The Plantation Strategy: Ireland, Sir Francis Bacon, and its Adjustment to the New World

Conceptual Background: Plantation Strategy, Virginia Company in Virginia & First Step in British Colonial Policy

Conceptual Background: Plantation Strategy, Virginia Company in Virginia

At this point I alert the reader once again this history is taking a different tack regarding the earliest years of the colony. Specifically, we see that colonialization policy-making is conducted in England, and an attempt at implementation is made in Virginia by a private-public partnership corporation that involves both the Crown, Parliament and the comprehensive English merchant community. During these years the turbulent politics of the seventeenth century is very pronounced–which only adds to the complexity and subtlety. To properly understand the goings on in Virginia we must first explain why the English policy-makers in England did what they did–and attempt to explain why. After that we can tackle why it succeeds or fails in Virginia.

I fully embrace the approach taken by Charles M. Andrews in his four volume series on the “Colonial Period of American History”. Much of this module series draw closely from Andrews, and our history of American state and local ED is benefited by it. This history proceeds in the spirit of partially fulfilling the unwritten last three volumes of that history which tackles the evolution and departure from the British control onto a path that led to what I refer as “the drift to Independence and Revolution”.

In Andrews’ view, “with the single exception of Virginia … [“Englishmen at home, i.e. England had other things to think about, so] they paid very little attention before 1660 to their plantations overseas. During that time there existed a highly decentralized relationship between the colonies and the mother country, a condition which created in the minds of the people already in America, a strong feeling of self-sufficiency, and which because of their distance from England, and the necessity of trusting in themselves for protection and maintenance, produced among them a lively spirit of local independence.”.

Not only does Andrews provides “strong emphasis to the English background” of colonial America, but that he insisted on viewing the American colonies as the English viewed them at the time as “parts of the expanding English world—and not as what some of them later became—units of a transatlantic republic. “The men, the circumstances and the institutions in England responsible for that movement, and later the policies developed in Great Britain for the” ‘exploitation and development of these plantations” are critical to understanding the path taken by each individual colony, and in particular to the early path of Virginia. [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 3. (Yale University Press, 1964, Foreword, p. 1.

In any event at this juncture in 1608-25 period, the events and the status of British politics heavily impacted the political and economic evolution of the Virginia Company to the extent they are not mere background but the driving dynamic shaping the events and the structure of governance in Virginia and the proprietary Virginia (London) Company.

Also, from the perspective of the American proprietary corporate colony, what we are witnessing is the recognition in London HQ and the Crown/Parliamentary colonial policy-makers is the necessity of following our self-sufficiency strategy in setting up the policy system and economic base. We also see the joint stock corporation, headquartered far away, must accede to some level of local discretion and autonomy, but not yet willing to surrender macro-level policy decisions to local governance.

Francis Bacon and the Royal Council – Smythe first fixed his attention on the Royal Council. The first visible result of the internal negotiations was the expansion of the Royal Council to about fifty members—the most notable of which is Sir Francis Bacon (also Oliver Cromwell, the older uncle of his famous namesake, and the Lord Mayor of London—all heavy hitters in the Parliamentary opposition and sitting members of Parliament). We know Bacon today as the “founder of empiricism”, an important philosopher and scientist. The Bacon we refer to here had been in Parliament since 1588, and Ipswich’s MP at that time. Bacon, we shall see had a very complicated history, and his inclusion into the Royal Council was crucial.

Bacon’s was a man on the make at this point, and his inclusion in the Virginia Company’ Royal Council was a strong indication that the old Company Royal Council was being replaced by a new Council composed of individuals not loyal solely to the King, but to individuals whose reference point was the Parliament. Bacon, with a hold on both Parliament and King was a balancing intermediary, the key to a bipartisan administration of the national colony. To provide the reader some context into the background politics a quick description of Bacon is provided; from the events that followed over the next decade Bacon’s role regarding the Virginia Company was for a time a major stabilizing factor in a tumultuous period of British politics.

In the last years of Queen Elizabeth. Bacon after a rocky start with the Queen, was heavily involved in the investigation of her former lover (the 2^nd Earl of Essex), the results of which led to his (Essex’s) execution in 1601. Bacon was a former protégé of the Earl of Essex, and Bacon’s role in his death marked an abrupt rupture in a long-standing protégé relationship. Essex, it might be added, was a supporter of James I as successor in the event of Elizabeth’s death. Knighted by James, Bacon over the next five years proved himself an incredibly astute politician by navigating himself as a favorite of James (in 1608 he was appointed clerk in James’s Star Chamber), and an influential and well-liked member of a very hostile Parliament. Bacon’s placement on Virginia Company’s Royal Council at this time thus was as a broker between the two opposing forces.

With two revisions of its charter under its belt, the King having seemingly granted most of what was asked for by the private sector, the Virginia Company, having seemingly stabilized its Jamestown settlement, haltingly made its first attempt to build a colony economic base in 1613. Plantation was the first instrument used in Virginia in 1613 for the purpose of installing a small-scale privately “owned” commercial homestead whose production was intended to be sold by a provincial-level monopoly export agency called the Magazine. Profits were intended to flow to both the private plantation and the colony-level monopoly and magically micro level economic base-building (and self-sufficiency) and macro level sustainability and even profits were to result.

Plantation was not an indifferent name or term chosen for Dale/Sandy’s pivot. Plantation was a “concept” that was in active use in the war-resettlement of Ireland by the Tudors, and after 1603 by James I. Plantation was the geographical administrative unit employed by Elizabeth I in her campaign to conquer and re-settle Gaelic Ireland, replacing its native independent and anti-English Catholic population with a more loyal population imported from England and the Scottish borderlands. During Elizabeth’s era the Irish plantation campaign was structured as a private-public initiative in which the Crown dominated the governance of the plantation corporation, but the day-to-day finance and management largely left to the private investors/intermediaries.

