the Road to Tobacco Road

Virginia Company Pivots: Changing Strategies 1613-1619 and Starts Down the Road to Tobacco Road

The key to understanding this module’s message is the central to understanding, not the “cause”, of the installation of the tobacco monoculture in Virginia, but how and when that monoculture was introduced into the Virginia economic base. I assert in this module that the “when” initially happened in the very short period of Virginia’s military policy system and the Greate Charter period, between 1613 and 1622. As such it is well within the heritage and the legacy of the Virginia Company.

That the implications of what transpired during this period were so profound and significant we can further assert this period is also critical for understanding the so-called “First Migration” to Virginia—a period that lasted through the 1650’s. The First Migration, a contentious period of American history, often ignored or depreciated, are the parents of Virginia’s first independent colonial policy system that governed after 1643 and continued through to the Restoration.

After 1613, the Company embraced a series of reforms, most of which revolved around land grants. Dale, it appears relaxed his communal militaristic trading factory practices which were so obviously counterproductive. The communal lifestyle and shared facilities were initially used because they were embedded in the terms of debt issuance and the prospectus that 1606 investors bought into; these practices were closely associated with a trading factory-military post mentality which, before Virginia, was the experience of the Elizabethan period.

Dale, the Deputy Governor in residence. naturally became the focal point in implementation of these initiatives. Of note his deputy George Yeardley was also deeply involved with these reforms—and he was destined to become the interim deputy governor when Dale left Virginia late in 1616. Remarkably, one can read Sir Thomas Dale’s Plan for Revitalizing the Colony”, sent in 1611 to Lord Salisbury, and see the seeds of much of what lie ahead.[99] Warren M. Billings, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 1606-1689 (Ed), (Institute for American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 33-6

Over the following pages the reader will see much asserting the prominent role of Sir Edwin Sandys in the liberalization, revitalization, and reform of the Company’s post 1616 period. Much of Sandy’s reform principles and his so-labeled Greate Charter rested upon the principles and practices that Dale designed and implemented during his tenure as Deputy Governor. No doubt as Treasurer of the Company Sandys was a powerful force for the approval and implementation of the post 1619 reforms, but lurking in the background, I think, is a former Deputy Governor who designed and set the stage for Sandys reforms.

By the time of the Greate Charter, Dale, now an fleet commander for the British East Indies Company had engaged in, and won, a series of naval battles against a Dutch fleet, and secured the relief of key ports in Dutch Indonesia. During and after these engagements, Dale contracted an illness, ironically very similar to the Jamestown “summer seasoning”—and died in August 1619. On the other side of the world, Yeardley and Sandys’ were  engaged in implementing that Greate Charter. Whatever his faults, and he did have them (Indian relations), Sir Thomas Dale is my unsung chief economic developer of the early Jamestown colony.

Our focus in this module is on the land-based reform initiatives, but there were others. In 1616 the Company created a sort of EDO-like entity it called “Society for Particular Adventurers for Traffique with Virginia”, located in London, which imported goods into Virginia, and accepted exports from Virginia for sale in England (early tobacco went through it); called a “magazine’, it was more a transatlantic “company store” that held a terrible reputation in Virginia, but being a monopoly people made do. In 1621 it went bankrupt. Still, the Company store, its Magazine, was in effect a key EDO of the Virginia Company. It handled both import and export trade for the colony; its chief merchant was easily the single most powerful ED official.

Through the Magazine not only did the Company provide for the domestic needs of its settlers, but it was the vehicle the Company looked to for its profits and revenues to pay off its debts. As one would suspect, the Magazine pleased no one, and captured more than its fair share of the blame for the failure of the colony to produce profits for the investors. In any event, the addition of tobacco exports went through this office—at least into 1616; the magazine certainly played a role in the spread of tobacco planting, although it was disrupted during the Argall period.

Intended to be a company monopoly over the export of Virginia’s trade goods, especially tobacco, the 1616 new monopoly was entrusted to a separate subsidiary corporation, with its own board, staff (including cape merchant and “beadle”) future behavior strongly suggests that Treasurer Smythe and his deputy Alderman Johnson hope to use the subsidiary corporation as a sort of “carve out”, a mini-private entity, prone to the interests of its key members on its board. If so it is far from clear whether it served the aspirations of its masters because in 1617 Governor Argall interrupted its ability to garner the produce from the various plantations, and divert it to Argall’s own interests–while being stored in facilities he controlled.

These actions constituted a major cause for London’s perception of Argall as a rogue governor, probably constituted, along with Argall’s transfer of the ancient workforce to Argall’s properties (and the associated treatment of the company’s agent Bennett), the reason for De La Warr to be sent to investigate the Lieutenant Governor. I would also add my suspicion that this organizational carve out for personal benefit was an important motivating factor in the November 1616 request by the Earl of Southampton and the Queen to request an investigation-audit, and suggesting maladministration during the Smythe period. To my mind this had the effect that “firing the guns at Fort Sumter” had on the start of the American civil war. If so, this seemingly obscure initiative in the last days of Dale, by leadership elements in London (undoubtedly led by Smythe) proved every bit as critical as the Dales Gift patents. We shall discuss this and associated material in the next module.

Another set of initiatives involved people recruitment. Certainly by 1613 the Company was well aware of the deficiencies in the quality of its non-gentlemen settler. In a trading factory, this element was composed of today’s “rough-necks” who could serve as a common laborer, a sort of rough and ready militia, and was capable of enduring savage conditions such as trading in the wilderness and digging mines, and rudimentary construction. They were impossible to manage, and this is why the Company relied on its military style and its early governors, including Dale, Yeardley and Argall were military commanders

Artisans on the other hand were obviously needed for a settlement community, and the Company slowly filled its supply ships with more of them as the years went by. The horrific death rate, however, combined with its trading factory military image did nothing to motivate the farmer or the artisan for that matter. There was nothing about a totally male community that added to the attraction magnet. The image was a company dictatorship in a horrible death factory developed.

Until 1618 the Company did not directly challenge that image and so even in that year, a large number of new settlers were sent over at Company expense that continued the old motif. Ninety young prisoners’ from London jails were sent over in 1618, and in the same year a number of convicts were also sent. The “summer seasoning” wreaked havoc among these folk, and all the survivors did was further transform Jamestown in particular into a wild west, Dodge City, atmosphere.

All this is why the land reform initiatives were key in the 1613-1619 period—and why the 1619 Greate Charter centered around their implementation. In the remainder of this module we will describe and assess the implications of each of the following land-based initiatives:

(1) he granted 50 acres to new settlers under terms very close to land ownership that carried generation to generation. But the heart of the Company’s post 1613 incentive program was

(2) its granting of special transfers to specific individuals—usually high-placed, and often within Virginia’s leadership community. These transfers, called “Gifts” established a tobacco-planting plantation as the core unit of Virginia’s agricultural economic base, created the Hundreds, as the basic unit of its sub-provincial system, and diffused the Jamestown population among the new Hundreds;

(3) there were also a number of land grants to voluntary, speculative joint stock “associations” that sought opportunities from plantations to mining, or fishing, but the more successful were “societies of adventurers” that developed plantations and individual manors;

(4) the last initiative transformed employees of the Company into non employee indentured then at first renter, and then near-owner of private land abandoned corporate communal living, the sharing of facilities, and the common community garden. This break from the military, penal approach was the most fundamental and transformative.

Dale’s chief personal innovation, an important one, was his limited allowance to well-behaved existing settlers (ancient settlers they were called) of autonomy from communal life and a homestead property of their own which except for certain annual requirements relieved them of communal labor obligations. This was very successful from its start, and over the next few years more former Company employees were able to set up their own farms apart from the two formal settlements. As regards to members of Jamestown’s gentlemen elite, like John Rolfe, Dale would make grants sufficient to develop a small farm or estate. In this manner Dale cemented his influence over this group—Rolfe named his son with Rebecca (Pocahontas) “Thomas”.

This innovation would catch Deputy Treasurer Sandys’ eye, and he would press hard for its expansion. Herein lies the seeds of what would evolve to be a serious issue in setting up Virginia’s future sub-provincial governance. Accordingly the next section discusses Dale’s “personal” land reform initiatives which he extended to the former employees of the Company and those new settlers who came over, or who were associated with voluntary joint stock corporations that were beginning to send over settlers at their expense (tobacco played a big role in this voluntary joint stock activity, but so did fishing, mining and Indian trade)

The Virginia Context in 1613

The 1612 Third Charter provided sufficient powers and autonomy to the Virginia Company to move significantly beyond the “trading post or trading factory” which had been the standard colonial enterprise until that point. As we have indicated, Smythe and his Deputy Sandys accordingly began a pivot to what I call a settlement strategy. They did so because it appeared necessary to more Virginia to a point of better self-sustainability, thereby relieving the Company of a very expensive supply obligation to send over settlers and their means of sustenance. The “plantation”.

Equally important was the post-1613 expiration of the terms for the financing and administration of the 1606 initial establishment of Jamestown as a colony. The seven year term would expire in 1613, and freed of its confining obligations (based on terms and conditions more particular to a “trading factory” than a permanent settlement) the Virginia Company was able to pivot its Virginia strategies to more effectively confront its perilous state.

In 1610, amazingly Virginia’s population was 350, located in Jamestown and its immediate vicinity. In 1611 a second settlement was founded, and from that point on the population in Virginia gradually dispersed away from the two settlements into adjoining hinterland. In this period the heart of Virginia was the James River. The principal impediment to population growth was the mortality rate (transatlantic and “summer seasoning”), and an undocumented reality many settlers returned to England. About 3,500 came over in its first three years; an estimated 3,000 died. Between 1607 and 1624, 6,000 settlers came over; in 1625, local accounting was 1,200 Virginia residents. http://www.virginiaplaces.org/population/. Under auspices of the Virginia Company nothing close to demographic/economic breakout was achieved.

There were several factors each partially responsible for what was essential not slow growth but no growth. First was the financial capacity of the Virginia Company; there were few pounds available for a promotional campaign of any substance. Secondly, the image of the Company, and of life in Virginia was very negative; there was a reason why the earliest settlers were “ruffians” and ill-disciplined-unskilled labors. Thirdly, little appreciated was during these years English and Scots in particular that wanted out of their homelands went to Ireland—not Virginia. Campaigns were organized to settle Derby (Ireland) and there is where the greatest number of emigres in this period traveled—better the Irish Sea than an ocean trip across the North Atlantic. Finally, it was not before mid-decade (1616) that serious attention/inducements were made by the Company to both interest settlers and make their settlement a genuine opportunity.

Throughout the next decade and half, the colony in all its settlements hovered at best around 1,000 souls (including women and children, such as there were), and at points Jamestown itself numbered fewer than 400. The colony in 1612 lacked an economic base of any nature, a fort whose maintenance was neglected in hard times, and surrounding fields incapable of self-sufficiency without the arrival of increasing numbers of Company-sent supply ships, and new emigrants to replace those who had died in the last summer sickness. The colony was on Virginia Company life-support.

At the start of the colony’s second decade, therefore, Virginia and the London Company remained in serious trouble. As a result of [its] land policy after 1614, settlements were widely scattered, and there was much confusion over land titles. The colony’s economic foundations were as shaky as ever, and the colonists grew more restive when in 1616 [Governor] Samuel Argall returned the colony to the strict discipline in Sir Thomas Dale’s “Lawes”. In London the situation was little better for the company verged on bankruptcy. [99] “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History 0f Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, pp. 10-11

Virginia Plantation’s Business Plan Restructured after 1612 Charter

 Innovation in Virginia’s Military Policy System

Let’s Bend the Virginia Twig

So now we start another module series that begins in 1612 and ends roughly in 1617-8. This series continues to an chronological historical outline with the examination of the Virginia Company and Virginia’s First Migration role and heritage in the bending of Virginia’s policy-society and economic twigs. In the course of this series we segue way from our previous series which closely examined the goings on in England/Virginia from the perspective of the Virginia Company. The main take away is the Virginia Company was broken from its start in 1606, and by even more so 1612 is was a fiscal basket case with little capacity to conduct sustained colony-building in Virginia.

 By that time, Virginia had already imploded and a rescue policy military system was imposed on Virginia in a near-desperate condition trying to make the most out of a second wind from its 1610 abandonment. A victim of a bad business plan and a worse location the Jamestown colony  Virginia-resident military-corporate leadership seemed to be tasked by a negligent London corporate leadership to salvage its business plan through a creative application of the Virginia settlement strategy in the time span allowed by the stability and order which it imposed. That creative adaptation of its settlement strategy and its hopefully positive effect on the fiscal capacity of the Company is the core of the story told in this series.

From my point of view, the Lieutenant Governor in residence, Sir Thomas Dale, was the innovator that led the colony into a series of innovations that in aggregate by the end of 1616 forged a path to a more sustained colony. In fact, I contend that during his brief governance, the defining characteristics of the Virginia colony thought the colonial system—and beyond—were put into place from Dale’s inspiration and his leadership, which was granted great latitude by London whose attention was fixed as much on Bermuda as Virginia. It might be added that any serious involvement by the king and his court in this period is hard to find. They “gave at the office” back in 1612,

So Dale was very much on his own, and his initial steps were both thought out, yet reactive. To his credit he understood the Company’s fiscal incapacity meant he had to uncover the “resources” with which to pay for colony-building—and he turned to land, land sales and grants, and land as an incentive to encourage immigration. Little noticed, other than its reporting, was a major initiative to get away from the hell-hole that was Jamestown. The capital city, the port of Virginia, with an incredibly small population, languished from Dale’s spreading and shredding population dispersal, and the port city was over the next near century treated to a surprising number of urban renewal initiatives that had little to no effect other than provide excellent archeological digs.

Still for the remainder of the century, the small capital city was the center of Virginia’s political life—but never its economy or society. Urbanization, it appears, was not Dale’s strongest suit. Either was transportation; rivers were Virginia’s highways, and mode of defense, and along them were spread a series of isolated, almost miniscule, settlements that grew themselves into clusters of plantations of varying size. Couple with land grants and the plantation, by 1613 Dale conferred upon it the “hundred”, the responsibility to manage local affairs—self defense, export, and tobacco production, by 1621 the larger hundreds also had court systems—and their commanders.

 From his beginning (1611) Dale moved the residents out of the capital city and spread them along the James River. Spreading out meant shredding the Virginia community, polity, and economy; it did utilize the plantation as its central political and economic institution, and by default, whatever came from that constituted his society—its chief characteristic, inequality, was based on a corporate planter and his indentured workforce. By 1619 that also included black slaves.

Dale-Smythe set up, pioneered, with the created a land-based a fiscal system that satisfied his immediate needs, an immigration “machine” that included the former indentured servant, and quickly extended to Virginia’s local corporate leadership, after it paid feasance to the London leadership, which in its turn copied it to create shareholder involvement that proved sustainable, albeit its primary institution, the Company “magazine” or store, never took root, and produced more disharmony, if not corruption. The Virginia planter learned early to bypass it and forge their own connections with the outside world. Sea captains and ship owners, many of them would be Dutch, squirreled their way into Virginia’s economy and politics. They proved to be no substitute for a growing middle class, a hallmark of successful colony-building in later American colonies, but again this was an age of pirates and privateers. This was an elite than proceeded the infamous Tombstone and Kansas City/Texas cattle barons of the American west. That the “wild bunch” ruled the Virginia roost came to reality with Governor Argall.

Dale was able to do all of the above because he found a way to restore relations with the Powhatan. Almost deus ex machina he supported the development of an innovative export crop, tobacco of course, by Virginia’s “entrepreneur in residence” John Rolfe. That greatly pleased (and likely surprised) London, and the king, who by the end of the decade had also embraced found in tobacco what they were always wanted above all: funds for their coffers. Dale was dead by that time (1620-1), but tobacco was already the dominant economic product, and the currency of the realm. It did not take long after Dale left town to root itself into the vehicle of Virginia’s economic stabilization that sustained and served as a metaphor of its existence—even to this day.

This is the story told in this module series.

Who was this Dale guy? He was well-born Anglo-Dutch family, resident in Surrey County England, fluent in at least three languages, Protestant, but of unknown lineage–with some possibility he “married up” in an unknown first marriage. He mixed it up with higher status nobility, even though he claimed his first position was a soldier a Dutch army in the mid to late 1580’s. In these years Dale served with Gates and the two seemingly became friends.

By 1594, a Captain in the English army, by1598-9 he commanded a company of Lord Devereaux’s Irish plantation military arm. Devereaux, Elizabeth’s famous lover the Earl of Essex, founded his own Irish plantation-colony (“Essex’s Enterprise”)–“an unmitigated disaster that failed in two years” but not before Essex’s death shortly after a gruesome massacre of Irish. His son, the Second Earl of Essex, picked up where dad had left off, making war on the Irish during the latter stages of the Nine Years War. It too failed.

Upon his return to England, Robert Devereaux attempted a coup against Elizabeth. He was executed as a traitor and, the reason for this digression, is that Thomas Dale was associated with Devereaux and imprisoned in the Tower until freed by James (or Prince Henry).  He was likely liberated by Prince Henry, the oldest son of James I (who, BTW, was not on the best of terms with Dad); how they met I do not know.  He subsequently fought in a Dutch army in 1604, appointed on the basis of a personal letter of reference by the King of France, Henry IV. [Dale, it appears got around, and mixed it up with some first class historical figures].

James I knighted him in 1606. In 1611, Prince Henry requested the Dutch Estates General to provide “leave” to Dale so that Prince Henry could send him to Virginia. Before he left England for Virginia he got married–and left her at the pier. Prince Henry, the heir to James’s throne, died in 1612–and my suspicion is Thomas Smythe sort of protected him. Whatever else he was, he was an established soldier of fortune, a veteran of foreign wars, and as well-connected as one could be in that day and age. It must also be hinted Dale also had lines of contact that extended to Warwick.

Taking advantage of the 1609 charter, Gates and Dale (who was “admiral of Virginia”) set up the local government of Jamestown–which is actually the state government of Virginia–was installed, composed of the ever fluid top leadership resident in Jamestown. It served with Dale, enhanced his capacity to govern, and even delegate, and that local council over the next decade would evolve into the de facto upper chamber of the Virginia legislature.

Dale’s Military Colony

We start off by understanding what Dale inherited from the troubled years. After Lord Delaware left, Gates and Dale essential “restored order” in Jamestown–assuming that there was some order to be restored, presumably that induced by John Smith in an earlier year. The key strategy was imposing a Draconian system of military justice, known as “Lawes Divine, Morall and Martial“. We could spend several pages on the nature and conduct of this military code, it has fascinated historians who with an exception or two emphasize its harshness, its deprivation of civil liberties, and the just plain miserableness of daily life under its strictures. Without doubt Dale was under instructions from London to bring a military-like discipline and order to Jamestown as they clearly contemplated such a policy system, and their Company Secretary Strachley has written the code himself—although it was added to by Dale later.

Dale is usually credited with being the most harsh of all the governors, and to him is given credit for the rather foul odor and opinion Virginia held among potential English immigrants of the period. In Dale’s defense it seems that some version of a military order was required. It is very evident from Dale’s writing of that period that he viewed the Jamestown colonist whom he was responsible for restoring order, discipline and production, as an entirely despicable body of something less than civilized men. Kenneth Andrews quotes from Dale’s lengthy letter dated 17 August 1611 in which he describes his constituency as  as being forced to Jamestown …

to bring over hither by peradventure and gathering them up in sutch riotious, lasie,and other infected places [such as Jamestown] can intertaine themselves with other thoughts or put on other behaviour than what accompanies such disordered persons, so prophane, so rioutious, so ful of Mutenie and treasonable Intendments, as I am well to witness in a parcel of 300 which I brought with me [on his ship from England to Virginia], of which well may I say not many given testimonie besides their names that they are Christians, besides of sutch diseased, and crazed bodies as the sea hither and the Clime here [in Virginia] but a little searching them, render them so unhable, fainte and desperate of recoveries as of 300, not more than three score [60] may be called forth or [employed] upon any labor or service”. [99] Kenneth R.  Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement (Cambridge University Press, 1964), p.322.

Douglas Bradburn credits Dales’ harshness as issuing from his intense religious, close to biblical fervor [99] Douglas Bradburn, “the Eschatological Origins of the English Empire” in Bradburn and Coombs, Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion [Ed], University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 15-1. Dale was a veteran of wars in the Netherlands and Ireland, and had no doubt seem men at their worst, but the folk in Jamestown seem to have been particularly ungovernable. No doubt he imposed severe and strict governance, with little trace of civil liberties or judicial processes, he did get the attention of these Jamestown residents. As neutrally described by Osgood [99] See the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1, pp.69-72), the code was applied more harshly in the beginning than they were in later years, but in the start colonists were organized to build structures of sufficient quality to not fall apart, and to build an armory separate from the storehouse so that any fire would not get both–and palisades that you could not walk through them.

Dale: Spreading and Shredding: Henrico

Wertenbaker posits that Dale upon arrival “seems to have perceived at once that the chief source of disaster had been the location of the settlement upon the Jamestown peninsula. The small area which at this place afforded for the planting of corn, and the unhealthfulness of the climate rendered it most undesirable as the site for a colony. Former governors had refused to desert the peninsula because of the ease with which it could be defended against the Indians. But Dale at once began a search for a spot which would afford all the security of Jamestown, but be free from its many disadvantages. This he succeeded in finding up the river [99] Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 1607-1688, Princeton University Press, 1958),  p. 21

Wertenbaker wasn’t kidding about “upriver”; Fifty-five miles upriver to today’s Henrico County on the outskirts of Richmond and just off interstate 95. On the peninsula on the north side of the James (Farrar’s Island), Dale platted and settled Henrico (1611), named after his friend, Prince Henry at the time successor to James I (he died in 1612). Three streets were laid out, a fort, houses and a church plus storehouses. Jamestown, was left with a very small population, certainly less than a hundred.

The significance of this move, and the series of smaller settlements established by Dale between 1611 and 1616 (estimated at five) diffused the colony’s population into the upper James River and entrance of the Appomattox Rivers. Gates, a bit later, returned from England in August, 1611, reassuming lieutenant governorship, he dropped off two hundred men, “nearly all artisans” and twenty women (including his wife and daughters) at Jamestown [99] Charles M. Andrews, a History of Colonial America, Vol. 1, p. 113. In the same section Andrews implies that Henrico and the restored Jamestown settlement were directly related to “Dale had taken hold with a firm hand and for the first time bringing the lives and activities of the settlers into a state of order and regularity. He made peace with the Indians, repaired and restored the buildings, and most important of all, founded Dale’s Town (Henrico]. Likely, this exposes the flip side of the military colony coin.

[999] In footnote 1, p.115, Charles Andrews citing a 1619 Sandys’ report offered some tolerance to the firmness of Dale’s governance, and a second letter by Governor Wyatt in 1623, that observed under the conditions of the time firmness was a prerequisite. Deputy Treasurer Ferrar (post 1619) called Dale “that worthy knight and greate advancer of Virginia action”. I further offer that Dale’s application of military authority preceded by a year, the signing of the Third Charter. [999]

Whatever Dale’s intention, Jamestown was restocked with colonists. But new immigrants to Virginia, once aware of Henrico, gravitated upriver and the diffusion of immigrant settlement resulted in the various settlements along the upper and lower James. One might suggest that an alternative history could posit the supposed non-urbanization of early Virginia was a myth; had events proved otherwise, it is possible Henrico, part of Richmond metro today, could have evolved into a city of some size.

