THIS MODULE IS SCHEDULED TO BE REPLACED WITH A MAJOR REWRITE WHICH IS ONGOING
OSGOOD VOL. 3, CHAP 2, VOL 1, CHAP IV, YEARDLEY (SANDYS OR SMYTHE) (JAMES VS CHARLES’S SUPPORT)
REDO THE MESSINESS OF THE 1621-1624 PERIOD-COORDINATE W/MINI-SERIES 2 AND 3
Background to the Greate Charter
The Greate Charter is not a single document like the Magna Charta. It was a list of “instructions” to a new governor by the Virginia Company’s new Treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys. For reasons to be described below, a new governor willing to implement the initiatives (Yeardley) did not begin his work until April 1619—a gap of nearly two years during which the Company politics of the Virginia Company had pounded it out. Sandys, to ensure Yeardley’s living up to the spirit of the instructions, also sent over a new Company Secretary, John Pory. Pory would, among other responsibilities serve as convener and moderator of the General Assembly. Pory also is the official responsible for the official record of what happened at the first session of the Virginia General Assembly. Pory and Yeardley were not friends.
Yeardley took with him a thoroughly revised set of orders and instructions [the original had been given to De la Warre earlier, and had been returned to England unopened upon his death en route to America], popularly called ‘the Greate Charter‘ [it had been referred to as such by Yeardley later] … they contained two basic sections: the first and longest outlined a comprehensive land system for the colony; the brief second section extended the London Company government to the colony. From the second grew the Virginia General Assembly [99] Grizzard Jr, and Boyd Smith, Jamestown a Colony, p. xliv
Yeardley implemented these instructions separately, referring at times to them in the aggregate as the “Greate Charter”. At no time were they systematized into one document—and if they had been, that document would likely have been lost as were Sandys’ instructions to Yeardley. Their implementation was sporadically carried out through 1622, after which all hell broke out. A reader looking for an easy chronological description is in for a rough time given the internal fragmentation of the strategy, and the political-economic situation within Virginia and the Company.
London provided the resources needed to begin implementing the initiatives. London, it seems, made the decision and implemented the Company’s “people recruitment” strategy. As a consequence, Andrews reports that between Easter 1619 and March 1620 ten ships crossed the Atlantic and deposited 1051 emigrants. But “Death took its toll as remorselessly as it had done in the early years of the colony … in [that] one year 1095 had died, either on the way over or in the colony …with 1051 [new] emigrants only 843 remained [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1 (Yale University Press, 1934-1964), pp. 136-7. More on the specifics shortly.
Still, Andrews rightfully senses the Greate Charter crossed the Company’s Rubicon, a ED strategy intended to establish a permanent settlement of the colony.
The bottom line goal of people attraction was a population increase sufficient to establish an agricultural and diversified economic base that could largely support the population and relieve the Company of its fiscal burden of sending fleets of expensive supply ships from England (each of which separately financed with debt that brought in new investors able to vote their will in the Company Annual Meeting, and through membership committees inject themselves into the administration of the Company. People attraction–and the future supply ships necessary for their maintenance–was probably the single largest expense incurred in the Greate Charter strategies.
Accordingly, one must thoughtfully consider this burden and reflect on how it influenced the adoption of a massively important workforce-entrepreneur incentive system that we now know as the “headright system”. That system has evolved through history and is principally understood as a controversial, highly inequitable workforce system that became commonplace in each of the thirteen colonies. That it began its life as a fiscal strategy to support, fuel, and sustain colonization managed by a private joint stock corporation has lost its significance. The Virginia Company’s extreme fiscal distress, its political isolation from the King, and an unplanned congruence with a rising tobacco monoculture, however, were midwives attending at its birth.
Virginia’s population in 1618 was estimated at 1650 [99] Andrews Vol One, p. 134) and that was after the infusion of nearly a thousand new settlers, and was previous to the annual culling of the Jamestown herd by the summer seasoning. Population growth had to “take off” from this non-sustaining subsistence level. Key to this take off in population was to end Dale’s military approach of governance and go full tilt into a “democratic” tone. That change in style was personified by a radical change in the Company’s on-site Virginia governance.
With the list of instructions in hand Yeardley set sail from England. Along with him and his ships was an infusion of population that were intended to serve as workers (be they servants or freemen) in the new plantations-hundreds that were being created. Both men it seems devoted their initial attention to implementing its population attraction strategy by offering a new headright to recruit “servants”, while continuing to bring on board a heavy dose of recruits from the London jail. Smythe and Sandys had put serious money into the new strategy for some very good reasons: As Sandys wrote as reported by Osgood:
the root of the body of the tree [i.e. the colony’s primary means of survival] and private plantations the branches … in pursuing [this] object [Sandys] sought in all directions for tenants with whom to people it. He advertised for laborers and artisans. He applied to the mayor of London for one hundred apprentices twelve years of age or older … domestic cattle and supplies of all kind were bought and shipped. The settlement of private plantations as well as the improvement of public land [by household grants] was also encouraged.
During 1619 the company sent out eight ships … carrying 871 colonial venturers. Three hundred were sent the same year by private adventurers [voluntary joint stock corporations] … the great majority [of both groups] were servants [indentured] … they received free transportation … were furnished with food for one year, also with apparel, cattle, tools and weapons … The tenants on the public lands were expected to return to the company one half of their annual product and to remain in employement for seven years … [receiving] an estate in fee simple as a dividend. [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 81-2
Pilgrims or Quakers these new settlers were not.
Grizzard, Jr. and Boyd Smith report “the company sent ‘an extraordinary choice lot’ of 90 young women willing to go out as wives to settled Virginians. [and] in 1620, 100 ‘maids, young and uncorrupt’ sailed over. Following spirited bidding t the wharves in Jamestown, they were quickly spoken for. Several hundred boys, and some girls drawn mainly from the London streets were sent out as apprenticeships and servants, their passage paid for by charitable organizations [an early form of philanthropy, no doubt]. From London and Middlesex almshouses and jails came vagrants, and criminals, but a decidedly lower percentage of the total than in the past‘. The authors end on a happy note that “these were honest and industrious poor” who were intended to create a “stable family society in Virginia”, p. slix. As a community development CDO, the Virginia Company was not my idea as a role model, but this is 1620.
