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From company-owned to royal control
The years 1625-1630 saw Virginia stabilize and grow, under governors like Francis Wyatt, George Yeardley, Francis West and John Pott. The King’s quo warranto proceedings to take over the Virginia Company were popular in the colony, but some new and recurring issues did emerge under royal control.
War with the Powhatan
The 1622 massacre had inevitably pushed the colonists and Powhatan back into a war, but it had been more extreme than that. It had made the colonists afraid of peace. If the Powhatan had been willing to attack after years of seeming friendship, the colonists calculated that it was safer to remain at war, where at least people wouldn’t grow complacent.
A tobacco monopoly
Could the colonists export tobacco to other countries? Could England import Spanish tobacco to compete with that in Virginia and Bermuda? These questions would determine the economic well-being of most Virginians.
Disorderly expansion
People came and bought land, but they often died or returned to England. They bought as much land as possible, and couldn’t maintain it all. The result was a patchwork of farms and wilderness, increasingly isolated and farther from Virginia’s core. This was dangerous while the colonists were at war, and also made economic cohesion and growth difficult.
Economic diversification
Virginia relied almost exclusively on tobacco for its prosperity. It was a one-commodity economy with nothing to buffer the effects of falling tobacco prices.
The return of the Virginia Company of London
In London, Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton were still pushing for the re-creation of a Virginia Company.
The continuation of the General Assembly
The colonists’ biggest concern was the continuation of Virginia’s legislature, the General Assembly, with its elected House of Burgesses. King Charles repeatedly reassured the colonists that he intended to keep the institution, but his actions remained noncommittal. He rarely called Assemblies, but didn’t interfere when they met without his authorization, and allowed the laws they passed to remain in force.
Transcript
Wow, welcome back! Not just to the podcast, but also to 1620s Jamestown, back to the first permanent English colony. And, since we last really discussed Virginia months ago, perhaps it’s time for a quick recap. Misery, corruption, disease, death.
Introduction
To be a little more detailed, though, the founding of Virginia was a two decade exercise in experimentation and corruption. We saw a hugely diverse group of people coming for a hugely diverse set of reasons and with a hugely diverse range of visions of what the colony would ideally look like. 80% of colonists either died or left, and factional battles on both sides of the Atlantic made things even harder. In spring of 1622, after years of seeming peace between the English and local Powhatan Indians, warriors massacred a quarter of the colony’s population in the course of a single day, and pushed the rest to the brink of starvation in an attempt to drive them out. In the aftermath, colonists worked to push the Indians out of Virginia, and King James finalized his takeover of the Virginia Company, making Virginia England’s first Crown Colony, under direct royal control. Then, before he could impose his own vision on Virginia, he died too, leaving his son, Charles, in charge of a colony he had no idea what to do with.
Along the way, we saw a few important developments. First, the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop on which virtually all successful economic development was based. Second, the introduction of a legislative assembly, and third, the first handful of Africans arrived as indentured servants, stolen from Spanish and Portuguese slave traders.
When Virginia became a crown colony, its governor was Francis Wyatt, the grandson of a man who had rebelled against Mary Tudor, born in Kent, educated at Oxford, and married to the niece of Edwin Sandys, Wyatt had arrived in Jamestown as governor bringing the colony’s first constitution in 1621. So, he’d served through the massacre, and he saw the colony through one of its most turbulent and uncertain eras.
When the king took over Virginia, he kept Wyatt in office. He sent Wyatt a set of instructions, but nothing regarding the General Assembly, which he clearly didn’t intend to keep. That meant that no elections could legally take place for the House of Burgesses. Instead, the king appointed a carefully selected, bipartisan group of colonists to act as a council, a blend of names we’ve discussed before, and those we’ll hear more of. Francis West, George Yeardley, George Sandys, Roger Smith, Ralph Hamor, John Martin, John Harvey, Samuel Mathews, Abraham Piersey, Isaac Madison and William Claiborne.
And, it was in the course of Wyatt’s governorship that we do start to read the names of these and other people who would define the next era of Virginia history. Claiborne was appointed treasurer at the same time as Wyatt was made governor. Mathews helped lead troops against the Powhatan after the massacre. John Pott had also been appointed to the Governor’s Council at the same time as Wyatt was made governor, but been suspended after he, the colony’s doctor, had poisoned Powhatan leaders. The Virginia Company had given Harvey land in return for transporting so many people to Virginia, and Harvey invested in a plan to produce potash there. And, in 1623, he was sent at the head of a royal commission to investigate conditions in Virginia, with Mathews, Piersey and John Pory also members.
