A Historiographic Prelude: How this history fits into past historical paradigms (It doesn’t)
[999] Those last examples bring up the issue of American historiography and how it too has affected the way we think about Virginia and its place in history. One of the very earliest, perhaps the first modern colonial Virginia paradigm, was labeled the “imperial school” of American colonial history. Several scholars whom we rely on in this topic founded that interpretation of American colonial history—and frankly our fascination with the Virginia Company dovetails very closely with several of its emphases. Unfortunately, Virginia history, colonial or otherwise, is litter with the residue of many historiographic battles, and the imperial school is one of the bodies found in the literature.
If the reader sticks with us, she/he will discover I use paradigms where they are helpful and shed them when they are not. The imperial school is essential to this module, and it is valid to use for our discussion of the Virginia Company. To help the professional reader I present the core theme of the imperial school as expressed by one of its creators: Herbert L. Osgood. In the below footnote, Osgood sets forth his firm conviction—and mine—that in American colonial history we cannot ignore the impact, events, and power of our colonial mother, England and Great Britain.
To all serious students, however, that without research … of [the] forms of colony government, of the relations between church [of England] and the civil power in the colonies, of the legal relations between the colonies and the mother country … is absolutely fundament. … we must know under what forms English situations were reproduced on the American continent, how, if at all, they were modified by the influence of kindred European peoples who settled near or among English colonists. Their slow unfolding and change must be traced and an effort be made to ascertain how this was due to internal causes, and to what degree it was produced by pressure from the home government. The origin of American institutions is not to be found wholly in those documents and principles which originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, but as well in earlier forms which had undergone steady development a century and a half before the date of independence.
This fact suggests a further distinction which must be observed in the treatment of the subject. Colonization, at least in modern times, means the reproduction of dependencies. In the study of the process of colonization attention must be fixed, not only upon the colony or dependency itself, but on the relations which it bears to the parent community or state whence it sprang. The nature of colonies themselves, and of the historical process which gives rise to them, suggest the two main divisions of the subject. The earlier writers on the period, with one or two exceptions, have concerned themselves almost wholly with colonies, and have failed to give a clear or continuous count of their relations with the home government. No systematic attempt has been made to ascertain what the constitutional law and practice of the old British colonial empire was, or to set it forth in its historical development … One side of the story is left untold or is referred to as something foreign or inimical to the colonies. In fact it is the very essence of the colonial relation, and without it the meaning of the period is to a large extent lost. … Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century: the Chartered Colonies, Beginnings of Self-Government, Vol. 1 (the Forgotten Books 7 the MacMillan Company, 1904), pp. xxvi-xxvii
- M. Andrews (who is roughly the same generation of Osgood) , but who writes seventeen years later, expands the attention of the imperial school to the larger Atlantic community: “I have approached the subject [American colonial history] from the English end, from the land whence the colonists came, and of which they were always legally a part … This point of view gives prominance also to the place which the colonies occupied as factors in England’s expansion, to their position for one hundred and seventy-five years as members of a growing island kingdom that was gradually widening into empire, and to their status during all these years as subordinate and dependent communities, legally subject to the executive authority of the sovereign power across the seas [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, Vol. 1, the Settlements (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964), pp. xiii-xiv
The arrival of yet another new paradigm in recent decades, “the Atlantic History Paradigm”, reinforces my belief one cannot discount the English influence and impact on American colonial history and the exercise of their sub-system policy processes. Carla Gardina Pestana, for example writes in 2004 that “in the two decades before 1661, England, Scotland and Ireland [the “Three Kingdoms”] experienced civil wars, invasions, regicide, religious radicalism, experiments in non-monarchical forms of government, and in the end the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. … That the Stuart colonies in the wider Atlantic world also shared in this history has not been widely appreciated, or even fully explored. … [suggesting] how intimately involved in the New World settlements were in the Old World battles that temporarily brought down the Stuart dynasty. The rhythms of revolution at the center and rebellion on the periphery [during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth periods] were closely related, and the interlock helped to create a new English-dominated Atlantic world and laid the foundations for empire. The revolutions literally gave shape to the English Atlantic”.
