Introduction to the Virginia Company Series
How did the Virginia Company in Partnership with King James I “Bend Virginia’s Political Development Twig” thereby shaping the future course of Virginia’s colonial history?
Founded in 1607 more than 1,500 settlers were sent over by the fall of 1609. In the fall of 1609, however, only 350 remained alive. Then the bottom fell out, and the first “starving time” (there will be one more) ensued. By the spring of 1610 about sixty of three hundred and fifty were alive.
And so it began, the first permanent settlement of a fledgling future British Empire, but from our American perspective, the first founding of what will be an American state. That we begin with its first in the British Empire is no accident; it reflects our strong sense that central to understanding Virginia’s political and economic development and understanding the structure and configuration of the contemporary American state is understanding how the experimental nature of Virginia’s founding and birth.
What value is there is the study of events so distant from our time. What is the relevance of such history to current events, to contemporary world, to present day Americans? While this is not the place in our history to elaborate in detail how colonial American history can be relevant to us today, I will offer my assertion that part of America’s uniqueness, not exceptionalism if that exists at all, lies in our multi-ethnic republic’s foundation based on myths, not the actual realities of the then-contemporary actors, people and decision-makers who first settled the American colonies, or even those who constructed the 1789 American Early Republic.
These are too far back for most people to feel interest or willing to spend time to place themselves in another world. I will suggest, however, the realities, effects and implications of those 500 + year old settlers and decision do matter and are still affecting our thoughts, values, and behaviors: long-forgotten today they are built in, incorporated, buried in our modern day myths and aspirational models, values and images that we sort of inherit from our socialization, histories, schooling, and simply precedents and an amorphous something we call tradition and heritage or legacy.
In a contemporary America in which I wrote this history we have come to be characterized as “red” or “blue”, our media obsessed with something called the end of American civilization, or engaged in a “culture war” based on ideologies, changing or static values, of what I often think of a chaos of affluence. Writers seeking to understand how we got to this condition, discuss many causes, but one who I think hit the nail on the head is Richard Slotkin, who asserts in his “A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, that:
The differences between red and blue America are rooted in culture: in enduring systems of belief developed over long periods of time, reflecting different experiences of life and understandings of what America is, what it has been, and what it is supposed to be. Each has a different understanding of who counts as an American, a different reading of American history, and a different vision of what our future ought to be …. But if our differences are an expression of our identities … then political loss threatens a whole way of life. …
Each side in our culture war appeals to American history to explain and justify its beliefs about who we are and the purposes for which our political community exists. They share the same body of historical referents, the stories we have accepted as symbols of our heritage. They constitute our national mythology, an essential element of the culture that sustains the modern nation-state. It defines nationality, the system of beliefs that allows a diverse and contentious population, dispersed over a vast and varied country, to think of itself as a community and form a broad political consensus. It provides models of political action that enable the nation’s people to imagine ways of responding to crises in the name of common good. The irony and peril of our situation is that the myths and symbols that have traditionally united Americans have become the slogans and banners of a cultural civil war.
[99] Richard Slotkin, A Great-Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), p. 2
That Americans have always been “different” in important ways, manners, values, classes, lifestyles, and ethic-racial-national backgrounds is almost always lost when we talk about that artificial construct labels such as Americans, or the American people. We are, and have always been, since day one, different peoples, who settled in different places, at different times, for different reasons, and with different values, hopes, experiences, and expectations of what America was and should be.
That is why I have tasked this history with explaining why every state and its cities are different from other states and their cities. State share the same institutions of governance–more or less; institutions have the same names, operate within the federal and their state constitutions, and yet all one has to do is move from one state to another to rapidly understanding that the old state is different from the new one. Each state has its birth. Each state has its history. The institutions in each state have varying historical experiences since their birth, just as they have developed different economic bases, all of which have made them distinctive from one another in ways important to our myths and our contemporary realities.
In a time when some are contemplating returning more powers and responsibilities to our states, while others are attempting precisely the opposite, we have to better understand why and how states are different to understand what we gain or lose in that struggle. Reevaluating the myths, which are the narrative stories of our history, and understanding how each state conveyed their then current myths into the institutions they founded at the birth of their state–and how and why that state evolved those institutions of decision-making and governance as they matured to the present day.
