On July 30, 1619, the first elected assembly in the English colonies met in Jamestown, Virginia.  Two delegates from each of the 10 Virginia settlements, along with the governor and his 6 councilors, met in the choir of the Jamestown church.  This governing body became known as the House of Burgesses.

When Governor Sir George Yeardley had arrived in Jamestown in April 1619, he carried instructions to call an assembly so that the settlers could “make and ordain whatsoever laws and orders should by them be thought good and profitable.” The House of Burgesses met for five days, “sweating and stewing, and battling flies and mosquitoes.” It passed strict laws against swearing, gambling, drunkenness, and excess in dress.  It also made church attendance compulsory and passed laws against injuring the Native Americans.

The House of Burgesses meeting marked the first time colonists had been given a voice in their colonial government.  They believed that right was now irrevocable.

The Jamestown colony was England’s first permanent settlement in North America, but it was established more than 100 years after the first English explorers arrived.  In May 1497, John Cabot headed west across the Atlantic.  King Henry VII of England had sent Cabot to “discover and find, whatsoever isles, countries, regions or provinces...  which before this time have been unknown to all Christians.” Cabot, an Italian navigator, had long hoped to find a western route to Asia.  He wanted, he said, to reach “the lands from which Oriental caravans brought their goods....”

Cabot landed somewhere near Nova Scotia, then sailed southward along the “barren shores” and “wooded coasts” of America.  While he did not see any people, he did see “notched trees, snares for game, and needles for making nets.” Back in England, King Henry granted Cabot a pension and bonus for finding what the king called the “new found land.” The next year, Cabot sailed west on a second expedition to America.  He was never seen again.

Although John Cabot arrived in America less than five years after Columbus, the English did not try to colonize America for the next 80 years.  The English government had little money, and Cabot had found no gold or other wealth.  There was also no compelling reason for anyone in England to migrate to America.  Furthermore, the Spanish had already claimed America, and their claim had been upheld by the pope.  In 1497 Spain and England were both Catholic countries and allies against France.  Any English attempt to settle America would have angered the Spanish and upset the alliance.  During the late 1500s, however, a series of dramatic religious, economic, and political changes occurred that led to the founding of the first English colonies in America.

TURNING POINT
The Protestant Reformation Divides Europe

At the time Cabot sailed to America, virtually all of western Europe was Catholic.  This unity began to break apart in 1517, when a German monk named Martin Luther published an attack on the Church, accusing it of corruption.  Luther’s attack marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.  In 1520 Luther was expelled from the Catholic Church, but his ideas continued to spread rapidly across western Europe.  Luther himself went on to found the German Protestant Church, now called the Lutheran Church.

As the Reformation spread, an important development occurred in Switzerland when John Calvin suggested that neither kings nor bishops should control the Church.  Calvin argued that congregations should choose their own elders and ministers to run the Church for them.  Calvin’s ideas had a profound impact on England, and ultimately America, because many of the first English settlers in America shared Calvin’s ideas.

The Reformation Changes England

In contrast to the theological debate sweeping Europe, the Reformation in England began with a simple disagreement between the king and the pope.  In 1527 King Henry VIII asked the pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.  It was not unusual for the pope to grant a divorce to a king, but in this case the pope hesitated.  Catherine was the king of Spain’s aunt, and the pope did not want to anger the Spanish king.

The pope’s delay infuriated Henry.  He broke with the Catholic Church, declared that he was now the head of England’s church, and arranged for the divorce himself.  The Catholic Church in England became the Anglican Church, but because Henry agreed with Catholic doctrine, the Anglican Church kept the organization and most of the rituals of the Catholic Church.

Following Henry’s break with the Catholic Church, those who wanted to keep the Catholic organization of the Anglican Church began to struggle with those who wanted to “purify” it of all Catholic elements.  People who wanted to purify the Church became known as Puritans.

