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VIRGINIA UNDER WYATT AND YEARDLEY, 1625-1627: TOBACCO AND DEFENSE

Sir Francis Wyatt, who had been the London Company's Governor in the
period 1621-1624, was appointed Governor by James I the first year the
colony was under royal control. Although the King made no specific
provision for the continuation of a representative Assembly, Wyatt and
the Council called together representatives of the various settlements
to meet in a General Assembly on May 10, 1625, in Jamestown. There they
drew up a petition complaining of the old Company rule and the miserable
state in which it had kept the colony during the previous twelve years,
and pleading with the King not to allow a monopoly of the tobacco trade.
The King's advisers, they feared, were those who had formerly oppressed
them and who would do so again should the King consent to a "pernitious
contract" taking all their tobacco at unfair rates. To present their
case against the contract they chose Sir George Yeardley, former
Governor, to go to England as their agent. The willingness of Wyatt and
the Council to call such an Assembly and the unanimity of views deriving
from it, show how single in their economic interests all Virginians
were.

Governor Wyatt attempted to prevent disorderly expansion of settlement
and to build positions of strength in the colony, but he knew that the
"affection" of the planters to "their privat dividents" was too strong a
force to resist. Hence he recommended that a palisade be built from
Martin's Hundred on the James River to Chiskiack on the York River,
with houses spaced along it at convenient intervals. In this way the
Indians might be kept out of the entire lower portion of the peninsula,
the cattle kept in, and the colony provided with a secure base for the
development of its economy. After the economy was flourishing, there
would be a chance for finding the riches in the mountains to the west
and the longed-for passage to the South Sea, so confidently believed to
lie just beyond the Appalachians. All these enterprises presupposed the
"winning of the Forest" between the York and the James, which Wyatt
hoped to accomplish by means of his palisade scheme.

Wyatt's project was not immediately put into effect. In 1626 he was
replaced by Sir George Yeardley. Yeardley, like Wyatt, devoted much of
his time to devising means to promote the security of the colony against
attack by land or by sea.

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