the Land: the shredded community settlement pattern and its core foundations, a supportive political culture based on an elite-non elite leadership/ownership and workforce that dovetailed with the tobacco steamroller
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 so materially diminished; its focus on governance distracted by investor rebellion, office and political intrigue, near-bankruptcy, and a feuding leadership and internal corruption. Sandys, beset as he was, ambitious as he was, depended on his exported assistants, his brother George and his son-in-law Governor Francis Wyatt. As we shall see within a few months of their arrival in Virginia, they were greeted by an Indian welcome party that wiped out one-third the colony’s population in one day. And then things got worse. We shall discuss their fate in this module.
The Company’s resident domestic officials, of subordinate in status and position, to London, now responded to events according to their own needs and perceptions, mostly disregarded previous instructions if perceived as unenforceable or dysfunctional, and simply kept on trucking under their own inspiration and ambition—and greed. We could also add the courage to perist in what for them was an existentialist crisis if not confronted successfully would likely mean the end of the colony.
In essence, left to their own devices they assumed authority over the settlers, conducted their own Indian relations, rebuilt their plantations, planted tobacco, trained their imported headright assisted workforce in its mystics, sent them to clear the fields, and plant, harvest, and barrel their export crop, which they developed and sold as they could, independent of the Company Magazine where possible (on their own Company-granted estates), up and down the James River and its tributaries. What was left of Company control over the colony was the merest shred of legitimacy, and little else after 1622.
When the indenture contract expired, the Company official as required by the headright granted them the appropriate acreage, a set of tools, and made his deal with them to follow him to his estates and new plantations as renters, free holders off into a new settlement in, adjacent or in the hinterland of his large home base plantation. Such was Virginia’s earliest settlement-building—until they too, of course, were greeted by the same Indian welcome party. Rolfe, himself, the personification of this model of development, was likely killed in it, or as has been claimed died days before it. Ironically, he lies buried somewhere in Virginia; his wife Rebecca, aka Pocahontas, lies buried in England.
The Massacre, as it has come to be called, is the beginning of this module. One would think the post-Company transition would begin in 1625 when the Company lost the charter through Court action? Not so, at least in my mind, the Company lost control over Virginia from the day the Massacre occurred, and never regained it. From the Massacre onward, Virginia was in the day-to-day hands of the handful of Company officials left alive and resident in Virginia.
That small group was expanded by a few new immigrants, free holders with respectable backgrounds and even some education and a degree of social standing and second son status in first generation new merchant-families. Their parents had some social standing, some wealth and position in England’s secondary cities and districts; they no doubt paid the freight to have their kids sent over for their beginning as primogeniture demanded. Others plied the seas as ship captains, until they recognized the opportunities on land—where they quickly found other fish to fry. Both sets of characters latched onto the good graces of the Company officials—and this was the real birth of Virginia’s First Migration elite. On the day after the Massacre, they were in charge.
Heritage of the First Migration
As presented in our table of contents, the first module in this mini-series is a chapter in its own right. To help the reader digest this module, a mainstay of our chapter on Virginia, we have divided it up into three distinct topic-focus modules which can be accessed only though this module. That is because each of these modules are dependent on each other; they occurred simultaneously, and are hopelessly intertwined. In some way each tells the same story from a different position or perspective.
The perspective in this story is the land, the Tidewater, and how, who and why it was settled and conquered during this period. The key dynamics in this first section are: the shredded community, the tobacco steamroller and the plantation system it left in its wake, and the profound “Tilt” or decentralization that it bent the twig that was Virginia’s first policy system. From that we will send you off to the second section, “the Narrative” which focuses on individuals, personalities, people, events and initiatives. The Powhatan are key players and the Second Powhatan War and Faux Peace will forge the formation of Virginia elites that will rule-govern over non elites, and occupy the political and economic institutions inherited from the Virginia Company.
The heritage of the First Migration left behind several “bends or twists” in the twig that was to become the Virginia tree.
Two of these “bends” are (1) the “Tilt to Virginia’s Bottoms Up–Sub-State–Style of Governance that led to the “county” (with plantations its dominant basic unit within the county) as the heart and soul of Virginia’s future policy system; and, (2) Virginia’s steadfast refusal to subject itself to unchecked gubernatorial power, its strong preference for a weak governor that reinforced the Bottoms-Up tilt. We shall discuss these in future modules.