Dale wrote of Henrico  “I have surveyed a convenient, strong, healthie, and sweet seate to plant the new town in, from whence might be  no more remove [than]… the principal Seate. [99] T. J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, p. 21. The sequence of history that followed Henrico left in tact the default diffusion of immigrants out of Jamestown into and around, the settlements of the James, and then as other rivers were settled into them as well. Diffusion of population was not “planned”, or intended by the Company, but rather became the “default”, as Jamestown’s healthfulness never improved for the next twenty years. New investor-sponsored settlements, as will be described shortly, found locations away from Jamestown, providing yet more alternatives for new settlers.

“Between 1613 and 1619 the colonists moved southward from Henrico to the mouth of the Appomattox River and palisaded the Bermuda Hundred [a hundred plantation to be discussed below] … The area son became the most populated in the colony. By 1634 when counties were established the map of the colony clearly indicated that region had evolved into the population core of the Colony at that time. Henrico bright future effectively ended in the morning of March 22,1622 when it was virtually wiped out in the initial Second Powhatan surprise attack. It never recovered, but lingered on until consumed by Mother Nature and today is a series of ruins and digs.  [99]  Ronald L. Heinemann, et al, a History of Virginia, 1607-2007 (University of Virginia Press, 2007),  pp. 26-7; https://henrico.us/history/colonial-era/

Henrico deserves comment as it could have become a new capital, thereby diverting attention from Jamestown. That Henrico was overrun in the first hours of the Second Powhatan War (and Jamestown saved by an early report by an Indian) less than eleven years later, calls attention to the very close interrelationship of English settlement and tension with the Powhatan. In 1611, the year of its founding, Virginia, and Dale were engaged in the First Powhatan War, and military security was key. Dale appointed a commander for the settlement, and that office, we will discover will evolve into the future chief county court judge. A further note, Henrico was also where Rolfe founded his granted plantation (Varina Plantation) in 1612, across the river from Henrico. Rolfe, by then Secretary of the Colony, it might be added, probably was killed in the first hours of the Second Powhatan opening attack as well.

The vulnerability of Henrico and surrounding area to the Powhatan suggests that the English traded Jamestown’s poor health for smaller settlements more vulnerable to the Powhatan and other powerful tribes—creating an even worse irritant to the neighboring tribes—in effect jumping from the frying pan into the fire. In a section below, I will further explore this dynamic and suggest that the “spreading” of the early colony led to the “shredding” of its community integrity, creating over the next generations “the shredded (isolated, vulnerable, small scale population clusters) that became the hallmark of colonial Virginia, and the underlying large plantation-dominated local policy system).

It might also be noted that Dale might not have been insensitive to the tension induced by such close contact, as Dale required of his military colony “that they become less dependent on the Powhatans, they began planting corn, bringing in a tolerable crop in 1612. By 1614 they had introduced the vegetables of an English garden: peas, onions, turnips, cabbage, cauliflower, and carrots” [99]  Ronald L. Heinemann, et al, a History of Virginia, 1607-2007 (University of Virginia Press, 2007),  pp. 27

 

Dales’ Land Reforms: Employee and New Settler Provided a Path to Private Landowner

The most critical feature of early Jamestown’s economic base–and its most crippling–there was no private property–for the elite as well as freeholders and indentured. With nothing to buy, there was little need for a currency. Even its officials were paid no salaries. Everything that came over on the supply ship, including its passengers, were tied by contract, investment, or indenture to the Company. Anything they did, any goods or services they produced, belonged to the Company–and all stores were in the company storehouse. This was Sparta on the James River.

Described as a  semi-socialist economy, workers daily output went into company storehouses, and even the often-attacked gentlemen were sent off in pursuit of finding the company’s future export product. The need to grow local foodstuffs, being so compelling meant the resident council focused on agriculture, garden plots and outlying fields and the like. If there was an economic base in these early years, it was going to be agricultural. Buildings were company shared. Even the resident council worked under these rules. Remarkable, Bermuda never embraced pure company ownership structure and for its beginning tapped into what they begrudgingly started in 1612 Virginia.

Dale puts a toe in the water: 1612

But all good things must come to an end. By 1612 the Company issued shares in the form of land grants to itself for its own use (in lieu of salaries). As to the indentured servants, a state somewhere ranging from property of the Company to its bound in service employee, they were awarded only at completion of service, starting in 1613. This is downplayed in many Jamestown histories, but there is little doubt that one of Jamestown’s most serious deficiencies that contributed to its rough start was whoever hard one worked in the fields, all produce went into the Company storeroom, and was shared among all at the dinner table.

The gentlemen, freeholders, were more loosely tied to this shared workforce in the sense most had probably traveled not to work the fields, but to scour the land for stuff to export-furs, minerals, fish, lumber, and marine-related–which at one point in that stressed period had been gold–because the Company was upset it was being sent back fools gold instead of the real thing. One might add that scouring the land was dangerous on a number of levels, and anything that was sent back to the Company for sale was not a solo enterprise and meant numbers of colonists were about the countryside on one project or another.

The need to work hard to produce local foodstuffs, including fishing, was further complicated by the terms of the charter, labor contracts, and debt agreements which committed the Company to supply colonists for all their needs, including housing and meals. Cattle and livestock were Company property, and were cared for accordingly. The Company took pride in this as it promised shareholders  “the produce of the colonist labor, when exported, was the property of the company and sold for its benefit … colonists had no right to export for themselves … economic conditions indicate the colony as like a private estate” [99] L. D. Scisco, “the Plantation Type of Colony“, the American Historical Review (Jan 1903, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 261.

Whatever his predisposition to martial order and use of harsh punishments, Dale put into effect during 1612 his rejection of the work-in-common and the use of a company storehouse for the colony’s food and produce. Historian Virginius Dabney, no friend of Dale’s, credits him with “recognizing the value of private initiative by assigning small plots of land to worthy settlers. They were told they could grow crops for their own benefit. The results were electric, and production increased almost immediately. The discredited system based on communal ownership was never permitted to return” [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia the New Dominion (University Press of Virginia, 1971), p. 23.

Corn was introduced as the staple crop in 1612; specific individuals were assigned to grow it, and, he allowed greater flexibility in assigning private plots allowing the “renter” to keep a portion of the produce. “Soon after Dale’s arrival, perhaps in response to a petition already presented to Gates, he consulted the council … [to] allot each man a ‘private garden‘”. [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1 (Macmillan, 1904), p. 75. From the start it seems, Dale was sensitive to the lack of a private economy, and for one reason or another, focused on “land”, and the use of land as linked to the introduction of private imitative into the Company town’s economic base.

[999] I will not focus on the Company store, its “Magazine”, which was in effect a key EDO of the Virginia Company. To not mention it will not provide the reader with the means by which the Company was to benefit from our first focus, the planting of tobacco. The Magazine handled both import and export trade for the colony; its chief merchant was easily the single most powerful ED official. Through the Magazine not only did the Company provide for the domestic needs of its settlers, but it was the vehicle the Company looked to for its profits and revenues to pay off its debts. As one would suspect, the Magazine pleased no one, and captured more than its fair share of the blame for the failure of the colony to produce profits for the investors. In any event, the addition of tobacco exports went through this office—at least into 1617, and it certainly played a major role in the spread of tobacco planting; in that period the Magazine enjoyed a monopoly.

We will expand on this introduction later, but the take away at this point is the Company did have a structure in place to exert, potentially, if not actually, economic influence on whatever product resulted from its land transfers. The Company was very much able to garner the tobacco, that’s what was important and to export it to England. The office of “Cape Merchant” was indeed powerful, its occupant being the Company’s resident economic czar. [999]

This reform mostly benefited freemen who paid their own way over to Virginia, making them freeholders (owners of property), and who from that time on were able to figure out on their own how to achieve what it was Virginia could offer them. For the bulk of the others, indentured servants to the company, the matter was more complicated.

Starting In 1612, Dale relaxed martial law, and systematically pursued a Jamestown urban renewal program, restoring the fort, laying out a street pattern with a market area, built more housing, and a church, plus a separate armory for storage of gunpowder and the like. For the first time, Jamestown took on the look and feel of a permanent settlement. Most importantly from my perspective Dale tackled the fundamental task of building a permanent economic base, and finding a way to retain a workforce in Virginia after the term of indenture expired. His intention was to transform the “ancients”, those very few indentured who survived their contracts, into a private workforce that produced food and goods willingly for their own self-interest—putting a nail in the coffin of the company’s original settlement plan in the process.

Corporate-Military Culture to General Society

Sociologist Sigmund Diamond tackled the little-noticed change from the 1611 penal colony-corporate culture in his “From Organization to Society”.

[99] Sigmund  Diamond, “From Organization to Society: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century”   ‘ the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. LXIII, No. 5, March, 1958, pp. 457-

Outlining the dynamics and shifts he provided some conceptual and historical explanation of the “society” that emerged in the last decade of the Virginia Company. Building upon that transition serious scholars, such as Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, and others to be sure, would develop a more robust and vibrant sense of the Chesapeake society that matured in the following decades. Our more limited purpose, at this point, is to demonstrate the shift from a corporate-military policy system to a more general society, not by any means “open”, and not by any means anarchistic, occurred during the Virginia Company “watch”, and is an important and legitimate element of the Virginia Company heritage in the development of Virginia.

Diamond asserts, perhaps too vigorously, that Virginia’s colonization “had to be undertaken as a private business venture” for which the king provided “some legal protections—and sometimes precious little of these” (p. 459). Accordingly, Virginia was “property” granted by the king through charter to the Virginia Company and its shareholders, and appropriately it was “established to return a profit to the shareholders of that company (p. 459). Diamond’s list of the initiatives specified as the essential mission of its colonization effort are drawn from the instructions provided to the first 1606-7 expedition, and further on his belief that the overall mission was drawn from that of the East Indies Company is more aggressive than I have developed in my narrative.

Still, his distillation of the Company and its mission and legal status of the Virginia “property” does not meaningfully depart from my notion of a rudimentary public partnership with James I entrusted to the joint stock company, the Virginia Company of London through a charter. It was in its essence “a private estate which in the absence of an amenable local labor force was worked on the basis of imported labor.  Basic policies were laid down by the General Court of the Company … the management and direction of affairs were untrusted to agents of these shareholders and the supervision of those who labor in Virginia was necessary for the attainment of the Company’s objectives in the hands of officials appointed in London (p. 461)

Accordingly, those sent by the Company to Virginia, Diamond asserts, “not citizens of a colony they were the occupants of a status in … the Company’s table of organization, and the status was that of workman [with the civil rights of an English citizen implied] but what counted in Virginia was that they should accept the directions of their superiors and that they should be willing to work” (p. 462). In my words, the residents sent to Virginia were employees of the Company, and subject to its direction and supervision from London. I then insert the Company’s delegation of these directives to a council it appointed is transferred to that body. Diamond also spends time in detailing the difficulty in attracting immigrants to work in Virginia and accordingly a contract of indenture was entered into to convey those obligations on a workforce in return for its transportation and supplies, etc., needed to sustain them during the contract.

Diamond then proceeds in an extended narrative of the initial years of Jamestown and the difficulty the Company encountered during those years in fulfilling the terms of its mission and maintaining the control over its employees under the conditions and realities found in Virginia. Seemingly acknowledging Dale’s land reforms making land grants to these employees in return for their work does not change their status as employees (p. 466).

Diamond also introduces the military-like code of law Dale (and others) imposed on these employees after 1610, observing that “Ultimately, however, the Company relied upon a military regimen and upon the imposition of force to obtain labor discipline”. [In so doing] Dale created a military rank for every person in Virginia and specified the duties of each in such a way as to provide us with important clues into the nature of labor discipline and what was expected to provide the motivation to work.” (pp. 467-8). In essence Diamond asserts over the years the Company created a number of “status’ position for each of its employees” as it adjusted to the realities of the colony in its efforts to satisfy the corporate mission and its objectives.

Mercifully, Diamond brings this to a point where he acknowledges that labor discipline, a necessary stream of immigrants to fill the various status, changes in the demographic profile (women and lots indentured children), plus land grants of various size were simply no longer adequate to relieve the internal tensions of its Virginia workforce—and that further action by the Company was then required. That resulted in the formulation and implementation of what we now call as the Greate Charter.(p. 470). But that too could not accommodate the tensions, as the corporate institutions created by that initiative, in particular, the General Assembly, conveyed powers to that body that seriously challenged the control over its employees at which time

For the planters in Virginia [which we suggest is typified by those transported by investors to hundreds and their plantation] considerations such as length of residence and of varying degrees of freedom [free holder versus indentured for example] now affected the rights and obligations of persons [Virginia residents]. No longer could relations be determined exclusively  by the positions persons held within a single system—the organization of the Company.

By 1619 Virginia was becoming a society in which behavior was in some way determined by the totality of positions each person held in a network of sometimes complementary, sometimes  contradictory relationships. The key to this transformation from organization to society lies in the consessions the company was forced to offer to induce persons to accept positions in the organizational relationship [as employee of the Virginia Company or as resident of Virginia]; for those consessions so multiplied the number of statuses and so altered the status of persons that a system of relationships was so created where only one had existed before

Diamond finally observes that “once Virginians had been governed administratively through a chain of command originating in the Company’s General Court [its London shareholder annual meeting]. [But] Now an authentic political system existed, and the members of the [Virginia] Assembly [the Company’s shareholder body and its meetings]… Once all land had been owned by the Company. Now much of it was owned by private persons, and even more had been promised to them, and the opportunities for the creation of private fortunes involved the planters in a new relationship with the Company [pp. 471-2] That the Company could no longer expect to command obedience was clear, for even its officers in Virginia perceived themselves of having a set of interests distinct from their London superiors and turned their backs to [London’s] authority [p. 473]

I concede Diamond’s article is about as “awkward” an explanation for the evolution of what had been a private business endeavor, whose Virginia labor force consisted of its employees, to a position whereby the preconditions and aspirations for a society had been created and expressed by the employees in Virginia, thereby rendering obsolete the old relationship. The problem is, however, that essentially happened. As devised in its charters, the Virginia Company’s relationship to its “property” was too restrictive and inflexible”, and the Company’s shareholders too unresponsive to Virginia’s needs and increasing obvious dysfunction, torn as they were to their need to satisfy their debt obligations and pledges to shareholders and the internal civil war that rendered the company incapable of consensual policy-making, led them into a situation that only the King’s 1624 suspension of their charter provided a way out.

Thus it is likely it was no accident that the form of joint stock company that was the Virginia Company was never again employed as the agent or vehicle of English colonization. Instead, a proprietary joint stock corporation was devised and used by the Stuarts during the remainder of their dynasty [the case of Massachusetts, which had by 1625 proceeded under the Virginia Company [Plymouth Colony] was somewhat rectified by the 1626 Bay State Charter under a reformed Virginia Company, the New England Council]

Dale’s Pivot to Permanent Settlement

1612 was Dale’s pivot in his stabilization, reform initiatives. During 1613, and each year after, he increased the tempo, with an important add-on: interaction with London-based initiatives. For the reader this period is very critical to understand as Dale’s initiatives in this period amount to a major transformation and an attempt to construct a meaningful settlement strategy that would break away from the company monopoly, mitigate its military order, allow for the innovation and initial production of tobacco, and the first manifestations of economic development, land-based incentives that incorporated with came to be called “headrights”—a program that aimed a t people-attraction through investor plantation development. All this was done in conjunction with Dale’s earlier spreading and shredding of Virginia’s population along the James and adjacent areas. As such relations with the Powhatan became even more important and Dale needed, even if he did not naturally gravitate toward a peace with his Indian neighbors.

This very brief period is important to my underlying assertion that is critical to my history; in this period we see the intensification of spreading and shedding, the introduction of tobacco, and the construction of a series of economic development programs and incentives that not only dominated Virginia through the colonial period, but were carried over in various versions to future North American English colonies. Sadly, the peace with the Powhatan did not hold and ended shortly in the early twenties. Finally, in these few years we can see how these programs and dynamics commenced the formation of a resident company elite whose domination was loose, marginally open, yet powerful, and the permanent birth of Virginia inequality of workforce and society that is a hallmark of the colony’s long term legacy.

Dale’s initiatives supported and supplemented by company officials in London, changed the character of the business plan, settlement strategy, and greatly affected the stability of the Virginia Company by further fragmenting the consensus of its shareholder and governance councils, but the turn of the Company to land as their primary incentive was both natural and probably inevitable as land was what the company and any new colony would have in plentitude.

That historians of note, Craven and Charles Andrews for example, felt it necessary to comment that the Company in London transformed itself in a land-distribution entity rather than a leader of Virginia’s settlement policy and that administration of that settlement policy was in the hands of a largely unmonitored resident company elite had major, policy and developmental repercussions that would constitute the core of the Virginia Company legacy for its colony.

What we see between 1613 and early 1617 are the first small steps for permanent settlement, and the true start of the First Migration into Virginia. While Virginia-based company officials did not enjoy statutory powers of governance, which were held in London, the de facto reality was that London’s exercise of day-to-day governance was weak to nonexistent.  London’s incapacity, even will, to extend itself into Virginia affairs provided from the start a decentralization of governance that amounted to almost fundamental self-governance in Jamestown.

Early colonial Virginia was handling her own affairs; the colony’s problem was just the opposite—London did little or nothing to provide the resources necessary for the settlement strategy to take off—nor did the king. His involvement was minimal and would not pick up until he saw tobacco trade as a means to raise funds for his use in 1620-2. Virginia’s fate, being founded in the years during which England drifted into Civil War under the rule of a new dynasty that did not understand or fully commit to colonization proved to be a very powerful answer to our question of why Virginia is different from the English colonies that followed.

Hopefully, the reader will perceive that the above assertions constitute the very first steps and initial dynamics which over the next half-century would harden and deepen into a distinctive Virginia policy system and economic base. Nothing in these years was inevitable, and change in later years could have moved Virginia in different directions. In fact for the next two or so decades after Dale, there will be major efforts to reshape the trends started in this period—but on the whole they came to naught.

That all this reform was Dale’s innovation is supported by his published plan of action. One can read Sir Thomas Dale’s “Plan for Revitalizing the Colony”, sent in 1611 to Lord Salisbury, and see the seeds of much of what lie ahead. [99] Warren M. Billings, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 1606-1689 (Ed), (Institute for American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 33-6. It my contention that Dale is the author, and in this period, prime mover in a series of initiatives, programs, structures that set in motion the laying of Virginia’s initial economic base–through 1618. Dale, the Deputy Governor in residence. naturally became the focal point in implementation of these initiatives. Of note, his deputy, George Yeardley, was also deeply involved with these reforms—and was destined to become the interim deputy governor when Dale left Virginia late in 1616.

After 1613, the Company embraced a series of reforms, most of which revolved around land grants. It is likely we are seeing the initial response of Smythe, likely Sandys to some extent, to the opportunities the new 1612 charter made available, and they likely took small steps to allow well-placed, and well-heeled investors to send offspring, friends, and associates to Jamestown to pursue whatever opportunities they devised. Simultaneously, the original 1606 debt obligations, was also terminating, and with it expired the seven year contracts between the Company and its first year indentured settlers. Although few in number they were a bloc of potential long-term settlers whose return to England would only promote the bad image of the Virginia colony.

After 1613 in small annual increments. Since the Company could not raise the capital it needed to keep the colony afloat, it needed to attract permanent settlers in a geography perceived as a death trap by the general population. It quickly became apparent to Sandys, and everybody else, the most desperate problem Virginia faced if it was to succeed at a permanent settlement was attracting and retaining a workforce.

The best candidates were those who had survived the death trap, its former indentured company servants who had completed the term of their contract. The first sizeable grouping (still very few in absolute numbers) became available in 1614. Most indentured servants had died, or would return to England, but Governor Thomas Dale saw an opportunity to create his  needed workforce, a group already socialized into Virginia. And so he devised a program to retain his former indentured servants. He was assisted by Sandys who continued to use company funds to send over a small army of indentured servants–often surprisingly young boys “recruited” from London and other large English cities, and even a few young maids. Given that an estimated seventy-five percent of those resident in Virginia during this period were indentured servants, we can see the potential in developing this grouping into permanent residents and workers.

Accordingly, Dale made an offer to these soon-to-become freeholders they could not refuse.  As a indentured contract expired, Dale rented out three acres to each in return for a month’s service and a donation of corn for the common store. He added more substance to this initial deal in 1614 when he allotted small tracts of land to these expired servants and new ones, in which they paid a quit-rent [let’s call this a property tax-but its payment made the former servant a landowner] and one month’s labor.  By the end of the year, 1614, there were eighty-one such “farms” [99] L. D. Scisco, “the Plantation Type of Colony”, the American Historical Review (Jan1903, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 265.Over the next several years, these agreements were expanded and were linked to the “hundreds program to be discussed shortly.

As for the investors, few had actually ventured to Virginia, but more sent their offspring and relatives-associates over and these were the proverbial gentlemen we associate with those starving quarrelsome first years. Until 1614 most colonists who went to Virginia were either “gentlemen” or {their] “servants”, i.e. employees of the Company who paid their expenses through service of seven years [99]  “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, p. 11.

The 1612 charter, however, opened another alternative. An London investor could assume the role and function of an “plantation undertaker” who recruited a colonist, paid their bills-transport, and sent them over to found a new enterprise-farm-plantation in the New World. For these new settlers Dale offered twelve acres of improved land, rent free for one year. Dale extended upon that by also making outright land grants (between 12 and 50 acres of cleared land with one year quitrent abatement) to new settlers immigrating into the colony) to these investor-linked adventurers.

At first glance, Dale has inaugurated a rather simple land development program. But there is a lot more involved because it was in fact a radical break with the previous Company monopoly over land, resources, and whatever else was found in Virginia. Dale in 1612 was institutionalizing private ownership of land in Virginia—for the first time in English North America. It was successful, as these initiatives went in 1616. By 1616 the number of “tenant-farmers on company land outnumbered those bound to regular [indentured service” [99] L. D. Scisco, “the Plantation Type of Colony”, the American Historical Review (Jan1903, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 265.

So, within several years, the Company converted these contracts to ownership rights. Renter or owner, these former servants were now mostly free laborers, and to the extent their contract with Dale allowed, they were able to do what they wanted with the land and their households. They had rights as English citizens, and held some autonomy to pursue economic and personal aspirations. In effect, land had become “capital” for the Company to use to pay off its obligations to the Jamestown settler community—and from the Company’s perspective, the employee had been converted into a “corporate citizens” complete with English civil and property liberties.

Through these new institutions the Company could secure the implementation of its initiatives, and exercise its powers of land and the economy. As Billings asserted: “The clear intent of the new program was to transplant as much of tradition English social [and economic order as the Virginia wilderness and the colonists particular circumstances would allow.] [99] “The Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, p. 11.

