Brogan’s narrative, which moves between
the primacy of Tocqueville’s life over his
thought and his ultimate achievement as a
historian, might have found mediating
ground by assuming that Tocqueville was
one of the true master thinkers of the great
kaleidoscopic period from 1776 to 1848 that
juxtaposed the Enlightenment and Romanticism and took form between the French
Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.
Along with the era’s greatest minds, he
wrestled with the meaning of what were truly
unprecedented events. The world had become a stage for the enactment of a new
order.
Tocqueville, I would have it, singularly
sought to ponder what democracy was and
what it boded for America and Europe. He
was a man who puzzled deeply over the
events of his times and the very making of
modern America, France, and Europe. On
this count, Tocqueville remains, though many
times removed, a cousin worthy of visiting.
The Start of Something Big
Bruce P. Frohnen
The Jamestown Project by Karen Ordahl
Kupperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
“D
iscovery” has been a term and a process more subject to revision than
most in recent decades. It was not Christopher Columbus who discovered the New
BRUCE P. FROHNEN is Visiting Professor of Law at
Ohio Northern University’s Claude W. Pettit College of Law and editor of the Political Science Reviewer.
276
World, we have been told; it was Leif
Erikson—or more properly the descendants
of the American Indians. This is in an important sense true. Moreover, pointing out this
truth is in important ways salutary because it
diverts our attention from the subjective act
of discovery (discovery for whom?) to the
more important process of settlement. Settlement itself is a contested term, of course.
Does it mean the spread of a particular
culture to new, unsettled parts of the world?
Domination of one people by another? Or
the beginning of something truly new—of a
pioneering offshoot of one culture that reacts
to and even brings into itself elements of
indigenous ways of life, surrounding geographical elements, and the lessons of pioneering itself?
This last vision pervades Karen Ordahl
Kupperman’s illuminating volume, The
Jamestown Project. As Kupperman points out,
Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607, was
far from the beginning of colonization of the
New World. Indeed, the relatively backward English were latecomers to the colonization game, lagging far behind the Spanish
and Portuguese, in particular. And most
observers, this reviewer included, prefer to
emphasize the influence of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and other Puritan colonies rather
than Jamestown on the development of
American institutions and character. Where
Jamestown evokes visions of violence, greed,
squalor, martial law, and the institutionalization of slavery, Plymouth brings to mind the
importance of religious faith, sacrifice, and
the striving after virtue in local democratic
communities. But history seldom rewards
virtue in and of itself, instead smiling on those
whose practical mindset spawns an experimental pragmatism and commitment to success before ideals. And it was commitment to
success by whatever means necessary that
made Jamestown the crucible in which was
forged the successful pattern of settlement
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from which grew the peculiarly American
culture of the United States. Kupperman
observes,
through a decade’s trial and error, Jamestown’s
ordinary settlers and their backers in England
figured out what it would take to make an English
colony work. This was an enormous accomplishment achieved in a very short period of time, a
breakthrough that none of the other contemporaneous ventures was able to make. The ingredients for success—widespread ownership of land,
control of taxation for public obligations through
a representative assembly, the institution of a
normal society through the inclusion of women,
and development of a product that could be
marketed profitably to sustain the economy—
were beginning to be put in place by 1618 and
were in full operation by 1620, when the next
successful colony, Plymouth, was planted.
There is a grain of truth to deterministic
theories like that of Jared Diamond, whose
Guns, Germs, and Steel portrays peoples as the
merely lucky or unlucky inheritors of geographical benefits and burdens rooted in the
availability of particular forms of livestock,
water supplies, and minerals. But that truth—
the importance of practical, material assets—
is overshadowed by the essential role of
cultural patterns for the harnessing, development, and integration of those assets into an
effective way of life. Why, after all, did some
peoples build lasting civilizations in geographically valuable areas, whereas others
were subjugated, driven out, or exterminated by nomadic invaders and/or neighbors? In the end it was emphasis on and
inculcation of a particular set of cultural
habits that allowed the English colonies, like
other societies before them, to flourish, as it
arguably led them to rebel against the mother
country.
The English were, at best, underdogs in
the colonization contest for many decades.
Africans frankly looked down on the quality
of English goods. Muslims dominated the
eastern and southern portions of the MediModern Age
terranean, having forged a series of empires
stronger than any in Europe, to which adventurous Europeans often felt attracted, and
to which some defected despite the requirement of religious conversion. And the New
World was dominated by hated Roman
Catholics from England’s dreaded national
enemies Spain, Portugal, and, to a lesser
extent, France.
