Word: virginias
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...need to keep these newly successful tobacco growers in line led to Jamestown's most far-reaching innovation, representative government. In 1618 the Virginia Co. created a general assembly to advise the Governor--including "burgesses," or representatives, elected by property owners--on the theory that "every man will more willingly obey laws to which he has yielded his consent." The general assembly first met for five days in the summer of 1619. It discussed Indian relations, church attendance, gambling, drunkenness and the price of tobacco. It sounds like the Iowa caucuses: war and peace, social issues, bread and butter. From...
Back home, the Virginia Co. sputtered in wrath at the imprudence of the colonists in allowing themselves to be killed. A royal commission found the colony to be "weak and miserable," and the company's charter was revoked in 1624. From then on, its Governors would be appointed by the King...
...commanders on the ground, Bush told lawmakers, but that plea was chilled by the testimony in another hearing room. The war's icons spoke in person and from the grave, honored and pitied as heroes and pawns. Jessica Lynch was no "little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting," she told the lawmakers investigating what families are told about how soldiers die. NFL star turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman had not died a hero under enemy fire, his brother Kevin said, but died by friendly fire. And in both cases, the chain of command told...
...carpenters built a gallows to hang Smith for insubordination. He was spared by the group's commander, Captain Christopher Newport, a career privateer who had lost an arm pirating booty on the Spanish Main and reckoned the colonists would need every fighting man they had once they got to Virginia. Sure enough, two weeks after they settled at Jamestown, 200 Indians attacked. Cannon fire dispersed the war party, but the skirmish served notice that the settlers were not welcome on the rich riverside tracts Native Americans first roamed some 13,000 years before the birth of Christ...
...great contest of Smith's life, though, was not waged against Turkish tyrants or English rivals. Smith met his match in a smoke-filled lodge of bark and skins, when he was captured and made to stand trial before the most powerful man in Virginia, an aging Algonquian chief the English knew as Powhatan. He wore a raccoon cloak, long strings of pearls and was attended by women, warriors, shamans and priests, Smith wrote, recalling that Powhatan projected "such a grave and majestical countenance as drew me into admiration to see such state in a naked savage...