Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Randall J. Stephens, Associate Editor 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Jamestown Redivivus: An Interview with James Horn
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

James Horn is O’Neill Director of the John D. Rock-efeller Jr. Library at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and lecturer at the College of William and Mary.  He is the author of numerous books and articles on colonial America, including Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).  A social historian, Horn has analyzed colonial society within the broader context of the 17th-century Anglophone world. He is also the editor of the just-published Library of America’s edition of John Smith’s works. His most recent work is A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (Basic Books, 2005).  Historian Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University, describes this study as a “grand effort.” Horn “brings together the perspectives of recent generations of scholars in this relatively brief and highly readable book.” (William and Mary Quarterly 63 [2006]: 597). Horn is currently working on a history of the lost Roanoke colony. Historically Speaking associate editor Randall Stephens spoke with Horn in October 2006.

Randall Stephens: How prominent is Jamestown in the American popular imagination?

James Horn: The history of Jamestown has been almost completely overshadowed by the history of Plymouth. If you took a straw poll, I bet you’d probably find that whereas most Americans have heard of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims, far fewer would know much, if anything, about Jamestown.

Stephens: Did 19th-century American historians have something to do with this? 

Horn: I trace it back to the late 18th century. Sectional rivalries, particularly between Virginia and Massachusetts, existed already in the 1780s. But, of course, the Civil War was what really clinched it for New England. As a consequence of the South losing the war, the New England founding myth became established as the nation’s beginning, taught to millions of school children in their textbooks and celebrated annually at Thanksgiving. The victors tend to write the dominant version of history, and so Jamestown was largely forgotten.

Stephens: Yet the story of Pocahontas and John Smith seems to occupy an important place in the American imagination.

Horn: Absolutely. But it seems to me that the story of Smith and Pocahontas is somewhat divorced from Jamestown. The location is early Virginia, but the theme is a romance that has little to do with reality. Pocahontas was only 11 or 12 when they first met. Smith was not in love with her and she was not in love with him. The true story of Pocahontas, at least as far as the English were concerned, is one of redemption. The fact that she converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church was evidence (the English believed) that Indians could be redeemed and brought to the true faith as well as, in time, to English ways. An overlooked aspect of early Virginia was the genuine effort on the part of the English to convert Indians to Christianity. It is a misconception to see Massachusetts as the “religious” colony and Virginia as the “greedy” colony.

Stephens: What are some other misconceptions about Jamestown?

Horn: It is a mistake to see Jamestown as a failure. Jamestown did not fail; it survived and was ultimately successful. Jamestown’s survival was partly a result of the determined efforts of the settlers and the support of the Virginia Company of London, the colony’s sponsor, and partly a matter of luck. But the fact that it did survive had consequences for the rest of the colonial period and ultimately, I’d say, for the later development of the United States.

Stephens: What kinds of consequences?

Horn: Think about what might have happened had Jamestown collapsed. If the English had abandoned the Chesapeake region, would Plymouth have been settled? (Prior to their arrival in North America, the Pilgrims were involved in negotiations with the Virginia Company, from whom they received permission to settle in the northern part of the colony, near the Hudson River). Similarly, would the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have gone to New England if there hadn’t already been an English presence in the mid-Atlantic? After all, there were already French settlers in New England in the early years of the 17th century, but they were wiped out by an English warship coming up from Jamestown in 1613. There is no guarantee that the English would have been successful in establishing settlements elsewhere along the North American coast if Jamestown had not survived. I do not see the settlement of New England as entirely independent of what took place in Virginia.

Then there are Jamestown’s enduring legacies: It was at Jamestown that English people first came into sustained contact with other peoples. They had encountered Indians before, and they had encountered Africans on the West Coast of Africa, but it was at Jamestown where the English, Indians, and Africans began living together side by side. There were tragic aspects to these encounters, which we have to recognize and come to terms with. Hostilities between the English and Powhatan Indians were merely the first in a vicious cycle of war, plunder, and exploitation—repeated over and over again across the continent during the next two and a half centuries—by which Europeans took possession of the land and dispossessed its native peoples.

To maximize profits and increase production, planters required a regular supply of laborers who could be forcibly controlled.  The arrival of some two dozen Africans (Angolans) at Jamestown in 1619 presaged the beginning of a system of exploitation and oppression that blighted the lives of countless Africans and their African-American descendants over the next two and half centuries. But Jamestown matters precisely because it is about coming to terms with our shared past—a past painful and conflicted but which ultimately laid the foundations of modern America. 

The nature of our society today owes in large measure to the foundation and survival of Jamestown, which led to the emergence of British America and the United States. It is why we speak English; it is why we have laws and political institutions based on British institutions. Virginia evolved into the most populous and wealthiest mainland colony in British America. It led the thirteen colonies into revolution and had an enormous impact on the new nation. Four of the first five presidents were Virginians.

At Jamestown the hard lessons were learned about how to establish a successful colony. A colony could not survive as a military garrison, but needed to establish private property, a profitable commodity, and some kind of representative government, as well as stable social foundations. These lessons were learned at Jamestown, and certainly the Pilgrims and the Puritans were well aware of them. That was why Captain John Smith wrote several books in the 1620s: to spell out the rules for establishing a successful colony.

Finally, at Jamestown we have the first expressions of the American Dream. The reason why English settlers moved to Virginia was to make a better life for themselves, and they kept coming despite the hardBeinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.ships. More English settlers moved to Virginia in the 17th century than any other mainland colony, far more than went to New England or the Middle Colonies for example. John Smith was the apostle of the American Dream: the vision that with hard work and thrift ordinary people could prosper and find the kind of life in America that would have been impossible at home. 

Stephens:  Did John Smith have contact with any of the people who came to New England?

