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James Horn: Jamestown and the Forging of American democracy

An exceptional year in which American independence and American slavery come

together in a hot spell in the middle of summer 1619 along the shores of the River James,

Virginia, happened in a few weeks from each other that would deeply shape the trajectory of

history. The first meeting of a representative governing body in America came together in the

newly built church of Jamestown. A few weeks later, the first African slaves landed in the

mainland of English America, entering Chesapeake Bay. In 1619 James Horn, historian, brought

to light the year which gave rise to our nation's great paradox: slavery in the midst of freedom.

This portentous year marked both the origins of American history's greatest political

development, democracy, as well as that of what would eventually become one of the greatest

challenges of the nation: the corrosive legacies of racial inequality that have afflicted America

since its inception. This paper discusses how slavery and racial prejudice gradually evolved in

Virginia during the half century following the arrival of the Angolans.

Horn refers to two events that took place simultaneously and shaped the whole of the

American history: a general assembly meeting and the arrival of a buttered privateer. A couple

weeks back, it carted the first shipment of African slaves[CITATION Hor18 \p 17 \l 1033 ].

According to this well-narrated account of events in history, Virginia is where slavery and liberty

were born in history at the same time [CITATION Bly20 \p 36 \l 1033 ]. He is also proof that
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Africans were already slaves in the middle of the sixteenth century and mentions some British

and American people who took advantage of this business. Horn relates a tale about the

emergence of the settlement of Jamestown along the shores of the James River in Virginia with a

vision of peace and liberty [CITATION Hor18 \p 53 \l 1033 ]. He also tells the origins of the first

slaves to the Congo.

However according to Allan Taylor, he argues that, Early Jamestown truly resembles a

vision of insanity, starvation, sickness and abuse [CITATION Tay02 \p 87 \l 1033 ]. The London

colonist company, The Virginia Corporation, naively told the colonial representatives not to

encourage the Indians to see English people killed, because the indigenous people could realize

that the colonists were mere mortals. This lesson was easily unlikely, as the colonists perished in

vast numbers from sickness and malnutrition. Just thirty-eight of the original 104 settlers who

had landed in April 1607 lasted nine months longer. The ongoing transportation of newcomers

scarcely kept the colony going [CITATION Tay02 \p 129 \l 1033 ]. 220 colonists were present in

the spring of 1609, but just sixty of them lasted the winter. One hungry colonist assassinated his

wife and consumed her, for which he was burnt.

Another thing to remember regarding 1619 was that Tsenacommacah's English

settlement and occupation were by no way certain. Bailyn’s has written against the establishment

of democracy in 1619 as a required phase in the unnecessary: "If we make the error of fixing that

position in time as intrinsically or predictably as English [CITATION Bly20 \p 441 \l 1033 ], we

pave the way for the assumption that the United States still existed in embryonic form."

In the half a century after the advent of the Angolan population, slavery and ethnic

discrimination eventually developed in Virginia when the Portuguese captured them and they

became "20 and strange" on August 20, 1619, and bought by the English colonists [CITATION
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Hag14 \p 594 \l 1033 ]. The first Africans enslaved, who arrived at Point Ease, today called

Hampton Roads. Many of their names and the exact sum that remained at Point Comfort was lost

in history, however most of their voyage is documented. Allan Taylor also argues that, In

America, nothing succeeds, particularly when writing common history[CITATION Tay02 \p 151

\l 1033 ].

Originally, the Portuguese imperial powers were captured and sent to Luanda port, the

capital of modern Angola, in prison rulers of the Kongo and Ndongo Tribal Kingdoms

[CITATION Hor18 \p 28 \l 1033 ]. The San Juan Bautista ship was ordered from there to sail to

Veracruz, in the colony of New Spain. Typically, approximately 150 of the 350 prisoners on

board the boat died at the cruise. Two privateers, the White Lion and the Treasurer, hit the boats

when it reached its goal [CITATION Bai05 \p 64 \l 1033 ]. It was the White Lion that at the

Punta Comfort at Virginia Colony, and on August 20, 1619 exchanged a number of prisoners for

food.

Bailyn's part is to blame Jamestown for his bad credibility for the famous historical

memory of the succeeding New England Pilgrim colonists of 1620 [CITATION Bai05 \p 91 \l

1033 ]. This First Thanksgiving is, of course, a highly selective image. The pilgrims fingered

friendship two years later in order to trick seven Indians into a deadly trap. The victors raised a

head to the fort to scare the surviving indigenous populations [CITATION Hor18 \p 15 \l 1033 ].

