How Royal Drift to Resolving Tensions in Virginia Domestic Governance Entered into Virginia Historiography.
The previous module alerted us contemporaries that many historians and popular history had misperceived the role and legacy of the Virginia Company. Many have and do assume the Virginia Company lost its control and influence over Virginia in 1624–when it didn’t. It lost the former, but not the latter. The Virginia Company lost its Virginia charter rights for the most part in 1639 or 1642 if you prefer. It is the Virginia Company and the King that composed the notes and lyrics that provided the background dance music alluded to in the last module. Only with the 1634 Laud Commission was the Virginia Company thrust out of the picture in Virginia governance but as we shall see the Company contemplated and was attempting to carry out one Last Hurrah. That effort would enter into the complex politics that led to the ouster of Harvey.
American historians, not hearing the music because it was so far away in another country, and they were around 350 years distant. Without the background music and lyrics emanating from London, the political dance in Virginia is almost comical, certainly opportunistic and driven by motives of uncertain morality by a bunch of uncivilized rural frontier hicks or worse. I suggest the real cause of the so-called Virginia “semi-anarchy” of thugs and middling fools driven by their greedy profit-laden ambitions. was London’s refusal or inability to compete the definition of the domestic Virginia policy system. The system lacked sufficient cohesion, definition of powers and limitations on powers, and was amazingly insensitive to the dynamics and venalities that typically permeate into public decision-making. It also required, as Craven repeatedly asserts, some constant level of monitoring and involvement by London. Pre-1639-42 Virginia domestic government, as we shall discover, simply was an incomplete government, whose processes, participants and institutions have been distorted or misunderstood.
That story line seriously distorted the history of the First Migration and disparaged its elite. Virginia’s resident elite—an elite which by almost anyone’s standards left a lot to be desired. But, if the story is better told, that elite did hear the background music and there are larger logics that create meaning, and even a level of competence to their ambitions and actions. Like all elites perhaps they wanted to create a Virginia that worked for the purposes they deemed valuable—but for Virginia to work they knew they had to get London on board. They knew that in 1624 the Virginia-based policy system was not formed or established, and only London could do that.
If this is ok to the reader. it wasn’t just the the First Generation-First Migration planter elite that led to the bad start of Virginia in the English colonial; rather it was the barons, opportunists, and dilettantes of the Early Stuart kings to prove that negligence need not be benign. That will be even more obvious as the reader engages in our story about Massachusetts colonial development. Massachusetts will never be mistaken for Virginia, or vice-versa, due in surprisingly large measure of how, and why, Massachusetts felt the impact of London-based policy-making during this period—and how it reacted to it.
That in fact was congruent with the chronological phases of political development penned by Jon Kukla’s classic [99] Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia (the American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No 2 (April 1985), -pp. 281-2-a work which this history relies upon as central to our task of establishing the importance of the First Migration and the First Migration elite in the development of Virginia,
We note the “shapeless” of Virginia’s governance posited by many historians, but also call attention that the Virginians themselves provided, to the extent they could, some important definition in the formation of their post-Company policy system. 1630, therefore, is an important year for us, as it notes the participation of a General Assembly as an independent policy making representative legislature sanctioned only by the consent and seeming consensus of Virginia colonial leadership and the electoral franchise of the Burgesses. They realized upon first meeting him and dealing with him that they weren’t going to get it. Harvey did not enjoy any honeymoon, and it appears he did not seek one. By its nature, this governor could not, and was not, to the liking of the “Virginia post-Company Fall establishment”.
The lack of an effective legislature meant Virginia had to rely upon a “broker-style”, semi-charismatic boss whose influence and skill rose above the inevitable factions, rivalries and parochial perspectives resulting from decentralization; that was the only way evident to satisfactorily resolve tension and provide some level of action by the overall policy system. It may be that Francis Wyatt was the first, William Claiborne was next, but Samuel Mathews is our choice as the model. Mathews was never governor (his son was), neither was Claiborne. Wyatt was, and a more unhappy camper there has never been. He quit twice. Between the three they brokered a deal with the King that finally got things done in Virginia. That is the story behind Phase II.
Several things these three brokers shared were that to some degree they were tied to the tobacco monoculture, the legacy that the Virginia Company left in its post-1624 wake, a really pissed-off attitude regarding the carve out of a Catholic Maryland from their territory, and a through dislike of a disagreeable governor that actually tried to be a governor, which, amazingly was not what his royal sovereign wanted. And that brings us to John Harvey. For him the main story behind his sorry fate was not Claiborne or Mathews, or even Potts; it was Charles.
All these moving parts blend and blur, ebbing and flowing in the telling of the thrusting out story—but they left out the effects of both on the oligarchical tobacco monoculture, First Migration elite. The flip side of the “Thrusting Out Governor Harvey” coin was the two step political development in Virginia: (1) the rise of its Greate Charter political institutions, and (2) the development of a planter-tobacco monoculture identity and a consensus against external rule. Lack of legitimacy of Virginia’s domestic institutions stood in the way of their evolution-development. Virginia’s elite wanted His Royal Majesty to legitimize their role so that the norms associated with self-governance, by Virginia institutions occupy a legitimate place in the English Hybrid Colonial Policy System. As we shall later see, they were very successful in the last matter.
Appreciating the “Thrusting Out” Requires Understanding the Interaction of Multiple Moving Dynamics, Personalities, and within the London-based Policy System and Virginia’s (Colonial Hybrid Policy System)
The literature on the subject (ousting) is surprisingly large and unusually pretty much uniform in its retelling. I approach it differently, however, because I am determined to try a retelling that includes an aggregate of factors and dynamics that led to the ouster itself or in turn resulted from it. In essence I am not convinced the “ousting story” is the real story that underlines Virginia’s 1630’s political development. What happened in 1635 (the ousting) is a legitimate story, but that event has not been relayed to Americans in a way (1) that informs them as to what caused the ouster, and (2) what events and dynamics it generated in the several years that followed. The consequences that flowed from the ouster were vastly more impactful on Virginia’s political and economic development than the ouster itself.
- Mills Thornton’s “thrusting out” portrait is the best of the classic approach to the ousting. Thornton very much appreciates the importance of what caused the ousting–and clearly puts in perspective that larger dynamics both in Virginia and London condemned a Harvey gubernatorial administration to fail, whatever his personality might have been. England was grappling with its colonial priorities, and colonial governance had not yet been thought out nor finalized. At the same time Virginia’s domestic governing institutions had not developed capacity-experience, legal definition, or legitimacy of its role in the developing English hybrid colonial system.
Charles I inherited a Virginia whose incomplete development had allowed a planter oligarchy to form, and the larger elements assume dominance of the Governor’s Council. He also inherited his father’s decision to step away from the Virginia Company and its charter and renegotiate one that was more to his liking. Charles in 1625-6 postponed a final decision and began a period of “coping” as he worked his way toward a final determination as to whether he would rule the colony directly or revamp the Virginia Company and its charter. Stepping back himself, he entrusted governance of Virginia–and colonial affairs– to two commissions supplemented by his Privy Council, and in 1628-30 sending over a royal governor to manage affairs locally.
Accordingly, during the period after 1629 until 1635 problems accumulated, tensions intensified and by 1635 a decision was still not made on Virginia’s long-term governance, and, if anything given the deteriorating events in an England drifting from simple political polarization into a civil war, any decision was even more unlikely. What made this even worse was the appointment of a royal governor whose personality and job description of a governor was so off the mark with reality and good sense that by 1635 the locals had reached their breaking point, leading to a coup or ousting of the governor. For this reason, our story of the ousting consumes two modules, this one which describes the dynamics, personalities and factors that played out through 1635, and a second module that relates the ouster itself and the reaction and its consequences–which I repeat is the main story–not the ouster itself.