Under the reign of Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, many Puritan ideas such as the supreme authority of the Bible gained acceptance within the Anglican Church.  Still, many Catholic rituals remained unchanged.  Although the Puritans objected to the Catholic rituals, the most important issue was who controlled the Church.  John Calvin’s ideas had influenced many Puritan leaders.  They argued that every congregation should elect its own ministers and elders to control the Church instead of having bishops and archbishops appointed by the monarch.

The Puritan cause suffered a serious setback in 1603, when James I became king.  Although King James was Protestant, he refused to tolerate any changes in the structure of the Anglican Church.  Since the king headed the Church and appointed its leaders, the Puritan idea of electing ministers was a direct challenge to royal authority.  James’s refusal to reform the Church made many Puritans willing to leave England.  Ultimately, many would choose America as their refuge.

Economic Changes in England

At the same time that the Reformation was transforming the English Church, a revolution in trade and agriculture was changing English society.  At the beginning of the 1500s, much of England’s land was divided into large estates.  The nobles who owned these estates rented their land to tenant farmers.  In the 1500s, Europeans began to buy large quantities of English wool.  As the demand for wool increased, many English landowners realized they could make more money by raising sheep than by renting their land.

The landowners converted their estates into sheep farms by enclosing their land and evicting the tenants.  This became known as the enclosure movement.  It created thousands of poor, unemployed beggars who wandered from town to town looking for work.  For these people, leaving England for a chance at a better life in America was appealing.

By 1550 England was producing more wool than Europeans would buy, and the price fell.  England’s merchants needed to find new markets to sell their surplus wool, and they began organizing joint-stock companies to find those new markets.

Joint-stock companies pooled the money of many investors.  This enabled the company to raise large amounts of money for big projects.  The development of joint-stock companies meant that English merchants could afford to trade with, and colonize, other parts of the world without government financing.

Explaining
Why did many Puritans become willing to leave England?
 

England Returns to America

The need to find new markets for their wool convinced English merchants to begin searching for a northern water route through North America to Asia.  In 1576 an Englishman named Martin Frobisher took three ships to America to search for a northwest passage.  He made two more trips by 1578, but he did not find the passage.  Although he failed, Frobisher’s voyages were important.  For the first time in several decades, the English had returned to America.

England’s new interest in America contributed to its growing rivalry with Spain.  The Reformation had changed Europe’s balance of power.  England had become the leading Protestant power, while Spain remained a staunch defender of Catholicism.  The former allies were now enemies.

After the Reformation, England not only had new enemies, it had new allies as well.  By the 1560s, most Dutch people had become Protestant despite being part of the Spanish empire.  When the Spanish tried to suppress Protestantism in the Netherlands, the Dutch rebelled.  To help the Dutch revolt, Queen Elizabeth allowed English privateers to attack Spanish ships.  Privateers are privately owned ships licensed by the government to attack ships of other countries.

Gilbert and Raleigh

English privateers found it difficult to attack Spanish ships in the Caribbean because England had no bases in the region.  This led many of Queen Elizabeth’s advisers to recommend that England establish outposts in America to support naval operations against Spain.

The first attempts at colonization were not promising.  In 1578 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a well-known English soldier, received a charter from Queen Elizabeth to create a colony in America.  Gilbert made two attempts to colonize America.  Both failed, and Gilbert himself died at sea.

Gilbert’s half-brother, Walter Raleigh, persuaded Queen Elizabeth to renew Gilbert’s charter in his own name.  He then sent two ships to scout the American coastline.  The ships passed through the Outer Banks along what is today North Carolina and landed on an island the Native Americans called Roanoke.  Impressed by the discovery, Queen Elizabeth knighted Raleigh, and he in turn named the land Virginia—in honor of Elizabeth, who was known as “the Virgin Queen.”