As we discuss the “Tilt” and the emergence of a provincial policy system whose power and impact flowed upward from its “counties” to the provincial level, we inevitably encounter the First Migration elite that made the twist or bend in the Virginia twig, and describe the context and dynamics that led to their bending the twig–that among other factors leads us to the founding of the export-inequality-based tobacco plantation and the seizure of the Tidewater region from the native tribes of the area.
Accordingly, we see the priority afforded to Virginia counties as key to understanding how the Tidewater region was settled by the English. It was the county-hundreds that provided the core of the administrative and fiscal resources that financed and implement Virginia’s post-Company settlement nexus. The county was the economic, political and social driver that inherited the mantle of the fallen Virginia Company.
Sometime, rather quickly, in the First Migration comes the Tidewater ouster–if not physical removal– of the Powhatan and associated tribes that were Virginia before Jamestown. We see the founding of the first “reservation” in English North America. The settlement of Virginia in the period of this model was arguably as blunt and ruthless a process of Indian-removal as any of the thirteen colonies unleashed–save perhaps Massachusetts. We incorporate, out of necessity, the role and impact of the seizure of Indian lands into the structures, the policy-making system, and describe the signature economic development project that resulted: the palisades project.
It is at least heuristic, if not necessary that we tackle the question of why the tilt–not just describe it. for this module to present the reasons for the “bottoms-up” policy-making tilt, and suggest in commentary how and why this development of Virginia’s first non-Virginia Company policy system took shape and form. In effect we are asking ourselves how does a policy-making system establish itself in the wilderness of English North America–how is it “born”. Who slaps its bum to kick-start its life.
I will argue that the “Virginia that was Virginia in 1625” had already developed to the point that biased the future evolution of Virginia’s future policy system(s). The Virginia Company had consciously and inadvertently founded the “system’s configuration and key institutions” during its period of administration. The post-Company Transition Governance inherited that “Virginia that was Virginia” and readjusted, rejiggered its governance, elites, institutions, and economic base. But what was it that this Transition Governance had inherited–what was this “Virginia that was Virginia in 1625”?
I will conclude by observing the First Migration also created Virginia’s first elite, an elite that set up and dominated its First Policy System. That will be a focus of the next module.
And now our organizational dilemma. From this point on all the themes and dynamics we have discussed took hold and started acting like moving parts, or as I prefer, transformed Virginia policy-making into something akin to a pinball machine, with policies being the pinball. This isn’t the way rational policy is supposed to be made, and academics and historians have tried ever since to explain it as best it could be explained through rational-based history and narrative. In my opinion and belief, that was never the situation in Virginia in 1622 and during most, if not all of the Transition Period. Hence our organizational dilemma—how does one put on paper the battering and buffeting of a pinball as it travels its non-rational course through the time period?
To save the reader some pages, I split this time period into two chapters—though they are meant to be understood as one; each occurred simultaneously with the other. The first module, this one, focuses on land, geography, economy, and the Powhatan, which I believe the most important of the moving parts. After all land, geography and economy describe the basic pattern, reality and uniqueness of Virginia, on which the second module, the elite, their activities, beliefs, and personalities traversed. If the latter ever conquered the Virginia nature, and their successors never thought they did, it was only because historians gave them the credit for doing so. It was Virginia herself that infused her uniqueness on the history that followed. It was men and women, however, that bent the twig of the tree Virginia grew.
Recalling the spirit of “Tara” in Gone With the Wind, it is the land that matters, so let us begin that tale. In this module we focus on the settlement of the Tidewater, the composition, configuration. internal dynamics and dispersion of population into Virginia’s shredded community, the founding of plantations of varying sizes, the diffusion and pervasiveness of the tobacco monoculture, the post-1629 tobacco depression and the reaction to it, and conclude with a case study of colonial America’s first large scale economic development infrastructure project: the Middle Peninsula Palisades Project.
The Game Plan
We shall, however, start off with the most significant dynamics of this settling of the Tidewater in the Transition from Company charter: the Second Powhatan War and the faux peace that was its 1629 peace treaty, Virginia’s Shredded Community, the Tobacco Steamroller, and the Failure of Jamestown as a Port City and the Tilt or Decentralization, to Local Government it created.
