Several European expeditions, including a group of Spanish Jesuits, explored the Chesapeake Bay during the 16th century.[13] To help counter Spain's colonies in the Caribbean, Queen Elizabeth I of England supported Walter Raleigh's 1584 expedition to the Atlantic coast of North America.[14][15] The name "Virginia" was used by Captain Arthur Barlowe in the expedition's report, and may have been suggested by Raleigh or Elizabeth (perhaps noting her status as the "Virgin Queen" or that they viewed the land as being untouched) or related to an Algonquin phrase, Wingandacoa or Windgancon, or leader's name, Wingina, as heard by the expedition.[16][17] The name initially applied to the entire coastal region from South Carolina in the south to Maine in the north, along with the island of Bermuda.[18] Raleigh's colony failed, but the potential financial and strategic gains still captivated many English policymakers. In 1606, King James I issued a charter for a new colony to the Virginia Company of London. The group financed an expedition under Christopher Newport that established a settlement named Jamestown in 1607.[19]
Though more settlers soon joined, many were ill-prepared for the dangers of the new settlement. As the colony's president, John Smith secured food for the colonists from nearby tribes, but after he left in 1609, this trade stopped and a series of ambush-style killings between colonists and natives under Chief Powhatan and his brother began, resulting in mass starvation in the colony that winter.[20] By the end of the colony's first fourteen years, over eighty percent of the roughly eight thousand settlers transported there had died.[21] Demand for exported tobacco, however, fueled the need for more workers.[22] Starting in 1618, the headright system tried to solve this by granting colonists farmland for their help attracting indentured servants.[23] Enslaved Africans were first sold in Virginia in 1619. Though other Africans arrived as indentured servants and could be freed after four to seven years, the basis for lifelong slavery was developed in legal cases like those of John Punch in 1640 and John Casor in 1655.[24] Laws passed in Jamestown defined slavery as race-based in 1661, as inherited maternally in 1662, and as enforceable by death in 1669.[25]
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From the colony's start, residents agitated for greater local control, and in 1619, certain male colonists began electing representatives to an assembly, later called the House of Burgesses, that negotiated issues with the governing council appointed by the London Company.[27] Unhappy with this arrangement, the monarchy revoked the company's charter and began directly naming governors and Council members in 1624. In 1635, colonists arrested a governor who ignored the assembly and sent him back to England against his will.[28] William Berkeley was named governor in 1642, just as the turmoil of the English Civil War and Interregnum permitted the colony greater autonomy.[29] As a supporter of the king, Berkeley welcomed other Cavaliers who fled to Virginia. He surrendered to Parliamentarians in 1652, but after the 1660 Restoration made him governor again, he blocked assembly elections and exacerbated the class divide by disenfranchising and restricting the movement of indentured servants, who made up around eighty percent of the workforce.[30] On the colony's frontier, tribes like the Tutelo and Doeg were being squeezed by Seneca raiders from the north, leading to more confrontations with colonists. In 1676, several hundred working-class followers of Nathaniel Bacon, upset by Berkeley's refusal to retaliate against the tribes, burned Jamestown.[31]
Bacon's Rebellion forced the signing of Bacon's Laws, which restored some of the colony's rights and sanctioned both attacks on native tribes and the enslavement of their people.[32][33] The Treaty of 1677 further reduced the independence of the tribes that signed it, and aided the colony's assimilation of their land in the years that followed.[34][35] Colonists in the 1700s were pushing westward into the area held by the Seneca and their larger Iroquois Nation, and in 1748, a group of wealthy speculators, backed by the British monarchy, formed the Ohio Company to start English settlement and trade in the Ohio Country west of the Appalachian Mountains.[36] France, which claimed this area as part of New France, viewed this as a threat, and in 1754 the French and Indian War engulfed England, France, the Iroquois, and other allied tribes on both sides. A militia from several British colonies, called the Virginia Regiment, was led by Major George Washington, himself one of the investors in the Ohio Company.[37]
Statehood
In the decade following the French and Indian War, the British Parliament passed new taxes which were deeply unpopular in the colonies. In the House of Burgesses, opposition to taxation without representation was led by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, among others.[38] Virginians began to coordinate their actions with other colonies in 1773 and sent delegates to the Continental Congress the following year.[39] After the House of Burgesses was dissolved in 1774 by the royal governor, Virginia's revolutionary leaders continued to govern via the Virginia Conventions. On May 15, 1776, the Convention declared Virginia's independence and adopted George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was then included in a new constitution that designated Virginia as a commonwealth.[40] Another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, drew upon Mason's work in drafting the national Declaration of Independence.[41]
After the American Revolutionary War began, George Washington was selected by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to head the Continental Army, and many Virginians joined the army and revolutionary militias. Virginia was the first colony to ratify the Articles of Confederation in December 1777.[42] In April 1780, the capital was moved to Richmond at the urging of Governor Thomas Jefferson, who feared that Williamsburg's coastal location would make it vulnerable to British attack.[43
