Jamestown's Significance for Americans 400 Years On
Four centuries ago the first English settlers arrived in Virginia, establishing a colony that laid a foundation for the future United States of America. What are the lessons of Jamestown 400 years later?
by Melvin Rhodes
In little more than four years, the emphasis has changed.
I was in Jamestown again just a month after the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first successful English colony on the North American continent. Britain's Queen Elizabeth was there to start the celebrations, as she was for the 350th anniversary in 1957.
Jamestown was the birthplace of representative government in North America. The first democratically elected assembly met there in 1619. In 1699 the capital was moved to nearby Williamsburg, and there it remained until the birth of the United States. In 1775, members of the Virginia House of Burgesses voted to instruct their delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for independence.
During two previous visits I listened intently to enthusiastic accounts of America's birth, a long process that began with that first fledgling settlement in 1607. It was quite a miracle.
Like Roanoke before it, Jamestown almost didn't make it. An earlier Spanish settlement just a few miles away, established in 1570, had been wiped out by natives. The English settlement was threatened by both Spain and the local native population, but starvation and disease killed off most of those early settlers.
A subtle difference
For the 400th anniversary, these things were said again, but this time there was a subtle difference, more in keeping with the times in which we live. The new emphasis was on the coming together of three distinctly different cultures—the English, the Native Americans and the African-Americans who started arriving in 1619, brought to the colonies through the West African slave trade.