The Lost Colony of Roanoke

In 1585 Raleigh sent about 100 men to settle on Roanoke.  After a hard winter, the unhappy colonists returned to England.  Raleigh tried again in 1587.  He sent 91 men, 17 women, and 9 children to Roanoke.  A month later Roanoke’s governor, John White, headed back to England for more supplies.  War erupted between England and Spain while White was in England, and he was not able to return until 1590.  When he finally returned, the colony was gone.  There were no bodies, only empty houses and the letters “CRO” carved on a post, possibly referring to the Croatoan—a Native American group who lived nearby.  No one knows what happened, and the fate of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke remains a mystery today.

Summarizing
Why did England want to establish outposts in America?
 

Jamestown Is Founded

Shortly after the war with Spain ended in 1604, a group of English investors petitioned the new king of England, James I, for a charter to plant colonies in Virginia.  In 1606 James granted the charter.  Their new company was named the Virginia Company.

On December 20, 1606, the Virginia Company sent three small ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery —and 144 men to Virginia.  After a difficult trip, the ships arrived off the coast of North America, and the colonists founded a settlement on the banks of a river.  In honor of their king, they named the river the James River and their settlement Jamestown.  Unfortunately, the colonists’ site turned out to be too close to the sea.  The land they selected was swampy and swarming with malaria-carrying mosquitoes.  The location was just the beginning of Jamestown’s problems.

Early Troubles

Most of Jamestown’s colonists were townspeople.  They knew little about living in the woods and could not make use of the abundant fish and game around them.  Even worse, none of the colonists knew how to raise livestock or cultivate crops.  Additional problems occurred when the upperclass “gentlemen” among the colonists refused to do manual labor.  Making matters worse, Jamestown’s governing council argued constantly and could not make decisions.  The results of all of these problems were nearly catastrophic.  Lawlessness, sickness, and food shortages all took their toll.  Although about 200 new settlers arrived in 1608, only 53 colonists were still alive by the end of the year.  All of the remaining colonists may have died as well, in fact, had it not been for two men— Captain John Smith and Chief Powhatan.

Captain John Smith, a member of the colony’s governing council, emerged as Jamestown’s only strong leader.  Born into a poor family, Smith had left home as a young man to become a soldier of fortune.  In late 1607, with winter approaching and the colony short of food, Smith explored the region around Jamestown and began trading with the local Native Americans—a group called the Powhatan Confederacy, led by Chief Powhatan.  It was this trade that helped the colony get through its first two winters.

Frustrated by events in Jamestown, the Virginia Company appointed a new governor with absolute authority, Thomas West, Lord De La Warr.  To entice settlers, the company offered land to anyone who worked for the colony for seven years.  The offer produced results.  In August 1609, 400 new settlers arrived in Jamestown.

The arrival of so many settlers late in the summer created a crisis.  There was not enough food, nor could enough be grown before winter.  Governor De La Warr had not arrived yet, and John Smith had suffered a gunpowder burn and returned to England.  Without strong leadership, the colony rapidly deteriorated.  As winter neared, the settlers began to steal food from the Native Americans.  In response, Native American warriors attacked the settlers.

The winter of 1609 and 1610 became known as the “starving time.” The colonists at Jamestown ate “dogs, rats, snakes, toadstools, [and] horsehides,” and a few settlers even engaged in cannibalism, digging up corpses from graves and eating them.

By the spring of 1610, only 60 settlers were still alive.  They abandoned Jamestown and headed downriver.  On the way, they met three English ships heading for the colony.  On board were supplies, 150 more settlers, and the colony’s governor, Lord De La Warr.  De La Warr convinced the settlers to stay.  Instead of returning to Jamestown, however, many decided to establish other towns along the James River.  By 1618 there were several towns in Virginia.

De La Warr’s deputy, Thomas Dale, then drafted a harsh code of laws for Jamestown.  Settlers were organized into work gangs and required to work at least six hours per day.  Dale’s discipline saved the colony, but Jamestown still did not thrive.  In 1614 Dale decided to permit private cultivation.  Settlers could acquire three acres of land if they gave the colony one month of work and 2 1?2 barrels of corn.  Whatever else they produced, they could keep.  According to one colonist, Ralph Hamor, the new system dramatically increased production:

“When our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly ... glad was the man that could slip from his labor ... presuming that howsoever the harvest prospered, the general store must maintain them, by which means we reaped not so much corn for the labors of 30 men, as three men have done for themselves.”