Thornton is well aware of, and sensitive to, the ongoing London-based events that stressed Virginia domestic governance. For Thornton, London, therefore, played a very large role in the ouster of John Harvey. Thornton also finds room to bring in the Claiborne clique and somewhat exposes its conflict with the emerging mainstream planter class. Harvey’s role in all this disruption and dysfunctionality is important, but he, like the other actors, are being thrust about by forces that said and done, emanate from London. What Thornton does very well is to center the story on London’s refusal to legitimize Virginia’s self-governance institutions, and its failure to accept or repudiate the decisions of the Virginia Company, leaving Virginians in a limbo as to the legality of their property holdings, or their local political decisions and actions. The underlying problem was never Harvey per se, but the unmade decision on how to govern Virginia.
Despite the centrality of the above, Maryland is the straw that broke Virginia politics, and triggered the timing of the ouster. which triggered the crisis in London on what to do with Virginia. Thornton’s article provides the framework for us, but to fill the gap it also necessitates our extended discussion on the emerging planter class and its crystallization fighting the Claiborne Clique and existential threats of London fundamentally disrupting a tobacco contract that was essential to its survival.
Overcoming their differences, the Claiborne Clique and mainstream planter class ousted the dysfunctional Harvey and initiated a set of negotiations and overtures that by 1639 resulted in a London acceptance of the Virginia policy system as its partner in its hybrid colonial policy system. Governors Wyatt and William Berkeley installed this policy system, and it governed the colony effectively, if interestingly, through 1649, when Charles lost the Civil War–and his head. Then things will become really interesting–but that is a third module series.
There has got to be a bending of the Virginia twig somewhere in all this.
There is. To help the reader focus on the key take aways that are central to future modules and to underscore the purposes of the book, the pertinent themes and long-term structural changes that arose from the expanded ouster story are:
(1) describes the evolution of the post 1622 Virginia domestic policy system, the Second Powhatan War, the spreading of the tobacco monoculture and the English settlement of their heartland, the Middle Peninsula;
(2) explains the “tilt” in Virginia’s domestic policy system that resulted from (1) above and the shredded tobacco plantation community that jelled in this period into a budding lower level of the developing Virginia policy system–that lower level presided over the system’s economic base, carried out the policies approved by the provincial system over which the forces from the lower level had predominant roles and influence;
(3) in the course of (1) and (2) the structured inequality of the actors resulted in the formation of an elite class of planters, whose plantations operated the economic base of the system, leaving in its wake an oligarchy whose vanguard had dominated the Council of State, largely ran in partnership with the local governor the provincial policy system–only to fracture in 1629-1631 when an element of plantation conquistadors broke away, formed the Claiborne Clique that with London’s approval started to implement a vast and potentially disruptive business plan that if successful would have transformed Virginia and its tobacco monoculture to the grave disadvantage of the mainstream planters in Virginia;
(4) That Clique playing well with the attempt to restore the governance and charter to a revamped Virginia Company in 1631-2, mobilized the mainstream planter class into a program of self-defense, anti-Claiborne Clique, and efforts to build capacity in the domestic policy system, often working with its royal Governor Harvey, and dealing with key issues disrupting the profit and productivity of the tobacco base. Both that effort and the implementation of the Claiborne Clique business plan, however, ran afoul of the imposed carve out of Maryland, and the resistance to it of both domestic factions, which were for different reasons, fundamentally opposed to the King’s decision–efforts by his governor to carry it out. The 1635 “thrusting out” follows from this alliance of convenience between the two factions of Virginia’s domestic elite.
That story told in (4) is the core of the tale told in the first part of this module. Like Dicken’s Christmas ghosts we will deal only with the first ghost in this introduction. Each ghost will get its own introduction. Like the Christmas Carol, there will be three ghosts or Parts in this module.
If the “Thrusting Out” is a story within a story, then what is that story: Formation of Virginia’s tobacco planter elite
Yet another story that is central to our history is the development of Virginia’s political and economic elite. The Virginia elite packed Harvey’s luggage, and sent him off with several of their fellows to explain what they had done to London. The consensus among Virginia’s elites, a budding planter proto-class, did not come easy. London, and the Virginia Company advocates were involved, so were plantation conquistadors, mainstream large and small tobacco planters, and the Claiborne Clique
Over decades that followed the Virginia policy system needed to acquire sufficient governance capacity to forge a consensus from the decentralized individual plantation-centric county elites who took root in the Virginia shredded community, tobacco monoculture during the first generation of the First Migration period. To engage in provincial level governance, Virginia had to evolve an effective approach to improve the quality, at least the capacity, of provincial policy-making. That was what Charles refused to do.
He did not understand the distinction between his royal governor—and his assistants, advisors or whatever the thought they were. Charles put them both in the same pot—and that really did not work. Next he ignored, feared, or most likely did not think about a Virginia legislature, the Assembly or Burgesses. Legislatures were never his preferred tool or vehicle for governance. That Virginia could form a provincial policy system without one, at least one that satisfied Virginia’s needs as well as his own, was not worked out until 1642.
Charles wanted of all was a governor kept things quiet and in order with his orders and priorities– keep the tobacco customs duties flowing to England, and implement his directives and agenda priorities– while His Majesty’s “commissions” figured out Virginia’s future. Holding the fort, however, was not what Harvey had in mind. He constantly tried to write his own job description. His sad lot is that today it is hard to fathom whether his efforts to follow his king’s orders and priorities, or the insensitive job description he constantly put in motion is what put him on the boat to England—twice. What Shakespeare could have done with a character such as Harvey!
And so the reader can see there are in this module two stories being told simultaneously in this module.
Charles Needed to Complete the Definition of Virginia’s Domestic Governance
All these moving parts blend and blur, ebbing and flowing in the telling of the thrusting out story—but they left behind the rudiments of an oligarchical tobacco monoculture, First Migration elite. The flip side of the “Thrusting Out Governor Harvey” coin was the two-step political development in Virginia: (1) the rise of its Greate Charter political institutions, and (2) the development of a planter-tobacco monoculture identity and a consensus against external rule that had not been defined and needed to be. Virginia’s elite wanted His Royal Majesty to legitimize their role, the self-governance, by Virginia institutions in the Hybrid Colonial Policy System. As we shall later see, they were very successful in the last matter.
How Have Historians Reacted to the Character of the Virginia Policy-making
Historiographic Paradigms
We are also describing the emergence of an elite that formed a policy system for Virginia. That policy system will rest on structures, values, and relationships between key institutions put in place by that elite during this extended time period to about 1660. While we may refer to the “oligopoly” and its oligarchs that compose and dominate this first policy system, our description of their rise, their personalities and behavior, and the values they seemingly held also laid the first foundation for a political culture we will call Tidewater.
This so-called oligarchy was in its composition eclectic, if not outrageous, and at points verged on its war of all against all. But unspoken, at least as far as I know, these often ruthless, greedy, violent plantation owners and businessmen came together in Jamestown and found a way to get along, divvy up their spoils, and, like pirates form a sort of representative policy system that unified them against the blunderings of the mother country, and provided a structure to which they could make policy and pursue strategies. Eventually they will evolve into a “Little Parliament”, but don’t get your hopes up–there will be ample qualifications as to what that meant.
In this module, one might make the mistake of thinking the Council of State is that body. Of more concern to us here is how they united against the governor, and did so with such success they embedded for one hell of a long time an almost instinctive resistance to a policy system characterized by a strong governor. Left mostly unsaid in the module, however, was the prime beneficiary of this will be its dominant level of government: the local guys and the plantation that was the prime unit of the policy system and economic base.
