Brase’s Case

This chapter reconsiders the foundations of slave law in Virginia in the years immediately following 1619. In contrast to prevailing trends in English law, the colonial experience in Virginia granted justices extensive discretion in the application of English legal traditions, and they used this discretion to craft a customary law of slavery long before the articulation of formal statutes regulating the treatment of enslaved people. This chapter offers a detailed case study of how this process worked by examining the case of Brase, an African man captured from a Spanish ship and brought to Virginia in 1625. It recovers the legal innovations that the justices developed to ensure that Brase would be held in bondage despite the lack of a formal law of slavery in Virginia.

“The Savages of Virginia Our Project”

This chapter investigates how debates about “the Indians” or the Powhatans informed Jacobean political thought. By calling it “our project,” Gray rendered “the savages” a collective concern, one that implicated Londoners as well as colonists. Through an examination of several sources and events from 1619, contrasted against the criticisms and bitter accusations of mismanagement following the 1622 massacre and the dissolution of the Virginia Company several years later, this study suggests that the English experience in Jamestown played a vital role in shaping nascent concepts of imperium in the early seventeenth century and that English interactions with indigenous tribes played a crucial part in metropolitan articulations of civil society. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that the earliest attempts at colonization was not just a case of the English acting on America but also that America and its peoples informed English discourses of state and society from its inception, far earlier than is generally assumed.

Virginia and the Amazonian Alternative

This chapter considers 1619 Virginia alongside contemporary efforts to colonize the Guianas. Though 1619 was a momentous year for Virginia, it is only in hindsight that we can recognize its importance. The 1619 charter for the Amazon Company demonstrates the appeal of contemporary alternatives. From the early seventeenth century, South American colonization schemes competed with those to the north. Many colonial enthusiasts argued that surer riches would be found closer to the Iberian empires. Building upon the explorations of Walter Ralegh, colonists there forged long-lasting indigenous alliances that were held as an ideal for the rest of the century. Guiana settlers and promoters also embraced tobacco as a viable export commodity at a time when the Virginia Company was admonishing its colonists for growing it. Yet, the Guiana settlements also provoked the protest of Spanish diplomats. The ultimate failure of the Amazon Company redirected investments and enthusiasm towards Virginia and other English settlements.

“These Doubtfull Times, between Us and the Indians”

The proceedings of the assembly that convened at Jamestown in late July 1619 reflect the delegates’ central concerns. As one might expect, the Burgesses devoted considerable time to topics such as master-servant relationships and the marketing of tobacco. They devoted even more attention—roughly 25 percent of the published proceedings—to Native Americans and Indian traders. Something new and troubling was afoot: as governor George Yeardley warned, these were “doubtful times, between us and the Indians.” Although Yeardley framed this in binary terms, as an issue between Natives and newcomers, most people knew better. These were doubtful times within Indian country as well, for Powhatan’s successor Itoyatin and his external chief Opechancanough faced challenges internally and on the edges of their paramount chiefdom. Yeardley’s “us” also elided significant differences among the Jamestown colonists, centering on the degree and character of their involvement with Native people and their competing visions of how Indians might fit in to the colony’s future.

From John Smith to Adam Smith

This chapter explores the long-term legacies of 1619 for the construction of an English settler colonial model. While contemporary Irish plantation projects gave the English colonizing movement considerable experience with settler colonization in densely populated and recognizably European areas, that experience by no means prepared that movement for planting in far-off lands inhabited by unfamiliar people with exotic cultures. As England’s first sustained experience with settler colonization at a distance, the Virginia colony played a foundational role in identifying, confronting, and working out solutions to the many problems that colonizers throughout the Anglo-American world would face as they created in the Americas the powerful and highly successful settler empire that many observers, including Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776), would celebrate during the last half of the eighteenth century. This essay treats the Virginia colony as a learning laboratory and offer a systematic survey of the problems the colony confronted and how its solutions would inform and influence later English settler colonizing projects.

