This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands…
William Shakespeare
Why then should we stand striving here for places of habitation (where many are spending as much labour and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of Land, as would produce them many and as good or better in another Country) and in the mean time suffer a whole Continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of men to be waste without any improvement?
John Winthrop
From the heights of Olympus the English conquest of North America, protracted though it was through a century and a half, must have seemed merely an incident in the movement which carried European power and European culture to every corner of the world. But those who try to understand the origins of the United States have to decide precisely what it was that so differentiated England from her competitors within the general European movement that she was able to outstrip them all. What were the special factors in Tudor and Stuart England that augmented the general outward tendency of the Europeans?
‘Gold, trade, tillage represent the three stages in the history of colonization, and the greatest of these, because fundamentally essential to permanence, is tillage,’ says the leading historian of the American colonies.1 He is right; but it is important to notice that the Europeans did not discover this truth for over a century. Even Ralegh, most intelligent of the first English colonizers, thought of Roanoke primarily as an instrument for securing a large and early profit, either by gold-mining, plundering the Spanish, or by trade. As for the Iberian nations, they were at first content to hold Southern and Central America by force, living at ease off the labour of slaves imported from Africa (for Indians made bad slaves, dying more rapidly than they could be replaced). Yet the wealth of North America had to be worked for by Europeans, not only as traders or trappers, but as farmers and artisans also. This, as much as any of Columbus’s, was a discovery that, once made, would change the history of the world. It was not enough to mine gold, to haul fish from the waters and to take beaver from the forest by barter with the natives.
This fact implied four things about the European advance. It meant that the country would succeed most completely which could most easily export the largest number of people; which could most easily keep them supplied – in other words, which was strongest at sea over the longest period; which had colonists who brought with them the most appropriate skills; and, lastly, which had the most adaptable culture, in the widest sense of that word.
That country turned out to be England. Inferior at various times and in various respects to her rivals, she possessed, overall, a stronger hand than any of them.
Her victory was ultimately due to the fact that she was the dominant entity in an island. She was thus spared the perils and temptations that afflicted the continental powers. Ireland, so near, so alien, so vulnerable to foreign fleets, was her weak point, but the Royal Navy guarded it successfully, on the whole, against foreign attack, and the Battle of the Boyne was merely the last of many victories which in the long run put an end to any danger from the inhabitants. Unlike one of her chief rivals, Holland, England was almost impossible to invade successfully while her fleet was in being. Unlike another, France, she would not succumb to the lure of continental hegemony, because her gentry, for their own reasons, kept the King in check, as they could not have done if a long land frontier, by making a large standing army necessary, had made him their master. In some respects Spain, isolated from Europe by the sea and the Pyrenees almost as effectively as England was by the Channel, shared the insular advantage; but this was neutralized by internal particularism and by the crushing, if spectacular, inheritance of the Habsburgs in the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bohemia. Unlike this ancient enemy, England had no territorial or dynastic entanglements of a kind certain to involve her in continental land war. Calais had gone under Mary Tudor, Hanover would not come until the death of Queen Anne. The result of all this good fortune was a steady husbanding of vigour and capital. Compared to the Thirty Years War, or the Swedish wars, or the wars of Louis XIV, England’s Civil Wars were mere episodes; and since their result, in the not-too-long run, was the remoulding and reinvigorating of English political institutions, which further increased the country’s strength in all forms of international competition, they are not episodes to be regretted by Englishmen or English-speaking Americans. Lying across the sea communications of half Europe with the outside world, in a period when, as has been said, European culture was coming to overpower all other groups whatever, the scept’red isle needed only the will to use its various resources to take to itself whatever it wanted – sovereignty, loot or the world’s commerce. Nor was the will lacking. On the contrary, many things fostered it.
More perils confronted England during the sixteenth century than in any other between the eleventh and the twentieth. In 1500 she did not seem well equipped to meet them. She was the weakest, militarily, politically and economically, of the leading Western states. Her trade was largely in the hands of foreigners. Her polity was still endangered by the rivalries of York and Lancaster. Her feudal institutions were in decay, her capital resources and geographical knowledge were small, Spain and Portugal were dominant in every ocean. Nor did things at once improve. Rather, the wool-trade declined, and after 1550 the cloth-trade did so too. Henry VIII involved the country in futile foreign wars to which he soon added a religious revolution. A disputed Crown and an even more bitterly disputed church settlement explain almost all the politics of Elizabeth I’s reign. Imports of American bullion helped to produce a European inflation which, in turn, generated social conflict and tension.
