men of masterful temper and governing talents among them. Captain Newport
came again with supplies in the winter; and still another ship followed
him the next spring. And, besides supplies, the two ships brought a
hundred and twenty new settlers between them. But among the new-comers
there were shiftless “gentlemen” in the usual proportion; and there came
with them a jeweller, two goldsmiths, two refiners, and a perfumer,—as if
there would be need of such people! Such additions to the settlement only
made it so much the harder to develop or even maintain it; and the few
men who could rule stood out like masters among the inefficient idlers of
whom the incorporators in London had thought to make pioneers.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH’S “TRUE RELATION”]
There was one among them, Captain John Smith, to whom, in large
part at any rate, they owed their salvation from utter helplessness
and starvation. Captain Smith had a gift for narrative which his
fellow-adventurers did not have, and has set his own achievements down in
notable books whose direct and rugged ways of speech, downright temper
of action, and air of hardihood bespeak the man himself. He was not yet
thirty years of age when he began to play his part there in Virginia;
he was exasperatingly sure of himself; older men found his pretensions
wellnigh unbearable. But it was certain he had seen more of the world
and of adventure than any other man of the company. He had known and
had come to conclusions with men of many races and of every kidney, as
he had cast about the world, a soldier of fortune; and he knew how they
were to be governed, as he presently demonstrated. He rang like brass
without, no doubt, but had a quality of gold within. He was a partisan
of his own way of making a colony, and it may be colored the narratives
he wrote to be seen at home; but he was no sluggard at work, and knew
how to take the burdens of tasks which no one else would attempt. He at
least found ways of getting food from the Indians, and of making interest
with their chiefs. Though he took authority when it was not given him,
he made the lazy, “humoursome, and tuftaffety sparks” of the settlement
work, upon penalty of being set across the broad river to shift for
themselves or starve; prevented would-be deserters from running away
with the boats; explored the neighboring coasts and river-courses,—for
two years and a half played his part very capably and very manfully
in keeping the struggling settlement alive, when the majority of his
comrades would have been glad to abandon it. He compelled no man to do
what he did not willingly do himself. “Gentlemen,” under the spur of his
example and command, learned to make a pleasant pastime of labor in the
forest,—so that “thirty or forty of such voluntary gentlemen,” as Master
Anas Todkill said, “would do more in a day than one hundred of the rest
that must be prest to it by compulsion,”—though doubtless “twenty good
workmen would have been better than them all.” No doubt there were others
who seconded Captain Smith in the maintenance of order and of hope, and
who worked as he did to take some hold upon the wilderness for their
principals at home; but upon him fell the chief burden of the task,
because he could carry it and prevail.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH’S MAP OF VIRGINIA, 1612]
When at last, in the autumn of 1609, he was obliged to take ship for
England, dangerously wounded by an explosion of gunpowder, it looked
as if the worst were over at Jamestown. The company at home had been
very busy getting colonists, and had sent them over in goodly numbers.
There were about five hundred persons at the settlement when Captain
Smith left,—a few women among them, making it look at last as if the
lonely place were to see homes established; and fifty or sixty simple
houses had been put up. But numbers, it turned out, did not improve the
living. Too many of the new-comers were “unruly gallants, packed thither
by their friends to escape ill destinies” at home; and those whom they
joined at their landing still did not know how to support themselves in
the wilderness, or how to keep themselves safe against the fevers which
lurked within the damp forests by the river. Added numbers made them a
little more helpless than before; and the six months which immediately
followed Captain Smith’s departure brought upon them a desperate
“starving time,” which no man who survived it ever forgot. There were few
to work where every one was ill and in want. They tore their rude houses
down for firewood before the winter was over; do what they could, only
sixty of them lived to see the spring again, and a gleam as of madness
played in the eyes of those who survived those days of desolation. One
came and cast his Bible into the fire, crying out that there was no God.
