The Flip Side of the Coin: Inside Virginia

The Flip Side of the Coin: Inside Virginia

Background to the Greate Charter: Settlement by Anciens, Associations, Freeholders, and Company-related plantations previous to and during the Greate Charter: Neo corporate settlements not private homesteads.

The General Assembly was not the first instance of future American democracy and a start of American exceptionalism. In 1619 it had other functions and motivations. Rather, we should understand that if anything was the first sign of the future of the United States it was the immigration of English settlers into what was in reality a swampy hellhole and a for most a surrender of their liberties by agreeing to be indentured servants, and for the remainder an exercise in gentry-aristocratic entrepreneurship and a way of life to which they had not been born.

What united them both was a belief they could do better in a new world, making a new start in life and fortune. They were among London’s and England poorest for the most part, but they also were the sons and daughters of a gentry-aristocracy in change, evolving into a new era, with a new demography, and economic life. Secondary in English society, these unstable elites were determined to find their own way in the new world. In this sense, both were refugees of change seizing an opportunity to a better life.

Neither group were saints; they were mostly sinners. But in each sinner there is a potential saint, a better angel. Indeed, there are no saints that were not in their past sinners. Opportunity and Necessity provided each a chance to exercise their better motivations, and many did so. They set up a colony on their own effort, hard work, inspiration, with minimal help from England and the outside world. They laid the base of colonial Virginia, both political and economic, and unfortunately social as well. It is these first settlers that the were the first footsteps that led in the end to Virginia’s contribution to American democracy and whatever exceptionalism that involved.

That is the heritage of Virginia’s First Migration. And they kept on coming. A Second Migration blended into the first. And they are still coming to this present day.

Prologue and Intro

But before proceeding on, it is imperative we note that as differences between the developing Sandys’ Plan and Smythe (and his ally the King) likely became more intense, Sandys relationship with Smythe deteriorated. Likely Smythe’s approach to colony-building, probably always different from Sandys’ basic instincts–departed significantly from Sandy’s and his parliamentary and secondary port allies. The fiscal crisis, the likelihood no dividends could be forthcoming to shareholders, demanded a more radical and timely pivot from Smythe’s traditional trading-export focus. Rich, ever the opportunist, stressed the privateer option to the king, thereby weaponizing the colonization enterprise by introducing a mercantilist offensive against England’s enemies.

While it is clear in hindsight that George Yeardley, the new governor, whatever his standing was at the time with Smythe, came armed and focused by his instructions which had been negotiated the previous months in the shareholder councils, which were likely penned into instructions written in two major sub-sections, and not only signed off by Thomas Smythe, but also used on his own volition by him to restructure the colonial administration of Bermuda a year later, a position which he retained despite the effort of Sandys to depose him there as well as in the Virginia Council. The sets of instructions issued to Yeardley were bipartisan as pertaining to the the two rival factions contesting the Company’s leadership, but also worked out in the presence of those shareholders interested enough and motivated enough to participate in their drafting.

The instructions were the answer, constructed by all interested parties, to the crushing reality the colony was not going well, and the Company was collapsing and sinking under its weight. A major reform and reorganization was imperative—and that was Yeardley’s task incumbent on his implementation of the instructions of the Company leadership and shareholder councils. His arrival therefore in April 1619 marked the beginning of what was intended to be the reversal of past failure and the start of a new economic and political revitalization long due, and improperly implemented almost certainly would threaten the future of the Company and its role in Virginia’s colonial governance, but would as likely as not pose an existential question as to whether the colony could survive its 1607 founding.

Unfortunately much research has not conveyed to their reader that we are at the turning point of the colony, and that fundamental to that turning point future revitalization was to convince existing settlers, attract new settlers, and to adjust to the Company’s new business plan that transferred most investment into the colony into the pockets of new investors in the form of private association joint stock corporations, the largest of which served as the core for a “hundreds’ plantation that was meant to be an semi-autonomous unit of local governance by the private association.

The first task of this Greate Charter implementation was to convey to new and older settlers that the military policy system with its military governance was officially over. Civil rights, individual liberty, property rights, and a place in the colony-decision-making had to be dramatically made evident, and a path had to be created so that these folk could and would participate in the new economic development strategy that was essential for a long-term diversification of its economic base without which the colony would, it was felt, almost certainly fail.

The bottom line of this strategy was that tobacco was a temporary expedient to pay the bills and sustain settler economic viability, but new industries and more sustainable agriculture, staples, livestock, orchards and tools, ships, and viable export products like lumber-related, wine, silk and furs had to be encouraged and fostered. The association-joint stock and their hundreds had to be weaved into this as well as the free man householder plantation.

For the economic welfare of any community must depend in no small part upon the peace and content which its government affords. Moreover, the necessity of enlisting additional supplies of capital and labor caused much attention to be given to the colony’s reputation. And there were few things of recent years that had done more to bring the [Virginia Company] into disrepute than the repeated and loud complaints of martial law in Virginia. These complaints were a strong factor in discouraging Englishmen from giving financial support to to the [Company] or from considering Virginia a fit place in which to live. To remove this blemish on the colony’s reputation by some form of the government was an almost indispensable preliminary to any effort at reestablishing the company’s fortunes. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 69

The second task was to establish, for the first time, a system of local governance that could keep order, civil rights, satisfy expectations regarding the practice of religious beliefs, and require conformity to British common and commercial law in the colony. This was an obvious overlap with the movement from a military policy system to a civil one, but this also meant the additional responsibilities that exceed the customary definition of shareholder rights and contractual enforcement, and an enlargement of functional responsibilities that came with colonial settlement. George Louis Beer noted “the characteristic feature of colonial administration under the early charters was that the English government had no officials resident in the colony and could exercise its control over the dependent community only through the proprietor [in Virginia, Bermuda the regulated joint stock corporation, the Virginia Company].

Of necessity in this very experimental version of English colonization, the Virginia Company, in addition to its shareholder rights to contract and stock ownership, the rights and obligations of the English citizen and to do so through entities similar in function and structure to those in England. Accordingly, the Greate Charter implementation thrust the Company into new areas of responsibility not generally associated then, or now, with a private joint stock corporation.

[99] George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660, Chapter 10. Beer earlier had observed “The colonies were part of England’s dominions, and were held of the English Crown, not of the individual who at that time was king of England. They were dependent communities, whose particular and close relation to the Crown was a direct result of the legal constitution of the mother country … [which] at that time was in a condition of unstable equilibrium. The Stuarts not only insisted upon the prerogatives that they inherited from the Tudor monarchs, but even sought to amplify them … On the other hand Parliament strenuously opposed this contention, and relying on precedents established before the Tudor era, claimed rights that tended toward its ultimate supremacy in the government. … The Crown’s claim to … exclusive jurisdiction over the colonies was opposed by Parliament”. In this chasm of authority and legitimacy early seventeenth century colonial administration was thrust—and I argue could not completely escape—and as the sixteenth century “tweens” moved deeper into the twenties this gap sharpened notably. We will see evidence of this in 1624 when the Parliament was on the threshold of involvement in James’s action of stripping away the Virginia Company’s authority to govern Virginia.

In the latter vein examples such as the essentials of judicial administration, self-defense, and local-decision-making and the facilitation of a community functioning in a larger society that was linked into a higher, provincial level coordination performed by Company officials placed in office by London and its shareholder council. That provincial structure, however, had to be more complex by developing a structure, equivalent in function to the shareholder council in Virginia residence. The reliance on individual and association investors, rather than reliance on exclusive Virginia Company monopoly, meant a structure had to be created to include these residential property-owning shareholders into the making of decision of direct concern to them, and whose feedback was needed if they were to be effective, and, for that matter, implemented at all.

Virginia was no longer just Jamestown and its immediate environs. It was now the James River, and the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay. And if the reforms and reorganizations were successful, the geography that was to be Virginia in future years would significantly expand. The geography of Company shareholder governance had to be flexible to deal with this spread into the wilderness interior and coastal areas. The General Assembly was the answer to this and it was among Yeardley’s primary instructions to quickly set it up and get it going.

Speedy implementation was essential to the attraction of sizeable investors to set up their own private association-joint stock corporations, recruit their own settlers, and send them to Virginia to found their plantation and commence their production activities so vital to their paying their bills, feeding their colonists, and producing for the benefit of the colony excess products for export and sale in England.

Craven takes special note of these motivations in his approach to the second set of instructions to create, and lead in Virginia a duplicate set of institutions to those found in the London joint stock corporation, but to infuse in them responsibilities and functions that expanded beyond those customary in England. The motivations presented in the paragraphs above place in a corporate setting what the evolution of the colony required of the Virginia Company to govern more or less effectively in Virginia but also blur and blend these into the corporate structure, mission and system of hierarchical control by the London corporate authorities.

It was because of practical considerations … rather than an idealistic scheme [such as] looking toward an independent and democratic state, that attention was turned to [the Virginia Company’s] political reform” [as specified in Yeardley second set of instructions].It was natural that in framing the new government, the [shareholders] should be influenced by the practices of the mother country, and in fact should endeavor to bring a greater conformity to the spirit of English institutions. For thereby, not only would it be easier to attract English immigrants [and investors], but the colony would enjoy a much better reputation among those to whom it must look for support. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 69

Craven makes these points not as a tangent, but as his reaction to, and distinction from, a number of Virginia historians and commentators—not to mention future text books—that see in these “political institutions” as the first steps toward democracy, American exceptionalism, and the birth of the future American state. This issue has waxed and waned since the institutions were created in 1619, and have infused in many observes an almost reverence for not only the Greate Charter, but its alleged author, then implementer in 1619.

Craven separates himself from these, as do I, and insists that more practical concerns of incorporating the functions associated with English colonialism into the Virginia version of the Company’s joint stock corporation organizational structure and hierarchy. Integration of the two can be seen more clearly in the need to establish a judicial administration in Virginia [see p..70], an administration operated and monitored by the provincial corporate bodies as specified in the second instruction of the shareholder council to the governor of the colony which it appointed.

The intention of the shareholder council was to set up a mirror of the English corporate structure in Virginia, with the General Assembly as the functional equivalent of the shareholder quarterly and annual councils that were the ultimate body from which corporate authority emanated and resided in. The irony is that corporate sovereignty lay in such a body as the annual and quarterly shareholder council at a time when the battle for Parliament seeking that status was just commencing in England. That English joint stock corporate sovereignty preceded the location of sovereignty in the English Parliament is for me extraordinarily interesting, but it is by no means suggestive of a future parliament, nor a modern American legislature. A half-century and the outcome from an English civil war had to pass before we are in a position to even suggest such a status.

The second main feature of political reform [the second set of instructions] was the provision for a legislative assembly. This action was partly dictated by the same general motive that led to the adoption of the English common law—the desire to bring a greater conformity to English institutions. But there were more specific considerations. One purpose that was served was to add much to the spirit and content of the colonists. There was a marked similarity between the government of the colony and that of the company after 1619, which suggests that the latter’s organization may have been a model. The company was governed by a treasurer, council and assembly of adventurers [shareholders]. In the public statements of the company, especially in appeals for colonists, there was much talk of Virginia’s resting upon the support of two groups of [shareholders], those in London who adventured their capital, and the planters in Virginia who adventured their lives and labor, both equally contributing to and enjoying the honor of its success. The establishment of the assembly may have been partly due to an effort to build up the spirit of the planters by the feeling that like the adventurers [shareholders] at home [in England] they too enjoyed a voice in the government. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 71

To this end, a document establishing the duties and structure of the Assembly, “An Organization and Constitution for a Council and Assembly in Virginia”, was published (only a 1621 copy is now in existence. This copy was provided to new governor Wyatt). Warren summarized this document: “There were to be henceforth two councils in Virginia. First, a Council of State, the members of which were listed as chosen by the company in London, was to act as a permanent advisory body to the governor. The larger council, to be known as the General Assembly, was to consist of the Council of State, and two burgesses chosen by the inhabitants from every town, hundred, or “other particular plantation”. It was to be assembled by the governor once a year, and no oftener except upon “very extraordinary and important occasions. It had the power to treat and conclude “of all emergent occasions concerning the public” and to make, ordain, and enact such general laws and orders for the welfare of the colony as should be from time to time seem necessary… The burgesses were required to follow the laws, customs, and government of England, as nearly as possible. The governor held at all times the right of veto .. and non of its laws were to have force unless ratified by a quarter court [in London] of the company [Craven, Dissolution, p. 74]. The Company hinted that in the future the latter statement would allow the Virginia Assembly the right to confirm London Company enactments before they could take effect in England.

The first assembly, set up by Yeardley (elections), and presided over by the Secretary of the Colony, John Porys, was held in July, 1619.

START Here p. 69

It appears Sandys wanted more say and also wanted to weaken the company monopoly of land, profits, and control by imposing a Virginia-based company-shareholder board-committees, at the expense of Smythe and the governor, to check company monopiles by gradual introduction of private property, including the facilitation of ventures and enterprises that competed with the company monopoly franchises. Likely Smythe, the consummate monopolist, would have as little of this as could be managed. It is also likely to the extent he was aware and involved, the King would see this as a check, another parliamentary intrusion into his exclusive control over foreign and trade policies–including colonization.

The pivot from the original Virginia Company strategy was complete, and the Greate Charter became the turning point of no return: settlement, self-sufficiency, and diversification of Virginia’s economic base were the colony’s primary economic development strategies. Through population attraction, greased by a heavy company land-based incentive program, the workforce would be recruited, at the expense of the prospective landowner. With the Deputy Governor Yeardley as the transatlantic transmission belt, the implementation and management of this pile of “reform initiatives” would be in the hands of his own gubernatorial advisory council and newly-created General Assembly were also settled matters.

Smythe, in 1619, surrendered his Treasurer position to Sandys, but not his control over the Virginia Company Magazine. Sandys, in turn, emphasized the diversification of Virginia’s economic base in his “list” that constituted the Greate Charter. He resisted reliance on the Magazine and its tobacco sale-export”:

That Damned Democracy Thing–The first of the major theorists that led to the development of English representative democracy, Thomas Hobbes, was a Virginia Company shareholder, and a small time player early in his career holding a position with a key member of the Sandys faction—thus participating in the “company office politics” of this period. To me at least, the politics on display in Virginia Company intra and environmental politics to a young Thomas Hobbes that was indeed congruent to “a war of all, against all”.

The involvement of Hobbes only warns us that there were several other important democratic philosophers yet to follow, and so the philosophical base for a representative English democracy lies a good century after the Virginia Company charter suspension. There was also, I would add, a future small event, the English Civil War, whose drift into is evident in these politics also. Talk about putting the cart in front of the horse, previous to the invention of the wheel is any thought the activities and initiatives of the Virginia Company, including its Greate Charter is an early step down this road. Rather there is, as Dicken’s might say, more theocracy than democracy in this discussion.

My contention is simple: that this period of “civil war” within the company not only led to the suspension of its Virginia charter by the king, but the internal, office politics within the company was so disruptive over the next eight years, it inhibited, and after 1623 (combined with the Second Powhatan War) reduced the capacity of the Company to govern, manage, albeit even consistently monitor, nevermind effect the events in Virginia—which by default proceeded on the course of their own domestic Virginia path left virtually unconstrained by London governance.

Craven’s Perspective on Implantation of the Greate Charter

The implementation of the Greate Charter initiatives is central to Craven’s view of why the Virginia Company lost its charter. He does not stress the political reforms, but rather states boldly as a chapter title, “Overhasty Colonization” and then follows up in its opening sentences with damning indictment of what was in fact the implementation of the Greate Charter strategy and its various initiative: “It was the failure of Sandys’s economic policies that welded his enemies into an active opposition and gave them the means of bringing about his fall. Various grudges tended to draw the Smythe and Warwick groups together, and embittered the quarrel with the company’s officers [Sandys], but the prolonged duration and growing intensity of the struggle [between the groups] was due mainly to the miserable failure of Sandys efforts to find for Virginia a profitable place in England’s trade. The motives of those who called upon the king to interfere [with the Virginia Company by petitioning for a royal investigation] in 1623 may be interpreted in terms of spite, jealousy or hatred, but a bankrupt company and a colony devastated by massacre, famine, disease, and death gave reason and justice to their case against Sandys [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 148

From the start the implementation in Virginia was launched from the decks of an already sinking ship. The coup of 1619 polarized the company’s shareholders transforming them from a diversified groupings of shareholders, increasingly disillusioned about colonization and the Virginia Company, fragmented into different goals and expectations into a weapon of his faction which intended little less than the removal of Smith and his aged old-style merchant adventurer constituency that had encased him as the Company leader, and had endowed him with security by their unwillingness to participate in its governance, leaving him largely on his own in the chaotic operations of establishing the Virginia colony.

By 1616, with no dividend issued, Smythe’s jig was up and shareholders were ready for the Sandys-Southampton mobilization that climaxed in the April 1619 coup. Along that way Sandys had no doubt led the shareholders, with Smythe seemingly a somewhat will associate in constructing a new economic development strategy believed capable of firmly putting in place an economic base that could sustain the colony itself, but as important sustain the company fiscal requirement, find new incentives for the restive shareholder base, encourage new shareholders to invest their money into direct colonization bypassing the company, and finally, produce exports that England wanted and needed, which could be sold for profit sufficient to pay the bills and pay down the huge mass of debt already on the books.

The plan had possibilities, and certainly Sandys believed in it, and Smythe did so as well in that he would implement it on his own in Bermuda. Firing Argall, he sent in a new Governor Yeardley, along with John Porys, and tasked them with the launch of the initiatives and the founding of the the institutions included in the second directive of his instructions. The problem was, as Craven quickly observes, the company was on the edge of bankruptcy and the aftermath of the coup ousting Smythe was a horribly divided shareholder base, at war with itself, and competing colonies each in their own joint stock corporation waging their own version of what was a internal civil war. To this Craven adds: “The problem of financing Sandys’ numerous projects was made more difficult by the fact that he alienated the most substantial element in the company and was forced to depend upon a party [his faction] composed largely of minor adventurers [and unexperienced aristocrats and gentry]”. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 149

Indeed, any major investment initiated by his allies was in the private association-hundred joint stock corporation which bypassed the company and founded plantations on its own, uncoordinated, mostly unsupervised, and determined to follow its own economic pursuits not for the greater good of the colony, but for their individual endeavor. This rendered Sandys’ public or provincial initiatives and projects intended to develop the colony’s capacity to sustain itself through planting and harvesting staples, maintaining livestock, and diversifying the colony’s economic base with needed resources such as iron, or silk to be exported. The only revenue he had for these critical and crucial projects which were the heart, if not the soul, of his economic strategy was the king’s lottery.

While he pressed the administrators of the lottery to intensify their efforts and raise more monies for the colony, Sandys also tried to convince the Anglican bishops to contribute more to their “university as missionary” imitative. By 1620, however, nine declined absolutely, and the meager c contributions by a few over the next few years came nowhere near what was needed—especially after the university plantation was totally overrun and wiped out in the 1622 Massacre. Still, Sandys held firm in his core belief that what the colony needed was a lot more settlers-servants, who upon arrival could produce more and more for themselves and export to England—and pay the company for its transportation and sustenance to Virginia.

So to save the university project he wrote Southampton with his solution to the investment shortfall: “[in 1619] he sent 150 persons to be divided equally between the governor’s land [land paid in lieu of a salary] and the company’s land [the public or provincial plantation], and the college land [financed by the church contributions], and it was his plan to double the number during the ensuing winter. He expected the profit from the labor of these 300 settlers to come to no less than L3,000 a year, which would provide L1,000 each for the governor, college and the company, and he hoped ‘in short time double that sum which would be a ‘fair ground whereon to reedify that state [lack of funds for the project”. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p.151

As we will shortly discover, the execution of the above plan did not yield the profit. The annual company budget did not have the resources it was supposed to have produced, and a deficit resulted. In hindsight we might suggest that Sandys and his Deputy Ferrar were not skilled budgeters and certainly not experienced project managers—but then again, they never claimed they were. But the even more harmful consequence of such project planning and budgeting is that scare company funds were used to ship these folk over to Virginia, leaving other initiatives completely unfunded. Unfortunately, Sandys was stubborn, nor apparently a quick learner, for his solution to that problem was to “repeat again” and send over more settlers-servants.

