The reader may wonder why so much of this “context thing” consumes this second module series? Aside from the initial reasons presented above, we have moved beyond an initial context into more fundamental matters. We are setting up the stage for the “first act” of our discussion on Virginia’s Tidewater political culture. We will hold off our first serious discussion of that matter until much later—mostly because political cultures do not take form sufficient to be a political culture until after they have coalesced, developed shared experiences, and been socialized. Political culture is not a flick on the light switch phenomena.
We rely heavily on T. H. Breen [99] T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (Oxford University Press, 1980), Chapter VI. Breen compares and studies Massachusetts and Virginia in the same time period, and his book makes the case that English “inheritance” produced many-splendored flowers in the colonies. “in my investigations, I attempted to explain why men and women who settled in these two regions, created, and then maintained strikingly different patterns of institutional behavior”. The common inheritance from England, he clearly concluded from his start, its “shared values” was “greatly exaggerated “(pp. xi-xii).
His observations, he shares, clearly suggest that despite shred values Massachusetts did not develop following the path outlined by Virginia, and it is obvious to him that “Virginians usually come come off poorly in comparison to the founders of the Massachusetts colony … Unlike the Puritans, the lazy planters failed to establish towns, a printing press, a strong religious system [and more] But … to insist that Chesapeake settlers should have acted like New Englanders, people who traveled to America under vastly different circumstances, blinds the historian to the more subtle aspects of cultural transfer and persistence. In any event, the alleged absence of [proper] values cannot explain patterns of public behavior in early Virginia” (p. xii)
Again, a gentle reminder of the history’s guiding question: why are states and cities similar yet different from each other. My basic core answer is “they were never the same; they started out differently”. Shared values and structures of English inheritance did not produce identical outputs in each colony, but rather reflected the environment and the values and experiences of their immigrant population (their initial inputs for a political culture).
Breen rests his argument on the backs of the values and experiences carried with the immigrant to each colony. He logically says that “when” the immigrant came over affects the attitudes held. England is in a period of great change, fundamental change, and he is quick to observe that New England Puritans especially were seriously affected by experiences over the previous decade. Virginians, however, were not united by Puritan shared values and experiences, but came with their own. Breen is reluctant to concede the superiority of the Puritan development, or the implosion of the extended Virginia Company period.
Nevertheless, he cannot escape from the weight of previous research that Virginia historians had amassed about the in appropriateness of the the Jamestown and Transition Era political development. At the onset he asks how can one explain the glorious great plantation system of eighteenth century Virginia when it is contrasted with the “desolation” of the Jamestown and Transition periods remaking that “it is difficult to conceive how the society that created such impressive structures could possibly have its origins in the earlier community .. Were the roughneck adventurers simply an embarrassing anomaly …, a group of people who left no lasting mark on the colony’s later cultural development” (pp. 106-7)
He quickly rejects that proposition and dedicates his research to demonstrating how Virginia developed its own distinct culture between 1617 and 1630 (especially). He argues that “the interplay between a particular variant of Jacobean (Stuart Era) culture and a specific New World setting determined the character of Virginia’s institutions, habits of personal interaction, and patterns of group behavior that persisted long after the early adventurers had died or returned to the mother country. … The men and women who sailed for Chesapeake Bay in the early seventeenth century were certainly part of a general English culture …[but] we realize that the early settlers of Virginia were an unusual group of Jacobeans …[who] did not represent a random sample of seventeenth- century English , or a cross-section of English values and society (pp. 107-8)
In a nutshell, Breen posits that the distinguishing value that Virginia immigrants possessed was an overwhelming desire to take advantage of “economic opportunity”. This is pretty obvious if one had struggle thought the Company period, and seen how it saturated their promotional initiatives and campaigns, and infused the recruitment of indentured servants that largely populated the colony not only during the Company period, but continued throughout the Transition period as well. He quotes Rolfe who acknowledges, not their laziness, but their hard-working, willingness to take risks against Indian and sickness in order to attain riches as quick as they possibly could. Concluding that “the lure of great wealth easily obtained particularly appealed to a specific type of seventeenth century Englishman, members of a distinct sub-culture of Jacobean society. … they flocked to the New World prepared to exploit their surroundings for quick profits. They were extraordinarily individualistic, fiercely competitive, and highly materialistic … [that] established economic privatism as the colony’s central value (p. 109)
Noting that in Jamestown’s first decade of this hyper steroidal individualist privatism worked very badly—to the point the existence of the colony was threatened—but that the discovery of tobacco changed it all, “altering the course of Virginia’s cultural development”. Freed of the Company’s earlier militaristic style, the discovery of tobacco, in conjunction with the willing initiatives of the Virginia Company (headright) grasped onto tobacco as the quick path to opportunity and profits—and set the settler out into the countryside and hinterland to establish their own homestead in such form as they could manage. “Every man was out for himself”, and those that could access the resources available first secured initial first advantage, and settled the James River in the Hundreds that were established. As early as 1617, Breen observes, the settlement pattern of the “Colonie [is] dispersed, all about planting Tobacco” (pp. 111-2). Seemingly tobacco created the shredded community. But Breen disagrees. I am less sure.