But danger and misfortune sharpened the wits. Throughout the century the Tudor state strengthened its efficient grip on the country. The struggle with Spain, religious in origin, quickly grew nationalistic: Drake, the principal burglar of the Spanish Main, became, in the eyes of his countrymen, a leading Protestant and English hero, as did his fellow Devonian pirates, Hawkins, Gilbert and Ralegh. Not only did he show the way to honour God and vindicate his country’s pride: his unlicensed but profitable war on the treasure-fleets of Spain seemed to point to the solution of English economic difficulties. His defeat of the Spanish Armada completed the fusion of motives. Realpolitik, covetousness and religious zeal fused in an apotheosis of patriotic triumph. Caribbean piracy was holy, lucrative and for a long time easy. It was resorted to more and more zealously, seriously weakening and deferring the first English attempts to colonize North America. Investment in buccaneering enterprises seemed surer and more pleasurable and more certainly God’s will than investment in what were called ‘plantations’.
Then in 1604 the new King, James I, made peace with the Spaniard, and English capital sought new outlets.
Thanks to various incidental factors, such as the exclusion of foreign traders and the dissolution of the monasteries, but, above all, thanks to the untiring enterprise of Tudor merchants, there had been a steady accumulation of wealth during the sixteenth century. New trading companies, regulated by royal charters, sprang up, partly to utilize, partly to increase, the new resources. The Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the East India Company, the Guinea Company, the Eastland Company – their very names are evidence of how far English merchants were prepared to go in their search for markets. Efforts to manufacture new goods for export led to a primitive industrial revolution, which created yet more risk capital. It was certain that before long, having explored in all other directions, the companies would turn westward. Peace hastened the process, as war had retarded it.
Some had been encouraging it for years. In 1600 Richard Hakluyt, friend, counsellor and protégé of Ralegh, crowned nearly two decades of diligent propaganda by publishing the final version of his Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation2 to rouse the English from their ‘sluggish security’, an aim in which he was largely successful. He prevented the achievements and projects of Gilbert and Ralegh from being forgotten, even when the one was dead and the other a prisoner in the Tower. Among his readers were the large number of influential men who had been involved with Ralegh and himself in their Irish and American enterprises, men now powerful in the companies – Sir Thomas Smith, for example, who dominated the East India Company.
Hakluyt made a complete case for colonization. In his pages it is easy to learn what the Elizabethans hoped to achieve in the West. Later propaganda confirms the lesson. From the whole corpus we can discover the appeal of America to all classes, and why the English made the great discovery, that tilling the soil – not gold, or even trade – would best bring permanence and wealth to the conquerors of North America.
To the rich, it seems, Virginia meant in the first place dreams of quick profit – if not from gold-mines, then from the North-West Passage to Cathay, which was no doubt close at hand,3 or from timber, soap-manufacturing or the export of pitch. Investors were also tempted by the idea of producing Mediterranean commodities, such as wine and olive oil. Land on a scale no longer available in England was as attractive to squires pent in petty acres as it was to labourers with none.
Other factors played their part. There was the usual missionary excuse to sanctify the enterprise. Englishmen were professedly as ready as Spaniards ‘to preach and baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of the Gospel to recover out of the arms of the Devil a number of poor and miserable souls, wrapt up in death, in almost invincible ignorance’.4 The legend of Prince Madoc was useful reinforcement to the claim deriving from John Cabot, for it proved (at any rate to Englishmen and Welshmen) that ‘that country was by Britons discovered, long before Columbus led any Spaniards thither’. Such were the sops to conscience, which made despoiling the Indians possible. More positive appeals could be made to the desire for glory in the high Roman fashion:
You brave heroic minds [wrote Michael Drayton]
Worthy your country’s name,
That honour still pursue,
Go and subdue!
