The Jamestown Experiment (26 page)

When the news of the Indian massacre and the starvation among the colonists reached London in the spring of 1623, the state of
the colony shocked members of the company and the government. The glowing accounts of Virginia in the company’s promotional literature were again contradicted by observers who reported on the continuing struggles. News of the attack was compounded by continuing internal struggles within the company and its relationship with the Crown.

Since 1619, when a seven-year exemption from import duties on the colony expired, the Crown had taxed the attractive burgeoning tobacco trade as a source of revenue. Although it was less than the tariff on Spanish tobacco, the tax significantly cut into the settlers’ income and caused resentment. They turned to smuggling the tobacco to Holland, incurring the wrath of the king’s ministers. Negotiations between Sandys and the Crown for a tobacco monopoly and tax only divided the company further, as Smythe and his allies attacked Sandys, resulting in bitter factional strife that was brought before the Privy Council.

In May 1623, the Crown established a commission to investigate the colony by examining company records, letters, and questioning former settlers and travelers who had been to Virginia. That autumn a four-man commission traveled to Virginia to inspect the colony.

The failures of the colony were obvious as damning evidence was accumulated. The Indian massacre was evidence that this threat had not dissipated. The colony may have generated profits with the export of tobacco, but these profits were not enough to prevent the company from falling into bankruptcy, nor had the colony established the diversified economy that the company and Crown had wished. On top of that, because of the disease climate, thousands had died since 1607.

The first commission declared that the colony was in a “weak and miserable” condition and argued that the Crown should revoke the company’s charter and seize control of the colony. King James
ordered Attorney General Sir Thomas Coventry to sue the company in the Court of the King’s Bench. On May 24, 1624, almost exactly after seventeen years of struggle and death, the court sided with the Crown and ordered the Virginia Company’s charter revoked. The following year, the new king, Charles I, made Jamestown a royal colony dependent upon the Crown rather than a commercial enterprise. The colony’s trade and commerce was an attractive target for the king. Yet, it did not take long for the colony to recover from the Indian attack of 1622, and the tobacco trade rapidly grew. Exports of tobacco to England increased dramatically from three hundred thousand pounds in 1630 to one million pounds in 1640 and almost thirty million pounds at the end of the century. The price of tobacco, however, followed the law of supply and demand and gradually fell, causing many farmers to suffer difficult times. Still, tens of thousands of Englishmen and women migrated to Virginia in search of opportunity. The settlers earned money from raising the cash crop, but their success was more fundamentally rooted in the expansion of liberty and opportunity.

The rule of liberty and self-government drew many more settlers than the false promises of the martial regime that predominated during the first decade of settlement. The principles were laid down after a decade of struggling under a failed authoritarian regime. The Virginia Company had introduced and fostered a more capitalist framework of free enterprise that built the American character at the dawn of the colonial era of American history.

Epilogue

D
uring the course of the seventeenth century, Virginia continued to grow and thrive. The Jamestown colony instituted free representative government, governed according to the rule of law, and introduced a system of free enterprise that rewarded industry and individual initiative. These entrepreneurial principles were inherited from England, held by the Elizabethan and Jacobean gentlemen adventurers who first settled North America, and gradually enshrined in the American character. Although the American colonies were part of the mercantilist system of England that limited free trade and heavily regulated American trade, the principles of free enterprise predominated among the colonists.

The development of a capitalist ethic in America was advanced by the American Revolution, as the Declaration of Independence stated that it was an unalienable right that all people could pursue their own happiness unfettered by government. Moreover, the U.S. Constitution was framed to protect liberty and private property and laid the foundation for the rule of law that was necessary for private enterprise to thrive.

The American Dream, which originated along the banks of the James, was perhaps represented most symbolically by the quintessential rags-to-riches story of Benjamin Franklin. In his
Autobiography,
Franklin stated the reason for writing his story: “Having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world…my posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own situations, and therefore fit to be imitated.”
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Franklin’s dream was not achieved by all who tried to flee poverty and obscurity, nor was it truly within reach of certain groups who did not enjoy the promise of liberty to pursue their own happiness. Nevertheless, it remained the ideal and part of the American identity. It was attained by many Americans over the centuries, as individuals were free to pursue their own destinies and reach for their dreams with industry, creativity, a bit of pluck, and a great passion to get wealthy.

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville, a French observer of American character, noted the relentless pursuit of wealth among Americans that drove them incessantly forward. In his classic
Democracy in America,
Tocqueville wrote, “In America, therefore, each finds easy ways, unknown elsewhere, to make his fortune or to increase it. Cupidity is always breathless there, and the human mind… gets carried away only in the pursuit of wealth. Not only does one see industrial and commercial classes in the United States, as in all other countries; but what has never been encountered—all men simultaneously occupied with industry and commerce.” This ribald individualism made America the most prosperous and dominant global power over the last two centuries.
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Despite all the changes in the American economy throughout American history—industrial, transportation, commercial,
technological and communication revolutions, globalization, and the growth of government regulation of the private economy—the enterprising American character has proved remarkably resilient, and has endured. Americans are still free individuals doggedly pursuing their wealth in ever-changing ways, taking great risks and sometimes reaping great rewards. The same enterprising spirit that drove the Elizabethan gentlemen adventurers to Virginia, that led to the rise of men like Benjamin Franklin, that characterized the American identity that Tocqueville observed, and that has been responsible for the success stories of countless famous individuals and ordinary persons is alive and well.

And it all started at Jamestown in 1607. The adventurers such as John Smith, Christopher Newport, and Sir Thomas Gates who loomed large in the early history of the colony were free and enterprising English gentlemen, but they could not establish a lasting colony because they built it on the wrong principles. In time, the colony thrived under the leadership of men such as the lesser-known George Yeardley, because it was rooted upon entrepreneurial principles rather than the vain personalities of the first gentlemen. By giving opportunity to all, the colony built the American Dream for all who would work hard to reap the fruits of their labor.