Sent out with these eight ships was included about one hundred and fifty that were to “devote themselves to the production of iron, others … to build saw mills … cultivate vineyards … sowing of hemp and flax, and for “the cultivation of silk grass … the production of grain was everywhere encouraged”. [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 82. Sandys also awarded about forty new patents, several of which to jumpstart new factories, and carve out a college on company owned land. Here was Sandys determination that the Company’s intention was to create a diversified economic base in Virginia—and he had put his money into it and included it among his initial actions. Sandys, however, fought a forlorn battle, practically alone (even Yeardley ignored it) to restrain the planting of tobacco and to encourage the economic diversification. Sandys was forced in later actions to doubled down on this strategy.
Included in this land program were a series of land allotments (reserves) which were to be used to create and support institutions, a college, a church ministry for instance, by attracting new settlers through an indentured servants imitative operated by the Company to farm Church lands, and the produce they reaped would be sold to support the institution. “One thousand acres were reserved for the maintenance of the ministers of the gospel, three thousand for the support of the governor, ten thousand for the endowment of a college, and twelve thousand for the use of the company itself” [99] Osgood, Vol 1. , p. 83. Specifically Sandys approved 1,500 pounds for the settling and improvement of the college; this included fifty servants half of whose annual production was devoted to the building and maintenance of tutors and scholars. This was Sandys “estate publique”, and in his mind that was the check on the privatization and decentralization which has dominated our discussion thus far.
Today this could be considered as infrastructure-institution funding. If so Sandys had envisioned an ED tool for the funding and support of vital common institutions necessary for a community that was to attract new settlers. It is the first step toward what we shall later call town/city building. In Sandys view, each of these institutions were foremost in recruiting of servants and settlers, and presumably investment. The headright nexus, then did have a “public strategy” that he hoped would establish the necessary prerequisites for a balanced policy system, not to ignore a more humane and attractive one. This along with his artisan-led, fur-trading, crop diversification, and extraction-based economic diversification. In 1619 and 1620 Sandys poured all the investment he could into these projects.
“Companies of associations were created for ‘the sole making of Glasse and Beades for Apparrell and other necessary provisions such as the Colony stood in great need of, “for sending of 100 mayds [maids] to be made wives”, for “setting out of a Voyage to trade with the Indians in Virginia for furrs”, and for the “sending Shipwrights and other principall workmen for making Ships, Boats and other Vessels” … Continuing the work of earlier years, plans were set on foot for making salt, silk, oil, wines, hemp and flax, and “ for engaging Dutch carpenters … skillful for erecting Sawinge Mills, pushing forward the Iron worke so long and earnestly desired and furnishing fishing tackle … and a grist mill”. And I might add to this list “a kitchen sink”. [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1, p. 139. Clearly by 1621, the Company under Sandys well understood the notion of self-sufficiency, and the necessity to diversify the Virginia economic base. Too little, too late does come to mind.
Accordingly, included in Sandys’ list of instructions was a new provincial governance structure in which the governor, his appointed royal council, and an elected group of settler representatives (burgesses) would meet annually, or as needed, to work out a common approach to dealing the “local” problems and issues. The General Assembly (including the proto House of Burgesses) was meant to close the polarizing gap between settlers and their local Company-government. For Sandy’s a primary goals was to remove the public and popular perception that the Company’s governance was dictatorial, corrupt, and accomplished little other than make Virginia a “death-factory”. Off to the side, it seems, was a headright economic development strategy which offered incentives designed to attract a new population in sufficient numbers—willingly based on their own personal interests and motivation.
In this section we discuss (1) creation of the “headright” land sales and population-attraction strategy which through its quitrents brought income into the Company’s offers; (2) the efforts made to diversify the economic base and create “infrastructure” deemed necessary to people-attraction by employing the headright system and turning it over to various types of joint stock corporations; (3) employing a new Company trade store or “adventurers magazine” to systematically manage the importing of needed goods and products, and to pay for these with domestic exports; and, (4) the creation of provincial level elective institutions, the Royal Council and the House of Burgesses, which in aggregate met as the General Assembly
One might argue in light of the sections presented below that in regards to land reform, economic and political development, and permanent settlement strategy that internal democracy among company members-investors no doubt occasioned factionalization and politics, it also led to individual members of the company forming through private plantations, voluntary joint stock corporations, private entrepreneurial ventures that while weakening the former iron hold Smythe and Sandys had maintained over decision regarding Company owned land, led to the dispersal and settlement of the Tidewater region. Given the weakness and lack of capacity of Virginia’s domestic governance institutions, and the mixed involvement of domestic company officials, the dynamics unleashed by the Greate Charter, unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly, were the foundations of what was to become the first basic economic base, and the foundations for, its political-policy governance for the colonial period (and long after I might add).
To consider 1619 Virginia as a “free enterprise zone” would require us to ignore much and simplify to the point of distortion. Still, the term does convey an atmosphere of almost unfettered, almost unrestrained entrepreneurism–checked chiefly as we shall see by Indian resistance. In this light, the political institution, the General Assembly which is founded by the Greate Charter, serves different purposes and follows certain decision-making criteria that depart from most colonial governance institutions. Since Virginia is the first, one does not see this until one can discuss other colonies-states. Amazingly in Virginia’s case, as little is going on government-wise (especially at the province level), much in fact is going on with the colony’s policy system, economic base, and electoral system at the sub-state/province level.
What followed over the next decade (actually a half-century), as far as land grants-plantation-hundred formation-and the awarding of such to voluntary joint stock corporations involved little planning or conscious design. If you had the capital and means to settle your acquired lands than you got the designations and incentives. In effect an open-door or member-investor enterprise zone was in effect until the Company’s termination in 1624.
