Ostensibly this module focuses on the initial development of Virginia’s tobacco mono culture in the period, 1611-1616. We all know John Rolfe did it. Many know that King James was dead-set against it. But for some reason magically and mystically, tobacco became the blob that ate Virginia. If so, the Virginia Company, its decisions and its fortunes, created the blob. Tobacco came early not only in Virginia’s history–but early in the Company’s administration.
Financed, planted, and harvested during the Jamestown period, it was the Virginia Company that first planted Virginia’s proverbial tobacco seedlings in 1611, by Rolfe who was determined to improve on Native American varieties of the weed. The real shock, at least to me, is how fast tobacco took over Virginia. Settled in mid-1607, with its first five years a near-disaster and economically a total waste, tobacco’s command of Virginia’s economic base was amazingly achieved by 1618-20. Bluntly, tobacco is introduced and became an economic gazelle because Virginia Company colonization encouraged its planting, based its economic development initiatives around its expansion, and lobbied hard, and successfully, in London to make Virginia a monopoly for English use–and, BTW, the Virginia Company management personally hated tobacco, and tried their best, a low bar to be sure, to manage, if not limit its spread in favor of a more diversified and “modern”, i.e. profitable economic base and the production of food staples. That didn’t go well, as we shall see.
The basic problem, as we shall see, was the the pitiful fiscal state of the company. They needed cash for dividends, and that meant Virginia had to send over something that someone wanted to buy–and the cash was needed right away to pay for expenses and debt requirements. With the Ulster Plantation sucking out investor interest in foreign ventures, the Virginia Company needed an export product from Virginia to pay the bills and debt–including the supply ships to keep the colonists alive.
In 1613 Tobacco export was probably only way available the Company could escape, at least postpone, its bankruptcy. At a time when the Company’s fortunes seemed most bleak, immediately after the starving time and the impact of the Ulster Plantation when investor interest dried up, the arrival of Rolfe’s experimental tobacco seemed Godsent. The Company may have hated the weed, but it needed it badly. Joseph Dorfman, predictably, says its succinctly and sprightly:
With tobacco production, of all things, turning out to be the profitable staple, a new chapter opened. The King had long ago written a tract against the ‘smoky weed’, and enlightened opinion agreed with him that it damaged the people’s morals and wasted the nation’s wealth. The company was of the same opinion, but it declared that its production would provide the funds for developing the really worth-while staples which would eventually replace it. The Crown resolved its dislike of tobacco and the need for revenue by placing a tax on the import, and ‘for the better support of the colony’, it prohibited the domestic production of tobacco. Tobacco even became the standard of value and medium of exchange of the colony [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865, Vol. One (Viking Press, 1946), p. 17
the former Indentured Servant: Dale’s First Beneficiary
A second grouping emerged after 1613 in small annual increments. Since the Company could not raise the capital it needed to keep the colony afloat, it needed to attract permanent settlers in a geography perceived as a death trap by the general population. It quickly became apparent to Sandys, and everybody else, the most desperate problem Virginia faced if it was to succeed at a permanent settlement was attracting and retaining a workforce.
The best candidates were those who had survived the death trap, its former indentured company servants who had completed the term of their contract. The first sizeable grouping (still very few in absolute numbers) became available in 1614. Most indentured servants had died, or would return to England, but Governor Thomas Dale saw an opportunity to create his needed workforce, a group already socialized into Virginia. And so he devised a program to retain his former indentured servants. He was assisted by Sandys who continued to use company funds to send over a small army of indentured servants–often surprisingly young boys “recruited” from London and other large English cities, and even a few young maids. Given that an estimated seventy-five percent of those resident in Virginia during this period were indentured servants, we can see the potential in developing this grouping into permanent residents and workers.
As one might imagine, these hard, sturdy, and thoroughly ungovernable folk were attracted to tobacco planting as iron was to a magnet. Tobacco entrepreneurship was surprisingly easy if land was accessible. It could be planted almost anywhere, with few tools, in small plots or large, and it took remarkably little care to grow–at least in this period. Since their company landlords could provide them some plots of land upon termination of contracts, this grouping of former indentured servants, now residents and English citizens again, could form a nucleus for a small agricultural homestead workforce that could be set up in and around the new plantations of the resident company officials, and the young entrepreneurs. And so here we have the start of a Virginia agricultural homestead, sharecropper, and plantation workers occupational grouping.
As the years rolled by, however, the vagaries of tobacco economics wreaked havoc on their hopes and ambitions. It happened before the end of the decade. By the early 1620’s we can see the makings of an agricultural lumpen proletariat emerging, nestled quite conveniently around the large plantations of company elites and gazelles. The reader may assume she has not seen the last of this grouping.
At the start of the colony’s second decade, therefore, Virginia and the London Company remained in serious trouble. As a result of [its] land policy after 1614, settlements were widely scattered, and there was much confusion over land titles. The colony’s economic foundations were as shaky as ever, and the colonists grew more restive when in 1616 [Governor] Samuel Argall returned the colony to the strict discipline in Sir Thomas Dale’s “Lawes”. In London the situation was little better for the company verged on bankruptcy. [99] “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History 0f Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, pp. 10-11
That this fiscal situation would profit the Virginia agricultural entrepreneur, and that Company investors who would find a way to bail out from their Virginia Company debt through tobacco export is the pleasing background music behind the rise of Virginia’s tobacco mono-culture. Oh yes, BTW, the English liked tobacco, so let’s thank them too. Back then tobacco was the “weed” of choice, and any contemporary American reader is well aware of “weed” in today’s economy. Some things never change. If you wanted to be an entrepreneur in 1613 Virginia, the only gazelle in sight was tobacco.