Ironically, at the time this oligarchy came into being, a babe was born–not in Bethlehem, but in a Bristol England suburb. John Locke was born in 1632, and he will be, arguably, the defining theorist of the policy system that came together in the seventeenth century. As a man deeply involved in American colonization, Locke no doubt was raised and lived his life aware of the goings on in Virginia–and elsewhere. I wonder, if not suggest, if the experience of the Virginia oligarchy that evolved and then came into full power in the 1650’s, his period of education, tilted his thinking and slipped into his theory. I will not argue, rather weakly whisper, that that Virginia’s first policy system reflected mildly many the features of his compact theory of go Robert Brenner’s classic Merchants and Revolution constructs the evolution and the development of capitalist entrepreneurs and investors from the Elizabethan-era to Merchant Adventurers ( London-based merchants such as Thomas Smythe and the famous trading companies (East Indies Company, the Levant), to the path-breaking Virginia Company, whose failure spawned the rise of a new generation of merchant-entrepreneur-investors who seized onto the English colonialization movement during the turbulent pre-Civil War (previous to 1642) period to rise to the commanding heights of eighteen century capitalism and industrialization.
His thesis, long acknowledged as both classic and page-opening has not generated the attention it deserves, particularly with American historians of the colonial era. In part, I believe, this is because “Brenner’s assertion” does not fit well into narrative themes pursued during the different phases-era through which American colonial history has passed over the now four centuries since Jamestown. We have not denied our English heritage, in particular its structural imports and law, but also its emigrants and their motivations for crossing the Atlantic. But what, I think we have done is emphasize how we altered that inheritance, usually in ways that set us apart, ways that made us “exceptional”.
- H. Roper draws our attention that of necessity Virginia as the first English colony, permanent settlement in the new world, thrust Jamestown, the Virginia Company, and early Virginia into the limelight. He asserts that:
from the period preceding the American Civil War until the 1960’s, Virginia constituted the chronological ace in the sectional struggle with adherents of New England over the ‘origins’ of American society and cultural attitudes which Great Britain bequeathed to the thirteen colonies which won their independence from it in 1783. This self-consciously Whiggish view attempted to place early American history within a wider context of the progress of Anglo-American liberty, and so, trumpeted such ‘achievements’ as the creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly in the New World’. It also lauded, particularly, the ‘yeoman-adventurer persona of Captain Smith as the prototype of American character against the rival claims made by ‘Yankees’ on behalf of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ and ‘Puritans’ as the progenitors of the United States [99] L. H. Roper , the English Empire in America, 1602-1658; Beyond Jamestown (Routledge, 2009, 2015), p. 2
Roper continues his historiographic assessment describing a post World War II historian paradigm which in stark contrast to the previous depiction sees American colonial history through the prism of the American Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and most critically (because in its own weird way this history is congruent with) a historical experience which is driven by and based on a “history [from the perspective] from the bottom up”. Up to this point that has mean concentrating on those, cynically, who were not Founding Fathers or dead white presidents [99] L. H. Roper , the English Empire in America, pp. 2-3. Roper cites a variety of works reflective of this approach in his footnote 5, p. 142. He summarized the hysterographic thrust of this paradigm from a sub-group, the ‘Chesapeake school’:
colonial society in the region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay underwent a series of phases en route to ‘modernity’. In the first decades of English settlement … the relatively egalitarian character of the early population, coupled with a keen desire for advancement and the exigencies of frontier life, exacerbated by the reality of routine premature death, created a rough-and-tumble socio-political environment in which only the fittest prospered, tobacco became the be-all and end-all, and a bizarre form of metropolitan social structure developed. By 1660, however [the period of our “second migration”) the population had settled to the degree that recognizable elite had emerged and the enslavement of Africans had become part of the the ‘success’ equation. After the convulsions of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), and in Maryland, the Glorious Revolution (1688-9), the membership of the colonial elites became further entrenched, and in accordance with their counterparts in other colonies, copied as best they could, the behavior and characteristics of the metropolitan aristocracy; they became increasingly ‘anglicized’. [99] L. H. Roper , the English Empire in America, p. 3
On the face of our comments thus far, the reader may rightfully conclude our argument in these module series reflects the latter paradigm. To that I must insert the prime purpose of this particular module, is to take this rough evolution and add a layer or two of subtlety, add a few more moving parts, and squeeze it into a conceptualization of what was Virginia’s first genuine policy system, a policy system fabricated by the first generation oligarchy “of the fittest”, which over time, after adoption by a second migration induced by William Berkeley, became the foundation for future policy systems, including those that formed during the Articles of Confederation and the Early Republic United States.
To this I would add the evolution I envision for Virginia and for each of the thirteen colonies does not culminate with the “entrenchment” of a institutionalized elite whose value system is congruent with a “metropolitan aristocracy” ( a term that still awaits definition). The policy system evolution that awaits our reader is one that emerges from the “deference classes” that are not meaningfully included in the first policy system we are describing–and for most practical purposes not Tidewater Virginia’s second migration policy system either. To make our history relevant today, and seriously provide an answer why our states and cities are different, we must understand policy systems and political cultures change, they evolve, and like Covid they find a new and disruptive way to manifest themselves.
These 1630 “deference” groupings of individuals consist of subsistence tobacco (household) plantations, indentured servants, slaves either Indian or Black, and Native American tribes will, each in their good time, develop new generational cohorts, migrate, and settle their own lands as they “Go West”, “North”, Sunbelt, New South or whatever. The reader will see that as we move toward the American Revolution we will begin to discuss the phrase “Interrupted Revolution”, and in Virginia we will describe the settlement of the Piedmont, but most importantly the Shenandoah Valley, as rudimentary “regional” policy systems that coexist with the dominant “Tidewater” policy system. At this point the reader may appreciate that we have not forgotten those who in the first sixty years of Virginia history were not included in the governing policy system of the province-colony.
I will also add this caveat that this Virginia policy system is not by any means the first United States policy system, if only because congruent with Virginia’s evolution there was a vastly different evolution ongoing in Massachusetts. That this caveat acknowledges some level of tension between the two different systems is also fundamental to our perception of the development of American political culture-an evolution which we believe is fundamental to understanding the policy systems of each period.
Each policy system rests, sometimes uneasily, on a political culture, at least until the arrival of the Early Republic when the elemental base of a modern political culture will evolve from its colonial base of religion, ethnicity, and local migration. That mercifully is not our task here–but it is a warning of things to come. For example, an implication is that American economic development policy reflects not only the structural and elite policy-making of a policy system, but of the values inherent in its configuration of political cultures of its citizens and residents.
through which American colonial history has passed over the now four centuries since Jamestown. We have not denied our English heritage, in particular its structural imports and law, but also its emigrants and their motivations for crossing the Atlantic. But what, I think we have done is emphasize how we altered that inheritance, usually in ways that set us apart, ways that made us “exceptional”.
Insert Roper (p. 3 English Empire) historical periods—See Stegg in Billington’s “the Reinterpretation of Early American History, pp. 85ff, Bailyn in J. Morton Smith pp. 96ff, GREENE’s Perspective
We have also focused on our drift to independence and the events and the “thinking” that led us to become the nation we are today. Indeed, I am struck by how much historians of the eighteenth century already think in terms of “us versus them”, to the extent that Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin came rather late to that perspective. There is more of the sixteenth century colonial America that is central and relevant to our basic question: Why are (American) states and cities so different, and yet the same, to each other?
