Settlement of English America

One of the most fundamental facts about English America, the society that later became the United States, is that it was founded twice, in two different places, at two different times, by two quite different sorts of people with wholly different sets of motivations. The second of these foundations, that at Plymouth Rock in 1620, is the first in pride of place. Perhaps it is different if one grows up in Virginia, but surely for most Americans their childhood memory of Thanksgiving, of Pilgrim Fathers and turkey dinner, is far sharper than their impression of Jamestown. This writer learned the name of the Mayflower in childhood; the names of the ships that brought the Jamestown settlers had to be looked up. (Indeed, even modern writers seem not to agree on them; Morrison and Commager, p. 38, give them as Sarah Constant, Goodspeed, and Discovery.)

Yet Jamestown was not inconsequential; it was not swallowed up by later settlers (as Plymouth itself was eventually swallowed up by the Massachusetts colony). The South remains the most distinctive of American regions, and while Southern particularism today is most heavily bound up with the era of the Civil War--or War Between the States--a distinctive Southern heritage can be traced back directly to the Jamestown settlement.

To what degree are the differences between the two settlements, and the regions they gave birth to, bound up in geography? Obviously geography played its part; our very name for the region that began wit

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have considered settling in New England. Plundering Spain was not their sole motivation, however; their underlying desire was simply to become rich. Jamestown was essentially a settlement of gentleman-adventurers, their followers, and men who hoped to strike it lucky and become gentleman-adventurers. If they could not become rich by adventure, however, they were willing to become rich in other ways, and those who made their fortunes did so as gentleman-planters. In so doing, they gave the South its enduring stamp. Whereas the New England archetype (and ultimately the general American architype) was the small farmer working his own land, the Southern architype soon became, and long remained, the planter ruling like a lord from the big house--and the fields worked by black slaves. This in turn raises two geographical questions. Could a Southern-style cash-crop economy have arisen at an early period anywhere but Virginia, and would it have come to depend on slavery? The Virginia tidewater was an environment well-suited to a cash crop for which there was already demand at the beginning of the seventeenth century: tobacco. Not only was it a cash crop; it was also rather well-suited to cultivation under plantation conditions.

Category: History - S