The Crown contributed its army to hack out the territory of the Plantation and it was supposed to keep order, and secure the sites of settlement within the plantation. That model of “colony as plantation” did not correspond at all with Virginia, if only because the English military presence was non-existent. Instead of a Crown-dominated Commission that administered the Ulster Plantation, Virginia was a allegedly empowered private Virginia Company joint stock corporation. Smythe and Sandys were attempting a reform that England had not tried before. Ireland, also restructured, was going down a vastly different path.

The Virginia Company was being set up according to traditional joint-stocks principles. By the charters of 1609 and 1612, the company received a monopoly of the trade [within the defined boundaries of Virginia, and] … control of land allocation and utilization. There was, in fact, little in its formal organization to differentiate the Virginia Company from the East India Company, chartered nine years earlier, or any of the other joint-stock commercial companies. Nevertheless, the growth of English commerce with Virginia presupposed the creation of a permanent export-producing colony. The fact that productive plantations [the micro plantation] were a prerequisite for commerce crucially distinguished the project of the Virginia Company from those of the purely trading ventures of the era. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), p. 93

Certainly for us, the key observation in the above quote was charter reform had not meaningfully redefined the goal of Virginia’s economic base. nor the means by which the Company would ultimately secure resources with which to retire its debt and pay dividends to its investors. Whether or not its economic base was a trading factory, or a permanent settlement/colony, the economic base was to be geared toward export to England. It was assumed that meant the discovery of an export crop or mineral/natural resource, or one hell of a fur-trading enterprise.

Quoting Charles Andrews:

Men prominent in official and mercantile life began to seek, early in the seventeenth century, new opportunities for the employment of capital, and saw in the West [north America] a field of commercial profit, rivaling and supplementing the advantages of the East. Through the influences of such important personages as Sir John Popham, lord chief justice, and the King’s bench, Sir Thomas Smith, head of the East India Company and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor at the fort of Plymouth [England]–all leaders in many public and private enterprises–attention was called for the first time to the possibility of utilizing [private] capital for the plantations in America as well as in Ireland …

Men of the Popham-Smith type, with the example of the great trading companies before them, saw the value of employing a similar form of organization–the legal chartered company-for the purpose of advancing settlement as well as trade. To them private parties were ‘cowld compfortes to adventures’ [cold comfort to investors] and had been ‘fownde [found] fatall to all interprices hitherto undertaken. … This statement … was an appeal for funds in the form of a joint-stock [corporation] and for the enlistment of organized capital and the organized company in colonizing enterprise under the control of the state” [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Settlements, Vol 1 (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964), pp. 73-74

The first five years of Jamestown did little to suggest fur-trading, export of minerals/timber, or manufactures would offer not any quick solutions of the export requirement, and since, as we shall see in the next module, the first Virginia Company ED initiatives were based on the chief resource within its control (land), and that land would produce (miracle crops) that would yield fast profits to retire short-term bonds and pay-as-you-go costs, for sale in the English market principally was anticipated by the Company. I would assume, since Rolfe was one of their members, and was two years down the road in his experiments, they had tobacco in the back of their mind. If this supposition is substantially accurate the Company knew what type of economic base it had better establish, and that they had better do it fast.

Their base-building did start over the next year (1613), and it rested on the micro plantation, in their thinking a private colony within the Company colony. The micro privately owned/managed, but made possible by Company land grants and tax abatements (not to mention seizure from the Indian tribes–no purchase of land was ever contemplated) was the key economic unit. The Company rested its hopes for revenues by using its authority to control trade (a right to a monopoly) through an export/import “agency”, the previously mentioned company store–the Magazine to import and sell products to residents, and then sell the produce from the plantations to England (or elsewhere). I think that was the Virginia Company business plan in 1612-13.

As Brenner also points out, the Company assumed risks that it could accomplish this, and simultaneously deliver agricultural produce sufficient to sustain the population, while increasing the population (and necessarily the workforce) to produce sufficient volumes of the export product to pay its bills and keep everyone happy.

The chartering of the Virginia Company in 1609 [1612] was accompanied by the full reassessment the Colony’s potential. The stockholders relinquished earlier hopes of quick windfalls through the discovery of precious metals or trade with the Indians. Facing the hard reality that nothing substantial could be gained without the production of staple crops, they initiated a full-scale effort at [permanent] colonization. The Company took complete charge of production, which was carried out on company land by indentured servants sent and supplied at company expense … As sole proprietor the company collected what was produced; as monopoly merchant, it carried out all colonial marketing functions” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), pp. 93-4

In the remaining modules of this module series, the reader will see my version of what happened after 1612, and how and why the Virginia Company engaged in an economic base-building enterprise based on its conception of “plantation” (colony-building) strategy (i.e. a private colony (micro plantation) within the colony-level plantation). In so doing, it pioneered a set of economic development tools and programs that, however, inadequate to solve the company’s fiscal crisis, did advance colony-settlement building in North America.

These economic development tools and programs were to be the first in our toolbox, would be replicated in other English colonies, Finally, the Company’s development of a MICRO plantation, the private colony within the provincial Company colony, as the key economic development unit, set a model for other colonizers who sought to create an export-based agriculture economic base–which, unknown at the time, of course, set the English North American colonial hegemony off into two quite different economic bases, which in essence set the Mason-Dixon line, with all that entailed.

Why this is very important to our history is, as we shall see , that not only did that entail a predetermined economic base for Virginia, but indirectly caused the development of a shredded community, non-urban, form of local governance that lent itself to capture by its micro plantation elites. Not only that, as we shall further see, events forced the Company to construct private/corporate forms of governance (the Greate Charter), on the fly almost, instead of what were customarily public institutions and structures ; that these structures would be incorporated into Virginia governance after the fall of the Company and would be converted into public government structures/institutions further leads us to recognize the legacy of the Virginia Company on Virginia’s future government and policy systems.