We have also focused on our drift to independence and the events and the “thinking” that led us to become the nation we are today. Indeed, I am struck by how much historians of the eithteenth century already think in terms of “us versus them”, to the extent that Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin came rather late to that perspective.There is more of the sixteenth century colonial America that is central and relevant to our basic question: Why are (American) states and cities so different, and yet the same, to each other?
I also suspect four hundred years blows in a lot of historical fog that obscures the relevance, and the sympathy for, the personalities and events of this period. For many they just get lumped in as the afterthought of the decline of medievalism. Labeled as mercantilist, this period is just not up to the relevance and centrality that events, personalities, and philosophies of the eighteenth centrury seem to convey. This is unfortune for this history because the most fundamental bending of the colonial twig that will become the American “tree” is done during the seventeenth century. We forget that twelve of the thirteen colonies were founded by the Stuart kings, with only Georgia settled and founded after the Glorious Restoration—which in itself will result in some considerable turbulence in our colonial provinces.
If so lost in this fog are how and why key institutions and structures we inherited were adapted. In this module I wish to call attention how the English politics of the pre-Civil War period, Charles I –Parliament during the 1630’s, the religious struggle within the Church of England, and the rise of a new generation of entrepreneurs-investors profoundly shaped the development of Virginia’s economic base and policy system—and Massachusetts to boot. That these dynamics shaped the Virginia governor’s powers and roles in the emerging Virginia policy system will also prove fundamental. That they further confirmed the role and power of Virginia’s emerging local elites, and cemented into place the plantation as the fundamental unit of Virginia’s economic base and its policy system has to be brought to the reader’s attention.
Virginia today is written off as an plantation, slave-based tobacco export monoculture and policy system, which is true enough as far as it goes. But left to its own devices it is very conceivable the rising new generation of English entrepreneurs-investors would have taken Virginia in a very different direction. That they did not do so is due to Charles’s misadventures in colony creation, caused by his debts of extravagance, and by his flirtation with Catholicism and his stuborn and polarizing vision of the Church of England, a vision and doctrine very much out of step with England’s emerging middle and upper classes.
When the Company fell in 1624-5, it is remarkable the colony did not follow its fate. Rather Virginia kept on going—almost as if nothing had happened. That was in good measure because after 1622 the Company’s presence had been materially diminished, its focus on governance distracted by investor rebellion, office and political intrigue, near-bankruptcy, and a feuding leadership and internal corruption. The Company’s resident domestic officials simply kept on trucking under their own inspiration and ambition–with ample role models available to emulate.
Once again, I repeat, the seeming vacuum that existed in Virginia political life after the Fall of the Company in 1624 is one of its most important developmental periods. Virginia histories typically focus on the Jamestown’s first half-decade, the horrible “starving years”, replete with Pocahontas, her Dad, Powhatan, and, of course, the inimitable Captain John Smith.
Then, for most, an appropriate “smush” summary of the next several decades. Virginia historians, perhaps without exception, view the period after the Fall until Governor Berkeley’s administration , as a policy system somewhat akin to a failed policy system. For them near-anarchy and a thug-oligarchy describe Virginia. These intervening years between the 1625 Fall of the Virginia Company and Berkeley are the relatively unappreciated years of Virginia’s First Migration. Older histories of Virginia do spend considerable time on seventeenth century Virginia, and do provide much insight into its influence on later colonial Virginia.
But over the last half-century, or so, certainly after the turn of the 21st century, the seventeenth century is pretty much reduced to the 1619 Project–and the reaction it generated. The rest of the period simply has fallen off the table, seemingly lost forever. To account for the better part of a hundred years, such attention as it garners, reflects a contemporary “consensus” that, for this history, is simply not adequate-rather is positively fatal to our purposes. They ignore the period in which the “twig” of Virginia’s political and economic development “tree” is bent.
If you want to know why Virginia is not like Massachusetts, nor Pennsylvania, New York or South Carolina–never mind Hawaii and Alaska–the critical elements of the answer are found in the seventeenth century, now lost to our contemporary history. If you want to know why contemporary American states are different, much of the answer lies in the seventeenth century.
The contemporary Virginia historical consensus asserts little enduring heritage or effect follows from the First Migration. Being so small, so few immigrants, that the families of its elite died out by the 1680’s. They were replaced by the elite of Governor William Berkeley’s Second Migration (post-1650), which is far more interesting, and central to Virginia’s future as the manors of tobacco-based slave plantations, and the elite, the royalist elite of the Tidewater political culture, for which Virginia, and her golden age plantations are best understood.
These are the families and the plantation system which allegedly produced our Founding Fathers–who led Virginia into the Revolutionary War and were powerful players in the writing of our Constitution and the founding of the American Republic. This Second Migration bleed into the settling of the Piedmont, the Byrd, Lee and Carter families, the golden years, such as they were, of the Plantation Manor, and then the more troubled years that befell Virginia during the 1740’s and 1750’s from which emerged the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Marshall and James Madison and the plantation-born host that formed the core of Virginia’s anti-Federalists.
From our last module, we know Virginia can be understood as being all about plantation conquistador dominant oligarchy based on the expansion of tobacco and plantations at the expense of the Tidewater Powhatan, left alone in their tobacco fetish by the absent and much preoccupied Charles I. If the 1620’s had witnessed the rise of the plantation conquistadores, the relentless increase in Tidewater lands, taken in one way or another from the Powhatan, and brought under tobacco cultivation in free holder subsistence land, large plantations, and the indentured and renter lands that followed in their wake.
We also saw, as described in the last module, a monumental and durable establishment of fragile, if isolated and yet complex, local sub-provincial system of “government” that resulted from the relentless expansion of the shredded Virginia community. From hundred in 1613, to counties in 1634, the level of government on which the colony and its settlers most relied was that closes to them. It was there we could find our plantation conquistadores in their entrepreneurial home fiefs. That will be the first topic we will examine in this module which focuses chiefly on the period of the 1630’s.
In essence the politics and players of the all to soon English Civil War overlapped into Virginia’s political development. Not only did the politics of Maryland’s founding bleed into the oligarchs campaign against Harvey, but they set up a distinct Virginian foreign policy to their new neighbor. Intra colonial competition, rivalry and contested ambitions carried over not only through the 1640’s, but erupted into an actual Virginian invasion and takeover of Maryland during Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650’s. While we will discuss most of this in later modules, the first phase of Maryland’s entry into Virginia politics will be discussed, and the fate of its conquistadores outlined.
Finally, we shall reintroduce our royal majesty, Charles I, who, in the midst of this first stage in the English Civil War (the Invasion of England by Scotland) finally made some decisions that got Virginia’s political and economic houses in some order. In 1634, he provided a hint of where he would wind up, but only in 1639 did he make his final commitments to Virginia governance. It is from this point on, that we can finally talk about Virginia’s political development, its autonomy and its position in the Stuart colonial framework. From that point on Virginia institutions possessed a key measure of legitimacy from the English government.
Edmund Morgan, in his article of Virginia as a boom town, sets up and summarized the general state of affairs that Harvey inherited–i.e. he describes the 1630 punchbowl:
It seems evident that while the Virginia Company was failing in London, a number of its officers in the colony were succeeding. In order to do so they not only rendered less than faithful service to their employer, they also reduced [the] other Virginians to a condition which while short of slavery was also some distance from the freedom that Englishmen liked to consider as their birthright. The Company in 1618 had inaugurated a popularly elected representative assembly [I must stress that is counter to the position taken in this history], but the effective power for at least ten or fifteen years longer remained in the governor and his Council [of State].
