2.1 Hard Decisions: Moving to America
Why did the Chesapeake colonies not prosper during the earliest years of their settlement?

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English colonists crossed the Atlantic for many reasons. Some wanted to institute a purer form of worship, more closely based on their interpretation of Scripture. Others dreamed of owning land and improving their social position. A few came to the New World to escape bad marriages, jail terms, or the dreary prospect of lifelong poverty. Since most seventeenth-century migrants, especially those who transferred to the Chesapeake colonies, left almost no records of their lives in England, it is futile to try to isolate a single cause or explanation for their decision to leave home.

In the absence of detailed personal information, historians usually have assumed that poverty, or the fear of soon falling into poverty, drove people across the Atlantic. No doubt economic considerations figured heavily in the final decision to leave England. But so did religion, and the poor of early modern England were often among those demanding the most radical ecclesiastical reform. As a recent historian of seventeenth-century migration concluded, “Individuals left for a variety of motives, some idealistic, others practical, some simple, others complex, many perhaps contradictory and imperfectly understood by the migrants themselves.”

Whatever their reasons for crossing the ocean, English migrants to America in this period left a nation wracked by recurrent, often violent, political and religious controversy. During the 1620s, autocratic Stuart monarchs—James I (r. 1603–1625) and his son Charles I (r. 1625–1649)—who succeeded Queen Elizabeth I on the English throne fought constantly with the members of Parliament over rival notions of constitutional and representative government.

Regardless of the exact timing of departure, English settlers brought with them ideas and assumptions that helped them make sense of their everyday experiences in an unfamiliar environment. Their values were tested and sometimes transformed in the New World, but they were seldom destroyed. Settlement involved a complex process of adjustment. The colonists developed different subcultures in America, and in each it is possible to trace the interaction between the settlers’ values and the physical elements, such as the climate, crops, and soil, of their new surroundings. The Chesapeake, the New England colonies, the middle colonies, and the southern colonies formed distinct regional identities that have survived to the present day.

A portrait of James the first, King of England, between 1603 and 1625. The royal emblem is seen beside him.
JAMES I (R. 1603–1625) ​James I and his son Charles I were at the center of religious and political conflict that contributed to English migration to North America.

2.1.1 The Chesapeake: Dreams of Wealth
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After the Roanoke debacle in 1590, English interest in American settlement declined, and only a few aging visionaries such as Richard Hakluyt kept alive the dream of colonies in the New World. These advocates argued that the North American mainland contained resources of incalculable value. An innovative group, they insisted, might reap great profits and supply England with raw materials that it would otherwise be forced to purchase from European rivals like Holland, France, and Spain.

Moreover, any enterprise that annoyed Catholic Spain or revealed its weakness in America seemed a desirable end in itself to patriotic English Protestants. Anti-Catholicism and hatred of Spain became an integral part of English national identity during this period, and unless one appreciates just how deeply those sentiments ran in the popular mind, one cannot fully understand why ordinary people who had no direct financial stake in the New World so generously supported English efforts to colonize America. Soon after James I ascended to the throne (1603), adventurers were given an opportunity to put their theories into practice in the colonies of Virginia and Maryland—an area known as the Chesapeake, or later, as the Tobacco Coast.

During Elizabeth I’s reign, the major obstacle to successful colonization of the New World had been raising money. No single person, no matter how rich or well connected, could underwrite the vast expenses a New World settlement required. The solution to this financial problem was the joint-stock company, a business organization in which many people could invest without fear of bankruptcy. A merchant or landowner could purchase a share of stock at a stated price, and at the end of several years, the investor could anticipate recovering the initial amount plus a portion of whatever profits the company had made. Joint-stock ventures sprang up like mushrooms. Affluent English citizens, and even some of more modest fortunes, rushed to invest in the companies, and, as a result, some projects amassed large amounts of capital—enough certainly to launch a new colony in Virginia.

On April 10, 1606, King James issued the first Virginia charter, which authorized the London Company to establish plantations in Virginia. The London Company was an ambitious business venture. Its leader, Sir Thomas Smith, was reputedly London’s wealthiest merchant. Smith and his partners gained possession of the territory lying between present-day North Carolina and the Hudson River. These were generous but vague boundaries, to be sure, but the Virginia Company—as the London Company soon called itself—set out immediately to find the treasures Hakluyt had promised.

In December 1606, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery sailed for America. The ships carried 104 men and boys who had been instructed to establish a fortified outpost some 100 miles up a large navigable river. The natural beauty and economic potential of the region were apparent to everyone. A voyager on the expedition reported seeing “faire meaddowes and goodly tall trees, with such fresh waters running through the woods, as almost ravished [us] at first sight.”

