King James directed his colonists to name their town after him, and they were politically-correct enough to rename "Powhatan's River" as the James River.
King James directed his colonists to name their town after him, and they were politically-correct enough to rename "Powhatan's River" as the James River.
Christopher Newport followed his orders and brought the 104 colonists far upstream from Hampton Roads when selecting the site for Jamestown. The colonial capital struggled through hard times initially. England had experience with settling Ireland, but Virginia was far different.
Powhatan skillfully milked the colonists for ornamental copper and beads, plus the iron tools (hatchets, needles, etc.) that dramatically improved Algonquian agriculture and the manufacture of clothing. He even obtained guns and training to use them. The English were aliens who just appeared without warning in his territory, and Powhatan restricted their expansion outside the settlement for several years.
The English had abandoned Roanoke Island twice in 1584 and again in 1585 before the third colony in 1587 was "lost." Jamestown was abandoned too, in 1610. After the 1609-10 winter known today as the "Starving Time," the English settlers crowded aboard ship and fled Virginia. They sailed down to the mouth of the James River, headed home in defeat - where to their surprise they met Lord De le Ware, arriving from England with new supplies and new colonists. The colonists had not burned the fort at Jamestown before leaving, nor had Powhatan - so the English were able to return to Jamestown and start over again in June, 1610.
The colony struggled along through the first Anglo-Powhatan War in 1609-14, which ended essentially when Powhatan decided to adopt other tactics and signaled peace by allowing his daughter Pocahontas to marry John Rolfe in 1614. Rolfe identified how the colony could make a profit, after he imported sweet-scented tobacco seeds from the West Indies and grew a crop successfully. Tobacco, an agricultural product which had no value as a food, quickly became a wildly marketable product in Europe. The colony had discovered an economic basis for survival, and all open spaces - even the streets of Jamestown, at one time - were planted in tobacco.
Jamestown did not grow into a major population center initially, because the whole colony was slow to grow even after the success of tobacco became clear. To attract immigrants, the Virginia Company allowed colonists to establish a form of self-rule via a House of Burgesses This ended the martial law imposed by Sir Thomas Dale in 1611. The elected representatives first met in July, 1619, and that group continues today as the General Assembly of Virginia.
During Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, Jamestown was destroyed. Afterwards, "the General Assembly voted to move the capital to Tyndall's Point, on the north bank of the York River opposite Yorktown - a place later known as Gloucester Point."1 However, the moved was vetoed by royal authorities in London. In the 1690's, Jamestown was still a tiny village with inadequate meeting facilities for the House of Burgesses or the General Court.
The statehouse in Jamestown burned on October 20, 1698, perhaps as a result of a fire caused by a prisoner in jail awaiting execution with nothing left to lose. Before that fire, proposals to move the capital to Middle Plantation nearby were considered too much effort. After the statehouse was destroyed and a team of students at the new College of William and Mary presented a proposal to move the capitol to their site, the House of Burgesses approved a bill to construct a new statehouse building at Wiliamsburg.
Though medical care in those days was unsophisticated, the colonists understood that the swamps between Jamestown and the mainland were not healthy places. The decision to move to Williamsburg resulted in a new capitol (building) in a new capital (seat of government). The local county seat for James City County remained at Jamestown for nearly 20 more years, however.
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Since Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America, why do school children studying the history of the United States focus on the Pilgrims? After the American Civil War ended in 1865, new public schools were established in the old Confederate states to educate the freed slaves and poor whites. Many teachers for those schools came from the northern states, especially Massachusetts.
After the horrors of the Civil War, those teachers - and many historians - preferred to highlight the heritage of the Mayflower Compact and free association in Massachusetts as the basis for American democracy. The role of the Pilgrims and Puritans who had settled in Massachusetts began to receive more attention than the role of the English who had settled Virginia. The 1619 General Assembly met in Virginia before the colonists arrived in Massachusetts, but the Virginia form of democracy led to a slave-based economy... |
1. Alonzo T. Dill and Brent Tartar, "The 'hellish Scheme' to Move the Capital," Virginia Cavalcade, v.33, No.1, Summer 1980 pp.4-11