The module series is organized around four major topics-themes, each of which include a number of political and economic drivers or forces that produced-resulted in very key and fundamental results, consequences, and structures and institutions.
Each theme has its own cast of characters, time frame, events and initiatives that pour key elements of the policy system that Governor Berkeley inherited in 1642. In aggregate the four topics will result in recognizable and familiar features we today associate with Virginia and its past.
Mini-Series 1 offers the reader a brief introduction to the larger issues of American colonializing in the Trans-Atlantic era. We discuss the historiography of the period, provide optional background to English politics and the drift to the English Civil War. The crux of this argument is to set the stage for the First Migration and its central role in Virginia’s policy evolution. The reader should understand that position is a major departure from the traditional Virginia history–and the compelling dynamic that underlies this Module Series.
Our second module in the mini-series provides a glimpse-introduction into the mercantilist policies of England as affected by competing kingdoms during the period of the great Thirty Years War. Virginia in the Transition Period plays a major role in the evolution of English colonial trade and development of modern finance capitalism–this is Virginia’s role.
The third mini-series module returns to our first, and fleshes out the thrust of much of Virginia history that this Transition Period is of little consequence to Virginia’s future–and counters with our assertion to the contrary.
Mini Series1: the Background Music Underscoring the Turbulent, but Foundational Transition Period:
- Pre-1650 Tidewater Immigrant: Ingredients of the Future Tidewater Political Culture
- The Historiography Thing: Should We Pay Any Attention to What These Thugs Did? The Atlantic Empire
Mini-Series 2: Concentrates on the Years 1622-1636
during which the domestic Company policy system morphed-developed- into the First Policy System. While that First Policy System will not come into place until the 1639-42 period, this early period tells the unappreciated tale of how and why it evolved, laying the foundations for institutions, a political culture, a tobacco monoculture, and an elite-mass based policy system. The proto-institutions and elites will be seriously challenged by the events, personalities and dynamics discussed in the next mini-series those challenges will be the fire that forges the First Policy System. In outlining the jelling of the First Policy System in this transition period, I must present evidence that several pronounced bends in the policy system, the decentralization tilt, and weak gubernatorial impact, can be found in this very early rudimentary transition period.
The first module introduces this Transition Period to the reader by providing biographic descriptions of major personalities, and their background, behaviors and activities that dominated policy, politics between 1622-32 especially. These men participated in the fundamental dynamics of the period: Indian fighting, spread of the tobacco monoculture through the Tidewater, formation of a Virginia domestic elite whose oligarchy kept the non-elites in place, and took over the decision-making of the political institutions at the lower and provincial levels.
These elites are the thugs that were slammed around in our historiographic module, but they are the fellows and widows who assembled the bits and pieces that constituted that policy system I assert came out of this period. Because our Virginia history is so reliant on this period and these thugs, we will include a short piece of what colonial Virginians thought of them–they sweep them under the rug, but it is the reason why they wanted to which supports our position. 0. The Wild Bunch: the controversial and much disliked thugs who set up Virginia’s First Policy System
The second module in this mini-series tells the story from the point of view of “the land”, or more precisely how and why the settlers settled-conquered the land, the Tidewater. The nature-character of that settlement produced the “shredded community” which was the single most important driver in the formation of the policy system. That the shredded community is closely tied to the tobacco monoculture, the reader should consider it the flip side of the shredded community. 1. the Land: the shredded community settlement pattern and its core foundations, a supportive political culture based on an elite-non elite leadership/ownership and workforce that dovetailed with the tobacco steamroller
The third major storyline in this module is the Second Powhatan War, which continued in one form or another through the entire period until 1644. The War and the Faux Peace that followed deals with the obvious reality this land was seized from the Indians. . The Settlement Nexus was permeated by the unique, impactful Second Powhatan War and the Faux Peace. Indian resistance did not stop the spread of the tobacco monoculture. A period saturated with Indian land seizure and a perpetual war, exerted an impact on individual behavior, both elite and non-elite, and policy systems they established and operated. In this sub-module we focus on the rise of plantation conquistadors, a sub-group of the planter owner elite. It was this sub-grouping that pioneered the opening of the Middle Peninsula in the 1630’s, spreading the monoculture deeper into Powhatan lands. They did so despite a serious decline n tobacco prices that drove the economy into a tobacco depression. Not even a tobacco depression could stop the tobacco steamroller. 2. the Second Powhatan War: its effect on settlement, formation of Virginia elites, expansion into the Middle Peninsula, the Tobacco Depression, its signature Palisades Project-AND English colonization as zero sum Indian conquest
The fourth sub-module The character of the county policy policy system, in particular, based upon self-defense from the Powhatan and associated tribes was hugely affected during the 1630’s. The self-defense function spun off the Plantation Conquistadors who provided muscle to the evolving provincial policy system, a system which exhibited a distinct TILT, the empowerment of local government relative to provincial, in large measure because the mechanics and realities of the shredded community-plantation-based tobacco monoculture required a policy system decentralization–which was reinforced by the activities and needs of the Conquistadors.