As I listen to the media, stereotypes abound, have become weaponized, and are being internalized by citizens, including a great number of new immigrants and their families, without any serious understanding of our myths, and how they vary among states, and even regions within states. Myths have become bullets in this cultural civil war. How in this atmosphere can we rely on federalism, or have faith in a federal unity, when we cannot distinguish between and among Americans and the American peoples. States and their localities are an excellent viewpoint from which we can better understand our myths, and the varieties of ways in which they have been interpreted and affect political behavior.
While the American baby is the central player in this birth, the baby is not making decisions regarding that birth. Those decisions are made elsewhere until the baby matures to a point where it can play a serious and thoughtful role in its own life. So as we begin our story of the birth of the first English American colony, we concentrate on the English decisionmakers who attended to, and performed, that birth: The physician in attendance was the Virginia Company of London. How that Company was assigned the birthing task we will retell in the course of our modules but we must put the Virginia Company in the context of its being the first to conduct the founding of a permanent settlement in North America (as opposed to the British Isles).
The best summary of that context, I believe, is the first paragraph of the preeminent history of the (ironically) dissolution of the Company and the loss of her charter to govern the colony.
Although the British people have founded colonies in all four corners of the globe, and in the course of three centuries have come to hold sway over the fortunes of a quarter of the world’s population, Virginia has held a place unique in the history of English expansion … This effort “to plant a nation Where none before hath stood” involved many new and unprecedented ventures: the first important transfer of British stock to a distant shore, the first hard lessons in the art of colonization, the first vague indications of a colonial policy, the first attempts to adjust English customs and institutions to the conditions of the American continent, the first representative assembly in the western hemisphere, the first justices of the peace, and the first introduction of common law into America …
Nor has Virginia’s later history, detracted in any way from the interest in her earlier days. Rather the development in the colonial period of a planter society of gentlemen and country estates, her greatness in the American Revolution, her contributions to the founding of the Republic, and her preeminent leadership in the nation through the services of a long line of distinguished sons [and daughters] have served to give Virginia’s history a growing importance. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: the Failure of a Colonial Experiment (Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 1
With its new governor (Thomas Gates) finally in residence after a ten month shipwreck on Bermuda rocks in which he was presumed dead. Gates thought the situation in Jamestown so bad, and the colony infrastructure so depleated, he decided to abandon Jamestown, and head for Nova Scotia. No sooner did the refugees sail away on their two ships when they were met by the rescue mission headed by a newer governor (De La Warr)—who ordered them back to Jamestown. A succession of three governors, De La Warr, Thomas Gates, and Thomas Dale who followed him set up what has been described as a military colony or a penal colony and through a harsh, brutal and authoritarian governance stabilized Jamestown by 1612.
This is the story most Americans have heard—and it outlines what they carry with them into adulthood—and what TV and documentaries focus on. Jamestown was a collage of bad decisions, badly executed by seemingly confused and weak Jamestown Council–at least until the ever-charismatic John Smith saves the day. In a nutshell that is an all too commonplace summary of what happened in Jamestown.
That is NOT the story we retell. We ask why the disaster and come to the conclusion it was the fault of the Virginia Company headquartered in London. This has to prompt the question on how had the Virginia Company got this so wrong! How did it make decisions that killed off almost all the settlers it sent over? That is the question we pose in this series: the Virginia Company Period, 1600-1625
First we ought pause and examine “the policy process” by which the Virginia Company came into existence-what today’s policy analysts might label as the policy agenda-setting, problem definition, formulation, and adoption, culminating in some introductory, hindsight-inspired observations on the future administration-implementation stage. Why, the reader may ask?
The reason is simple. My argument why colonial Virginia developed politically, socially, and economically as it did, why did the tobacco monoculture and all that it involved become firmly planted as Virginia’s economic base: why an oligarchy, with unequal social (including indenture and slavery), economic and political-policy systems come into being, and how did this all combine to lead colonial Virginia down a path to an export-commodity tobacco plantation-centered economic base, the inability to urbanize, develop a strong middle class, and evolve a major port city and capital as did Massachusetts and Pennsylvania did?
