the settlement of virginia takes place in 1607 after the failed colony at roanoke and the origins of the settlement of virginia actually start the year before in 1606 when the king of england king james the first here he is chartered a joint stock enterprise uh called the virginia company now what is a joint stock enterprise or a joint stock company well look first let's talk about the virginia colony as a great example of one of these joint stock companies you need to understand that creating a colony 3 000 miles away in the middle of a wilderness that you're highly unfamiliar with is an incredibly dangerous but also expensive undertaking and so investors can mitigate the cost of creating a colony by banding together to buy shares in what are known as joint stock companies this way large amounts of money can be raised and if the colony fails no single investor suffers the entire loss if the colony of course succeeds the investors will share in the profits based upon the amount of stock or shares that they owned in the company and these joint stock companies represented perhaps the most important organizational innovation uh that came out of the age of exploration and it provided really the first instruments uh for english colonization in america so the one that was chartered in 1606 by king james the first was known as the virginia company and it was owned of course by the investors who called themselves adventures you know of course they did uh and these investors are going to seek to profit from the gold and silver that they believe they will find when they travel across the atlantic uh and go over to the uh new world uh king james also gave the virginia company a spiritual mission right uh by ordering the settlers to take the christian religion uh quote christian religion to the indians who he believed quote live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of god okay now i want to make it abundantly clear the virginia company didn't care much about christianizing the virginia company exists to make the investors money so the first colony we're going to talk about is what's known then as a corporate colony it's simply designed to make money okay in december of 1606 the virginia company is going to send over to the americas three ships carrying a total of 104 colonists all of the men all of them boys no women and in may 1607 after five months on the atlantic ocean uh they finally reached uh what is today the chesapeake bay which extends uh 200 miles along the coast of present-day virginia and maryland now to avoid spanish raiders that they were operating in the area the colonists chose to settle about 40 miles inland along a large river that they ended up calling the james river in honor of their king and they named the settlement jamestown now the settlement of jamestown if anyone's ever been it's an interesting place uh they created this initial settlement uh kind of on a marshy peninsula that juts out into the james river and on the back side of that peninsula as this map shows you they the first thing they're going to want to do is construct a fort and the triangle there you see the solid triangles where they constructed this initial fort and with inside the fort uh fortified walls they began to build homes and then you know everything grew out from there so i want to talk just a little bit about this initial settlement that they called jamestown which uh they they first landed there on may 14 1607. um it turns out that as soon as they made landfall here very apparent problems uh that were associated with not only the virginia company but this expedition to create a colony uh became very apparent uh and i and these were big big problems so let's talk about a few of them real quick the first concerns the people that went here in 1607 they were what we call uh gentlemen uh these tended to be middle class to upper middle class english wealthy men many of them were the actual investors in the virginia company um and you can see by this this famous painting from the 17th century these people were ridiculous they're just ridiculous and and the reason this is a problem is that you know if you're going to start a colony 3 000 miles away in the middle of the wilderness you might want to send the people that know what the hell they're doing that know how to work with their hands right you want to send carpenters and and uh you want to send engineers and and and surveyors and things like that you don't send wealthy english gentlemen so why did they well because i didn't think this would be hard they thought it'd be easy they thought well i've invested in this company i'm gonna go over there and pick up gold and silver and off of the beaches and uh they're gonna be wealthy and so when you send all of these people over there you you don't have anybody that knows what to do right and when the going gets tough nobody knows how to handle it added into this another problem was that these are the type of people in england that are used to taking orders from nobody but themselves right they answered to no one but themselves so it meant that not only did they send the wrong people over here as a big mistake but there was no overall command there was no one in charge and so when things got rough and things are going to get rough real quick as we're going to talk about in just one second there's not going to be anyone there to kind of organize everybody into a manner in which they can survive and they can become prosperous and so two big problems stem from the people they sent right they sent people that don't know what they're doing and they sent people that are used to taking orders from nobody and then another problem and perhaps one of the biggest is they built this colony this initial settlement and probably the worst place in north america now i mean that's a bit hyperbole but they built this in a horrible place now this is a picture i took when i visited the jamestown national historic site and and in the distance you can see the the the palisade of it's a reconstructed palisade of the fort and the flag and all that and then far far background is the james river but you see this this peninsula they built this this settlement