At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is “Actual Citation from Book,” Complicity’s notes from Chapter Two.
COMPLICITY ERRONEOUSLY STATES that “Virginia may have been settled first, but the United States was born in New England.”1
The only thing that was born in New England is a particularly nauseating kind of virtue signaling of the type practiced by “Native American” Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Chappaquiddick Ted.
Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of President John Tyler, our 10th president, can help the New Englanders understand America’s birth. Lyon Gardiner Tyler is savior of the College of William and Mary which was devastated after the War Between the States. He was president from 1888 to 1919.2
He wrote a piece in 1921, Virginia First, that explains all the details of America’s founding. He writes that New England opposed expansion including the Louisiana Purchase and the admission of Texas so, if it had been up to New England, America would be a little strip along the east coast.
America was not only born in the South at Jamestown, Virginia May 13, 1607, a Southerner is the Father of Our Country, another wrote the Declaration of Independence and another is Father of the Constitution, all Virginians. It is hard for Massachusetts to claim to be the birthplace of America when Virginians did all that.
This is like a case of stolen valor by Massachusetts.
See Virginia First below, especially Section VII which includes:
VII.
Virginia Founded New England. In 1613 a Virginia Governor, Sir Thomas Gates, drove the French away from Maine and Nova Scotia and saved to English colonization the shores of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers were inspired to go to North America by the successful settlement at Jamestown. They sailed under a patent given them by the Virginia Company of London, and it was only the accident of a storm that caused them to settle outside of the limits of the territory of the London Company, though still in Virginia. The Mayflower compact, under which the 41 emigrants united themselves at Cape Cod followed pretty nearly the terms of the original Virginia Company’s patent.
In 1622 the people at Plymouth were saved from starvation by the opportune arrival of two ships from Jamestown, which divided their provisions with them. Without this help the Plymouth settlement would have been abandoned.
Though New England did not birth America, they were entrepreneurial as England had intended: “the first colonies were essentially start-up business ventures, scattered from Canada to South America, intended to make a profit.”
The Caribbean “not raw New England, was quickly taking shape as the area of real economic promise, and this promise was fulfilled when the English eventually struck the sweet mother lode of sugar.”3
Sugar “roared across the Caribbean like an agricultural hurricane” and “siphoned hundreds of thousands of Africans into slavery to feed a boundless, addicted market.”4
One observer in 1643 “raved that Barbados was ‘the most flourishing Island in all those American parts, and I believe in all the world for the producing of sugar.'”5
Producing that “‘white gold'” needed labor:
Between 1640 and 1650, English ships delivered nearly 19,000 Africans to work the fields in Barbados. By 1700, the cumulative total had reached 134,000. The pattern was repeated on other islands. Jamaica, barely populated when the English invaded it in 1655, had absorbed 85,000 African slaves by 1700. The Leeward Islands, including Antigua, took 44,000.6
Puritan John Winthrop, “founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” stated in 1630: “We shall be as a City upon a Hill.”7
In 1645, he heard from “a nephew vising Barbados that its planters that year had bought ‘a thousand Negroes; and the more they buy, the better able they are to buy, for in a year and a half they will earn (with gods blessing) as much as they cost.'”
Winthrop’s brother-in-law told him: “‘I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.'”8
Harvard professor, Bernard Bailyn, “dean of colonial historians,” wrote:
the main factor in New England’s phenomenal economic success, ‘the key dynamic force,’ was slavery.9
New Englanders and residents of the Middle Atlantic States “owned slaves and trafficked in slaves [but] they profited more from feeding the increasingly large numbers of Africans in the West Indies and providing the materials to operate the sugar plantations and mills.”10
The Triangle Trade—between America, Africa, and the West Indies—was how it happened:
Northern colonies sent food, livestock, and wood (especially for barrels) to West Indian sugar plantations, where enslaved Africans harvested the cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, and its by-product molasses, was then shipped back North, usually in barrels made of New England wood and sometimes accompanied by slaves. Finally, scores of Northern distilleries turned the molasses into rum to trade in Africa for new slaves, who were, in turn, shipped to the sugar plantations.11
Every acre was planted in sugar because profits were astronomical. Plantations “operated like factories, with sugar-boiling houses running around the clock.”
Just before the Revolution, “almost 80 percent of New England’s overseas exports went to the British West Indies. . . . a steady stream of flour, dried fish, corn, potatoes, onions, cattle, and horses as well as the fruits of Northern forests.”12
There were big plantations in Rhode Island and Connecticut that rivaled “the plantations of Virginia’s famed Tidewater region in the same period” but:
owners of small plots and farms in New Jersey and throughout rural areas of New York—including Long Island, Westchester, and Staten Island—also used slaves to grow crops to supply the sugar plantations.13
Families bound together by the “West Indies slave islands would include hundreds or thousands of names, depending on where the qualifying bar is set. In the eighteenth century, Boston merchant Peter Faneuil (endower of Faneuil Hall) had a plantation on French St. Domingue. Before its slaves rebelled, Sainte-Domingue (now Haiti) had supplanted Barbados and Jamaica as the world’s richest colony. And, of course, the Winthrop family did very well.”14
The bottom line is that:
Plantation slavery created tremendous wealth in the New World and the Old. It was the engine of the colonial Atlantic economy.15
I.