Whatever you choose to call this, one can hint that the contribution of the first two Stuart kings to early colonial government and policy–as well as economic base making, is a free-flowing proto aristocratic-merchant-plantation owner pre-industrial private enterprise that laid the foundations for a local elite and the crystallization of a political culture that produced massive and heartless inequality, and the pillars of an outstanding democracy. However, this coexists with the thesis behind a 1619 Project (which I heartily disagree), it does lend a complexity to our thought. This culture will be the roots of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry–and Johns Calhoun and Marshall, not to ignore Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. What strange bedfellows these characters are. Plantation elites all, they guided the fates and policies of America’s Early Republic, certainly into the 1840’s.
Company Politics Backe in Merrie Olde Englande
Virginia’s Virginia Company period–and the First Migration it generated–is not customarily thought as the “real” start of Virginia’s successful colonization. Not known for its institutionalization, not fully appreciated for its role in the founding of the Virginia tobacco monoculture, and certainly not understood to be the driving period of the colony’s future political development or its political culture–not to mention sustainable population growth–the Virginia Company has not captured a compelling description and focus among American historians. The starving years of Jamestown always get top priority, but the Valley Forge-like desperation of those years offer little credit to the Company, and what positive credit flows to charismatic explorer and soldier of fortune, John Smith, and the unfortunate, I fear, story behind. Pocahontas-Rebecca. The powerful Indian actors, Powhattan, and the unspellable O, are cast off to the side, the latter hardly mentioned before 1622. More solid actors, John Rolfe, Thomas Gates, and above all Thomas Dale are names and offices that held sway in the first decade of the colony’s fragile existence.
Our history, thus far has argued the politics and dynamics in London best explain the uninspiring colony-building associated with the Virginia Company period. The Company did not understand the preconditions for an effective colony-building strategy when it launched the colony in 1606-7, and it took over a half-decade to come up with somewhat more realistic ideas and strategies of how to accomplish colony-building. The more desperate story, if Jamestown’s starving years were devoid of their human misery, was in the Virginia Company’ s fiscal condition, which after 1610, made it a financial “going-concern”, floating with bond default, inadequate revenues, and little prospect of the attracting significant investment. No surprise this promoted what by the end of the teens, a civil war within a company, that led to the coup of 1618-19, and eventually after 1622 the fall of the Company and the termination of its Virginia charter. The period we are now about to describe, the years associated with the Greate Charter, are its golden years, the high water mark of the Virginia Company.
The Greate Charter, however, was no spectacular high water mark. The Company’s past performance set a rather low bar, and I can’t say other than as high water marks go, the Greate Charter was not particularly outstanding. That one of its structures, the House of Burgesses, would eventually morph into America’s so-called first democratic legislature a generation or two later, is about the only thing American historians praise to any particular degree–more on that later. But, as we shall try to support, the Greate Charter suffered considerably from the Company’s civil war, and the Company’s empty coffers. What success the Greate Charter would have economically, came from its ED strategy that fostered and relied upon extra-Company investment made attractive by profound Company incentives using the one resource the Company had plenty of “land in the wilderness”.
Those incentives, and the colony-building strategy were launched in 1612-3, and picked up real steam only when the Company’s 1606-7 debt matured in 1616. When that happened, older, more traditional merchant adventurers, departed, leaving the Company shareholder membership held by larger number of secondary town merchants, Parliamentarians, and landed gentry seeking opportunities for their progeny. The Company strategy, logically, wanted to allow these folk opportunities to benefit from Virginia, so that the Company did not have to pay a dividend for which it had no known source of revenues. Offering land to company shareholders, and then expanding the land incentive to newcomers who bought as little as a single share was the incentive that motivated new immigrants and offered investors some hope of a longer-term Virginia economic development project that could yield sustainable returns on the investment, and status for their offspring. It was these motivations and hopes that funded and founded Virginia’s tobacco monoculture–that and English consumer demand for the product. If the reader will note, no where in all this is a Stuart king mentioned.
That, friends, is the real behind the scenes story of the Greate Charter.
The reader is again reminded our position is Company politics exerted a major influence in the design and operation of Virginia’s settlement and development—and that the policy initiatives that were pursued in London were driven by London-based dynamics that distorted the structure and implementation of Virginia colony-building strategies.
Company Politics Underlying the Greate Charter
In the contested and critical period (1617- very early 1619), it has always been somewhat unclear what was the Smythe-Sandys relationship. I have implicitly assumed that Smythe’s relative detachment from the affairs of the Virginia Company after 1612. Sandys was not yet dominant, Smythe was still in charge, and more than nominally, but he was focused on elements of the Company strategy, export and the Company magazine–and the Bermuda Somers colony. He was more interested in stabilizing Jamestown-Virginia.
But Sandys was the leader who was developing an agenda and strategy, borrowed it would seam on what was learned from the Raleigh venture a decade earlier. He also was seriously interested in breaking up any “monopoly” exercised by an all-powerful company board of directors (i.e. council) decision-making. He wanted to decentralize company decision-making, into committees he could influence, and annual board of directors meetings that approved the next year’s initiatives and strategy direction.
As a patriot, and as an investor, he wanted to Virginia Company to succeed, but no merchant, he was more patient realizing profits required time to develop a venture in the colony, and for that venture to mature. His problem was the larger company membership was not that patient–and Sandys’ own politics as a Parliamentary leader made him the implacable foe of the Stuart king–for whom the Virginia Company was contracted to serve.
Accordingly as Smyth transferred much of his affections and time invested in the Virginia Company into the Somers Company (Bermuda), one can trace, in the Gates-Dale reforms a path that emphasized settlement and an increasingly likelihood of distant profits and dividends through investment in the only Virginia export that offered hope for sustainable revenues and profits: Rolfe’s tobacco. What was really causing disruption in the years before 1616-7 was the Somers Island (Bermuda) sub-company; it seemed to offer more opportunities–again with tobacco as the export product–not the least of which was privateering on Spain’s West Indies gold fleet and sugar-spice exports.
A third force in the Company membership, the influential and well-born noble Earl of Warwick had aspirations in Bermuda, and Smythe was having none of it. The first major disruption was Smythe against Warwick (the first earl). In this Virginia very much became their sideshow–leaving more decision-making to Sandys, and his allies. As a sideshow, Dale’s initiatives bore a sound measure of success, dispersing the population, retaining a fair share of expired former indentured servant “ancient settlers”, and developing plantations that successfully exported increasing quantities of tobacco for sale in England–whose performance, I might add, was watched by company shareholders who saw the opportunity they might have if they invested and developed similar plantations.
