a long time to come it received a large share of that attention which the English government was able to give the colonies in general [99] Osgood, Vol. 3, pp. 28-9
Complicating this complicated mélange of constituencies, was Sandys ambivalent role for tobacco in his earlier described four point Greate Charter plan. A Virginia tobacco monopoly for the Company’s exclusive sale of tobacco in England was the fourth element, but no sooner had it started than the Company, not through its fault, got into a controversy on the custom and impost it paid on import to England. The Company in the end won , its charter tax abatement was upheld, but the affair likely awakened James as to the potential of tobacco as a revenue source for him.
In his rather clumsy way–keeping in mind his struggle with Sandys was becoming ever more bitter and personal–he issued several tobacco-related proclamations that combined a higher custom and impost for the Company (10%) [99] Osgood, vol. 3, p.29, in return for his prohibition against growing tobacco in England. Explained much earlier, the English did “grow their own” in small volumes so there was a sort of quid pro quid in the deal. Whether there were behind the scenes negotiations, I do not know, but on December 30, 1619 he issued a final proclamation cementing this deal.
This, expectedly, did little but open up a can of worms for everybody. James was never able to satisfactorily enforce his English tobacco “prohibition”, and that led to repeated Company complaints, centering on a repeal, of if needs be, a reduction in the impost. Another part of the problem was the Crown was now inspecting tobacco for its quality (it had formed a commission-agency to do so). That inspection separated out the “goodness” from the “badness” tobacco, creating of course cheaper product. In June 1620, the King issued yet another tobacco-related proclamation, reiterating the English prohibition, but specifying that only those who held a formal patent to import tobacco could do so. As the reader can see, we are sort of drifting into the crafting of a monopoly.
But the hidden agenda behind these tobacco proclamations was James asserting his right to control imports free from Parliamentary involvement or restriction. [99] Osgood, Vol 3., p.22). In that the Company, led at this point indirectly by Sandys, was not perceived as a neutral party was a huge complicating factor. On top of James agenda, the Privy Council and other Crown officials had their own concerns and issues as to how colonial trade should be handled. In essence these bureaucrats felt the need to establish some core national commercial trade policy. To them tobacco was only the first of what was hoped would be many commodities and products to follow . “They insisted upon guarding the interests of England in her colonies, and upon subjecting them as a whole to a consistent and far-reaching policy” (IBID., p. 22).
Recognizing the interests of a joint stock corporation could, and this case likely did, deviate from national advantage, they began to question if the “contracting out” of colonial colony-building to a private Joint stock corporation” complicated the design and execution of a comprehensive colonial commercial policy. In short, they were questioning the wisdom of this arrangement in the future, and that in its way dovetailed nicely with the King’s agenda of asserting his traditional control over foreign policy, including commercial trade and colonialization. In microcosm we are seeing the seed that would grow to be a major cause of the American Revolution. Under the guise of importing tobacco and a possible monopoly of tobacco import, some deep and divisive currents in English colonial management had been exposed.
Still, as Andrews rightly points out, the conversations that emerged between the Virginia Company, the Crown, and various English domestic constituencies; the reason for this is understandable: England lacked a colonial trade policy system because Virginia (and tobacco) was the first major instance that a colonial possession had produced a commodity of such importance. This situation was little more than Virginia being the first to be able to trade an export the English actually wanted (with the possible exception of furs which at this point was not well-developed in Virginia). Hence tobacco import and export very quickly bogged down in debate, negotiations and cross purposes of the involved parties. To deal with this,, the Privy Council stepped in to develop what will be England’s first pass at a colonial trade policy—twenty years of before it published its first formal such policy: the Navigation Laws.
As one might suspect, the Privy Council held the upper hand, and it developed some firm positions on the matters at hand. As summarized by Andrews, these centered on five defining positions:
(1) the colonies were to enjoy a monopoly of the English market concerning tobacco—after all the leading competitor was England’s historical enemy and trade rival Spain;
(2) In return England was to enjoy a monopoly over any colonial exports it wanted for its own use and domestic consumption and reexport; [So much for free trade];
(3) English companies should benefit from this trade: banking, shipowners, port facilities, patent factors (distributors-sort of)—hence the tobacco trade was used to benefit England first, its colonies second, and outsiders were outsiders;
(4) accordingly, the colonies were held by England to be outside England’s boundaries (i.e. the colonies had to pay import customs and conform to import duties and regulations) unless, as in the case of the Virginia Company charter, the colony enjoyed some tax-custom abatement–that meant the colonies had to send their export only to England, and therefore could not export to other geographies. If the good was to to be exported after it was imported to England, then English owners could re-export it–not the colonial producer;
(5) Finally, all this across the ocean stuff should benefit of the English Navy and maritime industry which was needed to defend and transport the commodity-and the domestic consumer-taxpayer who paid for it. So English-built and flagged ships were given a monopoly in carrying tobacco and colonial exports to England. [99] Andrews Vol 4, pp. 13-14
Needless to say none of these decisions–excepting of course the first–was to the liking of the Virginia Company, nor its feuding leaderships. Still the Company was awarded an English monopoly in tobacco, meaning the complete exclusion of Spanish and Portuguese tobacco. When the English consumer went into spasm, Brazilian and Venezuelan tobacco was allowed in but extremely high tariff-custom duties were applied. On top of this the English tobacco prohibition was restated, and considerable compelled destruction of fields producing tobacco followed. As to the conditions set forth in the Privy Council policy, they would be incorporated into the future charters of future colonies. The Virginia Company was the first to have them applied, by means of a memo dated October 24, 1621.