The number of surviving inducted servants was not large; most “ancient settlers” (that’s what they were called at the time) rested in the cemetery, rotting in their own company land grant. But it did create a free-booting domestic land owner able to settle at his own volition, and do with his private land as he shall. It was hoped and intended by the Company that the private landowner would assume the obligation to support himself with staple food himself. He did, but, as we shall see, tobacco, the weed, raised its ugly stalk, and that fledgling farmer had other opportunities. If he planted tobacco, he planted less corn and vegetables. To fill the gap he traded with nearby Indians, or, if they were unwilling he raided their fields. This, it seems, became a way-of-life that developed in this period and carried on for the next half-century.

In 1617 Yeardley made a final adjustment to the expiration of servant contracts ending as Osgood put it “the system of joint management as applied to land (or company owned land tilled by renter contracts) which dominated the lower settlements and Henrico. Private ownership of land in Virginia became the freeholder default, and the eventual reward of an indentured servant. While I will spare the reader the details, the title to this land was not clear and unambiguous as ultimately all Virginia was land personally owned by the King/Queen. This is an important detail which will be vital to understanding post-Virginia Company politics.

Dales’ Early Land Reforms: Employee, Investor Shareholder and New Settler Provided a Path to Private Landownership and Spreading of Population

Until 1614 most settlers who went to Virginia were either “gentlemen” or “servants”, i.e. employees of the Company who paid their expenses through service of seven years [99]  “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, p. 11. As Dale began to break that communal pattern and initiate the first land grants to these servants, he had set in motion a fundamental change in the Company’s relations with its “servants” and employees.

Besides the original 1606 debt obligations, another set of 1606 (and following) contract was also terminating—the seven year contract between the Company and its settlers which converted the latter into employees, very close to, but not indentured servants. Accordingly, in 1613-4 these employee agreements were expiring and accommodations had to be made. As a contract expired Dale rented out three acres to each former servant in return “for a month’s service and a donation of corn for the common store”.

At the same time, for new settlers Dale offered twelve acres of improved land, rent free for one year. Dale extended upon that by also making land grants (between 12 and 50 acres of cleared land with one year quitrent abatement) to new settlers immigrating into the colony. Say it another way, Dale is institutionalizing the private ownership of land in Virginia—for the first time in North America. George Yeardley as Deputy Governor in 1617 made his final adjustment to the expiration of servant contracts ending as Osgood puts it “the system of joint management as applied to land (or company owned land tilled by renter contracts) which dominated the lower settlements and Henrico. A great deficiency in this land transfer was that land titles were unclear, and land ownership was a personalized relationship between Dale and the settler which implied more renter than owner in the behavior of the “owner”.

 So, within several years, the Company converted these contracts to ownership rights. Renter or owner, these former servants were now mostly free laborers, and to the extent their contract with Dale allowed, they were able to do what they wanted with the land and their households. They had rights as English citizens, and held some autonomy to pursue economic and personal aspirations. In effect, land had become “capital” for the Company to use to pay off its obligations to the Jamestown settler community—and from the Company’s perspective, the employee had been converted into a “corporate citizens” complete with English civil and property liberties.

Craven carries this reform initiated in Virginia over to the London fiscal situation. He observed that by 1616 the seven year term of debt (from the 1609 charter-related issuances and debt) matured, the Company “had only land to offer by way of dividend, and possessed not even sufficient funds to meet the administrative costs of such a division” [i.e. implement the policy in Virginia]. So the investors and debtors were notified by a “printed notice of a plan to provide now only a preliminary of ‘first’ dividend of fifty acres per share, [for which implementation was possible] the division to be made of those lands lying along the James ‘in our actual possession”.

This land dividend, however, was available only on payment to the Company of a L12 ,10 shillings to pay the cost of a governor and a survey. When the Company was in a position to make further dividend payments, perhaps as much as two hundred acres, it would issue a second dividend. Craven further suggests this offer was also extended to “non-adventurers” [shareholders] who were willing to venture over to Virginia. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 116-7 As might be expected, the use of Dale’s land reforms did not play well in London, and the inability to pay dividends and reduce debt still drained the capacity of the Company to effectively settle the colony through the early and mid teens.

Optimistically, however through these new initiative the Company hoped it implement its initiatives, and continue to exercise its powers of land and the economy thereby being still in conformity to the company and partnership mission. As Billings asserted: “The clear intent of the new program was to transplant as much of tradition English social [and economic order as the Virginia wilderness and the colonists particular circumstances would allow.] [99] “The Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, p. 11. Craven is willing to admit that by 1617 “new interest stirred [the Virginia Company]. The sources of this interest were varied, but at its heart will be found a reviving hope for individual advantage through ownership of [Virginia’s] land. Though the Virginia Company’s failure had recently seemed well-nigh complete, on second glance it appeared that the company must be credited with one solid achievement. Some of the land had been won from the wilderness and was now [to be] placed at the disposal of all who had the courage to take it. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 120-1

Old planters like Martin, Hamor and Argall, together with certain of the adventurers who saw an advantage in associating themselves with those experienced leaders by pooling shares, had been among the first to respond. In the months that followed the public announcement in 1616 of plans for a land dividend, the company offered a grant in proportion to the number of shares thus pooled, and an additional allowance of fifty acres for every person transported at the charge of the grantees, an offer containing features basic to Virginia’s subsequent land policy”. In other words desperation forced the London Company to build on its land ownership as payment for debt and to encourage immigration by converting the investor into an active and fundamental role in the settlement of the colony—thus taking it off the back of the Company. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 120-1

The numbers of investors were not large. Most ancient settlers rested in the cemetery rotting in their own company land grant, but these new land program innovations did promise to create a free-booting domestic land owner able to settle at his own volition, and do with his private land as he shall. It was hoped and intended by the Company that the private landowner would assume the obligation to support himself and any household he had. But that meant the individual may disturb peace with Native Americans or even worse not plant crops which he could eat, but plant tobacco for export—leaving the Company with obligation of feeding him. To Dale’s (and his successor Yeardley) this did not work out; instead of corn needed for self-sufficiency, these free laborers planted tobacco.

If necessity is the mother of invention, we can finally see in the period 1616-17 the Company had finally devised a series of land-based policy innovations, to attract private investor pools of capital directly into Virginia lands granted to them by the company, in return for which the investors transported and saw to the maintenance of the settlers in Virginia. We have come to know these land grants as headrights”, and we can now see their birth and the reason for their acceptance as the Company’s principal tool for permanent settlement.

When Dale introduced his Plantation and Hundreds initiative in 1613-14 he linked homestead plots to each of the Hundreds, and therefore broke up the Jamestown population and diffused a good number into the hinterland on their own homesteads. Tobacco soon took off, its price high and so, as discussed, the new homeowners chiefly planted tobacco in their plot.. The upper settlements were converted to renter three year contracts, and the remainder in the lower settlements to grants of land in fee simple—i.e. land ownership [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1 (Forgotten Books, 2021, reprint of the MacMillan Company, 1904), pp. 76-7; I would add the population statistics do not include women and children, and they are drawn from a letter written by Rolfe to the Earl of Warwick (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eighth Report II, no. 208).

This little appreciated reform introduced by Dale represents one of the most significant initiatives of the Virginia Company. Dale is making the transition from settlers who were essentially employees under contract to the Company, into individual landowners, or renter in process to become landowners on lands formerly owned by the Company and given in payment for service to the Company by these employees.

Tobacco, John Rolfe, the Mono-Culture, and its Impact on English Colonial Trade Policy

The Road to Tobacco Road

Joseph Dorfman says its succinctly and sprightly: With tobacco production, of all things, turning out to be the profitable staple, a new chapter opened. The King had long ago written a tract against the ‘smoky weed’, and enlightened opinion agreed with him that it damaged the people’s morals and wasted the nation’s wealth. The company was of the same opinion, but it declared that its production would provide the funds for developing the really worth-while staples which would eventually replace it. The Crown resolved its dislike of tobacco and the need for revenue by placing a tax on the import, and ‘for the better support of the colony’, it prohibited the domestic production of tobacco. Tobacco even became the standard of value and medium of exchange of the colony [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865, Vol. One (Viking Press, 1946), p. 17

Tobacco proved nearly the ideal staple commodity from a mercantilist perspective; it permitted the English to acquire a commodity from a colony rather than on the international market [from an enemy and hostile power at that]; it created a processing industry in England and a valuable product for reexport; it attracted capital and labor to profitable employment across the Atlantic; and it provided Virginians the means to purchase manufactures and commercial services in the English market. [99]  John J. McCusker & Russel R. Menard, the Economy of British America, 1607- 1789 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1985, 1991),  p. 118

Less appreciated today is that tobacco had already embedded itself in England itself. We might compare it to marihuana consumption pre-2016. My socks ran up and down when I discovered that tobacco cultivation IN ENGLAND, “inconsiderable in Elizabeth’s reign”, but within the first fifteen years of the [seventeenth century] confidence in the virtues of the herb increased greatly”, and that instruction manuals of how to plant tobacco (“An Advice How to Plant Tobacco in England and How to bring it to Colour and Perfection”, 1615) were flooding English bookstores. This was a sort of “grow your own” movement! Expensive Spanish tobacco was the good stuff; Indian tobacco was the bad stuff, and then Rolfe’s tobacco arrived on the market. Tobacco was almost underground, sinful luxury good that transcended English classes; so popular, it fetched a high price for quality tobacco.

Tobacco was the marihuana of its day. Disliked by traditionalists for its corrupting influences and the decline in moral values; hated by both James and Charles I, and regarded by English upper classes as simple pestilence, the popular culture picked it up and not only smoked it, but producing it locally England developed its own private cultivation and sale at a suirprising scale. Tobacco was the rage of English consumption when Rolfe’s first casks were unloaded in 1614 London. Tobacco was already being sold there “in every tavern and ale-house, and in so many other places also that in London in 1614 contained … seven thousand shops where it could be obtained and Englishmen spent 200,000 pounds a year for it” [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, Vol. IV, pp. 13-14

The chief source of English-imported tobacco was Spain and that was an easy target for Virginia lobbyists in their appeals to Parliament and King for a Virginia monopoly. If Virginia could secure legislation supported by a royal edict then it had a monopoly in English production; there would be no stopping its expansion. In 1621 James I issued that edict giving to Virginia a monopoly of English tobacco (Spanish tobacco could be imported but a stiff tariff was applied).

If timing is everything, Rolfe’s timing was impeccable. From four hogsheads in 1614, to 20,000 pounds by 1618 of tobacco–demand was insatiable, by 1630 it had increased to 500,000 pounds [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion, p.25 Kukla asserts these numbers understate the rapidity of tobacco production. He claims 2300 pounds in 1616, 40,000 pounds in 1618 at three shillings per pound, than by 1622 60,000, and by 1626 260,251 pounds at a shilling a pound [99] Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos, p. 284. Lost in this gold rush was that tobacco was meant for export to England—there was only so much 400 Jamestown residents could smoke. Tobacco was intended to be an export-based cluster from its beginning. This was the revenue source that would sustain the Virginia Company, bleed it off the national lottery, and attract immigrants and investors willing to come to Virginia for fame or fortune.  Hooked on tobacco meant exporting it–and the Company had found its provident revenue source, and its investors new motivation. Bermuda would follow in Virginia’s wake.

 

At the start of the colony’s second decade [the teens] therefore, Virginia and the London Company remained in serious trouble. As a result of [its] land policy after 1614, settlements were widely scattered, and there was much confusion over land titles. The colony’s economic foundations were as shaky as ever, and the colonists grew more restive when in 1616 [Governor] Samuel Argall returned the colony to the strict discipline in Sir Thomas Dale’s “Lawes”. In London the situation was little better for the company verged on bankruptcy. [99] “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History 0f Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, pp. 10-11

What was it the created the momentum to propel the tobacco economy in Virginia?

Birth of the Virginia’s Tobacco Monoculture

After 1612 hard, sturdy, and thoroughly ungovernable folk were attracted to Virginia tobacco planting as iron was to a magnet. Surprisingly few in numbers, they began to drift in as Rolfe’s  tobacco was introduced to the Company’s officers and associated allies. Priced at that time to make money quicker and surer than anything in England, it offered an opportunity to well-being to both freeman shareholders who wandered into Virginia, and former indentured servants who had survived their service at Jamestown. During the teens, these numbers were small, a relative handful in comparison to our imagined hindsight us contemporaries bring to our reading. It was here, putting Company officials to the side, that the First Migration began.

Small handfuls of immigrants trickled in to Jamestown, still likely their landing point. Tobacco was the talk of the town; claims were made at the time that Jamestown residents grew tobacco on its streets—probably “the ancients”. Tobacco entrepreneurship was surprisingly simple, a few tools, some uncleared acreage, low barriers to entry if land was accessible and seeds available. Company officials had the seeds, and after 1613 they had available land for freemen to lease. Former indentured servants, now residents and English citizens again, could form a nucleus for a small agricultural homestead workforce that could set up around new plantations of the resident company officials, and the young freeman immigrant entrepreneurs with access to them. And so in this wee tobacco bubble we have the start of Virginia’s tobacco monoculture.

Simplistically, tobacco evolved into an economic-social-political mono culture in the period simply because it was an economic kudzu from the start. An “invention” of the Company, subsidized by the Company with land grants and indentured servants, its innovative entrepreneur was John Rolfe who set out from England fully intending to grow it. The Company likely realized it was risky, but had no reason in 1612 to assume it would develop into a monoculture and serve as the magnet to develop slavery. Rather, if it took off tobacco would work to the company’s benefit by paying off its debts and the salaries of its resident Company officials.

The Virginia Company support began with a land grant for an experimental tobacco plantation in his settlement of Henrico by Governor Dale to John Rolfe  an unusual action in 1611. The sson-to-be-called “weed” was a candidate in the Company’s Holy Grail quest to find a marketable product to export and sell to the profit of the Company, tobacco planting came very early in Virginia’s history–during the military policy system period. Rolfe first planted and harvested his product on his granted land in 1612. He continued, expanding his fields each year after that, and he apparently supplied seeds-plantings to his company associates (all shareholders) in Virginia for their personal use, presumably on land granted to them in lieu of salaries, a practice that commenced formally in 1613.

John Rolfe and the Tobacco Economic Base

We all know John Rolfe, as an private entrepreneur, experimented in tobacco. Many know that King James was dead-set against it. Neither Smythe nor Sandys cared much for it. But for some reason, magically and mystically, tobacco became the weed that ate Virginia. Rolfe, a shareholder, brought his seeds on board with him in his travel to Virginia in the Gates Expedition. John Rolfe, a gentleman (he was the well-paced younger brother of an investor in the Virginia Company) who came to Virginia with his own tobacco seeds, found some more while stranded in Bermuda, and with thoughts of an agricultural innovation in his mind, he arrived in Jamestown in 1610 on the remains of the “Third Supply Fleet”, avoiding the starving years as a shipwrecked refugee on Bermuda..

That Rolfe was on board Newport’s command ship with the newly appointed leaders of Jamestown, provides significant support in itself to our belief that Rolfe was a well-connected young gentleman, who enjoyed considerable access to the Jamestown Company elite. In 1613-4, he was appointed to serve as Secretary & Recorder General to the Company. In the same year was also appointed to the Governor’s Royal (advisory) Council. He knew the new governor well after ten months in Bermuda and onboard small ships. To complete the picture: Rolfe smoked.

The single best evidence that Rolfe tied his personal interest in tobacco to the Virginia Company comes from the Secretary of the Company, sea captain Ralph Hamer, an early Company elite official:

I may not forget the gentleman worthie of much commendations which first tooke the pains to make the triall thereof, his name Mister John Rolfe [in 1612] partly for the love he hath a longtime borne unto it, and partly to raise commodity to the adenturers [the Virginia Company] Rolfe gave some tobacco from his crop to his friends ‘to make trial of, and they agreed the new leaf ‘smoked pleaant, sweetie, and strong” [99] https://historicjamestowne.org/history/pocahontas/john-rolfe/

Rolfe was “fortunate” in his ship’s 1609 breakup in a storm on the shoals of Bermuda, because Rolfe escaped the “starving time’ in Jamestown, but he lost his first wife and child in Bermuda. While Rolfe no doubt dreamed of personal profit, he was working for, and with, the Virginia Company; his seeds were Company seeds. Determined to break the Spanish monopoly on the weed, Rolfe upon arrival began his experimentation to grow tobacco in Virginia. Non-Indian tobacco seeds came to Virginia in his pockets and luggage  His Trinidad Spanish seeds brought from England produced tobacco deemed of lesser quality/taste than the Spanish, but he experimented to develop and cultivate new varieties and improving upon the processing.

He established his “plantation” (more a field or a plot of Company-provided land) in 1612 (Varina Farms) on the James River fifty miles upriver from Jamestown, across the river near Henrico. His sponsor in Virginia was its Governor Dale and Rolfe may well have been his protégé.. It took two years to get a product that was suitable to export. He produced a sweeter tobacco which he branded as “Orinoco” and Virginia became a place for (tobacco) lovers”. By 1614 he harvested enough for four barrels and exported it very successfully to England where it was gifted to many who could provide support—including Smythe. He was twenty-seven when he started his experimentation.

Orinoco enjoyed some notable demand in Europe. … Rolfe grasped the possibilities in the development of a milder type of leaf than the native variety. The latter, deemed soothing by the Indians, was described by English colonials as ‘poore, weake, and of a byting tast”. … Rolfe proceeded to plant some sweet smoking West Indian tobacco seed. He then began a form of agriculture which would serve not only as the foundation of Virginia’s economy throughout the colonial era, but also as the basis for its plantation system, and would later become a vital element in the state’s industrial development [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion, p. 25

Given Rolfe’s position in government and personal closeness to its governor, there is little doubt in my mind Jamestown elites took advantage of the opportunity and used their Virginia Company headright  privileges“” to issue land grants to themselves and found plantations on which they planted Rolfe’s seeds. Their interest was founded on Company desperation, and the hopes if this stuff worked out they could make their fortune and the Company could meet its debt and financial obligations. For Virginia resident Company officials this land—and seeds—were their salary for service. This was a risky gamble, only hindsight conveys a measure of inevitability. To scale up the export they made land grants to applicants, and to others associated with them. Thus the first major producers of tobacco in Virginia were resident Company elites–and by 1618 that included several large investors-shareholder immigrant groupings that formed “associations” that bought or secured land from the Company. They grew tobacco using company seeds, and granted company land–and workforce.

Rolfe married Pocahontas in 1614. In 1612, an English Company ship captain (future Governor Argall) kidnapped her through deception, and brought her to Jamestown. Governor Dale used her as a bait to entice her father, Powhatan, into a favorable mood for a peace treaty. Somehow Pocahontas and Rolfe (who was about a decade or so older than her) became a “thing”, and they got married by Governor Dale. The Powhatan peace treaty followed. This removed a very real barrier to the spreading of plantations, population and tobacco along the banks of the James and its Chesapeake Bay shores.

Having demonstrated sufficient demand for his product, he planted more—and apparently so did his neighbors, as new plantations exporting tobacco quickly populated the James River area at this time. It was in 1615 that Varina was formally designated as a “plantation”, and became eligible for the full benefits thereof. With additional curing, the quality was further improved and in 1617 he exported 20,000 pounds, and doubled it the next year. Tobacco Alley had survived its birth. Varina is still farmed (privately) today, but through the colonial period it prospered. It was acquired by the influential Randolph family; one of its scions married Martha, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson. The “city” on which Varina initially drew sustenance died (Henrico), and Varina itself became the new downtown and county seat of today’s Henrico County. In micro-capsule we can see the natural evolution of a plantation and Virginia’ sub-state governance.

Pocahontas lived with Rolfe on Varina Farms; she changed her name to Rebecca. Rolfe’s son by Pocahontas, named Thomas after Governor Thomas Dale. The militaristic, if innovative, Deputy Governor financed their unfortunate trip to England in 1616. So, in 1615 Rolfe and their young son, went to England on a trip intended to market the colony, attract settlers and, sell tobacco. In England Rolfe published a blog-pamphlet that promoted the colony. Introduced to English society (by Governor De La Warr), Pocahontas enjoyed an audience with the King, and became a celebrity. For his efforts Rolfe was granted sizeable “patents” or land grants along the James. Rolfe had indeed become among the most powerful of the Virginia Company elite by 1618.

Rebecca’s “career” was short-lived; she died in 1617 of a sickness returning to Virginia–in sight of the English coast. She is buried in England. Virginius Dabney provides the most interesting assessment of Rebecca-Pocahontas during her period Henrico and in England leading to her death:

Pocahontas [in 1613] was enticed on board Argall’s ship, and taken as a hostage to Jamestown. She was sent thence to the newly established town of Henrico and placed in the custody Marshall Dale. It was there that she was instructed in the Christian religion and baptized—apparently in the church at Henrico—with the Christian name ‘Rebecca’. (Her Indian name was actually ‘Matoaka’; ‘Pocahontas was a nickname that meant ‘playful one’). [In Henrico] Rolfe fell in love with the attractive Indian princess during the months when she was being transformed from an ‘unbeleeving creature’, as Rolfe put it, into the first Indian to be converted into Christianity by the English. Pocahontas returned his affection. Dale was quick to see the great value of a union between the daughter of Powhatan, and the leading planters, and he agreed at once. The wedding was held in the church at Jamestown on April 5, 1614. … In 1616 Rolfe and his wife and their infant son Thomas sailed to England, accompanied by about a dozen Indians who were supposedly to be educated in the mother country … Also on board was ‘exceedinge good tobacco’ then coming into production in the colony. Rolfe and Pocahontas and their infant son stayed in England for some ten months. Pocahontas, known there as ‘Lady Rebecca’ and honored as a princess was something of a sensation in London society. Though almost totally unaccustomed to British ways, this young woman … conducted herself with poise and dignity. She was presented at court, where ladies leaving her presence, curtsied and backed out of the room. The Lord Bishop of London ‘entertained her with festivall state and pompe’ …[during which an observer added] she ‘did not only accustome her selfe to civilite, but still carried her selfe as the Daughter of a King, and was accordingly respected, not only by the [London/ Virginia] Company, which allowed provision for her selfe, and [son]. …[John] Smith renewed his acquaintance with her, after a lapse of seven years … They chattered of old times, and said she would call him ‘father’ since Smith she asserted, had called Powhatan ‘father’. [She started her return to Virginia in March, 1617] [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion, pp. 26-28

Upon his return to Virginia, Rolfe remarried. Among the very first actions and legislation passed by the initial five day General Assembly, created by the Greate Charter (1619) was legislation that set up the fundamentals of a tobacco-dominated economic base. To me this was amazing. The 1619 election system embraced newly settled areas and granted them representation into the new General Assembly and Burgesses. Rolfe himself served in the first General Assembly (1619) thru to his death in 1622, only thirty-seven years old, probably killed in the 1622 Indian Massacre.

 

Little noticed, the diffusion of tobacco preceded Virginia’s self-government and were part and parcel of the military policy system period. Moreover, the initial units of local government [hundreds] were units created to manage/coordinate judicial courts, the defense of plantations, and tobacco production—and they too were initiated in the military policy system period.. The hundreds were transformed in 1619 into Company electoral districts for its shareholder corporate meeting-legislature for which plantation masters became delegates in the colony’s corporate governance. So quickly did this occur that it was all in place by 1621. For perspective, at the time of Dale’s departure in the fall of 1616, Virginia’s total population was estimated to be about 350, with about 65 being women and children. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 116.

