The Wild Bunch: the controversial and much disliked thugs that set up Virginia’s First Policy System

The Wild Bunch: the controversial and much disliked thugs that set up Virginia’s First Policy System

The Wild Bunch: the controversial and much disliked thugs that set up Virginia’s First Policy System

A biographic portrait of a post-Virginia Company elite taking root: Plantation Conquistadores & Local Planter Oligarchy

For simplicity and clarity let’s spend a couple of introductory paragraphs to succinctly smush the transition period’s creation of a domestic elite. At its start, whatever constituted the elites of the Company period, found after the 1622 Indian attack and war that they were on their own. Whoever owned plantations had to defend them, and Company officials had to respond on the spot, without approvals or even a sense of what the Company wanted—or would want when the ship carrying their instructions would arrive in two or three months or more. The same could be said of the King who at this time was at war with the Virginia Company Parliamentary officers.

With such a small, almost microscopic population with sufficient standing to participate in decision-making, and with that potential candidates scattered about in hundreds-plantations, burying their dead and marshalling a response to the attack, this was a period of reaction not thoughtful planning. They had been attacked, almost wiped out, and attack was the best defense. That mean from March 1622 on military skills were prized; that was the avenue of necessity. No one likely present in Virginia was not a tobacco planter, land owner of size relative to Virginia at that time, and an owner of numbers of indentured servants who were their workforce. Simply by default these men were defending the monoculture as well as their lives.

Using the fragile, undeveloped company structures they had on hand, the governor (Francis Wyatt) and the leadership he selected or who simply occupied a position in the Council of State, or the Burgesses, or was a large plantation owner-investor, or who had serious military experience gravitated into his decision-making groups. It was they who started down the path to construct what would be Virginia’s First Policy System; it was they who constituted the first oligarchy that would govern that system.

In that the Company never firmly reestablished its control over that oligarchy, and by the end of 1623 was fighting for its corporate life, this oligarchy as it evolved was the group that took over after the Company lost its charter in 1624-25, and the self-same oligarchy that newly appointed Governor Yeardley inherited when he returned to Virginia in 1627 with the new King’s instructions. It was this Council that was called into session by Wyatt, and served as his principal instrument of defense and governance during the 1622-1625 period. The records of the Council in this period were mostly destroyed in a fire—first reported by Jefferson in his history of Virginia.

Waiting for him on the Council were plantation conquistadores, of which he was the most prominent and powerful, large plantation owners-investors, and a mélange of ship captains, surveyors, cape merchants, and sordid military militia commanders. The Council had been  Governor Yeardley’s administrative vehicle of choice, indeed the only political structure existing that met on his summons and had Greate Charter legitimacy was the Council of State. In 1625, The Burgesses, linked to the Assembly, met irregularly only when called into session once a year for a short period. Fausz lists twelve members on the Council of State in 1625, all with lifetime membership, on the Council [99] J. Frederick Fausz, Merging and Emerging Worlds, Table 4, p.. 98. In this biographic section we shall concentrate on the Council of State, and its members relationship with other members of the jelling First Oligarchy.

That’s the smush story—and it carries us from 1622 to 1627. Within this smush there is an element of “let’s not overthink this wild and crazy period”. This is by no means a period of rational planning; and the candidates for office were as likely self-selected and opportunistic as well as desperate—and given the rough and opportunistic types that populated Virginia at that point, few are reading Shakespeare or even Thomas Hobbes (who wrote Leviathan in 1651); they are as Breen suggests, highly individualistic and ambitious, young, greedy, and tough. That’s why they are in Virginia, not England. This is not the way colonies are supposed to evolve. This would not seem to be fertile ground for the formation of a durable policy system. This is so un-American. This rough start cannot possibly lead to anything of value.

Except it did—and that is the task I now turn to.;

 

 

The disruptions within the Virginia Company and the disruptions that occurred in Virginia left a fairly troubled heritage of some complexity and animus among the First Migration elite–and even among and within the former cadre of the Company. For the most part, most residents, especially former company officials, probably did not want the Company to retain its charter. At one point later on a petition from the General Assembly formally opposed one of Sandys efforts to restore the charter. The counter to this dislike was that Virginian land titles and workforce headrights were uncertain without the Company, and would be under attack from the governor after 1630. In that context, the return of the company would grant them the security they desired. But that implied security, not love or respect. The Company was of little use to them after the 1622 Second Powhatan War. They had been on their own since that point.

What did unite them, despite differences in social and economic status, as described earlier, was their absolute dependence on the land sales-patents, and headright incentives on which their life, wealth and personal security rested. The other shared self-interest was in all things and issues related to tobacco, which was their path to prosperity, security, or self-sufficiency–and, of course, it being the chief “currency” of economic transactions. They didn’t like the Powhatans either. In case you didn’t pick it up earlier, there was their common obsession with tobacco.

Still as we shall see, hard as life was, there were opportunities that focused effort, the right connections, and a ruthless willingness to assume risk could translate into entry into this fledgling but flexible elite that was forming in 1622.We do further understand, these squires of the Virginia Tidewater squirmed to some degree because Tidewater life was hard, often short, and brutal. Their thrones on which they ruled were built of rickety, roughly cut and cleared estates, widely dispersed and vulnerable tobacco fields, and plantations which they had acquired using Virginia Company incentives and widow’s inheritances–the access to which had been supplied by well-placed Company officials in their last years with the Company.

To this relatively small number there were added those free holders who had paid their own way to Virginia, and who were themselves entitled to “import” contracted indentured servants for labor in their fields–receiving in return the same headright incentive of fifty acres for each–on top of the land they themselves received from the headright system. There will be folk like George Menefie and John Utie who paid their own way to Virginia, grabbed a few acres through headrights, imported one of two servants servants, survived disease and the Massacre, and literally picked up the pieces after. Another example was Abraham Wood, at first a servant boy for Samuel Mathews plantation would do well when his contract expired. So did Adam Throughgood. William Spencer was a simple yeoman immigrant who had paid his own way, and started his plantation without servants. [99] I borrowed this from Bernard Bailyn. “Politics of Social Structure in Virginia”, in Seventeenth Century America, James Morton Smith (Ed)University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 94-5

So the “glass ceiling” could be penetrated. Social mobility was possible, and termination of servant contract could lead to a free holder household plantation. “The most important single determinant in social position by the mid-seventeenth century, regardless of the status of a person upon arrival in America, was possession [i.e. ownership] of land and its very abundance no doubt encouraged class mobility. Nowhere is more clearly demonstrated than in the Chesapeake colonies”. Ver Steeg further observes  that this young gentry class that emerged in the Transition Period was made up of men who had risen to this status in America ‘… it was not the English gentry who had transplanted themselves to America” Compared to Massachusetts he comments that “a mercantile community failed to develop in the Chesapeake colonies. Men of talent and ambition achieved status through land ownership and tobacco plantations” Such was the power and obsession with the tobacco steamroller. [99] Clarence L. Ver Steeg, “the Formative Years, 1607-1763 (Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 67-8

I believe the newly forming “Thug Oligarchy” was not criminal transplants from England, but rather, with an exception or two (Tucker and Claiborne, for example) it was not the well-born who emerged during the Virginia Transition Period, nor the underclass, but what Ver Steeg describes as the English yeoman; simple freeholders, or second sons of new English merchant  families. “The yeomanry constituted the great middle class of English America in the seventeenth century, and the characteristics which have often been extolled as distinctively American-impatience of formality, optimism and self confidence, capacity for simple but deep loyalties, directness-are identical with those English historians have used to describe the English yeoman’. Like them or not, what these yeoman became in the harsh hinterland of Virginia, were the products of the Virginia Company, the tobacco monoculture, and the shredded community—at permanent war with their Indian neighbors. [99] Clarence L. Ver Steeg, “the Formative Years, 1607-1763 (Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 66

A Biographic Introduction to Selected Transition Era leaders/oligarchy: the Original Elite

A lot of information about these people has either been lost, or it never existed. But of this elite there is more than one might imagine. A literature, including genealogy research, exists, and although very incomplete, gaps all over the place, and devoid of personality and reflections on their motivation, we can catch glimpses into lives of those with wealth and status. We find some refuge in the public histories and records of this period. We can record their land sales, probates, marriages and offspring, and as the years go by trace their membership on the governmental bodies. More than anything their activities and course through life over thirty or forty years into the 1650’s-1660’s may ultimately be their best indicators for their elite participation.

And these indentured workers, as well as tobacco entrepreneur household kept on coming to Virginia dur the 1630’s. In small numbers to be sure: about 1,000 in 1628, around 2,000 in 1635, and 1,600 in 1636. Still by 1640, Virginia’s total population hovered around 8,000 [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 177. No breakout to be sure, but at least to the Powhatan, the relentless arrival of new settlers must have seemed disparaging. Sooner or later these settlers would likely be seen on the hinterland peripheries, or in raids on their corn fields.

