Prologue
Let’s get to the point early. There is much at stake in this module.
At stake in the module is its discussion of events, programmatic initiatives and development dynamics that will significantly shape (1) the future Virginia sub-state/provincial policy and jurisdictional system; (2) resulting in a decentralized bias/tilt within Virginia’s policy system, empowering the sub-provincial level that rested on local private elites, who controlled, not merely dominated, both the local economic base and its associated governance (church and state); (3) in so doing, when combined with the tobacco monoculture, created a “shredded” provincial policy system composed of many small, but also powerful larger plantations, that inhibited the creation of larger towns and cities, including a competitive port city for export. Colonial Virginia never developed a large city–which was unique to the other colonies;
Underlying these dynamics was the establishment of an economic base, centered on dispersed and constantly expanding tobacco plantations (both large and homestead-subsistence) that exported their annual production to England, and in so doing linked their investment and export-financing to English investors and factors, a relationship that over time not only chained the Virginian economy, but put at financial risk the plantation and their owners.
In short, I argue that in the twelve years that followed its third charter revision by King James, the London-based Virginia Company set in motion the structures, elites, economic base, and, as we shall see the political institutions that became central to the Virginia colonial experience. These structures and institutions, as they evolved, were imported into America’s First Republic the Articles of Confederation, and then incorporated in the Second, Early Republic. This module that lays the foundation for our defense of that assertion.
Through the remainder of this module series, I interweave two distinct perspectives: the “big picture” and the “on the ground” perspective. Each has their merits and limitations. In this module I start with the introduction of the “big picture”. In the next three modules that follow, I discuss what happened “on the ground” in Virginia. Then I return to the “Fall of the Company” which updates the “big picture” and then outlines the key factors and dynamics that constituted some of the “big picture” for the administration of Charles I up to the Civil War in 1642. From there we will begin another module series that concentrates on that period.
The Big Picture
To understand how Virginia got off to its rather horrible start we necessarily ought remind the reader, it was, by definition of its being a colony of England (English), a colony of England. What happened in England mattered! Virginia’s story is not the founding of the first colony in what was to become the greatest democacy in the world, the most “exceptional of nations”; the real story is you can’t ignore what was going on in England—the sovereign of the American colonies. Sorry Americans, the English North American wilderness is not yet American. When Virginia started there wasn’t even thirteen colonies—they were the first!
At certain points the colony, the tail, did wag the dog (the mother country), but for the most part it was the reverse. Still, it’s hard to imagine that if one watches a movie about Queen Elizabeth or Mary Queen of Scots, one is clumsily glimpsing into the time period in which the English began to settle the first of its future thirteen colonies. We go that far back! Don’t forget, Elizabeth’s father is Henry VIII, a major leader in the Protestant Reformation..
Elizabeth subcontracted his colony development and mercantilist trade, to the English “merchant and military” communities who joined forces in particular joint stock corporations like out Virginia Company. That set the stage for a private company to lead and manage Virginia’s first North American colony.
It was Elizabeth who developed a first draft of England’s colonial ambitions, and forged the first draft on how those ambitions were to be achieved. It became the paradigm of Tudor-Stuart colonialization and colony-building when James I inherited it when she died in 1603. Remember James is not her son (Mom was Mary Queen of Scots); Elizabeth was a virgin (hence Virginia’s name), and James was the King of Scotland when he became King of England. England under his rule was becoming Britain and would become the United Kingdom about a hundred years later.
In between England experienced a Civil War, a military dictatorship, a Restoration of the Stuarts, and finally the Glorious Revolution when Parliament fired the last Stuart King, and hired a new Hannoverian Queen-King. Get the message: Virginia developed as a colony, in the midst of what was England’s most turbulent century since William the Conqueror. If England matters, then Virginia’s timing was a bit off; stability might have yielded a better heritage.