Earlier I described the teens tobacco land rush as “a wee bubble”, and I now further observe that as we move into the later teens this wee bubble was adopted and carried forward by another small grouping of investors willing to travel to Virginia and set up plantations themselves on behalf of their investor associations. While these small numbers were incrementally increasing, the infusion of new free men and free holders remained remarkably small—and still subject to high death rates.

This slow drip of population adopting tobacco plantations as their road to opportunity is, in my view, a secret ingredient to the homogenous development of Virginia’s plantation elite and the inequality of its indentured workforce. This slow drip of population coupled with the spread of tobacco plantations into other rivers continued well into the 1630’s, and is a distinguishing characteristic-dynamic of the First Migration, its institutions, behaviors, and even its political culture and closed society.

The Company (in London, Sandys especially) never endorsed tobacco planting once the “gold rush began after 1614. He nor the Company ever officially reversed that position thru 1624 when the Company charter was suspended. Expressed through Sandy’s words and actions, the Company held a bimodal position in regards to tobacco. First, it never embraced tobacco as a monoculture and made firm attempts to limit its planting—why? Because it wanted a more diversified economic base, and during this period efforts, some investment and initiatives were proposed

Keeping in mind we will expand upon these concepts as the chapters flow, but for this module, we simply posit an agglomeration is the geographic concentration of a particular industry important to the relevant economic base, while a cluster is a nexus of relevant and related industries/sectors that in aggregate produce related package of goods and services, including jobs and income, to the benefit of a relevant economic base. An agglomeration is a geographic concentration of one industry or sector, while a cluster includes several industries-sectors working in tangent to create a group of end-products important in scale and impact on the economic base of the community under discussion. As a reminder, an agricultural economic base does have its agglomerations and clusters—although the concepts today usually refer to non-agricultural sectors and industries.

I consider tobacco production in Virginia as a cluster because in my opinion its use throughout the colony was so pervasive it did not enjoy a particular geographic concentration—and more importantly, it was evident from the beginning that tobacco production was hopelessly tied to its workforce, and the industries/sectors that would export it to Virginia. If one included the economy of the plantation which was the cluster’s chief production unit than those plantations of sufficient scale, in pre-1700 Virginia, could suffice for a small municipality and its hinterland congruent with a county. Again the caveat is that the population numbers are very small, and size in this period are a remarkably few acres. The mansions came after 1700, along with the fields of slaves.

As will be evident in this module, from its inception, the tobacco cluster was a public-private partnership, between Crown, the Virginia Company, the government of the province of Virginia, and the host of voluntary private voluntary joint stock corporations/individual homesteads. We strongly suspect the rapid spread of the tobacco culture after 1614 was fueled by Virginia’s few elites, and picked up by hook, or more likely crook, by the few landholding homesteads set up by Dale’s previously described land reforms.

It will be evident English private capital was the primary source of private venture capital. It will also be very evident that the spread of the tobacco economic base into the Virginia hinterland was very dependent upon access to rivers (to export end product), and required a serious and constant infusion of a suitable workforce. It also required passable relations with adjacent Indian tribes. Early plantations and homesteads were extremely vulnerable, major-league isolated, and rudimentary in scale and structures. Life was hard, even for elites. Subsistence comes to mind for this period.

[999] It is also worth note that both tobacco and the plantation were instituted in Bermuda, which by this time were under the auspices of a second subsidiary Virginia Company. Smythe was Treasurer in both, although Bermuda in this present period of discussion is heavily trouble with the rivalry of Smythe and Warwick, which as we shall see drew in Sandys as well. I have not yet ascertained the method by which Bermuda produced tobacco—no reference is made to a plantation or Hundreds in its literature. Nevertheless is very clear that Rolfe, who may well have gotten some of his seeds in Bermuda when he was marooned there in 1610, remained closely aware and involved in the extension of tobacco there. From 1613 Bermuda also was planting tobacco, and until 1617-8 it made more exports to England than Virginia. http://www.bermuda-online.org/history1505to1799.htm. In that the advance of tobacco in both colonies was overlapping one might assume the same process occurred, and that neither was the model for the other.[99] Andrews, Vol 1, p. 120 “Though legally the equal of and distinct from the parent company, the Bermuda corporation was in practice closely underjoined with the other”

Simply put, Virginia, the first English colony in North America, was not only struggling to make a go of it, but was managed by a joint stock corporation on the edge of fiscal collapse, and had little in the form of administrative capacity in the geographies it settled. Colonies that followed had their own issues, but in Virginia’s case administrative, fiscal and governance capacity of the Virginia Company was so minimal as to significantly “bend the colony’s political and economic development twig”. Dale tried, no doubt meant well, but by 1616 he was ready to move on. He left in the spring of 1616, on a ship commanded by Captain, soon to be lieutenant governor, Argall, with Rolfe and Rebecca. He left behind a settlement that had just reached into the eastern shore and had proceeded up the James River to a point near present day Williamsburg. His assistant, twenty-nine year old George Yeardley, took over as acting Lieutenant Governor.

By the time Dale left the colony in 1616, it was evident that a population nadir had reduced Virginia’s settler population to its lowest level since 1611. Despite the accumulation of men and women who had been sent over before 1616, the number of the inhabitants did not increase. In that year [1616] there were fewer men, women, and children, taken all together in Virginia, than there had been in 1611, three hundred and twenty-four as against four hundred and fifty [Brown reports that 300 had gone back to England [99] Brown, Vol. II, Genesis, p. 782) [99] Andrews, Vol. 1., p.134.

By 1618 the number had been raised to about six hundred, including Company shipments of new settlers, indentured servants primarily, who upon arrival were sent to Henrico’s, awarded with Dale’s incentives of land “rental” rights, garden plots. The Company also shipped one hundred apprentices and servants, and a hundred “young, uncorrupted maids to make wives“. If the maids married “public farmers” [the planters enjoying Dale’s land program], the Company would pay the costs of transportation. But if they didn’t, their future husband had to, in the form of one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco. Further, two shipments of one hundred children each from London were sent over in 1618 and 1619-paid for by the City of London [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 134. One might be forgiven for sensing some level of concern, if not despair in London during this time period. The Company’s finances were in desperate shape, and the future of the lottery was in question.

Tobacco a Colonial Cluster-How the Tobacco Mono-Culture Took Hold

Reacting to the political vacuum that the Virginia Company’s could not successfully fill, larger plantation owners did what came naturally and dominated local affairs within their Hundred and the surrounding plantation homesteads. They did so for an extended period, from the plantation founding, through the Company period in 1624, and after in yet another London vacuum as James I died and his son, unfocused on Virginia, simply pushed it off to the margins of his court politics, referring it, as it turned out to a series of special commissions or colonial bureaucracies to take the lade. Left to their own devices the plantation-hundreds, council of state larger plantation owners responded with more tobacco production and increasingly expanding their fields and eventually starting new settlements along one or another river system-

In effect Virginia was defaulted to a sort of automatic do what it takes to cope with tobacco prices and associated problems—a default which generally led to new fields and new settlements, often founded in areas with reasonably intense Powhattan populations. This created what has since been called “the shredded community”. Russo, the town planner from whom we pilfered the term defined it as a “dispersed rural population on small subsistence farms orbiting around plantations [from which they] relied for community services on crossroad churches, courthouses and markets. These constituted a kind of “shredded community” as scattered focal points for farming, trading, politics and religion” David Russo, American Towns (Ivan R. Dee, 2001) p.11

The proliferation of these settlements along river coasts and their hinterland accommodated the sparse immigration flows and organic growth which, in any event, generally gravitated to areas settled by company and former company officials and the association-hundreds. Urbanization of any size or consequence defaulted to this inertia and the seemingly everlasting hope-expectation that opportunity and tobacco prices would realize the dream which brought them to Virginia. On automatic pilot economic development constituted tobacco production and export, and entrepreneurism translated into new fields cleared, and new settlements founded along the coastal and hinterland peripheries—usually taking ahold of former, or soon-to-be-former, Indian fields and villages.

The isolated shredded community on the periphery of the colony’s settled areas reinforced Privatist individual self-sufficiency, and were sustained through service such as were required or needed; that meant many services, such as education, surprisingly self-defense, and roads-bridges into the interior, were ignored; others, associated with tobacco production and export wound up piggy-backing off the production and export infrastructure of the larger plantation owners—who alone had access to capital and headrights from which they could bring in artisans and indentured servants skilled in key occupations. To complete the plantation as urban center picture, the plantation owner was master of his community, and the institutions of local governance, including the parish were located alongside the boundaries of his main house. Moreover, if cities were the residence of culture and hospitality elsewhere, in Virginia the manor house extended its hospitality with abundance and graciousness; what culture there was, a library, discussion and a meeting of elites, occurred in the manor house. To the town was left the tavern (usually offering sleeping provisions, and some trading), usually at the cross-section of trails, rivers, creeks..

Colonists/settlers were primarily “land entrepreneurs”, interested in setting up their individual homesteads as soon as possible. The numerous natural river inlets were natural locations for the early plantation. With a pier tobacco could be laden onto ships and exported directly from the plantation. As late as 1775 George Washington exported and received imports directly from the wharf on his plantation on a Potomac River inlet. So it was geography and tobacco economics that set the course for Tidewater’s lack of urbanization and port cities. Neither political culture nor conscious planning had any determinant effect in that dynamic, but rather that dynamic exerted its impact on the former..

Service delivery was therefore loosely tied to government, and government’s physical absence translated into minimalist governance. In a tobacco-driven economy opportunity and profits lie working and clearing fields, not in a town hall. The judicial function was the most most outstanding unsatisfied service—along with record keeping and patent-land associated filings–that required a direct government entity accessible by the population That was just as well, the Virginia colony’s provincial-level policy system, lacking capacity and political will, until Berkeley’s arrival in 1642, was more or less overwhelmed, and isolated in a self-contained, remote, and unhealthful Jamestown. All rivers might have led to Jamestown, but no roads. Until 1619, for all practical purposes the Company lieutenant governor, military officials, cape merchant, surveyor, and secretary of the colony were the only government game in the city.

Less obvious, but hugely impactful was the Virginia royal governor and its colony-level institutions of governance were not able to draw upon budding urbanization. Formation of towns and settlements that seemed naturally to occur in other colonies. Massachusetts, New England and New York who developed the early towns and established a port and port infrastructure—as did Maryland its nearby rival. Virginia suffered from an almost non-existent urbanization dynamic. Noted by historians and economists, this lack of urbanization, in particular the weak formation of towns or formalized, incorporated settlements, meant colony-level institutions were deprived of a meaningful local structural unit through which it could exercise its influence over the local communities scattered throughout its isolated Tidewater region. Hence, the province came to rely upon whatever institutionalization and governance that developed at the hundred or plantation settlement level.

The tobacco-plantation economic base adopted by Virginia in its earliest days did not only encourage, it required, the dispersal of its production units along the coastal lowlands. Access to rivers permitted export of tobacco directly from the plantation. Lacking a meaningful commercial function, settlements/towns could not develop acquire either momentum or population to sustain meaningful growth. Virginia in particular did not connect its plantations by land, choosing to rely on river modes.

Virginia contained almost no towns and thus the sense and operation of community played out very differently [than New England].  Connections between isolated plantations or farmsteads often began with kinship networks. In the older settled Tidewater areas the average white family might be related to five other families nearby, and a household head might interact with thirty or more relatives on a regular basis. …

Small planters and families rarely ventured beyond the neighborhood, but when they did, it was normally for judicial proceedings and market days at county seats or religious services at the closest church. Some counties contained only one parish … Thus on Sunday mornings … several smaller rural neighborhoods came together not only to worship, but to exchange business documents, discuss tobacco prices, argue over the quality of horses, catch up on local gossip, and share news of the wider world … the interconnectedness of rural Virginia life makes it difficult to separate the social, economic and religious aspects from the political, House of Burgesses elections demonstrate how different layers of the county society related to the world of legislators, governors, ministers and even kings [5] . Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp. Anthony S. Parent, Jr., William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 72-4.

So finally having focused on the need for self-sufficiency, a permanent settlement in a colony whose purpose was to benefit England, the Virginia Company simply needed to create an economic base that supported those goals and ends. That, one might suspect, proved easier to say than do. What however, is so remarkable about Virginia’s future economic base is that it fell into place so fast and furiously that the Company never had control over it, and that economic base, tobacco plantation export, became the economic base that ate the Colony. Ironically, if anything, it accelerated the termination of the Company’s charter.

Is tobacco going to become the first “homegrown” cluster developed within the thirteen colonies? Guess so. Nothing that had been done in Jamestown previous to that date comes remotely close to an agglomeration or cluster. Speaking of which, just what is an agglomeration or a cluster as we utilize the terms in this introduction to economic base.

Keeping in mind we will expand upon these concepts as the chapters flow, but for this module, we simply posit an agglomeration is the geographic concentration of a particular industry important to the relevant economic base, while a cluster is a nexus of relevant and related industries/sectors that in aggregate produce related package of goods and services, including jobs and income, to the benefit of a relevant economic base.

An agglomeration is a geographic concentration of one industry or sector, while a cluster includes several industries-sectors working in tangent to create a group of end-products important in scale and impact on the economic base of the community under discussion. As a reminder, an agricultural economic base does have its agglomerations and clusters—although the concepts today usually refer to non-agricultural sectors and industries.

I consider tobacco production in Virginia as a cluster because in my opinion its use throughout the colony was so pervasive it did not enjoy a particular geographic concentration—and more importantly, it was evident from the beginning that tobacco production was hopelessly tied to its workforce, and the industries/sectors that would export it to Virginia. If one included the economy of the plantation which was the cluster’s chief production unit than those plantations of sufficient scale, in pre-1700 Virginia, could suffice for a small municipality and its hinterland congruent with a county. Again the caveat is that the population numbers are very small, and size in this period are a remarkably few acres. The mansions came after 1700, along with the fields of slaves.

Tobacco’s “Venture Capital”— As will be evident in this module, from its inception, the tobacco cluster was a public-private partnership, between Crown, the Virginia Company, the government of the province of Virginia, and the host of voluntary private voluntary joint stock corporations/individual homesteads. We strongly suspect the rapid spread of the tobacco culture after 1614 was fueled by Virginia’s few elites, and picked up by hook, or more likely crook, by the few landholding homesteads set up by Dale’s previously described land reforms.

It will be evident English private capital was the primary source of private venture capital. It will also be very evident that the spread of the tobacco economic base into the Virginia hinterland was very dependent upon access to rivers (to export end product), and required a serious and constant infusion of a suitable workforce. It also required passable relations with adjacent Indian tribes. Early plantations and homesteads were extremely vulnerable, major-league isolated, and rudimentary in scale and structures. Life was hard, even for elites. Subsistence comes to mind for this period.

 “Dales’ Gift”

 Plantations, Colony Within a Colony, Hundreds as Town-building and Tobacco—Spreading and Shedding, the Complexity of Land Ownership that Resulted.

Investor-Associations, hundreds, plantations, indenture, tobacco and terrible Native American relationships conflated into a settlement strategy that produced unique and unanticipated results

With the discovery of tobacco the Virginia boom was on. From 1617 to 1623, when the initially high prices for the crop began to falter, an average of fourteen ships left England for Virginia each year, bringing with them a total of roughly 5,000 new planters, while English investors pumped at least 100,000 pounds sterling into the venture. Despite annual mortality rates nearing fifty percent, the colony’s population tripled , approaching 1,300 in 1623. [99]  John J. McCusker & Russel R. Menard, the Economy of British America  pp. 118-19

In this section I introduce the institutions (plantations, hundreds, investor-associations) and the entrenchment of the colony’s economic base: tobacco. Include in this historical description, is some analysis, but also alerts on relationships with the tribes were affected, and how and why a closed large planter, company-dominated elite was formed. While my primary objective is to provide support so the reader can evaluate, hopefully agree, that the above must be considered as elements in the Virginia Company heritage and legacy to Virginia. Quite detailed as this historical description and comments may be, it does not intend, nor cannot be “complete”; no doubt some will wish I had ventured into other elements as well.

My attention in this module-section is to expose how the different elements-dynamics-institutions interacted, in a very short time period (less than six years), and that by 1619 a very different Virginia had emerged from what existed in 1612. This little-followed interlude in Virginia history, in my view, is essential to an understanding of what followed—and I add provides a very different context for the 1619 Greate Charter. I will over the caveat at the beginning that I do not mean these few years “caused” Virginia’s future. Virginia would have plenty of opportunities to chose other paths and disrupt the institutions planted in the interlude. But, in the end, most of the institutions and dynamics wound up substantially intact after the Company lost is charter, and most continued on their merrie way through the reign of Charles I, and even the Protectorate. We will pick up the Restoration in its proper time. In any case, by my way of thinking, it is not so remarkable that these major institutions came early in Virginia’s history, but that it is remarkable they were not substantially altered after. There are many reasons for this, and future modules will offer my perspective on the matter.

This is a “big picture” section, in which multiple dynamics are woven into the tale. The simple assertion is that previous to the suspension of the Virginia Company charter in 1624 the chief, most major elements of what was to be colonial Virginia were inserted, installed, and “planted”. To be sure all survived their birth in this period, but they matured, ebbed and flowed over the years, years that extended into the eighteenth, nineteenth, …  the twentieth century even, having been built into the the fabric of Virginia’s policy-making systems. As to the twenty-first century, that is not in my job description. What carried most durably is the “tilt in Virginia policy-making”—a concept we will introduce this section, and apply from then on. That tilt provides “really important” answers to why Virginia is not Massachusetts, or for that matter any other American state.

In a section much later in this module, I will look more deeply into the “hundred”, its development, laying the case for its evolution to counties, and drawing out its closed elite that would come to dominate Virginia local government, and then from the plantation veranda seriously enter into the affiars of the provincial level policy system. Some of that section will be repeative with the section below, but the perspective will be somewhat different, requiring us to ask different questions and inject different values and priorities into the discussion. The “hundred” is the container, or the vehicle if one prefers, that carried in its bosom the above other institutions and dynamics, and in which the personalities and proto-classes

Dale’s Gift was a contemporary label for a series of Dale-issued land grants to company officials and close company associates [such as sea captain Ralph Hamer]. These grants provided “first advantage to company resident (and key London) shareholder-officials of the company. The Company back in the London Headquarters were ok with Dale and his Gifts. They utilized them for their own purposes, and further turned them into new opportunities for Company investors. Both Smythe and Sandys got their own “gifts”—plus another with a joint venture of the two. Both in a very few years later, would be bitter enemies—if they were not already.

At this point in time a many serious historians make comment as to how they sense, the Company was turning into a land distribution entity. In 1611 land distribution was probably confined to Rolfe; by 1613 it was part of the Company’s benefit package, and the path to a successful colonial future. Such land grants on which company employees-servants could be employed to produce goods and commodities that could be sold as payment for their services. It is likely that Rolfe’s tobacco was planted on each of these [six] gifts. Accordingly, we can see from the start (1613) plantations and tobacco planted and harvested by company indentured servants, were granted to key company officials and associates, acquiring at minimum a “first advantage’, to which could be added further grants and headrights in following years.

Governor De la Warr, as appropriate, was the recipient of the first ”Dale’s Gift” plantation land grants. Thus De la Warr is credited with having established the first known plantation in Virginia, “Shirley Hundred” granted in 1613, opened the door for subsequent “gifts” to major resident, also Smythe and Sandys, over the next two years. Rolfe’s tobacco was planted in each.. This was confirmed by Rolfe himself in his “A True Relation of the State of Virginia left by Sir Thomas Dale, Knight last 1616” in which he listed six plantations/settlements as having been founded by Dale.

Rolfe noted by the time of its publication, Shirley Plantation, commandeered by Captain Issac Maddeson, [held 25 laborers and farmers “employed only in the planting and curing of Tobacco, with the profit thereto to cloth themselves, and all those who labor about the general Busyne [99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Plantation. This is an especially large number of servants and employees for that time period.

Explaining Dale’s Gifts

Dale’s Gifts are particularly hard to understand. The full impact is appreciated when one realizes it is more than a gift of acreage with a title of plantation. It is a radical break with the past as the Company’s land monopoly was for the first time (with some exceptions such as Rolfe) gifted for private use and ownership of its key officials in lieu of any salary. At first restricted to officeholders, it was extended to close associates of the Company, such as sea captains, who were essential to growth and stabilization of the colony. The original “gift” keeps on giving, and each gift “founds” a settlement and sets off a cluster of other smaller, sometimes sizeable adjoining plantations. These plantation gifts came with company indentured servants, which were easily added to with new headrights. They were part of Dale’s spreading and treading initiative.

The gifted acreage was used for the plantation house, a few to be cleared fields, and residential and working structures associated with the plantation. As the years passed, some acres were sold, leased, and passed to members of the family—and to affluent rising entrepreneurs of favor to the owner. There is little glamor in these structures, nor their architecture; most today are in absolute ruin. Shirley’s Plantation house is a pleasant site, if one keeps in mind it was reconstructed in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

The complexity of the initiative is compounded because they were inherently two separate types of programs rolled into one land grant closely linked to immigration and workforce incentives. One element (conferring a plantations to an individual or a pooled group of investors (association)) transferred company land to private ownership, at first to company officials in return for their services, and later to shareholder/private investors-associations. Economic in purpose, intended to replace officials salaries for their service, they expanded to an immigration program intended to make the colony viable and growing. That they were used by London to offload costs from the Company’s old business plan, and to encourage exporting tobacco that helped pay off debts and dividends—and please the king—inserted itself into package.

In another words, whatever were the purposes of the initial Dale’s Gift land transfers, the land transfers in effect served all sorts of purposes incentives or “add-ons” that made each initiative more marketable,, and of a scale that subsequent less influential land owners could not hope to match. This is key to the “first advantage” these officials obtained; when combined with tobacco production and export in the second year they were able to generate a surplus for investment very quickly—i.e. add to houses and clear additional fields, plus acquire workers, lease to former indentured et al.

By 1616 when these grants were available to London shareholders, and to resident freemen who could buy land and acquire headrights, we had a small, but given the size and population of the colony, significant land opportunities that bolstered tobacco export and generated wealth for residents and investors. Historians would begin talk of “booms” as tobacco prices were initially high—compared to what they became in the twenties. Dale might have opened up a Pandora’s Box for Company officials, but everybody interested in Virginia joined in as well.

Here, in a nutshell, we can see how the small scale incremental growth of the Virginia economy and its extension to other river systems started. The Company supply ships declined in the teens (but picked up after 1619), but mortality rates remained high and seasonality was still a huge factor. Still a land boomlet, by its nature, required participation—even commitment—of Virginia-resident company officials and new immigrants-expired indentured. A grouping of ambitious private freemen could—and did—take advantage of these opportunities in these early years to establish what would be their estate, or to assemble sufficient wealth to create new opportunities/contacts in the following years.