In pre-Industrial 1600 everybody’s economic base was dominated by agriculture and finance revolved around its trade and logistics of its products. There were stirrings of industrialization, “i.e. manufacture”, and basic material-metals extraction, fishing, but the commercial trade-finance had little patience for its profits–and a great need to invest them to make more.
Tobacco proved nearly the ideal staple commodity from a mercantilist perspective; it permitted the English to acquire a commodity from a colony rather than on the international market [from an enemy and hostile power at that]; it created a processing industry in England and a valuable product for reexport; it attracted capital and labor to profitable employment across the Atlantic; and it provided Virginians the means to purchase manufactures and commercial services in the English market. [99] John J. McCusker & Russel R. Menard, the Economy of British America, 1607- 1789 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1985, 1991), p. 118
So it fell on the Virginia Company management to navigate these rocks, winds, waves and shoals by quickly “installing” (is that the correct verb?) Virginia’s economic base–after, of course, it finally realized that the economic base of a permanent settlement is not the same as a trading post or factory. That pivot was made in 1612, and in 1613 Company leadership in Virginia, Gates and Dale, started their implementation. The results of Rolfe’s tobacco experimentation were in, and the product would sell in England–with the help of the King’s prohibition of domestic production, and his approval of a lottery. By 1613-4, the background commitments to tobacco were secured, and all that was left was for Virginia colonists to grow, harvest and export it.
In Virginia there was, as far as the English were concerned, no serious economic base save fur trading with Indians, whose tenuous co-existence with Jamestown, made fur trading much too dangerous for English gentlemen, which included the warrior John Smith whose run in with Powhatan, their chief, (and his daughter) is proverbial. Still, as we shall see, an important, if not essential element in the early rise of tobacco was the, again tenuous, peace with the Powhatans fabricated by Argall and Dale, and cemented by marriage with John Role in 1613. For the most part that peace held through 1621. The basic Virginia precondition for the spread of tobacco planting had serendipitously fell in place by 1614.
With the discovery of tobacco the Virginia boom was on. From 1617 to 1623, when the initially high prices for the crop began to falter, an average of fourteen ships left England for Virginia each year, bringing with them a total of roughly 5,000 new planters, while English investors pumped at least 100,000 pounds sterling into the venture. Despite annual mortality rates nearing fifty percent, the colony’s population tripled , approaching 1,300 in 1623. [99] John J. McCusker & Russel R. Menard, the Economy of British America pp. 118-19
What was it the created the momentum to propel the tobacco economy in Virginia?
Demand Creates Supply
Unappreciated today is that tobacco had already embedded itself in England; it was the underground, sinful luxury good that transcended English classes, so popular it fetched a high price for quality tobacco; sort of like marihuana consumption pre-2016. My socks ran up and down when I discovered that tobacco cultivation IN ENGLAND, “inconsiderable in Elizabeth’s reign”, but within the first fifteen years of the [seventeenth century] confidence in the virtues of the herb increased greatly”, and that instruction manuals of how to plant tobacco (“An Advice How to Plant Tobacco in England and How to bring it to Colour and Perfection”, 1615) were flooding English bookstores. This is a sort of “grow your own” movement! Expensive Spanish tobacco was the good stuff; Indian tobacco was the bad stuff, and then Rolfe’s tobacco arrived on the market.
Tobacco was the rage of English consumption when Rolfe’s first casks were unloaded in 1614 London. Tobacco was already being sold there “in every tavern and ale-house, and in so many other places also that in London in 1614 contained … seven thousand shops where it could be obtained and Englishmen spent 200,000 pounds a year for it” [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, Vol. IV, pp. 13-14 If timing is everything, Rolfe’s timing was impeccable. From four hogsheads in 1614, to 20,000 pounds by 1618 of tobacco–demand was insatiable, by 1630 it had increased to 500,000 pounds [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion, p.25
Kukla asserts these numbers understate the rapidity of tobacco production. He claims 2300 pounds in 1616, 40,000 pounds in 1618 at three shillings per pound, than by 1622 60,000, and by 1626 260,251 pounds at a shilling a pound [99] Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos, p. 284. Lost in this gold rush was that tobacco was meant for export to England—there was only so much 400 Jamestown residents could smoke. Tobacco was intended to be an export-based cluster from its beginning. This was the revenue source that would sustain the Virginia Company, bleed it off the national lottery, and attract immigrants and investors willing to come to Virginia for fame or fortune. Hooked on tobacco meant exporting it–and the Company had found its provident revenue source, and its investors new motivation. Bermuda would follow in Virginia’s wake.
Like marihuana today “the weed was valued not only for smoking, but its supposed medicinal qualities”. It was known in Virginia/Jamestown’s first year, and small amounts of it were raised in the Company’s communal garden. Given the turbulence of Jamestown’s first five years, tobacco took little hold on the imagination, never mind the economy. Rolfe’s 1614 success, however, seems to have changed it all. The Company was not slow in realizing what it had on its hands in Virginia. Local officials were using their own version of a headright system, using land grants to applications and awarding benefits and incentives to foster settlement. There were plenty of English voluntary joint stock associations that took advantage of the incentive package once they realized tobacco, could be successfully exported to England. They knew they had a gold rush in the making and private investment flowed if not in a gush, a steady trickle.
Tobacco was the marihuana of its day. Disliked by traditionalists for its corrupting influences and the decline in moral values, hated by both James and Charles I, and regarded by English upper classes as simple pestilence, the popular culture had picked it up and were not only smoking it, but producing it locally. The chief source of imported tobacco was from Spain and that was to be the target of Virginia lobbyists to Parliament and King. If Virginia could secure legislation and royal edict that it had a monopoly in English production then there would be no stopping its expansion. In 1621 James I issued that edict giving to Virginia a monopoly of English tobacco.