on it's got a bunch of little creeks flowing through it it's a drainage area into the james river and so anytime it's going to rain the whole place is just going to flood out but making matters even worse there's always standing water here now from standing water we're going to get mosquitoes and from mosquitoes we're going to get disease so here's what's going to happen at jamestown uh while once the initial enthusiasm wears off people start to realize we've made some horrible mistakes and the mistakes are going to lead to a lot of problems for example disease will be rampant throughout the the settlement of jamestown especially in the first year or two it's just rampant i mean people just die by like flies as a result of disease since nobody knows how to farm since nobody knows how to do anything people are going to die of exposure they're going to die of starvation they're going to die i mean there was never going to be enough food because nobody knew how to grow it and if they didn't know how to grow it it wasn't going to be enough to feed everybody uh you'd have to steal from native americans in the area which we'll talk about here in a second uh which could be highly uh dangerous for you so you're going to have a lot of mistakes made early on right sending the wrong people no leadership and building the initial settlement in the wrong place that this colony should have disintegrated it should have failed and it got even worse they built this colony right in the middle of a confederation of native americans that were known as the politicians now the palatines are just what the english called the uh the dominant indian group in the area and so that this palatine confederacy was perhaps the most influential and powerful native american confederation on the entire atlantic seaboard and they just happened to build this colony of jamestown right in the middle of it all now they might have gotten lucky here historians think that when the english initially showed up that the palatine confederacy was actually engaged in in finally uh overcoming its its main enemies in the area so maybe it couldn't focus exclusively on the english but the the the palatines ended up being a another big problem for the settlers of jamestown most notably their leader who the english called chief paladin i mean this guy was um a pretty brutal gentleman uh he was just as imperialistic as the english and the french and the spanish were i mean this guy had been leading his confederation of indians to conquer just about anybody that stood in his way in the chesapeake area so we got a lot of problems the colony probably never should have survived it should have gone extinct it should have vanished it should have failed just like roanoke so why didn't it well historians agree that the colony was able to survive the initial shock of the wilderness in the initial settlement period largely because of one of the initial settlers that went there and his name was john smith now a little bit about john smith who is obviously one of the most generically named people from american history john smith was a mercenary he was a soldier of fortune now a mercenary and a soldier of force i mean these are people that fight for nothing but money they fight for their own glory and their own and for money they also tend to be badasses and john smith really was when it came to warfare when it came to hand-to-hand combat sword fighting things like that tactics strategy john smith was a genius um he had been involved in numerous wars uh on the continent of europe as well as in the near east had survived the mall uh the reason he was here at jamestown is he was looking to further his own personal wealth he was an explorer as well uh the the reason he's so important is that he's here in jamestown when all of these problems become apparent problems that should have put an end and uh and snuffed out the colony of jamestown and which was going to become the larger colony virginia and he was able to prevent that from happening and the way he did it was that he filled that vacuum in the lack of leadership he he assumes command of the colony and because of his reputation and because of his skills right he's kind of like liam neeson he has a very s special set of skills if you will because of his special set of skills because of his reputation people were afraid to challenge him when he took control and what he did upon taking control of the colony is he just instituted a very simple little policy and that policy was and some of y'all may know it if you do not work you don't eat now that's going to have the effect of helping this colony limp along just a little bit right until more supplies can show up and so john smith is somebody that's worth knowing and the reason he has that statue built to him right in the middle of the jamestown historic site this is a great picture i took i'm not a photographer but this was just this you know the james river in virginia makes it easy on everybody the reason he is significant the reason john smith's worth knowing is he saves the colony from extinction he's not the reason the colony becomes the larger prosperous colony of virginia we're going to talk about that a little bit but he is important and the reason he has that monument built to him he is significant because he saves the colony from extinction now so he helps it survive 1607 1608 and most of 1609. however in late 1609 he was injured when a gunpowder a barrel of gunpowder exploded and he was severely injured and needed to return to england and he never did come back to virginia and so when he left in the fall of 1609 that that lack of leadership crept back in and uh that also coincided with with the arrival of more settlers to the jamestown colony and so without john smith there to lead the colony and with new settlers now arriving there wasn't enough food and beginning in the winter of 1609 into the winter of 1610 this was a period of jamestown's history that is known as the starving time now the starving time is called this not because historians refer to it as that we call it the starving times because the settlers of jamestown themselves referred to this as the starving time food was