Posted on 10/19/2009 6:34:50 PM PDT by presidio9
1619 - that decade makes a huge difference! Any idea of why they originally came to Virginia - to raise tobacco?
With whom is Openchancanough a legend? His existence is about as well-verified as any of that in the Powhatan Confederacy can be, including Pocahontas. shows up in so many of the original documents written contemporaneously with the Jamestown settlement. He led the 1622 massacre, and another in 1644, being captured and shot in 1646. If you are descended from him, you are extremely fortunate - what a famous and long-lived sire!
Some historians have argued that he was the youth who was sen to the Spanish Court at 17 to be educated and later returned; this is the part of the story that may be legendary. This was supposed to be the basis of his arguments to Powhatan that the European settlers had to be essentially exterminated, rather than tolerated - he had seen how powerful they were, and thought that they could easily destroy the Powhatan Confederacy.
He was correct, of course.
My own family line here in New Jersey began as three brothers from the Hesse region who landed in Philadelphia in 1772, and served as indentured servants in areas of southern New Jersey. My ancestor was apparently shipped to Canada in the early 1780s, and then moved back to the mountainous area known as Sussex County in 1783. His descendants have remained in the state, and farther afield in the nation, until today.
Of course, we have no pedigree as illustrious as yours - you have 160 years on us! There are many, many, many Americans - the majority of the population, I would bet - that can’t even trace their family’s stay in this country back 160 years.
I hope that here is a heritage and a culture that we all can share and believe in, whether we have been here 400 years or 4. I’ve come down to this: The desire of a human to lead his life as he sees fit, secure and at peace in his home and family,able to pursue honest work and education, and part of a community bound by ideals rather than blood.
What have you concluded the common American heritage to be?
The legendary aspect is “Mary” Sizemore’s kidnapping and supposed rape by Opechancanough, during that massacre.
It’s tough to tell, what William Sizemore’s exact occupation might have been. It appears he may have returned to England for a number of years and then back again, as well.
As far as Opechanacanough and the Spanish, many believe he was half-Spanish and half native. There was a Spanish “fort” that he reputedly spent some time at as a youth.
There’s not much “illustrious” about my heritage. Just about any native southerner could claim something similar, if they’ve bothered to research the matter. The only genuinely noteworthy family in all my lines, as far as the colonial era, would be the Carters of Corotoman Creek, VA ... “King” Carter.
Most everybody else was just regular folks, some transported, some who paid their own passage, some who achieved a level of prominence in a few generations, most who didn’t, some who distinguished themselves in the Revolution, most who didn’t, and the rare Tory or two. They’re all worthy of honor to me, though. Wouldn’t be here without them, as I mentioned.
I’d agree with your assessment, of the common heritage of Americans.
Now, it makes sense. Sort of.
Well... I'm glad I'm not the only one. This is just word salad. It takes a useless observation and takes it nowhere.
And that would be a demonstrably false contention. If the primary requirement for the foundation of a colony is not a permanent and self-sustaining settlement (and, I'm sorry to break the news that it will continue to be so when we settle Mars), then Vinland would be the obvious choice. If we were being politically correct, we could talk about some of the native cities, like a few of the pueblos in the South West. If we were merely concerned about continuous habitation (and we didn't care if the residents spoke Spanish), we could talk about St. Augustine. What Plymouth has going for it, apart from the rest, is that it was continuously settled, it achieved some self-sufficiency, and it inspired others to follow its example. That's why we teach our children about the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving. They were the foundation of our society. Deal with it.
Plymouthe was an authoritarian commune, with a single religion. Settlers were not permitted to grow their own produce. From each according to his ability and to each according to his need, more or less.
As a result, self-sufficiency eluded them for years. They would have starved to death, if it were not for the native Wampanoag taking pity upon them, even though the colonists had stolen corn from them, during that first winter.
Plymouthe was the result of a navigational error. The Mayflower and the ill-fated Speedwell were destined for ... Virginia. They had purchased a land patent from The Virginia Company, founders of Jamestown.
Doesn't sound foundational to me.
So the English didn’t establish a self-sustaining, continuous settlement in Virginia?
And why so pugnacious a tone?
I'm not so sure it's just for political aspirations. I think he holds a great deal of resentment against his mother.
So why the obesession to keep flogging the race issue from the fifth column enemedia?
But but but ... Plymouth is how we got Pennsylvania, right?
“Honestly, the business folks I know bend over backwards when any young person, ESPECIALLY a minority, proves that they want to work.”
Not always. I worked for a Fortune 100 and they wanted to hire a black programmer. They interviewed several candidates and settled on the one incompetent liar who told them what they wanted to hear. They never checked his references or previous employers. They automatically assumed he was useless and were hoping he would bring gravitas to the department. Instead, he stole stuff and wreaked havoc on any system he touched. Those Yankee managers passed over good candidates to get a BS artist. Luckily, he lied and got a better job where he lasted a week. But we were off the hook. Did they hire another black programmer? No way. They assumed they were all gonna be like this one guy.
The Virginia House Of Burgesses was established in 1618, making it the first establishment of a governmental body in the New World.
The Mayflower was to settle in Northern Virginia, due to their having purchased a land patent from the same group that settled Jamestown, the Virginia Company of London. Virginia encompassed much of the east coast at that time, ending in the Hudson Valley region of modern day New York, all the way down to southern Georgia.