He was convinced (to the end) that how could the colony develop and produce “a profitable trade … without a large and strong body of colonists? His first emphasis, therefore came to be upon numbers, and the number of colonists sent in the next few years gave such an illusion of success that not only were his contemporaries convinced, but many historians … Time and again Sandys, in replying to attacks by Smythe and Warwick, quoted statistics on the migration to Virginia as evidence of the improvement brought by his administration. … Yet, an examination of available records proves conclusively that this impatience of Sandys was his greatest blunder, and one of the chief causes of his ultimate failure”. What he ignored, or could not understand, was the commitment required, the fund obligations that were necessary to sustain these people, to house them, tp cloth them, to equip them, to develop necessary infrastructure to handle such numbers.

What he could also have included was some estimate of how many would survive the trip over, and how many would survive the first six months in Virginia. Had he included such estimates he would have found that each settler sent over was a liability, a net loss to the company, and brought little to the colony other than larger graveyards. [99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 152-3

If we follow this problem more deeply, we can see more clearly what was going wrong with the Greate Charter implementation effort. Why did sending too many settlers over cause the catastrophe it did suggest we look into who and how these settlers were sent over—which will demonstrate how the hollowing out of the London Company headquarters caused the problem in the first place. First historians often credit Sandys for his sensitivity to the occupations sent over; to a certain extent this is correct, but he picked up this sensitivity with the passage of time. His first ships in the early years were crammed with settlers of uneven capacity and skillsets, resorting to sending over children, orphans and the destitute. This was Sandys arguably overreacting to the mess he perceived Smythe had caused.

… there can be no doubt that in his desire to effect a rapid growth in population [Sandys] often compromised with these sound principle [of careful selection of colonists] and sent a large body of inferior colonists. This seems to have been especially true of the first shipments, for several warnings from the colony in 1620 urged that he be more careful in the selection of his [settlers]. Governor Yeardley, John Pory and William Weldon of the college land, all insisted upon the necessity of sending ‘true laborers’, men ‘brought up to labor’, and of twenty to thirty years of age, since Weldon added old men either died or lived to be of little service to the colony. … [This] applies with greater force to vagabonds and paupers. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 154

The speed in settling the colony, and basing the achievement of its economic objectives on the size of the workforce in the colony, whether correct or not, ignored the realities of sending as many colonists over on each ship as possible. Ships were small and there was a trade off in filling them up with settlers or their provisions. Provisions were expensive and the cost could not be deferred; settlers cost of sustenance were left to the governor of the colony, and travel supplies were minimized in their calculation. The quality of the materials sent over was always an issue, and one of the worst offenders was the grain seed sent over which upon planting never poked its head above ground thereafter. [pp. 164-5]. Both seed and grains were damaged by heat in the holds of the ships. The few livestock sent over during passage never was sufficient to build up herds upon their arrival, despite the effort made to construct enclosures in Virginia [pp. 166-7]

Journeys across the Atlantic took two months more or less, and much of the supplies on board were consumed, or lent themselves to spoilage. Yeardley (and Porys as well) pressed hard for London to demand the Company stop its practice of shipping over in the spring, insisting that fall sailings were best not only for the colony, but for the passengers.[p. 160-1] Ships arrived with most supplies consumed. Sickness on board was a serious matter, and nearly all were weakened by the travel, and rendered more vulnerable to the sickness of Virginia. Already weakened and sick upon arrival, the new settlers were compelled to double-up in existing housing for want of alternatives, and that only served to spread the infection to the established settler base. Building housing, because of the necessity of devoting most effort in spring, summer and fall to tobacco and staples, was left to the winter. [pp. 170-3.]

When they arrived, usually totally unexpectedly, very often after harvest time during late fall and winter (overseas travel was affected by seasonal winds as well as storms and becalming, and which routes they wound up taking) there were no supplies, foodstuffs, housing or clothes available, and offseason such could not be readily obtained—especially when the recent arrivals were incapable, unskilled, and in sickness in their early months after arrival.

A good deal of the excess immigration argument rests on London’s inexperience with realities in Virginia. Sandys had close relatives who were in Jamestown in the initial years, one would expect they could and did acquaint Sandys with the conditions of extended sea travel, the sickness and swamps, the Indians, and clearing the land before anything of substance could be built. I have not seen evidence that Sandys appreciated these realities, but in explaining this I became aware that Sandys, like Smythe before him, had delegated much to his headquarters staff (Johnson in particular). Craven rightfully points out that “the responsibility for this, one of the gravest errors of the Sandys’ administration … falls especially on John and Nicholas Ferrar, … the former until 1622 and the latter from that date to the company’s dissolution”. He observes that a shareholder committee of sixteen men was formed to assist them in the implementation of the settler selection and logistics. “Like the Magazine, the committee and deputy met in courts” (shareholder meetings) to design and manage these activities. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 155

The deputy treasurer was charged with the actual task of arranging for call shipments of colonists and supplies—a task that included included making arrangements with ship captains, buying provisions, recruiting emigrants, deciding the number of persons to be sent in each ship, and apportioning the supplies for each individual. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 154

John Ferrar, in his early thirties at this time, was the son of a merchant-privateer who had considerable experience for his age in trading and participation in trading companies. A “friend and familiar” he converted his home into the equivalent of Smythe’s Philpot resident to the headquarters of the Virginia Company. According to his History of Parliament biography he dedicated himself entirely to the administration of the Company, while serving until 1622 as the Company’s Deputy Treasurer. The biography goes on to observe “He was commended by Sandys for his zeal in the administration, although the governor of the plantation, George Yeardley pointed out in 1620 that Ferrar had underestimated the amount of provisions needed for the colonists who were on the verge of mutiny” [99] https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/ferrar-john-1588-1657

So like Smythe, Sandys a busy, busy man, and Craven suggests that “Their [the Ferrar’s] important duties might have been performed far better had Sandys been able to give more personal attention to this part of the work, but he was a man busy with many responsibilities, both within and without the company”. He goes on the detail Sandys’ multi-tasking in ways I find reminiscent of Smythe.:

The first year after his election (1619-20) most of his [company] time was given to the abortive efforts at auditing accounts [Smythe’s journals and accounts in an attempt to reach a conclusion on the company’s audit of the books as previously described in these modules], at settling disputes within the company [managing the internal civil war] and in the search for adequate revenue. In 1621 he was busy with many responsibilities attendant upon his leadership in the House of Commons, and through 1622 his attention to the work of the company was made more difficult by the extended illness of his wife who suffered a miscarriage in 1621 and was at the point of death for another year. During that period Sandys was most of the time at his home, Northborn, in Kent, and while he corresponded frequently with the Ferrars and made hurried trips to London when the occasion demanded it, the responsibility for carrying on the business from day-to-day was left largely to the Ferrars. It was they who must answer for a large part of the privations, sickness, and death suffered by Virginia through the four years of Sandys’ control [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 156.

It appears that London, and this included Sandys, did not fully grasp the reality that the colony could not simply absorb new colonists as they arrived, not could it understand what was required to perform the tasks associated with the goals set for them in London. Economic diversification, for instance, rested on the colony’s ability to house, clothe, and protect these new arrivals, and of course feed them when their required activities permitted no time for the growing of staples which kept them alive. Nor was sufficient understanding of the tools, and the infrastructure (a pier, storage areas, hacking of paths and trails to worksite, clearing of fields before construction, breakage and repair, and weather or the more time it took to attend to matters of daily life while in the wilderness. Sandys sent over 3,500 settlers by 1622, “most of whom arrived unexpected by the governor’. “Sandys’ haste, however, multiplied immeasurably the mistakes of inexperienced [local] officers and the toll exacted by disease, famine and death, with the result that his colonists were landed in Virginia so far from being prepared to enter into the work planned for them as to be instead a positive liability”. [99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 151-2 [999]

[999] I would add that it was the Ferrars that managed the headquarters at the time of the Great Massacre of 1622, and the cries for assistance of the colonial government and settlers during the Second Powhatan War, and the winter that followed. While a firm answer cannot be given as to if, and when, Sandys was brought up to the detail of these events, and reasonably understood the intensity of their impact on the colony, I do not know, but the possibility is reasonable that Sandys, devoted to the tobacco contract monopoly project in that period, was not kept up to Virginia realities or consumed by those negotiations and did not focus on providing help to the colony in that desperate period—leaving the colony to its own devices. For those who need specifics, please turn to Warren, Dissolution, pp.157-170 999]

Reviewing the specific instances of ships arriving through the Sandys administration, one has to conclude, at least in my opinion, that the problem was chronic. While the numbers of settlers financed by the company did decline over his administration, probably due to the lack of funds, the provision of new settlers continued to be grossly inadequate, and to double down on the imbalance, there were several instances where the company would issue patents to new investors, providing them headrights, but holding the locals responsible for food, clothes, and housing upon arrival. Possibly the worst example was the one when the Company, being told of the Massacre responded by saying more settlers were in process of being sent, and the Company was responsible for their provision—in the immediate aftermath of the Massacre!.

While the fault in execution was largely that of the Ferrars, the policy that encouraged this error was that of Sandys. And curiously enough, despite all the complaints and warnings received from the colony, he never seemed able to understand the seriousness of the problems arising from this practice [of ill-supplying new settlers]. After the massacre in 1622 when the company had been informed that the colony suffered much for want of arms, food, and shelter, and even faced the prospect of starvation during the winter, the [London shareholder] council replied that they were unable to send sufficient supply but were happy to inform [the colony] that there ‘go now over in this Ship, and are immediately to follow in others many hundreds of people’. It was most essential that they be given every assistance possible in settlement that ‘others by their welfare may be drawn after them’ since ‘in the multitude of people is the strength of a kingdom’” And this to a governor [Wyatt] who only by the most heroic efforts could hope to prevent the starvation of people already in Virginia. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p.159

Introducing Lorena Walsh

This last statement may seem in error because in 1619 the Company had just got its act together in a permanent settlement plan with a presumed shareholder consensus that presented for the first time since 1606 a reasonable initial effort that might offer decent prospects for a second start in the Company’s colonial enterprise venture into Virginia colonization. A decent second start it may well have been, but it was not to be. The Greate Charter may have been fortune, but the coup was not. The coup was the first step down the road to the corporation’s lost of its charter to govern Virginia. If Sandys was the underlying author of the Greate Charter (and I think he was), he was also the author of the coup. From this point on there was never an underlying consensus regarding corporate governance over the colony, either among its shareholders, or its royal public partner, the Crown and its bureaucracy. The Court and Parliament are another matter, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

A brief examination, however, of the investigation instituted in 1623 by order of the privy council is sufficient to establish the truth of an economic rather than a political interpretation. The explanation of the action by the lords of the council is to be found in the economic decay of both the company and the colony attendant upon violent disputes among the adventurers which had their origins in the failures of the business during Smith’s governorship. The disappointments of his administration were responsible for an attempt by Sandys to make a special audit of Smith’s accounts. Quarrels between the officers and auditors, extending through 1617 and 1618, spread into the company, and the final result was an effort by Sandys to displace the governor [Smythe]. In alliance with the Earl of Warwick and by arguing that a change in administration might bring a change in fortune, he [Sandys] was successful in 1619. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, “the Dissolution of the London Company for Virginia”, the American Historical Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Oct, 1931), p. 24,

Dr. Lorena Walsh said it best. This module examines “[In 1616] the transition from a corporate settlement, directed and financed by overseas investors and managed for their benefit, to numerous privately owned plantations operated by individual settlers for individual profit” [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 by University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 30. What from London’s perspective is a shift in the Company’s business plan, in particular its permanent settlement strategy and financing, a shift motivated if not compelled by its horrendous fiscal situation that by 1612 brought the Company to the edge of insolvency. The crisis that launched not a thousand ships, but rather a change in strategy was the implementation of a required dividend to past investors—a dividend in land grants not cash, smashing the previous fiscal-financing strategy they had employed thus far.

Saved by the 1612 Third Charter, more particularly by the king’s granting of a public lottery to finance the Company, the Company turned its attention to restructuring its fiscal obligations to better fit a permanent settlement by backing away from financing through revenues from shareholder purchases and company debt issuances. London management (Smythe was still very much the CEO at that point) clumsily followed his lieutenant governor’s lead [Dale] by installing a military-like policy system, which, when sufficient order had been restored, began to dismantle itself through a four-pronged permanent settlement strategy: dispersal of population, fiscal cost reductions, land incentives, and tobacco export production.

The key to understanding the company’s history, both before and after Sandys election, is to be found in the fact that the business of colonization was yet in its earliest experimental stage when many errors of judgement were inevitable and reality often proved contrary to theory. In any attempt to judge the record of Virginia adventurers, it should not be forgotten that they were truly adventurers in a new and unchartered field of commercial speculation with little in the way of previous experience to guide them [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 25

Each of Dale’s strategy prongs were in their infancy as tools of development, and implementation was slow, incomplete and ill-defined and inadequately recorded. Perhaps the best that can be said was they were repetitive: with each gift to a company official adding to the the ones before, so that by the time he left town, Dale’s gift were the customary way the company paid its officials and associates for their service in Virginia. Dale got his own hundred which he sold when leaving. The Virginia Company in Virginia was developing its own on-site culture, which was not tampered with by its overseers in London. Out of sight and out of mind in London, in its earliest years this company culture, its behaviors, practices, and byways were unappreciated in existential or long term effects, if they were aware of them at all. After all Smythe and even Sandys got included in their own Dale’s gift, as of course did the London-resident Governor, De la Warr.

The colony was left largely to its own course. Only a few new colonists were sent to replenish its population [during the Dale’s Gift period]. In 1616 the inhabitants numbered 351 men, women and children, which as John Rolfe declared was ‘a small number to advance so greate a worke’. This small band was composed of those who had become accustomed to the hardship of a frontier community, and as the ‘old planters’ they formed the nucleus around which the population of Virginia was to grow. Yet in April, 1618, the settlers were only 400, among whom according to Sandys only 200 were able to ‘set hand to husbandry and but one Plough was going in all the Country, which was the fruit of a full 12 years labor and above one hundred thousand marks expenses … over and above the sum of between 8 and 9000 pounds Debt into which the Company was brought, and besides the great expenses of particular Adventurers. Left in this fashion with no constructive guidance from the company, it is not surprising the colony’s development followed certain lines which in the end produced as much dissatisfaction among the adventurers as did the unhappy state of affairs in the company. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 34-5

The Shift from Hakluyt

The Great Charter approach reflected earlier conceptions of the New World plantation strategy, as espoused by 1607 Jamestown minister and Company investor Richard Hakluyt as overseen by Sandys handpicked official, John Pory, who upon his arrival in early 1619 assumed the positions of Secretary and presided over the first meeting of the legislative chamber created by Sandys instructions, the Virginia Company Assembly.

Sir Edwin Sandys summed up the dominant trend in 1619 when he observed that ‘as the private plantation began thus to increase, so contrariwise the estate of the publique [the Company-operated sector] … grew into utter consumption’. The consequence on Sandys’ view was that the colony became so obsessively devoted to tobacco planting that the colonists soon ‘reduced themselves into an extremity of being ready to starve unless the Magazine [the sub-company that brought them their provisions and marketed their goods] … had supplied them with corn and cattle from hence‘ …

Beginning in 1619, the Virginia Company did make a desperate, last ditch effort to reverse these trends toward individualistic and single-crop production. It suddenly sought to revive production on the company’s own lands (the estate of the publique) and sent over large groups of colonists [i.e. indentured servants, mostly, some artisans, children and criminals as well] to provide the labor forces for this purpose. It tried, at the same time, to break the tobacco monoculture and to diversify the colony’s economy. To that end it sought to compel the colonists to produce certain amounts of food and commercial crops besides tobacco, while itself taking charge of a series of ambitious projects–specifically, the construction of a colonial iron industry, the development of silk production, and the introduction of wine-making. The company could sustain these efforts, however, for only a few years [until the 1622 Massacre], and, in the end could make little impact on the overall direction of [Virginia’s] colonial development. The result of this brief period of intense company activity was actually to consolidate already existing trends [tobacco]. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), p. 95

If so, the future of Virginia’s Tidewater and Piedmont economic base was forged in 1621, with Smythe’s seeming defeat, Warwick’s death, and Sandys pyrrhic victory encased in his Greate Charter economic initiative. Sandys bold coup further unleashed a political firestorm whose fiscal implications finalized the company’s political future as a colony-builder. The echoes of this disruption, however, seem to have been heard, and felt, in Virginia.

To the extent there was any conventional wisdom concerning an English permanent settlement, it based based on Raleigh’s Roanoke venture, a generation of so previous. That this wisdom was available to the Virginia Company can be assumed as several of Raleigh’s principal backers and even Roanoke residents (who had returned to England) were founding members of the Virginia Company (his signature is one of eight on the founding incorporation document), including several “refugees” from the shattered and shuttered Plymouth-Sagadahoc expedition. Richard, Hakluyt (the Younger) was their principal advocate and his thought and writings on the matter crossed paths with Sandys thinking–and maybe Dale’s as well.

Hakluyt was, among many things, well-connected, an Anglican minister, and a geographer-colonizer [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hakluyt-richard-1552-1616/. . He had served as Elizabeth’s private adviser on English colonization, and his considerable writings (two books at least) were not circulated publicly, but accessible to Hakluyt’s relatives (Gilbert), and fellow adventurers. Hakluyt had intended to venture to Jamestown, but for reasons unknown he canceled at the last moment. He owned two shares in the 1609 Charter company.

Summarized, his perspective saw colonization as multi-purposed: commercial profits, a national purpose of mercantile supremacy for England–a purpose of national importance for her future, a boost to economic autonomy for vital English production of key materials and products, even a base to raid the Spanish in West Indies, a missionary intent to convert the Native Americans to Protestantism as both a balance to the Catholic presence in the New World and a basis for peaceful coexistence for the colony with the Indians, and finally, he saw the permanent colony as a way to draw off Scrooge’s “surplus” population offering them an opportunity to a new life in the New World-that included BTW use of criminals. [99] Grizzard, Jr and Boyd Smith, . Jamestown: a Colony, p. xx.

I take note of his strong interweaving of England’s foreign policy-national defense with English economic and social development. The similarities to Bacon’s first thesis on Plantations (1606) are substantial–and it also permeated his last 1626 writing. This is an important insight to English colonial American economic development- and as we have seen to George Washington’s justification for trans-Appalachian settlement by use of the Potomac canal. The reaction of American historians to this disarray was to acknowledge its existence, but keep away from the specifics, preferring to focus their attention on matters in Virginia.

Osgood in particular goes into detail on the background and specific individuals associated with these very large land grants—and importantly on how the dynamics of the internal fighting and factional politics within the Virginia Company and its subsidiaries. Osgood is not very neutral in this regard. He is a strong Sandys supporter, closely associating him and his faction with Parliament (its country or pre-Whig element) and the Southampton faction within the Company. He does have some sympathy for Smythe, but clearly believes the time for Smythe to move on had come.

The weakness in his approach was his sense that economic advantages could be quickly achieved considering the immense natural resources available in North America. To him colonization for a bonanza for all, colonists and English national defense, North America “was an Eden, needing only righteous, industrious men [and women I trust] to cultivate its gardens“[99] Grizzard, Jr and Boyd Smith, . Jamestown: a Colony, p. xxi. That generated unrealistic expectations, and his comprehensive list of valid purposes did not lend itself to precise economic development strategies, most fundamental being rapid self-sufficiency as the expense of any quick trade or profits. His conception of a diversified economic base was also fundamental, however, and one that Sandys, a tobacco-phobe, readily embraced in his 1618 Plan.

From this, I think, the reader should approach the 1619 coup and the events of the following half-decade with caution, and an appreciation there were “many balls in the air”, and that in these years the effective control over Atlantic affairs by any one player is not in evidence. There is not yet an English Navy sufficient to exert the control we assume to be characteristic of England. That is why there is a private-public partnership in the first colony. The Virginia Company was only one player in Atlantic and North American English colonization-trade.

Craven in his Dissolution of the Virginia Company presents the case that between late 1616 through 1618 there was substantial shareholder concern the Virginia Company was no longer “a going concern”, but rather during the Argall administration had become in essence “a gone concern”. Following this line of thought Craven makes the case that Dale’s Gift had dispersed much company public land and workforce to the benefit of certain of the Company officials and the resident Virginia shareholders including former ‘ancient’ indentured shareholders. By implication such shareholder officials such as Smythe and Johnson, whose control over an almost independent Company Magazine had taken whatever profits could be made from Virginia produce and export-import.