The initial answers to all these question are found in the Virginia Company period.
The foundations of all these dynamics, processes, systems, and their institutions and structures were in basic fashion created and place in operation by the Company during its rule through 1624—and then allowed to proceed in their development by a weak, inconsistent royal governance that persisted until 1639 when Charles I authorized-legitimized a Virginia self-governance policy system that would as it matured be capable of policy-making sufficient to the colonial purpose.
I am not making the claim that the Virginia Company, alone, was responsible for what colonial Virginia became. I do say, however, that the Virginia Company was not designed to be capable of achieving a successful installation and fostering of a permanent colonial settlement, no matter where the planted it. I will call the Company names, zombie company my favorite, and will attempt to demonstrate to the reader that before it ever sent a ship and immigrants abroad, it was more likely than not destined for failure.
Put it another way, I will make the case for an assertion that the Virginia Company, as launched in the Charter of 1606 in a royal partnership with James 1 was broken from its signature by James—i.e. from its start. It was broken for many reasons, but the one that is compelling for our history is that the Company was broken enough that it could not install the essential prerequisites of a growing and sustainable colony, in particular to put in place an adequate, at least functional Virginia self-governance policy/social system from which a more mature colonial policy system could evolve. That policy system would come together, but would not be reasonably in place until 1639-1643. When formed it would bear the heritage of the Virginia Company in its structural DNA, and would carry the experiences of its years in the memories and political culture of its citizens and residents.
Because of the Company, its lack of capacity in particular—also the political environment in which it necessarily functioned—burdened the Company to the extent is that it could never set up a Virginia-based policy system that had capacity to participate with London’s Company elites in the governance of the proposed colony. Practically speaking, that meant Virginians themselves had to fill in the gaps to install Virginia governance institutions they thought useful, and due to the ineffective governance of the Company, the inertia and entrepreneurialism of the Virginia freeman carried the burden of coping with day-to-day governance and working that into whatever the Company tried to set in place as a governance body.
Virginia was forced to “go native” very early—beginning in the sixteen “teens”—with the first five years at minimum an absolute disaster and policy-political development vacuum. That vacuum was filled by Virginians pursuing their own goals and ambitions and imputing their values into decision-making. With the flip side of self-reliance being a heady and almost unrestructured individualism, Virginia evolved its own elite, based, of course, in its tobacco monoculture—which they Company established for its own purposes—i.e. its fiscal survival—and which were left in the hands of a dispossessed company domestic elite that was left in place when the Company lost its charter in 1624. By that point, I hope to demonstrate that most of the essentials of future Virginia colonial government were in place—rudimentary to be sure.
Succinctly put, Virginians had to work out their own day-to-day governance and this self-reliance, particularly of those in governance and whose economic enterprises were successful (the two were hopelessly blurred and merged). This elite grouping too would leave its heritage on the future Virginia policy system, both colonial and American state—and it would install its own social-economic system based on inequality and unequal hierarchy that persisted for centuries. In large measure that structural relationship started and persisted because of the Company, willingly and unwittingly, encouraged it through its incapacity to set up and broker local self-governance.
Forced to be self-reliance, with few resources provided by England, the locals took over governance, usually basing their operations and strength from their dominance of evolving and emerging organs and institutions of local government. That domestic elite worked out on its own terms, often dictated by relations with the Powhatan and other tribes, its own customs, behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions/structures and policies. While it was in place those structures and values were left virtually untouched by the Company—and the king—which, although quite noisy at times, lacked both capacity and resources with which to influence Virginian affairs meaningfully.
Why did the Virginia Company fail so badly? Using a modern metaphor it was not ready for prime time colonization when it signed its first charter—and never was able to develop its capacities through the life of its three charters.
