As an Introduction, Permit Me to Restate My Position:
In my introduction, I made some pretty wild statements, accusations actually, that asserted the Virginia Company was “dead on arrival” in 1607 Jamestown. DOA meant at minimum the Jamestown colony essentially never stood a serious chance of establishing itself as a permanent English colony. It is my contention that American historians and commentators do not take seriously the Virginia Company’s role in Virginia’s political and economic development, and underplay its governance of the colony.
Obviously, I hope, the reader recognizes that my position is the Company played a major role in shaping the colony’s future political development, by leaving behind in its wake a policy system deeply implanted into the colony’s political, attitudinal and structural fabric. In other words, the Virginia Company was never able to govern its colony effectively for several reasons and that failure of governance forced the residents of the colony to conduct their own affairs, construct their own agendas, and fabricate their own social, economic and policy system that fit their perceived needs—and as we shall see, restrict the control and dominance of the mother country to the extent possible. The latter dynamic occurs after the Company had been tossed out of Virginia.
Most of what Americans learn and know about early Jamestown includes the horror, the swamp, John Smith and Pocahontas (a snapshot of Jamestown Powhatan relations), and a taste of the terrible decisions made in choice of settlers and their leadership. That’s fine, but it barely touches the surface of what happened in Virginia during the Virginia Company period. For those seeking to understand how Virginia developed the conventional treatment does not provide focused insight into the effects and dynamics introduced to Virginia by the Company governance—or lack of it.
Nor does the typical American possess any clear sense of the Virginia Company and what problems it confronted, and why it ultimately failed. There is a limit to how much one grasps what actually happened if all one thinks of is incompetence, greedy-impatient shareholders but has little feel for the experimental reality of early English Stuart colonial governance of Virginia, and how that lack of prior colonial experience left its mark on Virginia, while allowing following colonies (and England itself) to learn from Virginia’s early period—which they did for the most part.
Virginia was never England’s Old Dominion, it was always its New Dominion, and hence Virginia would develop differently than the other colonies, in effect creating from its start a potential de facto Mason-Dixon line. What is most startling to me is this distinctive difference came very early, during the years of its First Migration (pre-1642). We also are likely to miss how the First Migration cohort socialized and incorporated the Second Migration into the framework it created.
I say this because I am amazed how quickly the fundamentals of what we think of Virginia were installed by the late “teens’, and matured, becoming deeply embedded by the time of the English Civil War (1642-3), to the point that what we see in eighteenth century Virginia is but a further development of what existed by the mid-1650’s. The governance, social and economic twigs the Company left behind in 1624, had already taken root, and developed in fits and starts through the remainder of the century, taking off in the first decades of the eighteenth century.
My position rests less on the reality in Virginia, than on the lack of “capacity”, experience, a complete farce of a settlement plan, the absence of a fiscal-business plan, and a narrow-based private leadership that was pushed aside by a new king who valued control, but was unwilling to commit to Virginia colonization—a hallmark of the first two Stuarts. Of this litany of diseases, the Virginia Company was dead on arrival primarily, and without question, because it was a candidate for bankruptcy before the ships ever sailed. If the reader wants an easy simple answer as to why Virginia will be different from other colonies (and states as well), Virginia was the first colony England founded in North America—and, in hindsight, they had no idea how to found a colony.
My history benefits from hindsight, and results mostly from a reconstruction of the excellent scholarship on Virginia colonization. The central actor in the first seventeen years, the colony’s founding and birth, was without question the Virginia Company, not the colony itself. But the narrative Americans consume does not dwell on the Virginia Company per se, which for the most part is off the horizons, literally. Discounted as a group of greedy shareholders, even more greedy resident administrators, a rather sad attempt to replicate Virginia society in the American wilderness, and a “what do you expect of English mercantile capitalism” dismissal of a contemptible period of English history (the pre-English Civil War) made evident by the absence of its monarch, and his lack of interest in Virginia.