Whilst loitering hinds
Lurk here at home with shame…
And in regions far,
Such heroes bring ye forth
As those from whom we came;
And plant our name
Under that star
Not known unto our North…
(The poem ends with a puff for ‘Industrious Hakluyt’ and his Voyages.)
A less lofty motive was to be found in the general anxiety about the large vagrant population which wars, the rise in prices, enclosures and the growth of the towns had created in England. The well-to-do were vividly aware of the fragility of the social peace which the Civil Wars were soon to shatter. Hakluyt offered the New World as a literally God-given solution to the problem of ‘valiant youths rusting and hurtful by lack of employment’ – ‘idle persons’, John Donne called them, ‘and the children of idle persons’. ‘A monstrous swarm of beggars,’ said others. Prisons could be emptied of the ‘able men to serve their Country, which for small robberies are daily hanged up in great numbers’. Virginia and the voyage thither would not only free England of criminals, it would turn them into ‘sober, modest persons’, promised another authority. Unemployed soldiers could be used against the ‘stubborn Savages’ (no doubt in the intervals of preaching the gospel to them). It was all very tempting and convincing to a class which felt threatened from below. Transportation of convicts and, later, the encouragement of emigration became for centuries a settled policy of the government for dealing with this order of problems.
The upper classes were also encouraged by the precedent set in Ireland, which served as an experimental laboratory for identifying and solving the problems of colonization: the ‘wild Irish’ standing for the Indians. What seemed to be the absolute strategic necessity of securing Ireland to English rule, and the resistance of the inhabitants to that rule, had suggested the idea of colonizing the sister island; and what could be done there could be done in Virginia. By the same token, Irish setbacks inured the English rich to Virginian ones: they became prepared, in some measure, for a long haul.
The same could not be said of the English poor, who were the instruments of these schemes. Ireland as a place of settlement had little attraction for them. The soldiery knew it as a place of bad pay, food shortages, incompetent officers, native treachery and native cruelty. The civilians heard of it as a place where civilians were massacred. Both, therefore, ‘had as lief go to the gallows as to the Irish wars’; Ireland and war were nearly synonymous terms.
All this applied, with the added terrors of the stormy Atlantic, distance and the unknown, to North America. Only the strongest motives could override a distaste for colonization based on a certain knowledge of some extremely unpleasant facts. How sensible that distaste was, how reliable that knowledge, was demonstrated when at last a permanent settlement was achieved in Virginia. The first inhabitants died easily and in large numbers; and 300 of the survivors returned to England in the first nine years of the little colony’s existence.
The quest of the seventeenth-century capitalist was therefore the same as that of today’s historian. What, both asked, could induce the labouring classes of England to abandon their homes for the dangers of the Virginia voyage?
The answer cannot, today, be taken direct from the men and women best capable of giving it. To us, the poorer social classes are dumb. They had few means to tell their thoughts to posterity, since they were largely illiterate and since the presses were mostly used for the purposes of their betters, which did not include making surveys of mass opinion. However, among those purposes was a wish to induce large numbers of the better sort of lowly Englishmen to sail for the West. Successful plantations could be built only out of human material superior to that which could be swept together from the prisons, brothels and slums of London and compelled to go to America. The result was a vast literature of propaganda and persuasion directed not so much at the man looking for an investment as at the man looking for a chance in life. From that literature can be learned what their contemporaries thought would move the working men. And on such matters contemporaries are likely to be broadly right. It is only a matter of using the evidence with caution. Who could not learn a lot about the motivation of England today from such a study of English advertising?
Hakluyt was the greatest author of promotion literature, but he had countless imitators. One theme dominates overwhelmingly in their appeals to the people: land-hunger. ‘In Virginia land free and labour scarce; in England land scarce and labour plenty’ was the slogan that summed it up. In a pre-industrial age land was bound to be the most precious commodity, while the labour of his body was often all that a man had to sell. Virginia could, therefore, easily be presented as a land of unique opportunity. To the very poor, a country where an illimitable forest provided an inexhaustible supply of free fuel and free housing materials was patently a land ‘more like the Garden of Eden: which the Lord planted, than any part else of all Earth’. And, as has been noted, the very poor were very numerous in Tudor and Stuart England. So to them was sung:
To such as to Virginia
Do purpose to repair;
And when that they shall hither come,
Each man shall have his share,
Day wages for the labourer,
And for his more content,
A house and garden plot shall have
Besides ’tis further meant
That every man shall have a post
And not thereof denied
Of general profit, as if that he
Twelve pounds, ten shillings paid.
