Conceived in Liberty (9 page)

The new patent divided the monopoly powers of government over Virginia between two joint stock companies of merchants. The South Virginia Company was to have claim over the land between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels, roughly from Cape Fear north to the Potomac River; the North Virginia Company was to rule between the forty-first and forty-fifth parallels, roughly from Long Island to Maine. To stimulate competition and to provide incentive for colonizing, the zone in between was thrown open to settlement by either company, with the stipulation that one could not settle within one hundred miles of the other. Since the South Virginia
Company was headed by leading merchants of London, it soon became known as the London Company; while the North Virginia Company, centered around merchants of Plymouth, came to be called the Plymouth Company. Each company was granted powers to allocate its land in any way it wished; the king reserved the then customary royalty of five percent of whatever gold or silver might be mined from the new land. Insisting upon overall royal control and dominion unique to monopoly charters of that era, the king vested supervisory control of the two companies in a Royal Council of Virginia, which was appointed by the king and which in turn was to appoint resident local councils to govern each of the two colonies. The settlers and their descendants were supposed to enjoy all the “liberties, franchises, and immunities” of Englishmen at home—a clause immediately contradicted by the absence of any provision for elections or home rule.

The Plymouth Company for North Virginia was composed of west country merchants, gentry, and soldiers, and was headed by the governor of Plymouth, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who desired to establish a fishing and fur-trading colony independent of the London merchant-financiers. Also included in the group were Raleigh Gilbert, a son of Sir Humphrey, and Sir John Popham, chief justice of the King’s Bench; Sir John had played a leading role in procuring the charter. The Plymouth Company dispatched an exploratory expedition in October 1606, and sent colonists to America in May 1607 under Raleigh Gilbert and George Popham, a relative of Sir John. A settlement was established on the Kennebec River in what is now Maine, but because of a severe winter and poor crops, and the death of the two Pophams, the colony was abandoned in September 1608. Thereafter the Plymouth Company did not attempt further colonization, but concentrated on the Newfoundland fisheries and some fur trade.

The London Company for South Virginia was composed of members of leading political families. The leading member was the ubiquitous Sir Thomas Smith, the leader of the group that had purchased trade rights from Raleigh, and the governor of the East India, Muscovy, and Levant companies. Other leading members were: the Reverend Richard Hakluyt; Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, a leader in the monopoly-chartered East India, Burma, and Guinea companies; and the leading London merchants involved in the Muscovy, Levant, and East India companies. And just as the Levant Company had been founded by members of the Muscovy Company, and a quarter of the stockholders in the East India Company were members of the Levant Company, so over one hundred members of the East India Company were now investors in the London Virginia Company, a main purpose of which was to provide a source of raw materials, such as tropical products, spices, and furs. Another prominent member in the London Company was Sir Edwin Sandys, a prominent Puritan and friend of a royal favorite, the Earl of Southampton.

The London Virginia Company sent forth its first settlers in December 1606; they were carried then as in succeeding years on ships provided by
the Muscovy Company, which long remained the major operator in the Virginia trade. With them the colonises took the king’s instructions to the company, which included the requirement of a public oath of obedience by the colonists and a death penalty for all manner of crimes, including tumults, sedition, conspiracy, and adultery. The president and the council of the company were empowered to make laws for the colonists, consistent with the laws of England, subject to revision by the Royal Council.

The ships landed at Chesapeake Bay the following May 6. A settlement was founded thirty miles inland on the James River, called Jamestown, in honor of the king. This was the first sucessful English settlement in North America. The colony of Virginia had begun.

The new English colonial grants were placed between the French exploration and settlement to the north, and the Spanish occupation to the south. Through trading and missionary posts, Spain had been effectively occupying the coast of what was later to become South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The French had been continually exploring and trading on the St. Lawrence for some years; already they had established a trade in furs, which would become the most valuable French export from North America. In 1602 the patent for monopoly of the fur trade to France from North America had been granted to the Company of New France, which sent Samuel de Champlain to explore the St. Lawrence in 1603. The following years, Champlain established a fur post at Acadia (now Nova Scotia) and explored the coast of New England.

In 1607 the Muscovy Company commissioned Henry Hudson, a descendant of the founder of the company, to explore the Arctic regions around Greenland. Two years later Holland and Spain concluded a trade, which the Dutch claimed gave them rights, similar to those accorded to the English, to sail to the New World. Promptly the Dutch sent Henry Hudson, under auspices of the Dutch East India Company, to explore the Arctic regions. Saliing along the North American coast from Newfoundland to the Carolinas, Hudson returned by way of Delaware Bay (South River) and the Hudson River (North River), which he explored up to Albany; he claimed the fur regions for the Dutch. In 1610 Hudson set forth under an English company headed by Sir Thomas Smith, and discovered Hudson’s Bay before being abandoned by his mutinous crew. Several of the companies of which Smith was governor were subject to reorganization in the spring of 1609, because of the new Dutch competition in North American waters resulting from the Dutch peace treaty with Spain. New charters were granted in May 1609 to the English East India Company and the closely linked London Virginia Company. The East India Company was granted a perpetual monopoly charter, and in the following year established its first trading posts in India. Analogous to the East India Company charter, the new charter granted to the “Treasurer and Company of the Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia” a corporate body politic, with Sir Thomas Smith filling
the key, royally appointed post of treasurer. The charter was completely distinct from the old joint charter of the unsuccessful Plymouth Company.