Not only was England calling the Virginia “shots”, but England was periodically changing its mind who was making its decisions—between 1640 and 1661 alone there were at minimum four English CEOs. How can we ignore the impact on Virginia’s development of this political game of musical chairs. Pennsylvania founded at the end of this turbulence, missed most of it.
Colonialization by a Private Corporation: Joint Stock Corporation
Virginia received a proprietary charter from James I. The charter was awarded to an early form of English business organization: the joint stock corporation—explained in an earlier module. While there would be more proprietary charters in the future of English North American settlement, Virginia would be the only one that was a pure joint stock corporation (we will explain Massachusetts, an offshoot of the London-Virginia Corporation, in the next chapter).
The bottom line is that the Virginia Company will fail at colonialization—that is the obvious story in the Jamestown module series. Why it failed, however is very complicated. It could have failed, as many assert, because it followed the wrong set of strategies for a permanent settlement. It also could have failed because London and Crown politics, their political agenda, killed it, almost at birth. The Virginia Company was fortunate: both assertions are correct.
The first assertion is more complex and takes several modules to detail it, but the second assertion is handled in the next module. The second assertion, that the Virginia Company was a fiscal zombie by 1612 or so, will be discussed in the next module. Insight: if you want the best single reason-explanation of why the Virginia Company failed, and why it left a flawed legacy in building the Virginia colony, is found in the second module. It is the second module that explains why the Virginia Company developed our “Fifth Dynamic” (see below). As to why the second module is not the first, it is because the two assertions coexisted from the beginning of the Company and the first assertion explains the horrible failure of the initial settlement best.
This module attempts to set the context and provide the reader a road map of what lies ahead. I call it “the Big Picture” and it details two background, but hugely important sets of dynamics that drove policy-making within the Virginia joint stock Corporation. In particular, I show how the fiscal condition of the Virginia Company forced it to convert from, and redefine the original colonization strategy it adopted in its initial formation, and initial charter in 1606.
Deviation from the Plantation and Trading Factory Strategies
From the beginning the Virginia Company deviated from the plantation strategy Elizabethan paradigm. The Company pursued a corporate-led hybrid strategy in which it sort of combined a “trading factory”, a trading output as had been embraced by the British East India Company, but its intentions were always to set up a permanent settlement and engage in long-term colony-building.
Because the Virginia Company was the first English company to attempt the latter in the seventeenth century, it had no clear idea how the two could be combined. The unknown reality was they couldn’t; they were zero sum. I am not sure that lesson was ever learned by the Virginia Company. The horrible mess that resulted in its first Maine experiment, followed by the disaster that was Jamestown, forced a pivot to a better settlement strategy away from its trading factorty approach. What they didn’t realize was that the redefined strategy set the stage for Virginia developing an export monoculture (domination of one export product) economic base. The tobacco monoculture, or some other single crop export, followed.
That this created an Virginia economic base whose residues (tobacco and cigaretts) still characterizes Virginia as I write this module. In other words, that post 1611 strategy’s heritage is still around today. It’s not an interesting story; its just an important one. There is nothing more permanent than the temporary as we shall learn.
The problem was, however, the original 1606 investors (and that included its management) did not sign on to create a permanent settlement. The restrictive terms of the bond prospectus that underlined their conception of the colony were very restrictive and oriented to a more traditional trading factory colony. Expectations of profit and payback were based on that strategy. The pivot to permanent settlement, understood as necessary by most of its management, was much less accepted by its general investor shareholders. From 1612 on, the Virginia Company was very much engage in a “great civil war’ testing whether that company could long endure”. It did not, and its charter was revoked in 1624.
That civil war within a joint stock corporation, conducted over a decade, heavily impacted the development, and, as we shall later see, the planting and early growth of the Virginia twig, and those impacts persisted in their influence for well over a half century that followed the fall of the Company. That permitted those influences to harden into a distinct bend in the twig, a bend that stayed with Virginia and are evident even today.