just incredibly scarce right nobody was working because nobody was there to tell them they had to or threatened them right you had more people than they had they they were counting on to feed uh and you just didn't have enough food and so the settlers there at jamestown in 1609 the winter of 1609 1610 they just suffered tremendously um trying to find some numbers here when the winter began you had just over 600 colonists or so in jamestown but when the when the uh spring hit in may uh you only had about 100 or so left so i mean we're we're talking about just mass starvation people just dying by the scores now who was in charge while all this was going on well it turns out it was a guy named thomas gates and thomas gates didn't know how to handle any of this all he knew to do was ride the winner out and when the winner was over he could see it in the eyes of the people of jamestown that they were done they were done and so he had them all load up on ships and the goal was to return uh to england and so they load up on ships and they set sail down the james river heading out of the mouth of the james river to the atlantic ocean and just as they come out of the chesapeake bay what do they see a massive flotilla of english ships sent by the virginia company loaded with supplies loaded with food loaded with new settlers right settlers that know what they're doing engineers carpenters hunters just a massive resupply convoy great greets them at the mouth of the chesapeake river just as they are ready to abandon jamestown now in command of this flotilla was a guy by the name of thomas west he'd been sent by the virginia company uh he was an aristocrat he was the the third baron de la war uh later on he will uh help establish a colony that bears that bore his name and and became a state that bears his name today can you figure it out yeah i know you can so what do we have here well we had an initial settlement at jamestown that should have failed and without the critical leadership the crucial uh leadership of john smith in those critical first years of the colony the colony would have he saves it from extinction in spite of all that the survivors of the starving time are ready to abandon the fort and then but before they can do so they're told to turn around by by uh dale of war uh and he orders gates back to jamestown ordering that jamestown will not be abandoned and this really was a turning point for the colony of virginia because west's arrival was going to mean that the colony was going to remain now the colony of jamestown was never going to be successful based upon the story we've talked about so far yet we know with hindsight that jamestown ends up becoming the larger more prosper prosperous colony known as virginia so here's what we want to do now we want to explore how that happened beginning in 1612 and over the course of about 12 years to 1624 the virginia company i'm sorry the virginia colony begins to prosper and to understand it we need to dive a little bit deeper and figure out exactly what happened during these years that would cause the colony to become the prosperous colony of virginia so after limping along for several years uh the colony began to prosper first by becoming profitable uh you know we talked about all these problems and all of these uh mistakes that were made but one thing that was not happening was the virginia company was not making any money but that began the change in 1612 because of the contributions of one of the jamestown settler settlers known as john rolfe rolfe was an agriculturalist he was a botanist he understood plants and what he began doing upon arrival at jamestown is he began experimenting with um tobacco now tobacco was well known around the world it was well known in europe it just wasn't a profitable commodity because all strands of tobacco known at the time were just way too harsh so what rolf began doing as a botanist as an agriculturalist as he began cross-breeding different strains different um strands of tobacco and he was able to produce a more mild form of tobacco if you care it was known as oanoko tobacco and it was highly profitable because of how mild it was right the more mild it was more people would actually smoke it not only did raw figure out how to uh cultivate this more mild strand of tobacco but he also figured out how to dry it out and preserve it uh through a process of hanging tobacco leafs up and drying them out right so that they wouldn't rot for the three-month journey four months journey back across the atlantic that way any tobacco produced in virginia would not only be well preserved when it arrived in europe but it was now of a more mild strand and what happened is tobacco used throughout europe exploded and everybody wanted virginia tobacco and so what happened in 1612 because of john rolfe and his experimentation with tobacco is he provides the colony a cash crop so he is one reason the colony uh and tobacco becoming a cash crop is one reason the colony becomes the great prosperous colony of virginia that it does the second involves the exploits of one of the founding members of the virginia company a guy by the name of sir edwin sandys edwin sandy's in 1618 realized the colony and the virginia company required some significant reforms in order to exploit the resources of the colony most notably land and the tobacco so in 1618 he and other members of the virginia company drafted a new charter and this one was referred to later as the great charter of 1618 because of all the major changes it brought to not only the way the colony was run but also the way the company would be run and one of the most significant reforms of the great charter of 1618 was something known as the head rights system you know they had the company had always had a really hard time convincing people from england to go to the colony i mean this was dangerous a lot of people didn't have any money to do it uh and so getting people to actually go the three thousand miles across the atlantic uh was was a very difficult thing for the virginia company to do so the head rights system was a way to alleviate that problem there's a way to attract more colonists to virginia to jamestown in