It was resolved at last, when they could, to abandon the desolate and
hopeless place, and the forlorn little band were actually on their way
down the river, meaning to seek food and shelter among the fishermen in
Newfoundland, when Lord Delaware met them at its very mouth with fresh
colonists and supplies sent by the company to their relief.
The radical difficulty was, not that the company did not do its part to
sustain the colony, but that it could get few colonists of the proper
sort, and was trying to do an impossible thing. The settlers sent out had
no hopes or prospects of their own, as the company managed the business
then. They were simply its servants, fed out of a common store, and
settled upon land which belonged to no one but was used for all alike. No
man would work well or with quick intelligence if he could not work at
all for himself, but must always be working for the company. First-rate
men would not consent to be the company’s drudges. And what could the
company get out of the wilderness in return for its outlay by the work
of such men as it could induce to go to Virginia upon such terms? A few
cargoes of timber, a few new varieties of medicinal herbs found in the
forests, could not make such expenditure worth while. Captain Newport,
after his second voyage out, had gone back to England with his hold full
of glistening earth, which he supposed to contain gold; but it contained
nothing of the kind. It was only shining sand.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH’S “GENERAL HISTORIE”]
Lord Delaware, though a little slow and stiff and fond of wearing fine
apparel and going about attended by officers and halberd-bearers, which
seemed fantastic enough there in the shadow of the untouched forests
of that wilderness, was a wise and capable man, and no doubt saved the
colony by coming out, that hopeless spring of 1610, as Governor and
Captain General for the company. But it needed a radically new policy to
give real life to such an enterprise; and that it did not get till Sir
Thomas Dale came the next year (1611), after Lord Delaware had gone home
stricken with a fever. The new policy it needed was one which should give
it expansion and a natural vitality of its own. It was necessary that new
towns should be built upon the river which should not be, like Jamestown,
mere stations where men worked at tasks for the company, but veritable
communities in which men should be allowed to have land of their own,
and should be given leave to work for themselves as well as for the
incorporators in London. For five years (1611-1616) Sir Thomas Dale and
Sir Thomas Gates pushed this new policy forward; and it was their new and
better way of doing things that really made and established Virginia.
“Henricus,” “Hampton,” “New Bermuda,” and other new settlements like
them, were added to Jamestown, each with its fort and its stockade, its
military commander and discipline, and each with its group of virtually
independent land-owners, free to work for themselves.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF LORD DELAWARE’S “RELATION”]
Most of the colonists, it is true, were still held at Jamestown to serve
the company, and driven to their work, as little better than slaves, by
their new task-masters. Gates and Dale came with authority to rule by
martial law, without let or mercy, and colonists of the poorer sort got
nothing but blows and rations for their bitter toil. Those who mutinied
or ran away were put to death or to the torture, if need were, to keep
the discipline of toil and order which the company’s treasurer and
merchant adventurers were now steadfastly minded should be wrung from
the colony. But the new plantations showed the way to a new life. There
were independent settlers here and there upon the river, as well as men
who were mere servants of the company. The better sort, even of the men
whom the company had sent out, were given their patches of land and
their time,—if it were only one month out of the twelve,—to do work for
themselves, in order that the new plans might thrive. A strong root as of
a little commonwealth was planted at last.
Dale and Gates both belonged to that capable race which had been bred
under Elizabeth, willing to be soldiers or sailors by turns, if only they
could be always in the thick of action. They had both been soldiers in
the Low Countries against Spain, and, now that fighting flagged there,
were both serving their turn at this interesting business of setting up
colonies. Dale was the more capable and masterful of the two: a terror
to men who would not work or were slow to obey; a leader after their own
hearts for men who meant to do their tasks and succeed,—and his stay in
Virginia was, fortunately, longer by three years than Gates’s. He was
but Gates’s deputy so long as Gates was in Virginia (1611-1613); but he
was master when Gates was gone,—prevailed even when Gates was there,—and
it was his rough and soldierly energy which made the little group of
“plantations” at least ready to last and to expand into a lusty piece of
England over sea. When he had finished his five years’ work, the colony,
though small and primitive still, was yet strong and spirited enough to
survive being despoiled by an adventurer. For a year after Dale quit the
colony it was left under the government of Captain George Yeardley, the
commandant of one of the new settlements. But in 1617 Samuel Argall came
out to take his place, and proved himself no lover of the people he had
come to govern, but a man chiefly bent upon serving his own fortunes.