Horn: Oh yes. He explored New England in 1614, and, as you might know, was responsible for naming it New England. In some ways, he became as much—if not more—of an advocate for New England as for Virginia in his later years. He had hoped to be part of the Pilgrims’ expedition to Plymouth but was passed over for Miles Standish. Nevertheless, he remained convinced that trade, particularly fishing, was the way to create stable communities, as well as profits both for the colonies and for England.

He was right in principle, but he got the wrong commodity. Although fish was and has continued to be an important product, the two great staples of the colonial period were tobacco and sugar. But he was surely right about the importance of trade. If ordinary people were enabled to work for their own profit and well-being, then colonies would thrive.

Stephens: A fascinating episode of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers, “Unearthing Secret America” (2002), covered Jamestown’s rich archaeological record. Apparently, the early settlers were far more productive than historians have thought.

Horn: Yes, the evidence contradicts the long-held view (expressed, for example, in Edmund Morgan’s hugely influential American Slavery, American Freedom) that early Jamestown was run by a group of lazy English gentlemen, which resulted in starvation, disease, and death. Archaeologist Bill Kelso has found a good deal of evidence that shows just how hard the colonists were working, including, I think, the gentry. It is true that the gentry were primarily involved in exploration to find elusive gold mines or a passage to the South Sea, but they were also very active in Jamestown trying to find and grow products to send back to England.

Stephens: Where were most of the settlers of Jamestown from? 

Horn: The majority, both in the early years and throughout the 17th century, would have come from London and surrounding regions. The Southeast was the most populous part of England, and that is where much of the recruiting of indentured servants took place. But there was a fair number from the West Country, who headed out from Bristol and other local ports.

Stephens: What would have struck them as strange and surprising about Virginia?

Horn:  They would have been impressed, as they came into the Chesapeake Bay, by the size of the rivers. The bay itself is huge compared to English waterways. The English Channel, for example, is about twenty-two miles wide—the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay is almost as large. They would have also been impressed, too, by the woodlands and forests and the Indian peoples living in those areas. The English referred to their settlements as “English ground,” which I think was fairly specific in distinguishing them from Indian towns. They might have glimpsed, too, working in the tobacco fields men and women brought from Africa, which might have been their first sight of slaves.

Then they would have been struck by the absence of the familiar. There were no great cities or bustling market towns, no fine gentry houses or great cathedrals. No ancient Norman church towers pierced Virginia’s skies. The colony lacked the complexity and density of English society, the social gradations and centuries-old traditions and customs that regulated everyday life.

Stephens: I was not aware until I read your book how important the “lost colony” of Roanoke was to the early settlers of Jamestown. 

Horn: The people involved in the early history of English colonization, including Roanoke, were looking for silver, gold, gems, and a passage to the South Sea. The “lost colonists,” if they survived, would have been living with the Indian peoples in the interior for nearly two decades. The Jamestown settlers figured that the survivors of the Roanoke expedition would have had a pretty good idea as to the location of those gold or silver mines or whether there was in fact a passage to the South Sea. So the efforts to locate Roanoke survivors were not just recovery expeditions; there were very tangible reasons why they wanted to find them.

Stephens: Do you think the lost colonists merged with Native Americans?

Horn: Yes. I think the only way they could have survived was by joining local peoples. I am certain that is what happened.

Stephens: I read recently that you were working on a book on Roanoke. What drew you to the topic?

Horn: The story of Roanoke, like that of Jamestown, is much misunderstood. As I researched Jamestown and got into some of the issues concerning Roanoke, I realized that I simply couldn’t agree with the standard view of what happened to the lost colonists.  It is also, like Jamestown, a great story.
 
Stephens: What is the standard view?

Horn: The conventional theory is that when the lost colonists left Roanoke Island they moved to the south bank of the James River and settled with Indians somewhere near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The reason that this has been the dominant theory is simply that this was where they were originally heading when the expedition set out in 1587 under the leadership of John White. They were meant to go to the Chesapeake, and they got dumped on Roanoke Island instead. But I think that all the evidence points to them moving directly westward. They moved up Albemarle Sound to the confluence of the Roanoke and Chowan rivers, and that is where they established themselves initially.  The idea was that they were going to wait for John White to return with extra supplies and other settlers, but, of course, he never showed up.

Stephens: How would he know where they were?  How would they reach him?

Horn: Well, the great thing here is that there are lots of mysteries, which is what I want to write about. Why didn’t they simply tell him before he left where they were going? They said they would move fifty miles inland, which suggests that they weren’t quite sure where they were going to go. They left a message on Roanoke Island—the famous carving on the tree—to go to the nearby island called Croatoan. I believe that they planned to leave a small group on Croatoan who, when White came back, would lead him to the others. (They couldn’t stay on Roanoke Island because the Spanish knew they were there and local Indians were hostile). Nobody knows for certain where they went, but I think there is good evidence that suggests they ended up in the interior of North Carolina.

Stephens: How would this alter our basic ideas about early settlement?

Horn: It plays out in the way Virginia might have developed, which was quite different from the way it did develop.  The Virginia we know, and the Chesapeake we know, is really the creation in large part of John Smith and the vision of the colony based around the Chesapeake Bay. The vision of Virginia in 1609 was quite different; it was a colony, which would stretch across the interior of North Carolina and up to the fall of the James River. It was a colony that was not based on the Chesapeake Bay, but somewhat to the south and inland. Had that happened, we may have seen a different development of English settlement in this part of America. It could have been that the English would not have turned to tobacco.  It is quite possible that that colony in the interior of North Carolina and Virginia would not have lasted very long because it just couldn’t have kept going. They would not have found gold or a passage to the South Sea, and it would have just fizzled out.