Accordingly, we see an opening up, a relaxing, of the Company’s previous restrictions on member-investors use of the proto-headright incentives, thereby allowing more investors to start projects to take advantage of tobacco production (especially) outside the Company framework. The first such investors were mostly the company officials and leadership. The only other shareholders that benefited from these early incentives, were the indentured servants, who, promised an share upon termination of their contract, would experimentally received that share in the form of a land-rental-to-own company grant.
These preliminaries came to an end with a new governor, Samuel Argall (1617-18). The Argall interlude (see previous module), wracked with its Warwick-Smythe complications, created yet more intense and personal conflict between the parties. Sandys, for his own reasons, and for advancement of his evolving Virginia Company economic development strategy, decided to take advantage of the rifts and conducted his own campaign to “oust” Smythe from Treasurer in the Virginia Company. His perspective seems to have been Virginia focused.
If so, it is clear that The Virginia Company had departed from its original 1606 founding constituency, merchant adventurers, and that a decade later the Company membership was scattered among those who wanted trade foremost, adventure as in privateering, and more permanent settlement as Raleigh had attempted at Roanoke. Sandys represented the latter, Warwick, the middle grouping, and Smythe the former. To complicate this, Sandys, as a major parliamentary leader, had recruited a sizeable membership from his fellow parliamentarians–and these votes were his to sway, inclined the least to the “monopolist” Smythe.
… the personal rivalry between Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading figure in the opposition to the crown since James first Parliament (1604), and the champion of free trade … and that pillar of commercial orthodoxy and respectability Sir Thomas Smythe on the other. Since 1618 the struggle between these two formidable figures had waged within three companies, the East India Company, the Virginia Company, and the Somers Islands Company. The struggle was not without political overtones, since Sandys political career had earned him the hostility of the King. Sandys party had won effective control of the Virginia Company in 1619, and a year later had circumvented an attempt by James I to prevent Sandy’s re-election as Treasurer–‘Chose the Devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys’ [was publicly proclaimed by the King to the Board of Directors]–by substituting for [Sandys] one of his supporters, the Earl of Southampton [Sandy’s chief ally].
In 1621, the Sandys faction had achieved a further notable success when they ousted Smythe and his supporters from the key offices in the Somers Island Company. In contrast to his free-trade activities [previously] … Sandys had then sought in the parliament of 1621 to obtain a ban on the importation of all tobacco except from Virginia and the Somers Islands, and moreover to get the patent for the sole importation of tobacco vested in the hands of his supporters [in both company’s through the “Magazine”]–strange conduct for a supporter of free trade“. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, 1603-1643 (Cambridge university Press, 1979), p. 115
While Parliament was not in session during much of this period, Sandys had access to those who lived in the adjacent secondary ports, and large towns outside and rival to London. Conversely, much of Smythe’s support, from the Guilds, had been diverted to the Ulster Plantation, and in any case foreign plantations were a secondary priority, if a priority at all. There was also another major issues, that of “impositions”, a trade tax imposed by the King on exports and imports. Tobacco in particular was affected, its trade offered the King a major source of revenue which he alone controlled. The issue disrupted the 1614 “Addled Parliament”, a two month running battle between King and Parliament that led to its abbreviated term, and suspension.
Thereafter, a royally-controlled tobacco trade, with impositions, contrasted with a free trade tobacco trade advocated by Parliamentarians, of which Sandys was a major leader. Royal opposition to Sandys had to have increased, and this probably drove a wedge between Smythe and Sandys. Sandys was able to muster a loud, articulate mass at Company committees and annual meeting, and voice voting seems to have had an effect of passing Sandys motions more than Smythe’s. Company meetings, according to notes and minutes, were contentious, and throughout the period there was a perception that Sandys was taking advantage of it.
A three-way fight, Sandys-Warwick-Smythe, duked it out during 1618–culminating in Smythe’s loss of the Virginia Company Treasurer in early 1619, Sandys victory in attaining it–and Smythe retention of his control over the Somers Company. Warwick died at this time, and his son, even more aggressive than his Dad, did not have sufficient strength to wedge a spot in the Company leadership at this point. The Company, however, as a whole remained fractured, and only the skills of Sandys as a parliamentary leader, was able to muster consistent support on committee and the annual board of directors meeting over the next few years. Smythe, it was reported, was in increasingly ill health after 1621, and that likely played a role as well. That meant Sandys drove affairs in the Virginia Company during these years, and for the most part, the Greate Charter was his plan to develop the colony.
At this point I think it relevant to prepare the reader for an important transition in the configuration and evolution of England’s Commercial Revolution, the precursor to the Industrial Revolution and the maturation of “modern capitalism’. In the 1620’s, certainly the 1630’s, the composition of those who engaged in commerce and colonialism changed rather dramatically, and Virginia, while not the ground zero for this transition, was a major player in which the transition is evident. It is my suggestion that the disruptive Virginia Company politics played a significant role in dampening the enthusiasm for colonial investment by the “commercial merchant adventurers” that dominated the early trading companies.
As Craven asserted “the new merchants”, for they had been quite literally pioneers in the development of a new branch in overseas trade … The City’s [London] mercantile establishment, of course, had been significantly represented (especially by Sir Thomas Smith {Smythe] in the initial efforts to establish a colony in Virginia, but the experience seems to have taught most of its members to avoid such ventures thereafter” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, White, Black and Red: the Seventeenth Century Virginian (W. W. Norton Company, 1971), p. 22.
Robert Brenner, whose research guided Craven[99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003, pp. 92-102, suggests this is the earliest noticeable movement in the shift from our trading company merchant adventurers, mostly headquartered in London, away from colony-building. He starts his commentary with the 1609 Virginia Charter which he believes these adventurers realizing their hopes for quick profits, based on short-term transactions, or the discovery and trade in precious metals or Indian furs dissipated. In our parlance they recognized colony-building meant permanent settlement, the development of a long-term economic base–and all that might entail–and the need to achieve a reasonable level of self-sufficiency in daily life and personal quality of life in the colony.
