Virginia Company of London

An English Colony on the Chesapeake, pp. 71-80
In 1603, King James I of England, impressed by Spain's successes in the New World, was eager to establish colonies of his own in North America. England's success in defending itself from the Spanish Armada suggested that England might now succeed in defending new colonies in North America on land claimed by Spain. Thus, in 1606, the king granted a charter to the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company of adventurers, authorizing their occupation of over six million acres in North America. These men and other proponents of colonization hoped settlements would benefit the empire, both by yielding goods and by providing a convenient destination for masses of unemployed English people. Virginia Company investors dreamed about the quick and easy profits they could reap, but they failed to appreciate the difficulties of adapting European desires and expectations to the New World environment, particularly in regard to Native American peoples. Within twenty years the Jamestown settlement somehow managed to survive, but the English government replaced the private Virginia Company, which was never profitable.

Jamestown, Virginia

The Fragile Jamestown Settlement
In December 1606, 144 Englishmen sailed for Virginia aboard three ships. In May 1607, the survivors of the journey put ashore on a small peninsula in the James River in the heart of Powhatan's chiefdom. They hastily built a fort as protection from the Indians and Spanish and named the settlement Jamestown, but skirmishes with the Indians were frequent. The settlers soon discovered that disease and famine were greater threats than the Indians' spears and arrows or attacks by the Spanish. Despite Powhatan's eventual overtures of peace and delivery of much needed foodstuffs and John Smith's forays to trade with the Indians, by January 1608, only 38 of the original settlers remained alive to welcome the Virginia Company's supply ships and 120 new colonists. Although the Virginia Company sent hundreds of new settlers each year to Jamestown, few survived these early years.

Chief Powhatan

Cooperation and Conflict between Natives and Newcomers 
Given the colonists' vulnerability, it is surprising perhaps that Powhatan did not attack Jamestown and drive the English out of the Chesapeake. Several factors probably contributed to his hesitation. The Indians were impressed by the English God, whom they felt must be very powerful, and even more by English goods. They were eager to trade corn to get these valuable items. Moreover, Powhatan and hiswerowances probably concluded that such powerful strangers would make better allies than enemies, especially in regard to other Native American tribes. Notwithstanding, more than once the Indians refused to trade their corn to the settlers, but the English brutally broke that boycott by attacking the uncooperative Indians, pillaging their villages, and confiscating their corn. Despite receiving or taking food from the Indians, Jamestown failed to thrive not only because of the settlers' weakened physical condition, but also because the majority were gentlemen and their servants, who considered cultivating the land beneath them. Nevertheless, over time, the colony slowly expanded. Its continued existence changed Indian society, introducing new tensions over resources as well as European diseases that decimated Indians in epidemic proportions. 

John Smith

John Smith was the military commander of the Jamestown Settlement who led the earliest settlers through the toughest ordeals in the early days. He made a truce with the local natives, led by Powhatan and later traded with him to secure the colony's food supply. he made many necessary improvements to the colony, converting it from a gold prospecting outpost to a longterm agricultural community.

Opchanacanough

In 1622, after fifteen years of an uneasy truce, Opechancanough, Powhatan's brother and successor after his death, launched an all-out assault on the colony, killing 347 settlers— nearly one-third of the English population. The attack failed to drive the English out. From this point on, the colonists no longer deemed the Indians necessary for their survival; instead, they concluded that their settlement's existence depended on the destruction of all Indians in the vicinity. Jamestown survived but many smaller villages were abandoned. 

House of Burgesses

The House of Burgesses was the main political body in early Virginia. In General, government and politics intensified rather than reduced socioeconomic distinctions. Discrepant laws governed masters and servants. Moreover, the planter elite dominated the government, from membership in the House of Burgesses to the governor's council. In the late seventeenth century, the franchise became more restricted, with voting limited to landowners and householders. Colonial officials not only administered government but profited from it as well, especially through revenue collecting. Beginning in 1660, the Navigation Act allowed the crown to extract revenue from the Chesapeake, and subsequent acts would be applied to other colonies. These measures were designed to give English merchants, shippers, and even seamen a monopoly on the colonial import trade. The acts reflected English mercantilist assumptions— the idea that the colonies existed to benefit the mother country. Hierarchy and stratification defined not only the relationship between king and colonies but also that between the planter and the lower classes.

