Jamestown and Early American Colonies

Jamestown was, by almost any measure, a disaster. Of the 105 settlers who arrived in May 1607, perhaps 80 percent were dead by the spring of 1610. The site was badly chosen, the settlers were poorly governed, the indigenous Powhatan Confederacy was understandably hostile, and the colony was kept alive only by the resilience of its remaining inhabitants, the timely arrival of relief expeditions, and the development of a tobacco economy that, by accident, made the colony viable. The story of early English North America is, in this respect, the story of how a series of near-catastrophic failures were turned, by luck and persistence, into the foundations of a continent-spanning British America.

The Founding of Jamestown

Jamestown was established in May 1607 by the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock company chartered by James I in April 1606. Three small ships — the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery — carried 105 settlers to the coast of Virginia, where they chose a site on the James River, named after their sovereign. The site was, as the settlers soon discovered, almost uniquely bad: a marshy peninsula with brackish water, mosquitoes in summer, and no obvious source of fresh water. The choice was made for strategic reasons — defensibility, distance from Spanish Florida — and not on the merits.

The colony was governed initially by a council of seven, several of whom were already quarrelling. The early months were a study in mismanagement. The “First Supply” of 1608 found the colony on the brink of collapse; the “Second Supply” of 1609 was wrecked in a hurricane in Bermuda. The “starving time” of 1609–1610, in which perhaps 80 percent of the colonists died, was the colony’s nadir. The arrival of Sir Thomas Gates in May 1610, with new supplies and a stern determination to enforce discipline, was the moment of rescue. The colony’s survival in these years owed as much to the hospitality of the Powhatan as to the capacity of the English.

John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Survival of the Colony

Captain John Smith (1580–1631) was the most capable of the early Jamestown leaders. A self-promoting but professionally competent soldier, he imposed a degree of order on the colony in 1608–1609 and established trading relations with the Powhatan. The famous story of his capture by Powhatan hunters in December 1607 and his rescue by Pocahontas — the chief’s daughter — is preserved in Smith’s own writings and is now generally thought to be a misremembering of an initiation ceremony, not a rescue. The relationship between the two was, in any case, more complicated than the Disney version: Smith was a competent soldier and a terrible administrator, and his relations with the colony’s other leaders were persistently bad.

The colony’s survival owed much more, in the long run, to tobacco. John Rolfe, who arrived in 1610, began to cultivate a sweeter strain of tobacco using seed from the West Indies. By 1612 Virginia tobacco was selling at a profit in England, and by the 1620s the colony was exporting perhaps 200,000 pounds a year. The tobacco economy made the colony viable, and the 1618 headright system — which granted 50 acres of land to any settler who paid for their own passage, and 50 acres for each additional person they brought — encouraged rapid population growth.

The New England Colonies

The Pilgrims’ arrival in 1620 aboard the Mayflower — and the signing of the Mayflower Compact, the first written self-government agreement in the English-speaking colonies — was the founding moment of New England. The Pilgrims were religious Dissenters who had fled England for Leiden in the Netherlands, and from there to the New World. Their arrival, off-course from their intended destination in Virginia, led to a surprisingly cordial relationship with the Wampanoag people, who taught the settlers how to plant corn and helped them survive the first difficult winters. The first Thanksgiving of 1621 was a real event, not a legend, although the relations it celebrated did not last.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628), Connecticut (1636), Rhode Island (founded by Roger Williams in 1636), and the other New England colonies were the product of a much more self-conscious religious settlement than the Virginian. The Puritans who founded them believed they were constructing a “city upon a hill” — a model Christian commonwealth. The religious intensity, the strong town governments, and the relatively egalitarian land distribution produced a distinctively New England political culture that would, in the eighteenth century, become the seedbed of American resistance to British rule.

The Southern Colonies

The southern colonies — Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia — developed a plantation economy based on tobacco, rice, indigo, and (after the 1730s) cotton. The labour demands of the plantation system were met initially by indentured servants from Britain and (after the 1660s) increasingly by enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic in the horrors of the Middle Passage.

The southern colonies developed a distinctive social and political order, characterised by large estates, a small planter elite, and (in some areas) a long-established black majority. The dependence on slave labour and the relatively small proportion of free white settlers produced a society that was, in many ways, more similar to the British West Indies than to New England. The political tensions generated by this dependence on slavery would eventually contribute to the American Revolution, when the British Crown’s apparent willingness to constrain colonial slavery in the 1770s was one of the catalysts of southern independence.

The Middle Colonies

The middle colonies — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware — were characterised by ethnic and religious diversity. New Amsterdam was captured from the Dutch in 1664 by an English fleet under Colonel Richard Nicolls and renamed New York, after the Duke of York. Pennsylvania was established in 1681 by William Penn as a Quaker colony and was settled by English, Welsh, German, and Dutch immigrants who established some of the most successful commercial and agricultural communities in British North America. The middle colonies were known for their grain farming, their commercial activity, and their relatively tolerant religious environment. Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston but raised in Philadelphia, captured the spirit of the middle colonies in his “Way to Wealth” and in his experiments with electricity, both of which depended on the relative freedom of the colonial middle.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of early British America has been, since the 1960s, almost entirely reshaped. The older story — of heroic English settlers bringing liberty and property to a wilderness — was undermined first by the work of the Turner school on the frontier, then by the demographic and ecological revisions of the 1970s, and finally by the “New England Studies” and “Atlantic History” turns. Three works in particular reshaped the field: Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), which treated the rise of Virginia slavery and the rise of Virginia liberty as two sides of the same coin; Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West (1986), which placed the colonial experience in an Atlantic perspective; and Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972), which demonstrated the centrality of disease, plants, and animals to the European conquest of the Americas. The current generation of historians, including Kathleen Brown, John Smolenski, and Nandini Bhattacharya, has paid more attention to indigenous agency, to the experience of enslaved people, and to the Atlantic as a single connected world.

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