She goes on to track the early Stuart deteriorating relations with Parliament, the delegating of colonization to the various proprietary type aristocratic entities (of which the Virginia Company is also included in that larger category), thus exercising “minimal” governance by these early Jacobean rulers, the infusion of religious controversey, and my insertion the competition wth Holland over commercial trade and competing settlements, making the point that all these English decisions made their way into the sub-system policy making of the Atlantic English colonies. [99]. Carla Gardina Pestana, the English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 1
I welcome this larger view in the sense that the older imperial school, while faithfully to the extent possible at the turn of the twentieth century, recounted its colonial policy-making process of early Stuarts, did not fully develop the implications to the development of the various, in this case Virginia, colonies, and instead “pulled their punches” when early Stuart English policy-making wreaked havoc on the political and economic development of their colonies. That is the case I am making, at least in part, on Virginia’s First Migration, its snail-like evolution of a functioning Virginia self-governing policy-system, but at this moment, on its seventeen year reliance on an obviously failing and deficient Virginia Company partnership—not to mention the dalliance of Charles I toward reinstating that partnership, a dalliance that persisted to the mid-1630’s, and was then picked up by the Puritan dominated parliament in the early 1640’s.
As one looks over early pre-Restoration English colonial policy-making, we can see Virginia, left to its own devices, running on “defaults” so to speak, evolved its tobacco monoculture, complete with a semi-coerced cheap laborforce, “owned” by a small plantation ownership elite that was first inspired by Virginia Company officials left adrift when the Company charter was suspended and the fight for survival in the Second Powhatan War. If, as Bailyn later suggested, the pre-mid century Virginia policy procesess lacked English civilization and the proper exercise of authoiry and order, it was probably more the fault of the Virginia Company and the lack of effective and consistent royal colonial policy and the decision-making processes that followed it.
Say it another way, my enlargement of what is Virginia’s English inheritance includes not only the good safe stuff, like common law, civil rights, and the nomenclature of English insitutions of governance and economy, but also the incompetence, ill, inconsistent decision-making of the early Stuarts, especially Charles, and, in the present section, the entrusting of Virginia’s colonization to an entity incapable from its start to carry the burdens of that mission—a mission which for understandable reasons was at best an experiment, “learn as you go” process that demanded active royal involvement and injection of resources to stand any chance of success.
Virginia evolved as it did because it was on the margins of early Stuart interest, and left by default to whatever domestic resources it could bring to bear, it evolved suprisingly pretty much on its own at least until a remarkable governor, Berkeley brought some measure of order, consistency and authority into its domestic governance.
If this be imperial school, the Atlantic paradigm, or simple Coan stupidity, compete with bad puns and irritating metaphors/similies, make the most of it.
[999]
See Lorena Walsh”Introduction” Early Modern Virginia:Reconsidering the Old Dominion, Douglas Bradburn & John C Coombs (Eds), University of Virginia Press, 2011, 1-10
Charles Andrews and Herbert Osgood, rivals of a sense, “invented”20th century American colonial history. Born during the American civil war period, Osgood’s 1904 work was capstoned by Andrews four volumes launched in 1934. Their “imperial school” can be considered as the true womb of American colonial history, by firmly attaching its future development to the inheritance, direction, distortion and exploitation on occasion of the Mother County. They wrote in a period, sometimes mislabeled as the Progressive Period whose approach to American history commenced with Frederick Jackson Turner’s the Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893), and with Charles and Mary Beard’s, An Economic Approach to American History (1913).
The latter two historians focused on the United States as a nation that came into being with its American Revolution against its tyrannical Mother Country and after which developed formed a unique political-policy system contained in its 1787 Constitution. The reader is invited to guess which two of these four writers constructed historical paradigms which dominated the interpretation of American History. Andrews and Osgood could not compete for relevance and the interest of most Americans, and American colonial history was cast into the margins of our nation’s past. Sadly, if it weren’t for Pilgrims and Puritans we would have no colonial history, excepting Jamestown, John Smith and Pocohontas.
A bit overstated, certainly, but I have to get your attention to begin our story of As the Twig is Bent so Grows the Tree. Our sad tale that answers the question why American states and cities share so many common themes yet are so noticeably and obviously different depends heavily on Osgood, Andrews and a host of British historians.to explain its birth, the planting of our twig’s roots in American soil. We do talk about our inheritance from England our Mother Country, but we are quite selective as to what we claim to have inherited—we are after all, exceptional—and as we describe our initial tale of planting Virginia’s twig of political and economic development, we shall see Virginia’s inheritance is “complicated”. Virginia’s twig was both neglected, and planted by a county and king who hadn’t the least idea as to how to colonialize a continent three thousand miles away from its bathtubs and warm beer.
Ron W. Coan 