Chapter 1 - In the Beginning
If one understands the history of the Colony of Virginia, one understands the origin of the country we know today. From its founding through the revolution are microcosms of the “federal system” of government in use today; a phrase hotly contested by many members of the Constitutional Congress who favored “national system”, but were overruled because it lent the impression that power was consolidated in the federal government rather than balanced with the states.
The Colony of Virginia was chartered by King James I (for whom Jamestown is named) in 1606, and the first settlers arrived about a year later. These were not the Pilgrims, whose dewey-eyed fairytales told in schools are largely fabricated. First, it is much more likely that their hometown of Leiden (they had left England for Holland before undertaking their trans-Atlantic starvation adventure) was slowly degrading into a community of geezers and it was time to hit the road. Second, the Colony of Massachusetts was founded in 1620, making it a silver medalist in the New World race.
Virginia, on the other hand, was started purely for pecuniary reasons. The charter was granted to the Virginia Company, a speculative partnership of“Knightes, gentlemen, marchanntes and other adventurers of our cittie of London”, under the terms that they be completely responsible for their plantations, establish their own government, coin money, pass laws provided they didn’t contradict English law, create their own courts, and report extant issues the king might want to weigh in on back to England along with a fifth of anything they found worth money.
From day one the English Colonies in the New World were to be autonomous, self-governing independents, and from then on Americans would never give up what is the first principle upon which our modern country is founded: freedom. In truth is was sheer practicality that resulted in the nature of its charter. It was transparently obvious to everyone that support could not be expected, because round-trip communication or appeal for military support was a four-month affair. You were going to have to take care of yourselves, and that meant weapons. This subtle fact did not go unnoticed, and in the charter James I explicitly granted the “adventurers” the right to “sufficiente shipping and furniture of armour, weapon, ordonnance, powder, victall, and all other thinges necessarie for the saide plantacions and for theire use and defence there”. This resulted in the second basic principle upon which our country is founded: the necessity of weapons.
It’s a damn good thing too, because the new settlers didn’t count on the level of hostility they would encounter from the indigenous populations. In typical European fashion, the new settlers blew off the fact that someone might actually live there. Someones, actually. The territory had long been owned by the Powhatan Confederacy, a collection of Algonquin tribes about 14,000 strong. The settlers—sadly lacking in English soldiers for protection—were forced into forming militias, which would become the cornerstone of American military philosophy until the 20th century. Every able-bodied man was required to participate in the common defense, and it was largely a question of practicality. In a hostile land, you could all fight, or you could all die; or at least die of something else if you survived.
After most of the English settlers had dropped dead from malaria and starvation, relief came in 1610 in the form of several ships and Governor De La Warr (later, Delaware), and he soon pissed off the local tribes. The minor conflict that followed ended when John Rolfe married the famous Pocahontas, daughter of the chief, after she was captured by soldiers; another highly romanticized story.
By 1620, things were booming, and about this time Massachusetts started to sound like a pretty good idea for the Pilgrims. The Virginia Company had established the House of Burgess—a governing body for the entirety of Virginia that would later become the Virginia General Assembly—built churches, and established a school to educate the savages. Annoyed, the natives attempted to extirpate the settlers, but to no avail, and it is at this time that the Virginia Company established the third great principle upon which our country would be founded: debt. In 1624 King James revoked their charter, and Virginia officially became a colony of the Crown.