Word: virginia
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...Hakluyt, England's premier geographer, put it, "Valiant youths rusting [from] lack of employment" would flourish in America and produce goods and crops that would enrich their homeland. The notion was so prevalent that it inspired a blowhard character in the 1605 play Eastward Ho! to declare that all Virginia colonists had chamber pots of "pure gold...
Military discipline was a stopgap; serious reform, with long-reaching consequences, was already under way. The London Co. had reorganized itself as the Virginia Co. of London in 1609, and over the next dozen years settlers and backers alike realized the colony could not be run as an overseas mining company or an armed camp. Success would depend on large numbers of people and the steady production of exportable goods. That meant the incentives for living in Jamestown had to be modified...
...prophetic idea was to recruit religious outcasts--Englishmen who longed to put an ocean between them and the established Anglican Church. Some radical Protestants, known as Dissenters, had already fled to Holland. The Virginia Co. lured some Dissenters over and opened negotiations with others. One boatload of Pilgrims, blown north, landed in Plymouth, Mass., in 1620. Religious pluralism in British North America would suffer many backtracks and false starts (Virginia would develop its own Anglican establishment as time passed), but the first step was taken in Jamestown...
...economic system for exploiting it. The Powhatan smoked a crude indigenous species of tobacco. But in 1612, John Rolfe imported seeds of Nicotiana tabacum, the Spanish-American weed that was already a craze in England. By 1620 the colony had shipped almost 50,000 lbs. home. Fifty years later, Virginia and Maryland would ship 15 million lbs. Tobacco and foodstuffs were grown on privately owned farms. Beginning in 1618, old settlers were offered 100 acres of land, and newcomers who paid their way were given 50 acres, plus 50 more for every additional person they brought...
...privateer, brought a new labor source--"20 and odd negroes" from Angola. Our original sin was not very original--Spain and Portugal had already brought 200,000 African slaves to the Americas--and the colony was slow to exploit the practice. Slaves did not outnumber indentured servants in Virginia until the 1670s. Once acquired, however, the habit of bondage would prove addicting--economic and social nicotine...