Most of Craven’s attention is directed at Dale’s “ancien” shareholder land distribution program, as opposed to Dale’s Gift plantation-hundred land distribution to company officials. No mention also is made of the investor-association-hundred program either. The latter two initiatives accumulated more Virginia land grants and workforce incentives than the eighty-one ancien former indentured servants.

The larger point, regardless of who got the public resources, was that Virginia Company’s assets had dilapidated, and by 1618, still further disrupted by Argall, the company itself had little if any resources left either pay off its accumulated debt and obligations, nor provide any funds for the development and growth of the colony—whatever settlement strategy was to be adopted. These were the motivations underlying the 1616 company audit, and the intensification of effort to overcome the resistance of company officials only served to intensify the concerns of those shareholders who wondered what was left of the Company by that point. [see p. 37].

In 1618 it was discovered to the consternation of many shareholders that almost the entire investment of the common stock in the public [company] estate and property of the company had been allowed to waste away until almost nothing of value remained to show for an investment estimated at L75,000. … At Governor Argall’s arrival in 1617 the larger part of the settlers were tenant farmers and his administration of two years witnessed the practical disappearance of the company’s plantation” [i.e. workforce of indentured servants]. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution, pp. 35-6

Craven is making the case the Virginia Company’s threatened demise was overwhelmingly economic in nature, not political, and the cause of the economic collapse lay in the inaction of the Smythe’s administration, and its selective attention to exacting whatever benefit it could from Virginia. The recourse to tobacco, a controversial, if not despised product, that saturated the colony’s plantation export only made things worse. By that time, it was also evident that Virginia plantations of all sizes and shapes had turned to tobacco, and the tobacco produced was of low quality, while because of the Magazine the price for which was rather high in England—thereby raising an additional clamor for what the heck is going on over there in Virginia. Of note was tbe plantations of company officials in Virginia were producing even more tobacco, and of little help in diversifying the colony’s export and production of staples.

He sums it up as follows:

They watched with alarm the growing dependence on tobacco, not only because of the dangers they foresaw in an economic order resting so completely upon one product, but also because of the disrepute into which the whole enterprise might fall when, instead of serving the public ends for which it had been founded, it supported only a vice which they in common with the majority of their fellow countrymen condemned. And when the merchant leaders [Smythe] undertook no progressive program for the continued growth of the colony, and appeared to be interested in little more than the success of the Magazine ventures, it is easy to suspect them of having no interest but their own personal profit. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 41

I confess to the reader I am much in sympathy with Craven’s argument, but I do not find it sufficiently complete an explanation to the events of 1619, nor does it consider the question of how, and why, the Company’s internal civil war of 1616-1620, degenerated into a full-scale battle between King and Smythe versus Sandys, Rich, Ferrars and Southampton during and after 1621.

The role of tobacco in the dissolution, I believe was more prominent and impactful in the post-1623 period—not in 1616-8. I also sense a bit of a confused chronology in which the initial attack, the November 1616 company audit, is alleged to be caused by the aggregate of concern that arose in 1618 and 1619, and previous to the disruption engendered by the Argall administration. It is necessary to sort these out. Fortunately, Craven, in Dissolution, in his discussion of the audit, provides in his explanation of Company shareholder dissatisfaction with Smythe, how the settlement of Virginia from 1616-1618 affected the shareholder debate in London.

It was not tobacco that upset the settlers, it was Argall, and the reports of Argall’s actions and transgression, especially reports emanating from of investors associated with the hundreds investment that reached London, fueled the debate through 1617, and into 1618. Investors in the hundreds took their complaints to London shareholder meetings, and perhaps surprisingly, these reports were taken seriously by Smythe, despite their use by Sandys in his audit attacks. That Argall had, like a bull in a china shop, essential disrupted much of the Dale’s Gift program by actions that demonstrated little regard for the rights of English citizens and investors was nothing that Smythe was in agreement with. I strongly suspect that by early 1618, Argall’s increasing closeness to the Earl of Warwick, by this time in serious conflict with Smythe regarding Bermuda governance and allocation of land to investors that Smythe found an additional reason for his dislike of Argall and the need for his replacement.

We know that the Greate Contract debate in London was reduced to De La Warr’s instructions previous to his departure probably in May, 1618. He died on June 7 or July 7, and the Neptune with its letter to Argall—and his body—reached Jamestown on Aug 18. Thus Sandys and Smythe’ discussion-negotiations on the permanent settlement strategy and the governance of the colony was in place by mid Spring 1618. Following Craven, Dissolution , pp. 44-5, it appears that the settlement negotiation coincided-overlapped with the discussion on the Argall, and for that matter the audit. Each dovetailing with the other, but leaving sufficient impression on Smythe that a comprehensive reform and revamp was necessary.

[The attacks of the Company shareholders in London] was strengthened as the conditions prevailing under Argall became better known, and by 1618 there was strong demand for certain important reforms [undefined]. This demand was stronger by virtue of the fact that several groups of adventurers were now contemplating to settle plantations under patents from the company with the hope of succeeding where the company had failed. Among these was one led by Sandys and Southampton for a plantation which was at first known as Smith’s Hundred and later as Southampton’s Hundred. Another was that headed by John Smyth of Nibey [not our Smythe} … The fact that an influential and important part of the shareholders were now planning to send large numbers of colonists in the near future with the idea of developing Virginia into a colony of numerous and prosperous plantations was one of the most important factors in effecting the reorganization of the [Company[ which occurred in 1618. The incentive for these new ventures may have come in some cases from the prospect offered by tobacco, but it is more likely that it was chiefly the conviction growing out of the attacks upon Smith that past failures had been largely the result of mismanagement and negligence . [Specifically, Craven asserts] In the years immediately following the failure of the plantation type of colony, many statements derogatory to the climate fertility and resources of Virginia found wide acceptance in England. John Rolfe had written his “Relation of the State of Virginia … to answer just such attacks and to show that ‘this cause so much despised and disgraced suffered from much wrongful imputations. Now that the sustained attack on Smith and the other officers presented another explanation of previous failure, those of Rolfe carried more weight. There followed a revived interest and enthusiasm among the shareholders which was based upon a new belief in the possibility of a successful colonization of Virginia. And since this new confidence rested so much on the conviction that the chief hindrance in the past had been error in policy and management, it is not surprising that with it came a demand for the reform of certain conditions in the company and colony which were necessary not only for attracting colonists to new plantations but to the success of their efforts after arrival. Partly in response to this demand, partly perhaps to ward off the attacks of the Sandys’ faction, and partly because of a sincere interest in the welfare of the colony, Smith undertook in 1618 genuine reforms which were to have a lasting effect upon Virginia’s history. Smith’s program so nearly conforms to the policies followed by Sandys after his election 1in 1619, that there can be no doubt that Sandys had been largely responsible for calling attention to the abuses and weaknesses, demanding reform, and had led in pointing the way to their remedies. He evidently cooperated with Smith in 1618, and perhaps to Sandys more than any other should be given credit for this work, but it is a mistake to attribute all the reforms to him, and thus to neglect the important part played by Smith. Sandys was not yet in control of the Company, and these reforms could never have been accomplished without Smith’s support. One of the first steps taken was the recall of Argall. Pp. 44-6

How the Greate Charter was intended to bend the political and economic development Virginia Twig

Understanding the what, why and how of the Virginia Company’s singular initiative, the Greate Charter was, and how it bent Virginia’s economic and political development twig is the task at hand. To repeat the point once again, I restate my position on the matter.

Sandys so called Greate Charter was not the first step to American democracy, nor was Sandys the personification of America’s first true democratic instincts. The simple reality was the Greate Charter was authored, if that is the right word, by an internal shareholder rebellion, led by Sandys and a rather large and diverse grouping of shareholders, which to a considerable degree fabricated its version of a permanent settler strategy. That strategy reset the Company’s corporate structure by copying its London organization structure in Virginia; it concurrently replaced Virginia’s governor with a new one, and who was empowered by a compromise worked out with the previous merchant adventurer CEO, Thomas Smythe.

The latter embraced such strategy and the reforms and reorganization associated with it, and he made an earnest effort to see to its implementation in Virginia. That view is not incompatible with a behind the scenes aggressive role by Deputy Treasurer Sandys who likely was responsible for the much of its elements, and the wording in the instructions to the governor. It was also endorsed by the shareholder council in November, 1616, and whatever discord lay in the future, was never repudiated, not was any effort made to do so, by any party.

It will become apparent as we proceed on, that the cause of the dissolution of the Virginia Company did not lay in its permanent settlement strategy, but rather in the friction and antipathy of several factions in its governance to each other.

As we shall see, regardless who was CEO of the Virginia Company, its shareholder factions were unwilling to live with each other. As early as April 1619, the Virginia Company developed a cancer in its organizational bones, a cancer that would eat away at the Company, until the king and others concluded it could govern no more.

By May 1618, the first replacement governor was on his way to Virginia, armed with instructions on the what and how of the “Greate Charter”. That things didn’t work out exactly as intended then, the Greate Charter did reach Virginia a year later, and were implemented by another new governor, also sent over with instructions signed by Thomas Smythe. Then, stuff really began—but we get ahead of ourselves. More on that later. The short story of the Greate Charter is more complicated in the telling, but simple in its conclusion. The Company was to fail and be stripped of its charter to govern Virginia because of its own internal failures as development vehicle in an England heading down a path to civil war. The reality that Greate Charter implementation was crushed by a war with the Powhatan becoming a secondary factor in the implosion of the Company in London.

For me the Greate Charter was a creature of the processes worked out within the Virginia Company, and how the Virginia Company, itself a creature of the early Stuart colonial and politics and its drift into the English civil war combined to fabricate a transformational corporate pivot that was intended to “save the company” and thereby preserve the first experimental North American colonial colony from what seemed in 1616 to be a near-certain fiscal collapse caused in many ways by a misconceived and badly implemented permanent settlement program.

James or Charles would never have signed off on the creation of a potential independent “little parliament”, nor a colonial self-government destined to lead to its independence. This 1618 representative body instituted by the instructions that constituted the Greate Charter was a purely corporate-shareholder body that extended the ability of Virginia resident shareholders, including their investor associations, to exercise their rights in corporate governance. Of note, the Company itself noted that this structure of corporate governance was essential and proper in the conveying, protection and enforcement of individual rights as English citizens, and in particular allowed Virginia shareholders opportunity to exercise their shareholder rights and interests without having to travel to London to vote.

[999] Another version of the “seed of democracy” disease, is that all the above being somewhat ture, was that Sandys himself held that dream and through his efforts he instilled in the instructions on his own a seed, the Assembly, that in his mind would have created a representative democracy as he knew in England at the time. Without any pretense of knowing what he dreamed about at night, I doubt that very much. English “democracy” in his lifetime was not evolved sufficiently, and the theory of modern democracy had yet to start its development.

It is ironic the first author associated with that modern discussion of English democracy, Thomas Hobbes, worked with Sandys while the Company was in process of dissolving—years after the Greate Charter had been packed in Yeardley’s luggage. One wonders whether his “war of all, against all” had some applicability to his experience with the Virginia Company. Yet, returning to Sandys, his sense of the state of parliamentary elections is best explained by his experience in being elected as an M.P. in the 1614 Addled Parliament.

In the previous session of Parliament, 1614-the Addled Parliament, Sandys’s election had been a horrendous experience. Its description vividly demonstrates how “representative” the English parliament was at the time Sandys was presumably calling for a “Virginia Assembly”.

“In previous elections Sandys had relied on kinsmen to provide him with a borough seat [for parliament] as he lacked sufficient local influence to attain one for himself”. In 1614, however, Sandys thought he had sufficient name awareness and local support to run himself; he dropped out of the race four or five days before the election, however, because he “suffered from being associated with neither the Cobham nor Sidney factions, both of which had since the 1580’s divided up the county seats between them.

Accordingly, he sought help [from other M.P. brokers], from a former Speaker of Parliament, Edward Phelips, who controlled several seats in Somerset. Phelips arranged for a seat in Taunton. It turns out, however, that Sandys had also asked the Earl of Somerset for help in getting assigned a seat, and Somerset got the Earl of Rochester to assign him the seat of a representative, who after being elected had declined to serve. Now he had two offers. Then a third district was offered him by the Earl of Pembroke, a seat at “Hindon, possibly on the interest of the Third Earl of Pembroke, than a close ally of the Earl of Somerset’s father-in-law, [the Earl of] Suffolk”. Sandys chose Rochester’s offer, but the delay meant that Sandys missed the first days of the 1614 parliamentary session.

If this shopping around for a seat in the Assembly is what Sandys had in mind for Virginia than I suspect we are very premature in thinking he was calling for anything we consider as “democratic”? The English parliament still had quite a bit of evolving to do before we should think of it as democratic in a more modern sense. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/sandys-sir-edwin-1561-1629 [999]

The Greate Charter as seen in Virginia

Virginia’s Virginia Company period–and the First Migration it generated–is not customarily thought as the “real” start of Virginia’s successful colonization. Not known for its institutionalization, not fully appreciated for its role in the founding of the Virginia tobacco monoculture, and certainly not understood to be the driving period of the colony’s future political development or its political culture–not to mention sustainable population growth–the Virginia Company has not captured a compelling description and focus among American historians. The starving years of Jamestown always get top priority, but the Valley Forge-like desperation of those years offer little credit to the Company, and what positive credit flows to charismatic explorer and soldier of fortune, John Smith, and the unfortunate, I fear, story behind. Pocahontas-Rebecca. The powerful Indian actors, Powhattan, and the unspellable O, are cast off to the side, the latter hardly mentioned before 1622. More solid actors, John Rolfe, Thomas Gates, and above all Thomas Dale are names and offices that held sway in the first decade of the colony’s fragile existence.

Our history, thus far has argued the politics and dynamics in London best explain the uninspiring colony-building associated with the Virginia Company period. The Company did not understand the preconditions for an effective colony-building strategy when it launched the colony in 1606-7, and it took over a half-decade to come up with somewhat more realistic ideas and strategies of how to accomplish colony-building. The more desperate story, if Jamestown’s starving years were devoid of their human misery, was in the Virginia Company’ s fiscal condition, which after 1610, made it a financial “going-concern”, floating with bond default, inadequate revenues, and little prospect of the attracting significant investment. No surprise this promoted what by the end of the teens, a civil war within a company, that led to the coup of 1618-19, and eventually after 1622 the fall of the Company and the termination of its Virginia charter. The period we are now about to describe, the years associated with the Greate Charter, are its golden years, the high water mark of the Virginia Company.

The Greate Charter, however, was no spectacular high water mark. The Company’s past performance set a rather low bar, and I can’t say other than as high water marks go, the Greate Charter was not particularly outstanding. That one of its structures, the House of Burgesses, would eventually morph into America’s so-called first democratic legislature a generation or two later, is about the only thing American historians praise to any particular degree–more on that later. But, as we shall try to support, the Greate Charter suffered considerably from the Company’s civil war, and the Company’s empty coffers. What success the Greate Charter would have economically, came from its ED strategy that fostered and relied upon extra-Company investment made attractive by profound Company incentives using the one resource the Company had plenty of “land in the wilderness”.

Those incentives, and the colony-building strategy were launched in 1612-3, and picked up real steam only when the Company’s 1606-7 debt matured in 1616. When that happened, older, more traditional merchant adventurers, departed, leaving the Company shareholder membership held by larger number of secondary town merchants, Parliamentarians, and landed gentry seeking opportunities for their progeny. The Company strategy, logically, wanted to allow these folk opportunities to benefit from Virginia, so that the Company did not have to pay a dividend for which it had no known source of revenues. Offering land to company shareholders, and then expanding the land incentive to newcomers who bought as little as a single share was the incentive that motivated new immigrants and offered investors some hope of a longer-term Virginia economic development project that could yield sustainable returns on the investment, and status for their offspring. It was these motivations and hopes that funded and founded Virginia’s tobacco monoculture–that and English consumer demand for the product. If the reader will note, no where in all this is a Stuart king mentioned.

That, friends, is the real behind the scenes story of the Greate Charter.

The reader is again reminded our position is Company politics exerted a major influence in the design and operation of Virginia’s settlement and development—and that the policy initiatives that were pursued in London were driven by London-based dynamics that distorted the structure and implementation of Virginia colony-building strategies.

But one cannot depreciate the impact of high death rates which continued throughout the teens and the Greate Charter periods. The high death rates made annual any annual census, usually including those newly settled, very imperfect measures, in that after the deaths by seasoning in their first months of settlement, the colony’s surviving populations dropped significantly. In 1616, in England, Rolfe reported entire population in Virginia was about 326. If so, no wonder Argall when he arrived in 1616 Jamestown reported the settlement was a mess (my words), in considerable disrepair and degeneration.

High mortality decimated the settlers of particular [association-investor] plantations, just as it did those of the parent company. In the best of circumstances, most new settlers suffered an initial bout of seasoning. When large groups of new arrivals were dumped on the colony [usually without advance notice], with inadequate food and shelter, some already infected with shipboard diseases, the ensuing mortality was frightful. John Rolfe , for example, reported on January 1620 that plantations ‘were much weakened by the greate mortality’ the previous year. Smith’s Hundred had experience so much sickness that ‘no matter of gaine or greate industry can be expected from them’, and at least one settlement Christopher Lawen’s, was entirely abandoned on that account. A letter from the Virginia Company made reference in 1621 to the Society of Martin’s Hundred having had ‘misfortunes as well … Similarly, although the Berkleley proprietors sent over ninety odd settlers between the fall of 1619 and the spring of 1622, … just over twenty remained alive’. Four had returned to England and just eleven had been killed by Indians [in the Greate Massacre]. Fifty or more had perished from disease, starvation or accident [99] Lorena S. Walsh, pp. 61-2

Accordingly, I advise the reader to constantly keep in mind when we talk of broad conceptual structures, authority and political institutions, and driver dynamics in the case of pre-1640 Virginia the unit of governance (county or settlement) is “micro-populated”, with the entire colony being able to fit into an auditorium; when scattered into their individual shredded plantations, and surrounding settlements, with only one or two exceptions, population was usually less than fifty. In such communities, governance is necessarily personalized as “everybody knows your name”; charisma, wealth and English social status matters to some degree. Individual emotion, family, friendships and rivalries are had to remove from policy and its making.

In so small a community small group decision-making is almost innate, but conversely in situations of high stress vocal and activist individuals can and will speak and join in. I suspect this one reason why the first governmental reforms will be circuit courts, whose agenda were more judicial than rule-making. In any case, the possession of first advantage in settling up the community, i.e. holder of the patent or owner of the land title, however acquired, will be well-placed as inevitable hierarchies emerge. The figure of legal authority, the sheriff or militia commander, will stand out. When present, the minister and the sermon, and the authority of the parish vestry, will carry considerable influence. That a majority of the population would be indentured further suggests the Virginia shredded community is not a natural for the exercise of democratic, majority-rule policy-making.

In essence I argue for a serious dose of humble institutions, despite whatever rhetorical hubris is thrust upon them (for example instead of “little parliament” , think “tiny parliament”). So long as Virginia is composed and organized around these small plantation settlements, size and scale alone predisposed to closed policy-making systems. That means for the next generation, not until the 1640’s will more complex settlement patterns bespeak more moving parts in the decision-making process.

How London’s Greate Charter Instructions were expressed and implemented in Virginia: The First Session, 1619, of the Virginia General Assembly

Upon his arrival Governor Yeardley in April 1619, Governor Yeardley and Secretary John Porys in some sort of tandem began the implementation of the sets of instructions. First, we ought to refresh the reader that in April 29^th 1619, Smythe administration was replaced by a Sandys administration, and that the news of such arrived in June or so—previous to the First Session of the soon to be Virginia Assembly. Probably that news also included Smythe’s attacks of Yeardley that occurred after Yeardley’s Yeardley had left port. Sandys had defended and protected Yeardley, and had in the interim replaced Smythe as Yeardley’s new boss.

Yeardley’s immediate reaction as reported by Craven was ‘the news of these attacks so incensed Yeardley that he demanded a release from his office, but the report of Sandys’ election evidently persuaded him to continue” [99] Craven, Dissolution, p.81].