I tend to think that the notion of Plymouth Plantation settlers being regarded as the foundation of the colonies and ultimately this nation was written into national mythos as a result of regional bias stemming from the Civil War. The same can be said regarding the Revolution, with much of the impetus coming in the southern colonies and not New England.
I’ve always been amazed at the audacity, of the historical snub of Jamestown as our founding settlement.
That was not your original point. You said it was your contention that Jamestown was the foundation of America. That contention is demonstrably untrue.
And why so pugnacious a tone?
I get sick of people posting fatuous opinions on concrete historical matters here. Like when they suggest that Lincoln was not one of this nation's two greatest presidents, or that what we have today, with our drug laws, is exactly the same as Prohibition.
When you suggest that Jamestown is THE foundation for America, you are also suggesting that Plymouth definitely is not.
Pretty much everything you are saying is true, but it doesn't really help your argument. The only point that matters is that Plymouth DID succeed, where others failed. This success preserved the New World's first mutually agreed upon social contract, drafted and approved before these first settlers mistakenly set foot in Massachusettes.
Glorify failure in Jamestown if you like, but the suggestion that it is THE foundation of our society is asinine.
Failure? The first establishment of a permanent governmental body in the New World, the Virginia House Of Burgesses, was established several years before the Mayflower ever went blundering into Cape Cod instead of the intended Northern Virginia.
That's foundational.
And, I'm far from alone in this belief. In a May 13th, 2007 opinion article for The Washington Post online titled “America’s Founding Fictions” Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Professor of History at New York University, contrasts the two popular historical versions of colonial America’s early beginnings (Plymouth vs. Jamestown), on the eve of the 400th Anniversary of Jamestown.
America's Founding Fictions
By Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Sunday, May 13, 2007; B02
The colonists landed, short of food and supplies, after a long and harrowing transatlantic voyage. The initial exploring party stole a large quantity of corn that the Indians had carefully stored away for the hard winter. They then dug up some graves, looted items that had been buried with the dead and ransacked Indian houses. Furious fighting with the natives soon ensued. Once they had selected a site for their settlement, the migrants endured a winter of death in which they lost more than half their number.
Ah, of course, you're thinking -- Jamestown. All that looting and fighting and stealing and death. It's the creation story from hell. But think again.
That description is not of the troubled Virginia colony settled by a group of men popularly derided, then and now, as the scum of the Earth. Rather, it depicts the arduous first days of Massachusetts's Plymouth colony, our favorite myth of the nation's founding.
These aren't the kinds of events we remember the Pilgrims by, even though the description is drawn from their own words. Instead, our national mythmakers have accentuated the positive to carve the story of the pious Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving out of Plymouth's more complicated, less pure beginnings. In contrast, the earlier Jamestown colony, whose 400th anniversary we commemorate tomorrow, is depicted as a saga of unrelieved degradation and failure, relegated to second-tier status in the history books. But it shouldn't be.
American history today begins with the Pilgrims because their experience in Plymouth has been molded to offer a more acceptable foundation story than the exploitative dog-eat-dog world of the early Chesapeake. The Puritans' arrival in Boston, where they built John Winthrop's "city on a hill," clinched it for Massachusetts.
The Pilgrim story took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter"), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.
This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.
Encasing our national founding in a myth of immaculate conception feeds the assumption that the United States is unlike other nations, that it acts in the world only to serve the greater good…
But America's true founding story is much more interesting and much more real. All early colonies had tremendous difficulties becoming established. The reports sent home from Jamestown were overwhelmingly dismal; it was all harder than anyone had expected, and everyone had different ideas about how to proceed.
Dismayed by the high death rate and the disorder of Jamestown's first couple of years, the colony's London sponsor, the Virginia Company -- a kind of early venture-capital outfit -- decided to compel the settlers to be virtuous. It imposed the most severe martial law, regulating every aspect of life to force the men to work for the collective interest. The death penalty was ordered for almost any infraction. If civic virtue could be achieved by force, the Virginia Company was going to do it. Read more at the Washington Post
Here, Presidio9, why don’t you read the post immediately above yours? There are many historians who do argue that Jamestown was the first lasting setllement of these United States, and that the legal and governmental priciples that were established there are indeed the foundation of this national government. It’s not “fatuous.”
Nor is this contention “demonstrably untrue.” The “amnesia” about the primacy of Jamestown is the result of very specific political aims designed specifically to denigrate the primacy of the Virginia Colony. These historical forces began after the Civil War, and essentially rewrote American history books in the 1930s so as to glorify the Plymouth Colony and the story of the Pilgrims.
http://forum-network.org/lecture/jamestown-vs-plymouth-americas-historical-amnesia
Now, my mother’s side of the family is all from Boston and we were raised on the mythology of the Pilgrims in my family. But even a cursory bit of research into this debate will demonstrate to a person of open-minded intellect there is strong historical evidence that the Virginia Colony was indeed the first prosperous settlement with its own elected government to exist in what became the original Thirteen Colonies.
I believe that Jamestown is, yes, the foundation for our American enterprise. There is a valid historical argument to be made for this contention, if you care to explore the topic.
History is not theology; it is not a matter of eternal dogma. Here’s a huzzah for all those people who care so deeply about American History, whether they always agree in their interpretations or not.
P.S. So you get pugnacious and insulting with strangers because of your emotions? That’s not a very effective way to make an argument of any kind, with anybody.
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