We shall first discuss the Shredded Community because it is essential to understanding the Indian War and relations. The shredded community appeared during the Company Period, after Jamestown had stabilized sufficiently to permit its population to be dispersed along the James River. After 1613, tied at the hip to Rolfe’s tobacco seeds, small, almost miniscule settlements dotted the James. These Hundred’s plantation first set up by Company elites and then allowed to Company shareholders set the pattern as a “colony within a colony”: considerably autonomous and autarkic, the embodied the foundations for a plantation-based settlement and economic base.
Caught in this young tobacco export economy was Jamestown, which we briefly comment on its inability to develop into a master port city for the colony. Then we switch to the Tilt, and its first pillar that unequal and undemocratic formation of elites and non-elite masses upon which the future First (and the others following) Policy System would rest. The budding tobacco monoculture was dependent on this workforce and its elite masters on their access to seeds. Capital, and dominance over what political institutions there were in the period. A rudimentary political culture developed—during the Company Period and in the Transition-, a culture that resulted from, and was dependent upon, the tobacco monoculture and elite dominance. If the shredded community prompted the initial culture, the initial culture sustained the tobacco steamroller. It was all a vicious circle, even before the Company lost its charter..
It is Indian Relations, however, that we will explore more thoroughly in our second sub-module. While much of the impact of that war on white Virginians will be discussed in the next sub-module, that sub-module will develop why the war occurred, how it was fought, the impact of tobacco monoculture and the lack of a diversified economic base made it worse, review the style of Indian vs. colonist warfare, and throughout will consider the larger issues of Anglo-Indian relations.
The basic reality underlying our Indian-related observations is the spread of the Europeans into the Tidewater, its hinterland and neighboring river systems, was coterminous with the displacement-expulsion of the Powhatan from the area. We will make mention of what arguably is America’s first established Indian reservation, but will also include the mind frame of the white Virginian that underscored that war and Indian relations.
The final sub-model introduces the development of Virginia’s policy system, the development of First Heritage elites, the absent King, and initiates our discussion on the “Tilt”. The hallmark economic development project of the period, the Palisades Project, will be presented as a near perfect synthesis of the myriad dynamics that underlie the First Migration period. It concludes with a well-intended, if out of tune, observation on our approach to settlement, Indian relations and removal, and questions if English colonialization, its settlement goal, was so zero-sum in relation to Indian coexistence, that from the start it was a conquest, intentioned or not.
Shredded Community: Isolation, Population Dispersal and Effect on Governance Structures?
Put it bluntly and simply, the “Virginia that was Virginia in 1625” was a shredded policy system, in which its residents, political levels, and structures were isolated from each other. Thinly dispersed into solitary, secluded, relatively compact settlements, threatened by more powerful hostile forces, each individual settlement, found it necessary to “circle its wagons” and build palisades to protect their economic base. Autonomy and self-sufficiency were engrained into these developing communities and their residents-elites; the threat of attack and the need for Indian corn were conflated into a “self-defense” mentality that was made necessary by the incapacity of provincial-company higher level “governments”. Elites grew from the dynamics of these isolated, thinly settled communities.
Each shredded community developed and relied on a local leadership, perceived as capable of sustaining settlement existence, including a level of prosperity and growth. They did not depend on their provincial government or any elite based in the capital, Jamestown; rather the lower units made Jamestown conform to their needs and provide such resources as it could–to them. The formal structure that was employed, was the “Hundreds”, created from the early decision by the Company to allow private, non-company investors to set up investment plantations up and down the James River.
Overlapping with several Company officials’ estates and plantations, given representational status in the General Assembly by the Greate Charter Company reforms of 1619, and supplemented by a circuit “court systems” that extended the administrative authority of the provincial level to these bodies, a loosely defined administrative web had been set up previous to the commencement of the Second Powhattan War. With the Hundred, however, were scattered individual tobacco plantations, large and small, with a thin line of individual homesteads fairly isolated from the nucleus of the very small settlement.
