The Birth of America
Struggling from one peril to the next, the Jamestown settlers planted the seeds of the nation's spirit
Far more useful was Dale's decision to junk what amounted to communism. Since Jamestown's start, all land was held and worked in common, with rations distributed evenly from a central storehouse. There was no incentive for an individual to work harder. Dale assigned colonists plots and let them grow for their own benefit.
It was on one of those 3-acre plots that John Rolfe tinkered with tobacco and transformed Jamestown. The English regarded the tobacco grown in Virginia as much too coarse to compete in the growing world market with the sweet-tasting leaf the Spanish raised in the West Indies. Rolfe took Indies seed, combined it in 1612 with the local variety, and produced a leaf that was smooth to smoke and easy to raise.
In 1614, he sent his first shipment to England. Soon, London was importing tens of thousands of pounds of Virginia leaf a year. Virtually every clearing in the colony was planted with tobacco.
Rolfe also made a decision in his personal life that helped ease Jamestown's relationship with the Indians, which had deteriorated since Smith's exit. In dealing with natives, Smith relied on threats and an occasional hut-burning to show toughness. His successors favored massacres. In one nighttime attack, the English killed 15 men, burned their village, and captured and murdered their queen and her children. Indians responded with attacks of their own. Amid the strife, the English took a hostage—not an ordinary hostage, but Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas. The Indian attacks subsided. While the princess remained in custody, Rolfe got Dale's permission to marry her. In April 1614—the year he first sent tobacco to London—Rolfe and Pocahontas wed in the Jamestown church. In deference to his daughter, the chief would fight no more.
Thanks to Rolfe's tobacco and Powhatan's peace, Jamestown began to thrive, as did England's newer settlements along the James. The colony's population doubled in 1619 when more than 1,200 settlers came ashore. Many paid their way and got 50 acres in return. But most were indentured servants who worked payless for years in exchange for eventual freedom and a share of profits or a piece of land. Ninety were "young and uncorrupt maids," sent as wives for settlers.
That year, amid the sudden prosperity, popular government made its start. The company told its governor to abolish arbitrary rule, usher in English common law and due process, and form a representative assembly. Paradoxically, that also was the year a ship docked at Jamestown with 20 men and women from Africa—the beginning of the slave trade.
When Powhatan died in 1618, the "married peace" died as well. His subjects were retreating to the west, yielding their cornfields to the tobacco-driven colonists. The new chief, Opechancanough, decided the English had encroached enough. On Good Friday of March 1622, his warriors surprised and massacred 347 settlers. The survivors swore to "destroy them who sought to destroy us." Armies of Englishmen torched Indian villages and cornfields and killed hundreds of men, women, and children. The eradication campaign would continue off and on for decades. By century's end, only a few hundred Indians remained in a region once inhabited by tens of thousands.
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