One cannot convincedly attribute the dispersion of the population to the cultivation of tobacco. Rather the hap-hazard dispersion of the population to the cultivation of tobacco. Rather the hap-hazard spread of men and women along the James River and its tributaries was a cultural phenomenon. As Governor Wyatt discovered when he arrived in the region [1621] ‘most plantations were placed straglingly, and further from neighbors the better’. In other words, the early [Virginia] planters regarded space as private, and in contrast to the New Englanders who clustered around shared public grounds, Virginians expressed their individualism through actual physical separation … Because communication between private plantations was difficult … and lacking towns and well-developed voluntary organizations … they grew distrustful of whatever lay beyond the perimeter of their own estates …[that] value system … was in large part responsible for the creation of a dependent labor force …by 1617 only two meaningful social categories existed in Virginia, a person was either free or dependent … those men who held position of political and commercial power viewed servants and slaves simply as necessary instruments in achieving [their] economic success. (pp. 112-13).
It think Breen overstates his case. Cultural determinism is one bridge too far.
As I have argued elsewhere and will argue in the future, tobacco had qualities as a crop that compared to other crops not only promoted dispersion, but reinforced it. Moreover, the political development pursued, and consciously and unconsciously was fostered by the Virginia Company, including its treatment of domestic Company officials, and the timing of the 1622 Second Powhattan War, the desperation it caused, and the intense and determined reaction of the settlers and their leadership, when combined with a Company civil war and inconsistent royal policy, all played important roles in aiding and abetting the shredded community, the reliance on tobacco as an export crop, and the specific opportunities that hard-working, highly aggressive individualistic settlers took advantage of, which in the absence of any strong and effective direction by the provincial authorities and the London governance all combined to create a “shredded” settlement pattern, an unbalanced tobacco monoculture, a dysfunctional workforce configuration, and a policy system tilted to preserve and protect its individualistic plantation decentralization.
The issue that plagued Virginia’s political culture through the entire colonial period was present at its beginning. Structural inequality meant from the start an elite developed a distinct culture of its own, while the non-elite at the best of times operated socially and politically at the fringes, and economically the hope for quick tobacco profits proved more an anchor than an opportunity, leaving the greater preponderance of Virginia’s settlers presiding over a subsistence existence dependent upon the Powhatan for staples and protein. For the latter grouping, whatever the attitudes and values held by its members, frustration, if not a measured desperation, colored their role in Virginia’s politics and policy.
As to the elites, the First Migration elite was so focused on its individualist economic success, that internal relations within that elite were intensely competitive, yet it seemingly learned quickly that this competitiveness and drive for economic success was sufficient to build a consensus for action, a measure of trust for those inside the elite. If it was “honor among thieves” than so be it. When pressed they could take common action, particularly against outsiders like royal governors. They could work a voting consensus in the House of Burgesses, even in these very early of years.
To me, however, their crowning achievement, for better or worse, was to construct an elite in Virginia’s hostile wilderness. Indeed, what the Virginia Company left behind, as even Bailyn asserts, is no elite in the English late medieval aristocratic sense. The transition from the Virginia Company was not managed or directed by an aristocracy. Symbolically, its sole aristocrats, the brother of Lord De La Warre, used their non titled names, John and Francis West. Even Governor Wyatt during the worst of the Second Powhatan War, “went native” and defended Virginians from the criticisms of their counterparts in London.
