American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

Virginia, named in honor of their queen, Elizabeth I, a supposed virgin.

Initially, the English colonizers pursued get-rich-quick schemes: a search for gold mines on land and for Spanish treasure ships by sea. When those schemes proved expensive and deadly failures, the colonizers gradually turned to the slower and more laborious development of plantations.

In 1616, the colonists belatedly discovered their prime commodity in tobacco, which permitted an explosive growth in population, territory, and wealth. That expansion escalated to a crisis of confrontation between the English colonists and the Algonquian Indians, who defended their lands and culture against the intruders.

Because sober merchants wisely sought safer investments in trade routes closer to home, the earliest English colonial promoters were dreamers and gamblers driven by their visionary imagination.

The realm included the distinct kingdoms of England, Wales, and Ireland and, after 1603, Scotland as well.

After all, in 1571 an Indian uprising had destroyed the Spanish mission at Chesapeake Bay.

More thoroughly commercial, the English meant to Christianize the Indians by first absorbing them as economic subordinates.

In 1606, London investors incorporated the Virginia Company and King James granted them a charter to colonize and govern Virginia.

Seeking some security from Spanish discovery and attack, the colonists ascended the broad James River about sixty miles, to establish their settlement, Jamestown, beside a marsh on the north bank. They named both river and town to flatter their new king.

the colonists died in droves from disease and hunger. Of the initial 104, only 38 were alive nine months later.

In December 1609 there were 220 colonists; after an especially deadly winter, only 60 remained alive by the next spring. One starving colonist killed and ate his wife, for which he was tried, convicted, and burned at the stake.

Between 1607 and 1622 the Virginia Company transported some 10,000 people to the colony, but only 20 percent were still alive there in 1622. An English critic belatedly remarked, “Instead of a plantacion, Virginia will shortly get the name of a slaughterhouse.”

Arriving with alluring misconceptions of a rich and easy land, the colonists experienced the hard realities as a demoralizing shock from which many never recovered.

By 1616 the Virginia Company had transported more than seventeen hundred people to the Chesapeake and spent well over £50,000—an immense amount for that century—yet all it had to show for the investment was an unprofitable town of 350 diseased and hungry colonists.

During the later 1610s, however, the company and the colonists made two great adjustments. First, the company gave up trying directly to control the land and the laborers and instead permitted the colonists to own and work land as their private property. Indeed, the company adopted a “head-right system” that awarded land freely to men with the means to pay for their own passage (and that of others) across the Atlantic.

Led by John Rolfe, the planters learned how to raise tobacco in 1616. A New World plant long cultivated in the West Indies, tobacco had become popular for smoking in much of England and Europe.

Because tobacco plants prefer a long, hot, and humid growing season, the crop thrived in Virginia but not in England, giving the colonial farmers a comparative advantage.

Virginia’s tobacco production surged from 200,000 pounds in 1624 to 3,000,000 pounds in 1638, as the Chesapeake outstripped the West Indies to become the principal supplier of tobacco to Europe.

The expanding English plantations brought voracious and far-ranging cattle and pigs into the vicinity of Indian villages, with devastating consequences for native cornfields.

Disease and war reduced the Virginia Algonquians from 24,000 in 1607 to only 2,000 by 1669. Losing almost all of their lands, the survivors became confined on small reservations, surrounded by colonial settlements.

Responding to colonial opportunity, emigration from England to the Chesapeake more than doubled from about 8,000 per decade during the 1630s and 1640s to 18,000 per decade during the 1650s and 1660s.

The Chesapeake colonial population grew from 13,000 in 1650 to 41,000 in 1670.

The Chesapeake tobacco boom came too late to save the teetering Virginia Company from bankruptcy and foreclosure. Already encumbered with debt, the company could not cope with the losses suffered from Opechancanough’s destructive first rebellion. In 1624 the impatient crown terminated the company charter, taking control of Virginia as the first royal colony in the new English empire. The crown acted to secure the growing revenue generated by the tobacco trade.

In 1632 the crown set aside about twelve million acres of land at the northern head of Chesapeake Bay as a second colony, named Maryland after the queen of the new monarch, Charles I (son of James).

During the seventeenth century, the English developed two types of colonial governments: royal and proprietary. Relatively few until the eighteenth century, the royal colonies belonged to the crown. Initially more numerous, the proprietary colonies belonged to private interests.

as the promoters had predicted, the Chesapeake absorbed thousands of poor laborers considered redundant and dangerous in England.