Tobacco Saves the Colony

Well before the founding of Jamestown, the Spanish began shipping tobacco from their Caribbean colonies to Europe.  Smoking tobacco became very popular in Europe in the early 1600s.  The Jamestown settlers had tried growing tobacco, but the local variety was too bitter.

One colonist named John Rolfe continued to experiment, using seeds imported from Trinidad.  He developed a new curing method, and in 1614 he shipped about 2,600 pounds (1,180 kg) to England.  Rolfe’s tobacco was not as good as Spanish tobacco, but it sold for a good price, and the settlers soon began planting large quantities of it.

The First Assembly
In 1618 the new head of the Virginia Company in London, Edwin Sandys, introduced major reforms to attract settlers.  The first reform gave the colony the right to elect its own assembly to propose laws.  The first general assembly met in the Jamestown church on July 30, 1619.  The new Virginia government included a governor, 6 councilors, and 20 representatives, 2 from each of the colony’s 10 towns.  The representatives were called burgesses, and the assembly was called the House of Burgesses.

Headrights Lure Settlers
To entice new settlers to Virginia, the company also introduced the system of headrights, in which new settlers who bought a share in the company or paid for their passage were granted 50 acres of land.  They were given 50 more acres for each family member over 15 years of age and for each servant they transported to Virginia.  Up to that point, Jamestown had been a colony made up mostly of men.  In 1619 the Virginia Company sent about 90 women to the colony.  The first Africans also arrived in 1619 when a slave ship stopped to trade.  The settlers purchased 20 Africans as “Christian servants,” not enslaved people.  The Africans had been baptized, and at that time English law said that Christians could not be enslaved.

Virginia Becomes a Royal Colony
The new policies triggered a wave of immigration.  By 1622 more than 4,500 settlers had arrived in Virginia.  The dramatic increase in settlers alarmed the Native Americans.  In March 1622, they attacked Jamestown, burning homes and killing nearly 350 settlers.  The settlers eventually put an end to the uprising, but the colony was devastated.  The uprising was the final straw for King James.  An English court revoked the company’s charter, and Virginia became a royal colony run by a governor appointed by the king.

Describing
How did Captain John Smith and the Powhatan Confederacy save Jamestown?
 

Maryland Is Founded

A joint-stock company had founded Virginia, but the colony north of it resulted from the aspirations of one man, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore.  Lord Baltimore had been a member of the English Parliament until he converted to Catholicism.  This decision ruined his career, but he remained a good friend of King James I and his son, Charles I.  Catholics were opposed in England for much the same reason as Puritans.  Catholics did not accept the king as head of the Church, nor did they accept the authority of Anglican bishops and priests.  They were viewed as potential traitors who might help Catholic countries overthrow the English king.  Consequently, they were forbidden to practice law or teach school.

As he watched the persecution of his fellow Catholics, Lord Baltimore decided to found a colony where Catholics could practice their religion.  In 1632 King Charles granted him a large area of land northeast of Virginia.

Baltimore named the new colony Maryland.  Baltimore owned Maryland, making it England’s first proprietary colony.  The proprietor, or owner, could govern the colony any way he wished.  He could appoint officials, coin money, impose taxes, establish courts, grant lands, and create towns.  In most respects, he had a king’s powers.

Lord Baltimore died shortly before settlers arrived in his colony.  In 1634, 20 gentlemen, mostly Catholic, and 200 servants and artisans, mostly Protestant, arrived in Maryland.  Despite Baltimore’s hope that Maryland would become a Catholic refuge, most of its settlers were Protestant, although the government officials and most large estate owners were Catholic.  The friction between the two groups plagued the colony for many years.

Analyzing
Why did Lord Baltimore found Maryland?