None of this particularly attracted the great majority of these big-time London merchant adventurers, and they didn’t care for the rather substantial change in the Virginia Company’s business plan–or Sandys Greate Charter approach. Brenner details Sandys’ Greate Charter initiatives, and observes that Sandys “gentry party” was largely responsible for the ouster “merchant party”, but further observes Sandys Greate Charter initiatives meant greater reliance on the Company as the vehicle of economic development (the estates publique) and a rejection of the merchant approach of monopoly export trade through the Magazine). This analysis pretty much corresponds to the dynamics discussed in this module.
If anything, from this point on the merchant adventurers, as individuals, bypassed the company, and gravitated into the more promising trade in tobacco, with their preferred vehicle being the voluntary joint stock corporation–which after 1616 was eligible for the headright incentive package. Brenner cities estimates that between 1619 and 1623 somewhere between 80,000-90,000 pounds were invested in the Virginia economy, “but of this sum the company laid out only about 10,000 while private entrepreneurs supplied the remainder” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003, p. 95; Brenner cites W. R. Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, 1910-12), Vol. 2, p. 286.
Brenner concludes with the obvious–that Sandys Greate Charter initiate failed in its principal objectives and led to the final chapters in the destruction of the Company and its charter. But he offers one more interesting glimpse into how the “failure” of the Virginia Company and its colony-building altered the composition of colonial investors. Brenner notes a major reason why Sandys did fail was that the colonial investment he offered to his “gentry party” simply did not attract either their interest or investment. Sandys could bring no new investment into the Virginia Company so that his initiatives could be funded: Sandys “and his noble and gentry supporters proved no more willing to provide the investment funds necessary to underwrite production in the colony than the City merchants had been … Even worse, they were unable to induce those who had already subscribed to the joint stock [in 1609-10] to pay in their [required] funds. By 1620, a total of 16,000 pounds in uncollected subscriptions stood on the company’s books”. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003), p. 99
There will be one last hurrah in this struggle within the Company, the 1622-3 tobacco contract debate, and we will resume the description in that module.
Sandys Settlement Business Plan: the Plans of Mice and Men …
To the extent there was any conventional wisdom concerning an English permanent settlement, it based based on Raleigh’s Roanoke venture, a generation of so previous. That this wisdom was available to the Virginia Company can be assumed as several of Raleigh’s principal backers and even Roanoke residents (who had returned to England) were founding members of the Virginia Company (his signature is one of eight on the founding incorporation document), including several “refugees” from the shattered and shuttered Plymouth-Sagadahoc expedition. Richard, Hakluyt (the Younger) was their principal advocate and his thought and writings on the matter crossed paths with Sandys thinking–and maybe Dale’s as well.
Hakluyt was, among many things, well-connected, an Anglican minister, and a geographer-colonizer [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hakluyt-richard-1552-1616/. . He had served as Elizabeth’s private adviser on English colonization, and his considerable writings (two books at least) were not circulated publicly, but accessible to Hakluyt’s relatives (Gilbert), and fellow adventurers. Hakluyt had intended to venture to Jamestown, but for reasons unknown he canceled at the last moment. He owned two shares in the 1609 Charter company.
Summarized, his perspective saw colonization as multi-purposed: commercial profits, a national purpose of mercantile supremacy for England–a purpose of national importance for her future, a boost to economic autonomy for vital English production of key materials and products, even a base to raid the Spanish in West Indies, a missionary intent to convert the Native Americans to Protestantism as both a balance to the Catholic presence in the New World and a basis for peaceful coexistence for the colony with the Indians, and finally, he saw the permanent colony as a way to draw off Scrooge’s “surplus” population offering them an opportunity to a new life in the New World-that included BTW use of criminals. [99] Grizzard, Jr and Boyd Smith, . Jamestown: a Colony, p. xx.
I take note of his strong interweaving of England’s foreign policy-national defense with English economic and social development. The similarities to Bacon’s first thesis on Plantations (1606) are substantial–and it also permeated his last 1626 writing. This is an important insight to English colonial American economic development- and as we have seen to George Washington’s justification for trans-Appalachian settlement by use of the Potomac canal. The reaction of American historians to this disarray was to acknowledge its existence, but keep away from the specifics, preferring to focus their attention on matters in Virginia. Osgood in particular goes into detail on the background and specific individuals associated with these very large land grants—and importantly on how the dynamics of the internal fighting and factional politics within the Virginia Company and its subsidiaries. Osgood is not very neutral in this regard. He is a strong Sandys supporter, closely associating him and his faction with Parliament (its country or pre-Whig element) and the Southampton faction within the Company. He does have some sympathy for Smythe, but clearly believes the time for Smythe to move on had come.
The weakness in his approach was his sense that economic advantages could be quickly achieved considering the immense natural resources available in North America. To him colonization for a bonanza for all, colonists and English national defense, North America “was an Eden, needing only righteous, industrious men [and women I trust] to cultivate its gardens“[99] Grizzard, Jr and Boyd Smith, . Jamestown: a Colony, p. xxi. That generated unrealistic expectations, and his comprehensive list of valid purposes did not lend itself to precise economic development strategies, most fundamental being rapid self-sufficiency as the expense of any quick trade or profits. His conception of a diversified economic base was also fundamental, however, and one that Sandys, a tobacco-phobe, readily embraced in his 1618 Plan.
After 1612 the Virginia Company had stabilized, at least propped up, its beleaguered colony.
In 1612 the company had secured a new charter, the most important new provision authorized the creation of a lottery. Armed with new hopes and additional funds raised from the sale of lottery tickets. Company officials launched another attempt to revivify Virginia. But despite this latest infusion of capital and men, Virginia like a wounded albatross, limped along without showing a profit or even a hint of one.
Virginia’s growing reputation as a deathtrap deterred people from going there, but the chief difficulty with the colony’s population was its inability to exploit the country’s most abundant resource—the land. Moreover, given the rigors of military discipline [in its local governance] … there was little incentive to try. Artisans, craftsmen, gentlemen, transported felons … lacked the requisite skills for turning the Old Dominion into a prosperous agricultural community.