The effect on Company governance, however, was decidedly mixed. Corporate Virginia-resident “governance” was loose. Company residential officials consisted of a very small number of officials, who, with Dale’s Gift in their pockets, were thrown into managing their plantations, accompanied by company indentured workforce (who over time seemed to drift in personal ownership), and adding additional land grants as they saw fit. Hap-hazard at best, Company oversight of the settlement process left much to be desired; no doubt “a bit” of corruption, favoritism and simple negligence created the appearance of a land free-for-all that lasted essentially to the end of the Company period in 1624—and even after. Bermuda was much the same, and, the scandals and contesting officials, on the scene and in London attest Bermuda was even worse. Virginia escaped serious scandal (excepting Argall) although complaints and letters leave no doubt of consequential and probably pervasive administrative abuse.

In many ways, this differed little from how the major London-based Company officials behaved; Smythe and Sandys, Cape Merchant Johnson and the others, all had several irons in their fire. In this manner, the Company never enjoyed the undisputed attention of its key officials—although Smythe is credited with giving Virginia more than its fair share of his attention and personal commitment. In any event, the lack of focused commitment by Virginia Company officials plagued the Company, until 1618 when Sandys led a “movement” that promised increased internal vigor, focused strategy, and commitment of its officials.

What we are seeing I suggest is a robust exercise in entrepreneurial individualism that extended beyond company affairs and infused itself into a sustaining, if incremental, Virginia growth that was based on individual land ownership, the founding of plantation-estates, all centered around tobacco production and export. So long as one was a free man, it was possible, if not likely, that in this period one could become a free holder, and a free holder could aspire to be an empire-builder. The key company officials, so long as they could beat the death rates, could gain off of everybody. As more women and children came over, one could even suggest a bit of a society was coming together—there were pockets where Virginia was not a wild and wooly “frat” land boom.

The other program element included in a Dale Gift was the “Hundreds”. Said and done, the hundred was mostly administrative, self-defense and governmental in purpose, and could be construed as Dale’s attempt to put some order into his spreading of population. Awkward, hardly defined, a carry over from feudal border marches, Dales’ gift hundreds seemed also an effort to extend corporate governance into the newly settled areas created by Dales’ spreading of the population from Jamestown. Inherent in the hundred, therefore, was an element of town-building, and a start of the institutionalization of a local government level-entity.

A hundred demarcated a geographical area encompassed by the land grant made in the “gift”. That meant what seemingly was a private land transfer/grant also carried with it powers/responsibilities with governance implications and, in a short while, administrative responsibilities. Self defense against potential Powhatan raids was always an issue—and here we see the entrance of “the militia” into each hundred. Here we see plantation owners becoming “captains”, later colonels.  Avoiding it, and the labor draft, became a way of life for its average free man, and a curse for its indentured servant. When needed, the militia became an opportunity for those willing and able to exercise leadership. Some like Samuel Mathews, and George Yeardley embraced the military with full vigor, and turned it to their advantage.

Large and small plantation owners had to step up to the plate and assume military offices, and responsibilities for such as gunpowder—a real need—and palisades, and vigilance of one’s surrounding area. We will later discuss this more, but we can see each “Gift” quickly assumed attributes and behaviors we attach to a community. Community’s compete, and refuse to cooperate, and develop internal dissention and rivalries. Isolated from each other, they are inward-looking, parochial, and very dependent and deferential on their incumbent leadership. They compete for the most scare resource: workers

Each hundred had its own “personality”. With each plantation-hundred settled there were variations, lapses, and diligence that reflected their private autonomous owners who usually did what they wanted, or saw best to do. As we might imagine it took no time at all to see how complicated things could became. For example, transfer of land to formerly indentured servants created new private owners, as did any sale of the acreage in the hundred to others. The main area could be sold or inherited also. Shareholders-investors acquired or claimed land and registered it—or not.

All this complexity seems to have been of little matter in Dale’s time, but, again, it took only a few years before issues became evident, requiring correction or clarification. In 1617, with the arrival of Governor Argall, Virginia’s lack of control mechanisms became very apparent to the London officials—and to Virginians as well. Their response to Argall’s exercise of autonomy touched off some serious office politics, and one would not be too wrong in asserting the drift to the Company’s civil war began this early. In any event, Dale’s 1616 departure, Yeardley’s (his successor) military background, temporary status, personality, and tendency to “seize his opportunities as he saw them” did not enhance Virginia’s self-governance, and we enter into what may be the lowest point in regards to the Company’s site administrative control thus far in the Company period—no fear, it will get lower in a few years.

Hundreds and Investor Joint Stock Corporations

In these early pre-Greate Charter years, population growth lagged and congruently London investor interest declined significantly. Lottery yields were not sufficient to the Company or Virginia’s need. Accordingly, the Company, consciously or not, sought to stimulate investors who would buy Company shares and settle Virginia using their own resources. The “Hundred” contract with the Company allowed the investors to operate their plantation on their own terms, independent of the Company. For additional risk diversification private English investors “pooled” their shares to increase acreage, forming an association-corporation, a form of joint stock corporation. Taking advantage of the Company’s situation, they applied for a plantation-hundred in London knowing they enjoyed a buyers market. The number of these investor-association hundreds were far from huge, but, if nothing else, they continued the spreading and shredding Dale had started—and tobacco was the default business plan employed. Reaping the workforce and headright incentives (which we will soon discuss), the associations founded their private plantations in locations that, for the most part, they chose. They would continue to do so into 1622.

Association investor owners agreed to pay an annual quitrent to the Company. “Sometimes called societies of adventurers” these associations were issued a Company patent (land grant) for the purpose of founding a plantation, manor, economic enterprise, often with considerable acreage. “The patentees were to be invested with limited government powers with specific privileges over tenants or servants brought over” [ — “a colony within a colony” as it was referred to then–] :

The larger, and more populated, plantations were, as Andrews alludes, “in the nature of private jurisdictions” (p. 129, Vol 1), and the powers and immunities afforded to the plantation owners “almost an independent colony”. “The Company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who shuld go themselves to Virginia to inhabit ‘by virtue of their Graunts (grants), and should plant themselves, their Tenants, and servants” might have liberty ‘till a form of government is here and settled over them”, to make orders, ordinances, and constitutions, ‘associatinge unto them divers of the ‘greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and business, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England” (p. 129, Vol 1).

The reader ought combine this plantation-level private autonomy, a colony-in-a-colony, with the lack of any provincial level capacity, and the relative isolation (shredding) that such disjointed settlements created. Isolation obviously entailed a serious vulnerability to Indian attack, and provided no mechanism to resolve problems encountered by raids or anything else. Each plantation was on it own, with English investors necessarily leaving matters to a resident investor or to a manager entrusted with the plantation. Once again the reader is reminded that local settlements were founded previous to developing the capacity of the provincial corporate officials, or the London for that matter, to even monitor, nevermind regulate-coordinate either the corporate or the colony’s best interests. Again the opportunity for individualism to flourish was offered to the settler to treasure and to assume its continuation.

At minimum one might argue these empowerments allowed the plantation to follow along lines that today would be labeled a “company town”. Each plantation encouraged its own self-sufficiency, while permitting its periphery to be used for renters, free holder plantations, and a few artisans in its “downtown” based on crossroads/paths for local traffic. “The Hundred” typically included a variety of households-types of plantation, of varying size, in addition to the main plantation of the investor group. Despite their acreage, the population was small by any one’s standards, but it was convenient to develop the entity as a sub-provincial government for administration, judicial and religious matters, and self-defense responsibilities. If for no other reason than convenience and a lack of provincial capacity for exercising governmental powers in the hinterland, the Company was quite willing to delegate thru thru the hundred autonomy and responsibility to whatever form of governance the hundreds evolved. In effect, they were empowering owners of plantations, thereby planting the seeds for the fusion of economic and political power at the local lower level of government rather than provincial.

It gave the associations liberty to carry their commodities to whatever market they pleased—and the company had [at that point] no intention of controlling their tobacco or other output—and it allowed them to reap what reward they could from their own efforts. The idea of these colonies “or hundreds” as they were frequently called, was not so much to help the company on the commercial side as to replenish the colonial population in as short a time as possible “with good multitudes of people”. These societies remained in England, directing each particular “colony” [or hundreds] from a distance just as the company was doing [99] Andrews, Vol 1, p.130

[999] Several of these early volunteer joint stock corporations were not agricultural, but Indian trading entities, while others engaged in the development of fishing, and artisan tradesmen enterprises. [999]

We do not have copies of these grants/contracts, and so we rely on the “patents” as recorded (after the Greate Charter (1618) as a reference. These later patents, the aggregate of which most certainly produced the greatest diffusion of land ownership in the colony thus far, and had the most impact on the formation of the economic base, and future society of colonial Virginia. These patents conflated a private land-owning corporation with governmental powers, and included special privileges of the largest owners over its tenants, and of those who settled within its boundaries.

The manifest intent of a patent such as this was that the plantations should be separate, economically self-contained units in themselves, and possessing each its own local government, yet the fact they were subject to taxation, answerable for impositions, burdens and restrains  imposed by consent of the whole, and liable to be called into public service … [and] though they might be scattered they were to be near enough together to form a single fairly compact settlement under a common authority [99] Andrews, Vol 1, p.133

So the Company relied on the entrepreneur-land owner to handle local matters, confining the provincial level to judicial decision-making, survey, and administrative record-keeping. The reality of self-defense against the Indian tribes, always a serious concern, especially after Powhatan died in 1619, meant larger hundred landlords, with their ability to exert influence over servants/tenants and surrounding smaller households, had to play a major coordinative leadership function in each of the Hundreds. As new regulations and administrative expectations were thrust on the hundred with the Greate Charter the structures, configurations of influence that had developed in the hundreds served as the base from which the hundred would adapt and mature.

Sometime during this period, the London Company leadership,  generally personified in the growing influence and ambition of Edwin Sandys, recognized the need for provincial level coordination, monitoring, and management of the plantations. Andrews asserts these [sub] colonies or larger plantations and the hundreds were destined to be included in the Greate Charter reforms (including the General Assembly as elective districts), and were primarily intended by Sandys to be people-attraction vehicles, and also to facilitate attainment of nonagricultural diversification of the economic base, critical in its view to overall economic self-sufficiency. This shift toward more Virginia Company capacity and regulations at the provincial level, began to be implemented in Virginia during 1619 through 1622. In this manner, Sandys was entrusting privately owned and managed corporations to serve as the local level of a diversified economic base. There were forty-four such patents issued under the terms of the Greate Charter between 1619 and 1623. [99] Andrews, Vol 1, p.130.

Perhaps intended—but likely not–something big and fundamental is happening when the Company in 1618-19 imposed its Greate Charter instructions upon the somewhat willing mélange of hundreds. Hundreds-plantation based autonomy and decentralization without doubt began a tradition of provincial initiatives carried out thru local independent action, and blurred government-private structures and values, and superimposed on the workforce-societal inequality on which the hundred was founded and and set up.

Stuart Bruchey posits that the tobacco planter organized in plantations, hundreds, and voluntary joint stock corporations, over the following decades developed autonomy and capacity incrementally developing into a cutting edge, and the core unit of production for Virginia’s future economic base-policy system.

In essence, the local decision-making structure inherited from the hundred simply was passed onto the Greate Charter period—and when the Second Powhatan War commenced in 1622 became the vehicle with which the locals responded in their desperate efforts to survive and rebuild. As the Indians were eventually pushed back, the isolated hundreds that populated the lower reaches of the James River, largely self-sufficient, assumed burdens the Company could not carry, chief among them being the securement of investment capital and the importation of entrepreneurs into Virginia:

Great quasi-public trading companies, privileged, chartered and joint-stock, had served as the initial funnels through which English capital funds and labor sought to exploit the new-world opportunities opened by voyages of discovery and exploration. Overwhelmed by heavy costs of settlement and blinded by fools-gold schemes of easy wealth, they had failed to return profits to their investors. So too had failed the subsidiary colonizing associations which in some instances grew out of them. [So] the private plantation, a method of uniting English capital, the labor of indentured servant, or slave, and the resident management of the planter emerged from these early failures. ‘Venture and capital’ previously united in the person of an English absentee investor [the Virginia Company] split off from each other: the venture now came in person to America to manage his enterprises, and draw upon English capital in the form of mercantile credit. [99] Stuart Bruchey, the Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861 (Harper Torch Books, 1965) p. 32

In this last quote we catch a glimpse into the ticking time bomb that underscored the award to company officials of company-owned land. Whatever their motivation, the original hundreds and the plantations within them were private in nature, and represented opportunities for prominent Company officials in London and Virginia to make some profit, and to tender them a permanent settlement for which they were personally responsible; several of these awardees persisted in holding key offices after the Company charter was terminated in 1624, and thus we can see evidence of a “first advantage” in the formation of Virginia’s First Migration post-Company elite. Grizzard Jr, and Boyd Smith follow this hint up with a further observation that followed description of the 1618-19 Greate Charter which we insert here, a half-decade before it was intended to describe:

Smythe and Sandys knew that by establishing particular and private plantations they also had changed the lines of [ Virginia’s] political authority. No longer did the governor have direct control over the colony’s labor force. Each association [and awardee] ran its particular plantation, and the private planners controlled their own land. Furthermore the Londoners deliberately blurred distinctions between company officials and private planners, by employing men who had personal stakes in Virginia, rather than men who intended to make their fortunes, and return home. For instance, Yeardley, as governor was responsible for supervising company lands and the cape merchant, but he also managed Smythe’s Hundred and Weyanoke [a plantation], developed the governor’s lands for his salary [each governor got paid from the proceeds of a allotment of company land whose produce was sold by the governor for his pay], and [on top of this] established a large personal plantation. … Not surprisingly, these officers had a tendency to look out for their personal interests before meeting their obligations to the company. [99] Grizzard Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown Colony, p. xlv.

An important point that would follow is that the Greate Charter built upon the mélange of local plantations, and while it would inject controls, monitoring, and provincial policy-making upon that local base, it did not make a serious or radical effort to alter them. Provincial level would “regulate” the plantations, and impose laws to which they need conform, but the investor-owner autonomy of their plantations would largely continue. We can now comment that a characteristic of Virginia’s early colonial political-economic-social development was that at no point did the higher levels (provincial) of corporate governance make any serious effort to create a meaningful hierarchy in Virginia’s governance. Such hierarchy existed, inevitably, but was not cultivated aggressively or ambitiously. In fact we can and will argue the opposite occurred.

 

Plantations and Hundreds: the Shredded Community Case Studies

The First Plantation–Called “Sherley Hundred” [sic] the 8,000 acres it included, was the Virginia Company’s first plantation in Dale’s Gift settlement program. Cicely Sherley was the new wife of Sir Thomas West, 3^rd Baron De La Warr, the Virginia Company’s Governor for life and Captain General of Virginia. The grant of land was a “royal” grant directly issued by James (one presumes a marriage gift and an appreciation of the role West had played in “saving” the Colony). Within a year the plantation produced a small amount of tobacco, from seeds provided by Rolfe himself. West, aka Lord Delaware the absentee Governor living in England apparently was active in the Virginia Company circles although little evidence exists suggest that he was anything more than Smythe’s ally, and associated with the merchant adventurers. He was Dale’s superior and had been associated with Dale’s involvement with Virginia.

In any case, De La Warr’s grant to found the Sherley plantation was the first of a series of Virginia Company land grants, made from Company land, to its chief officials (London and Jamestown), seemingly by its Deputy Governor Dale. The Company grants were combined with the establishment of a “hundred, and it restarted earlier Dale initiative to diffuse the Virginia population from its two settlements (Jamestown and Henrico) into the surrounding James River territory. As such it is an unambiguous commitment to a permanent settlement, and a serious effort to reverse the stagnation, if not decline, of the colony—and a substitute for a salary for his involvement in service to the Company.

Directly following the Company’s Third Charter (mid-1612), the Sherley Plantation royal grant and the Virginia launch of the further plantations by Dale in Virginia, was Smythe’s “kickoff” signature initiative to get the colony back on track with its original promise, and to provide a legitimizing link with the Irish plantation in process at that time. With the participation of the King thru his royal land grant, the King and Company were restoring the belief in the existing and future investor membership that they “as undertakers” in a national endeavor should pay the next installment of their membership, and recommit themselves to development of the plantation. West’s Sherley Plantation placed West, and the Company in the position of “undertaker” in the development of land intended to settle Virginia and to commence the installation of an economic base from which future prosperity to England and the investor would follow.

The strategy behind Dale’s multiple initiatives, I suggest, was set as early as 1610-1 when in response to the flood of bad news from Jamestown, and the subsequent discouragement of the Virginia Company investor member (existing and future), Smythe and West had issued a promotional publication, ” a True and Sincere Declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia” [99] Drawn from Brown, Genesis of the United States, pp. 775-79, by Charles Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 124.

In that publication Smythe committed the Company to the development of a plantation whose chief purposes included conversion of the Indians, described as “a number of poore and miserable soules“, the enhancement of the honor and safety (think national defense) “of our Gratious King and his Estates” [Parliament], and importantly from our perspective, “to transplanting the ranckness [i.e. rank and file] and multitude of increase in our people [England’s Malthusian population explosion], [and]

Lastly, the appearance and assurance of Private commodity [land] to the particular undertakers [the investors], by recovering and possessing to themselves a fruitful land whence they may furnish and provide this Kingdome with all such necessities and defects (Copper, iron, Steel, Timber for ships yards masts, cordage, sope [soap] ashes under which we labor, and are now enforced to buy, and receive at the curtesie  of other Princes [foreign countries]. … These being the true and essential ends of this Plantation. “the Rationale for Colonization”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, Warren M. Billings (Ed), pp. 14-15

Starting in 1614, tobacco planting spread to properties held by the Company’s Virginia elite. First, along the James River, then to the West and Shirley Hundreds, and finally moved east to Point Comfort—a 140 mile expanse that marked the birthplace of Virginia’s tobacco economy and culture [99]  The population spread was remarkably quick. Given that Dale’s land reform was in its infancy in 1614, the numbers small until 1616, small household planters followed the profits of the Company elite as they acquired their land. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/tobacco-in-colonial-virginia/. In this period Henrico was successfully settled, fortified, storehouse (even a hospital) and residences as in Jamestown. Adjacent land was cleared for farming, and corn was stipulated by Dale to be planted. Nearby Indian lands were seized, extended the area for staple cultivation and livestock herding. With the creation of each hundred/plantation new settlements were founded–along the James, and the ancient planters diffused into the interior, and away from Jamestown. In these new settlements former indentured servants could now “rent” their own land and in a garden plot of their own sustain their existence. By 1616, previous to Dale’s return to England, six such settlements had been founded [99] Herbert L. Osgood, American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 74-77 The Hundreds– At this point, we need to transfer our attention to the other element in Dale’s Gift and the 1616 initiatives: the Hundreds.

It is clear that from 1613 on, Dale was dispersing into the James River hinterland Company indentured servants, and former indentured servants, both groups benefited from his post-1613 land incentives. Settlements were founded, and plantations were established; Virginia was transforming itself from a one-horse town, into a real colony. Dale’s gift had, at least rhetorically,  linked plantations to “hundreds”, and certainly by 1617 five  “hundreds” had been infused with population, and some level of settlement-building was in process.

[999] “Hundreds”, a commonly known English term that dated back to Anglo-Saxon days, used in William the Conqueror’s Normal conquest, and subsequently employed mostly in frontier or regions in flux. It was a sub-county structure, a geographic administrative unit intended for a new settlement holding about 100 persons-households. Its function was “governmental”, core unit being judicial–it had evolved with other functions over the centuries. [999]

In the Virginia context, absent any notion of “county”, and without any substantial demarcation of a town or city level function, Dale’s Hundreds just floated above a geography that was being settled by his dispersion from Jamestown. His initial failure to impart any powers, suggested that in Virginia it was a convenient geographical territory within which land grants could be made by Dale to others, and population diffused. The closest we can come is two judicial-focused courts circuited among the Hundreds, relieving pressure on Jamestown, and addressing local need for an accessible judicial function.

This is exactly what happened over the next three years after Dale left. It also left unclear whether the Virginia Company in London had anything resembling a vision as to how that territory would be administered. The decision to assign the common tasks of a local government to the provincial level council meant Virginia enjoyed no meaningful formal sub-provincial system, saving perhaps the Anglican parish. The Hundreds for its initial period was little more than a container into which Jamestown-based Company administrators–which should be understood as provincial-state level officials-infused and dispersed its population into the hinterland, chiefly for self-sufficiency purposes, but also a critically important element in its strategy to encourage and retain its shareholders through a rough patch when its debts expired and the Company was not able to pay an expected dividend.

After Dale left in 1616, his Deputy (George Yeardley) took over until the next Deputy Governor arrived on the scene. Yeardley had been involved with Dales’ Gift and the Bermuda Hundreds, and in the interim into 1617, he granted tenants in the Bermuda Hundred rent free tenancy, providing them near-ownership possession of their land. This should be considered an extension of Dale’s land reforms, and a continuation of the Company-led goal of creating private ownership of the land for former-employee residents-but more so a profit alternative for existing and new investors. [99] Osgood. Vol 1, pp. 77

A focus on the Company’s investor-shareholders was required in 1616 as the dividend from 1609 was due, and the lottery, in perpetual trouble, was not generating sufficient funds to deal with the past debt load accumulated in the first years. These investors were expecting a dividend in 1616, and the Company, realizing that was not to be, were likely pivoting its investors to take an award of land in substitute for “cash”. The willingness of the Governor, and of the Company’s management to do so, was leading by example, and further closing any gap between it and its investor core. As Dale was leaving London formally extended his Gifts to shareholders and this marked a new stage in the “Gifts settlement initiative”.

The first of these of which we have record (Smith’s Hundred-1617, Martin’s Hundred, 1618, or Martin’s Brandan (plantation of 7,000 acres in 1617; between 1619 and 1623 forty four of these patents were issued [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 130-1.

Lacking resources to transport additional colonists, the company devised a new form of settlement–the particular plantation. This was a private plantation, formed by a voluntary association [a form of joint stock corporation] of stock holders who pooled their dividends and concentrated their efforts in a specific settlement along the James [River]. The associates financed the full costs of their plantation, including transporting and maintaining settlers, most of which came as indentured servants with allegiance to that particular plantation, NOT TO THE COMPANY [Mine]. The first plantation was Smythe’s Hundred (renamed the Southampton Hundred in 1620-a slap at Thomas Smythe by renaming it in honor of his principal opponent in 1620), formed by Thomas Smythe, Sandys, and the Earl of Southampton [of Shakespeare fame, who was the alleged “leader” of the Sandys faction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wriothesley,_3rd_Earl_of_Southampton]. It encompassed nearly 80,000 acres in abandoned tribal land along the Chickahominy River. [99] Grizzard Jr., and Boyd Smith, pp. xliii-xliv

Case Study: Bermuda Hundreds–Perhaps the most important of these early  Hundreds was the “Bermuda Hundreds” (at confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers), founded by Dale in 1613, as a port town to serve James River exporters, as well as serving as a fishing port, vital in the colony’s self-sufficiency.