The seventeenth century created a very profound legacy to which other subsequent periods of history had to adapt. To understand the dynamic effects of a joint stock corporation under attack for changes in goals of its investors, we have collapsed it into a concept, labeled the Fifth Dynamic, a dynamic that continued through to the Fall of the Company in 1624.
The Fifth Dynamic
The Fifth Dynamic is the evolution of the Virginia Company during this period as internal affairs affected its management of the colony, change to permanent settlement strategy, and the effects it had on that strategy. During the period after 1612 the English investors of the Virginia Company, unsure and even confused by the pivot away from a trading factory to a permanent settlement, were an unstable base upon which to run a colony. The Company’s elite leadership soon became isolated from its relatively large number of investors–at a time it needed new and greatly increased investment which would not, could not, pay dividends or financial rewards corresponding to the (Asian) trading factory.
The Company’s business plan had been completely restructured, and bluntly its investor membership was not on board. Restive during this period, the Company had to respond to their demands, and since the Company elite leadership were investors themselves–the ones who individually put their own investment at risk–they too had motivations that were not entirely in line with the company’s new direction.
They had signed on in 1606 to a trading company, and now after a horrible experience in Virginia, they were venturing into new ground without relevant experience or a useful model to follow. Even its most prominent CEO, Sir Thomas Smyth, was not willing to give up his day job–as CEO of the East Indies Trading Company to venture it all on a permanent settlement. He turned over much of the tasks and planning to his deputy, Sir Edwin Sandys.
The immediate need was new financial resources to support the development of a permanent colony–without which it was obvious to all the company would lose its colony and face a reality that it too would be in the long line of failed English North American colonial efforts. The issue of whether one wanted to trust the Company to manage the risks involved in the permanent settlement strategy, or to find other ways and vehicles was a question that hit the Virginia Company as early as 1612-3.
From this point on the London Company elite faced a questioning, increasingly venture some investor membership; its Annual Meeting became a battleground of contesting investors, and its initial recourse to financing by English municipal lotteries, quite controversial and against the King’s grain. In England, the Company management then was under attack internally and politically.
This dynamic informed every decision the company made after 1612, and eventually led to the King terminating the Company Charter–and its role in the Virginia–in 1624-5. The pressures felt by the Virginia Company during these years are critical to understanding the limitations of a joint stock company engaged in a colonial venture, but also how and why elements of British colonial policy were developed–and imposed on the other English colonies. The Virginia Company was England’s first successful public-private venture into North America, and the eventual repudiation of its charter was a learning experience for all.
The consequences of that experience, however. were fundamental to the installation of a Virginian economic base and policy system, and would leave a lasting heritage on its social structure that lingers to the present day. Reminding our readers of our primeval question posed at the beginning of the history (why are states different?) this module makes more concrete why Virginia plays an important role in our history, but why it embarks on a singular path.
The “big picture” in the Virginia Company’s role in colonization shifted during this period through the fall of the company in 1624. We therefore need to understand what was going on internally, and further recognize that this internal change was directly linked to serious and fundamental dynamics in Virginia.
the Big Picture Merges With the Fifth Dynamic
Like all truly transformative dynamics, this one snuggled into the background of Virginia policy-making, buried so deeply that its outlines, motivations, and consequences seem the work of other factors. A transformative dynamic’s chief claim to fame lies in its imperceptible ability to create or reposition other dynamics to adjust to its purposes–embedding itself so deep in the change process that it is hardly noticed. Hidden in plain sight is what I call it. So hidden, we need to examine it closely before we touch upon the actual events in Jamestown.
Bluntly our fifth dynamic (the pivot of London investors away from the Virginia Company) fostered the creation of an American elite that became the cutting edge of Virginia settlement and expansion. That Virginia elite, bound to London investors, and linked to England and its traditions/social values, simultaneously set in motion a desire for autonomy in pursuit of private wealth, but over time, self-governance as well.