The name First given to the territory occupied by the present United States was Virginia. It was bestowed upon the Country by Elizabeth, greatest of English queens. The United States of America are mere words of description. They are not a name. The rightful and historic name of this great Republic is “Virginia.” We must get back to it, if the Country’s name is to have any real significance.
II.
Virginia was the First colony of Great Britain, and her successful settlement furnished the inspiration to English colonization everywhere. For it was the wise Lord Bacon who said that, “As in the arts and sciences the ‘first invention’ is of more consequence than all the improvements afterwards, so in kingdoms or plantations, the first foundation or plantation is of more dignity than all that followeth.”
III.
On May 13, 1607, the pioneers brought over by the Sarah Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery arrived at Jamestown on James River, and Founded the Republic of the United States based on English conceptions of Justice and Liberty. The story of this little settlement is the story of a great nation expanding from small beginnings into one of more than 100,000,000 people inhabiting a land reaching finally from ocean to ocean and abounding in riches and power, till when the liberties of all mankind were endangered [in World War I] the descendants of the old Jamestown settlers did in their turn cross the ocean and helped to save the land from which their fathers came.
IV.
Before any other English settlement was made on this continent, democracy was born at Jamestown by the establishment of England’s free institutions—Jury trial, courts for the administration of justice, popular elections in which all the “inhabitants” took part, and a representative Assembly which met at Jamestown, July 30, 1619, and digested the first laws for the new commonwealth.
V.
There at Jamestown and on James River was the cradle of the Union—The first church, the first blockhouse, the first wharf, the first glass factory, the first windmill, the first iron works, the first silk worms reared, the first wheat and tobacco raised, the first peaches grown, the first brick house, the first State house, and the first free school (that of Benjamin Syms, 1635).
VI.
In Virginia was the First assertion on this continent of the indissoluble connection of representation and taxation.
In 1624 a law was passed inhibiting the governors from laying any taxes on the people without the consent of the General Assembly, and this law was reenacted several times afterwards. In 1635 when Sir John Harvey refused to send to England a petition against the King’s proposed monopoly of tobacco, which would have imposed an arbitrary tax, the people deposed him from the government and sent him back to England, an act without precedent in America. In 1652 when the people feared that Parliament would deprive them of that liberty they had enjoyed under King Charles I, they resisted, and would only submit when the Parliamentary Commissioners signed a writing guaranteeing to them all the rights of a self-governing dominion. And when after the restoration of King Charles II, the country was outraged by extensive grants of land to certain court favorites, the agents of Virginia, in an effort to obtain a charter to avoid these grants, made the finest argument in 1674 for the right of self-taxation to be found in the annals of the 17th century. Claiborne’s Rebellion and Bacon’s Rebellion prove that Virginia was always a Land of Liberty.
During the 18th century the royal governors often reproached the people for their “Republican Spirit,” until on May 29, 1765, the reproach received a dramatic interpretation by Patrick Henry, arousing a whole continent to resistance against the Stamp Act.
VII.
Virginia Founded New England. In 1613 a Virginia Governor, Sir Thomas Gates, drove the French away from Maine and Nova Scotia and saved to English colonization the shores of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers were inspired to go to North America by the successful settlement at Jamestown. They sailed under a patent given them by the Virginia Company of London, and it was only the accident of a storm that caused them to settle outside of the limits of the territory of the London Company, though still in Virginia. The Mayflower compact, under which the 41 emigrants united themselves at Cape Cod followed pretty nearly the terms of the original Virginia Company’s patent.
In 1622 the people at Plymouth were saved from starvation by the opportune arrival of two ships from Jamestown, which divided their provisions with them. Without this help the Plymouth settlement would have been abandoned.
The 41 Pilgrim Fathers established an aristocracy or oligarchy at Plymouth, for they constituted an exclusive body and only cautiously admitted any newcomers to partnership with them in authority. As time went on, the great body of the people had nothing to say as to taxes or government.
Citizenship at Plymouth and in all New England was a matter of special selection in the case of each individual. The terms of the magistrates were made permanent by a law affording them “precedency of all others in nomination on the election day.” The towns of New England were little oligarchies, not democracies. It was different in Virginia. There the House of Burgesses, which was the great controlling body, rested for more than a hundred years upon what was practically universal suffrage (1619-1736), and even after 1736 many more people voted in Virginia than in Massachusetts. There was a splendid and spectacular body of aristocrats in Virginia, but they had nothing like the power and prestige of the New England preachers and magistrates.
“By no stretch of the imagination,” says Dr. Charles M. Andrews, Professor of History in Yale University, “can the political condition on any of the New England Colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of a very few men.”
VIII.
Virginia led in all the measures that established the independence of the United States. Beginning with the French and Indian War, out of which sprang the taxation measures that subsequently provoked the American Revolution, Virginia under Washington, struck the first blow against the French, and Virginian blood was the first American blood to flow in that war. Then, when, after the war, the British Parliament proposed to tax America by the Stamp Act, it was the Colony of Virginia that rang “the alarm bell” and rallied all the to her colonies against the measure by the celebrated resolutions of Patrick Henry, May 29, 1765, which brought about its repeal.
Later when the British Parliament revived its policy of taxation of 1767 by the Revenue Act, though circumstances made the occasion for the first movements elsewhere, it was always Virginia that by some resolute and determined action of leadership solved the crisis that arose.
There were four of these crises:
(1) The first occurred when Massachusetts, by her protest, in 1768, against the Revenue Act, stirred up Parliament to demand that her patriot leaders be sent to England for trial. Massachusetts was left quite alone and she remained quiescent. Virginia stepped to the front and by her ringing resolutions of May 16, 1769, aroused the whole continent to resistance, which forced Parliament to compromise, leave the Massachusetts men alone, and repeal all the taxes except a small one on tea. After the Assembly, “The Brave Virginians” was the common toast throughout New England.
(2) The next crisis occurred in 1772. In that year the occasion for action occurred in the smallest of the colonies, Rhode Island, by an attack of some unauthorized persons on the sloop Gaspee, which was engaged in suppressing smuggling. The King imitated Parliament by trying to renew the policy of transporting American to England for trial, but Virginia caused the King and his Counselors to desist from their purpose by her system of inter-colonial committees, which brought about a real continental union of the colonies for the first time.
(3) The third crisis occurred in 1774, after a mob of disguised persons threw the tea overboard in Boston harbor. Though Boston did not authorize this proceeding, Parliament held her responsible and shut up her port. Virginia thought this unjust, and was the first colony to declare her sympathy with Boston, and the first, in any representative character for an entire colony, to call for a Congress of all the colonies.
And to that Congress which met September 5, 1774, she furnished the first president, Peyton Randolph, and the greatest orators, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee.
The remedy proposed by this Congress was a plan of non-intercourse already adopted in Virginia, to be enforced by committees appointed in every county, city and town in America.
(4) The fourth crisis began in 1775 with the laws passed by the British Parliament to cut off the trade of the colonies, intended as retaliatory to the American non-intercourse. This led to hostilities, and for a year, during which time the war was waged in New England, the colonists held the attitude of confessed rebels, fighting their sovereign and yet professing allegiance to him. When the war was transferred to the South with the burning of Norfolk and the battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, this attitude became intolerable to the Southerners, and they sought for a solution of the difficulty in Independence.
While Boston was professing through her town meeting her willingness “to wait, most patiently to wait” for Congress to act, and the Assembly of the province deferred action till the towns were heard from, it was North Carolina, largely settled by Virginians, that on April 12, 1776, instructed her delegates in Congress to concur with the delegates from the other Colonies in declaring independence, and it was Virginia that on May 15, 1776, commanded her delegates to propose independence. The first explicit and direct instructions for independence anywhere in the United States were given by Cumberland County, in Virginia, April 22, 1776. Unlike the tumultuary, unauthorized, and accidental nature of the leading revolutionary incidents in New England, such as the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington, the proceedings in Virginia were always the authoritative and official acts of the Colony.
All the world should know that it was Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, who drew the resolutions for independence adopted by Congress July 2, 1776, and that it was Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, who wrote “the Declaration of Independence” adopted July 4, 1776, a paper styled by a well known New England writer as “the most commanding and most pathetic utterance in any age of national grievances and national purposes.”
IX.
During the war that ensued Virginia contributed to the war what all must allow was the soul of the war—the immortal George Washington, whose immense moral personality accomplished more in bringing success than all the money employed and all the armies place in the field; and the war had its ending at Yorktown, only a few miles from the original settlement at Jamestown. The Father of this great Republic was a Virginian.
X.
Virginia led in the work of organizing the Government of the United States. She called the Annapolis Convention in 1786, and furnished to the Federal Convention at Philadelphia which met, as the result of this action, its chief constructor—James Madison—who has been aptly described as Father of the Constitution. She furnished the two greatest rival interpreters of its powers, Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, and gave the Union its first President, George Washington.
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Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 45.
2 Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler was the son of our 10th United States president, John Tyler, who was president from 1841 to 1845. President Tyler was later a member of the Confederate Congress. Lyon Gardiner Tyler is also author of A Confederate Catechism and numerous other books and articles. As stated in the text, he was the 17th president of the College of William and Mary and its savior after the War Between the States. He served for over three decades, from 1888 to 1919. Virginia First establishes clearly that America was founded in the South, at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and not in New England as is erroneously stated at times.
3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 46.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 45.
8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 47.
9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48.
10 Ibid.
11 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48-49.
12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 49.
13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 51.
14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 54.
15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 55.
Complicity,
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