Fortunately for the purposes of this history, whatever we can do to trace the formation and evolution of the First Migration policy system, and to the core elite that dominated its policy-making provides some fascinating tidbits of insight–although I confess, reading much of this into their personal lives and thoughts is a venture into historical fiction. There are a few excellent works, including that of Bernard Bailyn’s “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia“, Thomas Wertenbaker, the Planters of Colonial Virginia, and the practical sound research of Wesley Frank Craven and Breen that we rely. There are histories which specialize on this sort of thing.

The first grouping are those that were prominent in the 1622-26 period, the immedient and turbulent aftermath of the March 1622 Massacre. As one might expect, former Company associates and investors resident in Virginia were able to take advantage of their contacts and status and it was they primarily that occupied the positions of governance. This entry of former Company associates and gentlemen settlers into governance was facilitated, if not enhanced, by the parade of Company officials who were appointed royal governor through 1629. Liberated from Company burdens, these individuals took advantage of the situation, cut their own deals, and were participants in the formation of the local political and economic elite.

Two excellent examples are Edward Bennet and Captain Ralph Hamor.

Bennet, Hamor, William Powell

Bennet, a London-based merchant, a shareholder of the Virginia Company, and a Puritan, with a Catholic wife who often allied with the Earl of Warwick in Company politics, who as part of his merchant business owned a large fleet of ships to carry his trade to the Netherlands and Virginia. Using the headright system, he established a rather large plantation in 1621 Virginia, and at his cost imported an estimated 200 indentured servants, half of which arrived in Virginia in February 1622–a month before the 1622 Massacre. Fifty-three of Bennet’s group were killed in the Massacre, but his brother Richard survived–they were relocated to a new hundred on Jamestown Island–(see Captain Hamor below).

Former Governor Yeardley, a commander, led an expedition in the next year which retook Bennett’s settlement. Constructing a fort, the settlement housed thirty-three residents in late 1623 (It is possible that most were Black). Bennett ventured to his settlement and eventually became a member of Burgesses in 1628, and after returned to England and his family, fleet and merchant business. His nephew Richard, took over the plantation management. Richard became A Virginia governor during Cromwell’s commonwealth (1652-55). Edward who died in 1664 stayed thereafter in England and ran his corporate empire.

Bennet’s ship captain Ralph Hamor had transported a goodly number of the Company’s earliest servants and officials, including Lord Delaware in 1610. Lord Delaware appointed  Hamor Secretary of the Colony and appointed him to the Governor’s Council in 1610. Hamer was one of eight children of a noveau wealthy, first generation merchant tailor who provided an excellent college education to his offspring, Emmanuel College of Oxford. At twenty, Hamor and his father became shareholders in the Virginia Company and both took off to Virginia, landing in 1609. On the ship that carried new Governor Delaware, captained by the Virginia Company’s ship captain extraordinaire, Christopher Newport, the younger Hamer was twenty-one.

It founded in a storm on the rocks of Bermuda—and that was the group (which included Rolfe and his wife and daughter) that stayed n Bermuda and rebuilt the ship—arriving at Jamestown ten months late—only to stop the boats of the Jamestown “starving period” survivors heading for anywhere after abandoning Jamestown. There are a bunch of notables that arrived on that boat and enjoyed each other’s company for ten months—another was Yeardley. Yeardley, himself a second son of a noveau rich merchant tailor, had left to find his fortune and wound up as a soldier in the Netherlands. When he landed in 1610, he was all of twenty-two years of age.

Lord Delaware appointed Hamer as Secretary of his colony, and Yeardley the head of his personal bodyguard shortly after landing, (1611). More on Yeardley later, but Hamer traveled back and forth on the supply ships of the Company, and in 1615, on a return voyage he carried the old Governor Gates, and John Rolfe and his new wife, Rebecca, and their son (1615). For his service to the Company, in 1618 the Company awarded Hamer eight shares, and was Vice Admiral to the new governor, Samuel Argall—in charge of detachment of sixteen marines. It was Hamer than went up and down the James relieving plantations and transporting survivors to safe concentrated areas set up for safety and regrouping. At that point he was thirty-three.

[99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake”, in  Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, Colonial Chesapeake Society (Eds) (Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1988), Table 4, p. 98. Hamer’s land holdings were devastated during the Massacre, but by 1624 he had rebuilt outside of Jamestown Hamor had extensive experience in dealing with the Powhatan tribes, and was well aware and sensitive to their frustrations. As Captain of Bennet’s ship, the Sea Flower, he returned to the colony in 1622 to develop his own plantation, with members of his family including his brother. Attacked while constructing their house, Hamor survived, although he lost a relative and his brother was shot in the back with an arrow. Gathering together refugees from other hundreds he led the group back to Jamestown Island, where he was named as “commander” and according led several raids against the Powhatan. At this time, he got into a fight with Bennet, who at that time was probably the colony’s largest landowner.

Hamor served on that Council of State through 1611-1625, and was probably still a member at his death in 1626. In the aftermath of the Massacre, Hamor inherited the holdings of several deceased relatives, married several times over the next few years, and engaged in a series of land disputes, some of which he won, and others which he lost for which he was compensated by the governor with 200 acres. During this period he was granted about 500 acres from the Company. He was associated with illegal alcohol sales, and public blasphemies, but is more well known by his expressed opposition to the Company during this period in the Council and the Burgesses. In service to the Burgesses he stole documents from another Burgesses member. As a member of the council in 1626 he boarded, a ship, confiscated its goods, and sold them for personal profit. By the time of his death in 1626 (probably of disease), he had accumulated title to between 600-800 acres, with about seven indentured servants.

His wife of the time inherited his holdings, but she transferred them to George Menefie. He was thirty seven years of age at death and twenty one when first appointed to the Governor’s Council of State. Whether Menefie married Hamor’s widow is unknown, but Menfie who had arrived in Virginia after the Massacre in 1622-3, had married the third wife of John Rolfe who died in 1622. Menefie’s fourth wife was to be the widow Potts, the infamous governor of the 1630’s. The reader should take note of these turbulent times, and the plight of a young widow—but Menefie seems to have made a career of marrying the widows of former Company officials (four marriages). In any event, the reader can see how many of the key elite that dominated the post Transition Period oligarchy became large landowners. Keep on reading, it gets more interesting.

William Powell an “ancien settler” came on the third supply expedition in 1609-10. A company shareholder, titled as a ‘gentleman’, he was assigned to the rank of ensign by Acting Governor Percy, and tasked to fight the Indians in the First Powhatan War during which he much distinguished himself. Governor Argall appointed him as captain, responsible for the Jamestown defense and fortifications. Argall shortly after appointed him as Lieutenant Governor when it became clear the latter had run afoul of both Thomas Smythe and/or the enveloping internal civil war of the Virginia Company.

Powell was elected to the 1619 Burgesses, and may have been on following Burgesses as well. He served on the Jamestown {City] Council. He married at some point; his wife Margaret; they had two sons. After his death, Margaret married Edward Blaney. It is not known when he was born, so we are uncertain of his age. He may have been about twenty-five when first appointed as ensign—maybe up to five years older.

Powell was in Jamestown during the eventful first day of the Second Powhatan War. Alerted by an conflicted Indian, the settlement successfully defended itself and did not fall to the Indian attack. He, accompanying George Yeardley, launched an immediate attack on the Indians, with supposedly devastating consequences to the Indians. Quickly sent to relieve the nearby Martin’s Hundred and once there claimed title to the plantation of Nathaniel Powell who had been killed along with his entire family. Unfortunately, his pretense that he was related to Nathaniel did not hold, as Nathaniel’s brother asserted successfully his claim to the plantation. There are genology that assert Nathaniel, a sea captain turned plantation owner, was one of four Powell brothers who emigrated to Virginia. If so he attempted to assert his rights against his brother. The incident, at the height of the Massacre, may be a sad commentary of the ambition, greed, or lack of integrity of William. That Samuel Mathews did the same to Powell’s kin after Powell’s death in 1626 may also be instructive. In any event Powell acquired the rights for a plantation in the post Massacre period; he acquired his first known plantation in 1619.

He was killed fighting the Powhatan either in 1623 or in 1626.

 

Introducing Factions ( Smythe and Sandys), the Virginia Domestic Politics and Cleavages that set up the Assumption of Power by the Governor’s Council in March-April 1622

Let’s first Summarize and Catch Up on Governor George Yeardley, Governor and soon to be plantation conquistador and diplomat

Piersey was likely Smythe’s guy on the scene, as was Yeardley, the new governor selected to replace Lord Delaware who had earlier died en route to Virginia in 1618, in an effort to clean up the Argall mess. In the unexpected vacuum created by Delaware’s death, Smythe had likely fell back on Yeardley who had been Dale’s Lieutenant Governor (1616-17) and was in London at that time. Smythe likely secured Yeardley’s knighthood from the King in an effort to prop him up in Virginia—which as we shall see did not satisfy other members of the West family.