order to exploit the tobacco cash crop and the way it worked is that any englishman that could buy a single share just a single share in the company under this head right system uh would be given 50 acres upon their arrival in the colony all they had to do was buy a single share and buy their passage across the atlantic and if you could do that under the head right system you get 50 acres if you brought anyone else with you 50 more acres now what does this do it it's going to cause now people in europe and in england to go whoa look at jamestown look at this place i can't get land where i live right now my land in england all the lands being enclosed up right it's all being fenced off so that the the great landed lords can grow their sheep but if i can just scrounge enough money together to buy a share in the virginia company and book my passage across the atlantic i can get 50 acres and if i take my son if i take my daughters if i take my wife with me i get 50 more acres the head right system had the the exact intention it fulfilled the exact intention it was trying to do it attracts immigrants and you're going to start to see then just this all of these tobacco farms pop up you're going to see population start to boom and the population is going to start spreading out all across the chesapeake bay so the head right system was a very important moment as a result of the great charter of 1618 that helped facilitate the growth of this colony and the growth of the colony is going to make it successful another reform of the great charter of 1618 was the creation of a representative legislature in the colony itself with so many people now here there needed to be some type of government there on the ground before the creation of this legislature the the running of the colony was done 3000 miles back in england but with so many people now here there needed to be some type of government in the colony to handle everything and the great charter of 1618 established the first representative legislature of the new world now i want to be clear this did not create the first representative legislature but it was the first one created in the americas in the new world what is a representative legislature a representative legislature is a form of government where the individuals that serve in that government are elected from the people at large they go to these government they go to the government to represent the will of their constituents the name of this representative government was known as the virginia general assembly it was later on changed the name to the house of burgesses now why is this important well guys englishmen were used to having a say in the laws that affect them this goes way back in english history it's a sacred right of an englishman to be represented in a government because it is through that representation you give consent to the laws that affect you the creation of this representative legislature in the virginia colony makes the colony attractive it makes the colony a place you want to go more people more profits so what happens here well two big ways in which the colony becomes successful is or three big ways that we've talked about so far is of course first the cultivation of tobacco second the head right system and third the creation of the first representative legislature in the new world now the last thing that's going to make the colony profitable it's going to make the colony a success will take a little bit of explaining to do this is pocahontas now pocahontas was one of many daughters of chief paliton but most people think that she was probably his favorite in 1607 when she was only 11 years old she figured that perhaps she figured into perhaps one of the best known stories in the settlement of uh the jamestown colony in virginia when she saved john smith from being killed for trespassing by her father now school children today still learn about pocahontas and john smith and through the years all of those stories uh and the facts have become distorted and falsified it's important to understand that pocahontas and john smith were friends and they were not disney world lovers um moreover the the indian you know pocahontas saved smith on more than one occasion uh before she actually was herself kidnapped by english settlers who were trying to blackmail her father now pocahontas did while in captivity end up marrying a settler of jamestown and the individual she married was john rolfe the gentleman we talked about earlier that cultivated and experimented with tobacco for the colony he was a 28 year old widower at the time and after the marriage you know they moved to back to england uh in 1616 and then in 1622 um i'm sorry they they were married in 1616. but in 1622 when they uh they moved back to england she actually died there from a lung disease now here's why this is taking so long when pocahontas married john rolfe and when she was living in the the english settlement the palatine confederacy did not attack the settlement for fear they might kill the favorite daughter of their chief chief paladin now by 1622 chief paladin had died and pocahontas's oldest brother had come to power over the palatine confederacy and then when pocahontas dies in 1622 uh there's really nothing left to stop the palatines from launching an all-out war against the english and that's what they did beginning on march 22nd 1622 a group of native americans from the pilot and confederacy infiltrated the jamestown settlement and massacred over 340 of its settlers a very bloody very nasty affair murdered him in their homes men women and children now this led to what was known as the second anglopolitan war now don't worry about the first one let me just care about this one this one lasted over 10 years and it really was a war of extinction um an extermination uh the english just absolutely snuffed out uh the pilot confederacy to the point that almost none of them survived and they did it in really nefarious really horrible ways i'll tell you the story one they at one point they left out poisoned wine which they knew some native americans would drink you know i mean i mean this is just nasty nasty stuff now uh why does that matter well the