The reader should be reminded that other colonies did not start from this context, hence will likely develop along different paths. In short from 1612 on, Virginia was headed down a singular path into the future United States.

Finally, as Brenner observes, and I concur, the Company’s 1612 decision to go forward and build a colony by assuming such huge, and largely unknown risks, with finances based on short-term debt, held by investors fundamentally uncommitted to the business plan nor the permanent settlement goal, was going to lead, as close to inevitably as one might get, to failure and collapse.

The fact remains that the Virginia Company’s [micro] plantations required a good deal of time to reach a level of development sufficient to produce the staple exports required to yield profits. As a result from the start the company faced a crisis of investment … Without fresh investment the Company found itself paralyzed, but it never came close to solving the problem. The consequence of the Virginia Company’s failure to finance itself was a fundamental change in the nature of colonial enterprise [i.e. English plantation colony building] under the company’s auspices, and eventually the company’s dissolution altogether [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), p. 94

Also as the plods through the remaining modules of this module series, the reader can see how the Virginia Company etched in its failures how not to colony-build, what risks cannot be ignored, what economic strategies (i.e. self-sufficiency) need be taken seriously and immediately. That all of this led to one lesson above all–that colony-macro plantation building required the development of a series of economic development tools, initiatives, projects–programs (an economic developer’s toolbox) which when combined into a programmatic nexus constitute what we will call a settlement strategy.

In that vacuum, he and likely the Board of the Virginia Company, saw themselves more as the “undertakers” (the irony of that term) than economic developers. What a permanent settlement would require in a policy system and an economic base–not to ignore fiscal and economic sustainability of its population–would be learned through actual experience over the next decade.

Ireland did not compare to Virginia one might think, but if we substitute Native Americans for the Irish who were in process of being conquered by the English in 1607-8 the distinctions diminish. Plantations had been created (and destroyed) in Ireland over the previous decades. What is a key distinction is its geographical, cultural, and religious closeness of Ireland to England, and the role it had played in England history. Ireland’s natives were in the English mind not comparable to Native Americans, but instead were viewed as long-time adversaries who practiced a hated religion.

The point of this being, the Ulster Plantation was a strategy to colonize Ireland so that a new population be imported to secure the conquered territories and England’s hold on a hostile population. By way of full disclosure, Bacon was born in Ireland and raised there until a teenager. He was not an advocate for the Irish, but very much the opposite. What he does in his essay is propose the plantation be so constructed that it will facilitate a more peaceful union of Ireland with England and a possession of its Tudor-Stuart monarchs.

We can discern from Bacon’s 1609 essay that the plantation concept as applied to Ireland at the time of the Virginia Company settlement was infused by notions of political and military conquest, and served as its arguably chief goal the political union of the two geographies to be accomplished by a systematic process of importing new “loyal population” of Scots primarily into Ireland, removing native Irish from the affected territory, and repositioning the immigrant Scots into land-owning and renter parcels of land. In terms of the mechanics of how it was accomplished, it amazingly does not deviate from what was practiced in Virginia during this period.

When the economic opportunity of the New World began to be considered it naturally was in terms of a commercial policy and the trading factory. But in a new situation, the history of this policy was quite different from the history of the Orient for the New World was thinly populated with a people whose economic wants and trading habits were relatively undeveloped [as thought by the Europeans].

This fact could mean only one thing, that the exploitation of the resources of the New World would require a new and settled population who knew the value of these resources, and who were willing to work or could be forced to work in order to make these resources available to the European market. ;;; The term plantation, in the original, and especially English sense, had reference not to a landed estate [a manor], but this whole process of migration and occupation.[I would add entrepreneurship] …

It was a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital, and looked for profitable return from capital. A plantation of people in the New World would have to be supported and cared for a few years … before it would begin to yield a profit, but the expectation of profit was basic to the idea of a plantation” [99] Edgar T. Thompson, “Population Expansion and the Plantation System” (American Journal of Sociology, (Vol 41., No. 3, 1935), p. 318.

This meant that land was the instrument of production, and that to produce a new population had to be imported. .. “a migration which became an army of occupation” (p. 318).

First, and foremost, discussing plantation in Virginia is fraught with the reader’s import of a conception of an economic unit that did not exist in England in 1600. The word itself carried at the time the flavor of what today we call a “farm”. It was NOT the inglorious Virginia plantation of its “golden age’ after 1725, nor its evolution leading into the Civil War.

As we shall explain below, even the largest of the period were very small, by anyone’s standards, and the estate house mirrored the reduced size and glamour. Slavery was NOT a major feature of the sixteenth century Virginia plantation, although there were slaves, they tended to be Native Americans. The workforce was imported indentured servants, and the smaller plantations were staffed by the family, and hired workers. Plantations in Virginia were little more than cleared fields and a core scattering of rudimentary buildings that tended over time to grown into the plantation’s “downtown”.

Its “suburbs” were likely to be a hodge-podge of cleared fields and truly basic, non-brick structures that housed the sharecroppers, and homestead freeholders that clustered nearby to take advantage of the downtown and advantages of working with, and through, the larger plantations owners (exporting/importing/lending). If there was a town in this period, it lacked formal and legal status as one, and it was a more a crossing of several roads that led to a port-warehouses for tobacco storage awaiting export (a pier or anchorage/beach). The entire plantation ensemble created a metro area that was anything but impressive or prosperous.