The Argall affair in 1617 opened the door to a huge cleavage between Smythe and Warwick, into which walked George Sandys. In response to Argall’s criticisms, De la Warre, the Governor of Virginia in London residence sailed to Virginia once again to rectify affairs. He died in route, and when a new governor was sent to replace him, George Yeardley, the latter’s appointment may have been an awkward and impulsive choice of. Yeardley, a commoner and soldier by profession but the former deputy governor previous to Argall, quickly knighted by the King, and sent off to restore order and implement a new set of instructions for great change and a significant economic development initiative intended to solve the fiscal crisis of the Company.

Yeardley, from his 1618 appointment, was roundly criticized. linked to the Dale reforms of martial law and granting of lands to former indentured servants, Yeardley was feared by others as potentially “going native” and for favoring and leaning to milder and generous rule to both servants and the Indians. [99]  https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/yeardley-sir-george-bap-1588-1627/.  The most damaging came in 1620 by De La Warre’s brother (and future governor), Francis West (of noble status). West attacked Yeardley for his lack of social status an impediment on the settlement recruitment program. To be sure, Yeardley at that time was granted 1,000 acres for his personal use and ownership. But his was “new status”, his marriage with the well-born Temperance Flowerdew a veneer on his merchant-tailor family; that did not sit well with “older high status” who mocked his knighthood [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/yeardley-sir-george-bap-1588-1627/

George Yeardley was a second son of a London merchant-Tailor, born in 1588, the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Choosing not to follow his father’s profession Yeardley joined a company of English soldiers and went off to war in the Spanish Netherlands, fighting for the Dutch. It was in this war Yeardley became linked to Thomas Gates, and likely as a protégé of Gates, Yeardley joined with Gates, the new governor of Virginia in 1609. https://historicjamestowne.org/history/george-yeardley/

En route, as is now well-known, the ship was wrecked in a storm and the party had to make residence in the unsettled island of Bermuda and rebuild their ship. They missed the starving year of 1609-10 while in Bermuda, but returned in time to run into the ship-bound Jamestown colonists en route to anywhere by Jamestown. As Captain of the Governor’s personal guard, Yeardley enforced Gate’s will in restoring the population to Jamestown and beginning the rebuild of what was a failed colony. He played a prominent role in the First Powhatan War, and upon Dale’s departure from Virginia in 1616, Yeardley replaced him in authority as a Lieutenant Governor until the new governor, Samuel Argall arrived (May, 1617).

During this period as a close deputy of Governor Dale, Yeardley, along with Gates and Dale, build ‘very fair houses’ about a half-mile apart from each other outside of Jamestown [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire,1602-1658 (Routledge, 2009) p. 66 Around the same time, Yeardley married Temperance Flowerdew, a well-born daughter of an Elizabethan era aristocracy, whose first husband and her arrived in Jamestown in 1609—just in time for the infamous “starving time”. Temperance had ben in Jamestown during the starving times; Yeardley was partying in Bermuda with Gates, Dale and, of course, John Rolfe—an eight months that cemented a personal relationship with these key players of future Virginia politics and economic development.

In 1616, George was twenty-eight. With no particular education noted in his biography, his past profession and personal experience was a combat-experienced soldier. Yeardley in his “first administration’ as governor faithfully continued Dale’s reforms, and provided continuity in the dispersion of population from Jamestown along the James River. With Argall in place, Yeardley returned to England, where he was conveniently available to replace De La Warr in a three year appointment to the governorship in 1618. While in London, Yeardley, according to Wesley Frank Craven worked with prospective shareholders and ‘some leading members of the company” who were interested in forming joint stock associations to develop ‘particular plantations’ (colony within a colony).

The intention was to take advantage of the opportunity created by the relatively nw formalized headright incentive system—which was a consensual initiative of the different factions to expand investment in Virginia, bypassing the company’s monopoly, and to alleviate  considerable elements of the company’s expense in maintaining new settlers. Likely these negotiations were successful as in 1619, Yeardley approved a patent to an association for 4,500 acres and an investment by a collection of investors, of which Yeardley was one. The association founded what became known as “Berkeley’s Hundred” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Virginia Company of London, 1606-24 (Jamestown 350^th Anniversary, Historical Booklet Number 5, 1957),pp 24-5

What emerges from this is that while Governor Yeardley did faithfully implement the Company scheme to foster investment and settlement, which lay at the heart of Sandys reform. Yeardley’s instructions specified Yeardley found four towns (boroughs) along the James in which grants to individuals or the lesser associations would finance and settle. These settlements, colony-within a colony, were self-financing and outside the company’s responsibility. In each borough the company would retain 3,000 acres to finance its expenses, and such lands would be worked by company indentured servants.

In this London-created model of Virginia investment we can see that while the company hoped these structures would save it financially—and settle their colony at the expense of others—we can see as actually administered it confused public with private, allowed Yeardley, as governor, to treat these lands as his own, and upon his replacement as governor allow him to keep some portion of land and servants as his own.

The silent dog that did not bark in this discussion is the centrality of the headright in the company’s salvation, and its rudimentary design in 1618 permitted an accumulation of land and workforce when placed in the hands of a company elite that were both shareholders and individual investors who founded settlements as a colony within a colony framework in Virginia, predisposed autonomy and decentralization into Virginia’s tobacco and river-based shredded community. Yeardley did not have to be consciously malicious in implementing this company policy during his administration, personally benefiting with each transaction—he was instructed to do so, and “seeing his opportunities, he took them’.

If the Sandys Greate Charter reform created a seedling that evolved into the first democratic assembly in North America, it also housed an economic development-settlement founding-workforce recruitment strategy-initiative that was seriously flawed, and open, if not prone, to manipulation-corruption. Moreover, here we see the Company’s most important contribution to the “the Tilt” in the Virginia Policy System, which is a central theme in this module series

Yeardley’s appointment was not without controversy. Apparently while in London, Yeardley came off as ostentatious in his public appearances, generating some comment. The major shot came from Francis West, brother of the deceased governor. West publicly questioned Yeardley’s lack of “birth status” made him unsuitable for a gubernatorial appointment. West asserted that potential settlers looked for strong leadership on which they could rely for health, safety and security and that assurance came from “men of action” by which he meant high social, if not noble background.

Yeardley lacked that, with West referring to his low background and almost certain failure to motivate settlers: “[Since] it is not easye to sway a vulgar and servile whose ‘Eminence or Nobillitye’ is such that [every] man subordinate is ready to yeild a willing submission without contempt or repyning … if therefore the Company hoped to attract and hold colonists, especially of the better sort, it should select s leaders in Virginia “eythar [either] Noble or lesse in Honor … to maintayne and hold vp [up] the dignitiye of so Great and good a cawse” [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), see Footnote 15, p.94.

Craven notes that his suspicion was the complaint was motivated by “fractional prejudice”, i.e. office politics [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 64, footnote 7. My take is Francis West and George Yeardley considerably overlapped their services and function as military commanders of Jamestown—and as commanders in the Indian War. He may have been a troublemaker;  he was cited as the reason for John Smith’s removal from office—i.e. Smith was charged for trying to kill him—which seems plausible enough.

That Dale chose Yeardley, and not the well-born brother of the governor who succeeded him, could have been sufficient inspiration for the complaint. It also could provide insight why Francis Wyatt, a decade later upon his election by the Council to Governor at Yeardley’s death, changed policy in regards to the permanent war with Indians, concluding  a peace treaty that was terminated by the Council when Wyatt retired and went back to London? Factional conflict and interpersonal rivalries were characteristic of this first elite.

Upon Sandys election as Company Treasurer in 1619, West’s criticism played into Edwin Sandys’ wish to send over his “own” high status governor at the end of Yeardley’s three year term. His brother’s high-born son-in-law filled the bill. Meanwhile, Yeardley was installed as governor in  January,1619, and had, upon his arrival, faithfully (or lackadaisically) implemented his instructions by creating, and giving spirit to, what Yeardley himself referred to as “the Greate Charter”. [99] See J. Frederick Fausz, “a Letter of Advice to the Governor of Virginia” (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan, 1977).

Craven, questions the implementation of the lost “instructions to governor written by Sandys” issued to Yeardley., These instructions, he believes, are likely to be the the means by which Sandys reforms were communicated to Yeardley—and there is nothing about democracy in these instructions, more his strategy to revamp the company in light of the financial and political crisis that was tearing it apart. In any case the vison was not implemented to the satisfaction of Edwin Sandys. Sandys did have reservations about Yeardley in this matter from the start as he sent to Virginia in 1618 John Porys as Secretary of the Colony to oversee that implementation. While Yeardley moderated the First Assembly in 1619, Porys who ran the show. Consequently at the earliest opportunity, at the height in his struggle against Smythe (Sandys was not reelected Treasurer of the Company), Sandys replaced Yeardley with thirty-nine year old Francis Wyatt.