The leaders of the colony selected—without consulting resident Native Americans—what the Europeans considered a promising location more than 30 miles from the mouth of the James River. A marshy peninsula jutting out into the river became the site for one of America’s most unsuccessful villages, Jamestown. Modern historians have criticized the choice, for the low-lying ground proved to be a disease-ridden death trap; even the drinking water was contaminated with salt. But Jamestown seemed the ideal place to build a fort, since surprise attack by Spaniards or Native Americans rather than sickness appeared the more serious threat in the early months of settlement.

However, avarice soon became an issue. Virginia’s adventurers had traveled to the New World in search of the sort of instant wealth they imagined the Spaniards had found in Mexico and Peru. Tales of rubies and diamonds lying on the beach probably inflamed their expectations. Even when it must have been apparent that such expectations were unfounded, the first settlers often behaved in Virginia as if they expected to become rich. Instead of cooperating for the common good—guarding or farming, for example—individuals pursued personal interests. They searched for gold when they might have helped plant corn. No one would take orders, and those charged with governing the colony looked after their own private welfare while disease and war ravaged the settlement. Since the first adventurers neglected to grow food, some settlers actually starved, and during the so-called starving time, a few desperate people engaged in cannibalism.

Quick Check
For English colonists, what was the appeal of migrating to America?

2.1.2 Threat of Anarchy
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Virginia might have failed had it not been for Captain John Smith. Before coming to Jamestown, he had traveled throughout Europe and fought with the Hungarian army against the Turks—and, if Smith is to be believed, he was saved from certain death by various beautiful women. Because of his reputation for boasting, historians have discounted Smith’s account of life in early Virginia. Recent scholarship, however, has affirmed the truthfulness of his curious story.

A portrait of Captain John Smith, with the text “The Portraictuer of Captayne Iohn Smith, Admirall of New England.”
JOHN SMITH John Smith (c. 1580–1630) was a professional mercenary and adventurer who fought against both the Spanish and the Ottomans before being hired by the Virginia Company to assist in the establishment of its new colony at Jamestown.

In Virginia, Smith brought order out of anarchy. While members of the council in Jamestown debated petty politics, he traded with the local Indians for food, mapped the Chesapeake Bay, and may even have been rescued from execution by a young Indian girl, Pocahontas. In the fall of 1608, he seized control of the ruling council and instituted tough military discipline. Under Smith, no one enjoyed special privilege. Those whom he forced to work came to hate him. But he managed to keep them alive, no small achievement in such a deadly environment.

WatchBill Brands: The Real Pocoahontas

Leaders of the Virginia Company in London recognized the need to reform the entire enterprise. After all, they had spent considerable sums and had received nothing in return. In 1609, the company directors obtained a new charter from the king, which completely reorganized the Virginia government. Henceforth all commercial and political decisions affecting the colonists rested with the company, a fact that had not been made sufficiently clear in the 1606 charter. Moreover, in an effort to raise scarce capital, the original partners opened the joint-stock company to the general public. For a little more than £12—approximately one year’s wages for an unskilled English laborer—a person or group of persons could purchase a stake in Virginia. It was anticipated that in 1616 the profits from the colony would be distributed among the shareholders. The company sponsored a publicity campaign; pamphlets and sermons extolled the colony’s potential and exhorted patriotic English citizens to invest in the enterprise.

The burst of energy came to nothing. Bad luck and poor planning plagued the Virginia Company. A vessel carrying additional settlers and supplies went aground in Bermuda, and while this misadventure did little to help the people at Jamestown, it provided Shakespeare with the idea for his play The Tempest.

Between 1609 and 1611, the remaining Virginia settlers lacked capable leadership, and, perhaps as a result, they lacked food. The terrible winter of 1609–1610 was termed the “starving time.” A few desperate colonists were driven to cannibalism—an ironic situation since early explorers had assumed that only Native Americans would eat human flesh. In England, Smith heard that one colonist had killed his wife, “powdered” (salted) her, and “had eaten part of her before it was known; for which he was executed.” The captain, who possessed a droll sense of humor, observed, “Now, whether she was better roasted, broiled, or carbonadoed [sliced], I know not, but such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.” Other settlers simply lost the will to live.

The presence of so many Native Americans was an additional threat to Virginia’s survival. The first colonists found themselves living—or attempting to live—in territory controlled by what was probably the most powerful Indian confederation east of the Mississippi River. Under the leadership of their paramount chief, or werowance, Powhatan, these Indians had by 1608 created a loose association of some 30 tribes. When Captain John Smith arrived to lead several hundred adventurers, the Powhatans (named for their werowance) numbered some 14,000 people, including 3,200 warriors. These people hoped to enlist the Europeans as allies against native enemies.