But Virginia and Maryland attracted few aristocrats or gentry, except as occasional governors who soon returned home. Instead, hard-driving merchants and planters of middling origins created the greatest fortunes and claimed the highest offices.

During the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake’s leading men lacked the mystique of a traditional ruling class. Competitive, ruthless, avaricious, crude, callous, and insecure, they were very touchy about their origins, qualifications, and conduct.

In a world where dependence was the norm, independence was an especially cherished and vulnerable status. Dreading a relapse into dependence upon a master, the small planters chronically feared the loss of their land to mounting debts, bad harvests, a poor market, Indian raids, heavy taxes, or corrupt rulers.

The proportion of landowners constricted as the more successful planters consolidated larger plantations at the expense of smaller, less profitable farms.

Class differences seemed less threatening as both the common and great planters became obsessed with preserving their newly shared sense of racial superiority over the African slaves.

In 1625, men composed 74 percent of Virginia’s population; only 10 percent were women; the remaining 16 percent were children.

The prevalence of single men deprived the Chesapeake colonies of a stable foundation of little commonwealths, increasing the social volatility.

Beginning in 1619, some planters bought a few slaves imported from Africa, but slavery was not yet economical because slaves were too expensive to risk where few newcomers, either black or white, survived more than five years.

Given the short life expectancy of all Chesapeake laborers, planters wisely preferred to buy English indentured servants for four or five years rather than purchase the more expensive lifelong slaves from Africa.

The common people ate with their fingers, sharing a bowl and drinking from a common tankard, both passed around the table. They usually ate a boiled porridge of corn, beans, peas, and pork, washed down with water or cider.

Instead of establishing an enduring land of opportunity, the Chesapeake’s brief age of social mobility led to a plantation society of great wealth and increasing poverty.

Because Berkeley granted the best public lands in large tracts to his favorites, freedmen could rarely obtain their own farms after 1665. Instead, most had to rent land from the wealthiest planters at the rate of 10 to 25 percent of their tobacco crop. Such tenants composed about a third of Virginia’s population by 1675. A crown investigation reported that land-hoarding was “one of the most apparent causes of the misery and mischiefs that attend this colony by occasioning the Planters to straggle to such remote distances when they cannot find land nearer to seat themselves but by being Tenants, which in a Continent they think hard.”

Rather than pay rent, many freedmen moved to the frontier, where they violently competed with the Indians.

Although Bacon attacked a royal governor, he did not seek independence from England. In 1676 no Virginian imagined that independence was feasible or desirable. Considering themselves English people who happened to live in America, the Virginians knew that their economically dependent colony could not survive in a world of hostile empires—Dutch, French, and Spanish—without protection from England and without access to the English market. Proclaiming their loyalty to England, Bacon and his supporters insisted that they acted only against a corrupt governor who had betrayed the king by mistreating his loyal subjects.

By wooing the common planters, Jeffreys hoped to strengthen crown power at the expense of the great planters.

Fearing a future reassertion of crown power, the great planters felt compelled to build a more popular political base by becoming more solicitous of the smaller planters.

Frontier wars urged poor whites to see a better future in the dispossession of Indians rather than in rebellion against their colonial elite. In eighteenth-century Virginia, the path of least resistance was expansion outward rather than rebellion within.

Almost all visitors considered the eighteenth-century Virginians both exceptionally hospitable and genial but shallow and materialistic.

In 1698, Parliament lifted the monopoly slave trade conducted by the Royal African Company, permitting an influx of smaller competitors who sought out new markets, including the Chesapeake. The slave numbers surged from a mere 300 in 1650 to 13,000 by 1700, when Africans constituted 13 percent of the Chesapeake population. During the early eighteenth century, their numbers and proportion continued to grow, reaching 150,000 people and 40 percent by 1750.

The planters shifted from servants to slaves for economic reasons, but that change incidentally improved their security against another rebellion by angry freedmen.

Consequently, in shifting to African slaves, the great planters acquired yet another reason to cultivate the common white men. Instead of a threat to social order, the armed whites became essential to its defense against slave rebellion.

As slaves became more numerous and more conspicuously African, masters became convinced that only pain and fear could motivate them.

Puritans came from all ranks of English society, including a few aristocrats, but most belonged to the “middling sort” of small property holders: farmers, shopkeepers, and skilled artisans.

Puritanism reinforced the values of thrift, diligence, and delayed gratification that were essential to the well-being of the middling sort.