Jamestown laid groundwork for America to come

1607-2007
Jamestown laid groundwork for America to come
By Matt Stearns
McClatchy Newspapers

Jamestown replica shps Discovery (left), Susan Constant, and Godspeed make their way up the James River from Jamestown Settlement. It is here, on a swampy peninsula in the James River that the first permanent English settlement in North America was established 400 years ago, on May 14, 1607. (Adrin Snider/Newport News Daily Press/MCT)
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JAMESTOWN, Va. - If you're looking for America's cozy creation narrative - pious settlers, friendly Indians and "the first Thanksgiving," all blessedly lacking the stain of our original sin, slavery - then go visit that rock where the Pilgrims landed.

But if you want the whole story of the white man in America - the full-tilt frenzy of near-starvation and cannibalism, salvation through entrepreneurial enterprise, importing slavery, overrunning Indians and the nation's first step toward representative democracy - then come to Jamestown.

For it's here, on a swampy peninsula between the James and York rivers of southeastern Virginia, that the first permanent English settlement in North America was established on May 14, 1607. The initial 1-acre, triangular fort was built 13 years before the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts, bearing its solemn flock of families in search of religious freedom.

"Jamestown is much more typical of American society in the intervening 400 years, as opposed to Plymouth, which was an eccentric experiment but not really what America would be about," said James Kelly, the director of museums for the Virginia Historical Society. "It (Jamestown) never had any idealistic pretensions."

Events billed as "America's 400th Birthday" will include a visit to Jamestown on Thursday and Friday by Queen Elizabeth II of England. President Bush is scheduled to visit on "America's Anniversary Weekend," May 11-13. There'll be concerts and fireworks, as well.

"My fellow honkies celebrating," said Helen Rountree, an emerita professor at Old Dominion University and an expert on Native Americans of the era.

The celebration commemorates much that wasn't pretty but that planted the seed for much that followed on our great bloodied continent.

The 104 men and boys who came to Jamestown - and the investors in the Virginia Company, the private firm that financed the effort - were looking for silver, gold and jewels. They were looking to get rich, dreaming the American dream before there was an America.

But many of the colonists were high-class fops who weren't amenable to stress or work, and nearly two-thirds of them had died by year-end. Food and drinking water were scarce. Indians engaged in tentative trading but also attacked the settlers within weeks of their arrival, killing two.

Then things got worse.

In the harsh winter of 1609-10 - after about 500 more settlers had arrived, including women and children - hundreds died from starvation and disease, leaving a population of about 60. Several survived "the starving time" only by eating the innards of others; Capt. John Smith called one man's meal "powdered wife."

The leaders decided to abandon the colony, but as they prepared to set sail down the James, they encountered three ships with 150 more settlers sent by London, so they stayed. In a precursor of the "by-your-own-bootstraps" mentality that would come to dominate the American psyche, Smith, a key colony leader, decreed that "he who will not work shall not eat."

Prosperity - and with it, a chance at permanence - finally came not from gold or silver, but from the golden leaf: tobacco.

In 1612, settler John Rolfe introduced a tasty strain of Spanish tobacco to Virginia's fertile fields. It was an instant hit, and within a few years Virginia was exporting tens of thousands of pounds of tobacco a year to England. Surrounding plantations, carved out for investors in the company that created Jamestown, focused almost entirely on cultivating tobacco.

Feeding Europe's growing nicotine habit provided the first pillars of stability. Rolfe hit history's daily double; he's also remembered as the settler who married Pocahontas, whom settlers abducted as a bargaining chip with increasingly hostile Indians led by her father, Chief Powhatan.

Jamestown also laid the foundation for two more of American history's less exalted experiences: grabbing Indian land and using African slaves to work it.

Tobacco wears out soil fast, which means that more land is required. That meant encroaching on Indian land, worsening already-tense relations with the Powhatan nation, a conglomeration of about 30 tribes - totaling about 15,000 people - whose land surrounded Jamestown. In last-ditch efforts to dislodge the ever-expanding settlements, Powhatans launched coordinated attacks on settlers in 1622 and 1644. Both failed, sparking deadly reprisals by the settlers.

By the end of the century, the Powhatan population had declined to as few as 1,200, their lands to a few scattered reservations.

It was a template for how the continent would be taken, a blueprint for Manifest Destiny.

"They flood in, and the native people have to hunker down and hold on to what they can or leave," Rountree said.