Porys, close to Sandys, sent to Virginia to ensure Yeardley’s faithful compliance with his Greate Charter instructions, was put in a somewhat awkward position. Somewhat redundant, now the Yeardley had abandoned Smythe and joined the Sandys’ camp, Porys was therefore expected to join hands with the governor, a man with whom during the trip over he evidently had not developed a liking for—and it appears the feeling was reciprocated.

While Porys was certainly closer to the spirit of Sandys that permeated if not saturated the instructions, the details of the instructions were not especially specific, and that left room for Yeardley’s interpretation of the wording and the sequence. It also became apparent that the instructions, spread across a number of issues and topics, necessarily had to be implemented over a period of time, and not simply by a set of enactments of the first session of the Virginia Assembly. Prone to work with the support of local officials and delegates whom Yeardley knew well, and returning to his personal estate-hundred which no doubt consumed some of his attention, Yeardley likely did not maintain the pace of implementation that Pory’s wanted.

Sandys Approach to Settlement Applied in Virginia

As stipulated elsewhere, Sandys primary law of settlement was to increase the population. Why? New settlers, for which they company paid as opposed to association-investor settlers, were sent either to staff the diversification projects, and thus were intended to be assigned to the company’s “public” lands. Using public lands Sandys hoped produce and exports could result, and those could be sold in England to pay the bills, and retire the debt. By Sandys estimate his workforce in 1619 was about 400 workers, but only 200 were able to handle “husbandry”. “

The apportionment [the first year] to the public lands provided 80 tenants for the governor’s [Dales Gift plantation], 130 for the company land, 100 for the college, fifty for glebe [church] lands, 100 apprentices for tenants, and 50 servants for the company” along with 90 maidens sent at company expense for the existing settlers. Aside from the obvious, the latter initiative was went to create a real colony able to sustain itself and develop as a community with families and such. Another hundred were sent over in 1620.

Penciled in for the second year (1620-21) were another 700 men at company expense, 400 of which would work the company land, 100 tenants for company officers, 10 added to the glebe land, 20 to support the existence of a doctor, 100 boys to become apprentices for artisans and such, and 100 servants for “old planters” [99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 96-7

In Sandys’ mind the first priority in company lands was to produce an adequate local food supply—primarily corn. Tobacco was not supposed to interfere with this, and a limitation was applied to any land used for it. Individuals would be allowed to grow only a certain amount each year. The next priority was new commodities such as furs, lumber products to be used for masts, rope, hemp and flax, wines, fruit, salt, soap ashes (lye for soap making], potash, and a host of such other sundries to be used locally and excess exported to England. “Polackers” were already in Virginia, and they were tasked with its production. The intentions were good to encourage ship building at a modest level (though greatly needed in the colony), fishing was encouraged, mostly rhetorically, and opening up of salt works was specified of the governor

Iron-making was intended to be a signature initiative core to economic diversification and subsistence to the colony (tools, fixtures, nails, etc). Iron required coal to fuel the works, and ore which was taken for granted as lying around in Virginia also. In the first year about 150 workers were assigned to it and tasked to found three separate works projects. Special individuals skilled were sent over in the spring of 1620. L4000 was allocated as it budget, and that was later increased to L5000. Silk and wine were the next priority projects. In the last the king was personally interested, it was his hobby to plant Mulberry and develop cocoons—which he sent over from the first year to the end. Unfortunately none survived the travel in either 1619 or 1620. Wine was thought to be a suitable produce from Virginia, and vines were sent over. Most of that project was taken up by the college, and by the end of 1621, George Thorp, its director, reported 10,000 vines had been planted.

While starting from scratch may be an overstatement, these public lands needed much effort, and a serious workforce, to be converted from wilderness to any commercial or personal use. The problem was this wilderness thing was being marketed in England as an advantage so that new settlers could be recruited; the Company painted such a picture as making the wilderness as a sort of paradise so potentially bountiful, fertile and full of game that it wanted not only quick returns from Virginia, but in London’s mind could produce sufficient for Virginia to assume more, if not complete, responsibility for the sustenance of new settlers once they arrived in Virginia.

What was seldom appreciated, however, was the considerable amount to time and effort had to be made in doing such opening up the access to acreage, clearing land, and constructing storage facilities on site, before anything could be done for production and export. Living up to the advertising was one thing, but even putting aside the tobacco monoculture obsession, the expectations in London were very high—and if not met or satisfied, the tendency was to blame the colonists and charge them with one or another abuse, mismanagement, or over indulgence on tobacco.

The Second Instructions—

formed the Council of State (with six members), called for and implemented elections, and convened the General Assembly. John Pory, Sandy’s Secretary of the Colony, was to preside over its activities. The Assembly did met for the first time in 1619.

It met for the first time in a church in Jamestown on July 30, 1619. In a five day session that followed, the General Assembly organized itself, elected its leadership, approved various items in Sandys instructions regarding his Greate Charter, made recommendations to the company for further actions, suggested revisions of the Great Charter itself, and enacted several laws, with Indian relations and the price of tobacco among its enactments. In attendance besides Pory, were Governor Yeardley, the six members of the Council of State, and twenty Burgesses. With several of its members becoming sick (one died) in the summer Jamestown climate, the Assembly, after five days of deliberations, was forced to adjourn its session and reschedule its next meeting for March, 1620. We have no firm records of that meeting, although there are references that it might have met.

In any event, the initial General Assembly instructed the governor to fix a price for which the “cape merchant” (the chief Company in-resident export-trade official) should accept tobacco for export, and further limiting the profits of that trade to 25%, while requiring all tobacco produced in Virginia be shipped by the cape merchants (thereby establishing a company monopoly over the trade), and implicitly instructing the cape merchant to ship such quantities “that the price be ‘upheld the better’. [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1946), p. 19.

Also the Assembly formalized Virginia’s sub-provincial hierarchy “It divided the James River area into four corporate boroughs straddling the river, beginning with Henrico at the falls, then Charles City, James City [Jamestown] and Kecoughtan at the bay (renamed Elizabeth City by the 1619 General Assembly). In each borough the Company reserved 3,000 acres for its own enterprises [the estate publique], run by half-share tenants sent at company expense. To pay the cost of local government, it set aside 1,500 acres in each borough for the use of borough officials, …. the governor occupied a 3,000 acre tract near Jamestown in lieu of his salary. Each parish minister would have a 100 acre farm (called a glebe] and an assurance that he could earn additional income equal to his annual salary of 200 pounds. Finally, the company undertook to meet its initial promise to educate and Christianize the Indians. It established an ‘Indian’ college’ at Henrico, on Farrar’s island, to be supported by income from 10,000 acres of College lands worked by half-share tenants [estate publique]. [99] Grizzard, Jr., and Boyd Smith, Jamestown a Colony, p. xlv

Notable effort was made to “reform” the land patents of several association-hundreds. Terms of their patents were clarified and communicated to the owners of the hundreds-plantation, and suggested accommodations by the Assembly were approved, i.e. a two-way street that allowed modifications. What emerged after the Assembly was the Council of State did continue to meet at the bequest of Yeardley, and that body, in which Yeardley had a veto, became the major policy-maker in Virginia.

To that extent then, the power of the governor had been reduced, and as a practical matter the lower of the larger plantation owners represented on the Council, increased-and legitimized. In the exchanges between the Yeardley and the central London company officials, the latter, after some commentary, conceded that London could not make Company determinations with effect on Virginia without concurrence by the Virginia Company General Assembly: “No orders of our Court [London General Assembly} afterwarde shall bind [the] colony unles they bee ratified in like manner in ther generall Assembly“. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 135.

This was an important clarification or concession, and that action provided significant justification to the new royal government when it took power in 1624-5 that the status quo in Virginia meant the General Assembly, Council of State were an established element of Company governance, and that their recognition as such by the royal authorities translated into their transformation into a royal government policy-making structure-institution. That, however, did not in any way stipulate or clarify what powers they had, and to what extent they could exercise their powers only in conformity to those in issued in London. The response issued by Sandys dated July 24, 1621 was sufficiently explicit to be considered as the company’s “constitution’ regarding its governance of the Virginia Colony [99] See Richard Middleton, Colonial America: a History, 1565-1776 (3rd Ed) (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 57.

It is worth note that among the initial actions of the first five day session of the General Assembly was its approval of the indenture system as called for in the Great Charter. “Measures were passed to enforce servants indenture and to prevent the ‘seducing’ of servants from one plantation to another” [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1946), p. 18

More interesting to me, and especially relevant to the future development of the House of Burgesses and the Greate Charter system of government were two questions that arose from discussion in the first General Assembly, and which were sent on to London for comment and answer. During the six day first Assembly, Osgood reports it formed a committee that met to ascertain from London (1) what laws might be passed on the initiative of the assembly (i.e. its independent jurisdiction), and (2) what petitions it might send to London from this session of the Assembly.

Out of this came (1) a request the land grants received thus far from the Company and its officials, including the Hundreds, be confirmed (clear title); (2) that a sub-treasurer be sent over to collect the Company’s rents; (3) “Admitting fully the right of the Company to disallow the acts [of the General Assembly], the Assembly requested that they might be regarded as in force till the report of their rejection should come from England, AND (Mine) the Assembly might be authorized to disallow orders from the company’s court [annual member-investor meeting] as it was empowered to reject acts of the assembly. Thus early something like legislative equality with the court of the company in England was sought”. Osgood, Vol. 1., p.94. As we shall confirm later in this module, the Company, nor Sandys apparently, responded directly to either request. Some clarification seems to have been included in the list of instruction to Governor Wyatt in 1621, in which the first recommendation was agreed to, but not the co-equality of the General Assembly with the Company Court.

The reader is cautioned not to treat this entreaty by the first General Assembly casually. This request will in the future be construed as not being denied by the Company to the General Assembly, which in the General Assembly’s own deliberations meant it was so entitled. In the period between the fall of the Company (1624) and the acceptance by the King of the limited authority of the General Assembly (1639), this slender thread constituted a meaningful element in the continued governance of Virginia by the General Assembly. As the reader might expect, more of this issue will be said in future sections and modules.

The only other Assembly we can confirm held during the period of the Company Charter met in 1621. It may be others did meet, but no records exist that firmly indicate it did, who attended, and what was discussed or enacted. The last Company Assembly was in February-March 1624–when the Company’s charter was likely to be terminated by the King and Virginia officials convened it to develop its position on the matter, and to address issues that needed resolution before the Company ‘s administration was terminated. An obvious concern regarding its future, and that of the land titles/land grants issued by the company to its shareholder prompted petitions to London for clarification. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 188.

It also seems that Sandys was “on board” with the activities of the 1619 and 1620 annual meeting of the General Assembly—the only indirect reference I know of that confirms the General Assembly did meet in 1620 (there are no references in Virginia documents). Osgood reports that records of the Virginia Company during the spring and summer of 1620 reveal that acts of the General Assembly had arrived in London, Sandys had “carefully perused them and “found them in greatest part to be very well and judiciously carried out and performed”. He further commissioned a Virginia Company committee be set up “to draw [such recommendations as he received] to a head and refer them to a [Company] quarter court [quarterly meeting of the Company elected officials]. [99] Osgood, Vol.1, pp. 94-5.lthough this committee did meet, it also requested more time for its review—and Osgood’s research never confirmed that any report was ever issued. Osgood finally observes of these exchanges and actions that “it cannot be positively affirmed that the acts of the first legislature ever received the approval of the company”. This is very important as will be demonstrated by our discussion regarding the transition to royal governor and direct control of the colony by the King in 1624-6.

On the other hand, Osgood seems to leave in tact Sandys’ review of the report concerning a March 1620 General Assembly. Hence, the Assembly did meet in “near the close of 1621” , but secondary records only confirm that it dealt with some business needs of the colony, and an introduction of a silk cluster and other staples into the colony. If so one might sense they dealt in part with the actions of the Company in use of its property-land reserves and took such action to diversify the economic base. Also during this period, Yeardley did issue an ordinance restricting the amount of tobacco that may be grown on each plantation. There is no evidence any effort was made to enforce this ordinance, nor whether any plantation paid attention to it.

It is also, I feel reasonable to observe, the Company records reveal no attempt to counter or reverse any actions approved or undertaken by the General Assembly. All in all, Sandys seems to have been accepting of the implementation of the Greate Charter list of instructions, and the response to them from Virginia. If the King and some of the Company’s membership were uncomfortable with them, Sandys was not.

Anyway, packed in Sir Francis’s luggage was a document that has since been called the Constitution of Virginia. Like most of the stuff in luggage, it would get lost—and we have no existing copy of it. It was either a restatement or a reiteration of the list of instructions that Sandys had sent with Yeardley. That means it either fleshed out the initial Greate Charter, or not. Lost, Governor Yeardley before he returned to England composed from his memory, what was in that initial list of instructions—which too has apparently been lost.

Andrews also refers to this constitution, in that references were made that “Ordinances & Constitution” were sent over with Wyatt when he left in July 1621. Those documents, Andrews asserts, Sandys granted the wish of the General Assembly (sent over as part of its response from the first General Assembly in 1619) that “no orders shall bind the colony unless they be ratified in the General Assembly”. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 187

An Open Question–both interesting and potentially significant was whether the wording in the so-called Constitution conceded the Company’s right to overturn the acts/ordinances of the Company. I see little evidence in the behavior of Wyatt or the Company that support that contention. The 1624 General Assembly will be considered in some detail, and its actions, and its requests did not challenge the Company’s past ordinances, but instead urged their carry over to the new administration of the King. At minimum we can believe the General Assembly was never willing to contest the authority of the King, whatever the Company may have granted.

Osgood, however, lacking any evidence that the Company ever responded to the three-pronged final request by the 1619 General Assembly, the matter seems to have been “tabled” until at the 1624 General Assembly, in anticipation of the repeal of the Virginia Company Charter, asked the Governor (Wyatt) to request the Company concur in that earlier request, so that the role and position of the General Assembly be a settled matter for any new government that followed the demise of the Company charter. Perhaps not surprisingly, nothing came of this request either [see p. 95]. Thus the “Constitution” remains an open question in the events that followed, but likely of little actual meaning to the participants.

What complicates this issue even further is the assertion in 1623/4 that it had the right to tax its residents, and that the Governor no longer “shall not lay any taxes or impositions upon the colony, their lands, or commodities other way than by the authority of the General Assembly” [99] “the House of Burgesses”, Warren Billings, p.67. By this point the Company was in a court-ordered receivership of the Privy Council. In this sense, in the vacuum of the transition, the General Assembly simply asserted its “right” to resist a Company-appointed governor who was no longer in power. That it continued to exercise this right in the following years raises new questions and issues as to the position of the King on this matter. That will be discussed later.

The reader has no doubt caught my drift; record-keeping was not the strong suit of the colonial administration, and was not the strong suit of the Virginia Company. By example, Thomas Smythe had just stepped down as Treasurer for over twelve years. He asked for an audit of his records to determine if things were kosher. The audit proceeded for a half decade and was never completed, because not even Smythe’s enemies, and there were many, could not figure out what went where. The period under discussion in this module, 1621-25, is characterized by lost materials and primary sources that may have never existed in the first place.

The reader is warned that future historians in their quest for primary materials, found few, and wrote less about this period than any other in Virginia history—save the period that followed and last to around 1642. The records of the General Assembly, important to our purposes, don’t exist until the 1624 Assembly, and only a fragment of that is available. Still, there is referential evidence the Assembly met each year in 1619, 1620, and 1621, and that Yeardley and Wyatt did conduct governance as was normal in the colony at that time. That tobacco plantations diffused in number and acreage in this period is also correct, if only because of the patent issued and the Indians reaction to it. In short, the Greate Charter was being implemented through 1621.

The Great Charter AND Local Government

Most historians, like Wesley Frank Craven, link the date of the introduction of “the hundred” with the “the Greate Charter of 1618-19”: “Under the pressure of the trend in settlement that municipal scheme of local government established in 1618 gave way to practices borrowed from the English county” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 166. Specifically, Craven referred to the “hundreds”, an olde English version of a shire that functioned in the frontier regions of early English settlement. Bruce also traces the origins of Virginia county government to the Greate Charter.

Bruce asserts Sandys intended that the counties serve a higher purpose than linking private investment with Company governance; he hope to effect a congruence of English law and institutions and practices of government with that set up by the Company in Virginia. As specified in Sandys’ Greate Charter outline, the intent of the founders were “to do justice in the redressing of all small and petty matters” (with value less than twenty pounds of tobacco). [99] Phillip alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia, Vol. 1 (Peter Smith, 1919, 1964), p. 484ff

Among the very first actions and legislation passed by the initial five day General Assembly was legislation that set up the fundamentals of a tobacco-dominated economic base. To me this was amazing. The 1619 Yardley election system embraced newly settled areas and granted them representation into the new General Assembly and Burgesses. Rolfe himself was appointed to the governor’s council in 1614, and continued to serve in the first General Assembly (1619) thru to his death in 1622. So quickly were the pillars of the tobacco economic base poured that they have been little noticed that the diffusion of tobacco preceded its self-government, and the proponents of tobacco were incorporated consciously into that initial self-government because most of the elite in Virginia were first on board with tobacco..

Instead the Company chose to rely on the entrepreneur-land owner to handle local matters, contenting the provincial level to judicial decision-making and administrative record-keeping. The reality of self-defense against the Indian tribes became a serious issue, especially after Powhatten died in 1619, and that certainly meant the larger landlords with servants/tenants and surrounding smaller households had to play a major coordinative/leadership function.

The autonomy and decentralization without doubt began a tradition of local independent action, and by its nature fostered an inequality in political leadership as well as economic. Aside from elections to the House of Burgesses, the 1619 Great Charter did not advance local government or local elective leadership. 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. These isolated entities that populated the lower reaches of the James River were meant to be self-sufficient, to assume burdens the Company could not carry, chief among them being 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

I will add to this by suggesting that for the better part of a decade the Virginia Company had laid a solid sub-state foundation for its provincial economic base. Virginia was on the path to develop evolved into a rather decentralized economy and bottoms-up policy system.

For political culture see articles on “the economy of identity,Oct5,2024, Roland Fryer and “a Nobel Prize … for the Inclusive Free Market, Oct 15, David R Henderson

Formation of Virginia’s first migration elite and its culture

The on-site culture, however, by its nature, as well as by the prevailing attitudes of the age, blurred company and personal, and had the unintended consequence of turning company officials into plantation owners, who by nature of their company position or access could acquire ample workforce through company indentured servants, or secure headrights for each company grant to new land. Sounds like a good deal to me. I don’t think we need to overthink or apply an ideology on steroids to account for how these practices were employed or their results. This was how colonization looked in the Virginia teens. It continued on for decades, largely with no pushback, and surprise, it became the way colonization was implemented, the default way of doing business in Virginia.

That they were to be handed what we will call “first advantage” in the onset of the tobacco monoculture, and that they led to a misstructured and unequal workforce probably did not enter into the mental calculus of Dale or Smythe’s guys in London. That the structure of Virginia’s settlement would cause a shredded isolated series of autonomous communities, each with their own units of decision-making centering around the larger plantations, would only have been obvious a decade or two later. Hindsight is a two-sided coin; it plays havoc with chronology and individual motivations, yet yields an undisputed timeline of activities and events.

By 1616, with Dale’s retirement, London had to apply formally Dale’s strategy to Virginia, and it did so by publicly adopting what it called its “colony within a colony” approach that accepted applications for shareholder joint stock “association” corporations and entering contracts turned over to the association company the obligations and burdens of colony-building. Supply and immigrant ships financed by the company became infrequent to non-existent. In Virginia the company handed out land grants and workforce headrights to finance plantation investment and immigration.