He was of gentle blood, but had too long followed the sea in those
disordered times, as little better than a freebooter, to relish law or
justice overmuch; and it was excellent proof that the colony had grown
strong and able to take care of itself that it endured for full two years
his tyrannous and selfish exactions (1617-1619), and yet was ready at
the end of them to assume a sort of independence, under a new form of
government which gave it the right to make its own laws.
[Illustration]
In 1619 Captain Yeardley, now become Sir George, returned out of
England commissioned to take Argall’s place and govern the plantations
under a new and better charter. He was to call together an assembly of
representatives from the several plantations, and that assembly, sitting
with the governor’s council, was to have the full right to make laws for
the colony, subject always to the approval of the court of the company
sitting in London. Here was a very radical change. The colony was to be
no longer the mere mercantile venture of a trading company controlled
by its stockholders. It was to be a little state, governed by its
people. The fact was that a notable change had come over the company at
home. Until now it had been managed by men who were mere merchants, not
statesmen: by men who cared very little about anything but the profits
some time to be got out of the colony,—the sooner the better. Now men of
another sort were in control; the chief among them Sir Edwin Sandys, a
man who loved liberty, had a statesman’s knowledge how it was to be set
up and maintained, and wished to see the settlement thrive for its own
sake, and the noble Earl of Southampton, whom Shakespeare loved. It was
upon the initiative of these men that Sir George Yeardley had been sent
out to give the colony self-government.
Here, under the quiet forms of a mere administrative change in the
management of the colony, was a veritable revolution wrought. Sir George
brought with him a document, bearing date 13 November, 1618, which
Virginians were always thenceforth to look back to as to their Great
Charter of rights and liberties,—a document which made of their colony
a little commonwealth. It was drawn in the spirit of the men for whom
Sandys spoke. Five years ago Sir Edwin had stood in his place in the
Commons and maintained in the face of all present “that the origin of
every monarchy lay in election; that the people gave its consent to the
king’s authority upon an express understanding that there were certain
reciprocal conditions which neither the king nor the people might violate
with impunity; and that a king who pretended to rule by any other
title, such as that of conquest, might be dethroned whenever there was
force sufficient to overthrow him”; and here was now a constitution for
Virginia drawn in like spirit. No wonder the King had cried, “Choose the
devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys,” when he heard that the
Virginia Company had a mind to make this too free-thinking friend of
Hooker and Selden its chief and treasurer, and deemed it revolutionized
and made an instrument of sedition against him when it chose Sir Edwin
notwithstanding.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF LETTER OF SIR EDWIN SANDYS TO SIR GEORGE
YEARDLEY]
The new Virginian assembly met in the chancel of the church at Jamestown,
on the 30th of July, 1619. We look back with some emotion upon it, as
to the first representative assembly in America,—as to the beginning of
liberty and self-government in the English colonies; but the colonists
themselves seem to have taken it very quietly, as if they had expected
it and looked upon it almost as a matter of course in the circumstances.
Its sessions were as brief, as businesslike, and as much without ado as
if they were already an established part of the custom of the colony.
Certain necessary enactments were adopted touching trade with the
Indians, the use of tobacco as currency, the salaries and authority of
clergymen, and various other matters in which special regulations for
Virginia seemed called for; but for the rest it was taken for granted
that the common law of England was in force there, as in every other
place where there were Englishmen; and within six days of its coming
together the little assembly was ready to adjourn. The quiet and ready
capacity with which the colonists accepted this radical change in the
method of their life and government afforded the best proof that they
were fit for the responsibilities it involved.