When Wyatt had come to office, his main priority was to encourage sustainable expansion of Virginia. He tried, unsuccessfully, to encourage the development of urban centers, and perhaps more importantly to organize the increasingly-disorderly expansion. We’d touched on this a tiny bit before, but Virginia was becoming a patchwork of cultivated land, land falling into disrepair, and vacant wilderness. People would come to Virginia and buy as much land as they could so they could grow tobacco, but then a huge percent either died or left. Others bought more land than they were able to maintain, so people were needing to settle farther and farther from Virginia’s center, and were increasingly separated by uncultivated or unmaintained wilderness.
It was one thing to have an extremely rural society, but another thing to have isolated patches of people setting up individual homes in the wilderness, completely lacking any sort of protection for themselves or their property. The colonists were still at war with the Powhatan, and there were additional problems, like livestock wandering off or being killed by wild animals. And, as the colony got more disperse, economic diversification became more difficult and less likely, and that was a major priority.
One way Wyatt saw to help combat the chaos, or at least to minimize its risk, was to build a palisade from the James River to the York, with houses spread along it at regular intervals. This would provide a barrier, keeping Indians out, and livestock in, and encourage colonists to fill the gaps between plantations rather than expanding further outward. Then, after things were going well within Virginia, they’d resume the search for natural resources, or a passage to the South Sea. At least, that was the plan. Between massacre and Powhatan war, and the transition to crown colony, Wyatt ended up having his hands full.
But, he was an effective enough leader that when Harvey returned to England in February 1625, to report his commission’s findings, he noted how surprisingly well the colony had recovered from the massacre, largely through its own efforts. Harvey said Virginia was efficiently governed, despite Company mismanagement, and he recommended Wyatt’s prompt reappointment as governor, as well as the reappointment of most of the council. Basically, he said that from Virginia, governance was good enough that the best thing the king could do was take over, and keep the colony’s American government going with as little disruption as possible. And, he said, that was exactly what the colonists wanted. They were overwhelmingly in favor of the takeover.
And his assessments were largely correct. Within Virginia, there was widespread support for the king’s takeover. If you listened to even a couple episodes of the Jamestown series, I don’t need to explain why. Even people who had been bitterly opposed to each other within Virginia, like, say, Francis West and John Smith, both helped and encouraged the destruction of the Virginia Company.
Now, royal governance came with its own problems, and the colonists realized this. First, in theory their property rights could be invalidated in the transition, and they wanted to prevent that. Second, they didn’t want policies which made their tobacco less valuable, like excessive regulation or a monopoly. And third, and most important, they wanted to keep their legislative assembly.
And, to address those issues, Wyatt called a convention. He didn’t have legal authority to call a General Assembly, but the governor, council and assorted influential citizens could get together to discuss the colony’s affairs.
They’d already sent a petition the previous year, but the man they’d sent it with had died at sea, and the petition seemed to have been lost. So, they drew up another one, and sent it with George Yeardley. They voiced their concerns on all these issues, asking for an Act of Parliament to confirm the validity of their land titles, asking that there be no tobacco monopoly, and asking that the General Assembly be retained as an institution, saying it was the only way they could prevent their governors from becoming oppressive, and that without it they couldn’t transact public business efficiently. In addition, they begged that Virginia not be put under the control of Thomas Smythe and his associates, and they said the colonists needed a shipment of clothing and tools.
They had written the petition before they realized King James had died, but King Charles’s Privy Council was impressed with the petition and Yeardley’s advocacy, and reassured him that they fully intended to respect Virginia’s rights, including to the General Assembly.
In reality King Charles was a little bit noncommittal about the General Assembly. He pretty much gave the colony free reign to do whatever it wanted, without calling any official Assemblies, so that they didn’t become the source of legal conflict. If they did start to do any rabble rousing, he could quickly shut it down by saying their actions weren’t authorized, but at the same time, he continually reassured it that he had no intention of doing away with the institution. Elections were held and laws were passed and enforced in Virginia, but without either support or opposition from the King. He had more than enough trouble coming from Parliament at home, so he’d just encourage Virginia and leave it be, which made him the first person ever to have treated Virginia that way. With few exceptions, this remained his policy throughout his reign.
The king also had concerns regarding Virginia. First, members of the old London Company, specifically the Sandys-Southampton-Ferrar faction, were still asking to get their Company back. They actually had a good relationship with King Charles, unlike his father. The year before, Sandys and Southampton had worked to impeach the Earl of Middlesex, who had opposed Charles and Buckingham’s plan to go to war with Spain. Now, the king wasn’t ready to give his colony back to a reconstituted London Company, but he did reach out to Sandys, Southampton and Ferrar for suggestions about how best to run the colony. Specifically, he asked what was the best form of government for Virginia, and he asked what form of tobacco contract would be most beneficial to the colonists and his own revenues.