One must also extend this “deference” to the non-elite as well. It was likely it underlie the Jamestown community and its governance and was passed on to the new tobacco settlements in the Hundreds and continued to their transformation in to counties. If so, the reader should assume democratic participation in governance and policy making may well not have been aspirational of democracy—which had little meaning in these decades. When linked with defense and a hostile wilderness, not to mention isolation of the shredded community, we can sense how deference played its role in the structured inequality that was Virginia.
Virginia’s elite were to be in their fashion New Men, not just in Brenner’s sense, but in a larger beyond financial sense: theirs’s was an oligarchy of men “on the make” in the hostile wilderness. If they governed for mostly personal and economic reasons, they assumed responsibility to govern as a group and not individual warlords, and they did so without violence against each other, uniting as they perceived the need against outsiders: Powhattan, London politics, and above all royal governors who were not of their ilk and shared experience.
Interestingly, although mostly Anglican, they were open to Puritans, but not to Quakers or the hated Catholics. The linkage of the Church of England with the King cemented their loyalty, but did not stand in the way, to allow those with Puritan linkages to assume such authority as needed to guide them all through the Civil War and Protectorate—and back to the Restoration of the Stuarts. Religious in their way, it was not the straight-jacket that was Puritanism. In any case, when the time came, after they had died out, their widows handed over their estates to a new elite. From this generational change, a new elite cohort took shape and assumed its power over policy-making—retaining much, arguably near all, of the heritage and institutions they inherited from their First Migration predecessors.
Deference; Roper’s the English Empire in America, 1602-1658 (Routledge, 2009) picks up where Breen does not venture. His additions to the Virginia value system fleshes out Breen’s dominant value, the pursuit of opportunity and profit. For Roper that pursuit reflected the English value system in its adoption of “land”, the ownership thereof, as the tangible expression of individual success. Like the manor system, however, in evolution it was at the time, land still was the basis of wealth, status, and power. If indenture was the “second serfdom” it transformed the indentured into their property, at least for the term of the contract.
It was the ownership of land that constituted membership in the Council of State, paved the way for membership in Burgesses, and was the foundation for the governance of local and county government. Through the back door than, the plantation, the tobacco plantation, became the vehicle and the entry criterion for meaningful participation as the First Policy System’s political and policy processes. Land and indentured servants combined with the export of large quantities of tobacco were the primary expressions of achievement in Virginia’s elites. To the degree, the indentured, and former indentured servant and the immigrant free holder who paid his own way over aspired to these—which for the most part they seemingly did—we see a further bond that was shared in the budding Transition political culture.
But Roper continues and further suggests that Transition’s culture also contained a shared belief a social, economic and political hierarchy-“A hierarchy based on landed income as the best means of ordering society, a system of reciprocity which required the cultivation of patronage links through deference to ‘superiors’, and condensation towards ‘inferiors’, and a keen sense of locality especially in terms of local administration and in negotiation with the central government with their counterparts in England (p. 8).
In this vein Roper selects John Rolfe as the prototype and model (he died or was killed in 1622), the innovator of the tobacco seed, arguably the owner of the first autonomous “plantation” landed estate who forged the consensus behind tobacco as an exportable commodity through connections in England (and celebrity status for his wife, Rebecca-Pocahontas), and his linkage of private success with public (Company) office at both the local and provincial level. One could add his death in the first day attack by the Powhattan (the Massacre) linked the elite with the need-obligation for defense against the Indian, perhaps superseding his marriage commitment to a more productive and peaceful relationship with the tribes.
Breen concludes in his last chapter, “Of Time and Nature” that later colonial commentators and historians like Robert Beverley Jr., did not think well of this period. Their descriptions and comments stress lost opportunities (a diversified economy, the failure to urbanize, and the absence of a port city of consequence. Structure inequality over a period of time lent itself it seems to a contempt for those of lesser status, and no records at all for the non-elites. Corruption and greed by all was freely acknowledged, with regret. Virginia’s First Policy System, and what passed for its rudimentary political culture had already been left behind by Virginia’s elite as early as the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Jefferson, commenting much later than that continued in his high disregard for this period. Still, out of this negativity, I suggest there is one take away: the decisions made in this period had lasting consequences. The Jamestown and Transition Periods mattered.
Ron W. Coan 