Part 3 (1/2)

The scheme was not without great possibilities, and the company spared neither money nor effort to make it a success. Within three years more than thirty-five hundred emigrants crossed to Virginia. In 1621 the expenditures of the company had reached a total of 100,000, and in 1624 the amount had been doubled. Yet, quite apart from the high death-rate which depleted the colony, or the Indian ma.s.sacre of 1622 which threatened its existence, all the efforts of Sandys ended in failure.

Drawn into the main current of English politics, the Virginia Company was unable to live in those troubled waters. James regarded with little favor the liberalism which Sandys and Southampton were promoting in England as well as in America. On high moral grounds he disliked the use of tobacco, and for economic and fiscal reasons was opposed to its cultivation in Virginia. He was determined, at all events, that such profits as might arise from its importation should enrich the royal exchequer rather than a powerful corporation controlled by men who were carping at the king's prerogative. And the king found support in the company itself; for Smythe and Warwick turned against the corporation and furnished pretexts to prove that it had betrayed its trust and should forfeit its rights. In 1624 the charter was accordingly annulled, and Virginia became a royal province.

Thus ended the most serious attempt of a commercial company to make profit out of American planting. Famous and successful in the annals of colonization, it proved a complete disaster as a financial speculation.

During the reign of Charles I, merchants were therefore but little disposed to venture their money in enterprises of that kind. Nor was Charles himself, who guarded the royal prerogative more jealously even than James had done, likely to look with favor upon the creation of corporations which would prove useless in case of failure and might prove dangerous if they succeeded. The rough sea of politics in the time of the second Stuart was unsuited to floating successful colonial ventures of any kind under governmental sanction; but in so far as he was disposed to further the development of America, it was natural enough for Charles, who found that his usurping Parliament was backed by the mercantile interest, to frown upon colonial corporations, and to make use of the proprietary feudal grant as a means of rewarding the courtiers and n.o.bles who supported him. The very year that the New England Council surrendered its charter, Archbishop Laud was urging the king to recall that of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. It was a few years later that Fernando Gorges was made Lord Proprietor of Maine; a few years earlier that Lord Baltimore, a loyal supporter of the House of Stuart, received a feudal grant after the manner of the Durham Palatinate of that part of Virginia which was to be known as the Province of Maryland.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best accounts of early exploration and settlement in America are in Channing's _History of the United States_, I, chaps. III-VII; and Bourne's _Spain in America_, chaps, VI-IX. An admirable account of the activities of English seamen in the sixteenth century is given by Walter Raleigh in volume XII of his edition of Hakluyt's _Voyages_. An interesting contemporary narrative of Drake's voyage around the world is in Hakluyt's _Voyages_ (Raleigh ed.), XI, pp. 101-33. Hakluyt's _Discourse on Western Plantinge_ is in the Maine Historical Society Collections, series II, vol. II. For the rise of the chartered trading companies, and their connection with early American colonizing companies, see Cheyney's _Background of American History_, chaps.

VII-VIII. The best discussion of the English interest in colonization at the opening of the seventeenth century is in Beer's _The Origins of the British Colonial System_, chaps. I-III. The most elaborate and learned account of the colonies in the seventeenth century is that of Osgood, _The American Colonies in the 17th Century_, 3 vols. Macmillan, 1904.

The most readable account of the founding of Virginia is in Fiske's _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_, I chaps. I-VI. John Smith's account of the settlement of Jamestown is in his _True Relation_, printed in Arber, _Works of Captain John Smith_. Birmingham, 1884.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Pesos_=approximately $3.00.

CHAPTER III

THE ENGLISH MIGRATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

_They are too delicate and unfitte to beginne new Plantations and Collonies, that cannot endure the biting of a muskeeto._

WILLIAM BRADFORD.

_To authorize an untruth, by toleration of State, is to build a sconce against the Walls of Heaven, to batter G.o.d out of his chair._

_The Cobler of Aggawam._

_I have often wondered in my younger dayes how the Pope came to such a height of arogancie, but since I came to New England I have perceived the height of that tripple crowne, and also the depth of that sea._

SAMUEL GORTON.

I

Those who looked to America for great financial profit or immediate political advantage were disappointed. The seventeenth century had run half its course before the colonies became an important a.s.set to the English Government: no gold came from them to enrich its treasury, few supplies to furnish its navy, while the revenue, derived from its slowly growing trade was insignificant. Equally deceptive was the New World as a field for corporate exploitation. The sagacity of Thomas Smythe and the idealism of Edwin Sandys were alike unavailing. Before the Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624 it had sunk nearly two hundred thousand pounds in its venture ”withoutt returne either of profitt or of any part of the princ.i.p.all”; and in 1660 Lord Baltimore, whose colony was well established, was himself living in straitened circ.u.mstances.

Yet within sixty years after the Susan Constant entered the James River, seven colonies were firmly planted on the coast of North America: Virginia and Maryland to the south; Ma.s.sachusetts Bay and Plymouth, Connecticut and Rhode Island, in New England; and between the two groups of English settlements was the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the Hudson. Within the limits of these colonies dwelt a population of more than seventy thousand people, economically self-sufficing, possessed of well-defined political inst.i.tutions and clearly marked types of social and intellectual life. The English migration and the founding of the English colonies was in fact due mainly to the initiative of the colonists themselves; and the inst.i.tutions which they established in America were different from those which statesmen and traders had imagined. The character of colonial life and inst.i.tutions was determined by the motives which induced the settlers to leave the land of their birth, by the inherited traditions which they carried with them into the wilderness, and by the wilderness itself--the circ.u.mstances which, in the new country, closed them round.