At this point, we can expect the establishment of a tobacco-dominant economic base was already (1614) in process of transforming both Virginia and intruding deeply into an yet unwritten, and supremely personalistic (dominated by the King/Queen) English colonial and trade policy. It is wise therefore we separate each out and deal with each in its own section. First, we shall describe the innovation and the entrepreneur who inspired this transformation, John Rolfe (and his wife Pocahontas), then we shall discuss the impact of the installation of tobacco into Virginia’s economic base and political-policy system, and conclude (for the moment at least) with analysis of how tobacco helped shape the contour of English-British colonial and trade policy for future colonies and events.
The Narrative Behind Virginia’s Tobacco Cluster
Admittedly I was somewhat shocked by the centrality of tobacco and plantations in the very first days of Virginian self-government. Before I began this project I did not appreciate the role the Virginia Company played in the establishment of the proverbial Virginia tobacco economic base; I always thought it evolved over a longer period of time. But by the end of this module series, the reader will see that by the time of the Company’s dissolution in 1625, the essential foundations of the future tobacco economy were surprisingly firmly established, and deeply infused into Virginia’s colonial governance as well. What’s more, the core of Virginia’s future sub-state policy system was surprisingly advanced. Virginia was designed since its infancy to be a tobacco machine, and those that controlled its production, its political and social masters. Thank you John Rolfe.
John Rolfe and the Tobacco Economic Base
Through the determined innovation of John Rolfe, a gentleman (he was the brother of an investor in the Virginia Company) who came to Virginia with tobacco seeds, found some more stranded in Bermuda, and with thoughts of an agricultural innovation in his mind, he arrived in Jamestown in 1610 on the remains of the “Third Supply Fleet”. Rolfe was “fortunate” in his ship’s 1609 breakup in a storm on the shoals of Bermuda, because of that Rolfe escaped the “starving time’ in Jamestown. He also lost his first wife and child in Bermuda.
Rolfe continued on to Virginia, arriving on the ship carrying a new governor (Gates) who saved the colony in 1610. That Rolfe was on board Newport’s command ship with the newly appointed leaders of Jamestown, provides significant support to our belief that Rolfe, whose brother was an investor in the Virginia Company, was a well-connected young gentleman, who enjoyed considerable access to the Jamestown Company elite. In 1613-4, he was appointed to serve as Secretary &Recorder General to the Company; .In the same year was appointed to the Governor’s Royal (advisory) Council. He knew the new governor, and the Captain of his voyages was to be a future governor. To complete the picture: Rolfe smoked.
While Rolfe no doubt dreamed of personal profit, he was working for and with the Virginia Company; his seeds were Company seeds. Determined to break the Spanish monopoly on the weed, Rolfe upon arrival began his experimentation to grow tobacco in Virginia. Non-Indian tobacco seeds came to Virginia in his pockets and luggage His Trinidad Spanish seeds brought from England produced tobacco deemed of lesser quality/taste than the Spanish, but he experimented to develop and cultivate new varieties and improving upon the processing.
He established his “plantation” (more a field or a plot of Company-provided land) in 1612 (Varina Farms) on the James River fifty miles upriver from Jamestown, across the river near Henrico. It took two years to get a product that was suitable to export. His governmental sponsor in Virginia was its Governor Dale. He produced a sweeter tobacco which he labeled “Orinoco”; this was to be Virginia’s “brand” name, and Virginia became a place for (tobacco) lovers”.
John Rolfe is the man who developed in Virginia a type of tobacco for which there was great demand in Europe. … Role [an English gentleman] grasped the possibilities in the development of a milder type of leaf than the native variety. The latter, deemed soothing by the Indians, was described by English colonials as ‘poore, weake, and of a byting tast”. … Rolfe proceeded to plant some sweet smoking West Indian tobacco seed. He then began a form of agriculture which would serve not only as the foundation of Virginia’s economy throughout the colonial era, but also as the basis for its plantation system, and would later become a vital element in the state’s industrial development [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion, p. 25
Given Rolfe’s position in government and personal closeness to several of its governors, there is little doubt in my mind Jamestown elites took advantage of the opportunity and used their Virginia Company headright privileges“” to issue land grants to themselves and found plantations. Their interest was founded on Company desperation, and the hopes if this stuff worked out they could make their fortune. This was a risky gamble, only hindsight conveys a measure of inevitability. They also made such grants to applicants, and to others associated with them. Several governors and high ranking provincial leaders set up plantations in this pre-Greate Charter period. The first major producers of tobacco in Virginia were the resident Company elites–and by 1618 its major corporate leadership. They grew tobacco using company seeds, and granted company land–and workforce.
Rolfe married Pocahontas in 1614. In 1612, an English Company ship captain had kidnapped her, through deception, and brought her to Jamestown. Governor Dale used her as a bait to entice her father, Powhatan, into a favorable mood for a peace treaty. Somehow Pocahontas and Rolfe (who was about a decade or so older than her) became a “thing”, and as an American version of Fiddler on the Roof’s third daughter (Chava), they got married. The peace treaty followed. By 1614 he harvested enough for four barrels and exported it very successfully to England.
Having demonstrated a sufficient demand, he planted more—and apparently so did his neighbors, as new plantations exporting tobacco quickly populated the James River area at this time. It was in 1615 that Varina was designated as a “plantation”, and became eligible for the full benefits thereof. With additional curing, the quality was further improved and in 1617 he exported 20,000 pounds, and doubled it the nest year. Tobacco Alley had survived its birth.
Pocahontas lived with Rolfe on Varina Farms; she changed her name to Rebecca. Rolfe’s son by Pocahontas. named Thomas after the Governor Thomas Dale, the militaristic but innovative Deputy Governor who financed their unfortunate trip to England in 1616. Rolfe, named his son Thomas, as an honor to his gubernatorial godfather.