By no coincidence the Council almost entirely of the men holding large numbers of servants [most of which acquired through land ownership and headright incentive]. Between 1619 and 1627, Hamor, Pott, Smyth, Sandys [George], Tucker, Mathews and Yeardley sat on it while Wyatt and Yeardley took turns in the governor’s chair. These men with a more than average interest in controlling the labor force, were thus enabled to maintain their personal ascendancy not only over their servants but over all lesser men. Whether operating under the Company, or after 1625, under the king, they met every challenge to their authority with a rigor not exceeded by what we know of the earlier absolute government [1607-1612] of John Smith or Thomas Dale [99] Edmund S. Morgan, “the First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630 (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April 1970), p. 193
From the perspective of this rogue and raucous post Company Virginia elite, John Harvey, outsider though he might be, was not an unknown. Harvey back in 1623-5 had “identified himself with the faction that had successfully sought the collapse of the Company”, and whatever the feelings the individual members of Virginia’s elite were in regards to the Company or its future, the simple reality to them was the stripping of the charter from the Company meant a serious challenge to their existing land ownership, contract with their labor force, and the future expansion of the tobacco monoculture.
Bailyn defines the situation as: The private interests of this group, which had assumed control of public office by virtue not of inherited status, but of newly acquired and strenuously maintained economic eminence, were pursued with little interference from traditional restraints imposed on a responsible ruling class. Engaged in an effort to establish themselves in a land they sought as specific ends [i.e. agenda goals]: autonomous local jurisdiction, an aggressive expansion of settlement and trading enterprises, unrestricted access to land, and at every stage the legal endorsement of [past land] acquisitions . .. [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia”, in 17th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, James Morton Smith (Ed), University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 96 By 1630, the Virginia second generation tobacco elite, with their army of indentured servants in their service, were more concerned with carrying out their own expansion plans rather than a holistic comprehensive provincial-royal perspective that Governor John Harvey carried as if a chip on his shoulder.
—
My assertions presented in the opening section of the first module, unfortunately, encounter two “historical” problems require some discussion. If you are not a historian it is not essential that you dwell on this module. If you are concerned as to how historians have dealt with this period in Virginia’s history and why–and there is good reason you should be–then you might want to take a gander. American “popular” history is not without its deceptions and biases; this period of Virginia history is one of them–at least in my opinion. That belief explains the great detail and attention I have placed on this Transition Period. It is during this period that the Virginia twig was seriously “bent”, and its twists and turns subsequently incorporated into future Virginia policy systems, including the present.
There is a surprising, to me at least, considerable literature on this topic and question. I cannot delve deep into the topic, although many others have. In the 21st Century this issue has been obscured by the pressure of current events and popular and political ideologies, and of course by the always impactful forgetful fog of time-history. I attempt a brief discussion to summarize my reaction to this literature and its impact on the history.
The first problem is that the Transition Period is grossly misunderstood by man historians {Not all, by any means). Excellent scholars, both of recent vintage and past heritage, have fought hard to impress us that this is an important period. But there are those who exhibit serious distaste for the period, and who prefer to ignore it to the extent possible. They typically begin serious comments only with Governor Berkeley (1642). Isolating or dismissing the Virginia Company Jamestown experience, they reduce the Transition Period to a semi-anarchical thug aristocracy—a period in which a nasty cartel arbitrarily ruled and excepting their greed and illiberal values produced little of note
Obviously, this concern has to be countered if my assertions mentioned above have any value.
What can you say about a time period when the royal appointed governor, John Harvey by name, arrested the former governor, seized his estate, and followed it up with an attack with a cudgel against a member of the upper body of his legislature on the grass outside the legislature itself. He beat him fairly, knocking out several teeth, with the simple explanation “that the fellow had assailed him with vile language”. [99] Bernard Bailyn “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia in James Morton Smith, (Ed) 17th Century America, Footnote 20, pp. 95-6. As one might expect, Relations got so bad with the upper house that in order to develop a working consensus that would permit some level of policymaking, a formal “peace treaty” had to be negotiated.
That broke down over the next two years, after an actual arrest of its powerful member and Secretary of State, William Claiborne, the same governor ran into arguably one of the second most powerful member of that Senate, on the streets of Jamestown, and confiscated one of his indentured servants on the spot? [99] the Thrusting Out”. Are we surprised that a year later the conflict “exploded …amid comic opera scenes of ‘extreame coller and passion, complete with dark references of Richard III (killed in battle) and ‘musketeers running with their pieces presented’, climaxing with the governor arresting yet another member of the Senate, and in turn hearing the so-called arrestee respond by saying “And we the like to you sir’. Followed by the governor being put under arrest by the Senate, escorted onto a ship back to England—to the King who had sent him in the first place.[99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia in James Morton Smith, (Ed) 17th Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 97
The point of all this being that the provincial policy system, and the local level as well, was populated by a rough group of plantation conquistadors who were unwilling to accept the authority of a governor whose policies, style, personality, and principles that could not and would not willingly accept—so they went to war with him, drove him to distraction, and extracted from him his worst behaviors and faults. I would argue the five years of political development since the Company had been stripped of this charter had not matured sufficiently to formalize its policy-making congruent to that expected by the new royal governor.
Bailyn follows up this parody of a ill-developed policy system by insisting that “In no traditional sense were they [the elite that governed within this policy system] a ruling class. They lacked the attributes of social authority, and their political dominance was a continuous achievement. Only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, could distinction be expressed in a genteel style of life, for existence in this generation [the First Migration} was necessarily crude … They had risen to their positions, with few exceptions, by brute labor and shrewd manipulation; they had personally shared the burdens of settlement. They succeeded not because of, but despite, whatever gentility they may have had … what countered was their common capacity to survive and flourish in frontier settlements [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia in James Morton Smith, (Ed) 17th Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 95
In the Virginia of the early and mid-1620’s through 40’s Virginia has been described as rough and tough, semi-anarchistic, and the policy-makers described as thugs. The best it could be said of it was that it was an oligarchy, presumably composed of thugs and rough-necks that grabbed what they could, and did what it wanted. No better a description of these folk was made by a doctoral student, Katherine Blank, who summarized as she understood them, Edmund Morgan, a noted historian I use profusely in this Virginia chapter, and Timothy Breen who the reader will see in the very next module:
One famous interpretation of early Virginia weighs the character of the first settlers and finds it severely wanting, with the early Jamestowners viewed shiftless men, starving out of their own pride, greed, and stubbornness. The descendants of these ne’er to wells were little better even if they were more industrious; they were the ones who gradually institutionalized racism, building the American Republic on the backs of enslaved Africans. Other accounts flesh out this idea of selfishness, painting the early Virginians as much less interested in the flourishing of the entire community than in their own individual well-being. In their drive to protect themselves and achieve individual prosperity, early Virginias were as ruthless as any Gilded-Age Robber Barons. In such a materialistic society, religious beliefs and practices had little place or influence. [99] Katherine Gray Blank, “A Church Adrift: Virginia’s Church of England, 1607-1677 (Dissertation, Department of History, University of Mississippi, 2018), p. 3. The reader should understand that my personal beliefs and professional view expressed in this book do not reflect these kind words. I argue even in these paragraphs much the opposite.
In essence the elite that had emerged after the Company left Virginia, called in hindsight the First Migration could, and should, be ignored Virginia, its governance pushed off into the dustbin of history. Its politics and initiatives, even its economics, were not suitable a proper understanding of Virginia’s later periods. Bailyn then simply moves onto the now-famous Second Migration and the policy and social system they fabricated—ignoring whatever it was this Second Migration inherited from the First. At minimum it meant ignoring the first half-century of Virginia’s his
- H. Breen expresses this sentiment best with his posing of the question in his notable article, “Looking Out for Number One”:
Within the same area of Tidewater Virginia, a visitor can still see the splendid mansions of the eighteenth-century gentry. The juxtaposition of these great plantations with the desolation of Jamestown is striking. The gentry’s homes give the impression of order, stability and success. Everything is under control … There is no hint here of the grim struggle for survival that permeates the atmosphere of Jamestown.