The Virginians’ settlement pattern reflected their distinctive, highly individualistic system of values. Once a European market for tobacco had been established, people fanned out along the James and York rivers. Whenever possible, they formed what directors of the Virginia Company called private hundreds, semi-autonomous plantations, often five or more miles apart which investors developed for their own profit. By 1618 forty-four separate patents for these private plantations had been issued—Southampton, Berkeley, Martin’s Hundred were several of the more ambitious—and by the 1620’s the dispersed settlement pattern characteristic of Virginia society throughout the colonial period was well entrenched [99] T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 111
The larger of these settlements may were a fraction of a hundred residents; the smaller quite small in the twenties or so. From this we can discern these settlements were “personalized” and from the start usually revolved around the initial main investor, the largest and most wealthy landowner. The bulk of the residents were currently indentured, with a core of former indentured “free holders” that had been issued land grants by the dominant landowner. Tobacco fields were exhausted after five years, and old fields were abandoned and new fields had to be cleared. The old fields were left fallow, and most reverted to past uses. New fields were cleared and one can understand how with a small growth population the need for more land was constant.
By no means are these communities comparable to the New England towns which were to develop during much of this period. One must conclude by observing these communities were more scattered cleared fields, rudimentary household homes and estates, and a few supporting facilities, buildings, and after the Indian attack, palisades. The most important infrastructure was “the pier” which was the access point for any contact with the outside world. The pier was owned by the largest plantation owner in these early years.
The standard interpretation of Virginia’s shredded community calls attention to its failure, from 1607 on, to develop settlements of size relative to their population. City/town building was never Virginia’s forte. The conventional explanation for this inability is a combination of its geography (a series of east-west rivers that open to the Chesapeake Bay/Atlantic and run deep into its hinterland), and a climate predisposed to agriculture, in particular tobacco that required large plantations to produce the volume needed to make export profitable.
The export function was managed from the pier of the plantation, situated on one of the river systems, and from which imports and exports could go, directly, to their overseas markets. The urban community as an export center was bypassed by the plantation and its owner. I should comment at the outset, that this pattern reflects the tobacco plantation most particularly; plantations were formed in other colonies, using other crops, without the dynamic of non-urbanization and the failure to develop a port city.
In no way do I dispute this. But my purposes are larger than accounting for the failure of Virginia to urbanize, no matter how important that is of itself. Other factors entered into the picture and exerted strong effects on political and economic development, which in turn factored into the social and societal development, including the political culture. I would also observe that much could be said about Maryland that compares with Virginia in these factors–but then we have Baltimore, and Annapolis, the so-called home of the American Navy (sorry Beverly Mass).
I must emphasize the small number of people involved in this settlement pattern. Remember, the entire colony fluctuated annually in a range of less than a thousand to about fifteen hundred before the Massacre. Virginia suffered from a failure to “thrive”; it never achieved either an economic or population breakout–despite the spectacular success of tobacco export and the development of the tobacco monoculture which simply saturated the colony’s economic base and occupational structure. After its stabilization in 1612-15 Virginia could simply not attract enough immigrants to meet the needs of its tobacco workforce.
In this module series, I will partially explain the cause of this scattered thinly populated web of settlements as directly tied to tobacco and the style of plantation that emerged from the Virginia Company. A perhaps competing explanation, although I prefer supplementary as one need not choose between the two, is offered by Breen who asserts the distinctive individualist culture that saturated the character of the Virginia Company recruited immigrants. In his view the shredded community was the result of a cultural driver: these highly individualistic Virginia immigrants “expressed their individualism through actual physical separation” and he cites support from the comment from Governor Wyatt who observed upon his arrival in 1621 that: “Most plantations were placed straglingly and scatteringly, as a choice veine of rich ground invited them, and further from neighbors the better” [99] Breen, p. 112. More on the Breen’s proposition and my counter later.
Wesley Frank Craven asserts “something like six thousand persons migrated to Virginia between 1607 … and 1624, [but] a census taken the following year showed hardly more than twelve hundred” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black (W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), p. 3. That census indicated the population was four to one male (p. 26). The amazingly small number of residents defines the failure of the Virginia Company in colony-building. Compared to Virginia over the same period the Ulster Plantation (Ireland) whose immigration commenced in 1606, and commenced full steam in 1609, reached an estimated English and Scot population of between 16,000 and 19,000 in 1622. [99] Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650, Revised Ed (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 211
Death remained at incredibly high rates in this period. Turnover (i.e., return to England) was huge, probably because death was a way of life. The obvious impact of the Company’s militaristic code of law, and its “socialistic” style of work, housing, and physical sustenance did little to attract English or Scots settlers, who clearly preferred the closer alternative of crossing the Irish Sea rather than the Atlantic Ocean–plus the less well-known role of Irish “undertakers” that fed immigrants into Ireland’s plantations.
