On May 14, 1607, the first permanent British settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia by the Virginia Company Charter. "We landed all our men," George Percy wrote in his account of the event, "which were set to worke [sic] about the fortification, and others some to watch and ward as it was convenient."1 The Jamestown colonists were led by Captain John Smith for their first two years in the settlement. After Smith left the colony in 1609, only 60 out of 500 colonists survived the harsh winter. The arrival of fresh supplies from England in the spring fortified the colony and enabled it to endure for several years to follow. On July 30, 1619, under the provisions of the Virginia Company Charter, the House of Burgesses met in Jamestown to establish a uniform government over all the settlements, which became the first representative assembly of European Americans in the New World. (Tradition dates the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy of five Indian tribes in upper New York state between 1570 and 1600.) Jamestown was also the site of the first Anglican church in the New World. 2
Another event of momentous consequence took place in 1619 when a Dutch slave trader exchanged a cargo of captive Africans for food. "The Africans became indentured servants," according to A Brief History of Jamestown, provided online by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, "similar in legal position to many poor Englishmen who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America. The popular conception of a racial-based slave system did not develop until the 1680s."3
Despite the success of the colony's survival and political organization, relations with the Algonquians were unstable and at times violent. In 1622, three hundred colonists were killed by the Algonquians while working out in the fields. Following this event, the King revoked the Virginia Company's charter and made Virginia a royal colony in 1624.
Learn more about Jamestown and related subjects in American Memory:
See the Virginia Records, 1606-1737 within the The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress. The Virginia Records volumes were part of Jefferson's personal library. These volumes were very fragile when Jefferson first collected them, can only be handled with the greatest care today, and are generally not made available for researchers except in microfilm format. Their presentation here, online, makes this unacknowledged treasure widely available to the public for the first time in an easily accessible format.
