A History of the American People

enforcing them. Unlike Smith's ordinances, they were civil not martial law, but they had a
distinctly Puritan tone. Sabbath observance was strictly enforced, immodest dress was forbidden
and idleness punished severely. The colony was not yet self-supporting even in food, however,
and had nothing to export to England. But, the year after the code was promulgated, a settler
called John Rolfe, fearing prosecution for idleness, began experiments with tobacco. After trying
various seeds, he produced a satisfactory crop, the first sweet-tasting Virginian tobacco, and by
1616 it was already exportable. In the meantime, in 1614, he had married an Indian princess,
Pocahontas, who had been in and out of the colony since its inception, when she was twelve. The
marriage produced offspring and many in Virginia to this day are proud of their descent from the
princess. At the time the union produced a precarious peace with the local tribes.
The year 1619 was significant for three reasons. In order to make the Virginia colony more
attractive to settlers, the company sent out a ship carrying ninety young, unmarried women. Any
of the bachelor colonists could purchase one as a wife simply by paying her cost of
transportation, set at 125 pounds of tobacco. Second, the company announced that it would give
the colonists their rights of Englishmen.' A fresh governor, Sir George Yeardley, was sent out to introduce the new dispensation. On July 30, 1619 the first General Assembly of Virginia met in the Jamestown Church for a week. Presided over by Yeardley, flanked by his six fellow- councillors, constituting the government, it also included twenty-two elected burgesses. They sat in a separateHouse,' like the Westminster Commons, and their first task was to go over Dale's
Code, and improve it in the light of experience and the popular will, which they did, sweating and stewing, and battling flies and mosquitoes.' The result of their deliberations was approved by Yeardley and his colleagues, constituting an Upper House, and both houses together, with the governor representing the King, made up a miniature parliament, as in England itself. Thus, within a decade of its foundation, the colony had acquired a representative institution on the Westminster model. There was nothing like it in any of the American colonies, be they Spanish, Portuguese or French, though some of them had now been in existence over a century. The speed with which this piece of legislative machinery had developed, at a time when its progenitor was still battling with King James and his theory of the divine right of kings, in London, was a significant portent for the future. Three weeks later, on August 20, John Rolfe recorded in his diary the third notable event of the year:There came in a Dutch man-of-warre that sold us 20 negars.' He did not state the price,
but added that fifteen of the blacks were bought by Yardley himself, for work on his 1,000-acre
tobacco plantation in Flowerdew Hundred. These men were unfree though not, strictly speaking,
slaves. They were `indentured servants.' Theoretically they became free when their indentures
expired at the end of five years. After that, they could buy land and enjoy all the rights of free
citizens of the colony. White laborers arrived from England under the same terms, signing their
indentures, or making their mark on them, in return for the passage to America. But in practice
many indentured men acquired other financial obligations by borrowing money during their
initial period of service, and thus had it extended. It is doubtful if any of this first batch of blacks
from Africa ended up free farmers in the colony. Most white servants, when they struggled free
of their indentures, found themselves tenant farmers on the Jamestown River. But it was not
impossible for a black to become a free man in early Virginia: some are recorded as having done
so. What was more ominous, however, was the success with which Yeardley and other
landowners used blacks to work their tobacco plantations. Soon they were buying more men, and
not indentured laborers either, but chattel slaves. Thus in 1619 the first English colony in
America embarked on two roads which bifurcated and led in two totally different directions: