Why 1619?: The Basics
If you have been reading this blog, or exploring the website, you probably have some idea that 1619 was a really important year in the colony of Virginia, and that it had something to do with race, gender and government. So what happened that year and why are we so excited about it? Well, the answer is complicated and it starts with three events: the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia, the founding of the House of Burgesses, and the news that the first marriageable British women would be arriving in the colony. 1619 was the year that a Portuguese slave ship arrived in Jamestown’s harbor looking for some supplies. They didn’t have any money to buy food, but they did have some slaves they could sell. The ship had gotten caught in a storm and was blown off course while on its way to the Caribbean. The captain sold 20 African men to the settlers at Jamestown, who were desperate for laborers to work their tobacco fields. The colony at Jamestown had been fighting on and off with the Powhatan Confederation (the local Native American tribe) since 1607, and deaths due to war, disease and accidents had devastated the population of the colony. Farming tobacco is labor intensive, and would-be plantation owners were desperate for workers. European men and a few women had come over as indentured servants (people who contracted their labor out in exchange for passage to America and the promise of land and supplies at the end of a 5 to 7 year contract), but not enough were arriving to fill the demand. The 20 African men sold to the colonists existed in a strange legal situation somewhere between what we think of today as chattel slavery and indentured servitude; in 1619, Virginia’s colonists didn’t have a fully developed idea of race-based slavery like they would by the end of the 17th century. Some of those 20 men would eventually be freed, others would remain slaves for their entire lives, but most died within a few years of arriving in the colony, as did most immigrants to Virginia. The second event of 1619 was the founding of Virginia’s first governing body: the House of Burgesses. Not only was it Virginia’s first governing body, but it was the first elected government body in the American colonies. The House of Burgesses sat for the first time on July 30, 1619 at Jamestown with 22 members. The members of the first house were the colonial governor, the six men who made up the governor’s cabinet, and representatives of the major plantations who were elected by all free (un-indentured), white men over the age of 17. The body passed its first law regulating the sale of tobacco, but it quickly went on hiatus as a malaria outbreak swept through Jamestown in August 1619 and the members fled the town to escape the disease. The final event that marked 1619 as a year of great importance to Virginia was the news that unmarried white women would be arriving in the colony. The colonial Chesapeake was a male-dominated world. Few women came to the colony before 1619, and those that did were the wives and daughters of the colony’s wealthiest planters. Only a few indentured women came to Virginia, and they were unable to marry without their master’s permission. The colony of bachelors was unhappy about the lack of marriageable women, and any unmarried woman who did immigrate found themselves the object of much male attention regardless of their social status (Anne Burras, the first unmarried woman to immigrate to Virginia arrived as a lady’s maid to Lady Forrest and was married within 3 months of setting foot on Virginia soil). The Virginia Company, which controlled the colony, decided that women were essential to the continued stability and welfare of the colony (which was plagued by infighting and unhappy colonists). In 1619, they decided that, “a fit hundredth might be sent of women, maids young and uncorrupt, to make wives to the inhabitants and by that means to make the men there more settled and less movable.” The woman began arriving in early 1620, and quickly found husbands and started families. The arrival of many little Virginians in1621 would spur the Powhatan Confederation to declare war on what they now saw as permanent interlopers. Colonists with families wanted to expand farms and build large and permanent homes outside of Jamestown’s walls. These three events meant major changes for the colony of Virginia: no longer was it a small settlement of white men on the edge of America, it now contained black and white families who, alongside Native Americans, would create America. Their struggles to coexist, define themselves and create systems both great and terrible would reshape the world.