“At Dale’s Gift salt was made and fishing carried on. The production of tobacco had already begun … but special care was taken … to encourage the raising of articles of food, ample in amount to support the inhabitants of the colony”. [Andrews} Rolfe lived there, as did Yeardley. An Anglican parish, probably established at its creation, married Rolfe and Pocahontas in 1614. By 1620 the parish population grew to 184, including 30 women and another 31 children/teenagers. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bermuda-hundred-during-the-colonial-period/

John Rolfe set up his first export-intended plantation there, It is certain these lands possessed Indian corn-bearing fields, and that Dale himself had earlier driven them off and seized control of the area. It was part of his early Henrico project. It was Dale who gave it the name Bermuda Hundred [99] Emily Jones Salmon, Early History and Establishment of the Bermuda Hundred https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bermuda-hundred-during-the-colonial-period/. Dale enclosed the area behind palisades, and located several dozen Englishmen within eight square miles included in original “hundred”.

The Bermuda Hundreds (as well as the five other Hundreds) were clearly a major Company initiative to diffuse the population from Jamestown into the hinterland, and to make available for settlement considerable land in strategic locations along the James River and its tributaries. It would appear that Dale got Bermuda Hundreds (he sold it when he departed).

Dale extended his land reforms to Company employees whose term of service had expired. [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 76. He also quickly annexed hundreds of acres to the original grant as territory to be used for plantation and household homesteads.. “Bermuda”, the name, was chosen because of the role Bermuda played in the fateful 1610 saving of the Jamestown settlement. This concession fostered population growth as by 1616 about 119 settlers called it home. It also demonstrates how the original gift was easily and quickly expanded by the Company officials.

Interestingly, a contingent of those former employees were transferred to the Bermuda Hundred Once there. They petitioned Dale for a special land tenure arrangement that provided an extra week of for the tenant-owner to plant and harvest (on top of the month already permitted by Dale in the original contract). Also each man with a family got a house with four rooms, with a year’s rent forbearance. Twelve acres per household were permitted for cultivation by the ancient settlers, and they were “supposedly” provided with livestock, tools, provisions for a “twelvemonth” [I suspect that this was a hit or miss affair] [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 76.

Nevertheless, around seventeen such farmers were positioned in the Bermuda Hundred before Dale’s departure. In the Bermuda Hundred we can see how Dale’s fledging land and workforce incentive program functioned as a key instrument in his town-building settlement strategy. [99] Emily Jones Salmon, Early History and Establishment of the Bermuda Hundred https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bermuda-hundred-during-the-colonial-period/. Dale

That raises the question of who was to handle local matters, and coordinate such activities as arose in daily life? That issue explains why the owner of the properties within the Hundred were entrusted with responsibilities and rights over servants and residents until future governmental entities were created. Even in 1613 , it was within the charter power of the Virginia Company to create such entities as it deemed fit—as Penn did in Pennsylvania seventy years or so later—it consciously chose not to do so.

An Extended Discussion of “Dales’ Gift” and “Colonies within a Colony”

Virginia’s basic problem was the the pitiful fiscal state of the Virginia Company. Associated with that was the fragmentation of consensus among the joint stock shareholders, as well as the simple reluctance of the sovereign to seriously involve himself in his Virginia private-public partnership. The Company needed cash for dividends, services rendered, expenses and debt repayment and that meant Virginia had to generate revenues to supplement the lottery and share subscriptions as a means of corporate survival. Tobacco was the only export that evidenced potential to generate such revenues and for that reason the Company facilitated its spread throughout the settled colony. Accordingly, as Dale, continued his spreading and shredding the settler population along the James, the settlers took tobacco plantations with them.

The Virginia Company was never able to forge sufficient capacity to extend its dominance over what happened in Virginia even when it installed a loyal military-based policy system. In that system, London relied necessarily and heavily, on the judgement of its generals in the field. That is why Dales’ planning tome of 1611 is so critical to us. In that plan Dales breaks open the Company monopoly over land, and over his administrations facilities the private ownership of Virginia land, as an incentive, as a mechanism for food staples, and a victim of his drive to spread the population over the James River banks. He extended his policy beyond ancients to servants with expired terms, free men, and in 1613 issued his first “plantation/hundred Dale’s Gift to company officials. .By 1616 the essential core of what is called “headrights” was in place; it proved so valuable and versatile that London adopted it with open arms, cutting its own deals with investor associations..

So after 1612, as we shall now see, the Company, as implemented by its generals, sold and granted royal-owned land as permitted in its charter with the King. Any Company program that granted land in title attained from the king through its charter, however, contained a risk that the king might revoke the charter and take the land back. After 1624 that uncertainty created an uncertain legal title to any such land grant—and for that matter uncertainty in land granted during the Company period as well. The reality was the King could reclaim his land- a practice that was happening concurrently in Ireland. The reader thus should recognize from the start that land sales, transfers and grants by the Company were not matters of settled law, and that the King, in a divine right policy system, could reclaim these lands at his volition was like a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of Virginia residents. The readers should also assume I insert this issue because it will be a significant matter during the period 1625-1639.

In 1613 Dale had rather large fish to fry to transition from the horrible previous years. Several initiatives he launched, interrelated, sequentially over several years were remarkable, but not spectacular in producing growth. Corporate officials in London launched their own versions, and implementation conducted in a rather disjointed fashion. Collectively at the time they were called “Dales’ Gift”. It is not clear to what extent they were Dale’s, or the Company’s initiatives, but my reading is they were congruent with Dale’s earlier program of spreading the population out from Jamestown. Dale awarded the first “Gift”  to his boss, Governor De la Warr in London in 1613; he went on and followed with Gifts-Hundreds to others, including himself.

Craven asserts “the company offered a grant in proportion to the number of shares thus pooled, and an additional allowance of fifty acres for every person transported at the charge of the grantees [investors], an offer containing features basic to Virginia’s subsequent land policy [aka headrights]. Even then the general response continued to be disappointing. So much so that such patents … issued were carelessly drawn of else the officers of the company were persuaded, in the hope of saving the colony to agree to almost any terms upon which men were willing to go. At any rate most of the early patents were repudiated, with charges in one or two instances of collusion for dishonest purposes. Some of them, especially in the case of a claim by Captain Martin [Martin’s Hundred] to five hundred acres per share, remained a subject of bitter controversy to the company’s last days. The explanation would appear that under the existing circumstances men were permitted virtually to write their own tickets”. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 121. It was a buyers market, and the Company during the mid-teens struck what deal it could with those investors willing to bypass the Company and develop-finance-operate their own “colony-within a colony”. Still a certain level of immigration was achieved sufficient to stabilize the colony’s size and replace those lost to disease and who would when able return to England.

Virginia resident Company officials and those, like sea captains essential to Virginia subsistence were first to acquire public lands; and simultaneously, land passed in various degrees to former indentured servants who survived; instead it was their term of service that expired. Shareholders in turn benefited, but Virginia was opened up to non-shareholders as well. There was a lot of flexibility, opportunism, and local monitoring at best was a land survey and formal registration in Jamestown. Yet whatever its limitations, both locals and London did transition from its 1607 business plan and settlement strategy and developed a replacement strategy for the latter that was refined, and able to be sustained into the royal administration period after 1625: that permanent settlement strategy revolved around the headright land incentives and indentured contracts that proved their mettle in attracting both investment and individual immigrants.

The reason for such a successful pivot lay with the support of the resident Company officials, such as Yeardley, Hamer, Martin, and even Argall. Argall took over after Dale/Yeardley, and, while his own performance was uneven and disruptive, his use of the headright and his divided loyalties as governor set the tone for future governors through to the American Revolution.

“Equipped [paid his own expenses without salary] largely at his own expense, and that of his associates, Argall, like so many Virginia governors thereafter divided his attention between the responsibilities of command and efforts to improve his own fortune. Later there would be charges of maladministration. But for the the present [mid-late teens] this willingness of old hands such as Argall and Martin to risk their lives and fortunes in a new venture to Virginia encouraged others to follow. The practice of pooling dividends to secure a common grant of land with its promise of savings in administrative and other costs, seems also to have helped persuade some of the smaller investors to seek the advantages of group action in approaching the hazards of American settlement, and to take for granted the necessity of settling together in units [hundreds] that would permit enjoyment of the diverse benefits of community life. The English village with its surrounding farm lands, not the isolated farmhouse of later America, continued to set the standard. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 122-3.

In this extended quote we see Craven’s sympathy with my assertion that the settlement pattern unleashed by Dale and his Gifts was picked up by old Virginia hands, and they provided sufficient inspiration for others to continue to settle in the new system of land ownership. The use of land grants as a substitute for officials’ salaries and expenses was expedient for the moment, but its long-term cost included blurring the focus of those officials between public and their personal wealth, and their subsequent behavior, performance on the job, and tied-at-the-hip linkage to the tobacco plantation and export economy only further reinforced the drift to the tobacco monoculture and its inequalities of workforce, society, and a closed elite.

Also, the divided attention of governors, in particular, shifted them into the plantation owner grouping, and until John Harvey in 1630, resident governors with land patents worked consensually with the Council of State to use both corporate and royal provincial government to provide them personal and family benefit, and yielded policy decisions such as raiding Indian fields, and continuing the Second Powhatan War longer than it likely needed to be. With preferential access to land patents in newly settled territories they were also able to ascend to the highest economic level available in the colony.

Thus official duties and the desire for personal wealth through associated land and tobacco export ownership, shaped such important political development “twigs” as gubernatorial style and their self-interest, which by nature both oriented them toward the interests of the larger planter owners, and which set them apart from the smaller planter, subsistence planters, and indentured servants. While the planter grouping did fragment around 1628-9, until then provincial government was closely held by former company officials transformed after the Company charter was suspended into the most affluent plantation owners in Virginia. Land, turned into personal wealth, created political power sufficient to almost close the system to outsiders.

Ironically a future governor, John Harvey, broke from this pattern, and through his own ineptitude and personality isolated the office from the planter elite, resulting in his ouster by them. The net result is that until the 1639 “Deal” with King Charles the governor’s office was not a commanding influence in policy, and its unqualified conformity to royal policy seriously challenge, weakened, and then as a consequence of Harvey viewed with some mixed feelings., In the future governors, certainly until the Restoration period, “went native” and tended to become dependent on elements of the planter class for local support.

In either instance the unrestricted powers of a Virginia governor were always to be subjected to check, if not repudiation, by one or another local grouping or faction. In reality, that pattern began in 1617-18; Argall, will be fired, replaced by Yeardley who in two short years would be replaced by Wyatt—who would almost upon arrival face the realities of the March massacre and the Second “Powhatan War—would set the tradition of a restrained governor’s office governing in conjunction with the larger Virginia-planter class and its emerging plantation conquistadors. During the Second Powhatan it appears, at least to me, that Governor Wyatt, lacking either corporate or royal resources and support, acted as first among equals to the strongest members of his Council of State. Consequently, there is little in the way of a strong governor’s office until 1630—and events after that did little but weaken it until 1639.

While causality between the public and private blurring of the Company elite and the subsequent evolution of the governor’s office can never be bluntly asserted, the practice did shift the behavior of company officials, including, if not especially its governor, and that behavior certainly facilitated the entry of the governor and other corporate, later royal, appointees into inclusion in the planter elite—with all that logically entailed. The Virginia political and economic development twig had indeed been bent.

That such early local dynamics could be so strong and durable to last for decades is, in my mind, attributable to first the Virginia Company’s inability to command its presence in Virginia’s affairs, and secondly, to the English Stuart sovereign’s unwillingness to take the time and resources to develop his position in Virginia, and to sustain in his gubernatorial appointments a devotion of countering local dominance over day-to-day Virginia affairs with that of the king. Thus the pattern which commenced as early as 1616 would continue well into the seventeenth century, relatively undisturbed, and tilting with each decade to more decentralized local administration of the colony.

Another pattern leading to the decentralization of Virginia colonial policy-making by elevating the role and function of its chief local unit of governance (hundred-county) also began, and took first root in the “tweens”. That of spreading the Virginia population from Jamestown principally, into the hinterland, extending to other river systems, and movement north in the Chesapeake Bay coastline, prompted my so-called isolated “shredding” of local governance, and a dependence on it by the weakened and also isolated provincial government.

Lacking empowerment by the Company and the Crown, the provincial government never enjoyed sufficient resources or developed institutions capable to implementing policy without the active assistance, consensus, and involvement of the local governances. Instead we can see evidence that from the infusion of local governance of the post 1616 investor associations the Company had to integrate an autonomous colony within a colony into the fabric of provincial governance it attempted during the very short Greate Charter period.

The Second Powhatan War cemented the reliance of the provincial government on its local hundreds, and its planter and conquistador elites. Again the role of the Council of State was central, with the latter structure composed of planter elites appointed for life by the sovereign, but in reality by nomination by elites in Virginia. I am very unsure that colonialism was supposed to work this way. In any event, we can retrace the dynamic flows after 1616 to observe how my infamous “tilt” in Virginia governance began and matured very early in the colonial period.

After 1616. The “pooled” investment associations which evolved out of Dale’s (hundreds) Gift to Company officials (starting in 1613) proved to be the most reliable source of investment and immigration into Virginia at least until the Second Powhatan War (1622). Under that investment motif the investor purchased land at locations they desired, and set up these plantation-hundreds as autonomous and self-operating settlements, dispersed in isolation of each other, which extended beyond those borders established by Dale’s “spreading and shedding” initiative. Described at the time as “a colony within a colony” these individual plantations spread (and shredded) the population (and decentralized the colony’s policy-making).

 Even beyond the inevitable building of tensions with the Powhatan, the spreading geographic settlement pattern evidenced in this period reinforced decentralization in Virginia’s governance—and as would be evident in early Virginia, inhibited the development, not only of a port city, but smaller but diverse and growing urban centers that could, in their time, lead to urbanization. Instead, the isolated plantation-settlement cluster within each hundred become the center of the local economy, and the aggregate of clusters of plantations rendered the plantation and its tobacco export the economic base of each hundred.

To repeat yet again, nothing was inevitable with these developments; they were not destined to be victorious. Rather, nothing of sustained resistance broke their growth pattern. What started as a default dynamic without challenge or resistance sufficient to alter its progression  permitted these early patterns to mature, harden, and then build protections for their defense from higher levels of government—and even the king. This is the ultimate bottom line of how Virginia’s political and economic development twig was bent—and bent very early in its years. Virginia politically developed from the bottoms-up.

To see how this could start, we return to Craven:

 … The several private plantations which had their beginning or were projected at this time varied considerably in size. Some were small enough for their ownership and management to be described in terms of a partnership which united in common effort only a few adventurers and perhaps one or more experienced planters. Others were held jointly by societies [associations] of adventurers which became large enough to require [an organizational structure] not unlike that of [the Virginia Company, such as Smith’s/Southampton Hundred] … In Virginia, where men could talk of 100, 200, or even 500 acre shares [unlike Bermuda] there was room for ambitious ventures. Moreover, Virginia’s expanding production of tobacco … could hardly be ignored by men who had pinned their faith [their business plan] in agricultural experimentation. … It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of tobacco in the history of Virginia after 1616. Indeed the significance of the fact that the colony at last had found a marketable staple [export]—one moreover promising a return on investment within a year of settlement—is so obvious that historians have been inclined to assume that this development alone offers explanation enough for the adventurers reviving interest. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 122-4

One can easily see in this investment-settlement atmosphere how tobacco expanded, quite beyond the company’s control, and why investor-settlers were attracted to it. Although as Craven observes, that these adventurers “put to a test practically the entire experimental program initially devised by the elder Hakluyt” , each attempt at diversification was crushed by the sustained expansion of tobacco planting, its dominance as the export crop, its use as a local currency, that it could not gain traction needed for counter investment necessary to “scale up”. The ease of raiding adjacent Indian fields even countered resident settler needs to grow their own sustenance crop, or divert them from importing their own tools, or building their own boats and ships—until much later in their development. Once Virginia’s economic twig was bent, that twig kept on growing in the direction it was bent.

The Shredded Community After Dale Departs

At some point in the mid-tweens and after, we see evidence and manifestations that Virginia gradually, almost imperceptibly, moved from a Virginia Company corporate-military culture to a broader society based on a series of autonomous plantations, non-Jamestown settlements, and multiple association hundreds communities/plantations. At the same time the demographics subtlety changed, adding women and children to the population mix with the expected accommodation of norms, aspirations, law and individual behaviors.

Not only did the Company lose its monopoly over land, but it had to pay its “employees”, and even award benefits to its indentured servants. The London Virginia Company corporate leadership, empowering as it did its Virginia-based corporate officials, and dividing their attention between corporate priorities and their individual inclinations and desire for personal wealth, transformed the latter in “individual entrepreneurs and speculative opportunists, who by the earliest of the 1620’s were able to stand on their own in Virginia, without corporate position.

Indeed as we shall see the more successful of the “land grabbers” of that period found seats in the very powerful “Council of State”, governor’s council of advisors/policy-makers that arose from the Greate Charter and Second Powhatan disruptions. There was no plan, just reaction to change and opportunities-ambitions, filling of vacuums—and with the scramble within Virginia Company politics that unleashed itself in 1619, more or less of a free-for-all, king of the hill individualist individual culture saturated the colony, relatively unrestrained by the goings-on in London.

With the entrance of investment association funded hundreds settlements the military policy system lost much of its ability to control most freeholders residing on non-Company lands. While Dale, as a matter of policy, was committed to dispersing the population along the river(s)—even though it seemed to have marginal effects on health and no serious impact on mortality rates—by the time of his departure (1616) non indentured free men/women could settle on their own volition, pretty much purchase land if they could afford it, file a claim and survey and establish a household on it.

Changes within Virginia also encouraged privately developed settlements. As the few survivors of the first group of settlers became free of their obligations to the Company in 1614, then Governor Dale granted them small individual plots. These, amounting to only three to twelve acres, could provide little more than expanded garden plots. As time passed, however, a small but growing group of “Ancient” Virginia planters joined with English [private investment] developers in pressing for wider scope for individual initiative within the framework of the Company organization. It was decided in 1618 that all [free men] settlers who had arrived in Virginia before 1616 would be granted one hundred acres for their personal adventure, and those coming thereafter would get fifty acres. Grants of this size would permit not just immediate subsistence, but also long-term commercial exploitation. [99] Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 34.

Yeardley, inheriting the lieutenant governor’s mantle after Dale left, had the reputation of furthering his own personal gain, even as he completed Dale’s land reforms. When replaced by Argall, he left for London to take over Smythe’s new “hundred”, returning again, after a company civil war erupted, as lieutenant governor and newly-married knight with enhanced social status. In these few years we can see a real shift from the military corporate culture of 1611, to a surprisingly open and access able society that, so long as you were not indentured, invited its settlers to see their own opportunities and “take them”.

There was not much to like in this transformation, as Bailyn later observed, but that aggressive individual assertion by that narrow company-related proto-elite, in the absence of both will, experience and capacity from London, opened the way for Virginia’s developing its own, “adopted home brewed” elite that tentatively forged its own policy system in accordance with its perceived needs. In any case this too was a legacy, an important element of the the Virginia Company heritage.

Company officials had dibs and the “inside track” in this transition from corporate to “non-corporate society”—hence first advantage—they also were willing to help those who wanted land, turning them into proteges or at least cooperative partners pursuing mutual advantages. In short there was a world of difference between living in Virginia in 1611 and 1617. In 1617 land, access to workforce, and tobacco were engrained institutions into a more open society—still dominated by the Company and its local officials, of course—and a series of communities-settlements stretching on the coast and year by year into the coastal hinterlands. To me it is pretty unclear just what site control the London-based Company enjoyed over the day-to-day life in Virginia. By 1617-18 that control, as we shall soon see, resulted in what I call the “Argall affair”, which, I believe, set the stage for the 1618-1619 Greate Charter.

Plantations and Hundreds

Governor Thomas Dale “institutionalized”  the Hundred in Virginia. But the story of the Hundred is not Thomas Dale. Rather it is the story of a level of government, a political structure, that evolved to be the centerpiece of Virginia’s colonial policy-system. The “style” of politics that developed within the Hundred has since been labeled “the courthouse gang”, and has often been placed within the conceptual category of “machine politics”, such as, for example, the “Byrd Machine”.

So the “Hundred story” is less a story about a simple level of government than a story of those played roles in its development, the purposes-constituencies they served, values and policy goals they advocated and resisted, and their relationship with higher levels of government (governor and provincial legislatures, courts, militia, bureaucracies) as they ebbed and flowed through time. In a decentralized state policy system such as Virginia was to become, local governments play a heavy role in state policy-making,; the county (into which the hundred was converted in 1632 and 1634), “hits above its weight” (place in the overall policy hierarchy)—which only brings us full circle into understanding its purposes, constituencies, values and policy positions. The records, many of which were burned either in London or Richmond, are hugely incomplete, and insights gleaned are much like the shadows discerned in Plato’s cave.

In that sense the hundred-county proved to be a stage on which the drama of Virginia’s political, social and economic development was played. I suspect Thomas Dale was not thinking along these lines. But without doubt in my mind he created English America’s first genuine level of local government—in 1613. Accordingly, we enter into the world of English colonial political development. That is a very troubled and biased world, as we shall see in these modules.

The Birth and First Use of the Hundred in Virginia

 

While I do agree the use of the “hundred” was the birth of Virginia’s counties, its first use was in 1613 to commence the first phase of the Company strategy-pivot away from its previous settlement strategy which was tied too much to a export trading factory heritage of the merchant adventurers, like Smythe, toward adopting a permanent settlement strategy that required sustained investments by the Company (or investors) over a long period of time. The quick profits that had been the hallmark of the trading factory strategy were obviously not to be had, and the desperate condition of Jamestown by 1612 had required the Company to forge a third charter with the king that allowed the Company to make the pivot.

The key was to attract new investment willing to make a commitment to the founding of permanent settlements in Virginia, and to encourage these investors, not the Company, use their funds to fund immigration and ongoing sustenance of the settlement. The “hundred” was the administrative vehicle that was employed to attract and manage settlement investment. The first phase of this pivot was to offload the Company’s expense in settlement by paying its resident and top managers and shareholders in land rather than cash. That tactic had worked well in motivating John Rolfe to experiment with tobacco by granting him a plantation around Henrico. Logically, the first candidate for this first phase was to award Governor De la Warre with his own plantation, named after his wife’s last name (“Shirley’s Hundred” or Flowerdew) in 1613.

The COO of this strategy in Virginia was the resident Lieutenant Governor Thomas. Dale. He awarded himself s plantation-hundred, today’s aka “Bermuda Hundred”, also in 1613. After that Dale confirmed a number of plantation-hundreds and after his departure in 1616 the program continued to, and after, the official 1618-19 Greate Charter birth. Collectively these awards acquired the tag of being “Dale’s Gifts” Even Thomas Smyth eventually got a large plantation-hundred, sharing it with Edwin Sandys (Smythe’s (or Southampton) Hundred”).

Other officials such as Company Treasurer and CEO of the Company Magazine were also awarded land grants as well. Over the next several years, numerous smaller land grants, creating individual plantations were issued during the teens (1613-19). Almost all beneficiaries wound up planting Rolfe’s tobacco, including Rolfe, who innovated a product on a plantation thirty miles north of Jamestown on which to experiment which was granted by his protégé Lt. Governor Dale. In early 1614 he sent his first four barrels of tobacco to England. Dale transferred to existing, and new plantation-hundreds, former indentured servants (the ancients) who had survived the first five years by providing limited property awards and tools to them; otherwise indentured servants were transferred from Jamestown area. Without this addition, many would likely have returned to England, at company expense. Given the mortality rate of the past, most of those indentures were resident in the Jamestown cemetery, and this crop of former indentures was small and benefited plantation-hundred owned by company officials.