Through its (lack of) effective leadership and capacity to establish a viable permanent settlement the Virginia colonists were left to devise their own—while the Virginia Company was consumed with its own survival. From the signing of its 1606 Charter to the suspension of its 1612 Charter in 1624 the Virginia Company contended with its own lack of a permanent settlement business and financial plan, a diversified and contentious batch of investors, a fragmented elite at war with itself, and a divine right sovereign who was unwilling to step up to the colonization task, preferring instead to offload it to the Virginia Company, until it imploded before his eyes. This could have been an excellent Shakespearian play; he had ample material and plot on which to base it even though he died in 1616. Perhaps it was done by Shakespeare; consider the Tempest as its Shakespearean metaphor.
the Legacy of the Virginia Company and the Virginia Experience Massachusetts Inherited
Prologue to the Series
So far this history has treated the Jamestown experience congruent with the paradigm recognizable to contemporary Americans. Americans, understandably, are most concerned with matters American. Realizing intellectually we are English, and Jamestown-Virginia was a colony of England, we are apt to cull out our accepted English inheritance using a broad, sweeping filter of England’s fine, if not outstanding, gifts, such as common law, and its early progression toward representative democracy, and our use of familiar governmental structures, towns, cities, counties. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but this history wanders into unfamiliar inheritances that tend to be less favorable as well.
The impact of the Virginia Company on Virginia’s heritage is a decidedly mixed bag. On balance I am not an admirer of that heritage, but, as the reader shall see, the Virginia Company left much to Virginia’s settlers and the settlers impact on the early political development of the colony was much more pronounced, and profound, and as we shall see that settler impact has generated a considerable literature which is not at all positive. That suggests had the Company been more successful, many commentators, citizens, and historians would have been pleased. This history will likely face conflicting headwinds as we develop that theme in this series.
Almost all are interested in how both concerns led to the rise of an exceptional American democracy, a democracy which currently begets the longest surviving government in the world. These concerns are usually, one way or another, mirrored in our contemporary text books and histories. This history departs from this paradigm. We look at our subject, American states and local government, with due consideration of their state policy system and culture. Accordingly, we are less focused on how we are exceptional, or why/how we were driven to Revolution, and subsequently to a modern-style democracy. We can’t ignore either, of course, but we approach the subject from our “bottoms up” state and local perspective, using economic development as our filter to focus attention on what we consider a very critical policy making area.
In this series we explore the first eighteen years of Virginia, the first English American colony—and future state–Virginia. This is Virginia’s “First Migration”(which continued onto the mid-century). Most historians view it largely as a failure (which for the most part it was, depending on your values and goals), but for us was the period in which the central pillars of future state economic base and political-policy institutions/structures were installed.
In other words, the Jamestown period, a period in which the London-Virginia Company was the government and corporate sovereign of the future state, exerted an outsized impact on the state’s future. It provides considerable insight into why Virginia is different from other colonies and states. In my parlance, the Virginia twig was bent most seriously during the Jamestown period.
The problem, from my perspective, is how, and why, did London affect the development of the Virginia colony. London, which, after all, is where the fundamental decisions concerning Virginia were made. Jamestown, Virginia was England’s first “successful” colony, but it was very much the tail, wagged by Virginia Company decision-makers in London. The first paragraph tells the story from Jamestown’s (Virginia’s) perspective and our narrative turns that upside down; we tell the story for the perspective of the Virginia Company, headquartered in London.
A close look in London affairs will reveal a mishandled and not to successful start that did not take hold, minimally at that, for the first forty years or so. The reason asserted in this history is that our first settlement was laden and plagued with the burden of England’s heritage of mercantilism and its approach to foreign affairs and trade. Truth be told, the English foreign establishment in the Tudor-Stuart years was not sufficiently mature, and was on the threshold, not of decline but was heading toward a transformative civil war.
The failures and catastrophe detailed in the first module resulted from the delegation of colonization to a corporation whose experience and structures were inadequate to the goals involved in the first settlement. Equally as important, that corporation got caught up in the backwaters of a rival colony-building effort in Ireland, the top favorite of the King, and lost its financing, within two to four years after the initial settlement of Jamestown. The Virginia Company by 1612 was almost as adrift as its colony was–caught up in the politics and policy of England’s foreign policy establishment.