[999] decentralization (i.e. spreading out the colony’s population heretofore overwhelmingly in Jamestown and its immediate surroundings to the James River and Chesapeake Bay coastline areas). Virtually simultaneously, Dale did this decentralization while making his deal with the existing “ancient” indentured settlers, a deal which provided land and property incentives for them to set up their own self-managed plantations, alongside the larger plantations of prominent company officials and affiliates, many of which were resident in Virginia, A unit of administration (at least that is what it turned out to be because it is not likely Dale had put much thought into that potential local government structure), the hundred, was picked up by London management (probably Sandys and his ilk), and a small number of shareholders, most of which were attracted to the Company after the Bermuda discovery and the awarding of the Third Charter, who saw personal opportunities for wealth or status in these overseas provinces. Lost in this list is the Magazine and the export function that was retained by the Virginia Company and would serve as an enormous disruption to internal company politics. [999]

As potential immigrants and investors watched events in Virginia, however, they saw Bermuda as the more attractive colony (and Ireland). Accordingly, likely Smythe in London took his eye off of Virginia and devoted more of his precious attention to affairs in Bermuda. In several ways, the Bermuda approach to colony-building supported Dale’s initiatives:

[999] Initial difficulties, inevitable in starting up New World outposts, were more quickly overcome in Bermuda. Costs of development were less for a small group of islands. There was no native population to threaten the English settlers, the environment proved exceptionally healthy for Europeans, and the indigenous food supply was plentiful. Profits from a variety of semi-tropical products were quickly realized, occasionally augmented by windfalls from [whale ambergris] discovered on the beaches, and goods salvaged from wrecked foreign vessels. Although the first settlers were transported to the island at the expense of the Company common stock, most of Bermuda’s development was underwritten by individual investors rather than by the [subsidiary] Somers Island Company as a whole. Bermuda investors got quick title to the land in proportion to the size of their [purchase] of the [Somers Island] Company’s joint stock. Although the common stock continued to send some laborers and tenants to the public lands [of the Company] to cover the costs of government and defense, most settlers were sent and supplied by individuals or groups of individuals to develop private lands. Settlers became tenants attached to clearly defined tracts of twenty-five acres, paying rents negotiated with absentee landlords. They had protection of English common law and legal right to any improvements thus encouraging greater commitment to the colony as a permanent home …. By 1618 [however] … Bermuda was well on the way to being filled up, but on the mainland [Virginia] the supply of land seemed unlimited. [999] [99] Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, pp. 30-2

Once again, Carville’s advice is salient: “Follow the money”! Association corporation shareholders banded together and formed a board of directors to manage affairs. Associations, therefore, were outside the authority of the Virginia Company; they entered into contract with it to determine the basic structure to be used to finance and physically commence a plantation in a geographic area specified. Associations were motivated mostly to share risk, but also to aggregate sufficient investment so they could commit to purchase Company land (donated by the king) and make a commitment to settle that land by shipping over settlers at their expense. These settlers would “found” new plantations within a unit of geography, the hundred, and sustain these settlers for what was then an unknown period of time. Investment and settlement in Virginia after 1616 was either through Virginia Company officials and associates or through association investors.

Finding some means of rewarding shareholders [and Virginia investors] was essential if the Company was to persuade disillusioned backers to continue the venture. It was hoped that individual investors might become more motivated to finance the peopling and development of ‘particular’ [i.e. their own] plantations that they would be allowed to manage independently within the normal [Virginia Company] proprietary sphere of the faltering parent company [colony within a colony approach] [99] Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, p. 30

This development by corporate associations, from our perspective, is a transformational movement away from the merchant adventurer financing of Virginia settlement based on a company monopoly of land and the exclusive right to sell the proceeds emanating from that land. That fiscal strategy had become little more than a “pay as you go” of your expenses through export of this produce and its sale usually in England. But after 1616 the Virginia Company persisted on investments by grants to its Company officials and associates and by association investment. In both cases company land was “gifted” or sold to private individuals thru contracts and a simple set of local bureaucratic procedures (surveying, apply for headrights, and registering).

Besides these incentives, the key to understanding the contract and its risks to be managed, however, lie in the associations’ ability to manage its plantation, conduct its plantation building, and importantly provide order, defense and infrastructure to the areas which it took possession. These areas sorted themselves out into a administrative unit called hundred, in which the association performed functions that in England of the time, and even today, we consider local government functions. Without conscious intention, association-hundreds were to evolve into Virginia’s basic unit of local government (today the county]. Inherent in the post 1616 Company-association investment-development colony within a colony approach, however, were tensions temporarily submerged in the physical founding of the plantation and initial formation of the hundred adjoining area.

That took several years—simply hacking out an initial clearing and building rudimentary housing consumed at least one year. As the infusion of new settlers, the immigration of some freeholders, and the addition of some “ancient” former indentured servants scattered into the various hundred plantations around 1619 and 1620, filling in the gaps of trade, defense, export and transportation responsibilities loomed heavy on the associations, and an “implied need” for the Company level provincial government to play a greater role in financing, coordinating and oversight was apparent to all.

For these tensions to be satisfactorily resolved required trust between the two levels, plus the locals asserted a compelling need to be able to advocate their positions and defend the integrity of their investment in the plantation as the solutions were devised and implemented. Finally, the success of tobacco export as the commodity-currency the colony required to raise funds for next years growth, and pay for this year’s as well, enlarged the agenda of concerns that had to be addressed. By the time of association-hundred investment, the tobacco monoculture was gathering considerable steam:

Exports of the Virginia leaf were negligible in 1613 and 1614, but approximately 1,200 pounds of the 1615 crops were shipped [to England]. By 1616 twenty-five company tenants at West and Shirley Hundreds [see previous module—these were the first hundred Dales’ Gift plantations to the chief company officers] were planting the weed to the exclusion of most other activities. Captain John Smith [he of the big mouth] reported that deputy governor Yeardley ‘applied himself for the most part in planting tobacco as the most present commoditie they could devise for a present gaine’, and both Smith and John Rolfe [during Rolfe and Pocahontas trade mission and sojurn in England] noted that other colonists were also making ‘good store of tobacco’. That year’s crop [1616] amounted to at least nine thousand pounds. By the spring of 1617 tobacco mania gripped the Virginia settlement. [99] Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, p. 38

Tobacco was not the only function the province inherited from Dale’s population dispersal along the James. Sales and grants to associations were required to be sited “within five miles of Company boroughs or within ten miles of each other and each plantation-hundred was granted fifteen hundred acres of land [to be worked so to pay off expenses of church. [99] Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, p. 39. The formation of hundreds created a need to accommodate the Anglican parish that was formed within the hundreds. Judicial functions reared their ugly head, ranging from contract and dispute management to indentured servant tensions, and with more women and families dispersing into the hundreds, widows and orphan issues had to be dealt with.

Complexity and day-to-day lifestyle matters came very quickly to Virginia in this period—and we can see how the settlement pattern encouraged what we call the shredded community, as towns, envisioned in their plan and thought, were not facilitated during the association-hundred investment period. [99] See Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 122 who asserts in this period “most men were still inclined to seek the advantages of group action in approaching the hazards of American settlement, and to take for granted the necessity of setting together in units that would permit enjoyment of the diverse benefits of community life. The English village with its surrounding farm lands, not the isolated farm house … continued to set the standard followed by those who sought some practical arrangement for turning to good account of their land … in America”. Whatever their intentions or plan, however, this particular desire did not fare well upon reaching Virginia.

The problem we will encounter in this module is that the Company’s transition was novel, and very much experimental. There was no instruction manual nor any legal standard for devising the contract for the hundred-association. Nor was their much of a definition to the rights of the “colony” that was located inside the larger Virginian Company colony. For the investor as much as the Company this was very much a leap into a potentially very deep pool, with little sense of what they would meet up with once they jumped into the pool. The thrust of what we will discover in this module is that both investors and the company had to deal with whatever they found in the pool, and then figure out a way to work out an administrative capacity for each side to carry out its contract obligations and intentions.

A not insignificant problem in this working it out is that London headquarters retained the responsibility for carrying out the negotiations and signing off—and importantly the London management had its own thoughts on the permanent settlement strategy, thoughts that matched rather poorly with what the colonists found in that very deep pool we call the Virginia colony. Accordingly it was not especially convenient, nor helpful, the London corporate headquarters entered into a six year civil war, an office politics so extended and so bitter that the king—and Parliament—got swept into it.

And BTW, I might add, both London and the colonists, had very little sensitivity to the interests, culture and ambitions of the overwhelming numbers of Indian swimmers they found in that deep pool. The more things went haywire between London and colonial settlers, the more relations worsened with the Indians. And there are a host of issues and problems that rose to the pool’s surface that involved the export crop, tobacco, that was supposed to pay everybody’s expenses and deliver the return on investment of the shareholders. We need to understand how to grow and export tobacco if we are to figure out how to handle this “colony within a colony” stuff (which I have a tendency to call political and economic development).

Finally, we need to understand what this “wilderness” or frontier terminology translates out to into imposing itself on the day-to-day life of the settlers [I call this the policy context]. In the long, and most importantly short, run whatever they say in London, the settlers on the ground have to carry out everybody’s misinformed intentions of their absentee corporate masters. Since in 1616 neither the prospective settlers, their investors, nor the London corporate management (neither side in the civil war) had any real sense of what they would encounter, the reality of what was happening in Virginia took its sweet time in becoming apparent in England—and when it arrived it was used mostly as fuel to fight the corporate civil war.

With London never in control of much of anything in this time period, Virginians dealt with their issues and problems, assumed what risk they could stand, and “founded” the colony. That story too is a major factor in this module—in fact it is probably the most import and story to be told. Colonialism is not what it is cracked up to be in the 16^th century teens” Virginia.

Fragility of the Association’s Investment Resilience: It Still is London’s Money

I think the most interesting period of Virginia, and the Virginia Company periods is not the Greate Charter years, but rather the association-company official period which preceded and overlapped it. With very few instances, the association-company official period is usually ignored or downplayed with a smush paragraph or two. For me it is key to understanding the political culture of future early colonial Virginia, and the First Migration.

Walsh estimates that between 1618 and 1623 forty-four association patents were issued, “giving a minimum of 5,000 acres to a group promising to transport at least one hundred settlers”. An addition twenty-seven patents were issued to groups who were granted less than 5,000 acres, with the number of settlers adjusted reflecting the grant size. By 1623 an additional thirty-six patents were under negotiation. Of these numbers, Walsh that thirty one of these groups actually sent settlers over and commenced their plantation-founding. She notes the effect of the Second Powhatan War brought association-investment and plantation founding to a screeching halt, and the suspension of the Virginia Company charter in 1624 effectively ended this initiative.

It was in the period after the charter suspension that we will turn to “Brenner’s Men” who will emerge in the mid to late twenties. I side with J. Frederick Fausz who asserts the pivotal dynamic that compelled any Virginia colony investment to focus on the planters of Virginia was the Second Powhatan War [99] See his 1977 William and Mary dissertation, “the Powhatan Uprising of 1622: Study of Ethnocentrism and Cultural Conflict, and his “the “Barbarous Massacre” Reconsidered; the Powhatan Uprising of 1622 and the Historians” (scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/). One should not look for the resolution of how to invest in a start up colony from plantations founded in the association-investor period

Again Professor Walsh sets us off in the right direction by raising the issue of what motivations underlay investment in the association-hundred. Without question, the pivot to investor-association-hundred founding of private settlements on private land was transformational to the Virginia Company, but did it really match the aspirations of the London-based investor, most of who had no intentions of locating themselves to Virginia. As Walsh suggests, these investors held a variety of motivations and attitudes, willingness to risk, but many, recognizing the realities of wilderness investing planned their return of investment on “renting” their land to those they transported to Virginia in return for an annual quitrent. But the key attitude that underlined their investment plan was quick profits were out of vogue, but not forgotten, by 1616.

Many probably gave disservice to Bacon’s “of Plantations” advice that “Planting of countries is like planting of Woods; for you must make account to lose almost twenty years profit and expect your recompense in the end”. Walsh, skeptical herself, suggests that association investors tossed all they available investment funds into the initial startup; follow-up monies could therefore only find an empty pocket and that meant the settlers had to pay for their own sustenance. That only meant recourse to tobacco whose return, whatever it was, could be harvested within a year, [99] Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, pp. 42.

Their mentality was that their association investment time line would in some intermediate period be terminated and the land divided up among the investors and each investor would manage their particular allotment of land, goods, and servants proportionately—after which the association would cease or become non functional. She also suggests a number of these investors, particularly those who were M.P.s—and likely allies of Sandys and his agenda for the Greate Council—held in great regard the patriotic value of the plantation to England’s “enhancing the country’s prestige over rival European powers, while others valued the opportunity to Christianize the native population, and still others saw opportunities beyond renting land by founding enterprises such as mining or fur trading, and even manufacturing. [99] Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, pp. 42-3.

She makes note that in the end, when tested by adversity and the realities of Virginia—quitrents required a renter homestead that produce excess profits above sustenance which in itself required several years to achieve—the investor motivations for profit proved very stressing on the perspective of the investor regarding the association as a positive investment vehicle. In short, the association, while bypassing the Virginia Company to lodge the colony-building function, did not solve the gap between investors and permanent settlement. [99] Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, pp. 41-2.

Looking ahead, we can suggest association investors early on could see the need for the Virginia Company to set up to the plate and form a partnership with them in the development of the plantation such that its economy, general welfare, and public order could be sustained over a longer period and that, in particular, a more diversified economy than that of tobacco could fill the empty vacuum of staples, tools, and vital products from England. From the beginning there was have an acknowledgement the association was not permanent as structured in the original contract, and that it would have to evolve in partnership with the Company. Indeed, I will shortly link the 1618-9 Greate Charter initiative to this investor expectation, and key to it will be the Burgesses which would be the instrument by which association investors could participate in the policy-making, advocacy and implementation of joint activities and shared regulation of the colony.

It should be little surprise then that several of these associations, particularly those dominated by Company officials, simply copied the Company’s shareholder structure and applied it to their association-hundred (Smith’s Hundred (later renamed Southampton), and Martin’s Hundred followed this structure which called for periodic London meetings of the investors to make policy, select leadership, and appointment of an official on site responsible for the founding of the plantation and its operation. As the years passed, these associations experience fluidity in the local management, to some extent reflecting the changing of the Virginia Company “elite” and control over its board of directors.

Also many associations followed a version of the old merchant adventurer “oligarchical” motif by forming a corporation of Company shareholders which then obtained a patent (title-contract with the Company. Splitting costs among themselves and sharing profits equally, they also allowed each to buy and sell their shares, They would appoint a local on site manager, with whom they monitored and involved themselves in local management and export sales.

Alternately, Walsh details the “ancient Adventurer or Planter” which taps an already on site planter-owner and uses him as the instrument of the plantation founding and management. This motif, allowing for several flavors of local ownership, I think was the one most followed, by association-hundreds that commenced after 1619-20. In this motif, London investors provided the funds, and the management shifted to Virginia. This motif, I alert the reader will be employed by a group of Virginia planter-owners that will emerge during and out of the Second Powhatan War: my plantation conquistadores.

Finally, I will add a category of plantation founders that is outside the association rubric: the freeholder Virginia patent exercised and registered by Virginia free holders granted by the governor lands of varying size, such lands either purchased from the Company, or in instances where the Company is itself attempting the founding of four ‘cities” as specified in the terms of the 1619 Greate Charter, in which resident Virginia company officials are themselves granted land personally to found plantations in these targeted cities. These patents almost always involved the application of headrights—providing the identical advantage given to associations—and, in those instances when the freeholder was a company official, land in lieu of salaries and expenses, was issued, and supplemented in later years. These grants were issued and approved by local company officials by simply registering and surveying the land and filing a claim. Legality of these patents lay in the governor’s signature affirming the patent, and the London board and management had no role in their issuance.

For them, the same aspirations that guided their investment, a timely return of a profit, was still on the tip of their investment tongue, but by 1616 it was clear to even these amateur’s colonial investors that timely was relative. The single voyage approach, with each voyage financed on its own—the trading factory motif—risks were knowable-and a couples of years duration. That had broken apart when reality dawned that a permanent settlement was an entirely different ball game. Virginia—and Bermuda—settlement demanded a different approach. Enter the association-hundred.

Probably the most difficult task for me, and for the reader, is to grasp what settlement was during this period. In this module and through this history I talk in concepts, events, relationships, structures and institutions at a time when settlement meant living on the edge of survival—and given death rates that, depending on the year and ship that arrived, could easily be greater than fifty percent of those who landed. Sickness, the effects and after effects of sickness, the despondency, the crowding into horribly small dwellings, literally dug out of the earth and covered over with wood planks and such, and crowded with numbers that contemporary readers could not fathom.

Nor is its economy anywhere near the image of a eighteenth century Virginia plantation. Clearing a well-developed forest, draining a nearby swamp, and constructing both a home, storehouses, and some sort of river pier can not be imagined by nearly all contemporary readers, including me. The labor required for hacking “a town”, nevermind a plantation field, with a scarce and perhaps unmotivated indentured workforce, limits the scale of the founding endeavor, and expands the time required for its construction. While we talk of these grandiose concepts and political institutions, the physical manifestation of these mighty structures was rudimentary, very very small, and the population size of the settlements usually no larger than a college classroom.

Whatever their English backers might have envisioned, once the settlers disembarked in the Chesapeake life on particular plantations [association-investor] into a routine designed to secure a combination of immediate survival and quick profits. The first steps were to throw up some sort of palisade for protection, to erect a secure storehouse for tools and provisions, and to construct minimal shelters for men and enclosures for livestock. … The plantation commanders, anxious to reinforce rank with tangible trappings, employed some of their people to construct relatively commodious and reasonable finished dwellings for themselves and their familities … Most settlers, however, lived in hastily thrown together havels. Few houses were framed, most being ‘punches sett into the Ground and covered with Boards, so as a firebrand is sufficient to consume them all” … They were also miseably small … measuring twelve by fourteen [or so]. [99] Lorena S. Walsh, pp. 68-9

We hear of land grants in the hundreds of acres, but the cleared field, residence and facilities of the plantation acreage were well under the fingers of one hand in any given year. In such an atmosphere, as described by Karen Kupperman, the first priority was security and maintaining order, and the pleasantries of talking and explaining your orders gave way to something approaching Dale’s military colony. Communal, or at least shared housing was normal;

The colony’s crude settlements failed to provide most of the amenities of English community life … Overcrowding in tiny, ramshackle houses only excerbated the situation, contributing both to high death rates from contagious disease and to lowered morale. One Company official found that when settlers were domiciled six to a very small dwelling, bickering and discontent increased while work diminished. Nor was there any place to escape other than religious services … the absence of families or even of much change in eventually forming them also contributed to frenetic profit seeking. Single men “estteeminge Virginia not as a place of [habitation] but onely of short [duration] have applied themselves and their labors wholy to the raising of present proffitt and utterly neglected not only staple Commodities, but even the verie necessities of mans life … Men who believed they had no stake in the continuance of the settlement and who lacked any conception of a common good refused to contribute labor to fortifications and other public works … Only the presence of women and children would lead men to focus their energies on building for the settlement’s future [99] Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit, pp. 60-1.

Colonists were to be motivated by force at first with incentives to follow. Thus Captain Woodlefe [the Berkeley Hundred, commander] was instructed to ‘lyve and converse with and amongst’ his colonists, and not elsewhere. He was to cement the five settlers named as [his] assistants to the cause by asking their advice and to reinforce their supervisory authority by eating with them at the same table and by serving them meals equal to his own [99] Quoted in Walsh, pp. 50-1, and taken from Kupperman, the Jamestown Project, p. 209 [I might add “strong words and fists to follow”].

In any event Walsh reports the associations did better in recruiting settlers and sending them over than the Company had done. Artisans and skillsets were more appropriate to the wilderness setting, and even this early on, the importance of motivated and skilled workers, and the willingness to offer them better terms of pay, and the fifty acres at the end of their service was expected. First year settlers were chosen to match the task: land clearance and housing-infrastructure construction. The tools required were sent over; subsequent migrants came with livestock, and had agricultural experience, families were sent over in small numbers, and masons, bricklayers, carpenters, millwrights, butcher, miller, boatwright, and medical personnel infused the emerging plantation.

Still, here we see a critical impact of tobacco being used as a currency in this period. With little or no gold or coin in Virginia, the pound of tobacco became Virginia’s monetary pound. Next years crop depended on converting this years crop into winter food, tools, livestock, and seed for next year, nevermind any annual quitrent. That tobacco could be seeded, grown, harvested and sold for export in a short annual planting season is a major reason for the spread of tobacco production and how and why it embedded itself so deep, so quickly, in daily life, nevermind evolving into a provincial monoculture. That those with “First Advantage” in a shredded plantation community would alone have the resources to provide discretionary assistance to others, thereby offers such fortunate individuals or households an opportunity for long-term benefit and position.