[Illustration: FIRST VIRGINIA ASSEMBLY—GOVERNOR YEARDLEY PRESIDING]
The company, under its new leaders, was a little too eager to help the
colony to prosper. Settlers were hurried over much faster than they could
be provided for. During the three years 1619-1621 quite three thousand
five hundred came pouring in, men, women, and children, fleet after fleet
of the company’s ships appearing in the river to put their mixed hosts
of inexperienced people ashore. And yet at the end of the three years
there were but twelve hundred settlers, all told, in the colony. Cleared
land and means of immediate subsistence could not be found upon short
notice for so many. Hundreds succumbed to the dangerous fevers and sudden
distempers drawn out of the damp forests by the summer sun or the first
chill of the autumn nights. A sore process of “seasoning” tried out the
river settlements every year, and only a few could endure it. It was
reckoned inevitable that hundreds of new-comers should die. Many saw how
things stood and went back to England again. But those who remained and
survived prospered well; and the settlements grew, after all, as fast as
it was safe for them to grow.
[Illustration: LANDING OF NEGROES AT JAMESTOWN FROM A DUTCH MAN-OF-WAR,
1619]
The terms under which land was granted to settlers became more and
more liberal as things settled to an established way of life. Even
Dale had not relieved the tenants of his day from the duty of working
part of their time for the company; and the colony had been conducted,
until Sir George Yeardley came, like a joint-stock enterprise in which
only stockholders might expect private profit. But under the changed
conditions which followed Sir George’s coming virtually independent land
holding became possible on very easy terms; and, what was quite as good,
the company no longer insisted that everything bought or sold should
pass through the hands of their factor, as the only middle-man, so that
the profits of all trade might fall to them. It turned out to be a very
important thing that Mr. John Rolfe, one of the colonists, had in 1612
introduced the cultivation of tobacco; for tobacco grew amazingly well
and of exceeding good quality in Virginia, and proved a most profitable
crop. By 1620 forty thousand pounds of the delectable herb were exported
from the colony in a single year, and everybody who could was planting
tobacco instead of grain. Its leaves even became the currency of the
plantations, coin being very scarce. “The people of the South-parts of
Virginia,” it was reported, “say that God in the creation did first make
a woman, then a man, thirdly great maize or Indian wheat, and fourthly,
Tobacco.”
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF SIR THOMAS DALE]
In 1619, the year Sir George Yeardley came to set up an assembly, another
very notable thing happened. A Dutch man-of-war came into the river and
sold twenty negroes to the colonists as slaves. A handful of slaves made
no great difference at first; they were so few as scarcely to affect the
life of the colony, and it was to be many a long day before their number
was much added to. But their coming was the beginning of a great change
which was slowly, very slowly, to alter the whole face of society in the
settlements.
[Illustration: JAMESTOWN IN 1622]
By 1622 it seemed as if the chief difficulties of settlement were safely
passed and the plantations secure of their growth and permanence. But in
the very moment of assurance a great calamity came upon them, sudden,
overwhelming, like a bolt out of a clear sky. On the same day and at the
same hour (22d of March, 1622) the Indians fell upon every settlement
from the falls of the river to the bay, all the tribes of all the region
round mustering in concert to strike a single exterminating blow. The
colonists had suffered themselves to be deceived by the submissive
friendliness of their savage neighbors, and had grown strangely heedless
of danger from them. For years they had traded with them, mingled with
them, admitted them freely to their homes, taught them the expert use of
firearms, made servants and even confidants of them, without caution or
reserve, deeming them an inferior race who had accepted the white men as
masters. But the old Powhatan, a real friend of the English, who had been
ruler among the redmen ever since the landing at Jamestown, was dead.
