By the second decade of the seventeenth century, it was becoming clear that bringing the gospel to the natives had taken second place to taking the land, and indeed their very culture, from them. Foreshadowing an approach to America’s indigenous peoples that would persist well into the twentieth century, the Virginia Company had issued instructions to Thomas Gates that he should acquire some native children to ensure that they were “brought up in your language, and manners.” Failing that, Lord De la Warr was advised the following year, they should send some “three or foure of them to England” where they might be instructed in English ways.13 Quite what this was meant to achieve in the long run remains something of a mystery, but it did reveal the start of a shift in attitude toward the Powhatan Confederacy. Later, after the death of Powhatan and the assumption of power by his brother, Opechancanough, an accommodation was reached whereby entire families, rather than just their children, were brought into the English colonies. The underlying impulse, however, to render the Indian invisible, as it were, was a portent of trouble to come.
Whereas Smith, while he remained unconvinced that natives and newcomers could readily merge into a brave new multiracial society, was nevertheless clearly fascinated by the variety of indigenous cultures that he encountered, those that replaced him in Jamestown were not so appreciative of native culture, and indeed increasingly suspicious of it. As the Virginia Colony became established in the New World, it sought to fulfill the promises held out by Ralegh, Hakluyt, Hariot, and Johnson - to create a new England in the new world, and to force both the land and its people into an English social, political, and religious mold. This had not been the founding intentions of the Virginia Company, but the reality, as distinct from the dream, of colonization, introduced many changes. Much of what eventually ensured Jamestown’s survival lay beyond the company’s control and had little to do with removing the indigent poor from England.
In the end, it came down to two valuable commodities in the seventeenth-century world: tobacco and slaves. Neither had figured in the Virginia Company’s plans, and for many years the cultivation of tobacco was restricted in favor of other crops. This early battle against the evil weed was doomed to failure. Tobacco simply commanded too high a price, and would become the economic and, indeed, social boost that the colony needed. In 1619, the company first shipped some ninety “younge, handsome and honestly educated maydes” to Virginia as wives for the colonists. The expectation was that “wifes, children and familie” might make the men in Virginia “more settled & lesse moveable.” The absence of family ties not only meant that Virginia would always be reliant on incomers from England to sustain the plantations, but those who did travel there, the company feared, did so only “to get something and then to returne to England.”14 The fortunate recipients of this early speed-dating enterprise paid for their wives’ passage in tobacco. Yet tobacco needed land, and it needed labor, more labor than the colony was yet in a position to provide. The long-term solution to that particular difficulty arrived in the same year, i6i9, when a Dutch trader brought the first Africans to the Chesapeake, and a whole new imaginative world opened up for America’s earliest immigrants and for the land that their ambitions had led them to.
The Origins of a Redeemer Nation
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.
(John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” 1630)
The arrival of English women in Virginia in i6i9 was designed to ensure the long-term stability of the settlement, to make it resemble more closely the world from which the English settlers, at least, had come. However, the introduction of African labor, which in time became the enslaved labor that would form the economic bedrock of the free-born English colonies, ensured that the society constructed in the New World would bear little resemblance to the world that the English and the Africans had left behind. Although one group arrived voluntarily and the other was coerced, both faced the challenge of constructing a new life in a new world. The arrival of the first Africans, too, highlighted the fact that the North American colonies were part of an emerging economic and social Atlantic world. So, too, was England, of course, but as the end-producer of the most obvious comestible commodities the New World had to offer - sugar, tobacco, cocoa - the actual processes, and personal costs of production were not as evident in the English communities from which Virginia’s settlers came as they would be in the Americas.
The very existence of the Virginia Company signaled the rise of the new capitalist forces at work in this period, and in particular the emergence of a powerful merchant class that recognized the opportunities offered by the New World and had the ability to raise the venture capital that America’s
early “adventurers” had lacked. As the Virginia Company discovered, however, raising the money was perhaps easier than controlling the men in whose hands its investments lay. A broader range and higher rates of productivity were necessary to drive this early capitalist revolution, but productivity was notably lacking in the early Chesapeake with the exception of one crop - tobacco.
Although its initial quest for wealth in the New World had not gone entirely to plan, by the summer of i620, the Virginia Company was optimistic about the future. While acknowledging “the many disasters, wherewith it pleased Almighty God to suffer the great Enemy of all good Actions and his Instruments, to encounter and interrupt, to oppresse and keepe weake, this noble Action for the planting of Virginia, with Christian Religion, and English people,” it reported that the colony “hath as it were on a sodaine growne to double that height, strength, plenty, and prosperity, which it had in former times attained.” Echoing earlier reports, the Company denied rumors that “sought unjustly to staine and blemish that Countrey, as being barren and unprofitable” and stressed that Virginia was, in fact, “rich, spacious and well watered,” a land “abounding with all Gods naturall blessings” and one “too good for ill people.” The degree to which the Company’s imagination had expanded by this time, both to accept the absence of obvious gold deposits and to accommodate the possibilities of the New World, was evident in its emphasis on Virginia as a one-stop-shop opportunity for England. Goods - furs, hemp, flax, wood - hitherto acquired at great expense from, among others, Russia, Norway, or Germany were readily available, whereas the “Wines, Fruite, and Salt of France and Spaine; The Silkes of Persia and Italie, will be found also in Virginia, and in no kinde of worth inferiour.”1