When it became clear that the two groups—holding such different notions about labor and property and about exploiting the natural environment—could not coexist in peace, the Powhatans tried to drive the invaders out of Virginia, once in 1622 and again in 1644. Their numbers sapped by losses from European diseases, the Powhatans failed both times. The failure of the second campaign destroyed the Powhatan empire.

In June 1610, the settlers who had survived despite starvation and conflicts with the Indians actually abandoned Virginia. Through a stroke of luck, however, a new governor and new colonists arrived from England just as they were sailing down the James River. The governor and the deputy governors who succeeded him, Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, ruled by martial law. The new colonists, many of them male and female servants employed by the company, were marched to work by the beat of the drum. Such methods saved the colony but could not make it flourish. In 1616, company shareholders received no profits. Their only reward was the right to a piece of unsurveyed land located 3,000 miles from London.

Quick Check
Why did the first Virginia settlers not cooperate for the common good?

2.1.3 Tobacco Saves Virginia
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The economic solution to Virginia’s problems grew in the vacant lots of Jamestown. Only Indians bothered to cultivate tobacco until John Rolfe, a settler who achieved notoriety by marrying Pocahontas, realized this local weed might be a valuable export. Rolfe experimented with the crop, eventually growing in Virginia a milder variety that had been developed in the West Indies that was more appealing to European smokers.

A lithograph shows a newly cleared forest area converted to a farm.  Tree stumps are seen all over the place and a few men on canoes are also seen travelling on the river next to the farm.
PLAN OF A NEWLY CLEARED FARM ​The establishment of new farms in Virginia required enormous effort. Note the many tree stumps within the cleared area.

Virginians suddenly possessed a means to make money. Tobacco proved relatively easy to grow, and settlers who had avoided work now threw themselves into its production with single-minded diligence. In 1617, one observer found that Jamestown’s “streets and all other spare places [are] planted with tobacco . . . the Colony dispersed all about planting tobacco.” Although King James I originally considered smoking immoral and unhealthy, he changed his mind when the duties he collected on tobacco imports began to mount.

The Virginia Company sponsored another ambitious effort to transform the colony into a profitable enterprise. In 1618, Sir Edwin Sandys (pronounced “Sands”) led a faction of stockholders that began to pump life into the dying organization by instituting sweeping reforms and eventually ousting Sir Thomas Smith and his friends. Sandys wanted private investors to develop their own estates in Virginia. Before 1618, there had been little incentive to do so, but by relaxing Dale’s martial law and promising an elective representative assembly called the House of Burgesses, Sandys thought he could make the colony more attractive to wealthy speculators.

Even more important was Sandys’s method for distributing land. Colonists who covered their own transportation cost to America were guaranteed a headright, a 50-acre lot for which they paid only a small annual rent. Adventurers were granted additional headrights for each servant they brought to the colony. This allowed prosperous planters to build up huge estates while they also acquired dependent laborers. This land system persisted long after the company’s collapse. So too did the notion that the wealth of a few justified the exploitation of many others.

Sandys also urged the settlers to diversify their economy. Tobacco alone, he argued, was not a sufficient base. He envisioned colonists busily producing iron and tar, silk and glass, sugar and cotton. There was no end to his suggestions. He scoured Europe for skilled artisans and exotic plants. To finance such a huge project, Sandys relied on a lottery, a game of chance that promised a continuous flow of capital into the company’s treasury. The final element in the grand scheme was people. Sandys sent English settlers by the thousand to Jamestown—ordinary men and women swept up by the same hopes that had carried the colonists of 1607 to the New World.

Quick Check
In what sense did tobacco save the Chesapeake colonies?

2.1.4 Time of Reckoning
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Company records reveal that between 1619 and 1622, 3,570 individuals were sent to the colony. People seldom moved to Virginia as families. Although the first women arrived in Jamestown in 1608, most emigrants were single males in their teens or early twenties who came to the New World as indentured servants. In exchange for transportation across the Atlantic, they agreed to serve a master for a stated number of years. The length of service depended in part on the age of the servant. The younger the servant, the longer he or she served. In return, the master promised to give the laborers proper care and, at the conclusion of their contracts, provide them with tools and clothes according to “the custom of the country.”

Powerful Virginians corrupted the system. Poor servants wanted to establish independent tobacco farms. As they discovered, however, headrights were awarded not to the newly freed servant, but to the great planter who had paid for the servant’s transportation to the New World and for his or her food and clothing during the indenture. And even though indentured servants were promised land when they were freed, they were most often cheated, becoming members of a growing, disaffected landless class in seventeenth-century Virginia.

