James Madison University - Index

James Madison University - Liberty & Learning - Index

liberty & learning
The first settlers to the Virginia colony were clustered along the banks of the
James River within easy access to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
They were almost wholly dependent upon a steady supply of food and staples
from Britain along with an ample quantity of replacement settlers who were
needed to fill the void left by those who seemed to die so easily in the New
World. In fact, Jamestown’s early years were punctuated by famine, pestilence,
and plague. Virginia regularly and repeatedly teetered toward financial failure
and catastrophic collapse until it finally achieved economic salvation through the
introduction of tobacco in 1612 by John Rolfe. The Stuart King, James I, was
initially unenthusiastic and hated the new fad of smoking, describing it as
a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine,
dangerous to the lungs and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling
the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. 2
His opposition to tobacco, though, was quickly mitigated by the steady stream
of revenue generated from his subjects’ insatiable demand for the noxious crop.
As the global demand for tobacco increased with improved supply, British mercantile
policy soon required that all shipments from the colonies be sent first to
England before being marketed and sold to other nations. In Virginia, land and
labor were both in great demand as thousands of new arrivals flocked to America
to seek their fortunes. The colony’s most successful and wealthy settlers were those
who had arrived early in the seventeenth century and had established their plantations
along the banks of the colony’s tidal waters with the closest and quickest
access to British ports. 3 These individuals became known as the First Families of
Virginia (FFVs) and included the Burwells, Byrds, Carters, and Randolphs.
The quest for cultivable lands led later arriving generations of Virginia settlers
to move inland to the gently rolling hills of the piedmont, far beyond the
fall lines of the colony’s great rivers. 4 In 1732, Ambrose Madison, his wife, Frances
Taylor, and their three children relocated from Caroline County to a remote
and primitive plantation known as Mount Pleasant in what would later become
Orange County. The fertile tobacco fields were farmed by a considerable number
of slaves, and the small manor house on the property was undistinguished but
had a remarkable view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 5
The cultivation, harvesting, and curing of tobacco required an enormous
amount of physical labor. The importation of slaves was instigated to meet this
demand, and, by 1660, slavery had become firmly entrenched in Virginia and
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