European Settlement

On May 14, 1607, slightly more than 100 men of the Virginia Company of London (also called the London Company) founded the first permanent English colony in America. They had come from London on three ships—the Susan Constant , the God-Speed , and the Discovery —under the command of Captain Christopher Newport. (Women did not arrive until a year later, and not in large numbers until 1619.) A site for the settlement was chosen some 30 miles (48 km) upstream on a river the colonists called the James, after the English king, James I. The settlement was named Jamestown.

In the early years the colonists, for a time led by Captain John Smith, suffered from disease, starvation, and Indian attacks. The prospects for Jamestown's survival improved after the introduction of tobacco cultivation by John Rolfe in 1612, for it gave the colony a potentially profitable crop to export. After Rolfe's marriage in 1614 to Pocahontas, daughter of the Indian leader Powhatan, relations with the Indians improved.

In 1619 the House of Burgesses was organized; it was the first representative assembly in America. Also in that year, the first black Africans to be brought to North America landed in Virginia. (They were indentured servants; blacks did not come as slaves until decades later.) After Powhatan's death, the Indians were led by Opechancanough, who hoped to drive out the English. In 1622 the Indians attacked the colony, killing 347 people, about one-third of the settlement's inhabitants. King James used the "Great Massacre," as it was called, and the slow economic growth of Virginia as reasons to revoke the London Company's charter and place the colony under royal control in 1624.