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English colonists landing in Virginia, 1634 (Getty Images) View more images
Richmond, Virginia, celebrates its 400th anniversary in 2007. It had a difficult birth. The settlement was not called 'Richmond' until 1737 (after Richmond, Surrey), a reminder that not all settlements immediately assumed an identity. The entry into Virginia - a huge landmass encompassing far more than the present state - was Jamestown. Here was the first British settlement in America.
In 1607, led by Christopher Newport, explorers moved up river from Jamestown to what is now Richmond. Then it was in a region belonging to the Powhatan Indians. For more than thirty years, growth was gradual rather than startling. Communities lived within easy reach of each other in forts including Nonsuch, West and James River.
It was not until 1644 and the building of Fort Charles that new settlers felt safe enough to move. Fort Charles became a trading post for fur trappers and tobacco growers. It was Colonel William Byrd who started the move to build a city on the site and Richmond was officially founded in 1737.
The growing wealth and possibilities in farming meant there was a labour shortage. There were not sufficient settlers and the economy would not support extra families with all the social and economic demands they would make. Consequently, the founding of one of the most famous cities in America is tied to the story of southern black slavery and of the introduction of white convict and child labour from England.
Samuel Johnson dismissed Virginia as "a race of convicts who ought to be content with anything we allow them short of hanging". The pamphleteer, John Hammond in 1656 called Virginia "…a nest of rogues, whores, desolute and rooking persons, a place of intolerable labour…".
Roger North, writing in the memoir of his family, Lives of the Norths, recorded how Bristol traders and officials sold petty thieves and vagrants. "…There had been a usage among the aldermen and justices of the city where all persons, even common shopkeepers, more or less trade to the American plantations, to carry over criminals who were pardoned with condition of transportation and to sell them for money."
The members of the North family included Roger (1653-1734), Sir Dudley (1641-91) an economist who predated Adam Smith and Francis (1637-85), later Lord Chief Justice, Lord Chancellor and the first baron Guildford.
This was the family which also produced the celebrated statesman, Frederick North (1732-92), the eighth Lord North who is still blamed for the loss of America.
The writer and biographer who chronicled the Bristol slave trade in the 17th century was Roger North who like many of his kinsmen trained as a lawyer. His Lives of the Norths is, not surprisingly, sympathetic to the family, although none should doubt their individual distinctions.
John Hammond on Virginia, 1656
The pamphleteer, John Hammond in 1656 in his Leah and Rachel or the Two Fruitful Sisters, Virginia and Maryland, declared that Virginia was a dreadful place which deserved no more than the dross of English society. Virginia, he wrote, was an unhealthy place ...
"... a nest of rogues, whores, desolute and rooking persons, a place of intolerable labour, bad usage, and hard diet. It was not settled at the public charge; but when found out, challenged and maintained by Adventurers whose avarice and inhumanity brought in those inconveniences which to this day brands Virginia. Then were jails emptied, youth seduced, infamous women drilled in, the provisions all brought out from England. Complaints were repaid with stripes, monies with scoffs, tortures made delights. Let such as are so minded to become planters not rashly throw themselves upon the voyage but observe the true nature and enquire the qualities of the persons with whom they engage to transport themselves."
King James's Privy Council
Issued on the twenty third of January, 1615
"Whereas it hath pleased his Majesty, out of his singular clemency and mercy, to take into his principal consideration the wretched estate of divers of his subjects who, by the laws of the realm, are adjudged to die for sundry offences, though heinous in themselves yet not of the highest nature, so as his majesty out of his gracious clemency could wish they might be rather corrected than destroyed, and that in their punishments some of them might live and yield a profitable service to the commonwealth in parts abroad where it shall be found fit to employ them, members of the council are empowered to reprieve and stay from execution such persons as now stand convicted of any robbery or felony (wilful murder, rape, witchcraft, or burglary only excepted) who for strength of body or other abilities shall be thought fit to be employed in foreign discoveries or other services beyond the sea, with this special proviso: that if any of the said offenders shall refuse to go, or yielding to go shall afterwards return from those places before the time limited by us, his Majesty's Commissioners, that then the said reprieval shall no longer stand, but the said offender shall from thenceforth be subject to the execution of the law for the offence whereof he was first convicted."