The rechartering of an independent London Virginia Company for American colonization was complemented by the chartering of a new company for planting English and Scottish colonists in the lands recently conquered in Northern Ireland. In the spring of 1610 a group of London and Bristol merchants, interested in founding a colony in proximity to the fishing banks off Newfoundland, was chartered as the “Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of Cities of London and Bristol for the Colony or Plantation of Newfoundland.” Under the direction of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the company prepared to send exploratory voyages along the New England Coast. To improve the financial condition of the London Virgina Company, a new charter was issued in 1612 to Smith as the “Treasurer and Company of Virginia.” The boundaries included the islands within three hundred leagues of the continent, specifically the rediscovered Bermudas or Somers Islands, which in 1615 were placed under the “Somers Islands Company” of which Smith was also the governor. Along with the 1612 Virginia Company charter, Smith received a charter as the “Governor and Company of the Merchants of London, Discovers of the North-West Passage” to follow up Henry Hudson’s last voyage. In addition, Smith’s Muscovy Company was rechartered in 1613; this enlarged the Muscovy Company’s privileges in exploring Greenland, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and North America, and included a monopoly of the whale and seal fishing, which had become the company’s major interest because of the troubles in Russia. As this was an attempt to exclude Dutch as well as independent English whalers, the States-General of the United provinces of the Netherlands granted charters in 1614 to a company for the Greenland whale fishery and, in formal recognition of the exploratory work of Henry Hudson, granted to the New Netherland Company the power to colonize and trade in the area about the South (Delaware) and the North (Hudson) rivers.

*
Henri Pirenne,
A History of Europe
(New York: University Books, 1955), pp. 524-25.

*
See Jelle C. Riemersma, “Economic Enterprise and Political Powers After the Reformation,”
Economic Development and Cultural Change
(July 1955), pp. 297–308.

The Englishmen and other Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries faced westward to the New World in awe and in hope. For here was a vast virgin continent, and its most striking feature was the millions of square miles of new and potentially highly productive land. To a Europe beset by the incubus of feudalism and statism, of absolute monarchy, of state-controlled churches, of state restrictions on human labor and human enterprise; to a Europe with scarce land, which was engrossed by feudal and quasi-feudal landlords whose vast government-granted estates drained in rents the surplus over subsistence earned by the peasantry—to this Europe the new and vast land area appeared as potential manna from Heaven. At home the mass of Europeans—middle class and peasants alike—faced centuries of weary struggle against the frozen cake of status restrictions, a network of taxes, feudal dues and rents, and controls and shackles by states and state-fostered guilds. This was a relatively stagnant Old World, whose population pressed heavily upon the means of subsistence; this was a Europe but recently emerged from the secular depression into which the growth of statism had plunged it at the beginning of the fourteenth century. But abroad they saw a quite different vision: new, productive, and virtually unoccupied land (with the important exception of the rather thinly populated Indians), a land relatively unencumbered with the feudalism and restrictions that humbled them at home. In short, here at last was the opportunity for the individual to leave his unsatisfactory conditions at home to try to carve out of the wilderness a better life for himself and his family—a life offering
him the freedom and opportunity to make his own way, stand on his own feet, and keep what he himself had earned. It is not the privilege of many generations of men to experience a revolution—a breeze of fresh air upon the stagnant social structure—and an opportunity to break loose from the old mold and strike out afresh on one’s own. Through the discovery of the New World, the men of the seventeenth century experienced at least the potential of such a revolution. For the escape hatch to the untapped storehouse of the New World lay always at hand.

New land, then, confronted the Old World, and this vast stretch of land furnished the most striking fact about the virgin American continent. But how was the ownership of this great new land mass to be allocated? Basically, new and previously unowned land can come into ownership in two different ways: either the settler—the pioneer who, in the later phrase of John Locke, “mixes his labor with the soil” and brings the previously unused and fallow natural resources into productive use—is conceded ownership of the land he has in this way “created”; or he is not.
*

If he is not challenged, the pioneer settler of new land will naturally and automatically become its owner. There are two types of threats to this basic principle of first ownership to first user: either existing settler-owners can be subjected to the arbitrarily imposed ownership of some overlord, or else new land can be parceled out to some person or persons
before
any settlement has taken place. In both cases, the arbitrary parceling is performed by the state—that institution that asserts its claim to a monopoly of legalized coercion in a given territorial area. The former is one of the chief methods of feudalism: the parceling out of peasant-owned land to the ownership of overlords favored by the state. But this method requires previously existing settlers. Clearly in the case of a new and untapped continent, the second method would be the major threat to settler-ownership of what the settlers would create. And this is precisely what happened in the case of North America.

It is the propensity of the state to parcel out arbitrary subsidies, in disregard of the individual’s natural right to own what he has produced This propensity is here aggravated by the fact that the state always assumes sovereign ownership over new and unused land—it’s self-proclaimed “public domain.” It hereby assumes the right to dispose of this domain in any way it sees fit. Unless forced by the pressure of public opinion to do otherwise, the state will naturally tend to dispose of such land in a way best calculated to maximize either its own revenue or the revenue of its privileged
favorites. The crucial question then becomes: Will the land pass after a time into the hands of the settlers, or will it remain permanently in the hands of privileged overlords dominating the settlers?

England, the major sovereign over the lands of North America, had been subjected to feudalism since at least the Norman Conquest of the eleventh century. After the conquest of England in 1066, the conquerors parceled out large tracts of land to the ownership of their leading warlords, and this newly created nobility became the liege lords of the subdued peasantry. Since the overwhelming mass of Englishmen were still engaged in agriculture, feudalism became the crucial fact about English—as well as other European—society. The major attributes of the feudal system were: the granting of huge estates to landowning warlords, the coerced binding of the peasants (serfs) to their land plots, and hence to the rule of their lords, and the further bolstering by the state of feudal status through compulsory primogeniture (the passing on of the estate to the oldest son only) and entail (prohibiting the landowner from alienating—selling, breaking up, etc.—his land). This process froze landlordship in the existing noble families, and prevented any natural market or genealogical forces from breaking up the vast estates.