Oh yes, certainly there were other consequences, important ones, that configured Virginia’s economic base and its export focus. And then there was its planting another seed that led to representative democracy. If this period isn’t the poster child for the saying “follow the money stupid”, it’s up there in contention. English investment that commenced in this period was fundamental to the evolution of Virginia, economically, politically, and socially.
Almost all of this started in the 1613-1623 period which are the principal topic of discussion in this module. Almost all of the motivation and initiatives that emanated from the London-based Virginia Company were based on the fiscal instability of its pivot to permanent settlement away from trading factories–and the queasiness of its investors. The focus of this module is to describe the initiatives launched in Virginia by the Company were intended to raise revenues to support a permanent colony, and were implemented by their Governor/Deputy Governor (in Virginia) faithfully.
Sandys gets a lot of credit for these initiatives, but I also suggest Governor Thomas Dale was their principal author. Still after the horrible first five years, 1612 and immediately after has to reflect a compelling need to keep the venture, obviously on the edge of collapse, going and simultaneously to repurpose the colonial venture to more realistic goals. But one weakness will become evident in this years: the role of top and resident company management, likely unconsciously, did focus on the company’s plans, but they did so by carving out for themselves a private “opportunity” that as it played out, ran counter to the company’s objectives, and in particular became the jumpstart of the tobacco monoculture.
From 1613 on, the Virginia Company resident investors, usually the key on-site leadership of the resident community, pressed by multiple needs, actually began the disinvestment process from the Company. They made grants to themselves of company-owned lands, and set up, in relatively short order, tobacco plantations and other crops/activities as well.
No secret, other investors wanted in on the action, and so the company adjusted by attempting to control the production of crops and sale/export of tobacco. The “Magazine”, I call it the “company store”, was the device, and through its profits and proceeds the company hoped to fund its internal investment program. Its Treasurer, Thomas Smythe no less, was willing to (and did) surrender his CEO position so long as he could control the affairs of this economic development entity. It didn’t work out all that well, however. More on that shortly.
When we examine what motivated the Company to move as it did in the post 1613 period, we sense that its London-based elite, separated by thousands of miles of ocean, and removed from the privations of Virginia, approached governance in this period more abstractly, focused primarily on its fiscal situation and its unstable investment community. The desperate situation in which the Company found itself, as it settled in to adjust to its third royal charter in six years (1612), and after the company had finally paid off/retired its initial 1607-8 debt, whose restrictive debt terms bound the Company to the world of trading factories gave it an opportunity to rethink its grand plan to get out of this mess. It did so incrementally, and seemingly was very sensitive to the input of its resident Virginia leadership.
As the company realized its need to improvise, to delay quick payments of dividends, and its need for an unknown amount of additional financing necessary to establish a permanent self-sustaining economic base, it also set up an internal debate on how to best develop a suitable ED strategy to install its colony permanently in the North America wilderness.
The problem was this resident leadership were also investors, and it fell on them to not only carry out company plans, but to secure their own investment. The key to that, most felt, was to find a crop, a mineral, furs, or some manufactured good to export and sell in England. From the profits of sale one could pay the bills, provide for some of the inevitable infrastructure a permanent settlement would entail, and most importantly bring critical resources and funds available to address the self-sufficiency problem-strategy. Oh yes, one could pay dividends to investors also–which, BTW, would probably attract new investors. What was this crop/mineral/good to be was not evident in 1612. It was evident by 1614-16. It was tobacco.
The Wild Card: Tobacco
In this internal policy-making the Company’s shareholder-membership Annual Meeting and the decisions of its Executive Board were where the action was—not in Jamestown. From 1613 on the company, principally its leadership, groped and experimented for solutions, only to discover each initiative would dilute its authority not only in the Annual Meeting, but in Virginia settlement. That, however, was not known or fully appreciated. One might remember the innovation that would finally come to Virginia’s rescue–tobacco–was still on the drawing board. Rolfe in 1609 was still in England; he left that year with his seeds and plants. At the time of the charter revisions and the pivot to permanent settlement, the magic of tobacco was still in the magicians bag. His first experiments, in very small volume, only entered into the equation after 1613-14.
