The article appears in Augusta Historical Bulletin, Vol. 55 (2019). I am using it under the Creative Commons License described here. I am breaking this article down into three parts, as follows:
Part One - Introduction + An Elected Representative Legislature
Two - The Women
Part Three - Arrival of Africans in Virginia
PART ONE
1619: Virginia’s Red Letter Year
By Katharine L. Brown, Ph.D.
Editor’s Note: The year 1619 marked a significant milestone in Virginia history. Four hundred years later, many of the significant events surrounding what Katharine Brown calls “the big three” in this talk that she presented, are still relevant today. It is, therefore, fitting that four hundred years after 1619, the Bulletin begins with Brown's lecture, and is followed by two more articles that address our area's African-American and women's history.
The reader might wonder why events in the Jamestown area more than a century before the sturdy Scots-Irish and German settlers began sinking their roots in Augusta County soil should be a matter of significance to the history of this area. It is the author’s hope that this essay will convince you that three events in that year 1619 were of critical importance to Valley settlers and all their descendants down to the present.
Here are the BIG THREE in chronological order:
1. The meeting of the first elected representative legislature in the New World
2. The recruitment of single English women to enable family formation and settlement in the overwhelmingly male Virginia colony.
3. The arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the British North American colonies.
Readers raised in Virginia and educated in its schools may be familiar with these events, but most Americans reach maturity in ignorance of them. Why is that?
You have probably heard it said that “The winners write the history.” Public schools across the United States really took off in the years right after the Civil War. The curriculum and the textbooks were dominated by the winners of that long and bloody conflict. The founding stories of the nation emphasized in the textbooks were those of the people who settled the Northern colonies. The virtuous Pilgrims and Puritans were the founders who captured the American imagination. Jamestown was noted in textbooks chiefly for mention of Pocahontas, while its settlers were dismissed as lazy gentry looking for gold.
The three events whose anniversaries we marked in 2019 took place before the Pilgrims ever set foot on Plymouth Rock or even climbed aboard the Mayflower. It can be argued that events during English colonization at Jamestown have been more important for the long-term development of this nation than most developments in the Northern colonies.
Before we examine the Big Three of 1619, let us look briefly at developments in Virginia prior to 1619, so that we can see why those three events were so important for shaping the future of that first permanent English colony in the New World.
Aside from a few short-term, unsuccessful attempts such as the Roanoke Colony of North Carolina in the 1580s with its mysterious end, the Jamestown settlement of the Virginia Company in 1607 was the first real English colony.
Jamestown did not have a happy or easy beginning. The only models for American colonization were the Spanish and the Portuguese who dominated the 1500s throughout the Caribbean Islands, Central America, South America, Mexico and Florida. Their colonization efforts were government-sponsored examples of military conquest, plundering, and the elimination of Native peoples by conquest, disease and enslavement, then their replacement with imported African slaves. Spanish and Portuguese settlements were often missions operated by Catholic religious orders and military forts rather than family-oriented communities.
In contrast with the officially sponsored Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the Jamestown settlement was an early capitalist venture, a private colony, not a government operation. Its intention was to find ways of making profit in North America from animals, minerals, and vegetables.
The difficult first decade at Jamestown included many mistakes such as ruinous competition among leaders, a mixed relationship with the Native inhabitants—sometimes good, but largely bad; a swampy location that bred disease; insufficient re-supply ships from the Virginia Company; terrible luck in the chief supply expedition getting marooned by a hurricane in Bermuda for a year; an unsuccessful experiment in military rule; the sheer bad luck in settling during the “drought of a century,” and a period of starvation that led to some examples of cannibalism. The record of the early years is not good, but it is useful to remember that everything they did was an experiment. Later colonies could learn from their mistakes.
The Virginia Company had learned that those who were given land of their own after laboring their seven years for the company produced far larger crops than when laboring only for the Company. Their excess production could feed new settlers. Private ownership of land thus became a key to recruiting new settlers and investors in the Company. Large land grants were made to large investors and to top government officials in Virginia, while the former laborers received small grants.
After years of failure to find a product to export and make money for the Virginia Company, the settlers finally found gold—but it was a golden leaf—tobacco, not a metal. That market crop with a high demand in Europe attracted new settlers and some families, and the colony was beginning to thrive. But it needed better direction and leadership.
That direction came from Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629), who led the Virginia Company reforms in the government and operation of the colony. The son of the Archbishop of York, Sandys studied at Oxford and became a close friend of the important Anglican theologian Richard Hooker. Sandys espoused a moderate form of Anglicanism in opposition to the radical Puritans and envisioned a vital role for the church in Virginia, especially in conversion of the Indians.
Sandys became a member of the governing council of the Virginia Company where he espoused the idea of a Christian Commonwealth for Virginia. He was well-versed in political theories and was influenced by church teachings and civic humanism. A key goal of a commonwealth was to strike a happy balance between private enterprise and the public good. Vital aspects of such a commonwealth included:
Just laws and the rule of law
Local self-government
Representative legislative body working with governor and council
Protection of private property
Public works to benefit the whole community
A diversified economy based on a variety of crops and of industries
Encouragement of trade
Anglican church integrating English settlers with converted Native Americans
First of the Big Three: An Elected Representative Legislature
A new charter from the company in 1619 comprised a sort of Magna Carta that provided
A Council of State appointed by the company to work with the governor and to serve as the superior court for the colony
An elected General Assembly
In late June 1619, the new governor, Sir George Yeardley, sent writs to the four boroughs and seven plantations for the freeholders and tenants to elect two representatives by a plurality of votes. These would be the burgesses in that first General Assembly, in the body that was known as the House of Burgesses until the American Revolution in 1776.
On Friday 30 July 1619 that first General Assembly met in the new timber frame church at Jamestown. The group consisted of the governor, his four appointed councilors, the secretary of the colony—all these appointed by the Virginia Company—and the twenty-two elected burgesses.
This is one of the most important events in the history of the British North American colonies.
The group organized and operated in the same manner as Parliament in England. The meeting opened with prayer by the Anglican minister in Jamestown, and then each member swore an oath of allegiance to the king. The group was divided into committees to review the Great Charter of the Colony from the Company, to find items of concern; to review the governor’s instructions and report recommendations on turning them into laws.
The areas in which they developed laws included:
setting tobacco prices
regulating trading voyages in the bay
enforcing contracts with tradesmen, tenants, and servants
encouraging production of a range of crops
laws regulating drunkenness, gambling, idleness
advice on maintaining peaceful relations with Indians
assignment of punishment of moral offenses to ministers and church wardens as in England, rather than to civil courts.
Finally, the Assembly functioned as a Court and heard some cases of grievances brought by settlers in matters of debt, land, and interpersonal relations. If we think carefully about it, this body set the precedent for the operation of all our state legislatures and of our Congress down to the present. It is hard to overestimate its importance in the development of this nation.
Governor Yeardley prorogued the assembly until 1 March 1620. This was an important move, as that indicated this elected representative legislative body was to be a continuing part of creating an orderly Christian Commonwealth in Virginia under the rule of law.