At the time what was the “thinking” that underlie plantation grants as a viable strategy for economic development? these patents were thought of and referred to as “colonies” and the patent holders were treated as the local governance of these entities. These patents were larger in size, more complex in their activities, and contained subunits, i.e. Hundreds could include individual household land grants, plantation land grants, and even voluntary joint stock corporation land grants. If it is helpful, one can think of a Hundred as a non-governmental “county” within which a number of different jurisdictions cohabit. Unfortunately in the post-1613 Virginia the functions of the Hundreds were not fleshed out, and that meant the powers of the sub-entities had to exercise governmental powers until that could be done sometime in the future

[P]owners ranted, according to the form of patent drawn up in 1620, were almost those of an independent colony. The [Virginia] company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who should ‘go to Virginia to inhabit ‘by vertue of their Graunts’ and should ‘plant themselves, their tenants and servants’ might have liberty ‘til a form of government is here settled over them’ to make orders, ordinances and constitutions ‘associatinge unto them divers of the greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and businesses, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 128-29

When one enlarges upon this by recognizing the formation within these areas of local militia-essential to self-defense and policing which was simultaneous to any plantation settlement, we can see a fusion of private and public that ran through the establishment of plantations during the years of the Virginia Company. Each of these plantation land patents generated owners that in the best way they could developed a self-sufficiency as they could, creating both a decentralized hinterland governance, defense, and local economy.

To drive a nail in this argument, James’s chancellor (the most powerful position in the King’s court) at that time, was a shareholder of the Virginia Company, a certain Francis Bacon, who in 1625 published his thoughts on the matter ,“On Plantations”, in which amazingly he applies to Virginia and offers his thoughts on how that strategy was to be implemented. Bacon’s position and his closeness with the Virginia Company enterprise in a period in which the King had suspended Parliament. Bacon was a participant in the process of Virginia Company oversight and he had an investment in it. De La Warr (and his father, the Second Baron) had been a loyalist to Essex—the Queen’s lover—at a time in which Bacon was Essex’s protégé. The two knew each other for decades.

That such a noted intellectual, and in this period a powerful royalist policy maker was aware of the “plantation” as a tool for James’s colonial expansion into the New World and that he willingly allowed the Company to go forward with it, suggests the Shirley Plantation was intended to be more than a simple land grant of four hundred and fifty acres. The key to that assertion is to ask and answer who is this “Sherley” who got the grant.

In the plantation we see a fusion of private production and local government, the foundation of Virginia’s sub-state policy system. As the Virginia tobacco plantation replaced the town in New England, and township in Pennsylvania-New Jersey, it’s planter elite replaced the more diverse elites that developed from an economically diverse economic base in the latter colonies. The implosion of the Company and the diminishing effectiveness of its governance until its dissolution in 1624 meant this mélange of dynamics and elements established itself throughout 1620’s Virginia, and almost on auto-pilot laid the foundations for that colony’s economic base and established the fundamental of its future policy system as well.

In short plantation was an economic development strategy, a conscious creation of a unit of production that required people attraction, migration (workforce development), and the funds necessary to sustain it for a period of time). As indicated in the quote, I believed if it was to work successfully it also required on-site entrepreneurism. It was this conception of the plantation strategy that served as a womb for Sandys future headright system and his so-called Greate Charter institutionalization.

Transition of “Plantation as a Colony” Conducted by a Joint Stock Corporation into an Economic Development Strategy for Private Profit

Up to the point the English tackled the difficult project of colonializing North America and the West Indies, “plantation” was the English term for what we call a colony. But it was a distinctive style of colonization, not that of royal decree, management, with the Crown granting and taking away of privileges, land, trading monopolies, but a colonialization conducted by by a privately managed, royally chartered joint stock corporation. That conceptualization seemingly worked well enough in the Far East, Levant, Russia, and even for the Flanders on the Continent. But when the first North American-focused English joint stock corporation attempted to create a “plantation-colony” in the New World, its numerous ventures fell on rough times immediately.

This was not the first time that a joint stock colony-plantation had rough times and failure. The Plantation as a colony-level strategy had failed in Ireland for over a half-century before Jamestown and the Virginia Company. Plantation as a strategy at that time had two approaches. First it created a public private partnership of sorts, designed to supplement English Crown military conquests, chiefly in Ireland, but also in West Indies. Conversely, the plantation strategy in the form of a “trading factory:, an established outpost for trade with an established native civilization and government(s). For this section we are interested in the former. As we shall see the plantation-conquest-colonialization strategy had demonstrated, over the past thirty years before the Virginia Company an indifferent track record that did not include merchant profits, and had generated considerable tension within the public private dynamic.

When Virginia and Ireland reached a fork in the road around 1609-1612, a short, but bold attempt was made by the private sector to update and upgrade the notion of plantation away from macro colony-building toward profit-making economic development for its investors and for the Throne as well. The “rubber had hit the road”, exposing the ill-defined and conflicting goals of the parties involved. It raised the question as to whether the joint stock corporation, as previously defined and practiced, could be successful in macro colony building. That the government under Elizabeth had exerted considerable pressure requiring private participation in the plantation-colonialization-conquest approach, it was hoped the onset of a new King, James might be more open and less coercive.

Underlying this short period of reform, we can see the initial incorporation and financing of the Virginia-London companies in 1606-7, the exceedingly rapid collapse of the Maine plantation, and the equally striking near collapse of the Virginia Jamestown plantation. Simultaneous the English king was debating the formation of a new “Ulster Plantation” in Ireland. The private sector had greeted with some interest the Virginia Company mixed trading factory-colonialization of North America strategies, and in 1606 fifty-six private companies, and guilds, had participated in the initial financing. At the same time, advocated for a restructure of the Crown plantation/colonialization model, including Sir Francis Bacon, advocated new terms more likely to yield profits, but also significantly reduce risks, and hence also reduce the element of Crown coercion and insensitivity in administration of the enterprise.