But American schoolchildren respond to the first thanksgiving every year instead of the

following head to the pole

His narrative started in the middle of 1619, when two occurrences were strikingly

juxtaposed – the first general assembly of Virginia and the introduction of the first African

slaves. By 1619, the elite of the settlement had cause to believe that it was behind the darkest
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days. Links with indigenous neighbors were friendly or, at least, secure, and the new colonial

charter encouraged the acquisition by colonists of private farms and public affairs [CITATION

Hor18 \p 11 \l 1033 ]. The most influential reformer of the Virginia Company, Edward Sandys,

saw in America not only the potential for benefit but most particularly, the hard cut stuff that is a

safer way of life for citizens [CITATION Bly20 \p 442 \l 1033 ]. Sandys, while not a Puritan, has

his own view of a city on a mountain: the land of mutuality between kings and leaders, the

religious correctness of the Church of England and the abundance of a number of crops, not only

tobacco. Virginia may not have been utopia in Sandys' aspiration, but it might have been a

commonwealth in which citizens might be wealthy not instead, but because of the way they

cared after each other.

But James Horn explores a far greater catastrophic occurrence in a recent reflection on

this seminal coulter, 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy [CITATION

Hor18 \p 3 \l 1033 ]. A promise of the collective good, which evolved from the horrors of the

first years and may have influenced the eventual United States, has been overshadowed in

Jamestown—not in 1607 but around a decade and a half later [CITATION Bly20 \p 442 \l

1033 ]. Horn's is a story about what should have been accomplished and is ideally placed to

inform him, as President of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, which encourages on-site

testing and training.

This hope was destroyed by disaster. The poisonous brawl of war and intrigue that after

1622 has shattered the trust in "Democratically" and created the mirror of Sandys's vision in

several respects. Second, Opechancanough and other natives organized their effort to push the

settlers to the sea. Then there came legislative machines in England where Sandys found himself

with James I on subjects not even connected to Virginia for cross purposes [CITATION
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Hag14 \p 595 \l 1033 ]. Embattled and discredited, the Commonwealth of the colony gave way to

a government of grandees which twisted the very institutions Sandys transformed into

instruments of personal enrichment for the fearful citizens. Worst of all, slavery came when the

"20th and strange Negroes," who appeared in 1619, followed thousands of other kidnapping

women and men as the labor replacement of the colonies [CITATION Hor18 \p 92 \l 1033 ].

While 1619 does not measure up to its subtitle theoretically – unlike "American

independence," what was forged in Jamestown didn't matter either democratically or separately

[CITATION Hor18 \p 100 \l 1033 ]. The lessons for an era when everyone is gaining and the

"common good" is nothing are sufficiently plain. Horn tells modern readers that the long journey

to independence for their forebears was split up by roads not pursued, even paths which did not

treat wealth and mutuality as mutually exclusive [CITATION Bai05 \p 175 \l 1033 ]. He invokes

a moment, albeit brief, in which the "general good" does not contain miracles for nebulous

memories but a means to a better existence.

Feisty and ambitious, he scorned his social inferiors almost as much as his political

superiors were scornful. In spite of the present reputation as an early American populist, Baily’s

rejected the popular colonists as "all the trash they could get in London" and as "slightly better

than the savages, if not worse[CITATION Bai05 \p 44 \l 1033 ]." They wanted government by

his iron hand because Bailyn could not bear power from the top or opposition from the bottom.

Leaving behind his political rivals, he led expeditions through the local waterways and to

extortion in Indian villages at the gunpoint. Instead of permanent escape into the wilderness, he

hoped to return a conquering hero to Jamestown's command. Bailyn’s tried to make his

leadership indispensable to his fellow colonists by acquiring food and unique expertise in the

landscape and in the indigenous relations [CITATION Bai05 \p 112 \l 1033 ].

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In conclusion, this entertaining study of Virginia in the 17th century does not provide a

more complete examination of slavery and the position it played in British North America's

growth. Before 1619, the great people of Virginia harbored prejudiced attitudes toward everyone

they perceived to be "other." Before rationalizing the genocide of the people of Powhatan, they

knew nothing of weak, landless whites before they defined Africans as black. Over the period of

the seventeenth century, for example, they accepted proposals to 'transport hundreds of poor

children' to Chesapeake forcefully 'as fieldworkers and housekeepers'.

References

Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Bly, Antonio T. "1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy by James

Horn." Journal of Southern History 86.2 (2020): 441-442.

Hagedorn, Nancy L. "The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The

Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn." Register of the Kentucky

Historical Society 111.4 (2014): 594-596.

Horn, James. 1619: Jamestown and the forging of American democracy. Hachette UK, 2018.

Taylor, Alan. American colonies. Vol. 1. Penguin, 2002.