No surprise, the near-bankrupt Virginia Company had to pay transport and sustenance to the lose ends of English society, and children from its debtors’ prison’s. What came instead after 1616 were well-connected opportunists-entrepreneurs that were attracted to the quick profits believed associated with tobacco. Artisans were always few in number, and merchants likewise. Those latter folk did enjoy little competition in their enterprises, and not surprisingly they accumulated wealth, if they could survive the sickness, summer, and “savages”. Partly, this is the price Virginia paid for not being economically diversified. Tobacco plantations, at least until 1630, was the best, maybe the only “game” in Virginia. Despite incredible high rates of “inequality”, wages were high in Virginia because the number of workers was so few. Obviously, if one wants to urbanize, it might help if a sufficient volume of people were willing to settle. They weren’t.
Unlike Ireland, women (and families) came late in Virginia. Women proved to be healthier than men, however, no matter how few they were. In fact, the chief method of the plantation conquistador to acquire wealth, land and status was to marry the widows of the older first-generation Company officials that had set up permanent residence in the graveyard. Historians labeled this pre-1640-50 period the First Migration, and remarked how few of its members survived into the eighteenth century. Those that did were hardy enough to last for half a century, but for the first half-century both the good and bad of Virginia died young.
That striking dynamic of the pre-1625 period was Virginia’s frailty caused by its climate-imposed poor public health. That frailty capped total population somewhere in an annual range of between 1000 to 1500—insufficient for any “take off” in its economy or capacity to support a dense population residing in dispersed tobacco plantations. Organic growth increased slowly after 1625, but it would be a mistake to call this any sort of a “take-off”. At best take-off happened after 1650 thanks to Berkeley’s historic royalist people attraction strategy.
To the extent of its small population and geographic size, its internal configuration fragmented into several hundred and multiple small homestead settlements adjacent to one or a few larger plantations, their geography of dispersal, and parish boundaries along several isolated and unconnected river systems, all of which were until 1634 “managed” governmentally by the individual hundred–the forerunner of Virginia’s county.
Tobacco Steamroller Tramples All in its Path
–The tobacco economy relentlessly in-filled settled lands, and pushed out deeper into the river valleys and their hinterlands. A small population dispersed in small plantations into more and more area meant the exact opposite of urbanization. As we shall see plantations did double duty as government agents and economic masters–and the need was to find a governmental unit that could bring order, self-defense, economic regulation, religion, and what passed for a lifestyle to a few settlers dispersed over a relatively wide area of inaccessible frontier. And so the “county” and its predecessor, the hundred, will fill the bill–as it still does so today. Today Virginia has the nation’s third most number of counties. Later in this module we will really expand on this topic.
It wasn’t Jamestown, the provincial capital, however, that kept Virginia going and expanding. The capital city, one would think, would have the advantage in developing into an urban area. Today Jamestown is a national heritage area and an archeological site. From 1613, the trick was to get Jamestown residents dispersed to other geographies, leaving behind only a rather substantial graveyard. it was the settlement by immigrants of more and more tribal lands, and the creation of new plantations and more hundreds that was responsible for whatever growth Virginia enjoyed after 1625.
This dispersion was the result of an economic strategy pushed by the Virginia Company, in large measure to produce more tobacco to export and sell so that it could pay its bills. Jamestown was one of the few settlements that survived the 1622 Massacre in relatively good shape, but the spinoffs from Virginia provincial government were few, and the English king was stingy in the extreme, and while it is said Jamestown residents grew tobacco in its streets, its economic base was struggling at best. But at root, Jamestown’s core problem was that it could not develop into a port city.
Jamestown: the Failing Capital and the Failed Port City– Jamestown, however was the designated sole port of entry and export for tobacco in the period before 1624 and continued as such by statute in 1642. Boiled down to its essences, Virginia had an economic port of entry, but no real political or social center. The plantation was its most viable competitor in export. Located too far into the interior, with access to only one major river system, the dispersal of population to other river systems could not be captured easily by Jamestown. Lacking an overland road and bridge system, land connections were never properly developed.