The Virginia Company turned out to be the only pure joint stock ,membership corporation among the thirteen colonies. Small wonder. Very much an experiment, Virginia’s first period of history proved very unique, and that, for the most part, follows from its London-based joint stock and membership decision-making. If you want government to be run by a business, Virginia in the Jamestown period is not your model.
For the purposes of our history, however, purposes which are much more institutional, more sensitive to the way structures make policy, and how those structures were initially installed, we must explore and explain how England entered into foreign affairs, and how it eventually engaged in colonization. We, of necessity, must spend time understanding our English inheritance.
The American States evolved from colonies which were called “plantations” back then. These colonies or plantations evolved, survived and aged, until in due course, they became in some mysterious and little understood way, American states in 1776 in the Articles of Confederation–that little known, easily discarded period of American history, which I ofttimes call our First Republic. Just like our current Internet owes a great deal to its founding algorithms and structure, so too will will our first thirteen states be indebted to a little known period of our history. The same is true of our first colony, Virginia which suffered from its founder, the Virginia Company, near abortive experience. The Jamestown period, the seventeen years during which the Virginia Company sought to found America’s first settlement offers important lessons and insights still valuable in today’s contemporary world.
Our colonization was not led and conducted by the English government, or its Kings or Queens, for that matter. The early colonies were “proprietary” colonies. Proprietary is a 1600ish word that today means something akin to “private sector”. Proprietary comes in two forms: corporate, and fief (or personal). Say it another way, for Virginia a business corporation founded the colony, under contract with the English government (King/Queen), a contract known as a “charter”.
In today’s parlance it was a public-private venture, amazing similar to a city-building corporate structure that created Irving, California or Woodlands, Texas. Today building a colony is not really thought of as a business venture, or a private-public partnership, and a good start to our story is to alert the reader in colonial Virginia English private enterprise played a major role in our earlies history. The initial guiding principles of our colonial birth are business-derived, not philosophical or political constructs. I doubt anyone in this period ever came to America to establish an “exceptional democracy”, a refuge of the throbbing masses. As we shall see they came to make money, or found a religious homeland. Virginia was the former.
Hence one way to look at these proprietary colonies is a sort of late medieval public-private partnership, with the private sector as the dominant actor. Virginia, under charter from James I, was a corporate proprietary colony–in fact it will be the only corporate proprietary. It was the only one because the Virginia Company, the first, was an “experiment”, a hybrid form of joint stock corporation that after eighteen years failed. It left behind a legacy, however, a legacy that still is relevant today, even though it is buried deep in our history and rendered invisible due to the fog that shields history from our present-day minds, values, and interest.
Our history hopes to shed light on our current realities, insisting the heritage of early Virginia colonial history has not only impacted our present day policy-political system, but has impacted our economic base as well. Say it another way, this history seeks to demonstrate the relevance of the past on the contemporary. To do this effectively we must endeavor to stress proper chronology, the impact of major drivers, be they good or bad, and try, as best we can, to understand why decisions were made back then, and show how and why they persist in some form today. There are few single driver explanations for factors that “bent Virginia’s political development and economic base twigs which means our history is likely to tell most readers more than they want to know. That is one reason we offer the material in the left column so the reader can delve deeper as needs be without having to endure the onslaught of too much material.
The point, the take away, is that English-British colonization was a private-public joint endeavor, somewhat dissimilar from its European rivals. The Virginia Company as I describe it, can not be summarily dismissed as simply a bunch of greedy pre-capitalist merchants, whose profit seeking caused its failure as a colonizer. Rather its failure resulted from the Company’s inheritance of the institutions, goals, and relationships developed for foreign policy and trade that fabricated during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (I, not II), way back in the 1550’s.
That inheritance castrated the Virginia Company during the time of the Jamestown settlement, and so castrated it never was able to bring about a successful birth of a colony. In frustration, wracked by its own internal civil war, the Company’s charter was terminated by the King in 1624. Say that another way, England had not yet developed sufficient experience and structures that could be successful colonizers in 1606. In fact, one may conclude the Virginia Company’s chief contribution to American political development is that by leading the way, later English colonization was more effective and a bit less disruptive.
Ron W. Coan 