Opecanchanough, their subtle and implacable enemy, had succeeded him. For
four years the wily savage had been drawing the tribes together for a
decisive treachery; and the dreadful secret had all the while been kept
safe behind the steady eyes of every Indian who entered the settlements.
Only at the last moment did one or two faithful native servants warn
their masters of the fearful peril; and then it was too late to do more
than put a few households on their guard. Before the sun went down that
fatal day three hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children lay dead
in the desolate settlements. Only because the Indians feared the white
man with an overmastering dread, and drew back dismayed wherever a firm
stand was made against them, if only by a single settler barred within
his house, did the terrible slaughter stop short of sheer annihilation.
No place escaped the carnage. But the colony, though stunned, was not
killed. The Indians’ courage had not held out to finish the bloody work.
There was henceforth an endless reckoning in store for them,—no longer
any friendship vouchsafed or any consideration. Steadily, relentlessly,
and by a masterful advance from settlement to settlement which they
could in no wise withstand, they were pushed back into the forests. The
very year which followed the massacre found nearly two thousand white
men still in the scattered villages and plantations of the indomitable
English, and their quiet way of growth had been resumed.
[Illustration: GRAVE OF POWHATAN]
But the great company which had founded the settlements and seen them
safely through their first struggles for life and maintenance was not to
be suffered to live. The King did not relish the politics and suspected
the loyalty of the gentlemen who were in charge of its affairs. They
were of the party which opposed him in Parliament. He had dismissed his
Parliament and meant to rule without it; but this great company, with
names upon its rolls which were among the chief of London not only but
of the kingdom itself, held meetings every quarter under his very eyes
which were like another parliament; which brought his enemies very near
him, and held the attention of the town. Those who wished his favor
or the ruin of Sandys and Southampton told him that they used their
conferences to plot sedition against him, and the councils of the company
to keep a constitutional opposition together; and he determined to be rid
of them. Every mismanaged or ill-judged affair with which the company
was chargeable was magnified and made the most of, and, despite a very
gallant fight in the law courts to save it, its charter was taken away,
and the government of the colony transferred to the hands of the King
and his ministers. It made little practical difference to the colonists.
They kept their assembly, and could live as comfortably under a governor
sent them by the King as under a governor sent them by the company. The
course of affairs in Virginia was not disturbed. But a great company was
destroyed, and the public-spirited men who had given it its best life and
the colony its first taste of self-pleasing liberty were deeply wronged.
[Illustration: ALL THAT IS LEFT OF JAMESTOWN]
_Authorities_ on the history of Virginia during the seventeenth
century. Excellent general narratives of the founding and
early development of Virginia are to be found in the first
volume of Mr. John A. Doyle’s _English Colonies in America_
and in Mr. John Fiske’s _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_.
Charles Campbell’s _History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion
of Virginia_ is the standard history of the colony; John
Burk’s _History of Virginia_ is the most solid and extensive
of the older accounts; and Robert R. Howison’s _History of
Virginia_ has the dignity of resting upon careful research.
William Stith’s _History of the First Discovery and Settlement
of Virginia_ brings the narrative down only to 1624, but is
compact of the most interesting matter, and is a significant
example of the scholarship of the middle of the eighteenth
century in Virginia. Mr. Stith was President of William and
Mary College. The Rev. Hugh Jones’s _Present State of Virginia_
was published in 1724, and is an excellent early authority.
Miss Ann Maury’s _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_ contains the
authentic records and letters of three generations of a family
driven from France to Virginia by the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, and affords a very intimate picture of the life of
more than a century. The Rev. E. D. Neill, in his _History of
the Virginia Company of London_, his _Virginia Vetusta_, and
his _Virginia Carolorum_, has brought together a vast deal of
scattered information out of which very direct impressions may
be got of the life and history of the colony. Bishop Meade,
in his _Old Churches and Families of Virginia_, has brought
together an extraordinary mass of authentic details, most of
which relate to the eighteenth, but many of which belong to the
seventeenth century.