The provincial administration of the royal governor, with its accompanying annual renditions of the General Assembly, generated little momentum that could overcome the dispersion of population into the cauldron of its all-consuming tobacco monoculture. Its effort at urban planning–which shall be described at a later point–was a two street grid. The expansion of tobacco meant a perpetual expansion of new acreage and a frontier constantly on the move deeper into the hinterland, and further away from the rivers Jamestown served. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, pp. 206-7 As to its function as a capital city, Jamestown “never was to the colony, as Williamsburg became afterward, a place of residence for the planters and the center of social and political life. Williamsburg in this period did not formally exist; it was referred to as “the Middle Plantation” on which by 1630, Governor Pott had a farm, which in 1632 was turned into a palisaded fort against Indian attack. Its glory days lay several module-series in our future.
For most of the first decade of the Company period “Colonists stubbornly clung to Jamestown in spite of its drawbacks. Fort and town were practically the same throughout the two decades … Both brushed ruination in 1610 and again in 1616, when the rage to grow tobacco drew all but fifty inhabitants to other settlements that offered more arable land … Deputy Governor Argall stopped the decline after he embarked on a vigorous rebuilding effort that resulted most notably in repairs to the company storehouse and the raising of a new frame church”.
Lacking the means to affect the behavior of these local elites, and dependent in many ways on the beneficence, local residents, small landowners, citizens made their peace with these elites, drawing what benefit they could from the latter. Also dispense with any notions of adjacent urban civilization as an exit strategy for settlers. Jamestown was less than one hundred souls—and they were scattered inside and outside its wall. Jamestown was a rough and tumble outpost, with few women, and fewer children. Tombstone Arizona in Earp’s day was more a family town than Jamestown ever was. The strong militaristic background and tone of Company leadership in the past also had worn a groove in the expectations of Virginias. To the extent the Company exercised any site control in Virginia by this time, it was in Jamestown.
This was the capital of the Virginia Company colony! The new frame church was the home of the 1619 Greate Charter Legislature. There was also “a company-owned governor’s house” in which the affairs of government were handled and the smaller Council of State met. [99] Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Virginia (Louisiana State University Press, 2004) pp. 41-2 From this out of the way, almost completely unconnected to the new river and tributary systems that were being settled, little could be expected, at least in terms of leadership or resources, and little was delivered.
Here’s How the Tilt Tilted: the Historical Narrative
The small number of Virginia settlers/citizens, dispersed along one hundred ninety-three miles long, and three to twenty-five miles deep into Virginia is today’s Tidewater, set the character and tone of Virginia’s oligarchical political style. The Virginia census of 1625 found 1,210 settlers; the 1635 census 4,914, and that of 1639 over 10,000. [99] Warren M. Billings, the Little Parliament, p.20. One could cite rates of change and give the impression of serious growth, but I think the raw numbers are more telling. Most of the growth occurred in the thirties, and while the twenties did witness incremental growth, it did little but sustain the drive to the hinterland. Accordingly this period expanded the shredded community and did not grossly change the character of previous settlement patterns, saving the opening up of the Middle Peninsula and settlement on the eastern shore..
Socially and culturally, there was no change in this period. The weight of English social deference in this late medieval period, and the power of the Anglican church whose official head was the King, provided a backdrop and support for the use of authority by Virginia elites. Yet one must also keep in mind that to some extent authority was checked by the rough and tumble frontier and the servant background of the general population whose unruly, anomic behavior was as unpredictable as it was passive aggressive.
Elites from the old Company remained in place when the Company lost its charter. Those that occupied official positions and enjoyed a measure of status became the de facto transition government. These Company officials had accumulated sizable personal–and even those youngsters in secondary positions could gain a headstart over their immigrant and former servant competitors. Former company officials formed the nucleus of the new elite, but the period after the 1622 Powhatan attack saw a rather dramatic and far-reaching expansion of the elite as high casualty rates exacted their toll, and opportunities arose from the slaughter of that year..
They converted what previously had been company positions into “governmental” offices-structures and used these structures to acquire and solidify their dominance. For example, the position and power of the sheriff, an officer of local government, served in Virginia’s policy system as the bastion of local authority; the sheriff reported to the local (hundred) council/justice that had been created in the company period. Others ventured into secondary enterprises ranging from merchant, to surveying, to even trade with the tribes. A hard to pin down key to their early success was the loose system of formal title recording, the flexibility of the headright incentive, and the often erratic quitrent payment paid in tobacco. Not everybody paid their fair share during these times–and access to a few officials worked wonders. Until the King took some sort of position on the parameters of his future government, the old rules didn’t apply, and there were, as yet, no new rules. Sounds like opportunity to me!