Large-scale tobacco farming required more than land. So in 1619, settlers purchased "twenty and odd negroes" from a Dutch ship that docked at Jamestown.

"There's a desperate need for labor," said Ira Berlin, a professor at the University of Maryland who's an expert on slavery in North America. "They've got plenty of land ... the piece they need is a secure, steady supply of labor."

There's some disagreement about whether those who were purchased in 1619 became slaves or indentured servants, but they were the first of the race-based, forced labor that became the backbone of Virginia's - and the South's - plantation economy, the beginnings of the "peculiar institution" that inexorably led to a brutal civil war.

Happily, commercialism, slavery and Indian subjugation aren't Jamestown's only legacies. Its settlers also developed the first English-style representative democracy on these shores. On July 20, 1619, representatives of several Virginia plantations - by then, "Jamestown" had spread far beyond the site of the original fort - met to make laws for the burgeoning colony.

"They were acting locally on local problems, to solve them in a way that benefit everybody's interests, the common good," said Dennis Montgomery of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, co-author and compiler of the newly published "1607: Jamestown and the New World."

At that first six-day meeting, the House of Burgesses levied taxes and passed laws governing personal conduct and trade with the Indians. It would meet semi-regularly. When Jamestown ceased to be a private commercial enterprise and became a royal colony in 1624, King James I severely limited the powers of the House of Burgesses, a move that inadvertently helped inspire embittered American colonists to rebel a century and a half later.

"You have this paradox of Virginia instituting the first democratic body in America to give voice to this landowning class, when the whole society is based on African slavery and Indian dispossession," Kelly said.

Jamestown's mixed legacy means the colony plays second fiddle to the Pilgrims when Americans recall the country's founding, never mind that the Spanish colonized Florida at St. Augustine in 1565 or that the godly inhabitants of Massachusetts' "City on a Hill" also bought slaves, killed Indians and got rich.

Still, Jamestown just isn't as pleasant a tale as Plymouth. Aside from modern-day qualms about some of its legacies, 60 to 80 percent of the settlers who went there from 1607 to 1623 died. "Virginia," Montgomery wrote, "was a death trap."

While some have understated Jamestown's significance in American history, and the settlers themselves focused mainly on survival, at least one person recognized the changes that the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery carried with them when they sailed up the James River 400 years ago.

"Many do inform me, your coming here is not for trade," Chief Powhatan told Smith, "but to invade my people, and possess my country."

For more information about Jamestown's 400th anniversary, go to http://www.jamestown2007.org
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If you want to know the real story of Jamestown and life along the James River, you might want to read The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James by Bob Deans.

From Publishers Weekly

Deans begins his absorbing history of life along the James River 15,000 years ago with Paleolithic hunter-gathers, and ends with President Abraham Lincoln taking Jefferson Davis's chair in the Confederate White House. In between, Deans demonstrates how the 340-mile river, stretching through the heart of Virginia, served as the headwaters of American history. The first two-thirds is a richly detailed history of people and events, including the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Deans vividly describes the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, the famines and Indian wars from which only one in six colonists survived, the landing of the first slaves in 1619, the emergence of the planter aristocracy and Virginia's role in leading Americans to independence. This book also details the remarkable 1775 meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses in Richmond, which was led by the pen (Thomas Jefferson), the sword (George Washington) and the tongue (Patrick Henry) of the Revolution. Anyone with an interest in early American history should appreciate Deans's mix of natural and cultural perspectives.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

A consciously populist history of Virginia's settlement and growth up to 1865, this narrative is crowded with personalities and flavored with idiosyncratic opinions. Whatever seriousness Deans, an experienced journalist, sacrifices by imagining how Chief Powhaten might have taken advantage of cable news television, he makes inroads on readers who regard history as old and irrelevant. He inducts them into the Jamestown saga beginning in 1607, introduces them to historical questions (Did Pocahontas save John Smith's life or did Smith invent the story?), and chronologically concludes with Abraham Lincoln's 1865 journey up the James River to the incinerated capital of the confederacy. The signal events of the intervening period, such as the 1622 Indian attack on Jamestown, Bacon's rebellion of 1676, and the American Revolution, are recounted against the background of the James River's geography and, most saliently, slavery. Deans' interlineal commentary reflects the zeitgeist's critical stance toward America's origin story, while his fast-moving presentation successfully engages interest in an overview of Jamestown and its aftermath.