Within the private sector Joint stock corporation the hope was to avoid entirely an participation in a new Crown Ulster Plantation, but if not possible, develop more favorable terms and elements. Accordingly there was an obvious tension between what the merchant-investor wanted out of the deal, what the King wanted. Off to the side, the Virginia Company was requesting a new charter (in 1609), and in 1612 another new charter. The latter was clearly trying to figure out how to square its mixed trading factory and colonialization settlement strategies; the reality of a establishing a permanent colony in in North America demanded a radically different approach, that that moved away from quick profits and short term lending.

These tensions fragmented the Virginia Company, and led by its management (Smythe, Sandys) seized the initiative sort of piggyback into the Ulster Plantation reform and restructure its relationship with the Crown, and to rejigger its role in creating a resilient economic base from which private return on investment could be achieved. Lost in both reform debates was a definition of what was required to establish a permanent settlement in either Ireland or Virginia. The matter at hand in this 1606-12 period was to free the colonization-plantation strategy of its Crown dominance, coercion, insensitivity, and to open the enterprise by emphasizing initiatives that could bring profit to the private parties, and yield tangible benefit to the Crown–and of course result in a permanent settlement in the territories.

Caught in this was the term plantation which over the next decade transitioned from colony-building to an “private-public” economic development strategy compatible with tobacco export combined to finance the colony-building strategy. The word “plantation” seemingly coexisted at two different levels, both imprecisely understood or defined. At some level, which was more pronounced in the debate about the Irish Ulster Plantation, what was in essence a redefinition of the Crown’s role in colony-building, and the merchant-investor desired limited participation in those areas it deemed suitable to its capacities and its goal to make profit. In Virginia, a less obvious need in 1609 was what did it take to build a permanent economic base “from scratch” in a hostile North American wilderness, a three-thousand mile ocean away from England.

Neither the Irish Ulster Plantation, nor the Virginia Company restructure yielded early success its advocates wanted, and in the Virginia Company, badly needed. It turns out that the resolution of the terms associated with the Ulster Companies were mixed, and the Crown was determined to require private participation in the new Ulster Plantation nevertheless. While James made significant concessions in the sensitivity to private profit-making, it did not provide the resources to live up to its commitment to defend the territory from attacks by the Irish, not did it live up to iits commitment to remove and resettle the Irish from the Plantation redevelopment areas.

What was probably not expected was the reaction of the private companies to their being required to join in the Ulster Plantation incorporation and financing. The reaction probably made it inevitable the Virginia Company would eventually fail in its colonialization-settlement initiative. To set the stage, we first tackle the events and mechanics of the incorporation of the Ulster Plantation.

Plantation as a Background—

Depending on when you start counting, the British conquest of Ireland commenced with Henry II in 1169 and the 1070’s. Henry cut out his piece of the old sod, but the invasion really got hot under the Tudors, especially Elizabeth, and was then inherited by the Stuarts. The invasion climaxed with Cromwell in the 1650’s (not in the chronology of this module series) but it is clear we are talking about a sustained conquest/reconquest of Ireland, by England.; overall the invasion persisted for the better part of eight centuries.

The motivations behind the invasion varied by period of time and the King/Queen . In this module we focus on the so-called “plantation strategy” period under Elizabeth and the Stuarts. It may be some surprise but the Irish plantation period overlapped with the Virginia settlement by the Virginia Company. The purpose of this case study is to demonstrate that English colonialist ambitions/projects did not start with Virginia and the Virginia Company, but rather the Virginia Company, and the Virginia Company model of colony-building was a dramatic departure from the established style of England’s colonial settlement of non-English territories.

In reality, Irish plantation strategy was less a strategy to conquer Ireland than a strategy-framework to maintain England’s hold on the territory it controlled in Ireland. The general idea behind the Irish plantation strategy, as least as it was seen from the Crown’s perspective, was to bring in the English merchant/investor/landlord private sector into the structure and process of England’s conquest-colonialization effort. Besides taking a financial load of the Crown, the private corporate plantation would conduct day-to-day management of the territory, implement a new upgraded agricultural and trade modernization, import reliable settlers to secure holdings, and establish small urban settlements for defense and trade.

The English Crown, i.e. the King, government or public sector, was leading the effort. Governmental bodies, usually called commissions, assumed much of the governance function, and the military, there in large numbers, the police and self-defense of acquired lands. Accordingly, one could expect some overlap with England’s turn to colonization of North America (then perceived primarily as a defense against Spanish aggression and dominance). Elizabeth, in effect, compelled the emerging English trading and investment community into financing and “governing” its acquired Irish territories. Forming joint stock companies, different groupings of English investors would incorporate a “plantation”, a colony in other words, over specified Irish areas.

Plantations were devised by Elizabeth, partly as a means to invite-compel the English private sectors, its guilds and merchant community for example, to finance the resettlement of the seized land; the government promised to evict the Irish from these areas as a critical prerequisite to effective economic base building ” and “segregation” as it was called constitute the core pillar of Irish plantation pacification. The private joint stock corporation was to manage the repopulation of these areas by sub-contracting with “undertakers”, wealthy English and Scot lower nobility and gentry, who had been tasked to stock the plantation with new settlers from their estates in England/Scotland. Once in Ireland, these resettled Scots and English would be set up in farm households around villages, settlements and trading posts, useful for self-defense, trade, and self-sufficiency of the new population.

Whether of not the plantation “pacification strategy” (that is what it would have been called in the Boer or Vietnam War) would have “worked” is a matter of debate, in large measure because the Irish natives were none too happy about it, and resistance from active rebellion, to guerilla war, to sabotage, and peaceful non cooperation made plantation governance and economic base-building a dubious enterprise in the extreme. In any event since the 1570’s, private-public plantations litter the Irish countryside, much like roadkill litters the highway.

