Virginia

Between the Spanish to the South and the French to the North the English sought to carve out their own colonies in what they called “Virginia” named for the virgin queen Elizabeth I.  The English relied on private investors operating under royal permission to found colonies that were some of the first international joint stock companies.  These promoters sought the quick riches of conquest and gold.  But instead, they found themselves in an area with a climate which initially proved deadly to Europeans and a land that had no easily obtainable minerals and that wouldn’t grow the preferred money crop, sugar.

In addition, after a false start at Roanoke they decided to try to establish themselves at Jamestown within the territory of a large tribal power known as the Powhatan Confederacy.   The first years of the colony were ones of short lives and brutal work.  Most people were either indentured servants who were worked to death or gentleman who refused to work.  The colony needed constant infusions of people to make up for the large death rate.

Emerging from a series of wars and revolutions the British Isles had eventually been unified under the scepter of the English monarch.  The social structure was a carryover from feudal times a steep pyramid with many poor people on the bottom and a few wealthy at the top.    Several occurrences such as the Civil War had begun to empower Parliament and mitigate the suffering of the people.  The franchise was exclusively for men with property but at least the Monarchy was no longer absolute, and the beginnings of a democratic structure were growing.  The enclosure of the land to facilitate animal husbandry as opposed to crops left many former peasants landless and uprooted from their homes.  These became the grist for the colonial mill supplying a large pool of ready workers and easy transplants.

The colonists eventually grew in number and after the introduction of tobacco they had a cash crop.  Spreading out quickly within a generation they were hundreds of miles into the interior building forts and plantations.  The freed indentured servants built new towns and constantly pushed deeper and deeper into the continent.  When the Indians had finally had enough it was too late.  The wars against the Indians cost the lives of many colonists but they decimated the Indians.   By the 1670s there were more than 40,000 colonists and they were pushing the Indians back and out through the piedmont and into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.