History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia

by Charles Campbell

It is remarkable, that from about 1614, for some seven years, James the First had governed England without a parliament; and the Virginia Company was during this period a rallying point for the friends of civil and religious freedom, and the colony enjoyed the privilege, denied to the mother country, of holding a legislative assembly.

Yeardley finding a scarcity of corn, undertook to promote the cultivation of it, and this year was blessed with abundant crops of grain. But an extraordinary mortality carried off not less than three hundred of the people. Three thousand acres of land were allotted to the governor, and twelve thousand to the company. The Margaret, of Bristol, arrived with some settlers, and "also many devout gifts." The Trial brought a cargo of corn and cattle. The expenditure of the Virginia Company at this period, on account of the colony, was estimated at between four and five thousand pounds a year.

A body of English Puritans, persecuted on account of their nonconformity, had, in 1608, sought an asylum in Holland. In 1617 they conceived the design of removing to America, and in 1619 they obtained from the Virginia Company, by the influence of Sir Edward Sandys, the treasurer, "a large patent," authorizing them to settle in Virginia. They embarked in the latter part of the year 1620, in the Mayflower, intending to settle somewhere near the Hudson River, which lay within the Virginia Company's territory. The Pilgrims were, however, conducted to the bleak and barren coast of Massachusetts, where they landed on the twenty-second day of December, (new style,) 1620, on the rock of Plymouth. Thus, thirteen years after the settlement of Jamestown, was laid the foundation of the New England States. The place of their landing was beyond the limits of the Virginia Company.

In the month of August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first introduced into Virginia. Some time before this, Captain Argall sent out, at the expense of the Earl of Warwick, on a "filibustering" cruise to the West Indies, a ship called the Treasurer, manned "with the ablest men in the colony," under an old commission from the Duke of Savoy against the Spanish dominions in the western hemisphere. She returned to Virginia after some ten months, with her booty, which consisted of captured negroes, who were not left in Virginia, because Captain Argall had gone back to England, but were put on the Earl of Warwick's plantation in the Somer Islands.[144:A]

It is probable that the planters who purchased the negroes from the Dutch man-of-war reasoned but little on the morality of the act, or if any scruples of conscience presented themselves, they could be readily silenced by reflecting that the negroes were heathens, descendants of Ham, and consigned by Divine appointment to perpetual bondage.[145:A] The planters may, if they reasoned at all on the subject, have supposed that they were even performing a humane act in releasing these Africans from the noisome hold of the ship. They might well believe that the condition of the negro slave would be less degraded and wretched in Virginia than it had been in their native country. This first purchase was probably not looked upon as a matter of much consequence, and for several ages the increase of the blacks in Virginia was so inconsiderable as not to attract any special attention. The condition of the white servants of the colony, many of them convicts, was so abject, that men, accustomed to see their own race in bondage, could look with more indifference at the worse condition of the slaves.

The negroes purchased by the slavers on the coast of Africa were brought from the interior, convicts sold into slavery, children sold by heathen parents destitute of natural affection, kidnapped villagers, and captives taken in war, the greater part of them born in hereditary bondage. The circumstances under which they were consigned to the slave-ship evince the wretchedness of their condition in their native country, where they were the victims of idolatry, barbarism, and war. The negroes imported were usually between the ages of fourteen and thirty, two-thirds of them being males. The new negro, just transferred from the wilds of a distant continent, was indolent, ignorant of the modes and implements of labor, and of the language of his master, and perhaps of his fellow-laborers.[145:B] To tame and domesticate, to instruct in the modes of industry, and to reduce to subordination and usefulness a barbarian, gross, obtuse, perverse, must have demanded persevering efforts and severe discipline.

While the cruel slave-trade was prompted by a remorseless cupidity, an inscrutable Providence turned the wickedness of men into the means of bringing about beneficent results. The system of slavery, doubtless, entailed many evils on slave and slave-holder, and, perhaps, the greater on the latter. These evils are the tax paid for the elevation of the negro from his aboriginal condition.

Among the vessels that came over to Virginia from England, about this time, is mentioned a bark of five tons. A fleet sent out by the Virginia Company brought over, in 1619, more than twelve hundred settlers.[146:A] The planters at length enjoyed the blessings of property in the soil, and the society of women. The wives were sold to the colonists for one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, and it was ordered that this debt should have precedence of all others. The price of a wife afterwards became higher. The bishops in England, by the king's orders, collected nearly fifteen hundred pounds to build a college or university at Henrico, intended in part for the education of Indian children.[146:B]

In July, 1620, the population of the colony was estimated at four thousand. One hundred "disorderly persons" or convicts, sent over during the previous year by the king's order, were employed as servants.[147:A] For a brief interval the Virginia Company had enjoyed freedom of trade with the Low Countries, where they sold their tobacco; but in October, 1621, this was prohibited by an order in council; and from this time England claimed a monopoly of the trade of her plantations, and this principle was gradually adopted by all the European powers as they acquired transatlantic settlements.[147:B]

Two persons unknown presented plate and ornaments for the communion-table at the college, and at Mrs. Mary Robinson's Church, so called because she had contributed two hundred pounds toward the founding of it. Another person unknown gave five hundred and fifty pounds for the education of Indian children in Christianity; he subscribed himself "Dust and Ashes;" and was afterwards discovered to be Mr. Gabriel Barber, a member of the company.