To legitimize their use of authority, backstop their personal land holdings, regulate tobacco affairs to adjust to the tobacco export environment, keep the local parish afloat, and find the resources to pay for the expenses of the hundreds, these officials secured either, or both, governor or Assembly authorization. There was a dialogue with London on clarifying the role and function of the Assembly and the Council of State and London seemed willing to “use” the Assembly, for the time being at least. as a vehicle to handle Virginia affairs–while keeping London out of the decision-making morass. So the Assembly and the Governor would take such action as needed, report it to London, and that was usually it.
In a few instances these elites were able or found it necessary to use the provincial authorization as the cutting edge of new departures from the past practices. The legislature asserting its “right to tax is one such instance. But the critical issue, in hindsight, was the Assembly’s willingness to empower local entities to implement and manage a function, task, initiative, or strategy under local leadership. In this time period much autonomy was granted to sub-provincial bodies, with much discretion, and very little oversight from above.
If so, why did the provincial legislature not protect its own interests, and demonstrate some concern for provincial-wide effectiveness and consistency–never mind accountability from misuse and corruption? The answer may be that the officials in the Assembly were, for all practical purposes, the same people who served as local elites. Perhaps half-hearted provincial legislation was, in fact, intended to set up these sub-state entities as the primary actor in those activities? In effect, in the political vacuum that was Virginia in the early years of Stuart royal administration, a local elite held sway over the provincial Assembly, Council of State, and indeed the Governor, who, for whatever else he was, was a large local landowner with undoubted ability to effect influence in local decision-making, and receive personal benefits from public action.
the Colony’s Masses–Whatever its discontents, the general population in day-to-day practice and behavior conformed to the its high status or power activist elite landowners and former company officials. More to the point, perhaps the non-servant population was primarily interested and engaged in the success of its tobacco and staple crop production, the only path it had to subsistence, profit, and literally survival. The Company had granted the right to private property, and had provided some incentives for the development of private property and for participating in the economic base. The best, almost the only, game in town was tobacco.
On the other hand, the Company during its administration had not developed structures and access to its decision-making that were open to the general population. While indentured servants did enjoy the franchise after the Greate Charter reforms, voice voting likely rendered independent voting an act of courage, or simple foolishness. In day-to-day matters, and in the courts, indentured servants were legally property during the time of their contract. The bulk of those recruited by the Company were indentured servants. After 1625, the King, failing to provide any security on the headright incentive placed in jeopardy any award of land upon expiration of their contract. This meant that to some degree the fortunes of the future indentured servants were tied to the Assembly and its oligarchical elites–Jamestown was the only avenue for representing their interests in London.
On top of this T. H. Breen argues with a good deal of logic that this insecurity, combined with the isolationism of the shredded community, created a distinctive political culture for these non-elites. Assuming that most indentured servants were not compelled, but had willingly agreed to their contract, Breen asserts they did so to create a new opportunity in life after tobacco had been accepted in the English marketplace.
These indentured servants came to Virginia with a goal to serve their contract, acquire the skills, and set off with their own land to grow tobacco. Once in Virginia, however, the shredded community placed them in an environment they had not anticipated; Constrained by geographical isolation, these servants developed an approach to life and the Virginia success that was based on attitudes and behaviors learned in their servitude. That these attitudes and practices were both dysfunctional and functional is less the point than they were instilled in the general population of the colony at that time. It was this “culture” that facilitated and sustained an unequal non-elite workforce and policy system. As such it embedded inequality into the fabric of the economy and polity that was evolving at that time. As articulated by Breen:
The scattering of men and women along the colony’s waterways, their self-imposed isolation, reduced … ongoing face-to-face contacts … a migrant to Virginia tended to be highly competitive … [and assumed] that other men would do unto him as he would do unto them … Dispersion heightened suspicion. Because communication between the private plantations was difficult, Virginians possessed no adequate means of distinguishing the truth about their neighbors from malicious rumor, and lacking towns [where they could break through their isolation] they grew increasingly distrustful of whatever lay beyond the perimeter of their own estates. Nor were these early private plantations a kind of small, self-contained community held together by a body of shared beliefs. The ratio of men to women were so imbalanced before 1630 that most young adult servants could not have formed families. They clung to their fellow workers …
[That] value system that transferred to the New World was also 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, either an exploiter or a resource. There was no middle ground … The distrust poisoned political institutions. Few colonists seem to have believed that local rulers would on their own initiative work for the public good. Instead, they assumed that persons in authority used their offices for personal gain.[99] Breen, p. 112-13
While Breen does not consider the “deference culture” that still dominated the Stuart years in England, and presumably in the colonies, it too likely played a role in suppressing expectations, and rendered any opposition to established authority outside the parameters of normal governance. Deferring to your betters in England, meant deferring to Company officials and your indenture owner in Virginia. When we discuss other colonies in later chapters, it will be evident the Virginia colony, not relying on a dissident religious culture, families, and an economy supportive of urbanism, nurtured a compellingly different elite-mass dichotomy in its political culture and an unequal workforce in its economy.