Worse perhaps was that no one could anticipate the drawbacks to an economy almost monopolized by tobacco export. In this period it became evident that tobacco exhausted the soil fertility and hence its productivity and profit. In a handful of production years, less than five for marginal fields, new fields had to be found and cleared. That made tobacco export a “mobile” economic base which constantly needed new areas to be settled–as the Powhatan’s would soon realize. What they could not really have known was that tobacco consumed the politics of Virginia, its drive for land and workforce. Could any have guessed at the “tobacco boom”, the agricultural gold rush that was to follow during these years?
When Rolfe’s tobacco became available after 1613, it immediately became the Virginia Company’s Holy Grail export crop. The Company elite recognized its potential as the crop that could pay its bills and yield dividends for its investors. Resident company elites (of which Rolfe was one) started clearing land received from “Dale’s Gift”, and were ready to ship when Rolfe’s tobacco became the hit of English smokers. The Company paid the resident company officials with land, and extended to that the use of company indentured servants. The first private plantation established in was the Shirley Plantation, in 1613, with the plantation named after the new wife of the then governor, Baron De la Warr–Thomas West. After West other resident company elites, key settlers, close friends and family got their Dale’s Gift land for their services to the company.
It wasn’t very long before an early version of the soon-to-be headright strategy was extended to fellow company investors in England so they too could directly enter into their own private tobacco production. In these very early years the few acres of tobacco planted by company officials or those close to them, jump-started the tobacco cluster from Rolfe’s seeds. With an indentured servant labor force, supplemented as we shall see with Dale’s recruitment of former servants as a supplement. With Rolfe’s (and Pocahontas’s) success in England’s social and elite circles (1616), and the success in selling the product off the pier, the green light for plantations and tobacco production/export diffused quickly within the Company and its shareholders.
n 1613 the unknown factor was John Rolfe’s tobacco. Rolfe, a brother of a Virginia Company investor, began his seed experiments in 1611, and sent his first batch off to market in 1613. Tobacco quickly, very quickly, became the gazelle of the Virginia economic base, its only gazelle. That gazelle fostered investment in tobacco plantations. That meant dispersal of elites, servants, and new entrants away from Jamestown to other locations on the James River. The reader should assume that the Powhatans and other tribes noticed the dispersal, and immediately felt its ill effects.
To provide some level of organization to the dispersal, Dale created several Hundreds, an ill-defined, amorphous set of boundaries, little more than a line on a map, that recalled an older traditional English frontier administrative unit called the Hundreds. To Brenner, the underlying intent “was to revive production on the company’s own lands (the estate of the publique” [company-owned lands], and sent over large groups of colonists to provide the labor force for this purpose“[99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003), p. 95 .
Using this device “a number of stockholders would combine their company shares, receive as dividends substantial grants of land (called ‘hundreds or plantations), over which they were given limited governmental powers, and attempt to develop them from England, at their own expense as small private colonies” [99] W. F. Craven , the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (University of Louisiana Press, 1949), pp. 120-3 and as part of Robert Brenner’s commentary, pp. 95-6
These Hundreds will figure prominently in future modules, but for the moment, whatever else they were or turned out to be, they were yet another effort by the company leadership to attract investment into the company, by themselves or by new investors. In 1618, one more, this time a huge comprehensive economic and political initiative, the Greate Charter was announced and implemented over the following years. If so this initiative was much less an exercise in democracy and the willingness to allow local self-governance, than one more trick up Sandys sleeve to keep the company afloat. Turning Dicken’s on his head: “there is more grave than gravy” in this most illustrious of company initiatives.
During the decade of the teens, the Hundreds were little more than a free trade zone for the establishment of plantation-joint stock companies that invested in the sub-provincial hinterland and diffused “ancient settlers” and new immigrants into Indian held hinterlands to clear fields and plant tobacco for the most part.
