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Jamestown's birthday notes a darker side this time
Quadricentennial of America's first permanent settlement shows Indian subjugation and African slavery.
from the May 4, 2007 edition
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The settlers were, to an extent, upper-class dandies who couldn't handle roughing it on the frontier; only 60 of the 500 or so settlers survived the "starving time" of 1609-10, when some reportedly turned to cannibalism.
But while enduring a standard of living 2,000 times worse than today's, it was also a diverse society of Germans and Italians, who saw the first interracial marriage in America take place when Pocahontas married John Rolfe.
Mr. Rolfe, in turn, became America's first entrepreneur when he planted "sweet" Spanish tobacco in the fertile James River dirt, laying the foundations for the capitalistic planter society that gave rise to Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.
"A lot of people reflecting back on Jamestown for the 400th anniversary would argue that Jamestown with all its complexities and contradictions was really a better forecast of what kind of rambunctious society America was going to become," says Jim Kelly, director of museums for the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. "The sort of idealistic city on the hill [represented by the Pilgrims] was an eccentricity. Jamestown, on the other hand, was about getting a piece of the American dream."
But those similarities are an easy target for critics of American policy today. The quadricentennial comes at a time when the nation is enduring a somber and uncertain national mood, says Matthew Sharpe, a Wesleyan University English professor and author of the new book, "Jamestown," which retells the tale of Smith, Rolfe, Pocahontas, and Powhatan as a science fiction story.
"The bumblingness of the Iraq adventure, for instance, bears a striking resemblance to the Virginia adventure 400 years ago," says Mr. Sharpe. "We look to these early founding stories as mythologies of the origin of who we are now and as models for how to live, and Jamestown happens to present a very complicated model for how to live."
But critics of the Jamestown "commemoration" say that overlaying modern social mores on the Jamestown settlers amounts to a misreading and misapplication of history.
For one, it's not clear to historians whether the first Africans on the continent, who came to Virginia in 1619, were slaves or part of a system of indentured servitude that became chattel slavery 50 years later. Historian Harold Wilson of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., points out that the House of Burgesses, the early democratic body in the colony, urged the crown repeatedly to stop the practice of slavery before 1630.
"This is the first time that America has had a jubilee or centennial that we're ashamed of," says Doug Phillips, president of Vision Forum, a religious group based in San Antonio, which is sponsoring an upbeat celebration of Jamestown next weekend. "Not to be grateful for [the settlers' accomplishments] cultivates indifference and ingratitude, and it's not healthy for us as a people."
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