From the English private sector’s point of view, they wanted little to nothing to do with them. Typical was one quote from a London company: “It would be very foolish to entermeddle in this busynesse, for it will be exceading chargeable [i.e. expensive]” or as Professor James Curt observed it would be “troublesome and a bottomless pit as far as money was concerned”. [99] Jahttps://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/index.shtmlmes, Stevens Curt, “London Companies” in BBC’s Wars & Conflict: the Plantation of Ulster.

As might be expected the private sector, when first “asked” to join into a plantation strategy resisted, and only when Elizabeth found a strong and loyal ally, Sir Arthur Chichester to lead the effort was she able to gain a foothold. Chichester, appointed as Viceroy of Ireland developed a plan , designed from his mind to appeal to private companies and investors. This plan, however, was unable to secure a sufficient corps of participants, and so Elizabeth stepped in, jailed several foremost private leaders, fined them, and then sent a strong letter to follow letting other potential investors know they were next. Persuasive as she always was, the London Companies joined in and a series of plantation initiatives followed over the next thirty years.

Elizabeth had authorized these undertakers to be granted 3000 hectares of Irish land in return for the immigration and resettlement of 48 adult males (20 families)–here one might see the underlying skeleton of Virginia’s future headright incentive system. The primary task of the plantation was, bluntly, to replace the Irish Gaelic population–who would be removed from the area–and replace it with a “British” population, Protestant, and English-speaking. It was labeled a civilizing strategy, as the English held the Irish in great contempt, not only for their religion, but their way of life and culture.

Resettlement was only the first phase of a long-term town-building and agricultural “farming” economic base, along with (depending on the plantation) diversification into artisan ventures such as wine-making and other pre-capitalist occupations. As such the plantation was by no means simply a royal travel bureau, but an agent of economic development. Northern Ireland was held to be an allegedly underpopulated region whose principal sector was cattle-raising. A second competing task was defense of the new communities, with fortifications, and the creation of a militia (muster) for self defense. All this was costly and long-term, and so Elizabeth’s plantation was her form of an early public-private partnership which brought in the private sector to manage and finance the “settlement” of Ireland.

In that year, Bacon wrote a little known essay on the Irish plantation, when he was England’s deputy solicitor general (whose boss in John Popham, above). This 1609 essay, however, is NOT the more known and widely published “On Plantations” which was written in 1625 after his experience as James’s Chancellor of England) and saliently after the 1622 Massacre by the Powhatans. The gap between the two, in terms of the goals intended of plantation and specifics of how to do it, are huge, and they suggest how the Virginia experience radically developed the concept as perceived by a major, and supportive colonization, settlement, and plantation supporter.

Bacon’s 1609 “Certain Considerations touching the [Ulster] Plantation in Ireland: Another Britain” essay was written for the Irish Commission and had a significant influence on the development of the “Ulster Plantation”, and for our purposes clearly reveals what he believed to the the ultimate benefit, and hence ultimate purpose behind colonization as people movement for national defense, and for the pursuit of private prosperity that could generate the revenues necessary for that purpose. He advocated the plantation, or any plantation, was valuable that made it possible for many families to receive sustentation and fortunes, and for England to discharge from her own bounds and from Scotland so many people that were they to remain they might be the cause of future trouble.

Soe shall Your Majesty in this work have double commoditiye in the avoidance of people here [in England] and in the making of use of them there’. He lays stress on the fact that Ireland was a weak spot in England’s defense, and was needed for England’s safety, and that under English control, it would be sure to become a source of profit to the realm. He urges that [the Ulster Plantation] ‘undertakers be encouraged and wishes a closer correspondency between the {Ulster Plantation] Commission in Ireland and the Counsell of Plantations in England, wherein I warrant myself by the [precedent] of a like Counsell of Plantations for Virginia, an enterprise differing as much from this [of Ireland] … [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Settlements, Vol 1 (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964), Footnote 1, p. 72

To clarify Bacon’s words a bit, he is arguing for an empowered joint stock corporation engaged in a public partnership with the Crown. That corporations be delegated responsibility for the management of a colony, as a permanent settlement. He is focused on an empowered joint stock corporation, but not with the requirements and the obligations that were incumbent on the founding of a permanent settlement. In 1609 when the needs of a permanent colony in North America was being advocated, the primary need, at least in Bacon’s mind, was that the Virginia Plantation (the colony itself) were placed in the hands of the Virginia Company in partnership with England, but he did not address what the implications of that task meant for the Company. That was a subject for another day, if in fact, he gave that issue any notice at all at that time.

How did the Ulster Plantation Strategy Play Out

The Irish Ulster Plantation strategy, a curious mix of simple conquest, resettlement of populations loyal to the English/British Crown in a rather brutal and blunt form of colonization, the active involvement of the English/Scots private sector, and a veneer of economic development designed to upgrade Irish agricultural economic base, and as w shall see build some urban centers/port for trade. The Ulster plantation strategy was a reaction to the fifty years previous during which several iterations of plantations had been attempted, established since the 1570’s. The general Irish plantation strategy had accumulated an indifferent track record, but one that was sufficient to provide a vehicle for incremental English success on the battlefield.

The private sector wanted the Crown to step and pay for more than it wanted, and it wanted to administer more of the economic development initiatives, particularly people-attraction/resettlement so that it more directly led to economic base-building, trade and therefore profits–a return on their investment.

Importing loyal, Protestant Scots and English, eviction of the Irish from specified lands, and a resettlement of these imported population on the lands was a centerpiece of this economic base-building and urbanization effort injected a measure of stability and a workforce into these areas, on which economic modernization could be more effectively implement, and would presumably yield greater profits.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/planters/es04.shtml

Virginia Plantation’s Business Plan as Restructured after 1612 Charter

So Plantation was not an indifferent name or term chosen for Dale/Sandy’s pivot. Plantation was a “concept” that was in active use in the war-resettlement of Ireland by the Tudors, and after 1603 by James I. about by Elizabethan and Stuart colonial officials and policy makers. Plantation was the geographical administrative unit employed by Elizabeth I in her campaign to conquer and re-settle Gaelic Ireland, replacing its native independent and anti-English Catholic population with a more loyal population imported from England and the Scottish borderlands.