Misunderstanding and mutual discontent between leaders at home and in the colony developed within the first two years of Sandys’ administration of the company’s affairs. Yeardley accordingly, was displaced at the end of his three year term in 1621 by Sir Francis Wyatt, whose instructions directed that he [Wyatt] put into effect plans and policies theretofore imperfectly followed Special concern over lack of progress, in efforts to develop new and more profitable staples [i.e. diversification of the economic base] led to the appointment of George Sandys, brother to Sir Edwin, as treasurer of the colony with the responsibility chiefly for the furtherance of all such projects. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 146

After his arrival, the new Treasurer of the Colony, George Sandys wrote he was displeased with Yeardley, decrying Yeardley’s preoccupation with his own personal affairs, neglecting his public duties and agenda. Noticing that no historian has cited evidence to the contrary, one suspects that the criticism may be largely valid, although partisanship within the intense company politics of that time no doubt played its role. One may suspect that in the short period after Wyatt’s arrival in Virginia, and the March attack, Yeardley was not well-appreciated by the new administration.

Yeardley did, however, upon Wyatt’s assumption of authority, retained his seat on the Council of State, and thus was well-placed to assume more responsibility in the aftermath of that most crippling attack. In a relatively short period after, Wyatt designated Yeardley as his successor in the event of Wyatt’s death and assigned Yeardley to a series of military responsibilities and expeditions throughout his administration. The reader will find these activities referenced in the various modules to follow, and, one might suggest that Yeardley earned my label as the personification of the plantation conquistador during that period.

Whatever his motivations, Yeardley after November 1621 was a former governor and, until 1625, the successor to the governor, a plantation owner, commander, and a member of the Council of State. In my view, the most impactful and prestigious of the plantation conquistadores, until September 1625 when Wyatt “retired” as governor. With Wyatt out of the picture, Yeardley and his wife traveled to London He conducted extensive negotiations with the Privy Council and seriously pursued Virginian interests in London. More to the point, the King reappointed Yeardley governor in March 1626. In the interim, Yeardley, seemingly preeminent over his Council of State compatriots, left Virginia affairs to the kindly dispositions of that body.

Governor Francis Wyatt and the Edwin Sandys “New Regime”

Wyatt and George Sandys were Edwin Sandys “new regime” whose clear intention was to ensure the successful implementation of the Greate Charter reforms. Such reforms centered on conducting Indian relationships through Christianization, adoption, and the new university intended to diversity the economic base was also central to developing more stable relations with the Powhatan. Sandys, however, in 1620-21 recruited his brother’s son-in-law Sir Francis Wyatt (of noble status), and sent him over to replace Yeardley as governor; simultaneous sending over his brother, George, as Secretary of the Colony. Wyatt served as governor until September 1625, after being reappointed in 1624 as a royal, not company, governor. Also, Henry Fleet, the governor’s second cousin, was sent over to be the colony’s new Treasurer.

Of note Edwin Sandys 1621 entourage included a new Surveyor General, Cambridge-educated, son of a businessman-Lord-Mayor of Norfolk England. Twenty-one years of age, William Claiborne’s new position carried with it 200 acres of granted land, $30 pounds annual and the right to charge fees for his land surveys. His background fit neatly into Edwin Sandys Parliamentarian base. Claiborne will be a major player in post 1630 politics, and one of the plantation conquistadors that will be discussed in later detail.

The motivating factor was finding sufficient export and self-sufficiency to reduce Virginia Company costs, open up new settlement, and expand, as well as diversify, the economic base. While seemingly at odds with its diversification effort, Sandys in action was little inclined to stop the tobacco export steamroller. There were, of course, more political goals to democratize the Virginia Company shareholder decision-making and feed Sandys shareholder base. That meant offering shareholders the headright incentives to settle Virginia at their own expense, and open up Virginia to joint stock corporations they and others might start.

Wyatt and Sandys thus had a mission when they commenced in early 1622. Five months after their arrival in Virginia, Opechanough’s devastating surprise attack on March 22, 1622 claimed nearly 350 lives on that day alone, wiping out nearly a quarter of the colony’s total population. The ensuing starving year and disease combined to reduce the colony by more than one half to two-thirds. Further Indian fighting consumed its share of lives and devastation. 1622-1623 was arguably as bitter and demoralizing as 1609-10 had been.

Thus the Massacre is the trigger to the formation of this elite, and was the catalyst for the rise of the plantation conquistadores–a grouping that emerged in the Summer and Fall of 1622. If this were not sufficient, the Massacre compelled the transformation of the Virginia Company shareholder structures, offices and institutions into governance or government ones. In so doing, it necessarily reshaped and adjusted the powers and responsibilities of these bodies and offices. It also forced the assumption of new roles, functions, and powers upon them, and in some instanced required the creation of new ones.

To start the Massacre isolated Wyatt as governor from London, his base of support. London’s immediate reaction, besides considerable shock and disillusionment, was to blame the settlers and their leadership for the attack. In their eyes Jamestown and the irresponsible settlers had handled Native American relations badly. On the edge of fiscal bankruptcy, the Company, however, even if it wanted to, had few resources and thus did not provide any serious assistance in the aftermath. The Indian attack only increased the fervor and the effectiveness of the opposition to Sandys within the Company, and put an end to any of its hope to avoid bankruptcy through investment by its shareholders. In essence, Wyatt was alone in Virginia, and would remain so for the remainder of his administration. That, my reader, explains why power during the Second Powhatan War became firmly lodged in the Council of State.

The Council of State: The Greate Charter had always linked the Council to the Governor and together were considered as the executive arm of the company in Virginia. Even the King had ofttimes asserted such, and Wyatt’s instructions from Sandys did not challenged what was a “shared” decision-making. That the Greate Charter allowed the Council to serve as the Upper Chamber of the General Assembly when it met, imparting a legislative function to its gubernatorial advise.

The Council was the only institution at that point that could meet on demand of the Governor, or even its own instigation. Its membership at this point was, by definition, appointment by the Governor and the Company, who was empowered to terminate a member, but whose successor would be elected by the Council.. In one way or another, each Council member was a shareholder-likely associated with some element of the Company’s London leadership. In the Company period, we have likened this governance to that of shareholder corporation, with the Virginia governance never officially formalized as either a subsidiary to London corporate bodies, or co-equal.

With the Virginia Company bankrupt, discredited and divided, and the court [the King and Privy] distracted with European affairs, authority to shape the colony’s future descended upon the inexperienced governor and his new councillors. These surviving leaders were evenly divided between ‘Men of Contemplation and discourse’ [Wyatt and the poet George Sandys] and ‘men of action and experience’ [Yeardley, Francis West, Hamor, William Powell, Abraham Peirsey, Samuel Mathews and several others] and they derived their strength by unifying diverse talents under adverse conditions.

This motley group of poets and profiteers, scholars and soldiers, quickly developed into an effective, if unlikely oligarchy based on their common acquisitive ambitions. By fairly distributing the bountiful spoils of office and considering it ‘ill-nature or worse nurture to desire contention’ with their fellow oligarchs. Wyatt’s councillors successfully merged public service with private gain and established the proto-type for the seventeenth -century Virginia Council [of State]. [99]  J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, Colonial Chesapeake Society (Eds) (the Institute of Early American History and Culture, North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 53

Wyatt in defense of his involvement with the conquistadors described such men to those who criticized him for it back in London: [“although] itt is much to be desired that either good men were commanders, or else that commanders were good men … we are all by natures the sonnes of wrath; serving … the spirit that rules in the hartes [hearts] of the disobedient.  [99] p.65 F. Frederick Fausz

Bernard Bailyn echoed Fausz’s observation who saw this grouping of the Governor and his plantation-based oligarchs and characterized it as  a “tough, unsentimental, quick-tempered , crudely ambitious men … with a common capacity to survive and flourish in frontier settlements“. He further asserts this First Migration elite hacked “the great tracts of land  such men claimed were almost entirely raw wilderness. 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 (p. 95)  [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), pp. 92-5. Edmund S. Morgan, yet another noted historian of this time period, acknowledged the existence and reality of these oligarchs, noted their rather mixed composition, but otherwise left it at that. [99] Edmund S. Morgan, “First American Boom” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser, Vol. XXVIII (1971), p. 190. [99] “Minutes of the Council and General Court, 1622-1624” published by the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. XIX, April 1911, No. 2, pp. 113-148

As a part of the domestic planter  themselves, those appointed to the Council understood its intents and needs, were, in Yeardley’s case for sure, an instrument of policy formation, and for the protection of its members position and property. West and Potts had over nearly two decades developed their own constituency and were friends with members on their own standing—Claiborne also. Their land titles and incentive rights were tied to their ability to guide Privy Council and the King toward solutions with which they were comfortable. To the extent possible, the governor weave an intermediate path between London wishes and those of his neighboring oligarchs. Accordingly, the evolution of the Council of State, in particular, conformed to a contested notion that the Governor was in fact limited by the advice–AND CONSENT–of the Council of State.

… both Sir Francis Wyatt, the first royal governor [and the last Company-appointed governor], and his successor [Sir George Yeardley-a former Greate Charter Company governor and subsequent plantation conquistador] found it convenient to sound out colonists’ opinions on matters of special importance. Although the governors had plenipotentiary powers, once in Virginia they found themselves very constrained. They had no soldiers or bureaucracy on which to fall back, and found ultimately that they could govern only with the consent of the colonists.

