the colony, the first clause just given is significant. The
company threatened with death those who ran away. Given
the new work regime, running away to live with the locals
became more and more of an attractive option for the
colonists who had to do the work. Also available, given the
low density of even indigenous populations in Virginia at
that time, was the prospect of going it alone on the frontier
beyond the control of the Virginia Company. The power of
the company in the face of these options was limited. It
could not coerce the English settlers into hard work at
subsistence rations.
Map 2 shows an estimate of the population density of
different regions of the Americas at the time on the Spanish
conquest. The population density of the United States,
outside of a few pockets, was at most three-quarters of a
person per square mile. In central Mexico or Andean Peru,
the population density was as high as four hundred people
per square mile, more than five hundred times higher. What
was possible in Mexico or Peru was not feasible in
Virginia.
It took the Virginia Company some time to recognize that
its initial model of colonization did not work in Virginia, and
it took a while, too, for the failure of the “Lawes Divine,
Morall and Martiall” to sink in. Starting in 1618, a
dramatically new strategy was adopted. Since it was
possible to coerce neither the locals nor the settlers, the
only alternative was to give the settlers incentives. In 1618
the company began the “headright system,” which gave
each male settler fifty acres of land and fifty more acres for
each member of his family and for all servants that a family
could bring to Virginia. Settlers were given their houses
and freed from their contracts, and in 1619 a General
Assembly was introduced that effectively gave all adult men
a say in the laws and institutions governing the colony. It
was the start of democracy in the United States.
It took the Virginia Company twelve years to learn its first
lesson that what had worked for the Spanish in Mexico and
in Central and South America would not work in the north.
The rest of the seventeenth century saw a long series of
struggles over the second lesson: that the only option for an
economically viable colony w as to create institutions that
gave the colonists incentives to invest and to work hard.