LITMIR.BIZ

      Pocahontas.

26. Annulling of the Virginia Company’s Charter.—In 1609, the year of Smith’s departure, King James gave the Virginia Company a new charter, which defined the limits of its territory in a very vague way and increased its power over its colonists. In 1612 he gave another charter, which took in the Bermuda Islands and allowed the shareholders of the Company to hold general meetings in London. Twelve years later, when the king’s Puritan opponents had got control of these meetings and used them for political purposes, he caused the charter to be annulled by a decree of court, which was a legal though not a justifiable act. The records of the Company were preserved in a romantic way,^[23] and are now in the possession of the government at Washington.

      27. Growth of Virginia.—Meanwhile the colony had had various ups and downs under several governors—Lord Delaware, Sir Thomas Dale, the tyrannical Samuel Argall, Sir George Yeardley, and Sir Francis Wyatt—but had on the whole become firmly established. Dale was strict, but successful in controlling the rougher elements; he also encouraged the policy of allowing settlers to become individual proprietors of land. Argall was speedily recalled for his misconduct. Liberal sentiments then prevailed in the colony, and its inhabitants were allowed, during Yeardley’s administration, to hold a yearly representative assembly, or legislature (1619), the first of its kind in America. This long step toward self-government, together with the increasing importance of the tobacco crop, gave Virginia a decided impetus, which the contemporaneous introduction of slavery, in the persons of twenty blacks landed and sold at Jamestown by a Dutch ship in 1619, did not at first affect. The presence of white slaves in the persons of indentured servants—a class recruited from convicts, vagabonds, and kidnapped children—produced some confusion. But colonists of position and means soon began to exert an influence opposed to disorder, and through Sir Francis Wyatt the Company promised to stand by its grant of free institutions.

28. Charles I. and the Virginia Burgesses.—In 1622 the colonists endured a loss of three hundred settlers, from an attack by the Indians whom they had maltreated. The collapse of the Company (1624) made Virginia a crown colony, dependent on the king, who was succeeded the next year (1625) by his son, Charles I. Charles, needing money in order to be able to govern without his Parliament, tried to get a profit out of a monopoly of the tobacco trade, but the colonial assembly, or Burgesses, as they were called, withstood him (1629). The convening of this assembly to discuss such a matter was an important precedent in the government of the crown colonies; but the assembly, although it could resist the king’s demand, could not prevent a royal governor like Sir John Harvey from making himself obnoxious.^[24]

THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW YORK.

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      Henry Hudson.

      29. Hudson and New Amsterdam.—In the autumn of 1609 Henry Hudson,^[25] an English seaman employed by the Dutch East India Company, sailed up the river now called by his name, as far as the site of Albany. He was searching for a northwest passage to India; he found instead a good opportunity to trade with the red men, which the Dutch afterward cultivated. By 1615 houses were built on the site of Albany and of the present New York. The fur trade of New Netherland, as the region was named, was turned over to a corporation organized for that purpose, called the New Netherland Company. Politically no steps were taken at first against the English title to the country. In 1621 the Dutch West India Company took up the rôle of the New Netherland Company, and three years later sent over a number of colonists. These settled mainly near Albany; but there were other centers of population, all of which did a thriving fur trade with the Indians.

      30. Organization of the Dutch Colony.—In 1626 Peter Minuit, director for the Dutch West India Company, purchased the Island of Manhattan from the Indians for a trifling amount (about twenty-five dollars), and made the town of New Amsterdam, afterward New York, the center of government. In 1629 the Company obtained a new charter and proceeded to develop a semi-feudal system of land tenure among the colonists. Individuals, styled “Patroons” (patrons), were allowed to buy tracts of land from the Indians and to settle colonists upon them. For every colony of fifty persons the Patroon was granted a large tract for himself; and as he was given political and judicial power over his colonists, New Netherland was soon in the hands of a powerful landed aristocracy, some families of which have retained a certain prestige down to the present time.

      New Amsterdam.

THE PILGRIMS AT PLYMOUTH.

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      31. The Plymouth Colony.—The London Company and the Dutch West India Company had now established promising colonies, but the Plymouth Company had done nothing since their unsuccessful attempt in 1607. Seven years later, Captain John Smith had made a voyage along the northern coast and given the region the name of New England. Other voyages added to geographical knowledge and developed the fisheries, but the more southerly colonies for some time attracted all intending settlers, and the reorganized Plymouth Company of 1620 might have fared poorly had not accident favored them. This accident was nothing less than the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock instead of somewhere within the jurisdiction of the London Company, as they at first intended.

      32. The Pilgrims in Holland.—The causes that led the Pilgrims to the New World were briefly as follows. There were large numbers of English Protestants who thought that the Established Church of England had not sufficiently broken away from the Church of Rome, especially in regard to the forms of worship. Such dissatisfied Protestants were called Puritans, and those of their number who refused to commune with the Church of England were further known as Dissenters. Those Dissenters who were ruled by elders, according to the system of Calvin and Knox, were known as Presbyterians. Such as desired each congregation to be independent were called Separatists, or Brownists, or Independents. The Pilgrim Fathers were Separatists who, in order to escape persecution, had fled from the village of Scrooby to Holland. The emigrants, headed by their pastor, John Robinson, and their elder, William Brewster, numbered about one hundred. Settling first at Amsterdam, then at Leyden, they were joined by other refugees, and lived peacefully by their labors.

33. Movement of Pilgrims to America.—These Pilgrims naturally did not wish their children to become Dutchmen; so their minds turned to America. Securing a grant of land from the London Company and financial aid from London capitalists who became partners in the enterprise, they collected their effects and sailed to their new home

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