The bulk of Kupperman’s book is taken
up with fascinating stories illustrating the
difficult position in which England found
itself during, in particular, the Elizabethan
era, as its rulers sought to increase their
prestige and importance on the European
continent, capitalize on the opportunities
inherent in increasing worldwide trade and
gain an empire for themselves. The risks
were significant, both for individuals who
risked capture, death, and loss of cultural
identity, and for the nation-state seeking to
compete with larger, more established empires. And England was far from an instant
success.
The Jamestown “project” was that of
finally establishing a successful English settlement in the New World. By the time
Jamestown was founded, the English had
attempted colonization everywhere from
Canada to South America, suffering dismal
failure after dismal failure.
Kupperman spends her early chapters
showing the relatively weak position of the
English in the newly wide world and illustrating the dangers of engagement. She emphasizes cases in which adventurers lost their
identity in other cultures. Some would convert to Islam and adopt “Turkish” ways
when captured by Muslims or merely to
advance their own careers. Some would “go
native” in the New World after being shipwrecked and taken in by local tribes. In
either case the result was loss of Englishness—
not just abstract political or religious ideas,
but the language and the manners of speech
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and dress seen as essential to individual character among the English at the time. Also
dangerous to individual Englishness was the
policy of hostage-taking and -giving,
whereby the English, sometimes in exchange
for taking tribal leaders’ children back to
England, would leave one or two of their
own with the indigenous people in order to
secure the natives’ friendship. This policy,
also aimed at developing increased knowledge of local terrain, language, and trading
opportunities, often led hostages to become
much more Indian–or rather Seminole or
other particular Indian—than English.
The fragility of cultural identity was not
the only lesson of England’s early engagement with the wider world. The limits of the
military model of expansion were made
brutally clear early on. The Iberian powers
did not dominate merely South and Central
America; they also dominated the Caribbean. And early on the Spanish, particularly
through their colony at St. Augustine, Florida
also dominated what would become the
southern United States. Military-style encampments had been the dominant pattern
among the English, who tended to focus on
harrying the more successful Spanish, largely
for reasons of European politics. But the
stunning military successes of the Spanish
conquistadors were not repeated by the English. The English lacked the centralized,
technologically inferior empires available for
relatively swift conquest that provided the
Spanish with subject peoples suitable for a
military style of colonization. The English
also lacked the military élan and brute power
of the Spanish at this time. Indeed, on several
occasions the Spanish simply destroyed competing English settlements, including on the
North American mainland.
Nor were the English able to repeat the
French pattern of success through trade. The
English lacked the diplomatic skills of the
French, along with the availability of large
278
amounts of valuable trade goods (furs) on
which the French colonies in North America
relied. Where the French made friends and
profitable trading arrangements, the English
had a habit of making enemies. Indeed, a key
weakness of the English colonies was their
dependence on trade with the Indians for
their sustenance—a trade for which the English settlers had trouble paying, particularly
in times of scarcity, and for which they had
neither the bargaining skills nor the military
superiority necessary to prosecute with success.
As the English attempted to make their
mark on this dangerous wider world, they
made a variety of efforts at colonization—
only one of which was embodied in the three
ships and one hundred eight colonists that
landed at what would become Jamestown,
Virginia. The Chesapeake region was not
important because of its special promise—
indeed, it had very little promise in the eyes
of colonizers. Rather, the area was important
because it was available. Farther south any
English colony would likely have been wiped
out by the Spanish. Farther north, it was
thought, any colony would succumb to harsh,
killing winter weather. The Chesapeake,
however, was swampy, unhealthy, liable
itself to harsh winters, and bestrewn with
other obstacles, only overcome with difficulty and much trial-and-error.
The royally-chartered Virginia Company
instructed the initial Jamestown colonists to
build a town, plant crops, seek minerals and
other valuable goods, find water routes to the
interior, and keep the local Indians ignorant
of their own weaknesses—especially the inaccuracy of their weapons and their own
tendency to grow sick and die. This was far
too onerous a set of instructions, resting on
far too optimistic a set of assumptions, particularly given the insufficiency of their food
stores, the drought, and the subsequent long,
cold winter the settlers had to endure. Within
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six months all but thirty-eight Jamestown
colonists had died from disease, violence, and
famine. And the remaining settlers, having
alienated the local Indians on whom they
relied for food with the harshness of their
bargaining and other interactions, found
themselves cut off from voluntary trade and
subjected to guerrilla warfare.