The better-off could best be tempted by larger, if similar, inducements:
With what content shall the particular person employ himself there when he shall find that for a £12 10s. adventure he shall be made lord of 200 acres of land, to him and his heirs forever. And for the charge of transportation of himself, his family and tenants he shall be allotted for every person he carries 100 acres more. And what labourer soever shall transport himself thither at his own charge to have the like proportion of land upon the aforesaid conditions and be sure of employment to his good content for his present maintenance.5
Not only was there plenty of the arable land that had grown so expensive, because so scarce, in England. In America there were none of the oppressive feudal laws that encumbered landholding in England: there, copyholders could become freeholders. No enclosing of common lands in America: there, men could eat sheep, not sheep men. It is little wonder that, according to Andrews, ‘the bulk of the colonial population was of the artisan and tenant class which in England held by some form of burgage or copyhold tenure’.6 Life in England held little charm for many such: they might reckon themselves fortunate to have a way of escape. Plague and famine are not pleasant things in themselves, and both were common; they also had disastrous effects on the economy, effects which, inevitably, bore hardest on the poorest. Misgovernment, as symbolized under James I by Alderman Cockayne’s scheme, which wrecked the cloth-trade in the 1620s, or international tragedy, such as the Thirty Years War, which completed Cockayne’s work, were only a little less inevitable. Human misfortune on a national or continental scale has been one of the most constant forces behind emigration to America from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.7
The promoters, in fact, were in a seller’s market. All they had to do was to overcome memories of Ireland by doubling and redoubling their assurances that America was the true demi-Paradise. Nor did they fail. The Reverend Daniel Price displayed the true colours of Celtic fantasy when, in a sermon in 1609, he rhapsodized that Virginia was
Tyrus for colours, Basan for woods, Persia for oils, Arabia for spices, Spain for silks, Narcis for shipping, Netherlands for fish, Pomona for fruit, and by tillage, Babylon for corn, besides the abundance of mulberries, minerals, rubies, pearls, gems, grapes, deer, fowls, drugs for physic, herbs for food, roots for colours, ashes for soap, timber for building, pastures for feeding, rivers for fishing, and whatsoever commodity England wanteth.8
Not only Wales spoke in this strain. It was an English play which, four years before Mr Price gave tongue, asserted that in Virginia ‘wild boar is as common as our tamest Bacon is here’ (the wild boar is not an American species). Curiosity and ignorance about the New World could be advantageously manipulated in a hundred ways. Thus, in 1605 five Indians were brought over and paraded round the country, to its vast excitement.9 They were an excellent advertisement for Virginia: the best sort of proof that it did actually exist. Pocahontas, the beautiful Indian ‘Princess’ whom John Rolfe married a few years later10 and brought to England, must have been an even stronger stimulus to the imagination.
It is true that another motive, the religious, played a major, indeed a heroic part in stimulating English settlement in America; but it can best be studied through the history of New England. And many years before the Pilgrims sailed, the twin desires of the capitalists for gain and of the poor for land, both stimulated by the tribe of Hakluyt, succeeded at last in planting Englishmen permanently in the New World. As a motive, materialism had proved sufficient. In 1605 two companies, for London and for Plymouth, were chartered, their business being to establish colonies in America. After some exploratory journeys and yet another abortive attempt by the Plymouth Company to establish a settlement (this time at Sagadahoc, in what is now the state of Maine) the London Company founded the first enduring English plantation, on 24 May 1607, on the James river in Virginia. It was small, and already unfortunate, since of the company of 144 that had embarked in three little ships (Susan Constant, Godspeed, Discovery) only 105 had survived the voyage. The place they founded, Jamestown, has long been abandoned.11 But with Jamestown begins the history proper of the people known as Americans.