That its policy governance system would rest on the same culture and workforce, we can expect the Hundreds-Shire-County unit of local government would be burdened with its impact and baggage. We can certainly assume that whatever direction the elite culture would take, the economy, and company elites as headright owners of a considerable number of indentured servants, they would have direct contact with these folk, and some familiarity with their attitudes and behavior. Directly benefiting from this system, they logically would be reluctant to allow change; as owners responsible for the plantation and its productivity, profitability, and debt repayment it is they who would directly feel any negative impact.
As we shall shortly see, the Hundred assumed the burden of self-defense against the Powhatan during the Second Powhatan War. It managed the local militia, the only force available in colonial Virginia purposed for military affairs. Because of their military adventures the elite was expanded to include associates, contractors and those with military relevant experience or skills; accordingly, the monopoly of Company officials in the Company Era was broken after 1622. Often such individuals would be paid in terms of granted land, and/or headright incentives. A group of new men, different from Brenner’s, would emerge and develop into what we call plantation conquistadors, plantation owners with military commands, and these men would constitute a core group in the Council of State from that period onward. It is at this time 1623-4), while the Company is still formally in charter, that the Council of State became arguably the forum for the province’s decision-making. The Assembly, in session for only a few days, and fraught with worries about its role and power, used to cut new policy departures and ratify or formalize decisions made earlier. More on this later also.
Acting in response to emergency situations, the hundred as administrative-political organization faced the obligation of acting as the service provider of provincial legislation. The scope of its concern and agenda was sternly focused on defensive-save-the-system, and was not open to any serious adjustment to its social and economic system. The crisis was not an opportunity for the masses to make demands such as limiting property owner’s rights and powers. They certainly were in no position to do much about the tobacco monoculture but they did take a very serious action to consolidate the hundreds and the various dispersed plantations into larger more defensible ones on the rivers where they could be reinforced and supplied. These concentrated hundreds, however, proved temporary, and by 1625 dispersion was already under way.
Barring any break or pivot from that economy, the continued immigration of indentured servants through the last years of the seventeenth century would only continue the pattern outlined by Breen, and embed it into its politics and policy-making until they were altered by changes in the environment or the system itself. Bacon’s Rebellion was the fire bell in the night, warning times were changing. When it rang out, we see the system “adapt” by jettisoning an unreliable indenture system in favor of black African slavery. That, of course, will be discussed later.
The Greate Charter specified hundreds as election districts, but initially not intended as service providers. Its early function was to set boundaries and empower the owner-administrator to assume certain responsibilities, for example the fledgling court system was superimposed on its framework. The nature of the hundred as an administrative vehicle devised by provincial company officials to set boundaries rather than serve as a conventionally thought election district. After 1619, election districts were not automatically, or even generally extended to new hundreds created as the population dispersed further into the hinterland.
Added to this was the key role of local elites in local self-defense against Indian attack. The opening attack of the Second Powhatan War in 1622 was so devastating, a game changer in Indian relationships, and a life and death existential reality for Europeans that war with the tribes was a forgone conclusion. Given their own attitude toward the tribes, the non-elite settler stood tall with the plantation conquistador, however much they disliked the call to service and work on compulsory labor gangs.
So, at this point it is best we turn directly to the Second Powhatan War. I assume the reader is familiar with the outlines of that war as was discussed in an earlier module (See Module X). We will therefore start our discussion on the reaction to the Massacre with a concern to the topics relevant to the purposes of this module.
Ron W. Coan 