The Jamestown settlement had been reduced to misery and despair. And, while
Captain Smith claimed to have held the
colony together through his short-lived regime of martial law and his aggressive bargaining parties, there was no improvement
in sight. By May 1610 Smith had been sent
packing, and Jamestown’s local leaders had
decided to abandon the colony. Only the
unexpected arrival of massive supplies and
reinforcement prevented Jamestown’s utter
failure and dissolution.
Unfortunately for the colonists, the Virginia Company learned the wrong lessons
from the disastrous experience of Jamestown’s
beginning. They determined that what was
required was absolute power in the hands of
their appointed governor, wielded so as to
rule every aspect of colonists’ lives and, with
harsh punishments, the central means of
enforcement. Despite constant resupply of
goods and new colonists, the results were
terrible and deadly for several more years.
Only with the development of wiser policies,
focused on bringing in women and families
and establishing land ownership and local
representation, along with the development
of improved strains of tobacco for export to
England, did the colony finally find its footing and begin to succeed.
The Virginia Company, mired in corruption and mismanagement (though not so
badly as had been rumored), was dissolved in
1624, but Jamestown finally had established
a pattern of life and governance that would
work for the English in America: devolution.
Colonists increasingly had been ceded greater
Modern Age
control over their own destinies through land
ownership, local representative government,
and family formation. The results were increased productivity, decreased mortality
and dissension, and the eventual flourishing
of the colony.
Given Smith’s identification with martial
law, it is fitting that Kupperman gives him
the final word on what would work in
America:
His central theme, the sum of all experience thus
far, was that colonization succeeded only where
each family had a stake in the outcome and where
merchants rather than aristocrats did the planning. He counseled New England’s leaders “not
to stand too much upon the letting, setting, or
selling those wild Countries, nor impose too
much upon the commonality . . . for present gain.”
Rather, they should weld colonists to the project
by giving each man as much land as he could
reasonably manage for “him and his heires for
ever.”
By transferring control to America and
fostering colonists’ own initiative, the English finally were able to succeed as a colonial
power; Jamestown was the starting point for
this pattern. And that pattern would be
central to the developing character of the
American colonies—of their forms of selfgovernment, their social practices, and even
the attitudes and practical habits of what was
becoming the American people.
The phrase “benign neglect,” so commonly used to describe the British
government’s policy toward its North American colonies prior to the mid-eighteenth
century, is unfortunate. That term, accurate
insofar as it describes the results of British
colonialism in its American colonies, nonetheless radically de-emphasizes the policy’s
intentionality. British authorities and the
well-connected leaders of royally-chartered
companies settled on devolution as a preferred mode of colonial governance after
much practical experience with a variety of
279
less successful strategies. And devolution
worked for the empire as much as for the
colonies. It increased the power and wealth
of the British nation by emphasizing one
aspect of its political tradition—localism—in
a manner calculated to serve another—aggressive expansionism. The end result, of
course, was constitutional crisis and separation. But then very few colonies remain such
in perpetuity. Moreover, the policy was
beneficial to both colonies and mother country, not only in terms of power and wealth,
but also in the development of constitutional
structures and political cultures suitable for
the promotion of ordered liberty. In particular, the growth or resuscitation of a multiplicity of authorities, with loyalties being
divided among local associations, provincial
governments, and the larger empire, fed
attitudes, institutions, and practices emphasizing the importance of relatively self-sufficient, property-owning individuals acting
within a variety of groups, thus staving off
centralization.
Over the course of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Virginia would become something other than what most Americans tend to think of in relation to localist
democracy. Wealth increasingly was concentrated into the hands of a few wealthy plantation owners. Slavery was institutionalized
very early and, though opposed at various
times and almost abolished, would come to
pervade Virginia’s social and economic structures. And settlement patterns, spawned in
large measure by the English Civil War,
brought increasing numbers of aristocrats,
along with their retainers and impoverished
dependents, to Virginia. This last development in particular helped produce a local
culture increasingly at odds with the less classbased norm in colonies to the north. But
Jamestown, after much painful experimentation, had established the kinds of local institutions, beliefs, and practices that colonizers
recognized as the prerequisites to successful
settlement and that we have come to recognize as the seedbeds of the American republic.
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