by James Mccall

Created on: April 08, 2008

Jamestown's founding has a much deeper meaning than being merely one of our national origins. It was the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities to innovate many profound social, political, and economic tenets that have come down to us through our history. Their lasting effect is what has differentiated Jamestown from other preceding or contemporary English and European settlements in America. It is also where significant ecological impacts were introduced from the British Isles and Europe, and the germs of our nation's most heinous social maladies were incubated, such as institutionalized chattel slavery and the devastation of American Indian life and customs.

While today's historians have thoroughly chronicled Jamestown's first seventeen years, most of them have given us only a glimpse of what was accomplished there. While it served as Virginia's colonial capital for almost another eighty years beyond the mid-1620s, there has been little mention that Jamestown is where some of our nation's fundamental rights and constitutional principles were conceived and how its settlers' consequential actions helped to shape its development, economy and culture.

To fully understand that deeper meaning, we need to look beyond that beginning, for, as noted Jamestown historian Warren Billings argues, "the significance of Jamestown lies beyond [those years]. To be sure, things such as the start of the tobacco economy, the founding of the General Assembly, and the transformation of the colony from a military outpost to an agricultural settlement trace their origins to that period, [but] it was in the decades after 1624 that the social, political, and economic implications of those developments played out, and Virginia became a place quite unlike anything the company backers envisioned, even in their wildest dreams." With few exceptions, such as Billings, recent historians have almost ignored the extraordinary consequences that the Jamestown settlers fostered for America's economic and political evolution.

When we look at those decades, we can recognize Jamestown's crucial place in our history, its contributions to our constitutional republic and how major threads of our country's heritage were first spun there to be woven into our national fabric. As Professor Jack P. Greene observes, "No longer can scholars think of colonial [history] as something exclusively prenational. Rather historians must recognize that this process has been fundamental to state building and

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