Out of the Woods

Our History

Recently the President traveled to Virginia to commemorate the Jamestown settlement and the first legislative meeting held there in 1619. He was celebrating 400 years of democracy on this continent, that 400 years earlier the first legislative meeting was held in the Jamestown colony.

The first English settlers had reached Jamestown about 10 years earlier. Most of them had been gentlemen unused to working the land or doing much of anything else for themselves. They were accustomed to having others – laborers and servants – do the work of maintaining them. One part of the workforce in the new colony consisted of what were known as "indentured servants." These were impoverished English people, some of them petty criminals, who were offered a choice between going to prison or shipping out to the colonies in the New World. Indentured servants served without getting paid from 7 to 10 or more years to pay for their passage and their food and clothing. After serving that time they would be free and be given a piece of land to farm for themselves.

The other part of the workforce consisted of black Africans who were bound for Bermuda on a slave ship that pirates captured and unloaded in Jamestown.

For the first 50 years the White indentured English and Black Africans lived and worked side-by-side (and sometimes married) pretty much under the same conditions as indentured servants. By 1660 legislation passed by the new legislative assembly-- so recently celebrated by our current president-- imposed on the Africans the status of slaves, a lifetime condition. Once a slave always a slave. The children of slaves were similarly enslaved for their lifetime. This legislation created a body of workers who labored year in year out without getting any reward for their work. Their work served to enrich the gentlemen in the Jamestown colony as well as the wealthy investors back in England who had financed the ships and equipment to found the colony in the expectation of rich rewards.

Barely hanging on for the first 10 or 15 years, the colony began to thrive when tobacco was first planted in Virginia. The soil and climate turned out to be favorable and the indentured servants, black and white, could be made to do the hard work in the tobacco fields.

The land needed to raise all this tobacco was taken – stolen – from the Native Americans who lived in the area. Many different tribes, organized into a powerful coalition, lived where the English colonists chose to settle. Initially welcomed by the native inhabitants, relations between the English and the local inhabitants soon soured and more than once erupted into bloody warfare. The colonists received instructions from England to convert the native peoples to Anglicanism and to civilize them in the ways of the English. The authors of these instructions did not see the irony of stealing people's land and then ordering the thieves to civilize the victims who had been robbed by teaching them the ways of the thieves.

This irony has been with us ever since. White Americans have ravaged the lives of the descendants of Black Africans and the descendants of the Native Americans and taken their own inhumanity as a sign of White superiority. Appropriating the land of the one and the ability to work of the other, White Americans have become very rich at the expense of people who are not White. They have shamelessly interpreted their success in exploiting other human beings as a sign of moral and even spiritual superiority.

The Jamestown assembly, the precursor of the US Congress and of the varied institutions of the United States government, in passing the first Black Codes defining slavery as a lifetime condition of utter deprivation set the precedent for later American legislatures that to this day, for instance by demanding picture IDs for voting, deny the humanity and the citizenship rights of Black and Native Americans. Successor legislatures to the Jamestown assembly have only managed to expand the range of peoples insulted and exploited and treated as less than human than White Americans.

That Donald Trump, arch racist, should celebrate that institution is not surprising. We, on the contrary should mourn it. In Jamestown, North America got off to a really bad start. We have never recovered from that. The efforts of many people to overcome this terrible heritage have only had very limited success so far.