The Tobacco Depression and the absence yet polarizing anti-Virginia tobacco policy of Charles I mobilized tobacco plantation owners and created a vacuum in local, county policy systems which they filled. In this sub-module we shall see how the tobacco plantation owners established their control over county government, newly established in 1634. With their new base in the county, the elites and their 1630’s Faux Peace Indian war continued to shape the formation of the emerging Virginia policy system. Introduced in the early 1630’s the “Tilt” became more pronounced with each passing decade. Finally, these dynamics are encapsulated in a case study of the signature economic development project of this decade, if not the First Migration: the Palisades Project. 3. the 1630’s: Expansion of the Monoculture into the Middle Peninsula, conquistadors and the larger plantation owners achieve class conscious and fuse their local and economic power into the provincial policy system through their control of the county. The Tilt become real.
All these dynamics of the three sub-modules in this mini-series are hopelessly tied together.
Mini-Series III:
Discusses the creation of a elite planter class, a subset of which, the plantation conquistadors, occupied the positions of authority and status in county, church, and the economic, in particular the key export of tobacco. This aggregate planter class dominated the Transition Era policy-making, agenda-setting, and established an empowered position for the individual large plantation owner in the counties. This misshapen citizenry led to restricted agenda-setting and policy-making governance that blurred private and public. This constituted a manifest threat to civil liberties and even public order as an policy-making oligarchy exercised its authority.
By 1630 the planter class also developed a “Clique” of large exporting planters and several plantation conquistadors that advocated for, and created a initiative, the Kent Island initiative, which threatened a breakaway from the exclusive and monopolistic tobacco monoculture—and a serious limitation on the other plantation owners. By 1631 this Clique intermittently exercised capacity to pass its own legislation through the Council of State, and in pursuit of its own agenda opposed the royal governor, and advocated in London its vision of a pivot in Virginia’s economic base congruent with a revitalization of the Virginia Company.
This vision reorganized the import (Provisioning) function and reduced reliance on tobacco through a fur trading alliance with Tribes in Virginia’s northern Chesapeake regions. This Clique sought and received investment and political support from the “New Men” of London’s colonial finance investment community, a grouping with impactful connections into Court politics and the Parliamentary opposition.
Disruptive by its very nature, the grant of such land to the new colony of Maryland, however, injected considerable complexity, tension and discord within the elites, between the governor and the Crown. For a period, the Maryland issue became the central issue of politics during the middle 1630’s. Never resolved, the issue would linger and seriously intrude into Virginia politics for nearly three decades. The discord and policy conflict engendered by the commercial pivot and the grant of Maryland played a great role in the evolution of provincial government: the Council of State, and the Assembly-Burgesses, and gubernatorial relations.
- Maryland–without which Virginia would not be the same today–through 1634
- the London-based Hybrid Colonial Policy System Plays the Tune & Writes the Lyrics to which Virginia Dances the Political Development Two-Step
2. Enter John Harvey: the first Virginia governor who tried to be governor and the planters who tried to be an elite “proto class”
4. the Planter Class “crops up” and asserts its intent to be Virginia’s elite
5. Maryland Expels William Claiborne–but not for ever–and Virginia has a new neighbor
6. the thrusting out of John Harvey and the productive chaos that followed to 1639
Optional Supplement
Mini-Series IV: Politics, personalities, events and policies from the Mother Country exacted and impacted Virginia greatly. The first, Charles’s failure to consider Virginia a priority, doomed it to a delayed (by a full fourteen years) confirmation of specifics regarding royal administration, and in particular the status of the Virginia Company’s inherited corporate—now governmental—institutions. Also, the King’s capricious decision-making, considerably under pressure from the drift to Civil War and his struggle with Parliament, created issues like the grant of Maryland to Calvert, and in 1635 a poorly thought-through change in England’s tobacco import monopoly did much to unifying the fragmented and polarized Virginia planter class, and mobilize the elites-masses in an Anti-Catholic movement.
The Maryland issue seriously disturbed Virginia policy-making and governance after 1633. That to a certain extent these New Men opened an opportunity for William Claiborne to disrupt Virginia policy-making to the extent of a coup and three year campaign against the royal governor Harvey left lasting consequence’s. To be sure in 1638 and 1639-40 it also led to a satisfactory resolution of the above first problem—setting the stage for a new governor, William Berkeley in 1642. But the key take away is the ability of Virginia’s planter class, when united, to limit, indeed launch a coup (1635) that ousted (after a four year struggle) the King-appointed royal governor. That struggle resulted in the King’s agreement to a new royal governor, and an acknowledgement of Virginia’s local and provincial governments legitimacy, and defined, roughly, their role in colonial governance that lasted until the last days previous to the American Revolution.
1.
2.
3.
1, The King Fails to Commit. Implications of his Failure to Commit
2. Virginia? Lost in London’s Limbo 1625-1630: The Political Vacuum that was Virginia
3. English Commercial Revolution Begins: 1620-1630’s Shift from Gentry London City Trading Company Merchants to Young “New Men”
3a. the Motherland Can Bend the Twig Too
6. the Ouster of Governor John Harvey: 1632 to 1635 Dorset, Laud Commissions, Claiborne and the Settlement of Maryland, the King’s Tobacco Contract–and the Coup
7. From Hundreds to Counties: From the Anglican Church to the 1660’s
Ron W. Coan 