There were no fixed boundaries and the two “monthly courts” set up in 1619 were correctly county courts without specified county boundaries; as such they traveled on a circuit to offer their session to those in the immediate “precinct”, which Osgood said intended were meant to serve a cluster of adjoining plantations. The General Assembly of 1624, and other legislative bodies that meant through the period to 1631, enlarged upon these court circuits to six.

As we have noted the Hundreds preexisted the original monthly county courts of the Greate Charter, as did the Jamestown Anglican parish. In that the the jurisdiction and scope of a Hundred was also a cluster of plantations that comprised an area from which one day or less travel was its intended district or precinct. Small-scale freeman plantations, and especially the larger scale plantations anchored on tobacco were the basic units of both the future monthly court, the parish and the Hundred.

As we have observed the “Hundreds and Plantations” were the closest geographical entities that demarcated what will pass as pre-1634 counties. The inspiration for both commenced after the 1612 Jamestown stabilization and the announcement of Dale’s Land Reforms (1613). Included in that was his land grant to Baron De La Warr’s Shirley plantation, the first in Virginia. The next step in the same year was Dale’s Gift which created the “hundreds”, and called for land grants for former Company servants. Coincident with these land grants were the dispersal of tobacco seeds from John Rolfe’s experimentation. In the next several years key resident company officials, including Dale himself, set up tobacco plantations in the hundreds and awarded land grants to the former servants in these hundreds—dispersing the population from Jamestown.

There is little doubt that Sandys saw the Company, its annual shareholder meeting as the sovereign of the Virginia colony, and the operations of the larger Virginia Company. In that the structure of the Virginia Company included a considerable number of “investment” joint stock corporations, eventually including the Bermuda colony as well, the matter of governance fell to the Company officers as elected by the shareholders. By Company Instruction, not contested after the termination of the Company charter, the Governor resident in Virginia (with powers of Captain General also) was the individual entrusted and empowered to implement and when necessary determine policy and organization within the colony.

The transformative break introduced by the Greate Charter was the empowerment of a General Assembly, and by act of the Governor and Assembly, the creation of a local government. The provincial level was indented to be superior, and the Governor retained the critical power to approve land patents over “public lands”, with the consent of the Council of State [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. II  (Peter Smith, 1910, 1964), p. 321. After his approval, the documents simply had to be posted into the land register, used for tax role, census and elections.

The fall of the Company, however, as we have seen very quickly led to a diminishment of the governor’s power, and the rise in importance and autonomy of the Governor’s Council, the General Assembly, and over the next generation the principal unit of lower government after its formal creation in 1634, the county or shire. As we have argued in past modules, the distant and unfocused administration of the colony by the King and his Crown apparatus after the termination of the Virginia Company charter, unintentionally had the effect of empowering the legislative and advisory institutions of the policy system, at the expense of the resident executive, the governor or acting governor.

That was the legal or formal theory of the structure of Virginia provincial policy system.

Without doubt, the principal dynamic in that transference of power and policy capacity lay in the growth and expansion of the colony both in its economy, but in this instance, its geography. A central provincial government in its capital, Jamestown could not govern on a daily basis the isolated and now distant reaches of Virginia’s shredded community. That isolation permitted the development of local elites, a functioning Anglican parish, local economic bases, and required self-defense in the form of a local militia with local leadership when confronted with the potential and reality of hostile neighboring Indian tribes.

On the Eve of the Greate Charter the Association Joint Stock Corporation-Hundred: the EDO of Virginia’s settlement-building

The structural reform we next turn to discuss is the Company’s use of a distinctive form of the joint stock corporation to promote Virginia economic development: the association. First employed as early as 1614, association joint stock corporations took off after 1616. Argall, as deputy governor took advantage of using an association for his own payment as deputy governor, and he let other investors take advantage also. By the time Yeardley started implementing the Create Charter instructions in 1619, the Virginia landscape was littered with association-hundreds, and subsidiary plantation level associations. The use of associations did not cease in the following decades, and their popularity ought be explained.

The association joint stock corporation was the EDO that the Virginia Company allowed to be used as a legitimate bypass of the Company’s near monopolistic economic control, first by its investors, and then to those who agreed to send over settlers, and establish plantations in the Company Hundreds set up along the James River and its tributaries. Through the association English investors could engage in their own plantation building independent of the Company. Predictably the path to profit was in tobacco, not corn or staples, and so the plantations they founded spread the tobacco monoculture through the Tidewater region-stopping only at the James River Falls that marked the boundary of the future Piedmont mountains-plateau region.

The association through the Company headright incentive program could import its own workforce, and establish its own autonomous position in the economy and politics of its local unit, the Hundred. Called at the time “a colony within a colony”, these “plantation-hundreds” in essence created a sovereignty-independence of action of their investors-plantation owners that buttressed their fortunes in the hard times that followed, and permitted their entry into the wider politics and policy making at the provincial level through the Assembly-the one place they all came together. In the 1630’s these hundreds were transformed into counties–and then their salience to us becomes more obvious. Until then, the hundreds ruled, and Jamestown and Company governance had to work through them, and respond to their needs.

We have already explained the desperate fiscal situation in which the Company found itself, but as important a motivation for use of the association by the Company was that it worked as a “too” or strategy to bring badly needed settlers into Virginia. After nearly a decade and a half, the colony was still tied to Jamestown and its deathly surroundings, with Dale’s dispersion on in process. The colony simply had not be able to increase its population, and with the headright for indentured servants, and the land grants and quit rate abatement for owners, groupings of new settlers tied to new locations along the James offered the potential of avoiding or lessening the impact of the annual “summer sickness”, and reducing mortality.

Andrews, Vol. 1, pp. 127-8 [99] argues this link to new settlement formation and population increase made the headright a useful economic development tool: “It was realized, as early as 1617-1619 that a variety of ways would have to be contrived to enlarge the population, and to increase the agricultural output. Among these aids were the subsidiary joint stocks [associations] or private ventures of one kind or another that were set up under the auspices of the company [most of all] … the encouraging of small groups or associations of men, organized on a joint stock basis, to settle particular plantations or private colonies within the boundaries of the company’s patent [charter]. These associates were to provide tenants, servants, and equipment from their own resources, and to engage in agriculture, Indian trade or fishing.

Smythe and Sandys knew that be establishing particular and private enterprises, they had also changed the lines of political authority. No longer did the Governor have complete control over the colony’s labor force. Each association ran its particular plantation, and the private planters controlled their own land. Furthermore, the Londoners [Company management] blurred distinctions between company officials and private planters by … [allowing] men who had personal stakes in Virginia rather than men who intended to make their personal fortunes and return home [to England].

For instance, Yeardley as governor, was responsible for supervising company lands and the cape merchant, but he also managed Smythe’s hundred and Weyanoke, developed the governor’s [public] lands for his salary, and established a large personal plantation, Flowerdew Hundred, as a long-term investment. Not surprisingly these officers had a tendency to look out for their personal interests before meeting their obligations to the company. [99] Grizzard, Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown: a Colony, p. xlv

Andrews asserted these grants and contracts made to the associations, especially the early ones, extended governmental powers to the owners, almost as “housekeeping” in function, to keep order in new settlements where the colony’s provincial government had little to no capacity with which to maintain order and sustainability in an isolated wilderness, often hostile wilderness–so long as the actions taken under the terms of the contract did not violate the “laws of England”. In his mind they were intended only as temporary, and in that the association owners would remain in England, they would be able to supervise their Virginia colonies appropriately:

[P]owers ranted, according to the form of patent drawn up in 1620, were almost those of an independent colony. The [Virginia] company agreed that the captains or leaders of these associations who should ‘go to Virginia to inhabit ‘by vertue of their Graunts’ and should ‘plant themselves, their tenants and servants’ might have liberty ‘til a form of government is here settled over them’ to make orders, ordinances and constitutions ‘associatinge unto them divers of the greatest and discretes of their companies’ for the better ordering and directing of their servants and businesses, provided these ordinances were not contrary to the laws of England

The idea of these colonies pf ‘hundreds’ … was not so much to help the company on the commercial side as to replenish the colonial population in as short a time as possible with good multitudes of people’. The societies themselves remained in England, directing each particular ‘colony’ from a distance, just as the [Virginia] company itself was doing.

[99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 128-30

From this period of special plantation land grant patents, areas today that are referred to as “hundreds” we can see the earliest manifestation of a Virginia pattern of decentralization in government and the economy—and their privatization of government, indeed its fusion, handled and conducted by private elites. To my best knowledge Virginia’s first plantation, in 1613, was the “Shirley Plantation”. Located along the James, upriver from Jamestown, it was cleared for operation in 1614—and planted tobacco. [999]

By last years of the decade a small but steady stream of their sons and even daughters emigrated to Virginia, took advantage of the company headright package, and started their Virginia careers in tobacco, artisan craft, or other types of business, including forming their own joint stock corporation and becoming part of Virginia’s budding travel-indenture-logistics-settlement industry complex.

Insiders of the Company in key positions also realized they too must invest their own funds in ventures they were willing to make only if they themselves controlled the venture privately. Since the only asset the company had at its disposal was its vast company owned and controlled lands, land grants, and what would shortly be called the “headright system” were issued to the top London-based land resident investor leadership. They received plots of land on which they could found their own private plantation. “These plots constituted the first productive area that the company allowed to fall outside its own direct control“.

By 1617 these, well-connected nobles or individuals with connects to the highest positions received their land grants in the form of a “hundred”, an exceedingly large area, which they were encouraged to settle, found settlements, and sell plantations and plots of land to whomever they choose. The workforce imported were “their” workers, not Company, and the freeholders, often renters, were also subject to their authority. To handle the inevitable administration of these geographies, the Governor and his Council, or the Assembly empowered these hundred-plantation grantee-owners administrative and legal powers over their servants and renters, beginning the tradition of the power of the larger plantation owners over their local districts.

As a result of [its] land policy after 1614, settlements were widely scattered, and there was much confusion over land titles. The colony’s economic foundations were as shaky as ever, and the colonists grew more restive when in 1616 [Governor] Samuel Argall returned the colony to the strict discipline in Sir Thomas Dale’s “Lawes”. In London the situation was little better for the company verged on bankruptcy. [99] “the Beginnings”, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: a Documentary History 0f Virginia, 1606-1689 (edited by Warren M. Billings, pp. 10-11 Two Roads diverged into Virginia’s Colonial History: I chose the other path:

How did the tobacco cluster, the establishment of a plantation as the core unit of Virginia economy, the shredding and spreading of Virginia’s small population by Dale, Dales’ Gift, Shareholder Investor Joint Stock Associations all combine to bend the Virginia twig. To explain the bending under pressure from the mélange of dynamics and initiatives, I employ some policy making tools and concepts to demonstrate how, why, and when the Virginia Company played a major role in establishing what would be Virginia’s policy system, leaving such structures and dynamics in its heritage to its successor, the administration of Charles I.

What we describe below is a significant part of the inheritance to Charles, which as we shall see he left, for the most part undisturbed, and and let it evolve further–driven by dynamics, structures, behaviors-individual goals, and systemic relationships that propelled the embryonic policy system during the Company period.

Restatement of My Position on the Hundred

You get more for your effort if you can plod through my argument. My narrative, including plantation, tobacco, Indians, the shredded community all wrapped up within the boundaries of the several hundreds and settlement clusters that were founded in this short period of time (1613-1621) is way more complex, but one senses more coherence and convincing continuity than if one collapses it into a short smush or ignores it.. During the overall Virginia Company period, this period is usually dismissed as a military colony policy system, run loosely by Smythe from London. Far too many histories focus on the Greate Charter period, quickly plowing through the intervening period between the “starving year” and 1619-21.

The individual dynamics elements are seldom linked into an interacting whole, although several are studied in excellent detail  (Lorena Walsh’s Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit is one of a few studies, Craven another. It is the aggregate of Dale’s Gift dynamics that combined and overwhelmed the weak and sparsely settlement shredded in the isolated river communities that ran on their own steam fed by the effects of population dispersal, land grants, headrights and tobacco production, and the new investors in the colony who paid their own way over and ran their own plantations—and hundreds—as they saw fit, or were compelled to by necessity. In these few short years, the colony was largely on autodrive into 1619. This is how the monoculture first took hold, and it never really let go until hundreds of years later. By then, of course, the hundreds were counties.

Tobacco’s marketability in England set off a mania for planting that would transform the colony from a pseudomilitary outpost into an agricultural community of families and political institutions that would become a key player in the developing trade patterns of the Atlantic world. The English dispersed throughout the James River region, planting tobacco on Indian lands. With their eyes on riches, the settlers justified taking this property on grounds of cultural superiority. They believed the Indians lacked a concept of private property—most Indian groups held land communally—underutilized the land, were irreligious or heathen, and although intelligent, were a culturally deprived people, with benighted souls with whom the English could civilize and Christianize and teach the appropriate use of land.[99] Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent, Jr., William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, 1607-2007 (University of Virginia Press, 2007),  p. 28

Literally, the Hundreds were chronologically not only Virginia’s first local government , but also the first in English America. One can argue, as I do, that the “central”, i.e. provincial level, followed—in Virginia’s case not formally until 1639–and hence were the Johnnie come late. As demonstrated in the previous sections of this module, the governor of the Company’s military policy system was the instrument that led the formulation and introductory implementation of the hundred, but he did so as an element of another of his policy initiatives, the dispersal of the population.

Almost by accident in the pre-1617 period, the spread of tobacco and the tobacco export plantation grew hand in hand—after all tobacco paid the bills. The series of land grants, headrights,  the spread of tobacco planting, and the founding of plantations—plus the dispersal of population heretofore centralized in and around Jamestown—were all elements in the aggregate of Dale’s Gift programs. It is to Dale’s Gift that we have the monoculture’s birth.

Designed to get Virginia off its subsistence path that had compelled the establishment of a military policy system and onto some level of growth that could create at least a sustainable colony, not one at the existential edge of collapse, Dale’s Gift broke apart the older trading factor legacy in Virginia and whatever the military policy system was in 1611, by 1616 Virginia was in considerable flux and change. Some would describe it as a boom, others like myself a tobacco rush as opposed to a gold rush. Unlike the 1849 California gold rush that burnt itself out, the Virginia tobacco rush embedded itself into the colony as no one could have imagined at the time.

Simultaneously, the London  version of Dale’s Gift pivoted the Company business plan away from its assumption of nearly all costs of colonization, a bottomless pit, that required its imposing a penal code, and while the colony still was wracked with extreme mortality rates that crushed any natural immigration of both settlers and investors, Dale’s Gift in London created a middling investor class willing to settle in Virginia on their own dime, putting, hopefully, the Company on a fiscal path that avoided its bankruptcy. It too bought into the tobacco rush, disliking the weed, but never imagining how it would take over in such a short time. Given alternatives a more diversified economy could be developed. Were they ever wrong! Accordingly, one can view the Virginia Company as the first roadkill on the road to Tobacco Road. We might toss in urbanization and port city as well. Not to ignore an unequal society and workforce.

The Hundred, my center piece in this module, was quickly lost in the plantation and the other dynamics. For those few of us focused on the building of a fully developed Virginia policy system, however, the hundred is as important as any of the other elements. Yet here in 1613, as much on his devices as London’s, Dale announces the movement of settlers from their home base in Jamestown, their resettlement at a new plantation of their far-away governor, the planting of tobacco seeds, and submission of the governor and Shirley’s newly arrived residents of potential, admittedly unknown, responsibilities, inherent in an administrative unit he called the hundred, an level of government that was a blast from England’s long distant past.

That new system had to be devised piece by piece, day after day, by “decisions that led to the end goal of constructing a new polity, society, and economy suitable for environment, time, and location. Those decisions that created the stability—and civilization– that flowed from those decisions “became actual through the actions and decisions of men … Stability is an achievement, not a [n inevitable] growth. It is the result of individual and corporate human volition  [99] J. H. Plumb, Growth of Political Stability in England, p. 13. “English colonists did not shed their traditional social structure  as they walked down the gangplank [?] into the promised land, but rather took with them a system very different from that present” in the system they had left behind [99] Alan Macfarlane, the Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property and Social Transition, p. 164-5.

Accordingly, “birthing” a new polity, society, and economy occurs over time, as that new entity acquires and adjusts the elements of those systems into more or less a complete whole. If so, Dale’s Gift initiatives constitute an important initial step in the development of a functioning of that complete colonial system. The birth of a baby is not successful and complete until it is out of the womb, and the umbilical cord is cut. In seventeenth century English colonial world, that took decades not hours or days. Until completed the systems were “in process”, “under construction”, “not fully formed”. Virginia’s, in my opinion, came together between 1639 and 1643.

These Dale’s Gift initiatives until 1616-7 were company initiatives intended to not only benefit company employees, including indentured servants, but also company shareholders whose investment and willingness to invest private capital had become the primary and foremost element of the revamped Virginia Company settlement business plan. The Company was literally fighting for its fiscal survival and the hundred became the organization structure that provided the benefits and autonomy sufficient to justify private funds and a willingness to settle in Virginia in order to benefit from company headrights subsidies. In this sense, the hundred is not just a level of the Virginia policy system, but also a key instrument of its permanent settlement ambition.

As part of this initiative, a series of other private plantations, followed, including a second Smythe’s Hundred, Martin’s Hundred, Berkeley Hundred, Flowerdew Hundred, and Martin’s [son of the Lord Mayor of London], Brandon and Lawnes Plantations followed. Included in this barrage of plantations, was a little noticed award to Pilgrims, who never did settle in Virginia, but in Plymouth Massachusetts–outside the boundaries as specified in their undertaker contract. [99] Grizzard Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown Colony, pp. xliii-xliv.

Each of these plantations were in varying degrees “stocked” with settlers/new colonists in the years before 1618. “Martin’s Hundred and Flowerdew were rather tightly settled villages reminiscent of the English countryside. They were administered separately from Company lands, often by men like George Yeardley [who in 1617 was intended to manage Smythe’s Hundred, but was instead appointed Deputy Governor by Smythe-Sandys to replace Argall-West], Lieutenant William Peirce, and Abraham Peirsey, company officers, soldiers and officials whose first obligation was supposedly to the company” [99] Grizzard Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown Colony, p. xliv.

In our case, focused on the Company period and the earliest days of the First Migration, American historians, with few exceptions, feel comfortable with the wild, on the edge of lawlessness, the incredible blurring of private and public goals in the absence of any serious pushback. Bailyn is not the only distinguished historian that has suggested we simply bypass and ignore these rather crude political actors, consumed with ambition and greed, but who nevertheless seem to have forged a code of conduct that allowed government to form and even grow.

Still, I cannot address the politics that was spoken in the time of the hundreds before the Greate Charter. But I do suggest the authority of the military policy system in Jamestown or Henrico was limited, and no replication of the post starving time. The variety of hundreds that were funded in the three or four years before the Greate Charter Assembly met in mid-1619 were in some measure isolated from each other—and the capital, and were as a “colony within a colony” based on their own sources, resources, and the personalities of those invested in them. Even after 1619 to the Massacre these hundreds continued to be founded—indeed their founders were of such intensity, in some instances religious, they were destined to fundamentally attempt to disrupt Virginia, and plague Maryland through its first decades.

By the 1630’s there is definitely a set of acceptable pattern of policy-making, a rudimentary hierarchy of institutions, and a willingness and ability to navigate London, using factions, court politics, merchants communities, and bureaucratic committees and bodies—which in a time of budding civil war meant dealing with a King and Parliament destined to be at war. The Virginia Colonels, as we shall see, did well as they defended their interests in England against English and Scottish aristocracies and Parliamentary factions.

In the Company period, the Company buffered direct contact with resident Company officials and others, so until the Company broke down internally in 1619, these wild and wooly denizens of the hundreds were kept at bay. As we shall see the onslaught of the Second Powhatan War, and the virtual collapse of Virginia Company efforts to govern the colony were the break point, I believe, in allowing Virginia’s hundreds-based elite to enter into larger politics on their own. A brief looksee into Samuel Mathews who first appears on my screen in 1617 tied at the hip to Governor Samuel Argall.

 He sailed in on Argall’s ship in 1617, seemingly with maritime (fishing) skills, and was somehow caught up in a privateering incident that Argall’s ship participated in on the way over. London held an inquiry, and in 1618 Mathews was issued a warrant to testify, which he did in London—to little effect on him or Argall—who was knighted by the King a few years later.. Returning, he established Argall’s fur-trading business, which Argall turned into a near-monopoly through gubernatorial actions. He survived Argall’s departure, pivoted to founding an estate/plantation on the Chesapeake James River. Appointed to the Council of State in 1624 by the King, he married the widow of the Company Cape Merchant, transformed into a proto-typical Second Powhatan War plantation conquistador, and in the late twenties allied with the Claiborne faction. This is a busy ten years—it got much more active in the 1630’s.

Who is Samuel Mathews? God knows. My research suggest he was Welsh, moved to London, and from there to his arrival in 1617 I have little solid clue. Mathews, as the reader will discover, is the foremost character—shared with William Claiborne, who dominated Virginia’s policy system—and economy into the 1650’s.

The decade of Indian warfare, after the Powhatan uprising of 1622, forged colony leaders, regardless of their social origins into what J. Frederick Fausz called an ‘unlikely oligarchy’ that dominated the other colonists, the neighboring Indians, and commerce in tobacco, maize, and furs [99] Jon Kulka, Order and Chaos, p. 283.

My much longer narrative of this very brief period is complex, but we can better see how Virginia developed differently than other colonies—and why it was a precursor for southern colonies. If nothing else, we can see a working explanation as to why urbanization and a port city and a more diversified economy did not develop; instead a radically different “class-elite” configuration took root—as it had in the free-flowing, cross-class Elizabethan and Stuart courts.

Obscured by its aristocratic background and high faulting kings and queens, the cast of characters that participated in the making of foreign and colonial policy in London from the 1580’s through the end of the Civil War blurs and blends, old feudal classes with new merchants, emerging warrior privateers, and a brand of colonialism that is anything but a permanent settlement approach. I’m not absolutely sure, but they were a mirror image of Virginia’s earliest years as it fabricated its own elite. At home in the Second Powhatan War, these rising plantation conquistadors took hold of the hundreds in which they lived, and permeated into the governing bodies surrounding the governors of this period.

In Virginia and England, the horror of the starving times “have prejudiced the image of early Virginia in the minds of historians. And yet the few who have closely studied the extant pre-Restoration records have described—in works published both before and after Bailyn’s essay—the emergence of social order within a few decades after that catastrophic winter” [99] Jon Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia” , the Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (April, 1985), p. 276.

Today most historians concede a reasonable measure of social order and stability had emerged in Virginia by the 1640’s, yet here I am in this module proclaiming the essentials of colonial Virginia can be found previous to 1619. I suggest the answer is that our political, social and economic development expectations clash fundamentally with the realities encountered by early seventeenth century English settlers when they first “jumped off their ship” [because there was no pier]. Importing a heritage is not simply plug and play—there is good deal of assembly required..