In Virginia’s case, King James sent a missive to the Virginia Company in October 1621 starting “Wheras the Kinges most excellent Majestie” [continuing on and on in an non-understandable, never-ending, run on sentence that culminated with] “henceforth all Tobacco and other commodities whatsoeur to be brought and traded the foresaid plantation shal not be carried into any forraine [foreign] parties until the same haue beene first land here [England] and his Majecties Customes paid therefore”. Included somewhere in that run on sentence were the two required bureaucratic forms (“enumeration of contents”, and “bond-bill of lading” to the seller of the goods warranting their good title)that were incorporated into the English trading system until a Virginia planter, Jefferson by name, wrote on the blank side of one, his Declaration of Independence. [Just Joshing, of course, I just made it up] [99] Andrews, Vol. 4, p. 16
As might be expected, “the eyes of the Privy Council were bigger than its stomach”; it had little capacity, if any at all, to enforce on a consistent scale any of these restrictions in 1621. It was a gloried honor system, and the domestic tobacco planters [as outsiders to England] had little need for honor. Virginia at that point manufactured no ocean-going vessels, but the Dutch in New York and the Netherlands did. A good deal of the early Virginia tobacco trade, tobacco and all, went on Dutch ships–and went wherever Dutch ships took their contents. Yeardley the governor employed Dutch ships for his personal export products.
Also, since the more glorious days when England ruled the waves lay in the future, the English Navy had little capacity available to chase down smugglers to places like the West Indies, Virginia plantation owners could take their chances and sell to ships that did. The forms mentioned above, over the years, were interpreted such that only portions of the ships inventories were listed–or not listed at all. While I am personally shocked by all this, shocked the reader understands, colonial exporters, certainly until the Navigation Laws of 1660’s, conformed to the 1621 missive to the extent they wanted to or had to. England didn’t like this in 1621, and it really didn’t like it in 1770, but there it is!
Still, it appears the fourth element in the Sandys Greate Charter plan was achieved. The Virginia Company got a tobacco monopoly, and maintained the Crown’s charter-based custom tax abatement that whopped off 9 pence of a 12 pence custom duty. But, as one might expect, Sandys, the Ferrars, and others maneuvered to improve upon the June 1621Tobacco Contract.
The Virginia Company Tinkers with the Royal Tobacco Contract
To explain how Sandys attempted to improve upon the Royal Tobacco Contract one needs to understand what happened to tobacco after it reached England. The import of each good, in this case tobacco, was awarded to a “farmer” (a joint stock corporation that distributed-sold the good to merchants/guilds, and sub-“farmers”). That farmer joint stock corporation had an effective monopoly on that product to the extent it traded in England.
The English government at this time was accustomed to grant exclusive rights to certain individuals–farmers and patentees of the imposts, customs, and garbling [quality inspection of the good] of the imported commodities, a practice which was extended to tobacco, because it was necessary [as deemed by the King] to restrain ‘the disordered traffique in that commoditie [by] placing it in the hands of able persons that may manage the same without inconvenience.[99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p.157.
In the common parlance these “able hands” often formed a joint stock corporation, and were thereafter frequently referred to as “farmers”. As far as tobacco went, these farmers were the “back door” of the English import of the commodity. I will attach the label “distributor” to their function, for a better understanding of their role in the tobacco import process.
No surprise, both Sandys and Smythe got their associates on the board of the tobacco farmer joint stock corporation. What followed over 1620-23 were a series of behind the scenes schemes, by both factions–Sandys being especially large and obvious. [99] Andrews, often using Scott, go into immense detail on these schemes-the reader is invited to review them. William Robert Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Corporations, Vol. 2, pp. 272-289; Charles Andrews, vol. 1, pp. 157-164.