Given that state of affairs, some kind of dialogue was required. To this end the assembly was a useful entity. Even the Crown acknowledged the wisdom of occasionally convening such a body, as in 1627, to discuss the issuing of licenses to import tobacco, and again in 1628, for the provision of a palisade between the James and York rivers. Charles I did not grant the assembly formal recognition, however, until 1639. [99] Richard Middleton, Colonial America, a History 1565-1776 (3rd Ed) (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 61

By late Spring 1622 a simple reality was that the only effective institution left in Virginia that could operate and formulate a reaction and a strategy were the surviving members of the Council of State, the old Governor’s Council–and, of course, the governor. The Council as a Company institution was a shareholder executive committee composed of the colony’s largest resident shareholders–who by happenstance of the headright were its largest planters.

Francis Wyatt: Wyatt joined with the conquistadors and planters on the Council in leading, until his willing retirement in 1625 (George Sandys followed along with him) the resistence against the Powhatan, and the formal leader of the Virginia company “government) in the period before the Company was stripped of its charter.. Wyatt, as will be argued conducted raids, usually co-captained, thus securing his position as the formal head of the company’s affairs. Records of this period are skimpy, and while we can detail specific actions taken, who was behind them, and who advocated or opposed them are not known. It is not clear who served on the Council or who attended/participated in its many unrecorded meetings. It is not clear whether specific actions are those of the Council or order by the Governor.

Hints such as that provided in the case study of the Palisades Project, such as when both Yeardley and Wyatt claim credit for its original inspiration and design, and Wyatt’s written suspicion it was Yeardley behind the criticism he received after his retirement. That Wyatt may have received inspiration and advice around June 1624 from his father on how to conduct the settlement of the Middle Plantation in a strategy to defeat the Indians may lend considerable support to Wyatt as the initial author. [99] See J. Frederick Fausz, “a Letter of Advice to the Governor of Virginia” (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan, 1977).

In any case the reader may recognize the First Oligarchy under Wyatt was never a pure “band of brothers”. It was faction-riven, personality dominated, flexible, tactical, and a decision-making that allowed substantial elements of self-interest which was built into its appointive process, i.e. conferring significant political power to autonomous large plantation-servant owners whose dependence on the headright and their autonomous colony-within a colony settlement

Wyatt got out of the governorship as soon as he could. That he was replaced by his designated successor, Yeardley, who was also in London at the time, suggest Yeardley was no shrinking violet in that Council, and that he commanded sufficient support to assume the governorship when it became available. We shall discuss that period shortly. But first we move on to discuss several other not only prominent, but also powerful and durable leaders of the the transition period and the twenty years thereafter. From this very desperate of coalitions would emerge the future leadership of the colony for the next thirty five years.

Abraham Peirsey,

Yeardley was not the only major company official that was tied to Smythe who survived the Sandys administration and retained throughout his position on the Governor’s Council until his death in 1626. Abraham Peirsey offers another interesting set of insights into the first years of the post-1622 Virginia oligarchy. Like Hamer he allows us to delve into the complicated network of officials that was the Virginia Company resident official.

Born in 1585, Peirsey first arrives in Virginia on the first Virginia Company Magazine ship in 1616. He stays in Virginia, probably to set up its offices and returns to England—only to return again, this time, likely a widower with two daughters, more or less permanently, in 1618 as the official Cape Merchant of the Virginia Colony (he would have been about 34 upon appointment). He served in this post through to the 1624 when the Company lost its charter. Suiting his official position, Piersey was appointed to the Governor’s Council, elected to the Burgesses in 1619 and 1621 and appointed by James I to continue service in 1624. He also was elected to the Burgesses in 1625.

The Cape Merchant was a powerful official indeed, arguably second only to the governor. Responsible for the Company’s import and export entity, he set the price for tobacco, and sold to Virginias those imports the Company sent over. Piersey was also authorized to trade so long as they were congruent with Company’s policies. This loose delegation of authority and widening of scope of his activities, no doubt presented many opportunities during the Company period. He was, as the saying goes “a good man to know”. It appears he was a friend of John Rolfe.

The timing of his appointment is critical to understanding his standing in the Company network. The reader will keep in mind the Virginia Company internal civil war had begun, and consensus is that Treasurer Thomas Smythe had carved out the founding of a new Company Magazine as the principal vehicle to derive some level of financial stability for the flailing finances of the Company. Smythe’s approach, vastly different from Edwin Sandys (the Greate Charter reforms), the man who succeeded him in 1618. He appears to have been caught in the crossfire, as in 1620 he was tried in London for price gouging, and wrongfully “detaining” the Company’s supply ship, “the George”. The charge seemingly came to nothing, and he returned unchastised.

Peirsey was deeply involved in the infamous 1619 Project affair; as his position of Cape Merchant, he could—and did—acquired several of the Blacks sold from the captured ship (as did his friend John Rolfe). Peirsey was appointed in 1623 to serve on a commission tasked by the Privy Council to review the “state and condition” of Virginia–an element in the investigation of the Virginia Company.

Piersey, whose responsibilities tied him to the Magazine, was unable to get the thing doing. It had a terrible reputation, known for excessive priced imports of indeterminate quantity and quality, and very cheap purchase of Virginia grown tobacco that contrast with higher price sales in England. Planters were often driven  to make their own export arrangements, sell discretely on their own, and use ships of any nationality (Dutch mostly). While the Greate Charter was in several ways at odds with the tobacco monoculture, Sandys and his faction needed revenues from Piersey to balance the books, especially when the King took away its lottery revenues in 1621. Still there is little evidence that the Magazine was challenged by Sandys in Virginia. Rather, the Magazine failed on its own mistakes, mispricing’s, and callous treatment of Virginia planters. Piersey certainly bears much of the responsibility for that.

Somewhere in this slurpy mess of tangled functions, Piersey flourished; but was seemingly threatened when in February 1622 George Sandys and Francis Wyatt arrived on the scene. About six weeks later, however, the March Massacre occurred—and so ended the Company effective influence over domestic Virginia. It is from this point we believe the future Virginia first oligarchy began to jell, and its role on the State Council—where Wyatt and Sandys were is a minority, heavily outvoted by past appointees.

In this period, the Company officially paid its resident employees through land grants and associated headrights allowed in the course of that time period. He, like former governors West, Argall and Yeardley was able to develop his personal estate, plantation, and in Piersey’s case trading relationships. For example in 1619, the Company granted him 200 acres which he rolled up into his personal estate, “Piersey’s Toile” so that at that time tt totaled about 1,150 acres near the Bermuda Hundred.

When the March attack occurred four men were killed at his plantation. Whatever else happened we know he was in London in May testifying in court on a series of law suits against Martin’s Hundred—an a counter suit from them stipulating Piersey’s theft of ten cows. He returned in July 1622 and in 1623, Piersey was appointed by the King’s commission investigating the Company affairs to participate in the making of a critical report on the fate of the Company (John Harvey was also on that commission, which was led by John Porys).

But here we will bring Piersey’s tale to a fitting end. In 1628, he died—again likely of disease—and his wife, Francis, married a gentlemen we shall come to know well—the most powerful and durable of all the conquistadors and oligarchy, Samuel Mathews—bringing Flowerdew with her into his stable. That will commence yet another story which we will relate on our discussion of Mathews.

I have tried to interweave into Piersey is a larger and sloppier picture of the Company period. The obvious object is to show how the Company elite came into their vast estates, and what they did with them. From just these three early Company officials, we can see how they passed on their estates to younger contenders as oligarchs. It is these estates, the reader remembers, that bought them entry into the Transition Period oligarchy and the Governor’s Council. I have added the internal civil war dimension to open the reader to the reality that the Company faction under Edwin and George Sandys and Governor Wyatt alongside, got hopelessly sandbagged by the March Indian attack, and those desperate conditions necessitated a coalition to save the colony—a coalition that in very little time, evolved into a durable oligarchic policy system.

The Underlying Complexity of the Flowerdew Land Sale (1624)

Sometime, the date is uncertain (sometime in the 1610’s), Yeardley married the landed-gentry widow of Richard Barrow. Temperance Flowerdew. They lived in Jamestown (“in a fair house”). Returning to London after Yeardley was replaced by Argall, when a few months later Yeardley was reappointed as Governor and both returned to Virginia. Yeardley, after 1619 acquired, and would settle on his 1,000 acre estate which, he named, Flowerdew Hundred. He also owned a second plantation named after his family, the Stanley Hundred. They had three children; she managed the plantation, Flowerdew, with several dozen indentured servants, and several black slaves from the infamous 1619 purchase. At residence was also her brother, Stanley, who may have founded the plantation previous to Yeardley’s ownership; he may have given it his family name Flowerdew.

In 1624),  Yeardley sold Flowerdew Hundred (about 1,000 acres), and about 2,200 acres on the James. The deed to this sale exists and is credited as being the oldest available in America. His two daughters since 1623 were in residence in Flowerdew, as was his new wife, Francis Grenville, the recent widow of Nathaniel West, the aristocratic brother of the Lord Delaware. She brought with her his estates.