So, in 1615 she, Rolfe and their young son, went to England on a trip intended to market the colony and attract settlers–and, oh yes, sell tobacco. Rolfe, while in England published a blog-pamphlet that promoted the colony. For his efforts Rolfe was granted sizeable “patents” or land grants along the James. Introduced to English society (by Governor De La Warr, Pocahontas enjoyed an audience with the King, and became a celebrity of sorts. Her career was short-lived; she died in 1617 of a sickness on her way back to Virginia while still in sight of the English coast. She is buried in England. Upon his return to Virginia, Rolfe remarried, and died in 1622, only thirty-seven years old at death, probably as a result of the 1622 Indian Massacre. He was twenty-seven when he started his experimentation.
Varina is still farmed (privately) today, but through the colonial period it prospered. It was acquired by the influential Randolph family; one of its scions married Martha the daughter of Jefferson. The “city” on which Varina initially drew sustenance died (Henrico), and Varina itself became the new downtown and county seat of today’s Henrico County. In micro-capsule we can see the natural evolution of a plantation and Virginia’ sub-state governance.
Among the very first actions and legislation passed by the initial five day General Assembly, created by the Greate Charter (1618) was legislation that set up the fundamentals of a tobacco-dominated economic base. To me this was amazing. The 1619 Yardley election system embraced newly settled areas and granted them representation into the new General Assembly and Burgesses. Rolfe himself was appointed to the governor’s council in 1614, and continued to serve in the first General Assembly (1619) thru to his death in 1622. So quickly were the pillars of the tobacco economic base poured that they have been little noticed that the diffusion of tobacco preceded its self-government, and the units of tobacco production, the Hundreds, became the electoral districts of its company legislature. Its plantation masters, the delegates to it.
The Complicated Big Picture Persistently Compounds the Virginia Colony Little Picture
If there was no tobacco, or an equivalent export product, by the late decade of the 1610’s, I am not sure Virginia would have survived as an English colony. After the Third 1612 charter, Smythe at least nominally the chief official of the Virginia Company, did his level best, given his rather part-time commitment to the Company, to keep the Company and the Colony afloat. The potential of tobacco offered hope and the potential for economic success for English investors, politicians, and potential settlers that carried all through the very early 1620’s (1621).
While Dale was in Virginia, as Governor until about April 1616, his strength of character, his willingness to make and execute decisions and reforms, and his administrative common sense and military background proved the correct skillset for making the pivot from trading factory to permanent settlement intended by the Third Charter. His departure in mid-1616 for England, carrying onboard Rolfe, Rebecca and their young son, was his last act to complete the marketing package for tobacco and the promotion of settlement in England.
Dale was replaced by George Yeardley as Acting Deputy Governor, and then by Deputy Governor Samuel Argall who assumed the authority in the spring of 1617. Virginia’s path to stabilization hits a roadbump as the latter resisted Company direction and stalled implementation of Dale’s Gift to former Company servants. Argall as we know did not work out well–due in a large part to the goings on we will describe in this “Big Picture”.
After Argall’s rather abrupt departure, George Yeardley reappeared in late 1618 armed with Sandys “instructions”. Three years and three governorships had taken their toll; the dynamics had gathered momentum and local Virginia elites were acting more or less autonomously. Yeardley “instructions”, known to us today as the Greate Charter hit Virginia much as Mao’s Great Leap Forward-aka, revolution from above.
Most American historians regard the Greate Charter as the turning point of early Virginia history. In many ways it was, but I am much less sanguine regarding its reassertion of Company authority in Virginia. I certainly agree the Greate Charter was a fundamental initiative that birthed key political institutions that channeled the direction of future Virginia, but while these institutions provided a vehicle for change and governance, future events suggest to me that we began Virginia’s Bottoms Up tilt no later than a year later. The giant steps the Assembly will take in 1623 and 1624 (discussed in future modules) were reactions to the catastrophes at the local level, and the lack of capacity and response from the Company in London.
The Big Picture background to the Great Charter, the events before and after its instroduction was the disintegration of the Virginia Company leadership structure, and the onset of a virtual administrative civil war. By early 1619 Thomas Smythe “retired” from his Treasurer position in the Company (a coup might be more accurate), but Smythe remained involved at the top. still a formidable force in the Company, and CEO of the subordinate Somers Company (Bermuda).
Sandys, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Southampton. the victors in Smythe’s ouster, formed a rather febrile triumvirate that did battle with Smythe (presumably the King also), and his old-line traditional trading adventurer faction. From his new perch as Treasurer, Sandys launched his comprehensive set of instructions that in aggregate became the Greate Charter in 1618-9.
The Greate Charter–with Yeardley as Governor charged with its implementation–was Sandys and Southampton’s grand reform and vision of how permanent settlement should be conducted in Virginia. It was a vision constructed, and probably most congruent with the Parliamentary groups that constituted a great faction of the Company’s investor membership (those who bought in during 1609-10, and stayed involved after). The Great Charter approach reflected earlier conceptions of the New World plantation strategy, as espoused by 1607 Jamestown minister and Company investor Richard Hakluyt as overseen by Sandys handpicked official, John Pory, who upon his arrival in early 1619 assumed the positions of Secretary and presided over the first meeting of the legislative chamber created by Sandys instructions, the Virginia Company Assembly.