Only after 1616, when the company declared a promised dividend in land rather than money did company officials … realized a possible salvation from their difficulties lay in transforming their colony from an outpost into a place that promised many of the trappings of English society. [99] “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History 0f Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, pp. 10
The colony needed much more than stabilization,; it was increasingly obvious that in today’s terms, the Virginia Company was facing a situation that questioned if the company could survive. It needed an economic base of such size and diversification that it could support its resident population and relieve the Company of having to send a fleet of rescue ships several times each year. The Company’s 1618 financial deficit was estimated at 9,000 pounds [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-company-of-london/ ). Slowly, almost begrudgingly, Smythe, and more aggressively Sandys, began to flesh out a strategy to pivot from a trading outpost to a permanent settlement. That created internal conflicts within the Company and its leadership, as did the fragmentation and factionalization fostered by the new and diverse 1609-11 investors, members such as Warwick who saw the colony more as a “freebooting” and opportunistic, quick profit trading company.
While Sandys may well have had personal propensities sensitive to the establishment of a democracy in England (he was allied and sympathetic to the “country” faction, later to be called Whigs, within Parliament, the aggregate dynamic of the Greate Charter was to sustain the Virginia colony and the Virginia Company [99] See Osgood, Vol 1, p. 80; it was closer to being an economic plan than a proposal to establish a political democracy. Certainly over the next half-century the institution created by the Greate Charter (House of Burgesses) did evolve into true colonial era democratic body, but that was not the intentions of its 1618 founder.
In any case, Smythe, in his own “adventurer style”, was finally converting Virginia from a joint stock corporation oriented toward managing a trading post, to a ED strategy transitioning the colony into a permanent settlement. Probably Dale’s land policy (Dale was likely a member of Smythe’s faction) was a likely behind the scene’s author. Smythe seems to have more acquiesced to Gates and Dales stern and militaristic approach to governing and application of the law—but also deferred to its gradual easing after 1611-12. He clearly never spoke, nor acted against it, likely deferring the decision to Dale who was in residence. That seems in character with Smythe who given his many positions, tasks, and conflicting administrative responsibilities, not to mention age and apparently decreasing health, was prone to defer decision-making to those on the spot, the front lines so to speak.
After 1614, he and Sandys were the beneficiaries of Dale’s marginal successful land policy which countered the effects of the negative image his style of governance conveyed. The style of governance and desperation of life in the colony, plus the threat of losing the lottery due to negative public opinion, resolved to alter harsh inflexible dictatorial/oligarchical application of political authority. If the perception of Virginia quality of life had to change, so did the impregnable and often insensitive rule of the Company’s local governance officials. Living so close to the edge of extinction, it was not feasible to strip the Governor/Deputy Governor of much of their powers, but to hold them accountable to a membership of settlers in the colony and to give the settler’s representatives a say in the making of its policy was a risk they felt they had to take.
Moreover, the turnover in local council and governors in Virginia itself (there had been close to fifteen presidents of the council, deputy governors, and governors during the first decade of the colony) meant by this time (1617-8) there was evidence that government from London was not working, unstable and discontinuous at the least. The logical implication was that London had to create a meaningful local governance acceptable to the residents-settlers if any further progress was to be made.
That the population of the colony still hovered around 1,000 (including women and children, and probably some goats), meant new settlers on a scale not yet achieved, had to be recruited willingly to immigrate. As indicated earlier, the dynamics of intra-company politics, and the wishes of the investor-members had by this time formalized into a member-cattle stampede into acquiring their own private propertied interests instead of simply drawing a dividend drawn from non-existent company profits.
On the other hand, the timing for reform seemed ripe–in fact absolutely necessary if the Company had any hopes to avoid bankruptcy. Despite their personal views of tobacco, for once, Smythe and Sandys realized they had caught a break; tobacco had secured a cluster breakthrough with a promise of a productive economic base (although as the reader will soon discover, tobacco had unfortunate implications which Smythe and Sandys opposed). So in 1617-8 the two drafted (Sandys primarily) a new economic development strategy and incorporated within it a new land use and people-recruitment policy (the Greate Charter) that promised a realistic effort to break the permanent settlement logjam [99] See Osgood, Vol 1, p. 83.
While the in-fighting initially concerned Bermuda more than Virginia, by 1617-8 it spilled over into a spirited internal polarization of its leadership, that in particular saw Smythe and Warwick enter into hopelessly personal bitterness/rivalry, as well as reflecting policy difference as to the nature and purpose of the Virginia Company. Sandys, the deputy responsible for operations, was seemingly less involved in the Smythe-Warwick struggle, more consumed in larger parliamentary matters, but much more focused on the situation in Virginia. During this period he gravitated toward the need for a major pivot, perhaps a great leap forward and he assembled a series of actions and initiatives that in aggregate constituted his approach to a settlement strategy. This “list of initiatives” in aggregate came to be called the Greate Charter after Sandys for his own reasons entered into the leadership struggle, probably during or after 1617..
But before proceeding on, it is imperative we note that as differences between the developing Sandys’ Plan and Smythe (and his ally the King) likely became more intense, Sandys relationship with Smythe deteriorated. Likely Smythe’s approach to colony-building, probably always different from Sandys’ basic instincts–departed significantly from Sandy’s and his parliamentary and secondary port allies. The fiscal crisis, the likelihood no dividends could be forthcoming to shareholders, demanded a more radical and timely pivot from Smythe’s traditional trading-export focus. Rich, ever the opportunist, stressed the privateer option to the king, thereby weaponizing the colonization enterprise by introducing a mercantilist offensive against England’s enemies.
It appears Sandys wanted more say and also wanted to weaken the company monopoly of land, profits, and control by imposing a Virginia-based company-shareholder board-committees, at the expense of Smythe and the governor, to check company monopiles by gradual introduction of private property, including the facilitation of ventures and enterprises that competed with the company monopoly franchises. Likely Smythe, the consummate monopolist, would have as little of this as could be managed. It is also likely to the extent he was aware and involved, the King would see this as a check, another parliamentary intrusion into his exclusive control over foreign and trade policies–including colonization.