Whenever possible, planters in Virginia purchased able-bodied workers—in other words, persons (preferably male) capable of hard agricultural labor. This preference skewed the colony’s sex ratio. In the early decades, men outnumbered women by as much as six to one. Such gender imbalance meant that even if a male servant lived to the end of his indenture—an unlikely prospect—he could not realistically expect to start his own family. Moreover, despite apparent legal safeguards, masters could treat dependent workers as they pleased; after all, these people were legally considered property. Servants were sold, traded, even gambled away. It does not require much imagination to see that a society that tolerated such an exploitative labor system might later embrace slavery.

Most Virginians did not live long enough to worry about marriage. Death was omnipresent. Indeed, extraordinarily high mortality was a major reason the Chesapeake colonies developed so differently from those of New England. On the eve of the 1618 reforms, Virginia’s population stood at approximately 700. The Virginia Company sent at least 3,500 more people, but by 1622 only 1,240 were still alive. “It Consequentilie followes,” declared one angry shareholder, “that we had then lost 3,000 persons within those 3 yeares.” The major killers were contagious diseases. Salt in the water supply also took a toll. And on Good Friday March 22, 1622, the Powhatan Indians slew 347 Europeans in a well-coordinated surprise attack.

No one knows for certain how such a horrendous mortality rate affected the survivors. At the least, it must have created a sense of impermanence, a desire to escape Virginia with a little money before sickness or violence ended the adventure. The settlers who drank to excess aboard the tavern ships anchored in the James River described the colony “not as a place of Habitacion but only of a short sojourninge.”

On both sides of the Atlantic people wondered whom to blame. The burden of responsibility lay largely with the Virginia Company. In fact, its scandalous mismanagement embarrassed James I, and in 1624 he dissolved the bankrupt enterprise and transformed Virginia into a royal colony. The crown appointed a governor and a council. No provision was made, however, for continuing the House of Burgesses. While elections to the Burgesses were hardly democratic, it did provide wealthy planters a voice in government. Even without the king’s authorization, the representatives gathered annually after 1629, and in 1639, King Charles I recognized the body’s existence.

Quick Check
What explains the extraordinary death rate in early Virginia?

2.1.5 Maryland: A Catholic Refuge
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By the end of the seventeenth century, Maryland society looked remarkably like that of its Chesapeake neighbor, Virginia. At the time of its first settlement in 1634, however, no one would have predicted that Maryland, a colony wholly owned by a Catholic nobleman, would have survived, much less become a flourishing tobacco colony.

The driving force behind the founding of Maryland was Sir George Calvert, later Lord Baltimore. Calvert, a talented and well-educated man, enjoyed the patronage of James I. He was awarded lucrative positions in the government, the most important being the king’s secretary of state. In 1625, however, Calvert shocked almost everyone by publicly declaring his Catholicism; in this fiercely anti-Catholic society, persons who openly supported the Church of Rome were immediately stripped of civil office. Although forced to resign as secretary of state, Calvert retained the crown’s favor.

Before resigning, Calvert sponsored a settlement on the coast of Newfoundland, but after visiting it, he concluded that no English person, whatever his or her religion, would transfer to a place where the “ayre [is] so intolerably cold.” He turned his attention to the Chesapeake, and on June 30, 1632, Charles I granted George Calvert’s son, Cecilius, a charter for a colony to be located north of Virginia. The boundaries of the settlement, named Maryland in honor of Charles’s queen, were so vaguely defined that they generated legal controversies not fully resolved until the 1760s when Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed their famous boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore, wanted to create a sanctuary for England’s persecuted Catholics. He also intended to make money. Without Protestant settlers, it seemed unlikely Maryland would prosper, and Cecilius instructed his brother Leonard, the colony’s governor, to do nothing that might frighten off hypersensitive Protestants. The governor was ordered to “cause all Acts of the Roman Catholic Religion to be done as privately as may be and … [to] instruct all Roman Catholics to be silent upon all occasions of discourse concerning matters of Religion.” On March 25, 1634, the Ark and the Dove, carrying about 150 settlers, landed safely, and within days, the governor purchased from the Yaocomico Indians a village that became St. Mary’s City, the first capital of Maryland.

A photo shows a replica of the Carrier Dove schooner with the Union Jack ensign at a dock.
REPRODUCTION OF THE ​ARK ​The first settlers in Maryland arrived in 1534 aboard the ​Ark​​ and the ​Dove​.

