The Colony of Virginia was the first enduring English colony in North America, existing from 1607 to 1776. Jamestown was the capital from 1607 to 1699, while Williamsburg was the capital from 1699 to 1776.
History[]
Jamestown colony[]
Smith arriving in Virginia with settlers
In 1606, King James I of England - who sought to have colonies as profitable as New Spain - granted the Virginia Company more than six million acres in North America with the goal of establishing an overseas empire. In December 1606, the ships Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed carried 144 Englishmen toward Virginia, and they arrived in the Chesapeake Bay on 26 April 1607. They quickly built their settlement of Jamestown (named for James), which would serve as the colonial capital until 1699. The colonists sought to protect themselves from both the Native Americans and the Spanish, but the Spanish never attacked. For weeks, the settlers and the Powhatan skirmished repeatedly, and English cannons and muskets repelled Indian attacks of Jamestown, although the English were unable to advance beyond their peninsula due to the natives' knowledge of the lands further into the colony. The settlers soon suffered from disease and starvation, but the Powhatan began to barter with the colonists. The arrival of Indian corn kept 38 of the original settlers alive, and 120 more colonists arrived in January 1608.
Conflicts with Indians[]
John Smith's soldiers
When a new group of colonists arrived in 1610, only 60 of the 500 previous settlers were still alive, owing to the "starving time" of 1609-1610. Hundreds of new settlers arrived each year, but most of them went to early graves.
The Virginia colonists bought corn from the Indians, but their attempts to convert the Indians to Christianity were mostly unsuccessful, and marriages between the colonists and Indians were rare. Whenever the Indians refused to trade with the English, the English colonists would attack their villages and plunder them. For fifteen years, there was sporadic violence, and the Indians suffered from disease epidemics in 1608 and from 1617 to 1619. In 1618, Chief Powhatan died, and Opechancanough became the new Powhatan chief. In 1622, he organized an all-out assault on the English settlers, and the Indians massacred 347 colonists, nearly a third of the English population. However, the settlers retaliated by launching a murderous campaign of Indian extermination.
Royal colony[]
A map of the growth of the Chesapeake colonies
In 1624, King James revoked the charter of the Virginia Company due to its mismanagement and made it a royal colony, an arrangement that lasted until 1776. The King now appointed the governor and his council, but the House of Burgesses, a legislative body established in 1619, survived. By 1624, the English population had grown to 1,200.
The colony became involved with the lucrative tobacco industry in 1617, sending the first commercial tobacco shipment to England that same year. It was transformed from a colony of aimless adventurers to a society of dedicated tobacco planters as a result. Headrights, cheap land, and high wages gave poor English folks (especially from Bristol, Liverpool, and London) powerful incentives to immigrate to the New World, and 80% of the immigrants arrived as indentured servants, being promised their own land after their contracts expired.
In 1619, around 20 African slaves from Angola were brought to Virginia aboard the White Lion (which had seized the slaves from a Portuguese slave ship), and a few more slaves trickled into the region in the following decades. A few Africans worked as indentured servants before becoming freedmen, but almost all Africans were enslaved for life.
While Anglicanism was the state religion of Virginia, and all men were required to attend Sunday services, there were few clergymen who traveled to the Americas, and those who did were not always paragons of religious virtue. For this reason, religion was not nearly as important in Virginia as it was in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north.
Upheaval[]
The Jamestown colonial militia
After the English Civil War in the 1640s and 1650s, the colony was nicknamed "the Old Dominion" by King Charles II of England for remaining loyal to the Cavaliers. In 1644, Opechancanough launched another Indian offensive against the English, killing 500 colonists in two days. This led to two years of warfare, and the English ultimately gained the upper hand and captured and murdered the old chief. The English began to push beyond their treaty limits of settlement as their population multiplied, and conflict with the Indians repeatedly flared up during the 1660s and 1670s. The system of indentured servitude would foster an inequality which ultimately led to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, in which Nathaniel Bacon led poor white yeoman farmers in an uprising against the Jamestown elites, claiming that they were too lenient towards the Doeg Native Americans. In addition, in 1670, the House of Burgesses changed the law so that only the rich could vote, fueling discontent against the colonial authorities. When Governor William Berkeley called a House of Burgesses election, Bacon and local leaders were elected, ousting the old burgesses from power. Bacon gave farmers a say in tax levies, forbade bribery, placed limits on holding multiple offices, and restored the vote to all freedmen, but Berkeley was convinced by the wealthy to once again declare Bacon a traitor. This led to an all-out rebellion, and, for three months, Bacon's supporters fought the Indians and attacked Jamestown, while Berkeley's supporters plundered the homes of Bacon's men. When Bacon died of dysentery and English ships arrived to support Berkeley, the rebellion was quelled, and several of Bacon's allies were hanged and their farms destroyed.
In the aftermath of the uprising, the King replaced Berkeley as governor and repealed Bacon's laws. During the 1680s and 1690s, an improving economy in Europe led to fewer servants immigrating to America, leading to the transition towards a slave labor system after 1700.
Independence[]
Patrick Henry speaking on the Virginia Resolves
Like Massachusetts, Virginia was a hotbed for patriot agitation during the American Revolution of the 1760s-1780s. Patriot statesmen such as Patrick Henry opposed taxation without representation, and the House of Burgesses passed the Virginia Resolves, which stated that only the House of Burgesses could levy taxes on Virginians. Governor Francis Fauquier responded by dismissing the Assembly, leading to continued opposition to British rule.
In 1775, Virginia was one of the first colonies, apart from those of New England, to join in the American Revolutionary War. Virginia's patriots chased out royal governor James Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore from the colonial capital of Williamsburg, and Virginia declared itself to be a free and independent state on 15 May 1776. On 4 July 1776, it signed the US Declaration of Independence, becoming a part of the United States.