In 1621-2, Smythe was ousted from the Somers Corporation treasurer position by a narrow vote that was manipulated by Sandys-Farrar’s administration of the board of directors/company meetings during which the Virginia Company offered Somers Company shareholders a grant of 40,000 acres of Virginia land IF the shareholder assigned his shares to the Virginia Company. When the vote was held, Smythe lost a handful of voters and the Treasurer [99] Scott, Vol. 2, pp. 273-275 is the most complete description of the conflict).
Sandys was for that point on in control of both Companies. Until he was able to seize control over the Bermuda Somers Company, Sandys constantly disadvantaged the latter, in favor of the former–and paid high salaries to those who could bring off the advantage–incurring the wrath of the general shareholder in the process. The take away in all this is the role of tobacco is the disintegration of the Virginia Company.
A constant stream of farmer and import manipulation followed, to the disadvantage of Smyth and his faction and to Sandys benefit. Each scheme was more insipid and outrageous than the last. The creativity behand these schemes is to be admired. In one scheme Sandys got one import farmer in the port of Bristol to charge only 1 pence for his involvement (one wonders at this). Then the tobacco farmer corporation restricted England’s tobacco import to only 55,000 pounds for that year. Sandys then, in a seemingly gracious manner, deferred first rights of compliance to the Smythe controlled Somers Corporation–which quickly sold its produce for 9 pence. Sandys then sold the remaining allotment to the Bristol farmer. In either event Virginia tobacco was cheaper and sold first and reaped more profits than Spanish.
Finally, in 1622 Sandys put on the table a plan in which the Virginia Company itself would apply for, and presumably granted, the rights to be the exclusive farmer for tobacco for both Spanish-Portuguese. The salaries to be paid to the Virginia Company management, Sandys faction were deemed exorbitant–and the effort made to ram them through offended many. When the proposal was made evident to the King, the Privy Council and others, and supplemented by a history of the schemes and distortions of voting that had followed over the past two years, the King was persuaded to set up an investigatory commission to determine what was going on within the Virginia Company. It was this commission and its investigation that started the motion toward the termination of the Company charter in late 1624.
It was tobacco, the tobacco contract, and the manipulations, scandals and administrative distortions it unleashed that brought about the downfall of Sandys, no doubt advanced the death of Smythe and possibly the King (both died in 1625), and the stripping of the Virginia charter from the Virginia Company. The distortions and mechanizations finally promoted the king and the Privy Council in March 1623 to revoke England’s “tobacco contract” outright. Instead, he “substituted a plan whereby any Englishman [bypassing the import farmer”] could import all the tobacco he wished, providing he paid custom duties and shipped all his tobacco to England for transshipment to the continent.
Revocation of the tobacco contract had major consequences. Politically, it was a major defeat for the Sandys-Southampton faction; economically it allowed any English merchant and Virginia planter to bypass the cape merchant [and the Company Magazine], thus completely undermining any profits the company could make from its only profit-making staple. Finally, it signified a reluctant recognition in England that tobacco could not be eliminated as a crop [99] Grizzard Jr., and Boyd Smith, pp. liii-liv. It was this new tobacco contract that persisted after the termination of the Company’s charter, and continued throughout the seventeenth century. In a future module we shall detail how this was implemented in Virginia, and elaborate on its consequences.
One could with justification claim that during and after 1622 the Virginia Company was in total civil war, and unable to provide effective or consistent administration of the colony, as with each passing month its fiscal condition rendered it a going concern and its decision-making a cesspool of contested meetings, board of directors votes, distorted minutes of alleged actions endorsed by its committees and boards, and finally frantic efforts to create a series of new subsidiary joint stock corporations and transfer assets into them–all of which resulted in their loss of capital.
Sandys dominated the residue of the defunct Virginia Company, and it continued for the better part of the next decade to reverse the King’s action, and to regain the charter. For various reasons, there was at least one occasion that it was on the edge of success–but eventually fell apart. The continued existence of the Virginia Company after the termination of its charter sporadically but pervasively affected the play of politics in Virginia at least to Sandys death in 1636.
It took three full years, including the death of Smythe and James 1, and the coronation of his son, Charles 1 before the formal ending of the Charter took effect in 1625. From this module onward to the end of the the Jamestown module series, we will transfer our attention to Virginia–with the reader understanding the London Virginia Company had for all practical purposes lost its administrative and fiscal coherence and that whatever passed for Virginia government and administration fell into the hands of Virginia’s domestic Company officials–the Governor most centrally placed, its employees, and resident shareholders in the General Assembly and Council of State.
Ron W. Coan 