How Do You Forget to Install a Society?
Society & Individual Rights: But we are not done with silent dogs not barking in the night. A huge neglected feature of the entrusting of colonization and permanent settlement through charter to the Virginia Company joint stock corporation was that it rendered its corporate members resident in Virginia without the protective structures and civil laws they enjoyed in England. Those who went to Virginia were either corporate employees or those individuals who surrendered themselves for a period of time to be the property of the Company. Company-immigrants, voluntarily, if unwittingly, were in effect leaving “English society” and placing themselves under the jurisdiction and legal authority of a corporation, its leadership/shareholders in London, and driven by its corporate purposes, limited only by its sovereign Crown.
Even more critical, if not amazing, was the King’s clarification that English residents of Virginia enjoyed the full rights of an English citizen in England. In the Second Charter the King name a new Treasurer (Smythe) for Virginia Company (the master corporation) and created the Captain-General Governor (for life) to serve within the Virginia Company (he was not a royal-appointed governor) responsible for the management and operation of the colony. The King also granted to the master company title to large parcels of land owned by the king, and now awarded to the company for its use.
The restructured Virginia Company was entrusted with greater powers of administration, greater autonomy from direct oversight and policy direction by the King and Royal Council in its internal affairs and its economic agenda had been clarified and given royal incentives design to make it more productive. Implicitly the Virginia Company had been afforded a limited power to self-govern the colony.
Key to that self-governance was the Company was empowered to diversify Virginia’s economy “to dig for all manner of mines of gold, silver, cotton, and iron, lead, tin and all sorts of minerals to be gotten thereby to the use and behoof of the said company of planters and adventurers [i.e. investors], yielding thereof, and providing to us” [the King] but granted a twelve year tax abatement and custom abatements, the right of future immigrants to be deemed as English citizens, and the authorization of what will be shortly known as the “headright” which allowed the granting of land at the end of an individual’s indenture. In its next to last section, the King grants the power to the Corporation to issue debt whose lenders shall be considered as “planters and adventurers of the company”.
The demanding reality of a permanent-settlement colony, located three thousand storm and wind-tossed miles from London, was not lost to the founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony, whose new elected governor carried (secretly)) the colony’s charter with him when he left England in April 1630. That charter anticipated the logic, and necessity, of limited self-governance and thus did not include a specific governmental structure, rather leaving whatever overlapped with governance to the Board of Directors/Council, and then in the third charter to the Annual Meeting to the Shareholder Annual Quarterly Court that elected its leadership.
Essentially, in this period of joint stock corporation, there was provision made for the provision of common law and civil liberties as recognized in England, but their interpretation and application was determined by the shareholder and its leadership—the Virginia joint stock corporation. Thus, in the first five years of the colony, when it was under “military justice” much of those rights were suspended by the corporation and its leadership; in London and Virginia, the colony came to be recognized as little more than a “penal” colony, composed of freemen who surrendered their rights to the company, and freemen who surrender their status/rights to become property of the company through indenture. Somewhere in the literature and the advocacy to found a permanent colony there was a missing discussion on the need for a “society (and a social order) composed of individuals”. Winthrop’s puritans had acknowledged it through religion, the congregation its ministry, and the Elect..
That few wanted willingly to join a penal colony is logical, and accounts for the extra steps the company, under Sandys in 1620-21, had to hurdle in order to achieve its aim of sending over more immigrants needed to pivot the colony into a full-scale permanent settlement. That was no sufficient either; as we shall see below, the Virginia Company, teetering on the edges of considerable internal governance fractures, had by 1612 already discovered English investors needed considerably more opportunities and profit potential if they were to fund a permanent settlement. They had to acknowledge the rights and indeed the existence of “individuals’ who were members, not employees/property of, a larger society than a mere joint stock corporation.
Pre 1613 Virginia was a Cross between an Military Colony and a Man-Cave
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Way back in the late 1950’s this absence of individuals functioning in a society that provided order and authority through hierarchies regarded as legitimate was recognized and “called out” by Sigmund Diamond. (see also Robert D. Mitchell, David W. Gelenson)
Lacking Winthrop’s “City on a Hill”(proclaimed about a decade later) and a solid Puritan congregation in support, the Virginia Company had to develop its own residential consensus and commitment on values and hierarchal authority if it meant to build and grow its colony and not content itself with trading, and the relatively quick profits or losses tied to that model. The missing dimension in the charter, the dimension that dealt with the individual and his rights and obligations and the existence of structures through which they could be recognized and defended had to be added into the Virginia equation.
Again, BTW, the reader is reminded once more that if one searches for an answer to our introductory question (Why are states and cities so similar and yet so different), this issue which we now address is one of the most important answers: how and why the colony founded and based its social order. A hint, Virginia formed its society from its pre-1612 workforce and formed from it a society in Virginia that linked individuals to the goals and purposes of the company—the growth of the colony and profits—and blended one into the other through the ownership of land.
The most obvious ways was to limit the corporation’s monopoly over the economy, and to provide a road to be a freeman and an individual participant in the economy to the indentured vast majority to upon expiration of that contract. In a very loose, but still very real sense, these paths shared at least one element, they acceded to and used for the corporate purposes the actions of individuals who willingly committed capital and labor in such quantities as to render their ambitions and aspirations believable. Both the wealthy and large scale investor and the small single individual of household expired servant could engage in an enterprise, with the legal rights and obligations of any Englishman.
In Virginia, for the very great majority that meant a tobacco plantation, an enterprise that centered on the acqusition and ownership of land, through which because of the headright that would be created, would also provide the workforce to satisfy that dream and hope. That is the topic of our next section. In that section we see how “Dale’s Gift” fabricated the tools and structures that made this possible: the hundred, the plantation or artisan/professional enterprise, the headright, and the commander.
Diamond’s Critiq p21 That Tate—Chesapeake and its Modern Historians –Chesapeake in the 17th Century
Diamond traced [Chesapeake’s society] back to its very beginnings in the London Company period … in effect to a breakdown of status based solely on one’s position and rank in a company ‘table of organization’ and the substitution of a variety determinants of status, particularly landholding, that marked the beginning of a genuine social order. [99] Thad W. Tate, the Chesapeake and its Modern Historians, in “Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays of Anglo-American Society (Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 20-1 [999]
Ron W. Coan 