The Company-Commonwealth

The Virginia Company, this chapter argues, was not merely a commercial enterprise, a joint-stock corporation, created in order to attract and invest resources in the colony of Virginia. It was a conceived by its members as a political society in itself whose purpose was, in turn, to establish political society in Virginia, to some degree in its own image. It was conceived in terms of the language of the commonwealth—a society of self-governing virtuous citizens—and also in terms of the language of greatness, a company that, through its own pursuit of glory, would augment the power of the state in its rivalry with other European states. These political languages were largely consistent with the political thought employed in English society more generally in the seventeenth century. As a civil society that was separate from the national stage, however, the Company also afforded a space in which it was possible to experiment with political discourses that were regarded as dangerous in other contexts. Two such discourses were the interrelated traditions of democracy and reason of state, which came to the fore in the final years of the Company.

“A Part of That Commonwealth Hetherto Too Much Neglected”

This chapter explores the creation of Virginia's General Assembly in a late Renaissance intellectual and political context in which safeguarding the colony's public took on new urgency. It attends to the ideals of the public and commonwealth that animated Virginia Company leaders like Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury, and Sir Edwin Sandys and recovers the particular political crisis the colony confronted in early 1618 from two different directions. In the first place, corporate entities like the Virginia Company faced new pressures from King James I and his Treasurer Sir Lionel Cranfield, who had come to eye such public repositories as sources of wealth to which the king had a rightful claim. The greater threat, however, came from the machinations of Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick, who had similarly come to regard Virginia's public stock as fair game, though for God's purposes rather than the king's. It was immediately after Warwick launched a raid on Virginia's public stock that the Virginia Company created the General Assembly. Its purpose would be to stand sentinel against any such pillaging missions, whether by royal treasurers or Puritan pirates, in the future.

Private Plantation

In addition to the other momentous events of 1619, the year also marked the Virginia Company’s first widespread granting of private land to colonists. The private land grants have long been seen as a natural outgrowth of a peculiarly English colonial desire to own and exploit land in the Americas, and as a first step toward the construction of a Lockean liberal settler society. This essay challenges these assumptions by recovering the long and complex debate within the Virginia Company about the virtues and pitfalls of offering planters private land. It traces different schemes for establishing landownership and connects them to competing ideas about market regulation and political economy in contemporary England. The essay ultimately argues that the system of plantation estates that developed in the 1620s, operated by private planters with indentured laborers but retaining some civic functions, was a compromise between these two models. It represented a unique evolution of English thinking about landownership, commerce, and civic order, which can only be fully understood by acknowledging the complex negotiation over private land that wracked the Virginia Company in the late 1610s.

“Poore Soules”

This chapter explores the emergence of indentured servitude in Virginia in the late 1610s. It focuses upon the Virginia Company’s increasing efforts to transport vagrants and paupers, who were often children, to the colony to serve as bound laborers. The chapter traces the roots of this policy to the political and social theories about commonwealth in Jacobean England and to the institution of pauper apprenticeship. It also uncovers the practical way in which the transportation of children and vagrants was organized in London and the ways in which it met with resistance from both local leaders and those facing transportation. The chapter offers a newly detailed analysis of the foundations of the system of bound English labor that became so critical to the development of seventeenth-century American colonialism.

Bermuda and the Beginnings of Black Anglo-America

Although 1619 stands out as a landmark year in early American history, Virginia was not the first English colony to import African laborers; that dubious distinction belongs to its Atlantic sister colony, Bermuda. The first arrived in 1616, and, by the time Jamestown's "twenty and odd negroes" landed, Bermuda had a hundred or more black residents. This essay examines why and how Bermuda's English colonizers deliberately imported African experts from the Spanish Caribbean to solve the problem of properly curing island-grown tobacco and argues that their contributions were critical to the colony's success. Integrated into the island's fledgling society as farmers, neighbors, knowledgeable consultants, and fellow Christians, black islanders were highly visible participants in Bermuda's full settlement. As Virginians wrestled with the novelty of incorporating Africans into their colony, they needed only to look to the east to see Bermuda's nascent slave system emerging.