In fact, it is difficult to conceive how the society that created such impressive structures could possibly have its origins in that earlier community. What influence could the Virginia Captain John Smith and Sir Thomas Dale have had upon the world of William Byrd III, Robert ‘King’ Carter and William Fitzhugh. Were the roughneck adventurers simply an embarrassing anomaly in Virginia history, a group of persons whose exploits left no lasting mark upon the colony’s later cultural development? [99] T. H. Breen, “Looking Out for Number One: the Cultural Limits on Public Policy in Early Virginia” in Breen’s, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (Oxford university Press, 1980), p.106.
Bailyn is far from alone in excluding the pre-Royalist First Migration from the mainstream of Virginia’s history and political-economic development. While several outstanding historians have specialized in the First Migration and its transition into the Second Migration (we are particularly in debt to Billings, Craven, the older classics Andrews in particular, and are thankful for British scholars, Brenner, who are anything but embarrassed with the thugs—who he demonstrates are an integral part of capitalism’s New Men”), but several outstanding American scholars begin their analysis not with the seventeenth century, but with the eighteenth.
Albion’s Seed backs away from the First Migration and the overwhelming bulk of its cultural-migration analysis focuses solely on the royalist and post royalist periods. Carl Bridenbaugh’s wonderful Seat of Empire bases his analysis on Virginia families which “consciously coalesced into an exclusive ruling class [that] wore an air of assurance and pride of place, exhibited a haughtiness and condescend toward their inferiors, and studiously cultivated the attitudes of leaders—characteristic of an aristocratic order” (p. 8). Grace L. Chickering, “Founders of an Oligarchy: the Virginia Council of 1692-1722) [99] in Bruce C. Daniels {Ed), Power and Status: Officeholding in Colonial America (Wesleyan University Press, 1986) simply bypasses all but eight years of the seventeenth century in her discussion of the key institution of Virginia’s colonial period: the Council of State.
This “selective” treatment of Virginia, indeed southern history, was noted by well-respected Clarence L. Ver Steeg in his histography essay, “Historians and the Southern Colonies” [99] Ray Allen Billington (Ed), the Reinterpretation of Early American History: Essays by leading historians of Colonial America (w. W. Norton & Company, 1966, 1968). Dr. Van Steeg seemingly frustrated commented that “Each generation of historians, influenced by contemporary ideas and attitudes, has produced ‘new’ interpretations ….Sweeping revision of what is conceived of as the southern experience [for example the Virginia aristocracy] has given way to still further revisions” … the “obvious conclusion, of course is that “the South” is a nineteenth century or at least a post-revolutionary creation”… “Approaches and points of view generated by discussions of the nineteenth century South have frequently been read back into the history of southern colonies, in some cases producing serious distortion, or even more disturbing, snuffing out further inquiry by assuming what was true of the later period was also true of the seventeenth and eighteenth century colonies. [pp. 82-3].
That, alas I believe, is true of the first, pre-Berkeley period of Virginia. That period does not fit with the dominant perception that the eighteenth-century golden Virginia aristocracy, which alone defines that state’s elite experience. That the golden year’s Virginia aristocratic elite lived and operated within a policy system, economic base, not to mention way-of-life, the tobacco monoculture, created by a generation, the First Migration—indeed took over the mansions and plantations built by these deplorables, often by marrying their widows—is simply too disturbing to mention.
This calculated removal of an outlier period of her history, I believe, simply leaves a gap that cannot be satisfactorily filled unless one constructs a workaround or offers an explanation of what and why the Second Migration inherited what it did. For us that gap is doubly important because, as we shall discover in our history, the most fundamental bending of the colonial twig that will become the American “tree” is done during the seventeenth century—most of which was dominated by the First Migration. Simply put, the First Migration picked up from the ashes and residues left by the Virginia Company, indeed many-most of the key members of this thuggish oligarchy were former Company officials, and their hangers on and proteges.
By ignoring the First Migration, we also jettison the heritage of Jamestown and the Virginia Company. After all, the inheritance of the First Migration was what the Virginia Company had left behind—and in 1622 when this module series really begins, ashes from the 1622 Second Powhatan surprise attack, the Massacre, the residues of its surviving handful of colonists, the weak, poorly developed-thought through company governance structures, and the tobacco plantation monoculture were the chief elements of that inheritance.
To compound this inheritance, as we shall see in this module series, the Virginia Company did indeed have its charter restored to it—and signed off by Charles–in 1631. The Company was back it seemed. But that fell apart by 1634 suppressed by the administrative and political reaction it generated the charter was never formally implemented. The effect the potential restoration of Company administration had on Virginia politics and policy-making was substantial. That period after 1632 was also fundamentally disrupted by a grant from Charles to Calvert, carving a new” Catholic” colony out of the northern wilds of Virginia. Virginia and Maryland were tied together at the hip through the period of this module-series and a generation after. When one tosses out the First Migration, with its much-deplored elite, on tosses out s substantial chunk of Virginia’s formative history—a disruptive history that seriously bent the Virginia twig.
While it is easy to dwell on the thuggish oligopoly post Virginia Company Virginia developed into, we ought also to remember Virginia was at that time a royal colony ruled and supposedly governed by its King, Charles I. We forget that twelve of the thirteen colonies were founded by the four Stuart kings, with only Georgia settled after the Glorious Restoration. The sixteenth century houses the birth of our colonies, and for some, the better part of three-quarters of a century of governing experience, evolution and political and economic development was critical to their path of development into American states. Whatever James, his father, had left Charles by suspending the Virginia Company royal charter, Charles was “in charge”—and responsible. That he “dithered until 1639 exacted enormous effect to Virginia and her political and economic development.
But let me boldly state this module series asserts the transition period (after the Virginia Company was stripped of its charter by James I in (1624-1642) was a period during which the main features of Virginia’s entire colonial period were installed; the critical foundations of Virginia’s political and economic development (macro) were set, forged, and finally confirmed by the King in the late 1630’s. If the Twig is Bent, So Grows the Tree, then this is the period the Twig is planted firmly, and then bent. Accordingly, I follow, in the main, a time line of this period as presented by Jon Kukla [99]. That time line is congruent with the literature, as I understand it, that rejects the historical approach that asserted this period is of little to no importance in understanding the course of Virginia history.
recent evidence suggests a four-part political evolution of early Virginia. First came the disorder of initial settlement, then, between 1612 and 1630 the military regime of Lord De La Warr and the councilor-commander oligarchy of the 1620’s …; Third, and in part simultaneously, between 1618 and 1646 the elements of a civilian consociational polity were created and civil offices–councilors, burgesses, and commissioners of what became the counties rather than the militia rank increasingly became the legal basis for the colonial elite’s domination of the economy and society. Finally, between 1635 and about 1646 the Virginians completed their transition from an imposed military regime to an enduring civilian polity. Jon Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia“, American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (April, 1985), pp. 281-2
The Second Problem
The second problem is the changing paradigms employed over the last four hundred years (yes Virginia has been around that long) by historians and commentators, even political leaders that stand in the way of our understanding what was going on in not only this Transition Period, but throughout the entire colonial experience. The implications of each of these paradigms has colored the interpretations of how Virginia developed, and how that development, and the development of the other colonies, led to the United States that we know today.