The King was not particularly on board with Sandys, his Parliamentary allies, or the general direction of his Greate Charter–and from that point on he drifted into an open résistance to Sandys, a resistance that ousted Sandys in 1621, and replaced him with his ally Southampton. As to the Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, he died in 1619, and was replaced by his eldest son, Robert Rich who dutifully became the Earl of Warwick. Over the next two years, Sandys contested Smythe’s parliamentary election–and beat him- but the King put him under house arrest. The tobacco contract episode morphed into a personal scandal, consuming several of his allies as well. Sandys too remained a force in the castrated Virginia Company with Smythe’s death in 1625, but the glory days were over. The Greate Charter in reflection was the brief high point in a rather inglorious governance of the Virginia colony.
If one is not aware there are two Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, and American historians seldom callout the difference, the involvement of the Second Earl in 1619 is more adventurer, more aggressive than his father–the Second Earl was the man mostly behind the 1619 Project venture in Virginia–not his Dad. But it was the Dad that drove Smythe crazy, with his privateering and raids in Indian Sea–against East India shipping, and was the factor involved in Smythe’s 1616-18 ouster.
The Second Earl went on to play interesting, somewhat important roles in the politics leading to the Civil War. Arguably the chief privateer of the period, he was instrumental in the downfall of the Company in 1624-5. A rogue in many ways, the Earl of Warwick was the rascally side of British foreign and colonial policy during these formative years. Ironically, at this time, his youngest son married the youngest daughter of Thomas Smythe–to the latter’s obvious opposition–there has to be a TV series, like Dallas, Billions, or Yellowstone, made on that one.
Smythe fought the good fight, but it would seem in increasing poor health, his involvement in Parliament, the East India and Somers Companies (and others) did not result in his achieving sufficient Virginia Company membership-investor support. In any event, after 1622, and the reports about the Indian Massacre, the Virginia Company was fragmented, probably beyond repair, torn by administrative investigations, a scandal involving Sandys and his closest allies over profiting from a tobacco monopoly, and the King’s own poor health that all combined with the latter stripping the Virginia Company of its charter in 1624-5. After 1623, whatever control the Virginia Company had in Virginia was through Governor Yeardley–and we shall later see, he was not without his mixed agendas.
Where in all this does the reader see Virginia and colony-building?
That is the point! Colony-building is at best secondary and inconsistent in its application. Whatever the Greate Charter promised, it was composed and led by local Company officials and wealthy plantation landowners elected from their hundred’s electoral district. It was an oligarchy, and a local one, not Company one. A Company at war against itself cannot long stand, and, as we shall see Sandys golden era lasted into 1621-2. From 1622 on, Virginia is drifting very much under its own dynamics–and that won’t really change until around 1629-30, or if one prefers, the more accurate, 1642. London had lost control over the day-to-day goings on in Virginia during this period. Instead, Virginia was riding the rapids of her own internal dynamics, left largely unchecked by the Company, colonial policy, or the King’s will.
The drivers of change, discussed below, ultimately were the aggregate of individual actions and decisions to which the key institutions and Company leaders would react and manage to the best they could. Sometimes the leadership would try to get ahead of events, but more often than not it responded to activists and leaders drawn from the plantations and hundreds–who, BTW, were usually the same as those in the provincial assembly–and even Yeardley the deputy governor.
Resident Company officials represented three tension-filled perspectives: the Virginia Company, the Provincial Assembly and its Executive, and their ownership of individual plantations and leadership of the hundred of which they were the dominant political force. Quickly a gap between London and Jamestown became evident–and to close that gap Sandys sent over his poet brother, George to assume a major role in provincial government (1621, along with a new Deputy Governor, Francis Wyatt–married in turn to George’s niece. George left town in 1626, returning to his travels and poetry, after the charter termination.
Drivers of Change
Thus, at this point we must turn our attention to making clear to the reader what those Virginia dynamics were because they were the driving forces behind Virginia’s politics, economics, society development, and that drove the colony’s reaction to the Native Americans. Using economic development as a filter, although not an exclusive one, I assert the following dynamic drove Virginia’s post 1622 policy agenda, and in their unconscious, largely unplanned, almost pin-ball like interaction, “installed” and “shaped” the respective institutions and actors, not to exclude, the geographic pattern of Tidewater settlement that resulted in the decades of their ascendancy.
The chief drivers are:
(1) the emergence of Virginia’s sub-state/provincial policy and jurisdictional system, and the nature of the relationship between local and provincial government. Central to this would be the role played by plantation elites in this new founded provincial government–and the ambivalent role played by its governor. The perhaps key sub driver in this structural development was “defense” policy against the Indians, which compelled Jamestown to empower locals in their survival efforts, and to respond to almost existential needs of that level of government.
the Second and later 3rd Powhatan Wars were a barbell for the displacement of the Powhatan Indians from the Tidewater. The settling of the Tidewater region of Virginia occurred during his period through 1640, and during that time the bulk of the so-called First Migration was to occur. As we shall see, the First Migration did not establish a permanent resident elite, but led by former Company officials, it did firmly cement the key institutions, relationships, and economic base of future Virginia, on which a distinctive political culture will develop, in and around, the early eighteenth century.
More than any other force, save self-sufficiency perhaps, this compelled its Indian policy, which paved the path of its geographic settlement of the Tidewater, installing innumerable tobacco plantations along the way. Over several decades, defense policy–and tobacco export and reaction to the Maryland colony in the 1630’s–interwove the strands of local-state policy-making into a more hardened view of the purposes and role of each level. This, I argue, created a distinct and durable tilt of Virginia government to its local level, and resulted in ‘bottoms-up” policy bias.
Weak provincial government did little more than make the King’s post-Company royal governor weaker and checked, or substituted a local resident governor who had previously resisted his royal governor. Charles II, drifting merrily into his Civil War, was a mostly absent father to his colony and his post-Company absence largely left Virginia’s power structure by default in the hands of former Company officials who had enjoyed first advantage in the glorious and expanding tobacco economy and ownership of its largest plantations to dominate the politics and the institutions of provincial governance in the First Migration period.