Since they could not do both, colonists faced a choice between either growing enough corn to feed everyone in the colony and going without all other necessities or concentrating upon just tobacco with which they might purchase both food and other needed commodities. They almost invariably opted to plant tobacco. Official orders to the contrary, settlers long neglected to plant adequate amounts of corn, trusting that they could get what they needed from the Indians either through trade or force if that proved more expeditious. … [Given the realities of investor demands for quick returns on their investments] and the failure to provide adequate supplies, left most Virginia settlers precariously dependent for survival on a risky combination of the good will of the Indians, the arrival of uncertain shipments from England, and the somewhat questionable mercies of a few highly-placed leaders. Doubtless few in England ever appreciated the real conflict that the colonists encountered between producing the cash crop and raising enough food to stay alive. [99] Lorena S. Walsh, pp. 73-6

The Political Dimension of the Greate Charter: Late medieval Corporate Democracy, the General Assembly, Gatekeeper of Virginia’s Future Decentralized Policy System

Sandys in his “instructions” to his new governor required Yeardley to call into session a “Council of State” comprised of appointed (by the governor) influential/large local landowners, all by definition company shareholders that had benefited from his post-1616 joint stock-hundreds land grants. The Council would serve as an advisory body to the governor. Sandys also ordered a provincial-level election to elect twenty burgesses, each of which “represented” a local district which overlapped the system of hundreds, and city corporations that had evolved since 1613. Both bodies (Governor’s Council and Burgesses), along with the Governor himself, were to be convened as soon as possible, and” when convened were referred to as the “General Assembly”.

The General Assembly was ordinarily to meet no more than twice each year, unless some compelling emergency required otherwise. That corresponded to the Company’s annual shareholder meetings, and was also known as the company’s General Assembly. The relationship of the English shareholder annual meeting, known as the General Assembly, with the Virginia General Assembly, required some stipulation on the rights of each, and procedures addressing disputes between the two Assemblies were included in the original instructions as best we can determine. London was finding a way to share its power with its Virginia settlers-shareholders.

The voting franchise fabricated it seems by Yeardley, included “the inhabitants of the colony” and that overlapped with the extension and definition of “free libertie … given to all men to make choice of their dividends of land, and, as their abilities and means [would]” . Burgesses was quite “democratic”, exceptional for its day and age—exceeding that of England itself in which the individual’s right to vote was not yet attained. Andrews asserts that “the word’ inhabitants’ was construed very liberally” including in his estimation freeholders, householders, and former servants whose term had expired “servants still under indenture were included also”. No age limits were specified, but it is likely women, children and apprentices [under 17] did not take part in the election [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, pp. 183-4.

I counter that all, in accordance with Dale’s Gift company policy, indentured servants were either actual shareholders, or potential shareholders on termination of their servant contract. Finally, we are not talking about a large colony with a diverse population–only about 1,000 total, and nearly all had acquired shares to become eligible for the headright because the Company had led the people-recruitment process, and the colony in its first half-decade were for all practical purposes Company servants, officials or shareholders.

Andrews concluded by stating that the General Assembly, “a system of popular control that was undoubtedly copied from the [internal] practice of the [Virginia] company itself in quarterly gatherings of the generality [membership]. He asserts it was written in November 1618 when Smythe was still Treasurer, and Sandys and Warwick were in [a short term] alliance—and nobody voiced any objections to its creation at that time. That suggests Andrews as most historians including myself recognize the popular assembly, the entity called the General Assembly was in practice if not in thought a hybrid creature of the Virginia Company. The Burgesses was clearly “popular”, but popular in 1619 Virginia was a population that in one form or another were shareholders of the Company. That might not be true a decade or so later–but in 1619, Virginia was still a predominately shareholder venture.

Before we go any further with this political structure, we need to grapple with the question of whether the Council of State, Burgesses and Governor–which in aggregate in session was defined as the General Assembly–was a government or a private entity set up to administer the affairs of a private joint stock company, whose shareholders included those who lived in England-London, and those who dwelled three thousand miles away. To demonstrate our decisiveness on this question, I firmly answer “Yes”, maybe? Perhaps, indeed likely, it was both. Probably, but otherwise No.

There is a definite lack of basic documents on the matter, and with what is available historians have made the case for either. The specific intent of the parties is not known. It is also not known to what extent Smythe was involved in at least earlier versions of the Greate Charter. or even in opposition to Sandys and Warwick found some reason for compromise on its contents, or finally to what extent it was Sandys and Farrar’s somewhat pure approach to the permanent settlement pivot. The Greate Charter is a jigsaw puzzle with key pieces lost.

Possibly, Smythe, Sandys and Farrar, never thought in those zero-sum terms (government vs private), because to do so was not relevant to those times or to the Virginia Company colony project. Sandys who knew better than most just what Parliament was, wasn’t, and what it aspired to be, also knew the Virginia Company was not setting up a “government” in Virginia. It was administering its own private colony, operating under the requirements of a charter issued by the King. If Sandys was doing anything concrete he was extending the rights as part owner of the Virginia Company to shareholders who lived in Virginia. That “democratization of the company” would have been consistent with his long-held view that trading companies were monopolies controlled by a board whose voting membership was limited and tightly controlled by a few. It is quite possible the Virginia General Assembly opened up participation in company decision-making to those shareholders resident in Virginia, especially former indentured servants through the Burgesses.

The issues with which the new structure would have to deal, would certainly include law and order, civil liberties, and administrative efficiency, effectiveness and accountability, which to some extent are more governmental in nature. This was inescapable, and the subject matter the General Assembly tackled would, in England, have been governmentally determined. But lacking the power to create an English government, the Company was clarifying how the shareholders and residents in this private colony were to enjoy those rights afforded to an Englishman in that day and age. It also was intended to send a firm signal to all that the days of “martial order” were over, and the corporation was intending to extent the corporate democracy enjoyed by shareholders in England, to those who lived in Virginia.

Finally, and importantly, it was clear to all by 1619 that the land grant policy, a policy that had made hundreds land grant to private individuals granting them powers intended for a government at some point in the future (a colony within a colony” had to be incorporated into a hierarchical system in which the Company could make macro Virginia policy that would extent to these sub-colonies, and also create some order as to whom and when these private entities needed to conform to more fundamental regulations for the good of the colony and company. In several ways, the Council of State could be a partial solution to that issue, involving these large landholders, and major local powers in the hundreds, to have their say in gubernatorial decision-making, and then as shareholders in the General Assembly.

Osgood cites 1618 Company records stating that among the intentions of the Company in regards to the list of instructions sent by Sandys was “there should be an equal and uniform government in the colony consisting of ‘two supreme councils’. One of these was the governor and [presumably Council of State], chosen by the Company in England. “The other should be the General Assembly, which should consist of the council of state and “two burgesses chosen by the planters from each ‘town, hundred, or other particular plantation’ in Virginia. In this there is no mention of the House of Burgesses as an entity, and interestingly, no mention of the Governor.

What confused matters was the Burgesses elected not just by shareholders in the Company (although in fact most were undoubtedly such), but to male freeholder residents who lived in the district. Likely, that was Yeardley’s interpretation of what Sandys meant in his instructions. If so, that still leave open what Sandys’s intentions were. London, in any event, never dealt with that issue–despite the fact the King was quite vocal in his displeasure at the time ( ‘popularness’ and ‘democraticall’—but that responded to his then open fight with the Company leadership); no doubt the General Assembly Burgesses election process was part of his final decision to terminate the Company charter

That insecurity regarding the role of the General Assembly as to what the king would tolerate was a major issue when the King terminated the charter and installed a royal administration headed by a governor he appointed. It matter little in 1625 and after what the members of the Virginia General Assembly thought of that matter; the final decision as to what the General Assembly was or wasn’t, was always the King’s–as was the ultimate title to the land. That decision was not forthcoming until the mid/end of the 1630’s.

But in 1619 It is clear to me that Sandys and his supporters did not intend to democratize Virginia and set up an elective government institution-legislature. Whatever this Burgesses was to become a half-century or more later, in 1620 it was neither a government institution, nor a legislature elected by “the people” until much later in Virginia history. It was a co-General Assembly with a legitimate role in the making of Company policy regarding Virginia. As to the specifics as to whether London General Assembly was to be first among equals, or there needed some more precise definition as to how both could share and make policy in combination was to be addressed, imperfectly, in the immediate years that followed.

Osgood describes his sense of Sandy’s objectives and Greate Charter reforms:

As a condition of further growth [the Sandys-Southampton party] favored the total abandonment of the monopolistic policy of Sir Thomas Smythe and the {Virginia Company merchant membership] with the plantation type of colony that accompanied it. It favored the establishment under due restrictions of private plantations, the encouragement of emigration to the colony on a larger scale, the granting of land under easy conditions [and] the largest possible freedom of trade.

It desired to elicit to the fullest extent the cooperation of the colonists with the company in this work. In order to secure this [the general court of the Company. i.e. its Annual Meeting of its Membership] approved] an equal and uniform government in the colony consisting of ‘two supreme councils’. One of these was the Governor and [his] counsel, chosen and appointed by the company in England. The other should be the general assembly which should consist of the Council of State and two burgesses chosen by the planters in each town, hundred, or other particular plantation in Virginia … presided over by the Secretary of the Colony.

Below may be duplication and redundancies

the Greate Charter Part I: Virginia Company Office Politics and Sandys Settlement Strategy

Only one section was shifted to the previous module. The rest of this module describes the implantation in Virginia

REDO THE MESSINESS OF THE 1621-1624 PERIOD-COORDINATE W/MINI-SERIES 2 AND 3

Beginning in 1619, the Virginia Company did make a desperate, last ditch effort to reverse these trends toward individualistic and single-crop production. It suddenly sought to revive production on the company’s own lands (the estate of the publique) and sent over large groups of colonists [i.e. indentured servants, mostly, some artisans, children and criminals as well] to provide the labor forces for this purpose. It tried, at the same time, to break the tobacco monoculture and to diversify the colony’s economy. To that end it sought to compel the colonists to produce certain amounts of food and commercial crops besides tobacco, while itself taking charge of a series of ambitious projects–specifically, the construction of a colonial iron industry, the development of silk production, and the introduction of wine-making. The company could sustain these efforts, however, for only a few years [until the 1622 Massacre], and, in the end could make little impact on the overall direction of [Virginia’s] colonial development. The result of this brief period of intense company activity was actually to consolidate already existing trends [tobacco]. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), p. 95

By 1619, with Sandys as Treasurer, his principal assistant, Farrar as Deputy, and his supporters dominating Company committees, the policy die had been cast. Sandys, whatever else was going in within the Virginia Company, dominated the affairs of the Virginia colony. His approach, his nexus of economic development colony-building strategies expressed in the form of a “list” of instructions sent with the new Governor Yeardley early 1619–the aggregate of which Yeardley referred as a “Greate Charter”. The pivot from the original Virginia Company strategy was complete, and the Greate Charter became the turning point of no return: settlement, self-sufficiency, and diversification of Virginia’s economic base were the colony’s primary economic development strategies. Through population attraction greased by a heavy company land-based incentive program, the workforce would be recruited, at the expense of the prospective landowner. With the Deputy Governor as the transatlantic transmission belt, the implementation and management of this pile of “reform initiatives” would be in the hands of his own gubernatorial advisory council and newly-created General Assembly were also settled matters.

Humphrey Dumpty Sat on a Wall–There was one might suspect, possible flies in the ointment. It was during this period, 1619, that James was being forced to reconvene a Parliament he suspended in 1614. The Parliament formally reconvened in 1621. Whether the dispute between the two forces was over larger constitutional issues, or the need-desire of the King for more money–James I was in desperate financial need–and the Parliament was unwilling to appropriate sums without meaningful reforms–including informally viewing itself as the chief English “check” to a divine-right king. The trading companies, Virginia Company in particular, were not central, in this struggle, but certainly were caught up, in the back and forth of the contending parties.

The struggle between King James, who had inherited many tensions evident in Elizabeth’s reign, and Parliament was intense from his royal assumption in 1603. And, as one reads the goings on, one not infrequently finds that Sandys played a serious role in the battle-negotiations. These were serious and fundamental matters and as a leading member of Parliament, Sandys opposed to the Crown publicly and ad hominin. Sandys was never anything but controversial, and a thorn in James’s side. The fight was as much “personal” as policy–and very public. His standing in the Virginia Company had to be derived from that role, and one assumes he is Treasurer because of it. Virginia’s colony-building has been politicized. Not only is the Company on the edge of bankruptcy, it is now on the cutting edge of a near revolutionary English politics.

On top of that the Company’s chief source of funds, the English lottery, was under attack in 1619, in large part because the Company was seen by the English public, and much of Parliament, as a bunch of freebooters and rich London-based mercantilist merchants that ruled Virginia as a selfishly as any monopolist would. Smythe was the personification of this, and to this must be added a rather faulty delegation of he lottery to several agents whose practices did little to enhance its productivity, nor its public approval. In that the King had never approved of lotteries, much like his position on tobacco, the Virginia Company lottery was always on rather thin ice.

While I am at some odds with Richard Middleton’s treatment of the Greate Charter, I do welcome his assessment of the King’s position on the matter. “The reality is that disputes over the {Virginia] company had tenuous links with those between the king and Parliament. Certainly the Court [King/Privy Council] believed that the company’s democratic method of proceeding, or ‘popular appeal had exacerbated the situation. Of a plot, however, there is no trace. The [future] annulment of the charter was forced on the Crown by the company’s failings, as evidenced by the fact that neither James I nor the Privy Council had any immediate plans for dealing with the ailing enterprise. [99] Richard Middleton, Colonial America: a History, 1565-1776 (3rd Ed) (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 60.

That minimum of royal involvement in Virginia Company politics, however, did little to connect the Virginia Company to the administration and evolution of of English colonial policy. In fact, the experience of the Virginia Company played a formative role in the development of future English colonial policy and administration. That the King could see the “Greate Charter” as another attack by Sandys and his Parliamentary allies (in the form of Virginia Company shareholders and committee members) is understandable. Between 1619 and through the Parliamentary elections Sandys, Smythe and the King would duke it out–the result at the end of 1621, leaving Smythe ousted from his seat in Parliament by Sandys (Smythe later acquired another holding), and the King placing Sandys under house arrest.

The background music to the Greate Charter was very loud indeed. I can’t help but wonder if the 1621 Office Christmas Party was the Office Christmas Party of all Time. If you don’t think so, consider William Robert Scotts thoughts on the events of that year:

[In 1621] A little consideration will show that the whole financial superstructure [of the Virginia Company] rested on the receipts from lotteries … this was the sole source of funds. Whether James I was sufficiently antagonistic to Sandys to show his displeasure in relation to the Virginia Company, or whether as it seems likely, he was urged to action by the Smythe party, it was not long before Sandys began to feel the royal displeasure. When the time came for a new election of treasurer, James sent a strongly worded message forbidding the Adventures [Virginia Company shareholders] to choose Sandys–according to one account his words were “Choose the Devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys”. As a result of this interference, which was contrary to the charters, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, was chosen unanimously as treasurer; at a meeting in which it is said as many as 500 persons were present. [Southampton] was a large adventurer [merchant-trader], but as treasurer took little part in the affairs of the company, Sandys remaining the moving spirit. There were many [shareholders in attendance] who were ready to show that the King’s wish had been evaded and the result was the license to hold lotteries, which was dependent on royal pleasure and was [actionable] on six months notice, was withdrawn on March 1621. [99] William Robert Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint Stocks Companies to 1720 (Vol II) (Alpha Editions (2019), Cambridge at the University Press, 1910), p. 272

In 1621, the King, furious at Sandys, terminated the Company’s lottery contract, leaving the Virginia Company without any substantial source of revenues to pay its ongoing expenses. That in its turn transformed Sandys into a tobacco-dependent advocate–and his difficulties associated with his advocacy of a monopolistic tobacco “contract” that soon followed (see future module). Without revenues, except those gleaned from annual sales of tobacco, the Virginia colony had nothing with which to pay its bills. At that point, 1621, tobacco was the make or break export commodity that kept the Virginia Company alive. That, and land sales derived from new settler purchase, was all that sustained the Company through 1625.

CONTINUE DISCUSSION THROUGH 1623-24, FACTIONS AND TOBACCO,

Background to the Greate Charter

The Greate Charter is not a single document like the Magna Charta. It was a list of “instructions” to a new governor by the Virginia Company’s new Treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys. For reasons to be described below, a new governor willing to implement the initiatives (Yeardley) did not begin his work until April 1619—a gap of nearly two years during which the Company politics of the Virginia Company had pounded it out. Sandys, to ensure Yeardley’s living up to the spirit of the instructions, also sent over a new Company Secretary, John Pory. Pory would, among other responsibilities serve as convener and moderator of the General Assembly. Pory also is the official responsible for the official record of what happened at the first session of the Virginia General Assembly. Pory and Yeardley were not friends.

Yeardley took with him a thoroughly revised set of orders and instructions [the original had been given to De la Warre earlier, and had been returned to England unopened upon his death en route to America], popularly called ‘the Greate Charter‘ [it had been referred to as such by Yeardley later] … they contained two basic sections: the first and longest outlined a comprehensive land system for the colony; the brief second section extended the London Company government to the colony. From the second grew the Virginia General Assembly [99] Grizzard Jr, and Boyd Smith, Jamestown a Colony, p. xliv

Yeardley implemented these instructions separately, referring at times to them in the aggregate as the “Greate Charter”. At no time were they systematized into one document—and if they had been, that document would likely have been lost as were Sandys’ instructions to Yeardley. Their implementation was sporadically carried out through 1622, after which all hell broke out. A reader looking for an easy chronological description is in for a rough time given the internal fragmentation of the strategy, and the political-economic situation within Virginia and the Company.

London provided the resources needed to begin implementing the initiatives. London, it seems, made the decision and implemented the Company’s “people recruitment” strategy. As a consequence, Andrews reports that between Easter 1619 and March 1620 ten ships crossed the Atlantic and deposited 1051 emigrants. But “Death took its toll as remorselessly as it had done in the early years of the colony … in [that] one year 1095 had died, either on the way over or in the colony …with 1051 [new] emigrants only 843 remained [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1 (Yale University Press, 1934-1964), pp. 136-7. More on the specifics shortly.

Still, Andrews rightfully senses the Greate Charter crossed the Company’s Rubicon, a ED strategy intended to establish a permanent settlement of the colony.

The bottom line goal of people attraction was a population increase sufficient to establish an agricultural and diversified economic base that could largely support the population and relieve the Company of its fiscal burden of sending fleets of expensive supply ships from England (each of which separately financed with debt that brought in new investors able to vote their will in the Company Annual Meeting, and through membership committees inject themselves into the administration of the Company. People attraction–and the future supply ships necessary for their maintenance–was probably the single largest expense incurred in the Greate Charter strategies.

Accordingly, one must thoughtfully consider this burden and reflect on how it influenced the adoption of a massively important workforce-entrepreneur incentive system that we now know as the “headright system”. That system has evolved through history and is principally understood as a controversial, highly inequitable workforce system that became commonplace in each of the thirteen colonies. That it began its life as a fiscal strategy to support, fuel, and sustain colonization managed by a private joint stock corporation has lost its significance. The Virginia Company’s extreme fiscal distress, its political isolation from the King, and an unplanned congruence with a rising tobacco monoculture, however, were midwives attending at its birth.

Virginia’s population in 1618 was estimated at 1650 [99] Andrews Vol One, p. 134) and that was after the infusion of nearly a thousand new settlers, and was previous to the annual culling of the Jamestown herd by the summer seasoning. Population growth had to “take off” from this non-sustaining subsistence level. Key to this take off in population was to end Dale’s military approach of governance and go full tilt into a “democratic” tone. That change in style was personified by a radical change in the Company’s on-site Virginia governance.

With the list of instructions in hand Yeardley set sail from England. Along with him and his ships was an infusion of population that were intended to serve as workers (be they servants or freemen) in the new plantations-hundreds that were being created. Both men it seems devoted their initial attention to implementing its population attraction strategy by offering a new headright to recruit “servants”, while continuing to bring on board a heavy dose of recruits from the London jail. Smythe and Sandys had put serious money into the new strategy for some very good reasons: As Sandys wrote as reported by Osgood:

the root of the body of the tree [i.e. the colony’s primary means of survival] and private plantations the branches … in pursuing [this] object [Sandys] sought in all directions for tenants with whom to people it. He advertised for laborers and artisans. He applied to the mayor of London for one hundred apprentices twelve years of age or older … domestic cattle and supplies of all kind were bought and shipped. The settlement of private plantations as well as the improvement of public land [by household grants] was also encouraged.

