After Columbus reached the New World in 1492, the Spanish focused their attention on extracting gold and silver from South America, and most of North America was largely forgotten. It was the British who would in the end most successfully colonize North America.
The North American colonial venture was the work of the London Company, a joint stock corporation that had been formed under charter by King James I of England. The London Company’s charter granted it rights to the southern half of the American coast, while the Plymouth Company was granted a charter for the northern half of the coast.
The first successful British settlement in North America was founded in Jamestown in 1607. This venture was run by a division of the London Company called the Virginia Company. Virginia Company shares sold in England for 12 pounds each. (William Shakespeare was a stockholder.)
While the Virginia Company was a for-profit venture hoping to find gold and other riches, it was also a social program utilized by the Crown Government to rid England of “excess population”. In the move from agrarian feudalism towards a modern industrial economy, the English aristocracy had removed huge numbers of peasant serfs from the countryside by converting tracts of land from agrarian use into rental properties, and grew rich by leasing this land to the sheepherders who were needed to feed England’s huge wool-cloth industry. The former serfs, now landless and moneyless, crowded into the urban areas. Some of these desperately poor people found employment as workers in England’s growing factory system, but a large number still remained unemployed and hopeless, living in the streets as beggars, prostitutes and thieves. Various efforts to remove them—by imprisoning them for vagrancy, by impressing them into the Royal Navy, or by locking them up in poorhouses—all failed. The growing number of poor and landless led to political unrest in England; the Midlands Revolt and the rebellions of the Levelers and the Diggers were all based on the demands of dispossessed peasant serfs for land.
In 1609, the Virginia Company offered a way for the British Government to “ease the citie and suburbs of a swarme of unnecessarie inmates” by removing them all and sending them to the Company’s new American colony in Jamestown, Virginia. In 1618, Parliament passed an act allowing the Virginia Company to round up the city’s “vagabonds”, with the Company promising to “sweepe your streets and washe your dores from idele persons, and the children of idele persons, and imploy them”. People as young as eight years were now rounded up and shipped off to Virginia as “indentured servants” of the Company.
The Virginia Company painted a glowing portrait of its American colony to stockholders and potential colonists. America, they declared, was a land of plenty, which had “alle things in abundance, as in the firste creation, without toile or labour . . . In all the worlde a like abundance is not to be founde.”
The Company, of course, knew better. The Jamestown colony was a death trap from the very beginning. The colonists, who had no idea how to survive in the American wilderness, died at horrific rates. In the first winter alone, known as “The Starving Times”, only 70 of the original 215 colonists survived. As large numbers of voluntary colonists and involuntary “vagabonds” began being shipped from England, the death toll rose steadily. In 1619, 165 children, age 8 to 16, arrived in Jamestown from the slums of London; by 1625, all but 12 were dead. One stockholder in London, poring over Company records, calculated that the Virginia Company had sent a total of 6000 people to Jamestown. Of these, only 1200 were still alive.
Not all of these had died of starvation. The Company officials, particularly those who managed the colony’s fabulously profitable tobacco and rice plantations, treated the colonists as virtual slaves. Abuse and beatings were routine, and forced over-work took its toll, particularly among the children—ninety percent of whom died within three years of arrival. Many colonists ran away to join the local Native American tribes; when found, they were hanged or beaten to death.
The desertion rate soon became so high that the Company was forced to make conciliatory measures. In 1619, the Company allowed a group of 22 representatives to be elected by the land-owning colonists—they formed a House of Burgesses that shared power with the Company-appointed Governor. America’s first democratically elected representative assembly, therefore, was a desperate effort by a tyrannical Corporation to prevent its own people from fleeing.
In 1624, the British government, horrified by the stories it was hearing from the colonists, revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and placed the colony under direct Parliamentary authority. The Royal Governor and the House of Burgesses became the Crown Government’s intermediary, and by 1700 all the other English colonies in America had adopted similar elected Assemblies to exercise local self-rule. These were in turn overseen by a committee of Parliament in London known as the Lords of Trade.
A total of 13 British colonies were established by Royal Charter in American territory. Some of these were granted as sole proprietorships to a single owner (the Pennsylvania colony, for instance, was chartered as the personal property of William Penn). Others were founded by charters granted to joint stock companies (the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company being examples). Like all Royal Charters, the colonies were tightly controlled by the British government. Under the mercantile system, colonies were viewed as simply ways of siphoning wealth from foreign territories and sending it back to the homeland. Many of the colonial charters spelled out how trade was to be conducted in the colonies, with England having special privileges (including, in some cases, the right that all colonial trade had to be with, or at least go through, England). A series of laws known as the Navigation Acts formalized these restrictions, limiting the amount of manufacturing that the colonists could do (forbidding them outright from making their own iron cooking pots, for example), and essentially turning the colonies into a source of raw materials for British industry and a captive market for the finished products.
Today, the Jamestown site is part of the Colonial National Historic Park near Williamsburg VA (which also contains the nearby Yorktown battlefield) and is run by the US National Park Service. In 1893, when the exact site of Fort James was unknown, a portion of Jamestown Island was donated to a private conservation group. The NPS obtained another 1500 acres on the island in 1934 and began archaeological excavations in the 1950s, which eventually discovered the original site of the Fort in 1996. Today that location is owned by Preservation Virginia, a statewide nonprofit group which protects historical sites, and the rest of the park is owned by the National Park Service. There is a walking trail that winds through the site, and displays of original building foundations including houses, a gunsmithery, a glassware factory, a tavern, and the home of Governor John Harvey.
Next door to the National Park is the Jamestown Settlement, a state-owned recreation of the colonial village with living history re-enactors. There is an exhibit hall with artifacts recovered from the site, and replicas of the three English ships—Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—which brought most of the original colonists to Virginia.
Photos from a visit.