It’s not that there isn’t some validity in these impressions, but not enough in my view, to let the Virginia Company off the hook for sending out these poor souls in a venture that would survive only by inventing just in the nick of time, a brand of tobacco that sold in European markets, and on tobacco’s production and export sustained itself for the better part of forty years on the edge of extinction. Without tobacco there would have been no sustainable Virginia.
Over that time, however, it was the locals, the First Migration Virginians, that planted and nurtured the social-economic-policy systems on which the colony, the province, and eventually the state of Virginia that are known today. Their near fifty year-long efforts generated a considerable literature that was none too impressed with its substance, morals, and quality. That they were left to hack and forge their way to Virginia sustainability and eventually growth, was because the Virginia Company never was able to produce a governance capable, sufficient and sustainable of founding a colony. Its organizational structure and fiscal capacity was broken from the signing of the charter of 1606. It spend the remaining almost eighteen years collapsing, actually imploding on itself.
A great deal of this checkered colonization is attributable to the heritage of the Virginia Company—and, as we shall later see, Charles I, in particular. As to the Virginia Company we ought understand the first fifty years of Virginia’s history left behind a checkered heritage that was incorporated into the entire colonial history of Virginia—and by extension the Early Republic at least to the American civil war. To understand Virginia, its institutions, economy and social structure, we must understand how and why its foundations, which were laid in the first fifty years, implanted the heritage of the Virginia Company in the long future of the colony and the American state that followed.
Just because all this happened a long time ago is no excuse that we don’t need to know and understand that heritage. Virginia was, in essence, the first permanent settlement of English colonialism, and that first effort was not just an experiment, a work in progress, but a misadventure, an abortion that somehow survived.
Why it survived, as we will describe, is mostly attributable to the incredible, if faulty and in some respects pernicious, extreme individualist entrepreneur that spun off from the Virginia Company and kept Virginia on the edge of survival until they were able to convince the English sovereign, literally in the opening of the first phase of the English civil war, to recognize their competence and stubbornness by granting a functional self-governance to the policy system they had laid in place—and then letting it run the shop until the end of the Civil War and Cromwell Protectorate. These extremely competitive entrepreneurs substituted for the neglectful London colonial masters and put in place a system of their own making. I share the perspective of L. H. Roper who also asserts his version of the nature of Virginia’s early First Migration development:
… the leading Virginians have long been identified as the sort of men on-the-make who constituted the quintessential inhabitants of the early modern Atlantic World. Correspondingly their experiences have provided ready support for the prevailing characterization of early Virginia society and politics as a manifestation of the formation of a peculiarly American socio-political scene that arose from the new opportunities afforded them by the relative availability of American land. The Virginians then opposed attempts on the part of higher authority [London] to bridle their control of their local situation thereby creating both a ‘divergence between political and social leadership’ and a social structure that was ‘by European standards strangely shaped’. [99] L. H. Roper, “Charles I, Virginia and the Idea of Atlantic History, Itinerario, Vol XXX (2006), No. 2, pp. 7-8
And England, nor the Virginians, ever replaced it after the 1660’s, or the 1780’s for that matter. It was in this manner that the Virginia Company perpetuated its heritage through the centuries. Virginia’s First Migration (a much disparaged grouping if ever there was one)–—which carried the system-building on its shoulders into the 1640’s and continued leadership through the 1650’—are the authors of Virginia’s policy-making institutions, its unequal hierarchical society-workforce, and an unbalanced, if not dysfunctional, economic base principally reliant on the export of tobacco.(shifting incrementally only after the 1740’s-60’s).
It is to them we credit the reality of a provincial-state policy system tilted down to counties who influence and perspective have had more than their fair share of impact over the weak executive, and a legislature too closely tied to the “court house gangs” of the counties and brokered by dynastic families that perpetuated their standing and dominance. Those court house gangs, and county-based dynasties were firmly entrenched by the 1650’s, if not sooner in the oldest counties.