During 1619 the company sent out eight ships … carrying 871 colonial venturers. Three hundred were sent the same year by private adventurers [voluntary joint stock corporations] … the great majority [of both groups] were servants [indentured] … they received free transportation … were furnished with food for one year, also with apparel, cattle, tools and weapons … The tenants on the public lands were expected to return to the company one half of their annual product and to remain in employment for seven years … [receiving] an estate in fee simple as a dividend. [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 81-2

Pilgrims or Quakers these new settlers were not.

Grizzard, Jr. and Boyd Smith report “the company sent ‘an extraordinary choice lot’ of 90 young women willing to go out as wives to settled Virginians. [and] in 1620, 100 ‘maids, young and uncorrupt’ sailed over. Following spirited bidding t the wharves in Jamestown, they were quickly spoken for. Several hundred boys, and some girls drawn mainly from the London streets were sent out as apprenticeships and servants, their passage paid for by charitable organizations [an early form of philanthropy, no doubt]. From London and Middlesex almshouses and jails came vagrants, and criminals, but a decidedly lower percentage of the total than in the past‘. The authors end on a happy note that “these were honest and industrious poor” who were intended to create a “stable family society in Virginia”, p. slix. As a community development CDO, the Virginia Company was not my idea as a role model, but this is 1620.

Sent out with these eight ships was included about one hundred and fifty that were to “devote themselves to the production of iron, others … to build saw mills … cultivate vineyards … sowing of hemp and flax, and for “the cultivation of silk grass … the production of grain was everywhere encouraged”. [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 82. Sandys also awarded about forty new patents, several of which to jumpstart new factories, and carve out a college on company owned land. Here was Sandys determination that the Company’s intention was to create a diversified economic base in Virginia—and he had put his money into it and included it among his initial actions. Sandys, however, fought a forlorn battle, practically alone (even Yeardley ignored it) to restrain the planting of tobacco and to encourage the economic diversification. Sandys was forced in later actions to doubled down on this strategy.

Included in this land program were a series of land allotments (reserves) which were to be used to create and support institutions, a college, a church ministry for instance, by attracting new settlers through an indentured servants imitative operated by the Company to farm Church lands, and the produce they reaped would be sold to support the institution. “One thousand acres were reserved for the maintenance of the ministers of the gospel, three thousand for the support of the governor, ten thousand for the endowment of a college, and twelve thousand for the use of the company itself” [99] Osgood, Vol 1. , p. 83. Specifically Sandys approved 1,500 pounds for the settling and improvement of the college; this included fifty servants half of whose annual production was devoted to the building and maintenance of tutors and scholars. This was Sandys “estate publique”, and in his mind that was the check on the privatization and decentralization which has dominated our discussion thus far.

Today this could be considered as infrastructure-institution funding. If so Sandys had envisioned an ED tool for the funding and support of vital common institutions necessary for a community that was to attract new settlers. It is the first step toward what we shall later call town/city building. In Sandys view, each of these institutions were foremost in recruiting of servants and settlers, and presumably investment. The headright nexus, then did have a “public strategy” that he hoped would establish the necessary prerequisites for a balanced policy system, not to ignore a more humane and attractive one. This along with his artisan-led, fur-trading, crop diversification, and extraction-based economic diversification. In 1619 and 1620 Sandys poured all the investment he could into these projects.

“Companies of associations were created for ‘the sole making of Glasse and Beades for Apparrell and other necessary provisions such as the Colony stood in great need of, “for sending of 100 mayds [maids] to be made wives”, for “setting out of a Voyage to trade with the Indians in Virginia for furrs”, and for the “sending Shipwrights and other principall workmen for making Ships, Boats and other Vessels” … Continuing the work of earlier years, plans were set on foot for making salt, silk, oil, wines, hemp and flax, and “ for engaging Dutch carpenters … skillful for erecting Sawinge Mills, pushing forward the Iron worke so long and earnestly desired and furnishing fishing tackle … and a grist mill”. And I might add to this list “a kitchen sink”. [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol. 1, p. 139. Clearly by 1621, the Company under Sandys well understood the notion of self-sufficiency, and the necessity to diversify the Virginia economic base. Too little, too late does come to mind.

Accordingly, included in Sandys’ list of instructions was a new provincial governance structure in which the governor, his appointed royal council, and an elected group of settler representatives (burgesses) would meet annually, or as needed, to work out a common approach to dealing the “local” problems and issues. The General Assembly (including the proto House of Burgesses) was meant to close the polarizing gap between settlers and their local Company-government. For Sandy’s a primary goals was to remove the public and popular perception that the Company’s governance was dictatorial, corrupt, and accomplished little other than make Virginia a “death-factory”. Off to the side, it seems, was a headright economic development strategy which offered incentives designed to attract a new population in sufficient numbers—willingly based on their own personal interests and motivation.

In this section we discuss (1) creation of the “headright” land sales and population-attraction strategy which through its quitrents brought income into the Company’s offers; (2) the efforts made to diversify the economic base and create “infrastructure” deemed necessary to people-attraction by employing the headright system and turning it over to various types of joint stock corporations; (3) employing a new Company trade store or “adventurers magazine” to systematically manage the importing of needed goods and products, and to pay for these with domestic exports; and, (4) the creation of provincial level elective institutions, the Royal Council and the House of Burgesses, which in aggregate met as the General Assembly

One might argue in light of the sections presented below that in regards to land reform, economic and political development, and permanent settlement strategy that internal democracy among company members-investors no doubt occasioned factionalization and politics, it also led to individual members of the company forming through private plantations, voluntary joint stock corporations, private entrepreneurial ventures that while weakening the former iron hold Smythe and Sandys had maintained over decision regarding Company owned land, led to the dispersal and settlement of the Tidewater region. Given the weakness and lack of capacity of Virginia’s domestic governance institutions, and the mixed involvement of domestic company officials, the dynamics unleashed by the Greate Charter, unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly, were the foundations of what was to become the first basic economic base, and the foundations for, its political-policy governance for the colonial period (and long after I might add).

To consider 1619 Virginia as a “free enterprise zone” would require us to ignore much and simplify to the point of distortion. Still, the term does convey an atmosphere of almost unfettered, almost unrestrained entrepreneurism–checked chiefly as we shall see by Indian resistance. In this light, the political institution, the General Assembly which is founded by the Greate Charter, serves different purposes and follows certain decision-making criteria that depart from most colonial governance institutions. Since Virginia is the first, one does not see this until one can discuss other colonies-states. Amazingly in Virginia’s case, as little is going on government-wise (especially at the province level), much in fact is going on with the colony’s policy system, economic base, and electoral system at the sub-state/province level.

What followed over the next decade (actually a half-century), as far as land grants-plantation-hundred formation-and the awarding of such to voluntary joint stock corporations involved little planning or conscious design. If you had the capital and means to settle your acquired lands than you got the designations and incentives. In effect an open-door or member-investor enterprise zone was in effect until the Company’s termination in 1624.

Whatever you choose to call this, one can hint that the contribution of the first two Stuart kings to early colonial government and policy–as well as economic base making, is a free-flowing proto aristocratic-merchant-plantation owner pre-industrial private enterprise that laid the foundations for a local elite and the crystallization of a political culture that produced massive and heartless inequality, and the pillars of an outstanding democracy. However, this coexists with the thesis behind a 1619 Project (which I heartily disagree), it does lend a complexity to our thought. This culture will be the roots of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry–and Johns Calhoun and Marshall, not to ignore Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. What strange bedfellows these characters are. Plantation elites all, they guided the fates and policies of America’s Early Republic, certainly into the 1840’s.

Company Politics Backe in Merrie Olde Englande

That, friends, is the real behind the scenes story of the Greate Charter.

Company Politics Underlying the Greate Charter

In the contested and critical period (1617- very early 1619), it has always been somewhat unclear what was the Smythe-Sandys relationship. I have implicitly assumed that Smythe’s relative detachment from the affairs of the Virginia Company after 1612. Sandys was not yet dominant, Smythe was still in charge, and more than nominally, but he was focused on elements of the Company strategy, export and the Company magazine–and the Bermuda Somers colony. He was more interested in stabilizing Jamestown-Virginia.

But Sandys was the leader who was developing an agenda and strategy, borrowed it would seam on what was learned from the Raleigh venture a decade earlier. He also was seriously interested in breaking up any “monopoly” exercised by an all-powerful company board of directors (i.e. council) decision-making. He wanted to decentralize company decision-making, into committees he could influence, and annual board of directors meetings that approved the next year’s initiatives and strategy direction.

As a patriot, and as an investor, he wanted to Virginia Company to succeed, but no merchant, he was more patient realizing profits required time to develop a venture in the colony, and for that venture to mature. His problem was the larger company membership was not that patient–and Sandys’ own politics as a Parliamentary leader made him the implacable foe of the Stuart king–for whom the Virginia Company was contracted to serve.

Accordingly as Smyth transferred much of his affections and time invested in the Virginia Company into the Somers Company (Bermuda), one can trace, in the Gates-Dale reforms a path that emphasized settlement and an increasingly likelihood of distant profits and dividends through investment in the only Virginia export that offered hope for sustainable revenues and profits: Rolfe’s tobacco. What was really causing disruption in the years before 1616-7 was the Somers Island (Bermuda) sub-company; it seemed to offer more opportunities–again with tobacco as the export product–not the least of which was privateering on Spain’s West Indies gold fleet and sugar-spice exports.

A third force in the Company membership, the influential and well-born noble Earl of Warwick had aspirations in Bermuda, and Smythe was having none of it. The first major disruption was Smythe against Warwick (the first earl). In this Virginia very much became their sideshow–leaving more decision-making to Sandys, and his allies. As a sideshow, Dale’s initiatives bore a sound measure of success, dispersing the population, retaining a fair share of expired former indentured servant “ancient settlers”, and developing plantations that successfully exported increasing quantities of tobacco for sale in England–whose performance, I might add, was watched by company shareholders who saw the opportunity they might have if they invested and developed similar plantations.

Accordingly, we see an opening up, a relaxing, of the Company’s previous restrictions on member-investors use of the proto-headright incentives, thereby allowing more investors to start projects to take advantage of tobacco production (especially) outside the Company framework. The first such investors were mostly the company officials and leadership. The only other shareholders that benefited from these early incentives, were the indentured servants, who, promised an share upon termination of their contract, would experimentally received that share in the form of a land-rental-to-own company grant.

These preliminaries came to an end with a new governor, Samuel Argall (1617-18). The Argall interlude (see previous module), wracked with its Warwick-Smythe complications, created yet more intense and personal conflict between the parties. Sandys, for his own reasons, and for advancement of his evolving Virginia Company economic development strategy, decided to take advantage of the rifts and conducted his own campaign to “oust” Smythe from Treasurer in the Virginia Company. His perspective seems to have been Virginia focused.

If so, it is clear that The Virginia Company had departed from its original 1606 founding constituency, merchant adventurers, and that a decade later the Company membership was scattered among those who wanted trade foremost, adventure as in privateering, and more permanent settlement as Raleigh had attempted at Roanoke. Sandys represented the latter, Warwick, the middle grouping, and Smythe the former. To complicate this, Sandys, as a major parliamentary leader, had recruited a sizeable membership from his fellow parliamentarians–and these votes were his to sway, inclined the least to the “monopolist” Smythe.

… the personal rivalry between Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading figure in the opposition to the crown since James first Parliament (1604), and the champion of free trade … and that pillar of commercial orthodoxy and respectability Sir Thomas Smythe on the other. Since 1618 the struggle between these two formidable figures had waged within three companies, the East India Company, the Virginia Company, and the Somers Islands Company. The struggle was not without political overtones, since Sandys political career had earned him the hostility of the King. Sandys party had won effective control of the Virginia Company in 1619, and a year later had circumvented an attempt by James I to prevent Sandy’s re-election as Treasurer–‘Chose the Devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys’ [was publicly proclaimed by the King to the Board of Directors]–by substituting for [Sandys] one of his supporters, the Earl of Southampton [Sandy’s chief ally].

In 1621, the Sandys faction had achieved a further notable success when they ousted Smythe and his supporters from the key offices in the Somers Island Company. In contrast to his free-trade activities [previously] … Sandys had then sought in the parliament of 1621 to obtain a ban on the importation of all tobacco except from Virginia and the Somers Islands, and moreover to get the patent for the sole importation of tobacco vested in the hands of his supporters [in both company’s through the “Magazine”]–strange conduct for a supporter of free trade“. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, 1603-1643 (Cambridge university Press, 1979), p. 115

While Parliament was not in session during much of this period, Sandys had access to those who lived in the adjacent secondary ports, and large towns outside and rival to London. Conversely, much of Smythe’s support, from the Guilds, had been diverted to the Ulster Plantation, and in any case foreign plantations were a secondary priority, if a priority at all. There was also another major issues, that of “impositions”, a trade tax imposed by the King on exports and imports. Tobacco in particular was affected, its trade offered the King a major source of revenue which he alone controlled. The issue disrupted the 1614 “Addled Parliament”, a two month running battle between King and Parliament that led to its abbreviated term, and suspension.

Thereafter, a royally-controlled tobacco trade, with impositions, contrasted with a free trade tobacco trade advocated by Parliamentarians, of which Sandys was a major leader. Royal opposition to Sandys had to have increased, and this probably drove a wedge between Smythe and Sandys. Sandys was able to muster a loud, articulate mass at Company committees and annual meeting, and voice voting seems to have had an effect of passing Sandys motions more than Smythe’s. Company meetings, according to notes and minutes, were contentious, and throughout the period there was a perception that Sandys was taking advantage of it.

A three-way fight, Sandys-Warwick-Smythe, duked it out during 1618–culminating in Smythe’s loss of the Virginia Company Treasurer in early 1619, Sandys victory in attaining it–and Smythe retention of his control over the Somers Company. Warwick died at this time, and his son, even more aggressive than his Dad, did not have sufficient strength to wedge a spot in the Company leadership at this point. The Company, however, as a whole remained fractured, and only the skills of Sandys as a parliamentary leader, was able to muster consistent support on committee and the annual board of directors meeting over the next few years. Smythe, it was reported, was in increasingly ill health after 1621, and that likely played a role as well. That meant Sandys drove affairs in the Virginia Company during these years, and for the most part, the Greate Charter was his plan to develop the colony.

At this point I think it relevant to prepare the reader for an important transition in the configuration and evolution of England’s Commercial Revolution, the precursor to the Industrial Revolution and the maturation of “modern capitalism’. In the 1620’s, certainly the 1630’s, the composition of those who engaged in commerce and colonialism changed rather dramatically, and Virginia, while not the ground zero for this transition, was a major player in which the transition is evident. It is my suggestion that the disruptive Virginia Company politics played a significant role in dampening the enthusiasm for colonial investment by the “commercial merchant adventurers” that dominated the early trading companies.

As Craven asserted “the new merchants”, for they had been quite literally pioneers in the development of a new branch in overseas trade … The City’s [London] mercantile establishment, of course, had been significantly represented (especially by Sir Thomas Smith {Smythe] in the initial efforts to establish a colony in Virginia, but the experience seems to have taught most of its members to avoid such ventures thereafter” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, White, Black and Red: the Seventeenth Century Virginian (W. W. Norton Company, 1971), p. 22.

Robert Brenner, whose research guided Craven[99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003, pp. 92-102, suggests this is the earliest noticeable movement in the shift from our trading company merchant adventurers, mostly headquartered in London, away from colony-building. He starts his commentary with the 1609 Virginia Charter which he believes these adventurers realizing their hopes for quick profits, based on short-term transactions, or the discovery and trade in precious metals or Indian furs dissipated. In our parlance they recognized colony-building meant permanent settlement, the development of a long-term economic base–and all that might entail–and the need to achieve a reasonable level of self-sufficiency in daily life and personal quality of life in the colony.

None of this particularly attracted the great majority of these big-time London merchant adventurers, and they didn’t care for the rather substantial change in the Virginia Company’s business plan–or Sandys Greate Charter approach. Brenner details Sandys’ Greate Charter initiatives, and observes that Sandys “gentry party” was largely responsible for the ouster “merchant party”, but further observes Sandys Greate Charter initiatives meant greater reliance on the Company as the vehicle of economic development (the estates publique) and a rejection of the merchant approach of monopoly export trade through the Magazine). This analysis pretty much corresponds to the dynamics discussed in this module.

If anything, from this point on the merchant adventurers, as individuals, bypassed the company, and gravitated into the more promising trade in tobacco, with their preferred vehicle being the voluntary joint stock corporation–which after 1616 was eligible for the headright incentive package. Brenner cities estimates that between 1619 and 1623 somewhere between 80,000-90,000 pounds were invested in the Virginia economy, “but of this sum the company laid out only about 10,000 while private entrepreneurs supplied the remainder” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003, p. 95; Brenner cites W. R. Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, 1910-12), Vol. 2, p. 286.

Brenner concludes with the obvious–that Sandys Greate Charter initiate failed in its principal objectives and led to the final chapters in the destruction of the Company and its charter. But he offers one more interesting glimpse into how the “failure” of the Virginia Company and its colony-building altered the composition of colonial investors. Brenner notes a major reason why Sandys did fail was that the colonial investment he offered to his “gentry party” simply did not attract either their interest or investment. Sandys could bring no new investment into the Virginia Company so that his initiatives could be funded: Sandys “and his noble and gentry supporters proved no more willing to provide the investment funds necessary to underwrite production in the colony than the City merchants had been … Even worse, they were unable to induce those who had already subscribed to the joint stock [in 1609-10] to pay in their [required] funds. By 1620, a total of 16,000 pounds in uncollected subscriptions stood on the company’s books”. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003), p. 99

There will be one last hurrah in this struggle within the Company, the 1622-3 tobacco contract debate, and we will resume the description in that module.

The Company’s London Agenda: Tobacco and forging of future Trade/Colonial Policy—

Both the Crown and the Company were able to move past their discomforts with the smelly weed, both turned to it for badly needed revenues to tax. The King forbade its production in England but consented to its production by the Virginia Company (defending it as ‘the better support of the colony’) who embraced it because “its production would provide the funds for developing the really worth-while staples which would eventually replace it”. [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1946), p. 17

The Company by 1621 urged Parliament to exclude Spanish tobacco from England and Virginia., and “protect” the young industry in Virginia from unfair labor rates that the Spanish with “thousands of women and children and idle people are available at less than half the wages of the lowest-paid labor in the colony. On top of that the shortage of workers in the colony grossly inflated their labor costs relative to what the price of tobacco allowed. The low price for Virginia tobacco, the Company alleged, was because of competition from Spanish tobacco. The remedy was a monopoly on English sale for Virginia tobacco.

Further the Company argued “through the reasonable price for Virginia tobacco [obtained by exclusion of Spanish tobacco from England and Virginia] would lure multitudes of people to the colony, and they will quickly find better commodities than tobacco. What’s more the Company feared that the competition of Spanish tobacco would lead to a “revolt” of the tobacco plantations. [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1946), p. 18. These efforts were not successful but Sandys was ready and waiting for an opportunity to try again. Sadly, that would not be long.

Further underscoring the interconnection of the workforce/indenture/headright system we see as early as 1619 that John Pory, the Secretary of the colony wrote (O)ur principal wealth consists of [indentured] servants. And the servants under long-term indenture in return for their passage, were rated as property, payable for debts, and even church dues. Their time was subject to sale, and [could be] transferred like a ‘damned slave’. [99] Joseph Dorfman, the Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1946), p. 18.

Subsequent American English colonies did not encounter this situation, and did not have imposed on them the confused, complex,closed corporate-centered system of making land available for private development. Here in a nutshell we see the origins of tobacco as Virginia’s export crop, the autonomous private plantation, the closed and inequitable polity, economy and society, and blurred intersection of public and private that came to be the critical heritage of the Virginia Company’s governance.

While certainly nothing was written in stone this early in Virginia’s history, this closed homesteading system, supplemented with important additional elements {TBA below}, would continue through the remainder of the company period, and remarkably would not change after the province became royally-governed in 1625. That former company officials would dominate both political affairs and policy making through the entire First Migration period [between 1650-60], we can begin to fathom how the Virginia Company heritage translated into its permanent colonial governance, economy and society

If there was no tobacco, or an equivalent export product, by the late decade of the 1610’s, I am not sure Virginia would have survived as an English colony. After the Third 1612 charter, Smythe at least nominally the chief official of the Virginia Company, did his level best, given his rather part-time commitment to the Company, to keep the Company and the Colony afloat. The potential of tobacco offered hope and the potential for economic success for English investors, politicians, and potential settlers that carried all through the very early 1620’s (1621).