Within a year, she married Francis West, the author of the scathing attack of 1619  on Yeardley. Upon Yeardley’s death, Temperance, as the sole executor his estate and will, retained control and ownership of the plantation and the estate. When she married West, she negotiated beforehand that upon marriage she would personally own the estate (which no longer included Flowerdew after 1624) and conducted its management on behalf of her children. She was repudiated to be Virginia’s wealthiest woman. She died late in 1628 around 38-40 years of age, and as we shall discuss, West unsuccessfully challenged the will, which was retained by the children—to little avail as the estate was by then in considerable decline.

It was likely Peirsey and Yeardley moved in the same circles—both were sons of merchant-tailors for example—and their different experiences, finance versus military-governance complemented each other. Rolfe was close to both. Captain Roger Smith, a master of ships, whose past experience included twelve years “at war” in the Netherlands, had first arrived in Virginia about 1620. Closely after John Rolfe’s death in early 1622, Smith married Rolfe’s third wife, Jane and her two young children. Jane was the daughter of William Pierce, a merchant-planter, neigbhor of Yeardley; we shall further discuss Pierce shortly.  Smith and Jane relocated to Jamestown on a plot near Yeardley’s, in Jamestown’s new neighborhood, “Newe Towne” surveyed by William Claiborne in 1623. The residents of Newe Towne were the who’s who of the colony. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hh/2/hh2f1.htm

Smith was appointed to the Governor’s Council in 1624 by the King. In 1623, Yeardley “commanded an expedition against the savages down the river. He drove out the Worrosquoyackes  and the Nansemonds, burned their houses and took their corn, on May 21, 1623, Captain Roger Smith was ordered to build a fort on the Worrosquoyacke shore, opposite to Tindall Shores” https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Smith-21192. Given his military background, Smith was likely Yeardley’s subordinate in the latter’s campaigns against the Indians. He died in 1629 around 42 years of age.

At some point Peirsey’s first wife, (Elizabeth) with whom they shared two daughters, died, and subsequently Peirsey married Frances Hinton (daughter of the Lord-Mayor of London). Francis Hinton was herself a widow, who had first settled in Virginia around 1620. Her first husband was a brother of Baron de la Warre, Thomas West the former Governor), died sometime during 1624. The marriage to Peirsey  followed several months after West’s death.

Francis Hinton’s family were extremely wealthy and occupied positions of great influence in the Charles I period; at this time her brother served on the Privy Council. When Peirsey himself died only two years later, she remarried months after to Captain Samuel Mathews Sr (she retained ownership of Flowerdew)—Mathews by that point owned several large plantation, along with other businesses and property. Samuel Mathews Sr. was destined to become Virginia’s most powerful and impactful political official in pre and post Berkeley periods, at least until his death around 1657.

Many associated in some way with the Virginia Company sold some of their land holdings, not infrequently to others associated with the Company—for instance Governor Yeardley sold to Abraham Peirsey in 1624 Flowerdew Hundred, probably the largest plantation of that period. The sale included the plantation (twelve dwellings, three storehouses, a windmill credited to have been the first in North America, four tobacco houses), and the plantation housed fifty-seven, including twenty-seven indentured servants plus  seven Blacks listed as indentured servants; otherwise six married men and households, three single men and a minister. Peirsey previous to the sale was regarded as the colony’s second most wealthy landowner, the first being Yeardley; the sale reversed the ranking.

We shall discuss Mathews shortly, but one last detail pertaining to Flowerdew. Hinton died around 1632-4, and Flowerdew Hundred passed to her daughter, Mary. It ought to have gone, if tradition matters to her eldest daughter. The elder daughter, Elizabeth, had by that time married a certain John Harvey, governor of Virginia—and a principal character of this module. Harvey, as we shall see was expelled from Virginia by a cabal led by none other than Samuel Matthews. Mary inherited, but Harvey contested. In the following years, the struggle between the two contenders was brutal and intense—at one point Harvey sacked Mathews own estate at Denbigh—and event that may have caused his termination as governor by the King.[999]

Finally, what no doubt leaps out is the role of widows, very quick remarriages, becoming in the process, mistresses of yet larger estates. Temperance Flowerdew, married two governors (the second being Francis West, yet another brother of Lord Delaware), gave birth to a another—and died the richest woman in Virginia; Francis Grenville married the most powerful man in Virginia, gave birth to a future governor, and succumbed to bad health in 1633, at about 35 years of age. And yes, I have persistently drawn attention to the relative youth of these oligarchs. In an age when private blurred with public, and families were the means to establish social status with the access it brought, Virginia of the Transition Period reflected a great deal of the flavor of the Stuart era. Such was the core underlying dynamic that formed the First Virginia Policy System

 [999] The Flowerdew estate was duly contested and not resolved until around 1638—which by that time the estate had been neglected to such degree that Mary was forced to sell it afterward to avoid her own bankruptcy. Still Frances’ son, Samuel Mathews Jr,  went on to be governor, 1656-1660, before he too died when he was less than thirty. Much more on all that later. But the point to be noticed is that politics of the post-1625 period were vicious and rivalries were brutal, and sometimes physically resolved; land sales and plantation acquisition were a key element in the struggle for wealth—marriage and inheritance being an element in the acquisition of wealth, status and power. Bailyn describes this period, which spawn several generations, until the 1660’s at minimum. [999]

After Yeardley: Conquistadors As Governors

Yeardley was Wyatt’s replacement as governor, but he died unexpectedly, but not suddenly in 1627. He in turn was replaced by Francis West (brother of deceased Baron De La Warre, the first Governor of Virginia). Francis West was (Acting) Governor (1627-9), and a prototypical example of a plantation conquistador he proved to be. Of noble heritage, one of the very few in Virginia, Francis West arrived in Virginia in 1608, appointed to the Governor’s Council in the same year, he was Jamestown’s military commander from 1612-18. He is said to have quarreled with Captain John Smith back in his Jamestown days—and persistent rumors were Smith tried to have him killed by the Indians.

Francis West served as Jamestown’s first delegate to the Burgesses in 1619. After service with the Company as Admiral of its New England Venture; he returned to Virginia as its Captain General, the colony’s chief military officer. He acquired a plantation, near Westover by 1622, and owned land at Shirley, the Baron’s old estate and the first plantation in the colony. West was able to amass considerable land holdings, becoming one of the colony’s largest plantation owner, by his none-too-subtle marriages to three widows in three years (1626 to 1629). One of these marriages was to Governor Yardley’s widow, (whose children fought somewhat successfully to keep him from inheriting Shirley).

He was to die, drowning, in 1634, but not before he was elected by the Governor’s Council to once again serve as Deputy Governor after its ouster of Governor John Harvey. At his death his younger brother, John, replaced him as Deputy Governor (don’t worry we will cover all this insider politics stuff later). In the meantime, maybe you can read a script from Dallas or Yellowstone—that will allow you to keep up the flavor of Virginia politics during these years. In any event the treaty of 1628 was negotiated by him–and abandoned by his successors.

His successor, after his first term in January 1629, was physician (graduate of Oxford), John Pott, who had served as the Company’s physician in Virginia since 1619. Pott’s breakthrough claim to fame, apparently, was his spiking the liquor with poison at a 1623 Indian peace treaty, leading to the death of an alleged 200 Indians. He was cleared of this charge (as local defender’s proclaimed “he was by far the best physician in the colony … skilled in epidemicals” [don’t ask], and restored to office. He entered the Governor’s Council after the Company’s fall in 1625. With a resume such as this, one can see into the nature of the oligarchy. Of all the oligarch’s Potts standing within the grouping was less a military chieftain, than its master, behind the scenes, wheeler and dealer, with a network that resembled a Rolodex

Elected to the Governor’s Office by the Council in 1628, Pott served in 1629 to 1630—when Harvey arrived and assumed his position. For all sorts of reasons. I suspect, a new and hostile Governor Harvey unleashed a contentious period of elite debate, on the Potts scandal, peace with the Indians, and a rising Maryland question. These goings on, the John Harvey Affair will be considered in depth with the next module.

Virginia’s provincial leadership, had it even wanted to assert itself over the local authorities, was in no position to do so. Effectively if it wanted to act it needed a consensus of the local elite leaderships — the General Assembly–and that met only sporadically, on the call of the Governor. That the majority of delegates to the Council of State and the Burgesses (and the governor as well) were local officials and most were plantation owners of some consequence more than amply assured the interests of locals would be secure and their initiatives advocated or protected.

 

New Adventurers Enter the Oligarchy in the Company Period

Our “First Oligarchy”, which jelled in Company’s Second Powhatan War period, were joined by a number of generally younger, non-company adventurers who emigrated to Virginia generally in the late teens. In the thinly populates settlements of Virginia, young, middling status, free holders with skills, interests, and willingness to take risk and work hard attracted interest from company officials in desperate need of quality associates to fill gaps servants could not, and held some management capacity. William Claiborne, a surveyor, who arrived with Wyatt is a prime example. In a land of land sales (patents) surveying was the necessary precondition. He found a niche immediately becoming known to all.