What has happened is that commentators during differing periods of our history have selected from the events of the colonial period, those factors, dynamics and developments which reflect the path colonial development followed in order to produce their sense of how the United States evolved to the American Revolution, and what the new nation did after 1789. That perspective logically shifts with the times, and the situation facing cohorts and new generations. A historian from the 1880’s will look at Virginia’s history from a different lens than one from the 1980’s is a blunt though accurate statement of the problem. An old saying is that we learn more about ourselves and the current historical period than the past when we read the history of a past period.
What seems relevant as we write a history very much affects the tone and landscape of the past history that are selected for discussion and inclusion. What actually happened, in terms those that lived in the period under observation, is often lost in the shuffle.
Teleological is the word that describes these histories; the desired ends (ideological position, reaction to current events and crises, etc.) affect the choice of what to study and how to interpret the importance of the colonial era to our modern United States. Unfortunately, what is not useful to each paradigm is simply discarded, ignored, or downplayed, i.e., smushed into a paragraph or a few sentences. The “reality” of the colonial experience, and its real effect of the past on how we are today is seriously, and negatively impacted. Each paradigm has its own set of narratives. Good historians, and there are good historians, try to overcome this bias and distortion. Still a herd can easily ride over a few authors, and popular history sells and gets published. We face this dilemma in all our modules.
While this book is not intended to be a historiography, I must cull out at least an issue important to this history which very much affects our understanding of the proper role inheritance from England plays in the colonial period, particularly in the seventeenth century.
What is the nature of our inheritance from England-Great Britain?
Most of us reading this history will concede, with little concern, that we inherited much from the England-United Kingdom-Great Britain. But what did we inherit? Did we import and use the inheritance-or did we seriously alter it, over time usually, to respond to the frontier that was North America during the colonial period? Did this importation and adaptation produce a nation unlike any other—an exceptional nation to be emulated and to lead the nations of the world in an inevitable progression into the future?
As the reader might expect we easily see the potential in all this to self-select institutions, events and dynamics to cast them in a light that supports our view and perspective. Inheritance becomes a word with little meaning and substance in terms of how and why the inheritance was actually employed in colonial America. We see more of the future than the past in our view of inheritance as treated by historians and commentators. Hence, we shall seek below to find historians who offer a view congruent with our position that what Virginia “inherited” from England in its first decades differs materially with the immigration inheritance of other colonies that followed.
That is a treacherous perspective if we are tracing the history of our governing structures, the evolution of our policy-making (economic development policy-making) systems, and the role of our citizens, both elites and non-elites in the making and implementation of policy. Individuals matter, and as we shall see in this decade, both elites and non-elites each may share a dominant composition and configuration, both include individuals, whom we must take note, that respond to other backgrounds and beliefs. In particular, we see a different background for those who will become affiliated with England’s “New Men” of finance and investment.
Accordingly, we will utilize the findings of two authors (Breen and Roper) who together all us to understand both. What we must first discuss, in different ways appropriate to all immigrant Virginians, is a culture dominated by deference to “one’s betters” socially and economically. Bluntly, 1630 is a bit too early for us to assume most Virginians want some rudimentary political liberties congruent with democracy and individual participation in political life. This will, in its time, come much later in the seventeenth century, and even then, less robust and more tentative.
Neither the Scots Irish, nor even the Germans who immigrated to Pennsylvania nearly a hundred years in the future came to America with political liberty in their hearts. Opportunity and a new economic beginning were defined by distance from politics and its tentacles, and more based on hinterland versions of policy systems because principally on individual autonomy resting on limited government, next to no taxes, and (with Philadelphia Germans as an exception) hinterland homesteading. Both of these groupings, the reader should be aware, settled in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley after the 1730’s. They will be a remarkably different group than those who settled in the Tidewater, and later emigrated into the Piedmont. It is the latter we now are most concerned. Deference is part of their approach to politics, economics, and policy systems.
Deference is so Un-American. Should we ignore the effect of the deference culture in the period as it underlies a good deal of the oligarchic thuggery that dominated the First Policy System? Obviously not. We must tackle this last dynamic in this module series. Why? How do we understand the “agricultural lumpen proletariat”, the shiftless greed infused wild westerner who resided in Virginia during this period we discuss? In this module series we need to understand how they were unable to withstand the curse of tobacco, and thereby get themselves into an economic position whereby they could not effectively resist their tobacco lords and masters. Following the tobacco “gold-style” rush the greater preponderance of Virginia settlers both lacked the motivation, the tools and resources, and could not find cracks in the oligarchic government system to oppose their betters.
The push to the boundaries, i.e., hinterland homesteading and the shredded community were in considerable measure an expression of how they pursued individual opportunity and autonomy: ownership of their land. Apart from passive aggressive and anomic reactions, they “let’ the oligarchs govern them in many ways hostile to their well-being? Is the stage being set for a future movement that may or may not have led to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676? How were they affected by the evolution of county government, and why did they consent, for over a hundred years, to the tobacco elite dominance over it? To give the reader an insight: would you expect the Quakers and Scotch Irish to suffer such impositions? What about the Puritan congregation? Tidewater Virginia was never like these immigrants.
Virginia had a mostly young male, largely but not exclusively, Anglican population whose reasons for immigration were not religiously-motivated, but are almost purely economic independence and a rise in social standing. Moreover, the Anglican Church of the 1630’s was not the Anglican Church of the 1730’s. Virginia of 1630 is a little more than twenty-five years after the last of the Tudors. We are still in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, and smack dab in the greatest war of European history to that point: the Thirty Years War. Louis the XIV was born in 1638. We shall discover shortly that John Locke, arguably one of the most crucial democratic theorists of colonial America was born in 1632.
Let’s not expect too much of this inheritance thing. Even commonly acknowledged inheritances such as English law, and civil rights as an English citizen were imperfectly realized in practice, even if the structures that administered these inheritances were instituted in Virginia, in reasonably similar structures. The Virginia Company was subject to English law, as it had evolved by that time. Virginians were English citizens, understood to be English citizens, but what that had to do with modern civil rights or even the state of the English franchise of that time was confused by 3,000 miles of water, and no red-coated English soldiers. Even the Whigs were fifty years in the future.
Domestic elites infested Virginia’s policy and judicial structures, and the shredded community and tobacco export installed barriers, not checks to the limitation of their authority. Whatever the inheritance of these structures did, they did not produce a quality experience for Virginia non-elites. Let’s not think of the Greate Charter political institutions as harbingers of democracy, at least at this point in Virginia’s history. In any event, we should not expect the inheritance of these English structures to have democratic meaning when England itself had not yet entered into its movement toward modern democratic practices.
