Jamestown, Virginia, founded May 14,1607 under the auspices of the Virginia Company of London, has the distinction of being the birthplace of American slavery and democracy. Among its other "firsts": first capital of colonial Virginia, the first permanent settlement in British North America, first Anglican (Episcopal) church in North America (1607), the first English celebration of Christmas in the New World (1607), the first arrival of Africans (1619), the first distillation of corn whiskey, first cultivation of tobacco as a cash crop, and, the first (1682) printing press in America (the colonial government banned both the press and its printer who fled to Maryland). Named in honor of King James I of England and located on a marshy peninsula (later Jamestown Island) in the James River, initially Jamestown was little more than a hardscrabble palisade fort surrounded by one of the greatest Indian empires on the east coast of America (the Powhatan Confederacy) precariously housing a motley combination of gentlemen, adventurers, servants, and ne'er-do-wells seeking adventure and quick profits from gold, timber, and tobacco. (Women colonists would not arrive for another twelve years.)
Jamestown was primarily a profit-oriented colony whose distant stockholders in England hoped to reap quick and easy riches from their initial investments. Unfortunately, many colonists preferred to look for gold and silver and arrogantly assumed neighboring Indians would give them food. Despite a surrounding abundance of fowl, game, and fish, many Englishmen died of hunger, dysentery, malaria and yellow fever (no doubt transmitted by the hordes of mosquitoes and flies infesting the area) during the first summer; the winter of 1609-1610 became known as "the Starving Time." Even the dynamic and skilled leadership of council president Captain John Smith (who insisted "He that will not work shall not eate") barely kept the colony alive. Situated in an unhealthful marshy area, the colony always had a small population because of a high mortality rate from disease. Only 12 percent of the original 500 colonists were still alive in 1611; yet the town gained a firmer economic foothold after 1612 thanks to John Rolfe's successful experiments in developing a new type of sweet-scented tobacco (the indigenous plant was too harsh and bitter for European tastes) which quickly became the colony's major exportable cash crop, especially after Sir Walter Raleigh and other London elites began smoking it in pipes. By 1624 Jamestown, which as a town had spread beyond the palisade fort, consisted of nearly 130 colonists, twenty-two houses, three stores, and one church. Despite King James's disapprobation of smoking ("a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs") and tobacco ("a filthy novelty") it became Virginia's legal tender (1642) as colonists measured their wealth in the number of acres or processed hogsheads of tobacco. Known as "brown gold" by planters and consumers, to this day tobacco remains Virginia's greatest cash crop--a $5 billion industry.
The Virginia General Assembly, the first representative government on the continent, met from July 30 to August 4, 1619; it remains America's oldest continuous legislature. The year also marked the arrival of the first white women when ninety "younge, handsome and honestly educated maydes," were sent by the Virginia Company as wives for the bachelor colonists. Each husband reimbursed the company in tobacco for his bride's passage. The African arrival in late August 1619 (a year before the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts on the Mayflower) was not accidental. Tobacco required heavy backbreaking labor--labor white men were deemed unable to provide. In April 1619 a Dutch ship and an English ship, Treasurer, ostensibly sent by the colony's governor on a routine trading voyage, were actually privateers on their way to raid Spanish shipping. During their joint voyage the two heavily armed vessels captured a Spanish slave ship and its cargo of nearly one hundred African slaves. The Dutch ship immediately returned to Old Point Comfort near Jamestown. Colonist John Rolfe's letter of January 1620 reported the arrival "about the latter end of August . . . of 20 and odd Negroes." The Dutch mostly sold the Africans to Governor Sir George Yeardley and the colony's wealthiest resident, a merchant named Abraham Peirsey. Smaller vessels from Old Point Comfort smuggled the Africans to Jamestown where some were sold as slaves and luckier ones as indentured servants. Shortly afterwards the Treasurer arrived and dropped off an African slave woman named Angela (the first African-Virginian whose name we know) and set sail for Bermuda with twenty-nine other Africans. Over the next three years English ships brought more Africans to Jamestown. Such was the birth of the transAtlantic slave trade by means of a Dutch ship whose name history has forgotten, a group of unfortunate West Africans stolen and sold at least three times during the horrors of the Middle Passage, and a colony willing to try anything to secure cheap labor.
Fires, Indian attacks and bad weather plagued Jamestown (perhaps the worst place in Virginia to establish a settlement) several times before the end of the seventeenth century. In 1608 it was accidentally burned and two years later nearly abandoned by its inhabitants just as a new governor, Lord De La Warr, providently arrived with additional colonists and supplies. An Indian attack in 1622 nearly wiped out most of the Virginia colonists (a friendly Indian warned Jamestown in advance); two years later King James took over the struggling settlement and made it the first royal colony in America. A violent hurricane on 27 August 1667 nearly destroyed the area with twelve-foot swells. The town was burned in 1676 during Bacon's Rebellion and suffered another fire in 1698. This proved its death knell; it fell into decline and the capital of Virginia transferred in 1699 to Williamsburg.
By the 1850s the peninsula had become an island and during the Civil War Confederate and Union forces occupied it. A group of white men (one a British citizen) and a free black were arrested in 1862 near the ruins of the old settlement by members of a runaway slave camp established and protected on the island by a small force of Union troops. Their captors took them before a self-styled black judge (and ex-slave) who conducted a quick mock trial and ordered their immediate execution by firing squad. Only the free black, though badly wounded, managed to crawl away and escape during the confusion surrounding the executions.
During the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century, under the leadership of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (founded 1888 for the preservation of colonial and other state historical sites), last-ditch conservation efforts and a seawall built by the Army Corps of Engineers halted the site's erosion. Publicity surrounding the April 1907 Jamestown Exposition, a national celebration held in Norfolk marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the first permanent English colony in America 1607 gave added impetus to the preservation of the site. As more excavations uncovered invaluable artifacts and structural traces of the original fort, the island was incorporated into the Colonial National Historical Park and later, the U. S. National Park Service during the 1930s; a recreation of the fort at its seventeenth century zenith was constructed. The federal government declared Jamestown a National Historic Site in 1940. Jamestown Festival Park became part of a historical reservation triangle of approximately fifteen square miles on the peninsula between the York and James Rivers encompassing Cape Henry (site of the first English landing on 26 April 1607) and Yorktown (the final battleground of the American Revolution and site of the British surrender in October 1781). Today Colonial Williamsburg often overshadows Jamestown but it remains a popular tourist attraction.
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