Given the power of the tobacco monoculture, all developed some taste for tobacco planting, and allowing that the plantation was both the economic goal and consummate expression of social status, all who could would acquire and build some plantation and “a fine house”. Headrights provided workforce, So in Virginia at this time social and economic status was attainable and achieved quickly. The crisis of the early Second Powhatan War only accelerated the need for these free holders—especially those with military background, or willing to participate in the militia expedition that were plentiful through 1626.

e of the surviving planters whose eminence by the end of the thirties had very little to do with the transplantation of {English] social status. The position of the new leaders rested on their ability to wring material gain from the wilderness [i.e. our self-sufficiency strategy]. [99] Bernard Bailyn,  “Politics and the Social Structure in Virginia” in James Morton Smith (Ed), 17^th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, p. 94.

Several younger, well-placed, Company settlers, some as early as 1621, had been appointed or elected to the Company Burgesses, and even to the Governor’s Council (the future Council of State). The Council of State, and the Burgesses were infused with these young, competing, aggressive and beyond opportunistic gentlemen, Samuel Mathews, William Tucker, George Menefi, and John Utie as some of the most notable of these young adventurers. Their backgrounds for the most part are not well documented; it is claimed the relevant repositories were burnt during the Civil War—or otherwise simply lost, or never existed.

Robert Brenner introduces this elite as “leading Virginia Councilors as Samuel Mathews, George Menefie, Thomas Steeg, and John Utie … rose from ‘middling sorts’ of backgrounds (or lower) to high positions in Virginia as merchant-planter-councilors; all were distinguished by their ability to combine planting with mercantile activity on a rather large scale, all forged connections with the leading London merchants. He separates these men from William Tucker, and William Claiborne, men who were more central to his “New Men” of English colonial capitalism.

The first set of individuals were of middling or lower birth, but Tucker and Claiborne were not; they had gentry status with tinges of nobility.

To be sure, under Wyatt, William Claiborne was hired to design Jamestown’s streets, construct palisades for each settlement, and to plan a newe town, an affluent suburt for Jamestown. He “marked off  two parralel streets (east-west) … River Road … and Backe Street” and from then on Jamestown was known as “New Towne”. Interestingly, I have not found reference to this first British North American urban planning design in any planning book? In researching this book I have discovered that “first” is a very flexible concept.

These oligopolistic adventurers were able to use the headright and import a workforce that, for the average Virginia settler was unaffordable. If the population of Virginia had hovered around 1,000 to 1,500 for  a decade and a half, after 1624 it exploded. The census of 1635 looked under enough rocks to estimate over 5,100 inhabitants lived there—which was an incredible growth over the 1,200 around in 1624 and 2,800 that resided in 1628. With no Virginia Company supply ships arriving, and the Magazine effectively dead in the water, trade and finance offered opportunities to those willing to take the risk. The Dutch from New York and the Susquehanna-based colony were ever present. Necessity and opportunity invited these young free holder emigres to venture beyond tobacco—and this was the key to their attracting Brenner’s interest.

Samuel Mathews: Brenner likes Samuel Mathews most of all, because Mathews plays a prominent role in Brenner’s “New Men” paradigm. Men such as Mathews, William Tucker and William Claiborne combine on the Kent Island project—an adventure which will be discussed in a future module. The reader is advised, I must get Mathews right!. If had to pick, Samuel Mathews is the most consistently significant Virginia political leader over the next thirty years.

His impact in key policy junctures is remarkable, and he is the closest to being the most significant power broker in the colony’s political life—a proto-type for the broker-boss leadership style that persistently appears in Virginia’s politics. Interestingly, Samuel Mathews will never be governor, but he will be powerful enough to elect his twenty one year old son, while he takes off to London to negotiate a settlement in the Maryland-Virginia “war”. So let’s take a moment and a page or so to figure out who he is.

Unlike the Tucker and Claiborne, Mathews does not have the social background of either. Mathews background is such a battlefield that we cannot determine, his birth date, his parentage, and when for certain he arrived in Virginia. Mathews does have his advocates for an enhanced English social social status. He may have been a bastard child of Archbishop Tobias Mathews, but, at the moment at least, that is regarded as unlikely. He could have been born in 1583—or 1590, deepening on “who” he was. Even today there is no consensus on who he was, or where he came from. So I’ll suggest an identity for him to guide us.

Encased in another uncertainty, Mathews arrival in Virginia is not precise; he arrived in Virginia before the Massacre, but and it could have been as early as 1617. What his situation was when he arrived is still unknown; Mathews may even have been an indentured servant in his late twenties or early thirties–that invites questions as he does not follow the typical immigrant profile. How he rose so quickly—from possible indentured servant in 1618 to Governor’s Council in 1621—from landless to one of Virginia’s largest landowners by 1625—from a new arrival to noted Indian fighter and fur trader—has not been nailed down.

We are fairly certain that by 1619 he was ensconced in a settlement he called “Mathews Manor” on the Warwick River (today within the confines of Newport News) (later he renamed in Denbigh, and another on the James River (hear Heinricus) called Harrowatox, where he had two houses, which he rented to the project manager of a college envisioned in the Greate Reform diversification program [99] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Matthews_(captain).

How he got to either is not settled. Mathews, however in May, 1622, did become a party in a lawsuit in London against former Governor Argall. The lawsuit involved an incident in 1618 when Argall in command of the Treasurer intercepted and boarded the Neptune, on which were transported Governor De La Warre, his wife and a number of servants, goods and associates. Argall in contested circumstances took a number of men and goods, leaving De La Warre on board; he died, however, before he could reach Virginia.

The uses put these men involved privateering in West Indies, before they were returned to Virginia at Elizabeth City (present day Hampton). The other items laden on the Neptune was a who’s who of servants and goods by the colony elite, including Yeardley, Abraham Piersey, and Francis West. Piersey was deposed and offered his deposition at the same time as Mathews in 1622. The suit introduced required and conducted depositions in May 1622. The depositions provided the description of Mathews that is cited above [99] Peter Wilson Coldham, the Voyage of the Neptune to Virginia and the Disposition of its Cargo, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol 87, No. 1 (January, 1979), p. 58 and p. 62

The claimant deposed that Mathews came to Virginia as a servant of Sherif (sic)Johnson of London before 1618 on board the ship Treasurer. That ship is closely associated with Argall, and may have been owned by either the Company or the Earl of Warwick at that time. Mathews returned to London to offer his deposition and he deposed that he was 32 at that time (meaning he was born in 1590—and not a child of Archbishop Tobias Mathews), and he offered testimony to alter the description of him in the claimant’s deposition. Moreover, the short deposition delivered by Mathews contributed little to our understanding of his role, and the extent of his involvement in the incident, or in how it affected any relationship he developed with Argall. It is reasonably clear, however, that Mathews was on board the Neptune, taken onto the Treasurer, and eventually returned to Elizabeth City, where Argall took command of the taken goods, men, servants etc.

That Mathews may have benefited from Argall’s benevolence during 1617-18 is possible; if so, as Captain of Harryhattock, Mathews was appointed to a military-like command.  Argall was very much engaged in Indian relations and fur trading—both of which Mathews exhibits early activity. Mathews was known for both as we shall soon discover and had been an active fur trader probably before William Claiborne in 1625-6.

After a short stay in Jamestown he went or was sent by Argall or Johnson to Sherley Hundred as a supervisor of Argall’s workforce there. At that point Governor Argall (somehow) appointed Mathews as a Captain at Harryatox (wherever that might be?). Deposed, Mathews did answer with his deposition on April 22, 1622, contesting none of this, and offering comment on the matter of concern in the lawsuit, Argall’s involvement with the ship “Treasurer”. His return to Virginia was in December 1622—it is possible that Mathews was onboard ship at the date of the Massacre.

However he got to Virginia, by 1619 Mathews was a plantation landowner and Captain of a settlement—hence not a servant—and by 1621 was cited as the owner of several plantations: Mathews Manor (later known as Denbigh) on the north side of the James at Blunt Pointe, one at the confluence of the Warwick River (now within the city limits of Newport News), one near Henrico’s, and one at Pointe Comfort. A final note, Mathews Manor, a present day historical site, appears not to have been developed until 1626, but ownership is not specified. The name Denbigh is from the 18^th century, and the Warwick River is named after the Earl of Warwick. Denbigh is a real castle, in Denbigh Wales (suggesting Mathews was Welsh) of some importance in the Welsh Rebellion. Denbigh Wales is a stronghold of the Mathews family name; while no determinate link can be made, save one assertion by Virginian Mathews family [99] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memories_of_Virginia/Historical_Sketch_of_Samuel_Matthews, the association of Samuel Mathews with a Welsh heritage and lineage.