The Salience of the Third Pivot and the Third Charter
The colony that I have spent the better part of one hundred pages describing thus far literally imploded in 1609-1610. The Second Charter, limited as it was, attracted a larger and more compatible investors congruent with permanent settlement realities. Reflecting a national public relations effort, and a more meaningful and observable royal partnership the sending off of Gates 600 settler, 9 ship fleet was well received.
Hopes were high that reform and change had come in the nick of time. While hope springs eternal, this set of hopes were decidedly temporary. By the end of 1609 the mood had shifted dramatically to despair. By the middle of 1610 fears that the colony was destined to quick collapse were widespread—and reasonably accurate. Events went from great to worst in a matter of a half a year. Dramatic and fundamental actions were required—and taken in the period between March 1610 and March 1612, when a Third Charter was preliminarily agreed to by James.
Within that time frame the colonists under Gates literally abandoned Jamestown, only to be rounded up and sent back by a new governor, De La Warr. Over the 1609-10 winter seventy-five per cent of the settlers had died. Reports of cannibalism filtered back to England. A new leadership imposed an emergency social-economic-policy system intended to stabilize the few remaining settlers, while the Company sent even more over to replace the dead. This military regime, or penal colony policy system provided the nick in time that allowed Virginia to be a future state, but before 1612 no one could know if it would be successful.
Was Jamestown facing the same fate as had befallen 1606 Sagadahoc?
To its credit, the Company responded to this existential crisis. Not every move or decision it made was the best, or a success, but if things didn’t work out it wasn’t because the Company did not try. The new leadership, with Smythe at the head, and a sort of national coalition with the Parliament MP’s a sizeable force among its shareholders worked together, more or less, to work with the King to engineer one more change in the charter that would make success possible.
In London, one last refinancing, a more detailed company restructure, and in desperation, changes in its settlement business plan that allowed a limited, but sustained, flow of new investors, who over the next thirty years not only thrust the colony deeper into its interior and along its Chesapeake coast, but were also able to make tobacco export work well enough to capitalize their plantations and expand them. But by the 1640’s the Virginia Company had been fired. More than fifteen years earlier its charter over Virginia had been suspended, and it never was to be renewed.
The Third Charter did not work either. Indeed, less than a decade later the Virginia Company was in the midst of an internal coup, a tobacco-laden corporate scandal, and nearly wiped off the planet by an Indian attack that killed one third of the settlers in one day. If the colony survived, however, it was not because the Company led them out of these disasters. It wasn’t able to lead; the Virginians did it themselves.
That is why we focus on this third pivot, the third charter, because in hindsight it was the last restructure of the public-private partnership that conducted the 1606 Virginia experiment. If the 1606 charter sent off a broken public-private partnership, the second and now the third charters were not able to rectify the problems and repair the damage. The Third Charter, the most effective of the three, did provide enough thrust to keep the Company up and running at least to 1621-2, but at that point it began to break apart, literally, and continued to break even more until in 1624 when the king was forced to suspend the Charter and turn Virginia over to the Privy Council for a royal receivership.
The Third Charter allowed the Third Pivot to be implemented during the sixteen “teens”. In the late teens (1619) a more serious restructure of Virginian corporate governance, the Greate Charter, was attempted to bring coherence into the various actions, reforms and initiatives launched during the “teens”. But the Second Powhatan War, a byproduct of the teens also, ended that hope. The Powhatan attack was beaten back eventually, by Virginians who took over the Greate Charter structures and rallied the settlers to hold on and strike back. The Company was no where to be seen. For that matter, neither was the King. Afterward, royal government functioned in London, but day-to-day government in Virginia was led by resident Virginians housed in a loose aggregation of political structures that the King refused to formally acknowledge as legitimate.