(2) The decentralized bias/tilt within Virginia’s policy system empowered sub-provincial actors, mostly large local private elites, who owned the largest plantations in the hundred (the election district for the Assembly) controlled, not merely dominated, both the local economic base and its associated governance (local judiciary, church, militia, local export function, and provincial representation). In essence, the character and nature of Virginia’s local level and its governance, as well as local society and economy were left in the hands of a newly created class of large plantation owners, whose background and reference point, if not legitimacy was drawn from their memory of the English manor and royalist-parliamentary politics of the period.
Brimming with fairly extreme inequality between themselves, their indentured servants, subsistence level former indentured servants–and the dependence of new immigrant freeholders/artisans/ professionals on their beneficence, these First Migration elites, almost like feudal lords, imparted an oligarchical fabric to local policy-making and governance. While the great plantations, with distinctive architectural manor house, and great social status–and black slaves was still seventy-five years in the future, it was these First Migration elites that poured their foundations, and supplied the legitimacy that enabled future Virginia elites to replicate and expand upon their pioneering models of inequality and tobacco production.
(3) As “they” say “its the economy stupid’ or “follow the money”, the third dynamic, in many ways the most complicated and subtle, but incredibly central to the evolution of England’s Commercial Revolution–the precondition to its Industrialization- that provided the flow of monies, the venture capital, the export factor financing, and the balance of payments between import and export, evolved out of this First Migration tobacco economy.
The more dramatic period for this development dynamics will follow the termination of the Company’s charter, but the futile, but in some ways brilliant company initiatives launched by Dale and Sandys and swept into the Greate Charter, established the colony’s first settlement and economic development strategy paradigm. Enjoying only the barest modicum of success in this period, headright, land sales and tobacco as the basis of Virginia economic transactions functioned well enough to staff its workforce, feed (when combined with stealing Indian corn) the incredibly small local population, and provide sufficient profits and incentives to expand settlement throughout the Tidewater, and carve a niche in international tobacco markets that severed future plantation elites well.
If Investors-Shareholders Can’t Get a Dividend, Give them land and let them settle on their own dime
The tobacco monoculture rested on a shredded, isolated but stable local policy system, which served the needs of the landed tobacco elite that either developed its own export-finance/logistics, or sold to the Company “magazine” and cape merchant. London-based Virginia Company shareholder-investors, discouraged over the lack of Company dividend, saw the Sandys-Dale reforms and incentive package as a potential path to bypass the Company monopoly, and set up their own private plantation-venture.
No latter than 1616, when the knowledge of no future dividends had permeated into the Company shareholders, the company extended to them the right to acquire plots of land at a rate of 100 acres a share “to develop as they wished“. The dividend was in the form of land, if the investor wanted to take the risk himself. That was unevenly welcomed by its socially diverse investor community. After 1616 the Company, still needing revenue badly, opened up its incentive program to “new” investors (who had to purchase as little as a single share) and that created an interesting, and well-connected new crop of shareholders (see below) that also set up an association joint stock corporation to both establish their own private plantation, and to sell off smaller parcels to other settlers less affluent, but certainly as adventurous.
By 1617-18, internal company politics came to a head and Smythe abandoned his CEO role in Jamestown (retaining through subordinates control of the Magazine) in favor of CEO of the Bermuda colony. Sandys took over. From this the reader might appreciate that the pivot to permanent settlement never went without very serious stress and division that weakened the Company’s day-to-day implementation of initiatives and again allowed the resident company officials to figure out their own path to implement company policies–while not neglecting their own path to personal profit.
Those more drawn to the quick profits of privateering and trading factories–generally the noble and upper classes– were not about to go tramping around in Virginia planting tobacco. When offered the opportunity after 1616, few nobles or well-connected took advantage of it. The merchants, artisan and middling gentry, however, saw in the land incentive an opportunity for the second sons–and even daughters. The latter were willing to send their offspring to Virginia to seize what advantage they could glean from the tobacco boom.
By last years of the decade a small but steady stream of their sons and even daughters emigrated to Virginia, took advantage of the company headright package, and started their Virginia careers in tobacco, artisan craft, or other types of business, including forming their own joint stock corporation and becoming part of Virginia’s budding travel-indenture-logistics-settlement industry complex.
Insiders of the Company in key positions also realized they too must invest their own funds in ventures they were willing to make only if they themselves controlled the venture privately. Since the only asset the company had at its disposal was its vast company owned and controlled lands, land grants, and what would shortly be called the “headright system” were issued to the top London-based land resident investor leadership. They received plots of land on which they could found their own private plantation. “These plots constituted the first productive area that the company allowed to fall outside its own direct control“.
By 1617 these, well-connected nobles or individuals with connects to the highest positions received their land grants in the form of a “hundred”, an exceedingly large area, which they were encouraged to settle, found settlements, and sell plantations and plots of land to whomever they choose. The workforce imported were “their” workers, not Company, and the freeholders, often renters, were also subject to their authority. To handle the inevitable administration of these geographies, the Governor and his Council, or the Assembly empowered these hundred-plantation grantee-owners administrative and legal powers over their servants and renters, beginning the tradition of the power of the larger plantation owners over their local districts.
