it would be cheaper, more productive, and less troublesome to allow them
some discretion. It had its governor announce that henceforward they
should choose from among themselves their own leaders to formulate laws
and regulations based on English common law. The “burgesses” were to be
selected from “from every Town, Hundred or other particular Plantation”
and, as the “General Assembly,” were to meet once a year with the gover-
nor’s “Council of State.” The council of state would gradually evolve into
an upper council, regarded as something like the House of Lords; and the
“House of Burgesses” would copy the pattern of the House of Commons.
The newly elected burgesses held their first meeting on July 30, 1619,
on the ground floor of the Jamestown church while the governor and his
advisory council met in the choir loft. After a few days of sweltering in the
July heat as swarms of mosquitoes buzzed in from the dank surrounding
woods and marshes, the delegates fled. But they had managed in their short
session to pass a number of laws, including the first tax levied in America.
Although historians may find this assembly the first step on the road to
independence, the colonists do not seem to have found it so. They were
much more concerned with clearing land, bartering for food and furs with
the Indians, and above all growing tobacco. Tobacco was their lifeline to
the good things they wanted from England. Tampering with the tobacco
market was much more sensitive than being allowed to levy their own taxes.
So, when in April 1623 the British government declared the tobacco sales
contract void and sent a mission to reassess Virginia, the burgesses boy-
cotted it. More pointedly, when one of their clerks agreed to assist the mis-
sion, they had him put into the pillory and sliced off his ears. That, together
with an expensive and disastrous war in 1622, when the neighboring
Indian tribes nearly destroyed the colony, caused the government in 1625
to get a court order declaring the company in default, to order it dis-
banded, and to proclaim the tiny triangle between the James and York
rivers, which was all there was to “Virginia,” a royal colony.
During the 1620s and 1630s, people were flooding into North
America. Virginia was being subdivided as plots of land were sold off to
separate groups; and new colonies were being established in Maryland and
Massachusetts. By 1641, the population of the “British” colonies had
reached 50,000; this critical mass gave a reassuring sense of capacity, stim-
“Mother England” Loses Touch 127