On many occasions the development of popular liberty in England has gone hand in hand with its development in America. The growing strength of the popular antagonism to Stuart methods of government was first conspicuously marked by the ascendency of Sir Edwin Sandys and his party in Parliament and in the management of affairs in Virginia. Its first fruit was the introduction of parliamentary institutions into America. Despotic government in Virginia had been thoroughly discredited by the conduct of Argall. More than 1,000 persons were now living in the colony, and the year 1619 saw the number doubled.[97] The people called for self-government, and Sandys believed that only through self-government could a colony really prosper. Governor Yeardley was accordingly instructed to issue writs for the election of a General Assembly in Virginia, and on the 30th of July, 1619, the first legislative body of Englishmen in America was called together in the wooden church at Jamestown. Eleven local constituencies were represented under the various designations of city, plantation, and hundred; and each constituency sent two representatives, called burgesses, so that the assembly was called from 1619 until 1776 the House of Burgesses. The eleven boroughs were James City, Charles City, the City of Henricus, Martin Brandon, Martin's Hundred, Lawne's Plantation, Ward's Plantation, Argall's Gift, Flowerdieu Hundred, Smith's Hundred, and Kecoughtan. The last two names were soon changed. Smith's Hundred, at first named after the treasurer, took for its sponsor one of the opposite party and became Southampton Hundred. The name of this friend of Shakespeare, somewhat curtailed, was also given to Kecoughtan, which became Hampton, and so remains to this day. These eleven names indicate the extent of the colony up the James River about to seventy miles from its mouth as the crow flies, and laterally five or six miles inland from either bank, with a population rather less sparse than that of Idaho at the present day. Such was the first American self-governing state at its beginning,—a small beginning, but what a change from the summer day that witnessed Lord Delaware's arrival nine years before!
Nature of the General Assembly.
Concerning this House of Burgesses I shall have something to say hereafter. Let it suffice for the present to observe that along with the governor and deputy-governor there was an appointed upper house called the council; and that the governor, with the assistant council, and the House of Burgesses, altogether constituted a General Assembly essentially similar to the General Court of Massachusetts, to their common prototype, the old English county court, and to their numerous posterity, the bicameral legislatures of nearly all the world in modern times. The functions of this General Assembly were both legislative and to some extent judicial. It was endowed with full powers of legislation for the colony. Its acts did not acquire validity until approved by the General Court of the London Company, but on the other hand no enactment which the Company might make for the colony was to be valid until approved by its General Assembly. These provisions were confirmed by a charter issued in 1621.
The first negro slaves, 1619.
This gift of free government to England's first colony was the work of the London Company—or, as it was now in London much more often called, the Virginia Company—under the noble management of Sir Edwin Sandys and his friends. That great corporation was soon to perish, but its boon to Virginia and to American liberty was to be abiding. The story of the Company's downfall, in its broad outlines, can be briefly told, but first I may mention a few incidents that occurred before the crisis. One was the first introduction of negro slaves into Virginia, which, by a rather curious freak of dates, came in 1619, just after the sitting of the first free legislature, and thus furnished posterity with a theme for moralizing. "About the last of August," says Secretary Rolfe, "[there] came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars." A census taken five years later, however, shows only twenty-two negroes in the colony. The increase in their numbers was for some time very slow, and the establishment of slave labour will best be treated in a future chapter.
A cargo of maidens, 1619.
The same year, 1619, which witnessed the introduction of slaves and a House of Burgesses, saw also the arrival of a shipload of young women—spinsters carefully selected and matronized—sent out by the Company in quest of husbands. In Virginia, as in most new colonies, women were greatly in the minority, and the wise Sir Edwin Sandys understood that without homes and family ties a civilized community must quickly retrograde into barbarism. On arriving in Virginia these girls found plenty of suitors and were entirely free to exercise their own choice. No accepted suitor, however, could claim his bride until he should pay the Company 120 pounds of tobacco to defray the expense of her voyage. This practice of sending wives continued for some time, and as homes with pleasant society grew up in Virginia, life began to be made attractive there and the immigration rapidly increased. By 1622 the population of Virginia was at least 4,000, the tobacco fields were flourishing and lucrative, durable houses had been built and made comfortable with furniture brought from England, and the old squalor was everywhere giving way to thrift. The area of colonization was pushed up the James River as far as the site of Richmond.
The great Indian massacre, 1622.
This long narrow colony was dangerously exposed to attack from the Indian tribes along the York and Pamunkey rivers and their confederates to the west and north. But an Indian attack was something that people had ceased to expect. For eight years the Indians had been to all appearance friendly, and it was not uncommon to see them moving freely about the villages and plantations. There had been a change of leadership among them. Wahunsunakok, the old Powhatan whom Smith called "Father," was dead; his brother Opekankano was now The Powhatan. It is a traditional belief that Opekankano had always favoured hostile measures toward the white men, and that for some years he awaited an opportunity for attacking them. How much truth there may be in this view of the case it would be hard to say; there is very little evidence to guide us, but we may well believe that Opekankano and his people watched with grave concern the sudden and rapid increase of the white strangers. That they were ready to seize upon an occasion for war is by no means unlikely, and the nature of the event indicates careful preparation. Early in 1622 an Indian chief whom the English called Jack of the Feather killed a white man and was killed in requital. Shortly afterward a concerted attack was made upon the colony along the entire line from Chesapeake Bay up to the Berkeley Plantation, near the site of Richmond, and 347 persons were butchered. Such a destruction of nearly nine per cent. of the white population was a terrible blow, but the quickness with which the colony recovered from it shows what vigorous vitality it had been gaining under the administration of Sir Edwin Sandys. So lately as 1618 such a blow would have been almost prostrating, but in 1622 the settlers turned out with grim fury and hunted the red men like wild beasts till the blood debt was repaid with compound interest, and peace was restored in the land for more than twenty years.
While these fiendish scenes were being enacted in Virginia a memorable drama was moving toward its final catastrophe in London. In the next chapter we shall witness the overthrow of the great Virginia Company.