Virginia

Sources

The Virginia Company. Even before there was a Virginia Company there was Sir Walter Raleigh and his dream of a colony in America. The colony at Roanoke had been his venture, and even though it failed he still had hopes for an English settlement in the New World. But Raleigh was bankrupt, and in seeking support for a colony he turned to traders and businessmen such as Sir Thomas Smith, first president of the East India Company, which had just been chartered in 1600. It would be men like Smith, wealthy merchants, rather than men like Raleigh, gentlemen-adventurers, who bankrolled early colonies as business ventures. That they all lost money must be attributed not to their foolishness but to ignorance of what settlements in the New World truly cost. By 1605 England was poised for greater adventures overseas. That year it had signed a peace with Spain that meant energy and monies could go elsewhere. Several investors petitioned the Crown to incorporate two companies—the London Company and Plymouth Company.

In 1606 the Virginia Company of London and of Plymouth was chartered, gfiving them rights to the land between the Cape Fear River of North Carolina and Bangor, Maine. The northern part of this huge grant fell to the Plymouth part of the company, the southern half to the London part. Government of each colony was administered by a thirteen-man council in America that took its orders from a joint royal council of thirteen in England. The charter further provided that the colonists and their descendants “shall have and enjoy all liberties, franchises and immunities” as if they had been living in England—in other words, the rights of Englishmen.

Valuable Lessons. Experience soon showed that the council in Virginia was unworkable, and in 1609 the company rewrote the charter, putting one man in charge. Gone too was the royal council, and instead the company in England took charge. It also reorganized its stockholders since it needed more money. Now called The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia, or the Virginia Company for short, it counted among its investors various corporations such as the Company of Ironmongers and the Company of Fishmongers {mongers means sellers) as well as 659 individuals. Yet problems in the colony undermined these efforts as well. Once tobacco was found to be a profitable crop, those hired to work the company lands chose to work their own instead, and laborers sent to work for the company found their way onto the personal farms of local officials. By 1616, the year that profits were to be divided among those who invested in 1609, no profits existed. Since Virginia needed people the company promised free land. In 1618 the company reorganized again, this time promising a more liberal and less authoritarian government and division of Virginia into four large settlements. The next year the company sent over 1,216 people of whom about half were laborers for the company; it also permitted a general assembly. Called the House of Burgesses, it was the first representative elected body in America. But the days of the company were limited. Even though it continued to send over settlers, high mortality rates considerably reduced their numbers. In 1622 came the crowning blow when the local Indians rose up and murdered one-third of the settlers, 347 “men, women, and children, most by their owne weapons.” On 24 May 1624 King James I dissolved the bankrupt Virginia Company, and Virginia became the first royal colony. Other companies in Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and New Netherland would try to underwrite colonies, but in the end the needs of such a complicated enterprise outstripped the available financial resources; none would succeed in North America.

PARENTAL DEATH

Even in an age used to early death, the mortality rates in Virginia between 1655 and 1724 were considered disastrous. The following table shows what happened in Middlesex County. Along with parental death it shows child mortality (infants, who comprise the most deaths in any population, are not included here since the table picks up children already aged one year). Of the 239 children aged one who comprised the “population at risk,” 164, or 69 percent, lived to reach the age of twenty-one or married, whichever came first. Of this 164, only 26.8 percent still had both parents living; 37.2 percent had only one parent still alive; and a full 36 percent had lost both parents.

Jamestown. The settlement of the new colony of Virginia began under an unlucky star. First, the three ships carrying the new settlers were kept by adverse winds for a full six weeks within sight of England. They finally arrived on the shore of Virginia almost five and one-half months later, in May 1607, only to place their settlement on a small peninsula on the James River surrounded by a marsh. This location proved to be especially unhealthy as

during the late summer and early autumn the force of the water coming down the river from the mountains was not enough to get past the tide coming up from the Chesapeake Bay. Not only did the colonists suffer from salt poisoning by drinking brackish water, but also the river became an open sewer and a breeding ground for dysentery and typhoid. Disease was not the only problem facing this first English colony. The Virginia Company had organized a government by committee, but the names of those in charge were kept secret until the ships reached Virginia.

Smith. The seven-man council of state was composed of men who despised and feared one another. Capt. John Smith, the most able of the seven, was already under arrest when they landed. He eventually became the leader of the colony only because three of the seven had returned to England and the other three had died. It fell to Smith to organize his unruly and unsuitable settlers into some sort of workforce. The ships he arrived in had carried 104 men, but 48 of these were gentlemen, defined as men who did not earn their living with their own hands. Only 24 were laborers. By September 46 settlers had died. Smith also had to contend with a well-organized and suspicious Indian population already living on the river. Relations were difficult from the beginning, with Smith eager to negotiate peaceful relations and wary of the excesses of his own men but also willing to force the Indians to provide grain for the settlers. Fall brought some relief as migrating wildfowl returned to the rivers and the Indians were willing to trade meat and corn. In January 1608 the town burned. Only the arrival of supply ships from England kept the colony afloat. In the fall of 1609 Smith was badly injured in a gunpowder accident and left for England, never to return. The colony quickly fell apart, and the winter of 1609–1610 became known as the “starving time,” brought about by not only a shortage of foodstuffs but also the hoarding and selling of what there was so that some ate while others died. Of the 490 settlers in Virginia when Smith left, only 60 had survived the winter. In 1610 a new governor, Lord De La Warr, a seasoned soldier with experience in Ireland, arrived. Jamestown was now under a form of martial law, and the men there were forced to work. But Virginia’s viability was not yet assured. In 1614 the settler John Rolfe was responsible for helping the colony find its moorings. First, his marriage to Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, head of a loose federation of neighboring Indians, brought about a truce. Second, Rolfe experimented with growing a West Indian species of tobacco and found that he could produce a crop of high enough quality to fetch good prices in England. Virginia’s tobacco boom began, and Jamestown settlers started growing tobacco in the very streets of the town. With its economic destiny set, Jamestown and the Virginia colony began the path toward a plantation economy that it continued throughout the colonial period.