During Elizabeth’s era the Irish plantation campaign was structured as a private-public initiative in which the Crown dominated the governance of the plantation corporation, but the day-to-day finance and management largely left to the private investors/intermediaries. The Crown contributed its army to hack out the territory of the Plantation and it was supposed to keep order, and secure the sites of settlement within the plantation. That model of “colony as plantation” did not correspond at all with Virginia, if only because the English military presence was non-existent. Instead of a Crown-dominated Commission that administered the Ulster Plantation, was a seemingly empowered private Virginia Company corporation. Smythe and Sandys were attempting a reform that England had not tried before. Ireland, also restructured, was seemingly going down a different path.

The Virginia Company was being set up according to traditional joint-stocks principles. By the charters of 1609 and 1612, the company received a monopoly of the trade [within the defined boundaries of Virginia, and] … control of land allocation and utilization. There was, in fact, little in its formal organization to differentiate the Virginia Company from the East India Company, chartered nine years earlier, or any of the other joint-stock commercial companies. Nevertheless, the growth of English commerce with Virginia presupposed the creation of a permanent export-producing colony. The fact that productive plantations [the micro plantation] were a prerequisite for commerce crucially distinguished the project of the Virginia Company from those of the purely trading ventures of the era. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), p. 93

Quoting Charles Andrews:

Men of the Popham-Smith type, with the example of the great trading companies before them, saw the value of employing a similar form of organization–the legal chartered company-for the purpose of advancing settlement as well as trade. To them private parties were ‘cowld compfortes to adventures’ [cold comfort to investors] and had been ‘fownde [found] fatall to all interprices hitherto undertaken. … This statement … was an appeal for funds in the form of a joint-stock [corporation] and for the enlistment of organized capital and the organized company in colonizing enterprise under the control of the state” [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Settlements, Vol 1 (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964), pp. 73-74

The chartering of the Virginia Company in 1609 [1612] was accompanied by the full reassessment the Colony’s potential. The stockholders relinquished earlier hopes of quick windfalls through the discovery of precious metals or trade with the Indians. Facing the hard reality that nothing substantial could be gained without the production of staple crops, they initiated a full-scale effort at [permanent] colonization. The Company took complete charge of production, which was carried out on company land by indentured servants sent and supplied at company expense … As sole proprietor the company collected what was produced; as monopoly merchant, it carried out all colonial marketing functions” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), pp. 93-4

Why this is very important to our history is, as we shall see , that not only did that entail a predetermined economic base for Virginia, but indirectly caused the development of a shredded community, non urban, form of local governance that lent itself to capture by its micro plantation elites. Not only that, as we shall further see, events forced the Company to construct private/corporate forms of governance (the Greate Charter), on the fly almost, instead of what were customarily public institutions and structures ; that these structures would be incorporated into Virginia governance after the fall of the Company and would be converted into public government structures/institutions further leads us to recognize the legacy of the Virginia Company on Virginia’s future government and policy systems.

The fact remains that the Virginia Company’s [micro] plantations required a good deal of time to reach a level of development sufficient to produce the staple exports required to yield profits. As a result from the start the company faced a crisis of investment … Without fresh investment the Company found itself paralyzed, but it never came close to solving the problem. The consequence of the Virginia Company’s failure to finance itself was a fundamental change in the nature of colonial enterprise [i.e. English plantation colony building] under the company’s auspices, and eventually the company’s dissolution altogether [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 1993, 2003), p. 94

Accordingly, we see the London Company in 1609 competing with a new colony in Ireland, specifically in Ireland’s Derry County. The Irish venture, located in an area we now know as Londonderry, was to become the Ulster Plantation–which had just been formed to manage and repopulate a new area in northern Ireland that had just expelled the Irish leadership and was beginning its resettlement, town-building and economic development efforts.

It was the Irish experience that was applied to Virginia when the Virginia Company made its pivot in 1612, not the other way around. In that vacuum, he and likely the Board of the Virginia Company, saw themselves more as the “undertakers” (the irony of that term) than economic developers. What a permanent settlement would require in a policy system and an economic base–not to ignore fiscal and economic sustainability of its population–would be learned through actual experience over the next decade.

It was a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital, and looked for profitable return from capital. A plantation of people in the New World would have to be supported and cared for for a few years … before it would begin to yield a profit, but the expectation of profit was basic to the idea of a plantation” [99] Edgar T. Thompson, “Population Expansion and the Plantation System” (American Journal of Sociology, (Vol 41., No. 3, 1935), p. 318.

This meant that land was the instrument of production, and that to produce a new population had to be imported. .. “a migration which became an army of occupation” (p. 318).

Its “suburbs” were likely to be a hodge-podge of cleared fields and truly basic, non brick structures that housed the sharecroppers, and homestead freeholders that clustered nearby to take advantage of the downtown and advantages of working with, and through, the larger plantations owners (exporting/importing/lending). If there was a town in this period, it lacked formal and legal status as one, and it was a more a crossing of several roads that led to a port-warehouses for tobacco storage awaiting export (a pier or anchorage/beach). The entire plantation ensemble created a metro area that was anything but impressive or prosperous.

