This group of new settlers arrived under the second charter issued by King James I. This charter provided for stronger leadership under a governor who served with a group of advisors, and the introduction of a period of military law that carried harsh punishments for those who did not obey. In order to make a profit for the Virginia Company, settlers tried a number of small industries, including glassmaking, wood production, and pitch and tar and potash manufacture.
Tobacco cultivation required large amounts of land and labor and stimulated the rapid growth of the Virginia colony. Settlers moved onto the lands occupied by the Powhatan Indians, and increased numbers of indentured servants came to Virginia. The first documented Africans in Virginia arrived in They were from the kingdom of Ndongo in Angola, west central Africa, and had been captured during war with the Portuguese.
While these first Africans may have been treated as indentured servants, the customary practice of owning Africans as slaves for life appeared by mid-century. The number of African slaves increased significantly in the second half of the 17th century, replacing indentured servants as the primary source of labor.
The first representative government in British America began at Jamestown in with the convening of a general assembly, at the request of settlers who wanted input in the laws governing them. After a series of events, including a war with the Powhatan Indians and misconduct among some of the Virginia Company leaders in England, the Virginia Company was dissolved by the king in , and Virginia became a royal colony.
Stories of a New World. Settlers also lived under constant threat of attack by members of local Algonquian tribes, most of which were organized into a kind of empire under Chief Powhatan. Firsthand accounts describe desperate people eating pets and shoe leather. Some Jamestown colonists even resorted to cannibalism.
In the spring of , just as the remaining colonists were set to abandon Jamestown, two ships arrived bearing at least new settlers, a cache of supplies and the new English governor of the colony, Lord De La Warr.
The baptism of Pocahontas in Jamestown before her marriage to John Rolfe. They took a hard line with Powhatan and launched raids against Algonquian villages, killing residents and burning houses and crops. The English began to build other forts and settlements up and down the James River, and by the fall of had managed to harvest a decent crop of corn themselves. They had also learned other valuable techniques from the Algonquians, including how to insulate their dwellings against the weather using tree bark, and expanded Jamestown into a New Town to the east of the original fort.
A period of relative peace followed the marriage in April of the colonist and tobacco planter John Rolfe to Pocahontas , a daughter of Chief Powhatan who had been captured by the settlers and converted to Christianity. That same year, the first Africans around 50 men, women and children arrived in the English settlement; they had been on a Portuguese slave ship captured in the West Indies and brought to the Jamestown region.
They worked as indentured servants at first the race-based slavery system developed in North America in the s and were most likely put to work picking tobacco. In March , the Powhatan made a major assault on English settlements in Virginia, killing some to residents a full one-quarter of the population. The attack hit the outposts of Jamestown the hardest, while the town itself received advance warning and was able to mount a defense. In an effort to take greater control of the situation, King James I dissolved the Virginia Company and made Virginia into an official crown colony, with Jamestown as its capital, in The New Town area of Jamestown continued to grow, and the original fort seems to have disappeared after the s.
Colonists, enraged at declining tobacco prices and higher taxes, sought a scapegoat in local tribes who still periodically sparred with settlers and lived on land they hoped to obtain for themselves.
A July raid by the Doeg tribe sparked retaliation, and when Governor Berkeley set up a meeting between the two quarreling parties, several tribal chiefs were murdered. Berkeley refused, so Bacon raided and killed them on his own.
Bacon died of dysentery in October, and armed merchant ships from London, followed by forces sent by King Charles II, soon put down the resistance. In , the central statehouse in Jamestown burned down, and Middle Plantation, now known as Williamsburg, replaced it as the colonial capital the following year.
While settlers continued to live and maintain farms there, Jamestown was all but abandoned. In the 20th century, preservationists undertook a major restoration of the area. A combination of Indian attacks, disease, and starvation killed three-quarters of the settlers in six months. Had the Virginia Company pulled out of Jamestown, the English might never have established themselves as the major colonial power on the mainland, leaving the Spanish or Dutch to colonize the mid-Atlantic region, which may well have discouraged the establishment of English settlements in New England.
Instead of settling at Plymouth, the Pilgrims might have ended up in Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, an alternative suggested at the time; Massachusetts settlers might have joined other Puritan groups moving to Providence Island, off the coast of Central America, and to sugar-rich islands of the West Indies. The English may well have decided to confine their activities to the Caribbean or abandoned colonizing projects in America altogether, turning their attention to dominating the business of transporting goods, much as the Dutch would do after losing New Netherland New York to the English in But against the odds Jamestown survived, becoming the first successful English colony in North America, from which the English language, laws, and secular and religious institutions in time spread across North America and the globe.
At Jamestown the English learned the hard lessons of how to keep a colony going. By trial and error, they discovered that only with the introduction of stable political and social institutions—representative government, the church, private property, and family and community life, as well as the discovery of profitable commodities—would settlements prosper and grow.
All successful English colonies followed in the wake of Jamestown. English colonization, however, unleashed powerful destructive forces and brought unimaginable misery for Indians and enslaved Africans alike. Hostilities between the English and Powhatan Indians kick-started a destructive cycle of violence, plunder, and exploitation that would spread across the continent over the next three centuries, depriving native peoples of their lives, culture, and lands.
The arrival of some two-dozen Angolan slaves at Jamestown in August presaged a system of exploitation and oppression that would destroy and blight the lives of countless Africans over many generations. At its creation, the new American nation would confront its greatest paradox: how could slavery persist in the midst of freedom? Few other places in America so richly symbolize both the good and bad of our shared past.
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