The period we now describe then is critical to understanding how the colony survived its existential crises of 1610 and 1622. Through stubborn, individualistic local leadership able to devise its own settlement strategy that overtime would stabilize and even allow for limited small growth over the next two decades. The fundamentals of that strategy, however, were imparted by the Company during the teen years. Amazingly, the reforms and initiatives launched on the borrowed time provided by the Third Charter is what Virginians’ employed to save their colony
What I found amazing, however, is that between 1610- 1611 when the Third Pivot began, there was little that could be described as anything but a military colony. By 1619, however, reforms and initiatives launched by the London Company and the leaders of the military policy system had put in place a rudimentary James River tobacco plantation monoculture with an indentured workforce and establishing and expanding, a local-based level of government (hundreds) created, a powerful economic development-immigrant-investor attraction program in operation, administered mostly by local company officials, their ship captains, and yeoman hangers-on had already installed themselves as Virginia’s local elite. This was to be the most positive features of the Virginia Company heritage. If they are controversial today, they were still the cornerstone on which Virginia, through to the American Civil War, based its various policy systems and economy.
Seven or eight short years with a fabricated new strategy and mastery over the social-economic-political order provided the time needed to partially overcome the disastrous first five years.
Insight into the Dynamics of the 1610-12 Third Charter/Pivot
In the outline/discussion of the course of events that led to the pivot and the Third Charter, we see the London-Virginia Company leadership emerge, but they and their shareholders “hitting a brick wall” in Virginia. Recognizing a serious pivot had to be made—and fast—to save the Company and the Colony, their past investments and their reputation. Making a strong commitment, as they defined it, to do what was necessary to keep the project alive they went through a series of events and launched several initiatives over the next two years that resulted in a third charter.
It also started when its newly sent governor went “down with his ship” during a storm off what is today Bermuda. It got worse when that governor, Thomas Gates, returned to England as a former governor in February 1611. The Company quickly sent him back to replace the Governor De La Warr who had nearly died (he claimed) in May. During that period on a series of actions and events, including a national patriotic campaign to support Virginia’s colonization, brought the king into action supportive of their mission.
In partnership they continued the restructure of the Virginia Company to provide it with leadership capacity sufficient to founding and managing a colony–and the Virginia Company itself. A new round of investment, with new investor types coming on board (for better or worse), a Third Charter was signed making serious changes in the business plan and the company organization. There is a lot that went on during this period.
Significantly, they expanded Virginia Company’s scope to include new-found (Bermuda) Somers Island colony. The key ingredient, however, in these reforms was increasing the autonomy of the Virginia Company from the King so it could, with consent of its shareholders, move in new directions and thereby pursue a more realistic business-investment plan more suitable to a permanent plantation. Accordingly they sent over more settlers to replace those lost, little realizing they were compounding the misery in Virginia. Not realizing the negative impact of hyperactive immigration they sent lots more indentured and freeman settlers over to Virginia to meet the same fate as had befallen previous immigration ships. Still, there was more to the third pivot than shiploads of settlers doomed to die.
In many ways, that immigration created a pivot point for the Powhatan, and led to an intensified First Powhatan War. On the other hand, the military regime in Jamestown did restore order, and for the first time the Company in London, for better or worse, manage the course of events in Virginia. Ironically, the new business plan to be initially implemented in 1612 broke apart the company monopoly and allowed individual entrepreneurism and land ownership outside the company.
Accordingly the below sections, in rough chronological order, describe in detail sufficient to place the reader in that time period. Between 1610 thru 1612 those advocates associated with Virginia and the Virginia company realized they had “got it wrong”, and that if not fixed in a hurry, the venture would almost certainly fail. They were only beginning to realize they didn’t know what they didn’t know, and that colonization-permanent settlement was more complicated than they had realized. With a few exceptions, London had not figured out the colonization paradigm, and surprisingly, they were willing, in some desperation, to take cues from the military administrators they sent over to restore order. That story will be told in the next module.
What proved crippling in the 1610-12 period was the devastating fear of financial bankruptcy was staring them in the face—and they could not get beyond that. Their business plan overlapped the settlement plan, and what they got out of that overlap was the Company had bitten off more than it could chew; it had pursued a corporate monopoly over the colony which made them liable for not only all the decisions (which the Second Charter had only partially address), but the financial implications of supply ships and immigration recruitment, combined with a semi-hostile and unwilling native population, put several nails into the Hakluyt settlement paradigm.