Most American historians regard the Greate Charter as the turning point of early Virginia history. In many ways it was, but I am much less sanguine regarding its reassertion of Company authority in Virginia. I certainly agree the Greate Charter was a fundamental initiative that birthed key political institutions that channeled the direction of future Virginia, but while these institutions provided a vehicle for change and governance, future events suggest to me that we began Virginia’s Bottoms Up tilt no later than a year later. The giant steps the Assembly will take in 1623 and 1624 (discussed in future modules) were reactions to the catastrophes at the local level, and the lack of capacity and response from the Company in London.

Drivers of Change

Thus, at this point we must turn our attention to making clear to the reader what those Virginia dynamics were because they were the driving forces behind Virginia’s politics, economics, society development, and that drove the colony’s reaction to the Native Americans. Using economic development as a filter, although not an exclusive one, I assert the following dynamic drove Virginia’s post 1622 policy agenda, and in their unconscious, largely unplanned, almost pin-ball like interaction, “installed” and “shaped” the respective institutions and actors, not to exclude, the geographic pattern of Tidewater settlement that resulted in the decades of their ascendancy.

The chief drivers are:

(1) the emergence of Virginia’s sub-state/provincial policy and jurisdictional system, and the nature of the relationship between local and provincial government. Central to this would be the role played by plantation elites in this new founded provincial government–and the ambivalent role played by its governor. The perhaps key sub driver in this structural development was “defense” policy against the Indians, which compelled Jamestown to empower locals in their survival efforts, and to respond to almost existential needs of that level of government.

the Second and later 3rd Powhatan Wars were a barbell for the displacement of the Powhatan Indians from the Tidewater. The settling of the Tidewater region of Virginia occurred during his period through 1640, and during that time the bulk of the so-called First Migration was to occur. As we shall see, the First Migration did not establish a permanent resident elite, but led by former Company officials, it did firmly cement the key institutions, relationships, and economic base of future Virginia, on which a distinctive political culture will develop, in and around, the early eighteenth century.

More than any other force, save self-sufficiency perhaps, this compelled its Indian policy, which paved the path of its geographic settlement of the Tidewater, installing innumerable tobacco plantations along the way. Over several decades, defense policy–and tobacco export and reaction to the Maryland colony in the 1630’s–interwove the strands of local-state policy-making into a more hardened view of the purposes and role of each level. This, I argue, created a distinct and durable tilt of Virginia government to its local level, and resulted in ‘bottoms-up” policy bias.

Weak provincial government did little more than make the King’s post-Company royal governor weaker and checked, or substituted a local resident governor who had previously resisted his royal governor. Charles II, drifting merrily into his Civil War, was a mostly absent father to his colony and his post-Company absence largely left Virginia’s power structure by default in the hands of former Company officials who had enjoyed first advantage in the glorious and expanding tobacco economy and ownership of its largest plantations to dominate the politics and the institutions of provincial governance in the First Migration period.

(2) The decentralized bias/tilt within Virginia’s policy system empowered sub-provincial actors, mostly large local private elites, who owned the largest plantations in the hundred (the election district for the Assembly) controlled, not merely dominated, both the local economic base and its associated governance (local judiciary, church, militia, local export function, and provincial representation). In essence, the character and nature of Virginia’s local level and its governance, as well as local society and economy were left in the hands of a newly created class of large plantation owners, whose background and reference point, if not legitimacy was drawn from their memory of the English manor and royalist-parliamentary politics of the period.

Brimming with fairly extreme inequality between themselves, their indentured servants, subsistence level former indentured servants–and the dependence of new immigrant freeholders/artisans/ professionals on their beneficence, these First Migration elites, almost like feudal lords, imparted an oligarchical fabric to local policy-making and governance. While the great plantations, with distinctive architectural manor house, and great social status–and black slaves was still seventy-five years in the future, it was these First Migration elites that poured their foundations, and supplied the legitimacy that enabled future Virginia elites to replicate and expand upon their pioneering models of inequality and tobacco production.

(3) As “they” say “its the economy stupid’ or “follow the money”, the third dynamic, in many ways the most complicated and subtle, but incredibly central to the evolution of England’s Commercial Revolution–the precondition to its Industrialization- that provided the flow of monies, the venture capital, the export factor financing, and the balance of payments between import and export, evolved out of this First Migration tobacco economy.

The more dramatic period for this development dynamics will follow the termination of the Company’s charter, but the futile, but in some ways brilliant company initiatives launched by Dale and Sandys and swept into the Greate Charter, established the colony’s first settlement and economic development strategy paradigm. Enjoying only the barest modicum of success in this period, headright, land sales and tobacco as the basis of Virginia economic transactions functioned well enough to staff its workforce, feed (when combined with stealing Indian corn) the incredibly small local population, and provide sufficient profits and incentives to expand settlement throughout the Tidewater, and carve a niche in international tobacco markets that severed future plantation elites well.

—-

Behind the Curtin: The Virginia Company Evolves

There will be one last hurrah in this struggle within the Company, the 1622-3 tobacco contract debate, and we will resume the description in that module.

Still, Andrews rightfully senses the Greate Charter crossed the Company’s Rubicon, a ED strategy intended to establish a permanent settlement of the colony.

During 1619 the company sent out eight ships … carrying 871 colonial venturers. Three hundred were sent the same year by private adventurers [voluntary joint stock corporations] … the great majority [of both groups] were servants [indentured] … they received free transportation … were furnished with food for one year, also with apparel, cattle, tools and weapons … The tenants on the public lands were expected to return to the company one half of their annual product and to remain in employement for seven years … [receiving] an estate in fee simple as a dividend. [99] Osgood, Vol 1, pp. 81-2

Pilgrims or Quakers these new settlers were not.

Actual disorder in the Somers Company came first, and it continued throughout these years [see below discussion]. Merchant adventurers dissatisfied with the 1616 dividend policy, loosing interest and moving on to other ventures, left Smythe without a mobilized constituency. The king, perhaps prodded by the Spanish ambassador, heard potential threats to disorder his foreign policy and dynastic ambitions—we are on the eve of the start of the Thirty Years War—added yet one more element of fracture. And then came the appointment of Argall to the Virginia governors, and disorder spread in 1617 more pervasively to Virginia.

The Big Picture background to the Great Charter, the events before and after its introduction was the disintegration of the Virginia Company leadership structure, and the onset of a virtual administrative civil war. By early 1619 Thomas Smythe “retired” from his Treasurer position in the Company (a coup might be more accurate), but Smythe remained involved at the top. still a formidable force in the Company, and CEO of the subordinate Somers Company (Bermuda).

Sandys, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Southampton. the victors in Smythe’s ouster, formed a rather febrile triumvirate From his new perch as Treasurer, Sandys launched his comprehensive set of instructions that in aggregate became the Greate Charter in 1618-9. The Greate Charter–with Yeardley as Governor charged with its implementation–was Sandys and Southampton’s grand reform and vision of how permanent settlement should be conducted in Virginia. It was a vision constructed, and probably most congruent with the Parliamentary groups that constituted a great faction of the Company’s investor membership (those who bought in during 1609-10, and stayed involved after).

The King was not particularly on board with Sandys, his Parliamentary allies, or the general direction of his Greate Charter–and from that point on he drifted into an open résistance to Sandys, a resistance that ousted Sandys in 1621, and replaced him with his ally Southampton. As to the Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, he died in 1619, and was replaced by his eldest son, Robert Rich who dutifully became the Earl of Warwick. Over the next two years, Sandys contested Smythe’s parliamentary election–and beat him- but the King put him under house arrest. The tobacco contract episode morphed into a personal scandal, consuming several of his allies as well. Sandys too remained a force in the castrated Virginia Company with Smythe’s death in 1625, but the glory days were over. The Greate Charter in reflection was the brief high point in a rather inglorious governance of the Virginia colony.

Where in all this does the reader see Virginia and colony-building?

That is the point! Colony-building is at best secondary and inconsistent in its application. Whatever the Greate Charter promised, it was composed and led by local Company officials and wealthy plantation landowners elected from their hundred’s electoral district. It was an oligarchy, and a local one, not Company one. A Company at war against itself cannot long stand, and, as we shall see Sandys golden era lasted into 1621-2. From 1622 on, Virginia is drifting very much under its own dynamics–and that won’t really change until around 1629-30, or if one prefers, the more accurate, 1642. London had lost control over the day-to-day goings on in Virginia during this period. Instead, Virginia was riding the rapids of her own internal dynamics, left largely unchecked by the Company, colonial policy, or the King’s will.

The drivers of change, discussed below, ultimately were the aggregate of individual actions and decisions to which the key institutions and Company leaders would react and manage to the best they could. Sometimes the leadership would try to get ahead of events, but more often than not it responded to activists and leaders drawn from the plantations and hundreds–who, BTW, were usually the same as those in the provincial assembly–and even Yeardley the deputy governor.

Resident Company officials represented three tension-filled perspectives: the Virginia Company, the Provincial Assembly and its Executive, and their ownership of individual plantations and leadership of the hundred of which they were the dominant political force. Quickly a gap between London and Jamestown became evident–and to close that gap Sandys sent over his poet brother, George to assume a major role in provincial government (1621, along with a new Deputy Governor, Francis Wyatt–married in turn to George’s niece. George left town in 1626, returning to his travels and poetry, after the charter termination.

The Second Powhatan War and the Virginia Uprising against the Company

Without question the single most important event-dynamic of 1622 was the Great Massacre of March 22, and the onset of the Second Powhatan War. We will detail the War in the next module which concentrates on Virginia itself. This module concentrates on London, and accordingly, as appropriate chronologically, we will consider the London Company’ reaction. In London, however, the dominant dynamic by far is the intensification of the Company’s civil war, and, in 1622 principally, the series of initiatives that centered around the king’s tobacco contract.

As reports filtered back about the devastation of the war during the year, the Company, Sandys, was compelled to reiterate the Company was unable to respond to the questions for assistance from its colony. It was to some extent a simple restating of what Sandys said in 1621, but considering the devastation and the extent of disaster, it does more than restate the Company’s inability to govern and manage the colony, but magnifies the position and responsibility of the Company leadership in Virginia. The war would persist, at some level to 1628, 1630, or whatever year desired, because for all practical purposes Virginia was engaged in what it considered to be a “permanent war” with the Powhatan. A third Powhatan War erupted in 1644.

In 1622, the massacre of the 22^nd March killed nearly three hundred and fifty settlers, women and children included, outright—about an third of the colony. Over half of the settlement-plantations were taken over by the Powhatan or abandoned by the English. The Magazines and stores, the food in planting, were lost. The summer and winter that followed produced a pandemic of sicknesses, disease, and death by warfare, which in the English case was constrained by a lack of ammunition and food staples. Refugees and organized transfers from “straggling plantations were centralized about Jamestown.

Four of the larger settlements, Charles City, the Iron Works, the College land, and Martin’s Hundred were essentially wiped out and totally abandoned to the Powhatan, who finish the job of reducing them to ashes. Two-thirds of the survivors were women and children, and one-third of the men had no arms to bear. Instead of blitzkrieg food production, the rudimentary fortifications had to be manned. As one would expect, in the best tradition of John Wayne in a besieged fort, the ships sailed fast to England requesting assistance, munitions-food, soldiers, weapons and ammo as quickly as possible. There was little to none forthcoming.

Indeed, the company did not respond until August to the March events. Craven reports they responded in the same language of 1621; no supplies except what the colony could pay for, plus an insistence the company debt be also paid down. He quotes, the quintessential Sandys’ ‘gaslighter’ position that London would not, could not, provide relief. The first letter sent back to the colony after the Massacre was sent in August, 1622:

To speak plainly, we shall never believe nor dare to attempt anything of great engagement and hazard, till by real example of some extraordinary work by you [the Virginians] effected, we may have proof of the sincerity of your intentions and assurances not to be deluded and frustrated, as we have hitherto been in so great and chargeable undertakings. … We have to our extreme grief understood of the great massacre executed on our people in Virginia … To fall by the hands of men [the Virginia leaders] ‘so contemptible’ to be taken by surprise in a time of known danger, to be deaf to all warnings of conspiracy [by the Powhatan], even ‘to be made in part instruments of contriving it, and almost guilty of the destruction by a blindfold and stupid entertaining of it, which the least wisdom or courage sufficed to prevent even on the point of [its] execution. … Through it all [it] was apparent the hand of Almighty God in punishment of their [the leaders of the colonists] sins. … In particular, it was necessary that a speedy redress [against] … those enormous two excesses of apparel and drinking … have gone up to heaven, since the infamy hath spread itself to all that have but heard the name Virginia to the destation of all good minds, the scorn of others, and our [in London] grief and shame. It was in these faults, and in the neglect of divine worship, that the Indians had prevailed, rather than in their weakness.

At an unknown date, probably late October, 1622, the Company sent instructions on the response to the Powhatan attack. The letter refused the Virginia request to move their defenses to better locations; the Company said no as “they could make themselves as secure there as any other location”. Further, in regards to the concentration of population into four locations “was not only a matter of discontent to [London] but of ‘evil fame’, and [London further] insisted ‘that [abandoned settlements] be replanted at once. In essence the Company wanted Virginia to follow a policy of “replantation”. As to the Powhatan: attack them with all means possible. As to food, “the fear of your want of corn doth much perplex us, seeing so little possibility to supply you … we have no hope of raising any valuable Magazine [goods and supplies] … We cannot wish you to rely upon anything but yourselves”. The letter placed much responsibility of the association-hundred plantations to live up to their contracts of self-sufficiency. Craven’s assessment of this letter was that “Even at this late date, the council [which approved the instructions] quite obviously underestimated the colony’s needs” .[99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 204-6, pp. 209-12, p. 211

Craven concludes the letter with his conclusion: “With this last thrust the company was to leave the planters entirely to their own resources. … This disregard of the earnest plea from Virginia … added to it the most colossal blunder of the Sandys’ party …With almost the same breath that they lamented their inability to send food, the [London] councillors were happy to inform the colony that there were to go ‘now over in this Ship, and are immediately to follow in some others, many hundreds of people”. And to these plans the administration stubbornly clung, despite the fact that later letters from Virginia brought a fuller realization of the true state of the colony. No factor contributed more to the suffering of the colonists through the ensuing winter, and nothing can show more clearly Sandys’ failure to appreciate the most fundamental problems of colonization. These [new] settlers, of course, went to private plantations at the cost of the individual associations of adventurers, and they therefore constituted no drain on [company] funds.[99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 204-6

The reply of the Company is cited extensively because in my view, this is the single best evidence of the company’s inability, untimeliness, if not unwillingness, to respond to a genuine need of the colony. The Sandys Company response is “take care of yourselves”, and then proceeds to blame, bash would be a better word, the colony for everything that has befallen it. If this man is not the messiah of a future American democracy. The company simply declared the colony was on its own. Didn’t even wish it good luck.

To my mind, this company letter is the official start of the resident self-governance. Craven does try to temper the above harsh criticism by supposing that it was based on Sandys belief the tobacco contract negotiations could be brought to a conclusion profitable by the company. He then suggests the Company may not have appreciated the real extent of what was going on in Virginia; he then adds an incredible statement that “the massacre caused no stir in the courts” [shareholder council meetings] before the return of Captain Butler in the spring of 1623—more than a year after the Great Massacre.

Even after that Craven feels it possible that a reasonable sense of what transpired was not available. He does admit that Sandys opposition did use the Massacre against the Sandys’ administration after that time around the return of Captain Butler. That may be because it was only then that they got sufficient information to understand the Virginia reality. In short, the it appears, the plight of Virginia seems to have fallen into a vacuum in the London Company that responded only with criticism in August, and in October a series of instructions not congruent with direction from Virginia. It also seems that whatever information the London Company top leadership had, or was getting from Virginia, was not being transmitted to the general council, and possibly to Sandys himself? How could that be?

I find this difficult to accept the Company heard little to nothing for that long, that private letters and the such from private associations did not supplement the information from Virginia, nor individual letters to family that so many in Virginia had died during that year. The ships bearing new immigrants had to return with their own on site review of the situation. On top of this of course was the continuous stream of pleadings and requests, with descriptions of the need, that flowed in the course of the year. I suggest the most plausible reason for any lack of response from London, and shareholder councils in particular, is they were not informed in the first place.

I further raise the possibility the silence from the top levels of the Company were those of the Ferrar brothers, not Sandys. The timing of the Greate Massacre could not have been worse for Sandys London tobacco negotiations. First reports from Virginia likely arrived no earlier than mid to late April, maybe early May. Sandys, as we shall see below, was pitching that the Company be awarded a monopoly over English tobacco importation, and he had linked up with the Duke of Buckingham (April, 1622, [99] https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/sandys-sir-edwin-1561-1629—with some success. Indeed, it was awarded in late November, 1622—but more on that later.

It appears during that interim, Sandys’s wife was seriously ill (Sandys had already buried two wives) and his third wife had “twelve births”) and Sandys apparently left residence in London for his home in Kent. He traveled only for key issues and events after that—for an unknown period of time. During this period he turned over daily Company business to the Ferrars in London. Following a chronology, [99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 209-12. Sandys may have first heard in detail about the conditions that followed the Greate Massacre as late as October, when he traveled to London on behalf of his tobacco monopoly initiative. In the week that followed the above October letter seems to have been both composed and sent. In the meantime, it appears the negotiations on the tobacco monopoly continued to the point that in November, 1622 the Company shareholder council agreed to accept a tobacco monopoly contract from a Commission tasked by Buckingham to craft a “deal” on the matter. That contract, however, lived in a sort of bureaucratic limbo through to May 1623—more on that later below.

It is in this period, as Craven reports, that the colonists by the winter of 1622-3 pressed the case for immediate assistance. “A host of letters, written not only to officials in the company, but indiscriminately to friends, and relatives, brought to England in the spring of 1623 news of Virginia’s plight” [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 216 . This letter writing campaign was led by none other than the newly arrived (late January 1622) treasurer of the colony, the brother of Edwin, George Sandys. His ostensible reason was because he deemed the blame received by the colonists for the Powhatan attact was undeserved, unfair, and that the Company response had been negligent.

Of these none spoke in stronger terms than those of George Sandys, who apparently abandoned his plan to return to England [and present the case for assistance and provide to the Company council a true picture of what happened in Virginia], in a series of letters through the spring [of 1623], as complete a condemnation of the company’s policies and practices during the proceeding years … To Samuel Wrote in March 1623, he suggested that some person of ‘judgment and integrity’ be sent to inquire as to the true state of Virginia, where they suffered from ‘extreme sickness and unheard of mortality’. There was a shortage of the absolute necessities of life, and [new] colonists from England came ‘so famished to halves’ that they made ‘a dearth [shortage] of [what had been] a plentiful harvest. Their suffering had been increased by the instructions from the company which forced the responsible officers to act contrary to their own judgement … To his brother, Sir Samuel Sandys [as well as to another brother, Sir Miles Sandys], he wrote to the same effect. [99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 216-18

Accompanying it were letters of detail from Governor Wyatt, the Governor’s Council which replicated the content of George Sandys’ letter.

In aggregate, these letters and petitions constituted a rebuttal to the first Company letter of August 1622. These letters also, almost at the point of demanded, that the institutions of the company reorganization, the council and assembly be mobilized as points of decision-making that were primary to Virginia’s defense, if not survival. In detail, they outlined the strategy they would follow, a strategy not congruent with the October letter. It was this basket of letters and petitions sent across a broad spectrum of Company-related officials, shareholders, investors, friends, relatives, and even co-settlers living in Bermuda that, in its way, brought about the total mobilization of Sandys opposition within the Company to demand the king, the Privy Council, and the Company councils to replace Sandys and his officials. Launched largely in the spring of 1623, and culminating in a formal petition by Alderman Johnson to the Privy Council, the campaign prompted a reaction that in a series of steps resulted in the suspension of the Company charter over Virginia on May 13, 1624.

In its practical effect, this written uprising of Virginia was taken not just as a repudiation of the Sandys’ faction, but of its policies, in particular that of the Greate Charter economic development strategy.

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