It was not until 1622, that the Company created the company equivalent of “county” courts which functioned as a fused (judicial-legislative-executive branches) commission style government. That these courts became focused on self-defense and local militia in their reaction to the great 1616 Indian Massacre only served to intensify the concentrated power of local and plantation elites. That these local elites would over time forge their own distinctive and self-serving political culture, and then extend that culture through their dominance of provincial decision-policy making is a discussion for future modules. How that culture would respond to demands for independence and the subsequent development of an Early Republic America, complete with its own Constitution, is a matter for still other future modules.
The tobacco monoculture required a shredded, isolated but stable local policy system, which served the needs of the landed tobacco elite that operated its large scale-exporters. In this group, London investors disinvesting from the Virginia Company, found a new path to wealth that met the needs to found a permanent economic base from which they could form long-lasting source of profit. Rather than investing though a third party corporation, they took equity positions in the land and tobacco of this young former Virginia Company elite, as it too disinvested from the Virginia Company.
This was no homestead program in the sense contemporary readers might associate with the 1862 homestead movement. With some exceptions nearly all who were freeholders and could participate in these land grants were company-related, or had the skill and the luck to move into resident company elites economic circle. It was only after 1616 when Dale and Yeardley opened up the program–and when Governor Argall [999] suspended the regulation in 1617 the mobility of former company servants diminished considerably until restored by Yeardley in 1619’s Greate Charter reforms.
[999] Argall remained through April 1619, when he was replaced by Yeardley who would serve for three years as the full governor of the colony. Argall, a hardened soul if there ever was one, may be best known for his kidnapping of Pocahontas from her father in 1613. Peace with the Indians was restored after this venture when John Rolfe married her. Argall in 1616 commanded the ship that took her and Rolfe to England—where she became a celebrity, took sick and died.
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Through use of these early land/workforce incentives company officials (their protégés/families, merchants, and all sorts of tag-along associates who emigrated from England) captured first advantage of the benefits. The Company used the Company Magazine to grab ahold of tobacco export, in what would be a futile effort to pay their bills and provide funds for the inevitable infrastructure that an economic base would require. And as important as the headright, they used it to import indentured company servants into the swamp-infested tobacco grinder.
If company elites used tobacco as a short term solution to their provincial and corporate woes, they also sent over all sorts of artisans to diversify the economy. The company elite sincerely and earnestly attempted to diversify the Virginia economy–and prevent, or at least slow down (through regulation), the tobacco boom that distorted every initiative they devised. Sandys, and those around him, did not inhale their product, and in a perfect world most wanted it to go away. Like a steam roller or a gold rush, the tobacco boom, the TINA of Virginia (there is no alternative), crushed all in its path.
The Fifth Dynamic Meets the Tobacco Boom
No later 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.
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. The merchants, artisan and middling gentry, however, saw in the land offer 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 from the tobacco boom. By mid-decade a small but steady stream of their sons and even daughters emigrated to Virginia, took advantage of the company headright package available at the time, and started their Virginia careers.
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 lose Virginia site-control, and its permanent settlement strategy was buffeted about by the contending factions.
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 1617-18, 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 and developed and launched his signature permanent settlement initiative, the Greate Charter (1618-19). 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.
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).
“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.
For the most part this was beneficial but many of these new young gentry entrepreneurs took advantage of their families and access to company elites and sort of tagged along with the resident elites, and sharing to some degree the opportunities the latter were able to find amidst the various company initiatives and the rough bureaucracy that inevitably took form around Jamestown. The most ambitious of these entrepreneurs were able to assemble the rudiments of a business conglomerate and with that scale and access were appointed to key positions in the colony corporate governance institutions created by the Greate Charter. The astute reader will see in this the formation of a young gazelle elite entrepreneurs grouping attached to the trappings of the Virginia Company as early as 1621.
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
Ron W. Coan 