In response, they drafted a long, elaborate and detailed document called the “Discourse of the Old Company,” detailing the Company’s struggles, and pushing the king to restore the company, or at the very least to place it in the hands of a committee which was friendly to them. In other words, not in the hands of Thomas Smythe, or the Earl of Warwick. And, the king seemed to agree to the latter part at least.
The king’s bigger worry, though, was about the diversification of Virginia’s economy. Kings James and Charles weren’t keen on tobacco anyway, but Virginia’s dependence was objectively a problem. You cannot have a whole economy built around a single commodity, no matter how valuable it is. So, the king told them repeatedly to figure out how to make pitch, tar, potash, iron, salt, pipe staves or whatever, but something that wasn’t tobacco. His highest priority, and the one issue he really wasn’t prepared to budge on, was economic diversification.
So, these are the issues which were on everybody’s mind as King Charles took the throne. And, these issues would recur throughout his reign in one way or another. So, the stage has been set for the next epoch of Virginia history.
But, Wyatt needed to return to England to deal with his father’s estate, so he also sent a petition asking to leave his position in Virginia and go home. Permission was granted, and in his place, George Yeardley was appointed to his second term as governor. In the meantime, John West temporarily filled in. It wasn’t long, just long enough for the acting governor to compose another tract apprising the king of Virginia’s situation and reiterating the colonists’ needs, again, and the next spring, Yeardley got to Virginia.
And, Yeardley continued and expanded on Wyatt’s policies. He established a check point at Point Comfort, and gave William Tucker complete authority to check ships and sound the alarm. To further curtail disorderly expansion, he required people to get permission before moving their residences, and even required them to get local permission before being absent from their places of residence.
The war with the Powhatan continued, now in its fifth year, and Yeardley organized one of the most destructive English attacks since Wyatt’s decisive 1625 victory, a surprise attack on Powhatan villages near English settlements along the lines of the old Jamestown raids. The English would sneak into their towns, kill people, and destroy their corn. This had always proven the most effective method of attack, and yet again it proved its efficacy, this time on a larger scale than it’d been done before.
As Virginia stabilized and its rights seemed secure, people began to emigrate in larger and larger numbers, though the populations of Jamestown and Henrico actually shrunk in these years. Land was increasingly organized into “hundreds,” or “particular plantations,” which weren’t quite towns, but were groups of properties, often established by people already connected to each other.
And, since the king hadn’t yet officially re-formed the House of Burgesses, enabling legal elections in the colony, in 1627, Yeardley organized the sending of another petition, this one written much more urgently, asking the king to re-establish its democratic institutions, and the king agreed, confirming he would keep everything in the colony as it was in 1620, and instructing the governor to call an assembly in spring of 1628.
He also sent a set of instructions to be discussed at the General Assembly, which was fairly common practice. The contents of the instructions, though, were discouraging. On the positive side, the king announced that he would prohibit the importation of Spanish tobacco into the English market, reducing foreign competition for Virginia’s crops, which had been something Yeardley had pushed for. But, he also said that all tobacco must be sold to the crown or its representatives, and he also said that because the colony had refused to explore economic diversification, no landowner could plant more than 200 pounds worth of tobacco per year, and no servant more than 125 pounds.
So, overall, quite an assault on tobacco from Virginia’s point of view.
Then, in November 1627, Yeardley died, at 39 years old. In his place, the king named John Harvey governor, but Harvey was still in England at the time, so Francis West was named interim governor and captain general.
And, West held the Assembly the king had ordered, and among other things, discussed the instructions he’d sent over. And, they were received about as well as you might expect. The Assembly drafted a response to the king, thanking him for prohibiting the importation of Spanish tobacco, but explaining that his policies would have crippling effects on the colony. In fact, they said the mere suggestion of a monopoly had made people fear for their financial future, and had reduced trust in the king. First, they said the limit of 200 pounds, plus 125 per servant, wasn’t enough to live on. The highest price of tobacco in the 1620s was 36 pence per pound, and that would translate to an annual income of 30 pounds per year, which compared to the average of 40, wasn’t too bad. At the lowest point of the decade, 7.8 pence, that would translate to 6.5 pounds per year. In 1628, it was looking like Virginia would be seeing lower prices rather than higher ones.