[P]owers ranted, according to the form of patent drawn up in 1620, were almost those of an independent colony. The [Virginia] company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who should ‘go to Virginia to inhabit ‘by vertue of their Graunts’ and should ‘plant themselves, their tenants and servants’ might have liberty ‘til a form of government is here settled over them’ to make orders, ordinances and constitutions ‘associatinge unto them divers of the greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and businesses, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 128-29

To drive a nail in this argument, James’s chancellor (the most powerful position in the King’s court) at that time, was a shareholder of the Virginia Company, a certain Francis Bacon, who in 1625 published his thoughts on the matter ,“On Plantations”, in which amazingly he applies to Virginia and offers his thoughts on how that strategy was to be implemented. Bacon’s position and his closeness with the Virginia Company enterprise in a period in which the King had suspended Parliament. Bacon was a participant in the process of Virginia Company oversight and he had an investment in it. De La Warr (and his father, the Second Baron) had been a loyalist to Essex—the Queen’s lover—at a time in which Bacon was Essex’s protégé. The two knew each other for decades.

—

Accordingly, we see the London Company in 1609 two separate joint stock corporations, the Virginia Company renegotiating its 1606 charter, and establishing a new colony in Ireland, specifically in Ireland’s Derry County. The Irish venture, located in an area we now know as Londonderry, was to be venture in a new Ulster Plantation which had just been formed to manage and repopulate a new area in northern Ireland that had just expelled the Irish leadership and was beginning its resettlement, town-building and economic development efforts.

It was the Irish experience that was applied to Virginia when the Virginia Company made its pivot, not the other way around.

It was a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital, and looked for profitable return from capital. A plantation of people in the New World would have to be supported and cared for for a few years … before it would begin to yield a profit, but the expectation of profit was basic to the idea of a plantation” [99] Edgar T. Thompson, “Population Expansion and the Plantation System” (American Journal of Sociology, (Vol 41., No. 3, 1935), p. 318.

This meant that land was the instrument of production, and that to produce a new population had to be imported. .. “a migration which became an army of occupation” (p. 318).

[P]owers ranted, according to the form of patent drawn up in 1620, were almost those of an independent colony. The [Virginia] company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who should ‘go to Virginia to inhabit ‘by vertue of their Graunts’ and should ‘plant themselves, their tenants and servants’ might have liberty ‘til a form of government is here settled over them’ to make orders, ordinances and constitutions ‘associatinge unto them divers of the greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and businesses, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 128-29

Virginia Plantation’s Business Plan as Restructured after 1612 Charter

Quoting Charles Andrews:

Why this is very important to our history is, as we shall see , that not only did that entail a predetermined economic base for Virginia, but indirectly caused the development of a shredded community, non urban, form of local governance that lent itself to capture by its micro plantation elites. Not only that, as we shall further see, events forced the Company to construct private/corporate forms of governance (the Greate Charter), on the fly almost, instead of what were customarily public institutions and structures ; that these structures would be incorporated into Virginia governance after the fall of the Company and would be converted into public government structures/institutions further leads us to recognize the legacy of the Virginia Company on Virginia’s future government and policy systems.

Also as reader the plows through the remaining modules of this module series, he and she (are these the correct pronouns?) can see how the Virginia Company etched in its failures how not to colony-build, what risks cannot be ignored, what economic strategies (i.e. self-sufficiency) need be taken seriously and immediately. That all of this led to one lesson above all–that colony-macro plantation building required the development of a series of economic development tools, initiatives, projects–programs (an economic developer’s toolbox) which when combined into a programmatic nexus constitute what we will call a settlement strategy.

a Short Conceptual Discussion on the Importance of “structures” in this History

When I entered graduate school in the late 1960’s, I encountered within political science, my major, a radical departure from the focus of my undergraduate history degree. As an undergraduate my professors, excellent all, concentrated on political structures, and some economic. The role of personalities, great men–and although every one of my chief history professors was a woman-focus on personalities and events mostly inhabited by men. In particular I learned how governments and legislatures revolved around internal structures like committees, the Constitution, dynamics such as check/balances, separation of powers and a bit of federalism, although that was by far the weakest.

Armed with a solid knowledge of history, geography and some economics, I was almost an outcast in my graduate political science department. Nothing, literally nothing was valuable or could be used in my classes and requirements. My masters did not even allow me courses in American government, presidency, or Congress, but channeled me into behavioral functionalism, scientific analysis, paradigms, statistics, factor analysis, methodology.

Thomas Dye, Gabriel Almond was more important than Franklin Roosevelt, and Kuhn, Deutsch and a horde of “el al” were what I read. I embraced it all–and parroted it. Francis Rourke was the best, and I would learn how to use his bureaucratic politics in my works. I also liked Huntington, but I had to keep that a secret–some thought him almost fascist. Political and economic structures carried no weight and no virtue. They were at best terms, a container of dynamics and forces that played no role. Larger forces, education, class, and urbanization created the policy.

Not in this history.

My concentration on the various types of joint stock corporations, the Virginia Company, may seem as tangents to many a reader. For me they are vital players in the making of policy. I do not drink wine or beer from the barrel, not anymore anyway. A wide variety of other containers, structures all, distinguish between various policy areas. In economic development, the very first structure, one that blurs the economic with the political, is the joint stock corporation. It is the first primary unit-vehicle-structure of American economic development; we get that structure from England.

Each type of structures has biases, characteristics, distinctive outputs, and often distinctive leadership and interaction with the great structures like the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary. They too differ among nations, periods of history, and policy areas, and they play an outsized role in the making of economic development policy. In American different states have structures of the same name, but defy Gertrude Stein in that they are not a simple rose, that is nothing but a rose. Structures of the same name have evolved differently over time in different policy systems. We are fortunate in this Virginia Chapter that we start at the beginning of the evolution of joint stock corporations, and we can see the very first transplantation into American colonial history, and its very initial effort to develop distinctive economic development appropriate to the New World, in a period before capitalism, almost before colonialism itself. We are now seeing how sub-state American government, and an initial economic base are being constructed.

Structures matter in this story. Get used to it.

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