The England of early Virginia is not the England of the Glorious Revolution, never mind the England of Cromwell or the Restoration. Virginia, and a goodly number of colonies, were founded in the reigns of the early Stuart dynasty. England’s greatest change and dynamic growth lay in the future. The England that Virginians inherited bore more resemblance to that of the late medieval period, albeit with dynamic ongoing, but unresolved change. In this perspective, the package of institutions, political structures, political cultures, social and class configuration were in flux—throughout the entire colonial period. Whatever we inherited and how it was used in America reflected the different time periods and their current events. We inherited English poor laws and Benjamin Franklin founded the first American hospital in 1751 (Pennsylvania Hospital) following their general principles. Perhaps, we didn’t inherit as much as we thought? Perhaps we copied it and made it fit our own conditions? As T. H. Breen argues:
Once they arrived in Massachusetts or Virginia, the colonists neither replicated immemorial English custom nor gave themselves over to frontier democracy. The process was far more involved than either of these familiar explanations of [American] cultural transfer would suggest. The settlers created institutional structures that responded to specific local conditions they had experienced in England on the eve of departure, conditions which ins some cases the migrants’ thoughts were in desperate need of reform. Decisions about institutional forms, of course, took environmental realities into account, and in each colony the relation between Old World background, and New World environment was slightly different. A common set of values—attitudes about popular participation in the formulation of public policy, or assumptions about human nature just to cite two examples—affected the shape of church, state, and militia … (xv)
I wondered how pieces of these particular societies fit together. How did various levels of authority—local, county, colonial—related to one another? How were local units integrated into larger social structures? How did persons whose material interests were clearly in conflict—the great planters and dependent laborers in Virginia for example—achieve coherence? (p. xvii)
The Atlantic Empire
To reassure the reader the regard of “Atlanticists” in their account of Jamestown released on conjunction with the 400th anniversary of its founding: was” the first permanent English settlement in the territory that would become the United States constituted ‘the tiny seed from which would grow a powerful nation…” [99] Kupermann, the Jamestown Project (pp. i-xi)
To which L. H. Roper added “This seed came to flourish through trial and error—and error often predominated’ employed by the settlers … over a decade or so after 1607. In doing so, the emerging society overthrew the ‘hierarchical arrangements devised by the Virginia Company, which had also conceived, ‘notoriously unrealizable goals’ for its colony. The ‘improvisation, undertaken by ordinary people, with the people and the land they found’ created the outlines of a genuinely American society, with all its virtues and defects’ … that] made ‘elites nervous’ as they ‘set about the task of building families and family farms” (p. 5).
I share with Roper that his purpose to “adopt an unfashionable ‘national perspective [i.e., not “Atlantic paradigm bound] in order both to provide clearer insights of WHAT TRANSPIRED [capitalization mine] in what passed for the English Empire during the first half of the seventeenth century, … [in which] English people, living in a New World, necessarily had to adapt to rather different social and environmental realities from the situation they had left. Most famously they lacked an aristocracy … the absence of this customary [English] leadership created a vacuum into which the aspiring Jacobeans [congruent with Brenner’s New Men] could and did step—often over each other—in assuming prominence in this colonial backwater” [99] L.H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658: Beyond Jamestown (Routledge, 2016), p. 7
Roper, as I have come to conclude, believes the Virginia Company heritage is very relevant, if not essential, in understanding the progression of political (and economic) development in Virginia. From this perspective Virginia (and the other colonies) installed the English practice and tradition, while in other places the English experience was adapted, and improvising on their own, or substituting their own American-made version was equally evident. This blending in the case of substituting our own American version of an English social, economic and political aristocracy, produced an elite more congruent with that installed by William the Conqueror than that which emerged from Virginia a hundred years later. The position he summarized below is therefore an excellent segue way into the module series we are about to launch:
In accordance with the principles of good management and the character of early modern English politics and society, the [Virginia] Company’s leaders remained willing to defer to their men in charge on the scene. Unfortunately, these realities, aggravated by the distance between London and Jamestown, entailed issues which proved insoluble. In particular, generations of colonial leadership took to cultivating patronage connections and socio-economic interests of their own, just as their ‘superiors’ at home did. It proved beyond the capacity of the company to compel their officers to devote their attentions to the corporate good. As a consequence, a recognizable Virginia elite emerged by 1614
[Using John Rolfe as his example and metaphor] he established the early template for Anglo-American colonial success: the acquisition of a landed estate fueled by an exportable commodity and the formation of connections in the metropolis [London]. He also took an active role in promoting the colony [99] L.H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658: Beyond Jamestown (Routledge, 2016), pp. 9-10
The large land owners harken back to the medieval manor system; they develop their own private plantations, and wrest their living from crops grown. Today we talk about private property, but in the 1630’s Virginia, the critical and dominant property was land owned. The plantation owned was the “factory” that produced crops and products that were consumed in larger markets, bounded by the country borders. In a loose but heuristic, way we have grounded our conversation in what is known contemporarily as a mercantile or mercantilist political economy.
His thesis, long acknowledged as both classic and page-opening has not generated the attention it deserves, with American colonial historians until recent years. In part, I believe, this is because “Brenner’s assertion” does not fit well into narrative themes pursued during the different phases-era through which American colonial history has passed over the four centuries since Jamestown. We have never denied our English heritage, in particular its political units and law, but emigrant motivation for crossing the Atlantic treats them as economic or political refugees.
It downplays the positive opportunity for a new start rather than a desire for a more open and democratic policy system which, in reality, precedes any meaningful exercise of electoral and even civil rights in England. England in 1630 is still a deference polity and that will be carried over to the New World. But what, For American historians, the tendency has been to suggest expectations that led to democratic impulse in a America that would I think we have done is emphasize how we altered that inheritance, usually in ways that set us apart from England and the continent in, ways that made us “exceptional”.
- H. Roper draws our attention that of necessity Virginia as the first English colony, permanent settlement in the new world, thrust Jamestown, the Virginia Company, and early Virginia into the limelight. He asserts that:
from the period preceding the American Civil War until the 1960’s, Virginia constituted the chronological ace in the sectional struggle with adherents of New England over the ‘origins’ of American society and cultural attitudes which Great Britain bequeathed to the thirteen colonies which won their independence from it in 1783. This self-consciously Whiggish view attempted to place early American history within a wider context of the progress of Anglo-American liberty, and so, trumpeted such ‘achievements’ as the creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly in the New World’. It also lauded, particularly, the ‘yeoman-adventurer persona of Captain Smith as the prototype of American character against the rival claims made by ‘Yankees’ on behalf of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ and ‘Puritans’ as the progenitors of the United States [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658; Beyond Jamestown (Routledge, 2009, 2015), p. 2
Roper continues his historiographic assessment describing a post-World War II historian paradigm which in stark contrast to the previous depiction sees American colonial history through the prism of the American Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and most critically (because in its own weird way this history is congruent with) a historical experience which is driven by and based on a “history [from the perspective] from the bottom up”. Up to this point that has mean concentrating on those, cynically, who were not Founding Fathers or dead white presidents [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, pp. 2-3. Roper cites a variety of works reflective of this approach in his footnote 5, p. 142. He summarized the hysterographic thrust of this paradigm from a sub-group, the ‘Chesapeake school’:
colonial society in the region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay underwent a series of phases enroute to ‘modernity’. In the first decades of English settlement … the relatively egalitarian character of the early population, coupled with a keen desire for advancement and the exigencies of frontier life, exacerbated by the reality of routine premature death, created a rough-and-tumble socio-political environment in which only the fittest prospered, tobacco became the be-all and end-all, and a bizarre form of metropolitan social structure developed. By 1660, however [the period of our “second migration”) the population had settled to the degree that recognizable elite had emerged and the enslavement of Africans had become part of the ‘success’ equation. After the convulsions of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), and in Maryland, the Glorious Revolution (1688-9), the membership of the colonial elites became further entrenched, and in accordance with their counterparts in other colonies, copied as best they could, the behavior and characteristics of the metropolitan aristocracy; they became increasingly ‘anglicized’. [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, p. 3
On the face of our comments thus far, the reader may rightfully conclude our argument in these module series reflects the latter paradigm. To that I must insert the prime purpose of this particular module, is to take this rough evolution and add a layer or two of subtlety, add a few more moving parts, and squeeze it into a conceptualization of what was Virginia’s first genuine policy system, a policy system fabricated by the first generation oligarchy “of the fittest”, which over time, after adoption by a second migration induced by William Berkeley, became the foundation for future policy systems, including those that formed during the Articles of Confederation and the Early Republic United States.
Ron W. Coan 