As a result of [its] land policy after 1614, settlements were widely scattered, and there was much confusion over land titles. The colony’s economic foundations were as shaky as ever, and the colonists grew more restive when in 1616 [Governor] Samuel Argall returned the colony to the strict discipline in Sir Thomas Dale’s “Lawes”. In London the situation was little better for the company verged on bankruptcy. [99] “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History 0f Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, pp. 10-11
At the same time (see Dale’s Gift below) a series of Hundreds were created and within them still more private plantations were granted. The first of these of which we have record (Smith’s Hundred-1617. Smythe’s Hundred in 1617 was the first–owned by Smythe and Sandys ally, the Earl of Southampton, it “encompassed nearly 80,000 acres in abandoned tribal lands along the Chickahominy River”; it was followed by Martin’s Hundred (1618), Berkeley’s H, Flowerdew (dieu) (Yeardley’s) Hundred, and Martin’s Brandon (1617, 7,000 acres) Hundred (whose father was the Lord Mayor of London) which proved infamous due to its imprecise and expansive powers conferred to its owners. In 1620, a grant was even conferred to the famous Pilgrims of Plymouth England, who for their reasons to be discussed in the next chapter, founded a colony on Cape Cod Massachusetts [99] Grizzard Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown Colony, p. xliv. Between 1619 and 1623 forty four of these patents were issued [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 130-1.
This would be the real beginning of the James River Tobacco Ally.
Further diminishment of company management’s monopoly over land and tobacco export resulted from the workings of the new gentry entrepreneurs whose ventures, usually supported in some way by the families of the company investors, proceeded along paths they perceived as more lucrative and opportunistic, tobacco, trading, and even merchant-professional (surveyors, artisans). All of this coincided with the Company’s self-sufficiency program, on which dependence on the Company-paid supply ships could be dramatically reduced. Settlers and investors were hopefully motivated to pay their own costs of transport, and through a land/workforce quitrent incentive start up a plantation or business on their own dime, through self-initiative–outside the purview of the company monopoly.
“Individual entrepreneurs, operating through a variety of partnership forms, now took over responsibility for colonial growth, and they devoted themselves with increasing intensity to one engrossing task: the production of tobacco for export to England” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003), p. 95. With this change of economic development strategies, the forces on the ground in Virginia were increasingly becoming the tail wagged by the London Company investor–dog.
In no time at all, it was apparent this settlement strategy could work. “The population jumped from 400 in 1618 to 1,000 in 1619. Hundreds of other settlers followed. Quickly plantation villages sprang up along the James” Grizzard Jr and Boyd Smith, Jamestown: a Colony, p. slv.
With the company shareholders divided, several led efforts to overthrow its leadership. The inclusion of Bermuda into the Virginia Company pie also injected a huge battle between the Company Smythe faction and the Earl of Warwick’s privateer followers–a battle that spilled over into Jamestown and even divided the resident Company leaders as well (Governor Argall). In this mid-decade period the London elite began to loose Virginia site-control, and its permanent settlement strategy was buffeted about by the contending factions.
Whatever the tumult between Smythe and Sandys back in London, both saw an opportunity, and simultaneously, with receipts of reports about Argall, knew they had to take action. Smythe, in his last days of Treasurer and Sandys–and Governor de la Warre fabricated a major reform initiative, more of a list of things to do than formal plan of action, and empowered West to head back to Virginia and take charge of its implementation.
Warre on the way over, got sick and died en route. The ship headed back to London, when Smythe and Sandys got behind former Acting Governor Yeardley, got the King to knight him, gave his de la Warre’s old instruction-reform list, and sent him to Virginia to fire Argall and begin implementation.
By April-May 1619, Yeardley was back, Argall had “escaped”, and Yeardley began implementation of the Greate Charter.
Two Concluding Observations: the Association Joint Stock Corporation, and, Tobacco as a Cluster
the Association Joint Stock Corporation: the EDO of Virginia’s settlement
The structural reform we next turn to discuss is the Company’s use of a distinctive form of the joint stock corporation to promote Virginia economic development: the association. First employed as early as 1614, association joint stock corporations took off after 1616. Argall, as deputy governor took advantage of using an association for his own payment as deputy governor, and he let other investors take advantage also. By the time Yeardley started implementing the Create Charter instructions in 1619, the Virginia landscape was littered with association-hundreds, and subsidiary plantation level associations. The use of associations did not cease in the following decades, and their popularity ought be explained.
The association joint stock corporation was the EDO that the Virginia Company allowed to be used as a legitimate bypass of the Company’s near monopolistic economic control, first by its investors, and then to those who agreed to send over settlers, and establish plantations in the Company Hundreds set up along the James River and its tributaries. Through the association English investors could engage in their own plantation building independent of the Company. Predictably the path to profit was in tobacco, not corn or staples, and so the plantations they founded spread the tobacco monoculture through the Tidewater region-stopping only at the James River Falls that marked the boundary of the future Piedmont mountains-plateau region.
The association through the Company headright incentive program could import its own workforce, and establish its own autonomous position in the economy and politics of its local unit, the Hundred. Called at the time “a colony within a colony”, these “plantation-hundreds” in essence created a sovereignty-independence of action of their investors-plantation owners that buttressed their fortunes in the hard times that followed, and permitted their entry into the wider politics and policy making at the provincial level through the Assembly-the one place they all came together. In the 1630’s these hundreds were transformed into counties–and then their salience to us becomes more obvious. Until then, the hundreds ruled, and Jamestown and Company governance had to work through them, and respond to their needs.
We have already explained the desperate fiscal situation in which the Company found itself, but as important a motivation for use of the association by the Company was that it worked as a “too” or strategy to bring badly needed settlers into Virginia. After nearly a decade and a half, the colony was still tied to Jamestown and its deathly surroundings, with Dale’s dispersion on in process. The colony simply had not be able to increase its population, and with the headright for indentured servants, and the land grants and quit rate abatement for owners, groupings of new settlers tied to new locations along the James offered the potential of avoiding or lessening the impact of the annual “summer sickness”, and reducing mortality.
