In 1607, some one hundred settlers arrived in Virginia and founded Jamestown. Let’s just put it right out there from the start. The majority of them were stupid somewhat rich gentleman and their house servants. They were the kind of people most likely to fall for get rick quick schemes and who had no skills whatsoever when it came to creating a colony. The Virginia Company, which owned the colony, had promised them that Virginia was a land filled with gold and other easy riches, which they figured out was completely false soon after arrival. Things pretty quickly went to shit from there. The colonists, being complete idiots, built Jamestown in the middle of a swamp and then began failing at farming in said swamp. The local natives of the Powhatan Confederacy, fairly confused by the general ineptitude of the strangers from across the ocean, at first tried to help by trading food, but a local drought and the fact that the colonists were a bunch of lazy assholes soon put a stop to such kindnesses. Two-thirds of the first settlers were dead, killed by disease and pissed off natives in less than a year.
Meanwhile, back in England, the Virginia Company was busy convincing as many people as they could that things were totally hunky dory and that they should totally check out this whole Jamestown thing. By the end of 1608, 170 new colonists had arrived, again most of them gentleman who didn’t know how to do a jack shit, plus a few craftsman who knew how to make glass, which was pretty useless, and a couple women, because why not add jealousy over a select few people getting laid just to make things more interesting. The colony limped on for the next few years, pretty much entirely dependent on food shipped from England, the shipments always including more colonists, also known as suckers. Unfortunately, when a storm stranded one of these shipments on the newly discovered island of Bermuda, the result was mass starvation, which in turn led to cannibalism. In the fall of 1609, the colony had some 500 residents, by the spring of 1610 it had only 60. The only thing that saved the colony was the timely arrival of a new food shipment and the fact that the Virginia Company was finally wising up, sending not only colonists who knew how to farm, but also livestock and women, the latter in hopes that family men would be less likely to constantly demand a ride home to England. These new settlers, actually knowing what they were doing, decided it would be in their best interest to start farming better lands further from Jamestown.
Now through most of these shenanigans, the Powhatan Confederacy remained fairly patient with their new neighbors. Though they could have easily wiped out the colonists, their leaders hoped that via trading with the colonists they might gain an edge over rival tribes in the area. However, this came to an end in 1610, when the newly invigorated colonists decided to take control of better farmlands by just up and killing the natives already living on them, committing all sorts of pretty terrible acts of violence. From the colonist’s viewpoint, the Powhatan had pretty much done nothing to help as the colonists starved to death. From the Powhatan viewpoint, they had never asked the colonists to show up in the first place. What followed was four years of warfare, with both sides committing atrocities against each other, but the English eventually gaining the upper hand thanks to their firearms and willingness to just completely fuck shit up if they didn’t get their way. When the two sides finally made peace, the colonists controlled a much larger chunk of coastal Virginia, which proved advantageous given what happened next.
For most of the first decade of Jamestown’s existence, the colony struggled to make money. Once it became painfully obvious that no gold was in the area, the Virginia Company tried numerous strategies to make money, the most lucrative was the export of lumber. However, none of these brought in the kind of money needed to sustain the colony. This all changed in 1614, when a colonist named John Rolfe became the first to plant tobacco as a cash crop. Tobacco had long been grown by the natives throughout the Caribbean and present day southeastern United States, using it mostly for various spiritual and medicinal uses. The Spanish first brought tobacco to Europe in 1528, where smoking it for recreational and purported medicinal uses became popular across western Europe by the mid-sixteenth century. As they were the only major suppliers, the Spanish profited handsomely from this trade, so much so that they threatened to execute anyone who tried to sell seeds to a non-Spaniard. Though the natives did grow tobacco in Virginia, the local strains were too harsh compared to the smooth flavorful strains grown by the Spanish. However, by 1614, Rolfe had managed to somehow get his hands on some seeds from Trinidad. As a result, tobacco began to be widely cultivated in Virginia for export to England.
With the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop, for the first time the Virginia Company began to show a profit. Eager to make money, new settlers began to cross the ocean to set up tobacco plantations. However, cultivating tobacco was pretty labor intensive and for some reason the local natives weren’t really down with helping out. Passage across the Atlantic was also quite expensive. To alleviate this issue, the Virginia Company set up an indentured servant system, where poor people could have their passage paid for by rich planters in return for four to seven years of free labor, after which the servant would be given a free plot of land. As a result, the colony’s population reached 2,000 by 1620. However, the increasing number of English at Jamestown did not sit well with the Powhatan, who finally came to the conclusion that having the English around was not really a good thing. In 1622, they initiated a widespread sneak attack, killing around a quarter of the colonists in a single day. The hope was the colonists would be so horrified that they would leave, but instead they formed a militia, which burned all of the nearby Powhatan villages, killing any inhabitants they could find. The attacks were so vicious that the Powhatan sued for peace the following year, but the colonists poisoned the wine used at the peace conference.
The second war with the Powhatan lasted for a decade, with the Powhatan attacking smaller settlements and killing any colonist they found in their territory, and the colonists sending out a militia each summer to attack Powhatan villages and burn their corn fields. The Powhatan definitely got the shittier end of the stick. Already at a disadvantage due to their lack of firearms, famine and disease further thinned their numbers. They sued for peace in 1632, agreeing to hand over an even larger portion of coastal Virginia to the English. As for the English, the war convinced the king of England it was not in his best interest to allow the Virginia Company to remain in control. Immigration to Virginia slowed greatly, endangering the growth of the important tobacco exports. In 1624, Virginia was declared a crown colony, putting it under direct control of the English government and ending the Virginia Company’s monopoly. Rule of the colony was given to a royal governor, which somewhat pissed off the colonists given they had pretty much been ruling themselves via an elected assembly of landowners, but a compromise was reached where the two would share power. Following the end of the second Powhatan war, the end of the Virginia Company’s monopoly and the new land available for settlement spurred a period of rapid immigration, with new towns springing up along region’s coast and rivers. By 1640, the English population reached 10,000.