The narrowness of the merchant adventurer investor base could not hope to raise funds sufficient for a permanent endeavor, and the furlong hope that a permanent settlement could be based on a version of the trading factory was leaving behind in its wake a pile of disillusioned old-style colonial investors. The reality the same investors were being pigeon-holed for their money by the new king, and destined for Ireland, meant the traditional selling shares to merchant adventurers was an exercise in futility. Hope spring eternal, and inertia resisted change, but the Company as configured in 1606-09 had recognized the need for change. The share subscriptions of 1609-10 demonstrated the gentry had the funds and were willing to invest. But 1609 investors had been sold a “bill of goods”, that their investment would get the colony back on track, and by the end of 1610 that was outrageously wrong. So now what?
Bumping against these dynamic realities was the 1606 decision to make the Virginia enterprise a private-royal public partnership. On its merits this decision was correct. Colonization required resources that only the royal government had access to; colonization also in a mercantilist age necessarily had to bring on board the sovereign. The new king Scottish James VI was not young, and he brought with him his own ideas—and fears—and presided over the heritage of Elizabeth whose players still roamed the court halls, bureaucracy and peerage. And then there was Parliament. His signature initiative, the Union with Scotland was not approved (sandbagged by an MP named Edwin Sandys), and divine-right do what your told approach, combined with his Catholic tendencies simply put him at odds with the mainstream agenda and practices. And then we had the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot in 1605.
He put his team in order, and Thomas Smythe was a big name player—as was Salisbury, and that provided an opening for the Virginia advocates. Likely Smythe, back from Russia was brought in at the last moment, and he no doubt turned to his compatriots, the merchant adventurers. Into this the 1606 Virginia advocates wandered and they got little out of their First Charter in terms of buy-in to Virginia-Massachusetts settlement. James if anything was interested in Ireland, as were many of his Scottish peers. The 1606 Charter was long on royal dominance, and short on royal buy-in. But the lack of a finance plan and the naïve Hakluyt business plan produced huge deficits from day one.
How it came about I do not know, but in and around 1608 Smythe (and certain of his allies) joined forces with Edwin Sandys (and likely his key allies, including parliamentary MP shareholders) to make a series of decisions that renegotiated the royal public private partnership somewhat, but only sketched out the private corporation that was to inherit colonial decision-making and management-financing. The Second Charter, a step in the right direction, was a classic too little too late, however.
In the meantime, of course, events moved from bad to worse in Virginia. Nevertheless the Gates Expedition was financed, outfitted, and sent off armed with new instructions to replace a Company appointed local council and install a military authoritarian policy system/boot camp that would get things going, find an export to pay the bills opening a door to recover from the incredibly crippling startup costs that brought it to the brink of near-bankruptcy. Gates ran into and onto Bermuda rocks and shoals in a terrible Tempest, and that was the last anyone saw of him—at least for awhile. In any case the loss of Gates set off a reaction which is the substance of this module.
That reaction would culminate in a Third Charter signed in 1612. The Third Charter in summary
- led to a more self-sustaining Virginia;
- a considerable reduction in the expense burden required of a permanent settlement borne by the Company;
- and a new investment drive that raised enough funds to keep it ongoing—until
- (4) new funds—a national lottery—could be approved and implemented.
- Oh yes, as they renegotiated not only the Company organization, but the partnership with James.
Taking advantage of the 1609 Company move to utilize a new regulated joint stock corporation, with the Royal Council bypassed or abandoned, a new more open shareholder decision process was characteristic of this period. It is also important to note that, believe it or not, new well-to-do aristocrat shareholders become involved in the Company, mostly because of the more optimistic prospects associated with Somers Island. We must assume that sub-rosa that campaign also was pursued with agents of the king, and his court. Given Sandys poor standing with those elements, the burden had to fall on Smythe. They convinced the King to sign a third charter that made these actions possible.
Ron W. Coan 