The colony’s charter was a throwback to an earlier feudal age. It transformed Lord Baltimore into a “palatine lord,” a proprietor with almost royal powers. Settlers swore an oath of allegiance not to the king of England but to Lord Baltimore. In England, such practices had long ago been abandoned. As the proprietor, Lord Baltimore owned outright almost 6 million acres and had absolute authority over anyone living in his domain.

On paper, at least, everyone in Maryland was assigned a place in an elaborate social hierarchy. Members of a colonial ruling class—persons who purchased 6,000 acres from Baltimore—were called lords of the manor. These landed aristocrats were permitted to establish local courts of law. People holding less acreage enjoyed fewer privileges, particularly in government. Baltimore figured that land sales and rents would finance the entire venture.

Baltimore’s feudal system never took root in Chesapeake soil. People refused to play the social roles the lord proprietor had assigned them. These tensions affected Maryland’s government. Baltimore assumed that his brother, acting as his deputy in America, and a small appointed council of local aristocrats would pass laws and carry out routine administration. When an elected assembly first convened in 1635, Baltimore allowed the delegates to discuss only those acts he had prepared. The members of the assembly bridled at such restrictions, insisting on exercising traditional parliamentary privileges. Neither side gained a clear victory in the assembly, and for almost 25 years, legislative squabbling contributed to the political instability that almost destroyed Maryland.

The colony drew both Protestants and Catholics, and the two groups might have lived in harmony had civil war not broken out in England in the 1640s. When Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan faction executed King Charles I in 1649, transforming England briefly into a republic, it seemed Baltimore might lose his colony. To head this off and placate Maryland’s restless Protestants, the proprietor drafted the famous “Act concerning Religion” in 1649, which extended toleration to everyone who accepted the divinity of Christ. At a time when European rulers regularly persecuted people for their religious beliefs, Baltimore championed liberty of conscience.

However laudable the act may have been, it did not heal religious divisions in Maryland, and when local Puritans seized the colony’s government in 1650, they repealed the act. For almost two decades, vigilantes roamed the countryside, and one armed group temporarily drove Leonard Calvert out of Maryland. In 1655, civil war flared again, and the Calvert family did not regain control until 1658.

In this troubled sanctuary, ordinary planters and their workers cultivated tobacco on plantations dispersed along riverfronts. In 1678, Baltimore complained that he could not find 50 houses in a space of 30 miles. “In Virginia and Maryland,” one member of the Calvert family explained, “Tobacco, as our Staple, is our all, and indeed leaves no room for anything Else.” Tobacco affected almost every aspect of local culture. A steady stream of indentured servants supplied the plantations with dependent laborers—until African slaves replaced them at the end of the seventeenth century.

Europeans sacrificed much by coming to the Chesapeake. For most of the seventeenth century, their standard of living there was primitive compared with that of people of the same social class who had remained in England. Two-thirds of the planters, for example, lived in houses of only two rooms and of a type associated with the poorest classes in contemporary English society.

Quick Check
What motives led Lord Baltimore to establish the colony of Maryland?

Journal 2.1

2.1.6 Past and Present: African-American Freedom in Seventeenth-Century Virginia
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In 1619, a Dutch ship delivered the first African slaves to English North America. One slave, Anthony Johnson, worked so extraordinarily hard on a tiny plot of land that he managed to purchase his own freedom and that of his wife, Mary. The couple joined other free blacks in founding a community on Virginia’s Pungoteague Creek. For several decades they flourished. Free blacks even took white planters to court, winning as many cases as they lost. But over time, an increasingly racist society tightened the laws governing blacks. By 1700, the world the Johnsons had struggled to create had disappeared. White planters assumed they could forever deprive African Americans of freedom. The colony’s lieutenant governor knew better, and warned complacent Virginians that “freedom … Can Without a Tongue, Call Together all Those who Long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery.” The demand for full freedom has echoed throughout American history. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders gave fresh voice to Anthony Johnson’s dream. For many the election of President Barack Obama marked the realization of this dream; but the death of a disturbing number of black men at the hands of police during his second term reminded the nation that the full equality sought by the community on Pungoteague Creek remains elusive.

A black-and-white photo shows a court document regarding Anthony Johnson.
ANTHONY JOHNSON COURT RECORDS ​Court documents attest to Anthony Johnson's success in helping to build a free black community in Virginia.

A photo shows a group of protestors marching on a street, holding banners that read 'Black lives matter' and placards that read, 'Beat back the bullies,' 'EPA: We need clean air protection,' and so on.
BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTEST ​With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, allegations of police brutality have moved to the center of the debate about race in the United States.

Read the Document General Assembly, Of the Servants and Slaves in Virginia, 1705

Journal 2.1.6