John Rolfe

Tobacco grew wild in the New World where Native Americans had been using it for thousands of years. During the sixteenth century, Spanish colonists in the New World sent tobacco to Europe where it was an expensive luxury. In 1612, John Rolfe's experiments with West Indian tobacco seeds showed that the plant could be cultivated successfully in Virginia. The first shipment of Virginia-grown tobacco arrived in England in 1617 and sold for a handsome price. Ironically, the same Virginia colonists who could not or would not grow food for themselves quickly learned how to harvest as much tobacco as possible. Tobacco cultivation proved a crucial turning point for the Virginia colony, as the crop changed the aimless settlers into a community of dedicated planters.

Pocahontas

Headright

Headright was a policy of granting land to new settlers in order to attract more colonists. However the title for the land was granted to whoever paid the for the passage over the Atlantic, This allowed rich landowners to grow their plantations rapidly and forced new settlers to become indentured servants to pay off their transit fee. 

Indentured Servants

The seventeenth-century Chesapeake was fundamentally a servant society, with about 80 percent of new arrivals working as indentured servants. As indentured servants, English workers contracted their labor for a period of four to seven years in return for passage to Virginia and the chance to acquire land and wealth. The planter paid the cost of transportation and provided the servant with food and shelter. As many as half of the indentured servants died before their servitude ended, but those who survived were likely to acquire their own farms. More than two-thirds of the servants were young, unskilled males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Only about one servant in four was a woman because employers preferred men for fieldwork. Servant life was very harsh by the standards of England and the Chesapeake. Servants who ran away or female servants who became pregnant had additional time added on to their contract. For some servant women, premarital pregnancy was a path out of servitude: The father of an unborn child sometimes purchased the indenture of the servant mother-to-be, freed, and married her. Notwithstanding, indentured servitude was not an easy road for those who chose to work it. 

Maryland

Dispersments of the Chesapeake settlements were determined by the demands of tobacco. Because tobacco exhausted the land of its nutrients quickly, farms consisted of cultivated land surrounded by virgin forest. Moreover, planters preferred land on navigable rivers to ease transporting the tobacco onto ships. Most Chesapeake settlers nominally were Protestants, but few were very observant. Even the colony of Maryland, which was founded by Lord Baltimore and intended as a haven for persecuted English Catholics, devoted more attention to tobacco cultivation than to religion.

Bacon's Rebellion

In 1676, Bacon's Rebellion erupted as a dispute over Indian policy. As the Chesapeake population grew, the land-hungry poor whites encroached on Indian land and violence between settlers and Indians erupted. The government tried to maintain the peace, but frontier settlers, led by the ambitious Nathaniel Bacon, wanted revenge. They saw the colonial government, headed by William Berkeley, as run by corrupt officials who were as much their enemies as the Indians.

William Berkely

Governor Berkeley pronounced Bacon a rebel, threatened to punish him for treason, and called for new elections of burgesses, which Bacon and his supporters swept. They passed Bacon's Laws, which gave local settlers a greater voice in the government and cracked down on corruption. When the king learned of the turmoil in the Chesapeake and its devastating effect on tobacco exports and customs duties, he ordered an investigation. The royal officials replaced Berkeley with a governor more attentive to the king's interests, nullified Bacon's Laws, and instituted an export tax on every hogshead of tobacco as a way of paying the expenses of government without having to obtain the consent of the tightfisted House of Burgesses. After Bacon's Rebellion, political stability slowly returned to the Chesapeake.

Pueblo Revolt

Compared to the English colonies on the Atlantic coast or the Spanish colonies of Central and South Americas, the Spanish settlements in Florida and New Mexico were failures. Florida and New Mexico lacked both Indian gold and an obvious export crop, and therefore attracted few Spanish settlers other than missionaries and soldiers. Spanish colonists coerced Indians into building churches, paying taxes, and performing labor. Angry at this harsh treatment, native peoples set aside their own disputes to fight Spain. In 1680, Popé led the Pueblo Indians in a revolt against the Spanish colony in New Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt temporarily ended Spanish rule. When Spain returned to New Mexico late in the seventeenth century, its agents decreased missionary work and cut back on labor exploitation. Although Florida witnessed no uprising comparable to the Pueblo Revolt, Spain's colony there also had limited success attracting settlers or converting Indians.