The Founding of Jamestown

The Chesapeake region was home to the Powhatan Indians, an Algonquian-speaking people led by a paramount chief the English called Powhatan. Archeological evidence shows that Native people used the Jamestown site more than 10,000 years ago. England, after the failure at Roanoke, tried again with a commercial venture: the Virginia Company, whose investors wanted a return on their money.

The colonists left England in December 1606 on three ships — the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. They chose Jamestown for its defensibility: surrounded by water on three sides, far upriver from Spanish raiders, with deep water for ships. The site was also not inhabited by Native people, though it lay within Powhatan hunting lands.

The colonists finished a triangular fort by June 15, 1607. Disease — partly from drinking salty river water — killed many in the first months. Without food sent by Powhatan, the settlement would most likely have failed. By late 1609, as the English demanded too much food during a drought, relations collapsed. In the winter of 1609–10, the “Starving Time,” colonists afraid to leave the fort ate animals, leather, and in some cases the bodies of the dead. In May 1610, survivors were about to abandon Jamestown when a new governor and supplies arrived.

The colony’s fortunes changed in 1612, when John Rolfe introduced a new strain of tobacco that became the cash crop the Virginia Company had hoped for. Rolfe’s marriage in 1614 to Pocahontas, Powhatan’s daughter — who had been kidnapped by the English in 1613 and converted to Christianity — brought a period of peace.

In 1619 Governor George Yeardley called the first representative legislative assembly, the beginning of representative government in what became the United States. That same year the first documented Africans were brought to Virginia and sold, and the Virginia Company shipped about 90 women to the colony to start families. Tobacco’s demand for land and labor drove expansion onto Powhatan territory. In March 1622 the paramount chief Opechancanough launched a coordinated attack that killed 350–400 colonists; another in 1644 killed a similar number. After Opechancanough’s capture and death in 1646, the Powhatan were reduced to tributary status. In 1624 the king revoked the bankrupt Virginia Company’s charter and Virginia became a royal colony.

Jamestown set patterns that shaped the South and the nation: representative government for some; a plantation economy built on tobacco; the dispossession of Native peoples; and, increasingly, slavery. Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 — frontier colonists attacking Native peoples and defying the governor — exposed tensions among poor whites, elites, and Native nations. Jamestown remained the capital until 1699, when the government moved to Williamsburg.