Planting a society, polity and economic system is not “an import”, an inheritage that is stored on board ship and in an IKEA-like fashion quickly assembled for us in the New World. Kulka makes this point when he sarcastically commented that the definition of an English manor landscape today requires a five hundred year old lawn. Further on he cites, J. H. Plumb’s definition of  “political stability” [99] J. H. Plumb, Growth of Political Stability in England, p. 13, as the acceptance by society of its political institutions, and those classes of men or officials who control them”.

The origins and dynamics of Tilt and Decentralization of PM that Bent the Twig

It is not easy for all to accept or discern why this study is based on he notion the political-economic development “twig” of each colony-state bent at its birth or founding, and the direction taken then served as the base, starting gate, for its subsequent evolution through to our present time. Radical (outlandish if one prefers) as it may seem, the assertion can be found in various forms in the works of many historians throughout the many years since the first two decades of the seventeenth century. To start us off, I offer the comments in detail of one of America’s most noted historians, Gordon S. Woods.

I do not agree completely with Wood’s cause for twig-bending (spreading of tobacco), nor with his history of the formation of Virginia’s counties (he ignores hundreds and the Second Powhatan War), but Professor Woods and I share the insight that the bend in colonial Virginia policy-making came very early—as early as 1622—and that counties were the vanguard in Virginia (and towns in New England). Accordingly, Wood’s argument is presented in detail, and in the later commentary in this section I will offer my modifications as developed thus far in this module.

The Virginia Company, for example, hoped to set up buroughs in the Chesapeake, and indeed created four towns on paper—Jamestown, Charles City, Henrico, and Kiccowtan. The settlers desire to grow tobacco, a very soil-exhausting crop, undid the plans of having buroughs with burgesses as citizens. Although only one of the four towns, Jamestown actually arose, the colony’s legislature was initially called the House of Burgesses and the name stuck.[The Oxford definition of burgesses  is “an inhabitant of a town or borough with rights of citizenship].

Instead of congregating in towns, the settlers dispersed and created private plantations throughout the Chesapeake area. By 1622, the spread of the population was such that not all of the judicial cases could be brought to Jamestown. And so the Magistrates, that is the members of the governor’s council [my Council of State], went on circuit to hear judicial cases. By 1632 authorities [the General Assembly] created five monthly courts, each headed by one of the magistrates. By 1634 the scattering of settlements had become so great in the Chesapeake area that some sort of local organization became necessary and the colony was divided into eight counties [shires] in imitation of England’s country structure, each with its own court.

Within less than a generation these county courts became not only the basic unit of local government in Virginia, but also the source of representation [i.e. electoral unit] in the central [provincial] government, with each county sending two burgesses [in the beginning number was flexible with financial support of county the determinate] to the central [provincial] government. Although the parish originally had been the organization for local government, the county soon supplanted it and became the sole authority relating to the central [provincial] authority in Jamestown. The county courts became powerful, self-perpetuating, bodies that combined within themselves various civil, criminal, ecclesiastical, admiralty, and administrative jurisdictions that in England were exercised by different institutions.

In England the Crown was considered to be the source of all local authority. But during the first generation of settlement in the New World, the English Crown, for all intents and purposes, simply did not exist. This meant that the local units of government in both the Chesapeake and New England attained extraordinary degrees of autonomy and power without being beholder to the Crown at all. Indeed so strong and autonomous did the local authorities become that even the central [provincial] governments in each of the early colonies in the Chesapeake and New England had difficulty dealing with them.

It soon became evident that these central [provincial] authorities not only existed at the behest or the sufferance of the local units, but also were sometimes the creatures of the local units.

[99] Gordon S. Wood, the Localization of Authority in the 17^th Century English Colonies, Historically Speaking (Vol. VIII, No. 6, Jul/Aug 2007), pp. 2-3

While this module takes a different path, and we add several dynamics, events and a context to the story, both Wood and I arrive at pretty much the same conclusions. At the very least we can see the provincial government after 1619 or so was challenged for dominant input into its decision-making by the locals, and the governor pushed off to the margins unless he could forge links with the legislature and its its local factions. The divine right Crown is notable for his absence—although after 1621 it was clear he had hopes for tobacco as a revenue raiser. But the locals never supported it and it did not take effect. In any event, it was not the royal governor that ruled the Virginia’s roost, it was the local roosters on the plantation barnyards.

This section further buttresses my argument the Company deliberately fostered a  coordinating corporate central authority (that exercised government-like functions-relationships) which blurred the distinctions between public and private, but in so doing left in its post 1624 wake, a government that was weaker than developed in other colonies, but was tilted in a very special and distinctive way, to be “bottoms-up” with agenda and its politics set by representative of subordinate levels of government to the state-without check or balance other than a weak  royal governor.

In the absence of strong, consistent direction from either (or both) London (king and corporate) and Jamestown (the provincial corporate governance center in Virginia), we see instead the thrusting of policy-making, policy-making fundamentals to what became the core unit of Virginia local governance: the hundred (the future county). Conscious of not, and I think more likely the latter, the hundred was given birth at the same time as the tobacco cluster, and its chief institution, the export plantation. The hundred, Governor Dale’s first exercise in structural development, was probably coordinative-administrative-self defense in in purpose, harkening back as it did to the old early medieval border marches of England. Unintended to be sure, it nevertheless set in motion a process bias and trend of structural evolution that produced the tilt—after a generation or two of maturation.

With provincial government constituting a level that only a handful of individuals solely concentrated upon, and with its capacity to extend one’s will limited to what one could see from one’s doorstep, function, and hence capacity gravitated to the local level. To me the more interesting story, which we in its time will discuss, is that gravitation to the lower level was not significantly challenged in later decades.

What proved to be important to this evolution was the lack of provincial structures that were empowered by London, and which, left to their own devices, fragmented into competing centers of authority (governor, council of state, House of Burgesses), without sufficient capacity to extend its decisions to other levels of government (and even to other provincial officials such as the deputy to the governor, surveyor, and secretary of the colony). The absence of such in London (the Virginia Company shareholder leadership, the king and his coordinating colonial bureaucracies) meant fundamental decisions, policies, and their implementation were left to “the locals”, resident in the hundred, and thru the hundred the smaller plantations within its boundaries.

Examples of those fundamental policy areas thrust downward for resolution include: Indian affairs and actions, workforce, coordination and management of economic production for export, identification of investment capital for plantation and export, the diversification of plantation-level occupational development sufficient for plantation self-sufficiency, the recording and oversight of land patents, leases, surveys, records including probate, orphans, widows—and responsibility for self-defense, including palisades, from external adversaries, and the dredging-construction-maintenance of river access, storage, and piers, private housing, public structures as church and meeting house.

Much of this burden was judicial, conflict and contract resolution for example, and some of it, public behavior for example, was left to the local parish which was also entrusted by default to the local, usually larger planters and by nature and default inherited the judicial function and responsibility as well. With minimal involvement of provincial outsiders, minimal contact from not-so-neighboring adjacent hundreds, way up or down the river, the individual hundred naturally was a breeding ground for autonomy, maximize impact of families and their dynasties.

From its tender beginnings, we can see province-wide, or more comprehensive views and perspectives were pushed off to the margins at best. Just as the Powhatans, a confederation of tribes not all of which were part of the confederation, negated their numerical superiority, and decentralized the execution of warfare to a variety of smaller geographies often within/adjacent to the boundary of a particular hundred.

To add to the mix joint stock association-hundreds led by, and responsible to, England-based shareholders from which future investment and costs of governance would emanate, only complicated the autonomy of the hundred, No doubt decision-making within each hundred varied and each process was, in its way also varied, likely meant any hundred could ignore or bypass pressures from provincial levels, That decision-making and policy formulation in these relatively closed policy systems would reflect the personalities and goals of its most powerful or activist members is pretty obvious as well. [99] See Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 120-22, with comparison to Bermuda as well.

For better or worse, a decision point as close “to the people” as could be obtained was required in 1616 Virginia. Thus in those sparsely settled areas a nexus of expectations, shared relationships, and agreed-upon procedures, standards and practices, if not behaviors, took root. That in small, closed, isolated, and so-labeled deference cultures, plantation-based hundreds proved fertile ground to develop the power of the larger owners with outside contacts and access to capital is seemingly natural, and given the company-leadership in spreading the population, the movement of indentured servants seeded inequality from its birth.

When one remembers the relationship of these larger owner investors that traveled to Virginia extends back to England, and travel on board ship, the awareness of whom one settled with is not distant. In these early plantations we have a culture in which “everybody knows your name”, and dwells in multiples in small rough housing. In these founding days, masters and owners likely spent time out in the fields regularly—given that the shaded porch veranda was decades from being constructed.

I do not think this hard to imagine, and even given obvious inequalities that pervaded this governance ethos, one can see how these decision-makers came to think and expect that future upper levels of government, a legislature that would one day be given birth for instance, would be structures responsible to the local-as-perceived needs and wants, and that local decision-makers ought to have considerable say and impact so that higher government hierarchy’s internal procedures and decision-making would not challenge these local autonomies.

That such fundamental decisions lodged so very early in larger plantation owners—in this period very closely associated with the resident Virginia Company local leadership- preference local decision-makers with a larger than life role in the definition of their problems, and the formulation of of possible solutions. Moreover, it left the implementation of any policy decision largely in the hands of those larger plantation owners. This is how the “ethos” of local autonomy started—and its continuance over several generations forged a basic natural tendency for decentralized policy-making for the colony-province-state.

That limitations on provincial taxing and imposition of fees that were not of perceived benefit to the hundred, would also strike a painful nerve as well hence be early and very fatal third rails of legislative action. Accordingly, in essence, I see in these years that local government, as it existed in the teens, carried with it “first advantage” over higher levels enjoying incremental empowerment over decades. Succinctly, the path of Virginia political and policy development is from the bottom-up.

All of the above can be lost in the fog of history, not easily determined through records and conventional historical documentation, and simply so outside the reach of contemporary comment and analysis dismissed as next to worthless to historical observation. misleading. On the other hand, and congruent with what research I have uncovered, is that these investors had all they could do to get to Virginia and scratch a living from virgin wilderness fields. One does not dwell on philosophical thought or the evolution of long term trends when clearing a field threatened by nearby tribes.

Isolated by shredding dispersal of population, the terrain, Indian resistance, and the recourse to the river as the mode of transportation, each hundred would commence its development of structures and policy-making processes to satisfy their needs and resolve the demands each encountered.

 

Argall’s Interlude

Thomas Dale Sails off into the Sunset

Dale’s trip home went well, accompanied by Rolfe and his new wife Rebecca (Pocahontas), and no doubt entertained by Dale’s on board execution of a prisoner (an English spy for Spain). [99] Brown, Vol. II, CCLVI, pp. 783-4. As regards to members of Jamestown’s gentlemen elite, Dale was held in high regard–and why not. Most, like John Rolfe, would receive Company land grants from Dale sufficient to develop a small farm or estate, then called a plantation. In this manner Dale cemented his influence over this group—Rolfe, for example,  named his son with Rebecca (Pocahontas) “Thomas”.

Whatever his faults, and he did have them (Indian relations), Sir Thomas Dale is my unsung chief economic developer of the early Jamestown colony. It is worth note, perhaps, that immediately previous to his departure he revoked his infamous “Lawes Divine”, the penal military code of law (and lifestyle) [Grizzard Jr, p. xliii].

Dale’s chief innovations were important. One was his allowance to well-behaved existing settlers (ancient settler) of autonomy from communal-military lifestyle, and by 1617 a homestead property of their own. This was very successful from its start, and over the next few years more former Company employees were able to set up their own farms apart from the two formal settlements. Without doubt his key innovation was his early dispersal of the population from Jamestown to the James River and coastal hinterlands.

Thirdly, his friendship with Rolfe fostered the employment and spread of tobacco-plantations-export as a means to satisfy the Virginia Company’s need for an export to pay its debt and obligations incurred in support of founding a permanent settlement. That dispersal set in motion a counter-reaction from the Tribes; it also uncorked the proverbial “genie’s bottle”, or opened Pandora’s box of tobacco and the future inequalities it rested upon.

In short, Dale and his successor, Yeardley, from 1613 until April 1617 had initiated a major economic development program, consisting of tobacco production lodged in plantations located in an administrative unit the Hundreds, diversification of the economic base by voluntary joint stock corporations, and most critically the development of a small mostly agricultural workforce composes of former indentured servants/employees of the Virginia Company whose term of indenture had expired.

This workforce had its own ideas regarding what they would grow. Dale, before he left issued a directive that each homesteader had to plant at least two acres of staple crops in their allotted acreage. “Tobacco became the new gold … The rush to tobacco came so quickly that many ignored their food crops, a few nearly starving in the midst of their tobacco boom ….His temporary successor, Captain George Yeardley, could not enforce the order, and by 1618 a food shortage loomed. When Rolfe returned to Virginia following the death of Pocahontas in 1617, he found Jamestown in disrepair ‘the colony dispersed all about, a shambles’, and all Indian defenses abandoned. [99] Frank E. Grizzard Jr, et al, Jamestown Colony, p. xlvii

Yeardley upon Dale’s departure, held the fort (literally) until the new deputy governor arrived (Samuel Argall), after which he returned to England in 1617.

Dale, upon leaving Virginia, was about to start a new adventure, a fleet commander for Thomas Smythe’s British East Indies Company. In that capacity, Dale engaged in, and won, a series of naval battles against a Dutch fleet, and secured the relief of key ports in Dutch Indonesia. During or after these engagements, Dale contracted an illness, ironically very similar to the Jamestown “summer seasoning”—and died in August 1619. On the other side of the world, Yeardley and Sandys’ were  engaged in implementing that Greate Charter.

Captain Samuel Argall, a protégé of the rising new power in the Virginia Company, (Robert Rich) known to us as the Earl of Warwick (aka Warwick) had been appointed by Governor De La Warr to serve as his replacement. Argall was a naval officer and longstanding an experienced sea captain of the Virginia Company whose appearance and actions we have noted in our past modules..

Of gentry background, Argall, previous to Company employment, had been engaged in the war with the Dutch, and had served as captain in fishing expeditions and transatlantic trade to Newfoundland, Spain and England. For his youthful age, Argall had significant marine and military experience. John Pory’s, the Secretary of the Virginia Company, described Argall as “a soldier truly bred in that university of warre the lower Countries [the Dutch War] [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/argall-samuel-bap-1580-1626/

Argall captained one of the relief ships that saved the colony in 1610. He also captained the ship that took Rolfe and his wife to London; and the ship that returned Rolfe to Virginia alone a year later.  To his credit, Argall did engineer a peace with the Indians (by kidnapping Pocahontas in 1613) that led to her marriage with John Rolfe, which commenced a period of peace that substantially persisted to 1622. A tell-tale episode of Argall’s future governance style was his 1613 raid against French Canada, attacking French Arcadia, a French settlement in Maine, and seizing Port Royal in Nova Scotia.

A close relative of Thomas Smythe, he may have been afforded his opportunity with the Virginia Company by its CEO. Argall’s brash aggressiveness, however, and his actions by 1617 certainly support a wildness and propensity to military-privateering that Smythe did not share. This may suggest to the reader that Argall, his temperament and experience, departs greatly from the previous leadership sent by Smith and Sandys to the colony. Smythe’s core conflict with Warwick at this time erupted “because of Warwick’s freebooting activities [privateering] which had brought him into trouble with the East India Company, of which Smythe was Treasurer [CEO] [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1. pp. 122.

Argall was an adventurer, an adventurer who appealed to Warwick, and conformed to his image of Virginia/Bermuda’s purpose and mission. The ships he captained in this period were owned by Rich. In this shift of alliances we see the effect of Virginia Company politics in the period after 1610, and in particular, after discovery of Bermuda during Argall’s 1610 voyage. Warwick (and by extension, Argall) is not onboard with the settlement movement embraced by Sandys, and insulated and protected by Smythe. Warwick, and represents the more “privateer” –trading mission and his early quarrels with Smythe almost certainly were a combination of personal issues and their conflict over Bermuda’s development and operation by the Virginia Company. Warwick in this sense, is part of the diffusion of Virginia Company over-membership that accompanied the expansion of Company membership.to accommodate new investors

Upon arrival in 1617 Virginia Argall wasted no time. He terminated Dale/Yeardley’s program of land ownership for expired employees of the Virginia Company (approximately fifty-four men). These men were to have their allotments in the proposed Smythe hundred, to which George Yeardley had already travel to London to assume its direction. In effect, held without their consent, these former indentures were reinstated into indenture by Argall, who, having restored “Lawas Divine” compelled their service to him on lands he received as governor. Smythe shifted and became one of Argall’s chief opponents, plus Smythe repudiated Argall’s land policy and his support for the “Adventurers Magazine. Finally, maybe most of all, Warwick had recently married Smythe’s youngest daughter in opposition to Smythe’s will, and without his consent.

To add insult to injury, when Governor De La Warr ordered the transfer of several of those workers confiscated by Argall, the latter arrested De La Warr’s agent and condemned him to death. The court that tried him, however, and Anglican clergy outraged at Argall, ordered the agent to be released and sent back to England. It was this outrage that prompted De La Warr to board ship under instructions from the Virginia Company leadership to replace Argall, and institute a series of reforms, the Greate Charter, and return to America; De La Warr, however, died in transit over and prompted Company leadership to devise “plan B”, George Yeardley-as governor—which we shall discuss later.

A brutal winter that followed 1617 killed colonists and livestock, and generated sickness and disease. During his two year tenure in Virginia Argall made no private grants of land to former indentures. Instead, Company employees were continued as such and their service was shifted to activities that resulted in personal profit to Argall, and his friends. “The ‘ancient colony men’ who were entitled to their freedom, and the laborers from the common garden {and salt works] were kept at work as the governor directed, and largely for his personal advantage” [99] Osgood, Vol 1, p.77. Argall established dominance over trading with the Native American tribes by limiting colonist contact with the Indians.

Argall also made personal use of the stores of grain derived from quitrents at Charles City, and took control over the livestock as well. At the same time he allowed ship captains and private traders to export sassafras and tobacco produced in the colony—closing the Company’s trade-export unit, the magazine (essentially the Company Store). He granted himself, “Argall’s Gift” (his personal Hundred), which, within a year, he sold to private bidders. Whatever Argall did with the profits is not known, at least by me. When he died in 1626 he left little behind.

The Company formally relieved him of his governorship and sent back George Yeardley in 1618. Argall, receiving advanced word, quit, and left Virginia on a Warwick-owned ship a week before Yeardley’s arrival. Warwick was able to divert English court charges against Argall and in 1621 James I knighted him and gave him command of a major military expedition against Cadiz (which failed). The net effect of Argall’s two year governance as summarized by Osgood was “The significance of [Argall’s] administration appears in the fact that it delayed the process of economic transition in the colony for two years” [99] Osgood, Vol. 1, p. 79

The story behind Argall may be a bit more complicated than this, however.

Andrews posits some mitigating factors that were behind Argall’s imposition of military-communal discipline and economy in Jamestown. Commenting that Yeardley’s previous administration  and probably “lax and inefficient”, “while that of Argall, which gave rise to prolonged debate in the councils of the company after 1619 was citied because of its generally arbitrary characer. That severe laws were needed to restrain the habits and practices of the particular brand of settlers that had come to the colony from the jails, bawdyhouses, and slums of London—and there were many such—can hardly be denied, but that such laws aid in any way to increase the prosperity of the settlement or to make the people more contented may well be doubted” [99] (Vol. 1), p.116,

Argall’ personal correspondence is congruent with this and provides specifics regarding the lack of maintenance at Jamestown, the rundown condition of the fort and its facilities, and failure t work the fields. That Dale’s land reforms and diversification of the economic base may well have been a poor fit with folk of this nature may be controversial with many readers, but is not unreasonable. That the Jamestown communal resources Osgood alleges Argall stole for his own profit, may, at least in part, have been used to feed and supply the communal employees is also a reasonable possibility.

Historians have been divided on how to deal with Argall. His style and his clear abandon of any distinction between personal profit and his role as governor, neither likely mortal sins in this day and age, compound a modern day sympathy with Argall, but his subsequent rise to greater authority, and the inability of an London court of inquest to cite any infractions further suggests Argall got caught up in the larger politics of the Virginia Company.

Records of this period are at best poor, and it is very clear that Argall had been placed in the crosshairs of Smythe and Warwick’s accusations and investigations in the very turbulent office politics that followed 1619. It also appears Argall’s ship, the Treasurer, was owned and outfitted by Rich, and that ship during his period of governorship seems to have engaged in privateering against Spain and Portugal, and was likely the culprit in the first importation of African slaves captured in such actions—i.e. the infamous 1619 first sale of such blacks in Virginia may be yet another of Argall’s actions. This episode was a prime cause for the inquest in London against Argall that followed.

[99] See also a very interesting article by Seymour V. Connor, “Sir Samuel Argall: a Biographical Sketch (the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 59, No. 2,) p. 171ff which develops and provides support in defense of Argall. Connor has a different take on Argall’s seizure of the Company Magazine (prevent the London Company from using the profits of Jamestown produce instead of the Jamestown residents who needed them greatly. Connor and others also offer mild praise for Argall’s consistent and persistent initiatives to limit colonist contract with Native Americans. It could be so that he could himself hold a sort of monopoly for personal profit, or was intended to maintain the peace between the two conflicting neighbors. I am aware of no definitive records that would preclude any interpretation—and again have in my mind that he died seven years later, with had no extravagant estate derived from Virginia.

Argall’s most impactful initiative was to work with voluntary joint stock corporations (usually formed in England and utilizing English capital), but some were set up within the Virginia Company as well. The corporations agreed to purchase land in Virginia and populate it with families and indentured servants in a plantation, which was considered to be a “private colony within the colony”. These plantations could engage in fishing, Indian trade, or agriculture, with attracted populations considered as beneficial to these activities. These voluntary “associations” or joint stock companies were entitled “societies of the adventurers”, and they would be issued a “patent” or land title. These patents were invested with “limited governmental powers”, and the owners of the plantation were afforded “specified privileges over all tenants or servants brought over”.

Osgood is correct that Dale’s land reform, converting settlers into private ownership, were derailed during Argall’s period, but it is also clear Argall did permit the establishment and settlement of the Hundreds by English voluntary joint venture companies and that in his administration the diffusion of tobacco plantation continued. It is also clear that none of this advanced the population in Virginia—that 1618 Virginia held fewer residents than in 1611.

That negative reality being noted both Osgood and Andrews, while sometimes conflicting on their dates [999], report the creation of a large number of sizeable plantation-hundreds during the period between 1617 and 1619. This overlapped with the considerable inner turmoil within the Company and its fragmentation into three main factions—a turmoil that led to Smythe declining to run as Treasurer—a post he had held for a decade—and the election of Sandys and his allies to that position.

The termination of Argall, the travel of De La Warr to Virginia to investigate, and the subsequent replacement of Argall with Yeardley also transpired in this period. All this  leads one to wonder if the two dynamics did more than overlap. In particular a number of investor-members formed voluntary joint stock companies and received a number of very large (one 80,000 acres) plantation-hundred land grants in this period. These were in effect insider deals and they easily could have been fodder for the intra-Company feuding [999].