Andrews, Vol. 1, pp. 127-8 [99] argues this link to new settlement formation and population increase made the headright a useful economic development tool: “It was realized, as early as 1617-1619 that a variety of ways would have to be contrived to enlarge the population, and to increase the agricultural output. Among these aids were the subsidiary joint stocks [associations] or private ventures of one kind or another that were set up under the auspices of the company [most of all] … the encouraging of small groups or associations of men, organized on a joint stock basis, to settle particular plantations or private colonies within the boundaries of the company’s patent [charter]. These associates were to provide tenants, servants, and equipment from their own resources, and to engage in agriculture, Indian trade or fishing.
Smythe and Sandys knew that be establishing particular and private enterprises, they had also changed the lines of political authority. No longer did the Governor have complete control over the colony’s labor force. Each association ran its particular plantation, and the private planters controlled their own land. Furthermore, the Londoners [Company management] blurred distinctions between company officials and private planters by … [allowing] men who had personal stakes in Virginia rather than men who intended to make their personal fortunes and return home [to England].
For instance, Yeardley as governor, was responsible for supervising company lands and the cape merchant, but he also managed Smythe’s hundred and Weyanoke, developed the governor’s [public] lands for his salary, and established a large personal plantation, Flowerdew Hundred, as a long-term investment. Not surprisingly these officers had a tendency to look out for their personal interests before meeting their obligations to the company. [99] Grizzard, Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown: a Colony, p. slv
Andrews asserted these grants and contracts made to the associations, especially the early ones, extended governmental powers to the owners, almost as “housekeeping” in function, to keep order in new settlements where the colony’s provincial government had little to no capacity with which to maintain order and sustainability in an isolated wilderness, often hostile wilderness–so long as the actions taken under the terms of the contract did not violate the “laws of England”. In his mind they were intended only as temporary, and in that the association owners would remain in England, they would be able to supervise their Virginia colonies appropriately:
[P]owers ranted, according to the form of patent drawn up in 1620, were almost those of an independent colony. The [Virginia] company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who should ‘go to Virginia to inhabit ‘by vertue of their Graunts’ and should ‘plant themselves, their tenants and servants’ might have liberty ‘til a form of government is here settled over them’ to make orders, ordinances and constitutions ‘associatinge unto them divers of the greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and businesses, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England
The idea of these colonies pf ‘hundreds’ … was not so much to help the company on the commercial side as to replenish the colonial population in as short a time as possible with good multitudes of people’. The societies themselves remained in England, directing each particular ‘colony’ from a distance, just as the [Virginia] company itself was doing.
[99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 128-30
From this period of special plantation land grant patents, areas today that are referred to as “hundreds” we can see the earliest manifestation of a Virginia pattern of decentralization in government and the economy—and their privatization of government, indeed its fusion, handled and conducted by private elites. To my best knowledge Virginia’s first plantation, in 1613, was the “Shirley Plantation”. Located along the James, upriver from Jamestown, it was cleared for operation in 1614—and planted tobacco. [999]
Tobacco as a Colonial Cluster–
So finally having focused on the need for self-sufficiency, a permanent settlement in a colony whose purpose was to benefit England, the Virginia Company simply needed to create an economic base that supported those goals and ends. That, one might suspect, proved easier to say than do. What however, is so remarkable about Virginia’s future economic base is that it fell into place so fast and furiously that the Company never had control over it, and that economic base, tobacco plantation export, became the economic base that ate the Colony. Ironically, if anything, it accelerated the termination of the Company’s charter.
Is tobacco going to become the first “homegrown” cluster developed within the thirteen colonies? Guess so. Nothing that had been done in Jamestown previous to that date comes remotely close to an agglomeration or cluster. Speaking of which, just what is an agglomeration or a cluster as we utilize the terms in this introduction to economic base.
Keeping in mind we will expand upon these concepts as the chapters flow, but for this module, we simply posit an agglomeration is the geographic concentration of a particular industry important to the relevant economic base, while a cluster is a nexus of relevant and related industries/sectors that in aggregate produce related package of goods and services, including jobs and income, to the benefit of a relevant economic base.
An agglomeration is a geographic concentration of one industry or sector, while a cluster includes several industries-sectors working in tangent to create a group of end-products important in scale and impact on the economic base of the community under discussion. As a reminder, an agricultural economic base does have its agglomerations and clusters—although the concepts today usually refer to non-agricultural sectors and industries.
I consider tobacco production in Virginia as a cluster because in my opinion its use throughout the colony was so pervasive it did not enjoy a particular geographic concentration—and more importantly, it was evident from the beginning that tobacco production was hopelessly tied to its workforce, and the industries/sectors that would export it to Virginia. If one included the economy of the plantation which was the cluster’s chief production unit than those plantations of sufficient scale, in pre-1700 Virginia, could suffice for a small municipality and its hinterland congruent with a county. Again the caveat is that the population numbers are very small, and size in this period are a remarkably few acres. The mansions came after 1700, along with the fields of slaves.
Tobacco’s “Venture Capital”— As will be evident in this module, from its inception, the tobacco cluster was a public-private partnership, between Crown, the Virginia Company, the government of the province of Virginia, and the host of voluntary private voluntary joint stock corporations/individual homesteads. We strongly suspect the rapid spread of the tobacco culture after 1614 was fueled by Virginia’s few elites, and picked up by hook, or more likely crook, by the few landholding homesteads set up by Dale’s previously described land reforms.
It will be evident English private capital was the primary source of private venture capital. It will also be very evident that the spread of the tobacco economic base into the Virginia hinterland was very dependent upon access to rivers (to export end product), and required a serious and constant infusion of a suitable workforce. It also required passable relations with adjacent Indian tribes. Early plantations and homesteads were extremely vulnerable, major-league isolated, and rudimentary in scale and structures. Life was hard, even for elites. Subsistence comes to mind for this period.
Ron W. Coan 