Tobacco. The emergence of tobacco as a cash crop changed the destiny of Virginia. Whereas in 1616 the colony exported 2,300 pounds of tobacco, by 1626 it sent to England 260,000 pounds of tobacco. What James I had called a “stinking weed” and threatened to outlaw now paid enough in taxes that he quickly came to rely upon it. The emergence of an export crop changed the labor situation in Virginia. Even before the tobacco boom the company had sent over indentured servants, who usually worked four to seven years in exchange for free passage to Virginia, room, board, and maybe a little land at the end of their service. With the discovery of tobacco the need for labor increased. Virginians also fanned out, occupying small settlements along the James River. Many of these were crude, and life was harsh and often short. Indentured male servants aged fourteen to forty worked on meager rations and less protection. As Richard Frethorne wrote to his parents in 1623, “And when we are sick there is nothing to comfort us; for since I came out of the ship I never ate anything but peas, and loblollie (that is water gruel). As for deer or venison I never saw any since I came into this land. There is indeed some fowl, but we are not allowed to go and get it, but must work hard both early and late for a mess of water gruel and a mouthful of bread and beef.”

Field Hands. The labor needs of tobacco were met by Englishmen for the first fifty years or so of Virginia’s history, but beginning in the 1660s black slaves began to replace white indentures even though there had been a few slaves in Virginia since 1619. Reasons for this shift in labor included Virginia’s reputation as a death trap for whites, better job prospects in England, the opening of new colonies in America that needed labor, and the increasing availability and decreasing cost of slaves. Virginians also learned that tobacco impoverished soils, and in order to grow a high-quality plant they needed to put fresh lands into cultivation. Planters spread out along the various rivers since this was where the better soils lay and rivers provided the easiest way to transport the heavy casks of tobacco leaf. This settlement pattern assured a more scattered population and an isolated one. Virginia did not attract many nationalities other than the English until after the 1740s when the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania brought in Scotch-Irish and Germans. For the tidewater region the chief diversity was racial. Close ties to England forged by tobacco also affected the religious diversity of the colony. Most were members of the Church of England, although Quakers were tolerated. In the eighteenth century Presbyterians and Baptists emerged, especially in the backcountry.

Mortality. The history of colonial Virginia (and Maryland as well) was in many ways shaped by the high mortality rates for those who lived there. The earliest years under company rule were a disaster as far more people died than came in and few children were born to offset the losses. More than half of those who stepped off the boat with Captain Smith died within a few months. Dysentery and typhoid did most of the damage, but poor nutrition, overwork, and occasional losses to Indians added to the chance of early death. Richard Frethorne listed 20 people who had died in his master’s household in a four-month period. He estimated that of the 150 that come over with him, two-thirds had died before the first year. In the three years before the Indian massacre of 1622 some 3,470 people had been sent to Virginia to join the 700 already there, for a total of 4,170. But right after the massacre only 1,240 survived. The Indians had killed 347, but another 2,700 souls had also perished in three years. Virginia’s climate, marshes, and seasonally slow rivers undermined the colony’s health.

Malaria. Once malaria was introduced into America, first a less virulent strain from England and then a more deadly type from Africa that came with the slaves, rivers and swamps provided the breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that carried the disease. (South Carolina and Georgia, which both grew wetland rice in low-country marshes, fared even worse.) High mortality rates had an especially depressing effect upon family formation, already undermined by the high ratio of men to women sent to the colony. In late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century Middlesex County, Virginia, of 239 children born between 1655 and 1724, only 44 reached either marriage or age twenty-one (whichever came first) with both parents alive. In some cases the parents had died; in some the children had died. Grandparents rarely survived long enough to know their grandchildren. Men and women married serially as spouses died, leaving them with young children. Children, in turn, lived in households with stepparents and stepsiblings. Many growing up had no adult relative to turn to for help and advice. Among the indentured servants, age at first marriage was high since servants were not allowed to marry. Late marriages for women also meant fewer births. For those not servants, men and women married younger than they did in Old England or New England where ages at death were much higher and more parents lived to see their children into adulthood. Virginia’s population grew relatively slowly. In 1625 the total population was 1,300; in 1653, 14,300; and in 1699, 62,800. These figures include Africans, but their number is hard to determine; one estimate suggests that by 1699 there were between 6,000 and 10,000. The eighteenth century saw a large growth in the black population. In 1754 there were 168,000 whites and 116,000 blacks in Virginia.

Sources

Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964);

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975);

Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, volume 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Virginia Historical Society, 1960);

Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, “‘Now-Wives and Sons-in-Law’: Parental Death in a Seventeenth-Century Virginia County,” in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth-Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, edited by Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 153–182.