The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America

by Madison Grant

The settlement of Virginia, beginning with Jamestown in 1607, was of a different character from that of the northern and middle colonies. It was not a colonization project undertaken by families, but an exploitation by adventurers. In a sense it may be compared with the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the nineteenth century. Men went forth seeking fortune and expecting to return in a few years with newly acquired wealth. The motley array of colonists sent to Jamestown by the Company during the first decade of activity seems to have been drawn from every part of the British Isles and every stratum of society.

After ten or a dozen years, the proprietors recognized that the wealth of their plantations would not consist in gold and pearls but that they were facing an actual colonization project, which could only be built upon the foundations of family life. An early recognition of this fact has been one of the principal sources of strength in all British colonization, and the proprietors of the Virginia colony, while continuing to encourage men of all sorts to go to their settlement on the James River, undertook one of the famous eugenic enterprises of history by sending over several shiploads of young women to make homes for their settlers. The undertaking seems to have been carried out in good faith and with good judgment and the result was notably successful. A little later, however, the continuing demand for wives led to a sort of traffic that probably produced a less carefully selected feminine population for the plantations. On the whole, it would probably be fair to say that the "First Families of Virginia" represented a higher social standard in the male than in the female lines.

The year 1619 was racially eventful. It saw the arrival at Jamestown both of the first shipload of "uncorrupt maydes for wives," and the landing of the first cargo of Negroes. The next half-century brought the development of the plantation system and the spread of Negro slavery and the problem of miscegenation between Negro women and the lowest and most unintelligent type of white servant came into prominence. In this way originated the mulatto group which has ever since been a characteristic feature of the Negroes in the United States. Those admirers of the Mulatto who boast that he carries in his veins the blue blood of the aristocratic families of the South, would do well to read the actual records of Virginia and other colonies during the seventeenth century and see what sort of white stock actually formed the foundation of that half of this hybrid group.

The colony continued to grow for the first quarter of a century by attracting voluntary adventurers from whom the rule of the survival of the fittest exacted so heavy a toll that probably the survivors were a fairly fit lot. The abandonment of the original proprietary company in 1624 led to a marked change in the manner of populating the colony, and for the next generation the bulk of the immigrants were assisted in one way or another to get to Virginia and allowed to work out the money advanced them by their labor after their arrival.

At its best, there was little difference in the colonization plans that British colonies have always used to get desirable settlers from "home." In the case of Virginia it brought a vigorous population of all sorts, and the name of "indentured servant" covers not merely the domestic in the kitchen and the laborer in the tobacco field but artisans' apprentices and medical students. Under the extremely trying conditions many of these immigrants were unable to survive. Governor Berkeley asserted that four out of five died during the first year of residence, while Evelyn, the diarist, declared that five out of six succumbed. Such statements at least point to an excessively high mortality which must have spared most frequently those who were physically and mentally superior and well adapted to be among the founders of a new colony. Hence it seems clear that the importance of these indentured servants in the later development of Virginia, as of other colonies, is not to be reckoned in proportion to the number who arrived, but to be estimated upon the much smaller number who survived and founded families.

Another type of assisted immigrant of which a great deal has been heard was the deported convict. Some of these were evidently men who had cheated the gallows, for the Virginians continually protested against their arrival. Apparently much the larger number, however, were men of superior quality in many respects. When nearly three hundred offenses were punishable by the death penalty in England, many of those convicted were not persons marked by great moral turpitude, and the so-called "transported convict" might have been equally well a pirate, or a preacher who persisted in expounding the gospel without proper license from the ecclesiastical authorities so to do.

Large numbers were political prisoners who found themselves temporarily on the losing side; still more were mere prisoners of war. During the Protectorate, victories like Dunbar and Worcester and the suppression of the Irish Rebellion by Cromwell in 1652 were followed by deportations of prisoners of war to the colonies, and the government felt fully justified in recovering part of the expense of transportation by selling the services of these able-bodied and intelligent men for seven years to the highest bidder. Unquestionably most of the foundation stock of this kind that survived to perpetuate itself would be entirely fit for colonization. During the same period many cavaliers took refuge in Virginia.

When the royalists were again in power after 1660, a similar stream of Commonwealth soldiers and non-conformists began to come into the colonies. The Scotch Rebellion of 1670 brought another accession to Virginia, and in 1685 many of the captives at the Battle of Sedgmoor were exiled here. Such labor was welcomed by the Virginians in marked distinction to the real criminals, of whom there were apparently only a few thousand in all. After about 1700 the spread of Negro slavery reduced the demand for white indentured labor and less of it arrived.

In the great diversity of men and women brought over in these and other ways, there are some who figure in the ancestry of the best families of Virginia at the present time, and others who, from the beginning, were misfits in the colony. Such of the latter as survived the trying ordeal of the tobacco fields either ran away, or, when their term of service expired, drifted out to the borders of the settlement.

The Virginia holdings were large and far beyond the reach of an ordinary man without capital, in marked contrast to conditions in New England, where the great majority of the settlers were small landowners. The freed bondsmen therefore had to go to the frontier or drift down into North Carolina or some other region where they were not handicapped by their lack of funds. The most shiftless and least intelligent of them tended to collect in the less valuable lands at the fringe of civilization, or to drift along to other similar settlements farther west and south. In this way originated one of the peculiar elements of the Southern population, the "poor white trash." Their numbers were recruited generation after generation by others of the same sort while the able, enterprising, and imaginative members were continually drained off to the cities or sought better land elsewhere. These "poor whites" in the Alleghanies and through the swamp lands of North and South Carolina have been an interesting feature of the population for three centuries. Largely of pure Nordic stock, they are a striking example to the eugenist of the results of isolation and undesirable selection.