The motives which induced many Englishmen to come to America in the seventeenth century must be sought in the profound social changes occurring in the time of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts. The high hopes with which the Virginia Company looked forward to successful colonization were partly inspired by the prevailing belief that England was overpopulated. There was much to justify the belief. The reign of Elizabeth witnessed a striking increase in the number of unemployed, the poverty-stricken, and the vagabond. The destruction of the monasteries left the poor and defenseless without their accustomed sources of relief; while steadily rising prices, due partly to the increased supply of silver from the Spanish-American mines, were not infrequently disastrous to those who were already living close to the margin of subsistence. As never before country roads and the streets of towns were enc.u.mbered with the vagrant poor, and the jails and almshouses were filling up, as a result of Elizabethan legislation, with petty thieves, ”rogues and st.u.r.dy beggars.”

That the surplus population would readily flow into the colonies, to the advantage of all concerned, was the common belief. For successful colonization, said the author of _Nova Britannia_ in 1609, but two things are essential, people and money; and ”for the first wee need not doubt, our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, so that if wee seeke not some waies for their foreine employment, wee must provide shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions.” Yet for more than a decade one of the chief difficulties of the Virginia Company was to procure settlers. Reports from Virginia were discouraging. The prosperous preferred to remain at home, and the company had ”to take any that could be got of any sort on any terms.” Little wonder that the colony for many years barely survived. It survived only by taking on the character of a penal camp, in which the settlers worked for the company that fed them, and ordered their daily routine by the regulations of martial law.

The settlement was doubtless saved from destruction, but it did not greatly prosper, under the military and joint-stock regime; for ”when our people were fed out of the common store, glad was he who could slip from his labour or slumber over his task he cared not how.” The first step in the abolition of the joint stock was taken in 1616 when Sir Thomas Dale ”allotted to every man three acres of land in the nature of farms.” It was the beginning of better things, since not even the most honest men, when working for the company, ”would take so much pains in a weeke as now for themselves they would do in a day.” The first general distribution was made in 1618, and within a few years the communistic system was a thing of the past. Throughout the century the ”head right”

was the nominal basis for the granting of land: fifty acres were regarded as the equivalent of the cost of transporting one colonist. But in fact the head right was customarily evaded. The payment of from one to five s.h.i.+llings was usually sufficient to secure t.i.tle to fifty acres, and in 1705 the practice was legalized. t.i.tles so secured were burdened with the payment of a small quit-rent to the state; but the quit-rent was difficult to collect, was often in arrears, and sometimes never paid.

A greater incentive to settlement than free land was the discovery of a crop that could be exported at a profit. Virginia had been founded to raise silk and tropical products, and to supply England with naval stores. But the difficulties were greater than had been antic.i.p.ated, and in 1616, when John Rolfe, having discovered a superior method of curing the leaf, sold a cargo of native tobacco in London at a profit, the future of Virginia was a.s.sured. Neither the plans of the company nor the scruples of the king could prevail against the force of economic self-interest. Twenty thousand pounds were exported in 1619, forty thousand in 1622, sixty thousand in 1624. Tobacco became at once, and in spite of long opposition on the part of the home Government remained, the chief enterprise of the colony. Virginia was founded on tobacco, and like the other Southern colonies, sacrificed everything to the raising of her most important commodity; and for Virginia, as for the other Southern colonies, the conditions necessary for the cultivation of her great staple were of determining influence in the development of her social inst.i.tutions.

Those who were interested in the Virginia Company loudly proclaimed that the recall of the charter would ruin the colony. But it was population, rather than corporate or royal control, that Virginia needed, and the profits from tobacco proved a more powerful incentive to large families and immigration than all the efforts of king or company. Within a decade after 1624 the number of settlers increased from 1232 to 5000. In 1649 the population had reached 15,000, and in 1670 it stood at 38,000. Land was virtually free to those who could pay for the cost of clearing, and the rich soil of the tide-water bottoms a.s.sured an easy living and the prospect of acc.u.mulating a competence. As the conditions of life grew easier, the Virginians, with the true instinct of frontiersmen, described America as G.o.d's country, abounding in every good thing: ”Seldom any that hath continued in Virginia any time will or do desire to live in England, but put back with what expedition they can.” The glowing accounts which reached England appealed to those of every cla.s.s whose straitened circ.u.mstances or unsatisfied ambitions disposed them to a hazard of new fortunes. The yeoman farmer, whose income was small and whose children would always remain yeomen; the lawyer and the physician, the merchant and the clergyman, ambitious to become landowners and play the gentleman; younger sons of the country gentry, for whom there were no a.s.sured avenues of advancement: these felt the call of the New World.

Fretted by social restrictions, or pinched by rising standards of living, they saw Virginia in the light of their ideals, and were willing to exchange a safe but restricted position for the chance of economic and social enfranchis.e.m.e.nt.