[Footnote 1:  Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston, 1898), p. 68.]

[Footnote 2:  Capt.  John Smith, Works, Arber ed. (Birmingham, 1884), pp. 442-445.  Smith’s book, it should be said, is the sole source for this letter.]

This unwelcome advice while daunting all mercenary promoters gave spur to strong-hearted patriots.  The prospect of profits was gone; the hope of an overseas empire survived.  The London Company, with a greatly improved charter, appealed to the public through sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, and personal canvassing, with such success that subscriptions to its stock poured in from “lords, knights, gentlemen and others,” including the trade guilds and the town corporations.  In lieu of cash dividends the company promised that after a period of seven years, during which the settlers were to work on the company’s account and any surplus earnings were to be spent on the colony or funded, a dividend in land would be issued.  In this the settlers were to be embraced as if instead of emigrating each of them had invested L12 10s. in a share of stock.  Several hundred recruits were sent in 1609, and many more in the following years; but from the successive governors at Jamestown came continued reports of disease, famine and prostration, and pleas ever for more men and supplies.  The company, bravely keeping up its race with the death rate, met all demands as best it could.

To establish a firmer control, Sir Thomas Dale was sent out in 1611 as high marshal along with Sir Thomas Gates as governor.  Both of these were men of military training, and they carried with them a set of stringent regulations quite in keeping with their personal proclivities.  These rulers properly regarded their functions as more industrial than political.  They for the first time distributed the colonists into a series of settlements up and down the river for farming and live-stock tending; they spurred the willing workers by assigning them three-acre private gardens; and they mercilessly coerced the laggard.  They transformed the colony from a distraught camp into a group of severely disciplined farms, owned by the London Company, administered by its officials, and operated partly by its servants, partly by its tenants who paid rent in the form of labor.  That is to say, Virginia was put upon a schedule of plantation routine, producing its own food supply and wanting for the beginning of prosperity only a marketable crop.  This was promptly supplied through John Rolfe’s experiment in 1612 in raising tobacco.  The English people were then buying annually some L200,000 worth of that commodity, mainly from the Spanish West Indies, at prices which might be halved or quartered and yet pay the freight and yield substantial earnings; and so rapid was the resort to the staple in Virginia that soon the very market place in Jamestown was planted in it.  The government in fact had to safeguard the food supply by forbidding anyone to plant tobacco until he had put two acres in grain.