Worse, if the king imposed a monopoly, the tobacco planters would be at the mercy of whatever price the merchants chose to pay for it. There would be no competition, no bargaining by the planters. They would be able to sell to the king’s agents for whatever price those agents demanded, or they wouldn’t be able to sell at all. That meant prices would go even lower, and Virginia’s economic foundation would be completely destroyed.
If the king insisted on creating a monopoly, he needed to at least agree beforehand on the minimum price and minimum quantity he’d be buying from the planters – and for that minimum, they suggested he commit to buying at least 500,000 pounds of tobacco per year at 3 shillings 6 pence per pound delivered in Virginia, or 4 shillings delivered in London. If he was unwilling to commit to those figures, he should allow them to export their crops to the Low Countries, Ireland, Turkey and elsewhere.
Colonists also explained that the reason they hadn’t pursued economic diversification was that everything except tobacco required a substantial upfront investment. Rich people weren’t moving to Virginia. They may or may not have been well bred, but none of them were coming to Virginia with much money. If they had the kind of money needed to set up a new industry, they probably wouldn’t bother settling in the Chesapeake to begin with. The Chesapeake was a last resort, not a dream destination. Tobacco required minimal skill and minimal investment, but it was reliably profitable. The same could not be said of manufacturing pitch and tar, pipe staves or mining iron. It was easy to say “develop other industries,” but not exactly easy to do. The colonists acknowledged that salt was a bit more promising, and agreed to pursue salt production, but on the necessity of protecting tobacco, they were united.
In addition to their written response, Virginia commissioned Wyatt, who was already in England, and two other Virginians, to negotiate with the king in person. In these negotiations, they allowed them to come down six pence per pound on each of the prices they’d asked for. This was far too high a price, and the king didn’t push the issue. There wouldn’t be a tobacco monopoly, at least for now.
Around the same time as the General Assembly, the acting governor also received a message from the Powhatan, informing him that they had taken several hostages which they were holding at Pamunkey. They wanted to negotiate a peace treaty.
The problem is, the 1622 massacre had convinced the colonists that it was safer to be at war than at peace with the Powhatan. 1622 hadn’t just been a devastating massacre. It had been a devastating massacre after years of peace and seeming friendship, and, most of the members of the Governor’s Council had lived through it. I mean, William Capps, who acted as a councilor and Royal Agent at this time, had lost his wife and kid in the attack or its aftermath. And furthermore, Opechancanough was still a leader of the tribe. In their minds, and they literally said this, it was safer to be at war, because if relations got too peaceful, people wouldn’t be as diligent in defending themselves. People needed to be on guard, and they needed to prioritize maintaining their weapons and ammunition, and keeping them around in case of attack. The colony could not be caught off guard again.
But, they still had to get their hostages back.
And so, the colonists made a cynical, though completely practical decision. They would sign a peace treaty, and break it at the earliest possible opportunity. So, in August, they signed the treaty, and got the hostages back, and in January, they informed a Powhatan messenger that the treaty was void, saying that this was because the Powhatan had repeatedly violated the terms of the treaty by entering English settlements, and by stealing livestock. They told the messenger that they had forbidden the English to kill any Indians until February 20th, but after that, war would resume.
Soon after this, though, Francis West returned to England. He’d married George Yeardley’s widow, but she’d also died, and he had ended up in a spat with her children over the inheritance of her estate. So, off to England he went. In his place, John Pott became the acting governor. Pott’s medical knowledge made him indispensible to the colony, and he had been a faithful council member and was generally popular, but he had repeatedly shown himself to be a thoroughly irresponsible individual. He’d been brought to court several times for neglect of engagements, and for stealing pigs and cattle, and George Sandys had lamented that he consistently chose bad company, people who “hung upon him while his good liquor lasted.”
And, his term as governor went about as well as you can expect given that reputation. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t a success either. He did maintain defense against the Indians, and the Assembly he presided over passed regulations regarding tobacco planting. But he was the governor who had refused to allow George Calvert to settle in Virginia, and though his term wasn’t particularly well documented, we do get little hints that there was corruption, too, which wouldn’t be out of character. One man under his governorship wrote that he hoped for “an Easterly wind to blow to send in Noble Captain Harvey, and then I shall have right for all my wrong.”
Just under a year later, the man got his wish. After two years of things like finalizing the paperwork, negotiating his salary and negotiating about the colony’s military needs, John Harvey arrived in Virginia as its new governor. He would become the second longest serving governor in 17th Century Virginia, extremely successful in some ways, extremely unpopular at times, principled, powerless, hot-tempered and ultimately drawing out all the passions of the age in which he lived.