If this assessment is substantially accurate, this core conflict between Treasurer, his Deputy, and a privateering shareholder faction may have sealed the lid on the Virginia Company fiscal coffin. The struggle was over the purpose of the Virginia Company, but in reality it exposed its organizational fragmentation in the face of its fiscal crisis. It may also have ruptured what good feelings the King had about the Virginia venture, or at least its potential success under the auspices of the joint stock Virginia Company. Sandys would indeed oust Smythe from the Treasurer position–and have seized dominance in Virginia colony’s policy direction–but his hold on that was fragile, and the Virginia Company holding company as an aggregate had been broken into rival feudal subsidiaries, regulated poorly by unstable shareholder majorities in its internal structures, the annual and quarterly meetings, and committees.
It seems clear that from 1618, to its effective Virginia demise in 1624, that the Virginia Company lacked sufficient internal cohesion and consensus around its strategies to both pivot the colony’s economic base and to promote successful permanent settlement. From this point on the Company was confronting not just a fiscal crisis, but a leadership and internal cohesion civil war.
Internally, Smythe and Sandys different approach to Virginia colony-building–and the fate of the Virginia Company itself–may well have been the deciding issue that destroyed what had been a moderately reasonable consensus between the two. It may have been a point of divergent priorities between the need for quick revenues derived from tobacco sales as Smythe likely preferred.
Smythe, while likely not opposed to a diversified economy, nor to the national defense linkage, was tied closely to annual production, sales, and export by the Company Magazine, and quick sale in England-presumably to pay bills and generate secondary profits for his merchant constituency. Sandys, a tobacco phobe as was Smyth, placed his bet on a more diversified economic base that yielded exports other than tobacco. It came to a head late 1618, and the die was cast early 1619.
The answer is likely Smythe consented to some of the instructions, if for no other reason is that he had few options of his own. But, as a conservative royalist, he did not support Sandy’s list of instructions that weakened the governor and company by creating a Virginia-based shareholder “Assembly” with powers surprisingly congruent with the English-based shareholder annual “Assembly”. Smythe seemingly counted his votes and “retired” as Virginia Company Treasurer, but before he left, Smythe created a new economic development entity to replace the existing Company trade bureau (the “magazine”) with a new one “Adventurers of the Magazine”. Smythe’s long-time ally and deputy, Alderman Johnson was placed in charge.
One can assume the motive was personal profit, and a backdoor way to continue to exert a major impact on the day to day affairs of the colony and Company. It also meant that whatever Sandys did, there was some check to company decentralization and any challenge to company profits. This was not likely to be congruent with Sandys approach. Predictably, Sandys never cooperated with the new entity and it fell into bankruptcy by 1621 [99] See Andrews, Vol.1, p. 127]. Smythe, in any case had moved his corner office to the Bermuda Somers Company. From their competing corner offices the fight got worse each passing day.
Bypassing the Magazine, I might add, counter-intuitively affected, i.e. reinforced, the spread of tobacco and strengthened the role of the plantation elite in marketing that product. Why? The inability of the Magazine to manage the tobacco export trade left the matter in the hands of the plantation owner. At the least, the export of tobacco increased owner autonomy, and transformed him into the only effective intermediary for the export of tobacco raised by renters and small homesteads in his isolated hundred. In that this dynamic was evident at the birth of the tobacco monoculture, it will not be surprising it was built into the the plantation enterprise and tobacco business model. In this respect the reader can see how these several dynamics we discuss in this section flow and interweave in ways one could not imagine.
Handling the colony’s import and export trade/finance this entity controlled the heart and soul of Virginia’s economic base—and was the single place where profits might be had.[99] N. W. Stephenson, “Some Inner History of the Virginia Company” (William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, Vol. 22), pp. 91-2 If this assertion is correct (and the supporting documents have mostly been lost over the years), then we see evidence that calls into question whether it was both Sandys and Smythe, or Sandys alone, who supported the creation of the Virginia General Assembly or rather that Smythe had simply carved out for himself an entity from which he could secure profits for himself and his allies.
Smythe, in 1619, surrendered his Treasurer position to Sandys, but not his control over the Virginia Company Magazine. Sandys, in turn, emphasized the diversification of Virginia’s economic base in his “list” that constituted the Greate Charter. He resisted reliance on the Magazine and its tobacco sale-export”:
Sir Edwin Sandys summed up the dominant trend in 1619 when he observed that ‘as the private plantation began thus to increase, so contrariwise the estate of the publique [the Company-operated sector] … grew into utter consumption’. The consequence on Sandys’ view was that the colony became so obsessively devoted to tobacco planting that the colonists soon ‘reduced themselves into an extremity of being ready to starve unless the Magazine [the sub-company that brought them their provisions and marketed their goods] … had supplied them with corn and cattle from hence‘ …
Beginning in 1619, the Virginia Company did make a desperate, last ditch effort to reverse these trends toward individualistic and single-crop production. It suddenly sought to revive production on the company’s own lands (the estate of the publique) and sent over large groups of colonists [i.e. indentured servants, mostly, some artisans, children and criminals as well] to provide the labor forces for this purpose. It tried, at the same time, to break the tobacco monoculture and to diversify the colony’s economy. To that end it sought to compel the colonists to produce certain amounts of food and commercial crops besides tobacco, while itself taking charge of a series of ambitious projects–specifically, the construction of a colonial iron industry, the development of silk production, and the introduction of wine-making. The company could sustain these efforts, however, for only a few years [until the 1622 Massacre], and, in the end could make little impact on the overall direction of [Virginia’s] colonial development. The result of this brief period of intense company activity was actually to consolidate already existing trends [tobacco]. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), p. 95
If so, the future of Virginia’s Tidewater and Piedmont economic base was forged in 1621, with Smythe’s seeming defeat, Warwick’s death, and Sandys pyrrhic victory encased in his Greate Charter economic initiative. Sandys bold coup further unleashed a political firestorm whose fiscal implications finalized the company’s political future as a colony-builder. The echoes of this disruption, however, seem to have been heard, and felt, in Virginia.