It is alleged by several sources that he was appointed to the Governors Council in 1621—but the first recording I can confirm is 1625 when he was appointed by the King in his new roster of appointees for his royal government. As most royal appointees in that 1625 government were those of the previous company period, it is likely Mathews like the remainder of the Council had already been a member previous to 1625. It is also recorded that Mathews was active in several military expeditions, as a member and leader, after 1622. Described by Fausz “he quickly rose to prominence as an Indian raider and trader … Mathews’ skill in stealing Indian maize was only matched by his success in exploiting large numbers of English laborers [headright indentured). A major exporter of tobacco (ten thousand pounds by 1630), land speculator … [and] he established “Mathews Manor”, near Newport News and [William] Tucker’s Kecoughtan, as a site of influence and affluence second only to Jamestown itself.[99] J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds”, p. 58

He was always known through life as “Captain” or Colonel, and he made friends with such as William Tucker who was a committed Indian fighter. He is not listed in the census of these times as having a wife or children, although he traveled back from England in 1622 with a Robert Mathews.

There is a tale to be told in this hyperbolic rise from 1618 to 1621—but I don’t know what it is.

Fausz attributes Mathews with a “frontier acumen in Chesapeake Indian relations” which he displayed with tribes not associated with, indeed opposed to, the Powhatan. Likely he early on was interested in fur trade with tribes to the North (it may have been part of his Argall heritage) and the Chesapeake Bay. Mathews successfully secured from the Governor’s Council in 1626 and 1629 monopolies with those non-Powhatan tribes involving maize and furs. It is likely he developed close relations with William Claiborne no later than 1626 when the two were involved in constructing a fort at Pointe Comfort.

He was also a party to the early expansion up the Middle Peninsula and Fausz attributes to him leadership in settling new plantations “in the midst of hostile Indian territory”, and further attributes to Mathews authorship in “winning … the Forrest”, a strategy we will award authorship to Governor Wyatt and perhaps George Yeardley. [99] J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, p. 58. Success, it appears has many authors.

Wrap Up and Seque Way

What is the reader to make of these disparate personalities? What is the reader to take away from the still poorly understood early transition from the Virginia Company and the hesitancy of royal administration through the late 1620’s? Simply put, stuff happened at the ground-plantation level and those local level elites that climbed out of that stuff, reverse-gravitated into, and seized dominance over the only institution-political structure that was useful to Virginia governance at that desperate time from 1622 on: the Governor’s Council or our Council of State.

Whatever actually happened in this period, it is clear the main actors of the First Migration emerged and jelled into the First Oligarchy. There is nothing remotely resembling a rational plan, a follow–the-instruction manual of how a colony is built and developed. I cannot help but wonder if the aftermath of Gorbachev’s breakup of the Soviet Union and its transition into the Russian Federation, complete with its accompanying oligarchs of Russian industry, and the democratically fragile policy system that developed from it, offers some insight into what from history is both mysterious and not well understood period of Virginia history. Let’s suspend our judgement for the moment and delve deeper into the years of this transition period before we tackle the “meaningful observations” quest.

For me it is clear that the First Oligarchy was not semi-anarchistic, but rather developed out of a semi-anachronistic early transition period. For better or worse, the oligarchy that made its appearance, certainly from the Yeardley second administration (1626), would provide governance and a measure of order—our problem is we just don’t like it. We don’t agree or feel comfortable with what they did, and certainly we will not be impressed with how they did “it”. Sometimes hindsight is a curse; the first elite worked with what it had at had, while we who are contemporary are free to plug in our values and expectations. But as we shall see in the following modules, they did build institutions, set firmly in the land that was to be Virginia, the pillars of its future economy and policy system, not to mention its social-economic status system as well.

With Mathews introduced, we will leave to future modules several of the most prominent actors, William Claiborne and William Tucker in particular, who will join to form “Claiborne’s Clique”. As we fill in the detail of the late 1620’s and 30’s, we develop more fully their role and flesh out the personalities we have discussed in this module. Since we have acquainted the reader with the personalities that came to dominate the First Generation, we will next delve into the “land” settled by that generation; on the shredded community and the tobacco monoculture that was the first oligarchy’s principal legacy, we can see better their role in  laying the political, social and economic foundations on which the future state of Virginia rested.

The politics and inter-family relations, and the mechanizations of business rivals found in Billions, Yellowstone, and Dallas (my favorite) are way too refined and sophisticated, complex subtle. Post – 1625 Virginia political and economic power elite, dominated by the younger sons and daughters of the most powerful in Stuart England were in another league altogether. Located in a disease-ridden hell-hole, living in remote and isolated, palisaded plantations in small rough manor houses, these contenders made their own law—and had no problem in bringing their disputes back to mom and dad in England for resolution.

Pity the Native American and Blacks who were in the crosshairs of this drive to wealth, power, and status. Pity also the indentured servants who, attracted by headright incentives to surrender themselves to control by these folk for up to seven years, wound up in an economic, social, and political hole from which only a fraction were able to realize their dreams.

What should the reader take away from this morass of plantations, politicians and marriages? A lot! We will see:

• that for the next forty years after the fall of the company, Virginia politics was an insider’s game, with English politicians and families serving as the backdrop for the actors on the Virginia stage;
• the lingering influence of former Virginia Company elites, investors, and successors persisting into the 1640. They commanded the highest of Virginia’s commanding heights: the provincial governorship, solid and imposing portions of the growing economic base—which being based on tobacco meant they could use their position to secure new acreage for depleted older plantations;
• small-scale immigration began in the last days of the Jamestown Company. Drawing from lower gentry second sons and aspiring sons of established English merchants, a small trickle of young elites on-the-make arrived in Virginia. Three such emigres standout from this period, William Claiborne, Samuel Mathews and William Tucker. All arrived in the late teens, made their way into the domestic planter oligopoly, and eventually each took a seat on the Royal Council. William Claiborne was the most disruptive, and Samuel Mathews the behind-the-scenes broker that worked out solutions and provided muscle at critical policy junctures.
• The frustrating reality of the Virginia Company “first migration”, and the elite governance that emerged from it produced a lasting impression on governance in Virginia, but it did not development into a permanent elite that survived past the end of the seventeenth century. The first migration elite literally will “die out”; its widows and children selling the father’s estates to a new imported royalist Civil War refugee elite” The fact is that with a few notable exceptions … these struggling planters of the first generation failed to perpetuate their leadership into the second generation. Such families as the Woods, the Uties, the Mathews, and the Pierces faded from dominant positions of authority after the deaths of their founders. “these newcomers … had greater possibilities for permanent dominance than Harvey’s opponents had” and the Berkeley newcomers “absorbed and subordinated the older group, forming the basis of the most celebrated oligopoly in American history” [99] Bernard Bailyn,  “Politics and the Social Structure in Virginia” in James Morton Smith (Ed), 17^th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, 98.

Bailyn states that at no point could these contending and rival landowners could be considered as a “ruling class” (I suggest they could be labeled as a ruling elite). As a class, they lacked “the attributes of social authority”, and whatever political power/economic they possessed at any moment was vulnerable and involved in rivalries and the vagaries of health and marriage.

Only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, could distinction be expressed in a genteel style of life, for existence in this generation was necessarily crude. [Samuel] Mathews may have created a flourishing estate, and [George] Menefie had splendid fruit gardens, but the great tracts of land such men claimed were almost entirely raw wilderness. They had risen to their positions, with few exceptions by brute labor and shrewd manipulation; they had personally shared the burdens of [Virginia] settlement [Indian attack, disease and starving times]. They had succeeded not because of, but despite, whatever gentility they may have had. … what counted was their common capacity to survive and flourish in frontier settlements. They were tough, unsentimental, quick-tempered, crudely ambitious men concerned with profits and increased landholdings … they roared curses, drank exuberantly, and gambled for servants when other commodities were lacking. [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and the Social Structure in Virginia” in James Morton Smith (Ed), 17^th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, p. 95, 1988), p.56

But are they “thugs” or like Putin’s siloviki?

A Dutch visitor of that time (1631), de Vries, observed that Virginia’s merchant-councilor elite “were very hospitable, but they are not proper persons to trade with. You must look out when you trade with them … or you will be struck in the tail; for if they can deceive anyone, they account it among themselves a Roman action” [99] quoted in Fausz, p. 57

That comment shifts our sense of what the first elite was about, what they truly pursued. It was business, profits, and trade. They were not the Virginia planters of the golden age a hundred years into the future. They were not Washington, Jefferson or George Mason; nor were they the Carter’s nor Byrd’s. In most ways they were dissimilar from them almost totally—as did the environment and economic-socio-development in which they dwelled and functioned. Our elite was a wilderness elite, as a first generation ought to be. Accordingly, I leave the reader with an assessment of this first elite as presented by Robert Brenner:

The decay of the Virginia Company and the subsequent weakness of royal control from England engendered a chaotic pattern of social, political and economic development in the Virginia Colony. The 1620’s and 1630’s witnessed a struggle for spoils in which the leading members of the colonial government were the main participants. Almost all of these officials came to Virginia from undistinguished social backgrounds in order to enrich themselves through trade and plantations. They appear to have regarded the Virginia Council [Council of State], through which they governed the colony, primarily as a means for the aggrandizement of their own clique. Throughout the period councilors joined with one another and with various friends in a series of business and political partnerships to milk the resources of the colony … most of the major political events for thirty years after the company’s dissolution  … were incidents in the pursuit of private goals. [99] Robert Brenner, p. 116

See Breen: Time & Nature for future update