elimination of the palatine confederacy which really was the greatest threat uh external threat to the colony had been eliminated and this meant that you could then see a rapid expansion of settlement a rapid expansion of the tobacco uh production and rapid expansion of the profits so the elimination of the native american threat of the paluten confederacy was another ingredient in making the virginia colony into the economic and political uh success that it became the last concerns the monarch of england with all of these things going on in the english colony of virginia it caught the attention of king james the first uh you know in spite of the successes that are going on it was still very dangerous in virginia and people died by the scores i mean so many of every wave of immigrants that came to the colony uh so many of them ended up dying and the news of that jamestown massacre caught the attention also of king james and he wanted to know what was going on over here and that just makes sense i mean these are subjects of the crown they he is the crown and he's hearing about all these horrible things and he's hearing about uh you know the these the basically his citizens are going across the atlantic and dying so he wants to know what's going on so he sends a fact-finding mission over to the jamestown colony and what he realizes is that in spite of the potential of profits here the virginia company is running a very bad operation and quit in fact he he was quoted as saying that the virginia company is a is in a sickly and desperate state um and in 1624 he essentially revokes the charter of the virginia company uh now when he does this it means that control of the company or control of the colony no longer belongs to the virginia company and it now belongs to him this is the moment in 1624 that the colony of virginia became a royal colony and it would remain so until the american revolution now james the first dies in 1625 so he's not really going to be in charge of converting the virginia colony into a royal colony that would fall to his brother charles the first who we've talked about a little bit uh or we'll we'll see him again in some other lectures especially involving maryland now once the colony is freed from the control of the virginia company this has a significant effect on the settlers they're now free to own their own property right there's no company there that owns everything they now own it themselves so they're now free to own their own property and they can start any business they want they don't have to have the approval of uh the company so this is actually a good thing for people that live in the virginia colony removal of the company and the revoking of the charter and the colony become a royal colony means that the settlers are really gain a lot of self-determination uh the only thing charles wanted is that he would appoint a uh a governor uh to kind of oversee the colony and so the you're gonna have uh royal governors then of the colony uh up until the revolution and it would then fall to the first governor appointed by charles the first uh i misspoke this wouldn't be the first governor appointed by the monarch but one of the more significant governors uh that was appointed during the colonial era of virginia his name was sir william berkley and the reason i'm going to mention him here is that it was berkeley who would preside he arrived in the colony by in 1642 it's going to be berkeley that's going to provide prophesied over the colonies rapid growth and i mean rapid over the next 35 years tobacco prices started to surge anyone engaged in the tobacco industry started becoming incredibly wealthy they ended up dominating all social and political life in the colony and so uh berkeley is important in this regard in terms of the cementing this transition from the virginia company over to a royal colony uh and really setting the colony up um for great success so we'll stop right there with the uh history of the the settlement of virginia for now and let's just kind of bring it all together and talk about what we should take away from all of this um you want to keep it in context right the jamestown experience and the settlement of jamestown and settlement of virginia did not invent america right but but the colonies gritty will to survive in spite of all of these difficulties its mixture right of greed its mixture of uh piety and of course it's exploitation of both indians and later as we'll see here in a second uh africans formed the model for many of the achievements and really many of the ironies that would come to define this country even today the settlement of virginia is worth knowing especially how the colony became so successful for a few reasons it's important to understand how virginia went from that failure to a success so that you understand why the colony of virginia became such a major player in the lead up to and during the american revolution virginia by the time of the revolution in 1776 had become the wealthiest strongest most influential most powerful of all the original 13 colonies for england and north america and as a result of that emergence as the strongest and most influential it allowed virginia to take a leading role right a leading role in the american revolution some of the most famous leaders and impactful leaders uh of the american revolution people like george washington right people like thomas jefferson people like james madison these were all individuals that were from virginia and it wasn't a coincidence that so many of the leaders of the american revolution came from this colony it's because this colony became so powerful and why did it become so powerful it started to happen with the development of the cash crop of tobacco the great charter of 1618 creating the head rights system and the first representative legislature thereby attracting a lot more colonists the suppression of native american resistance in the colony and then finally the transition from the uh from a corporate colony to a royal colony all four of those major events are what explain the emergence of the virginia colony as the wealthiest strongest most influential by the time of the american revolution