By 1619, with Sandys as Treasurer, his principal assistant, Farrar as Deputy, and his supporters dominating Company committees, the policy die had been cast. Sandys, whatever else was going in within the Virginia Company, dominated the affairs of the Virginia colony. His approach, his nexus of economic development colony-building strategies expressed in the form of a “list” of instructions sent with the new Governor Yeardley early 1619–the aggregate of which Yeardley referred as a “Greate Charter”. The pivot from the original Virginia Company strategy was complete, and the Greate Charter became the turning point of no return: settlement, self-sufficiency, and diversification of Virginia’s economic base were the colony’s primary economic development strategies. Through population attraction greased by a heavy company land-based incentive program, the workforce would be recruited, at the expense of the prospective landowner. With the Deputy Governor as the transatlantic transmission belt, the implementation and management of this pile of “reform initiatives” would be in the hands of his own gubernatorial advisory council and newly-created General Assembly were also settled matters.
Humphrey Dumpty Sat on a Wall–There was one might suspect, possible flies in the ointment. It was during this period, 1619, that James was being forced to reconvene a Parliament he suspended in 1614. The Parliament formally reconvened in 1621. Whether the dispute between the two forces was over larger constitutional issues, or the need-desire of the King for more money–James I was in desperate financial need–and the Parliament was unwilling to appropriate sums without meaningful reforms–including informally viewing itself as the chief English “check” to a divine-right king. The trading companies, Virginia Company in particular, were not central, in this struggle, but certainly were caught up, in the back and forth of the contending parties.
The struggle between King James, who had inherited many tensions evident in Elizabeth’s reign, and Parliament was intense from his royal assumption in 1603. And, as one reads the goings on, one not infrequently finds that Sandys played a serious role in the battle-negotiations. These were serious and fundamental matters and as a leading member of Parliament, Sandys opposed to the Crown publicly and ad hominin. Sandys was never anything but controversial, and a thorn in James’s side. The fight was as much “personal” as policy–and very public. His standing in the Virginia Company had to be derived from that role, and one assumes he is Treasurer because of it. Virginia’s colony-building has been politicized. Not only is the Company on the edge of bankruptcy, it is now on the cutting edge of a near revolutionary English politics.
On top of that the Company’s chief source of funds, the English lottery, was under attack in 1619, in large part because the Company was seen by the English public, and much of Parliament, as a bunch of freebooters and rich London-based mercantilist merchants that ruled Virginia as a selfishly as any monopolist would. Smythe was the personification of this, and to this must be added a rather faulty delegation of he lottery to several agents whose practices did little to enhance its productivity, nor its public approval. In that the King had never approved of lotteries, much like his position on tobacco, the Virginia Company lottery was always on rather thin ice.
While I am at some odds with Richard Middleton’s treatment of the Greate Charter, I do welcome his assessment of the King’s position on the matter. “The reality is that disputes over the {Virginia] company had tenuous links with those between the king and Parliament. Certainly the Court [King/Privy Council] believed that the company’s democratic method of proceeding, or ‘popular appeal had exacerbated the situation. Of a plot, however, there is no trace. The [future] annulment of the charter was forced on the Crown by the company’s failings, as evidenced by the fact that neither James I nor the Privy Council had any immediate plans for dealing with the ailing enterprise. [99] Richard Middleton, Colonial America: a History, 1565-1776 (3rd Ed) (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 60.
That minimum of royal involvement in Virginia Company politics, however, did little to connect the Virginia Company to the administration and evolution of of English colonial policy. In fact, the experience of the Virginia Company played a formative role in the development of future English colonial policy and administration. That the King could see the “Greate Charter” as another attack by Sandys and his Parliamentary allies (in the form of Virginia Company shareholders and committee members) is understandable. Between 1619 and through the Parliamentary elections Sandys, Smythe and the King would duke it out–the result at the end of 1621, leaving Smythe ousted from his seat in Parliament by Sandys (Smythe later acquired another holding), and the King placing Sandys under house arrest.
The background music to the Greate Charter was very loud indeed. I can’t help but wonder if the 1621 Office Christmas Party was the Office Christmas Party of all Time. If you don’t think so, consider William Robert Scotts thoughts on the events of that year:
[In 1621] A little consideration will show that the whole financial superstructure [of the Virginia Company] rested on the receipts from lotteries … this was the sole source of funds. Whether James I was sufficiently antagonistic to Sandys to show his displeasure in relation to the Virginia Company, or whether as it seems likely, he was urged to action by the Smythe party, it was not long before Sandys began to feel the royal displeasure. When the time came for a new election of treasurer, James sent a strongly worded message forbidding the Adventures [Virginia Company shareholders] to choose Sandys–according to one account his words were “Choose the Devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys”. As a result of this interference, which was contrary to the charters, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, was chosen unanimously as treasurer; at a meeting in which it is said as many as 500 persons were present. [Southampton] was a large adventurer [merchant-trader], but as treasurer took little part in the affairs of the company, Sandys remaining the moving spirit. There were many [shareholders in attendance] who were ready to show that the King’s wish had been evaded and the result was the license to hold lotteries, which was dependent on royal pleasure and was [actionable] on six months notice, was withdrawn on March 1621. [99] William Robert Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint Stocks Companies to 1720 (Vol II) (Alpha Editions (2019), Cambridge at the University Press, 1910), p. 272
In 1621, the King, furious at Sandys, terminated the Company’s lottery contract, leaving the Virginia Company without any substantial source of revenues to pay its ongoing expenses. That in its turn transformed Sandys into a tobacco-dependent advocate–and his difficulties associated with his advocacy of a monopolistic tobacco “contract” that soon followed (see future module). Without revenues, except those gleaned from annual sales of tobacco, the Virginia colony had nothing with which to pay its bills. At that point, 1621, tobacco was the make or break export commodity that kept the Virginia Company alive. That, and land sales derived from new settler purchase, was all that sustained the Company through 1625.
CONTINUE DISCUSSION THROUGH 1623-24, FACTIONS AND TOBACCO,
Ron W. Coan 