What was the House of Burgesses?

Despite the tobacco profits,rift gold controlled in London by a monopoly, Jamestown limped along near extinction. Survival remained a day-today affair while political intrigues back in London reshaped the colony’s destiny. Virginia Company shareholders were angry that their investment was turning out to be a bust, and believed that the “Magazine,” a small group of Virginia Company members who exclusively supplied the colony’s provisions, were draining off profits. A series of reforms was instituted, the most important of which meant settlers could own their land, rather than just working for the company. And the arbitrary tera gold rule of the governor was replaced by English common law.

In 1619, new management was brought to the Virginia Company, and Governor Yeardley of Virginia summoned an elected legislative assembly—the House of Burgesses—which met in Jamestown that year. (A burgess is a person invested with all the privileges of a citizen, and comes from the same root as the French bourgeois.) Besides the governor, there were six councilors appointed by the governor, and two elected representatives from each private estate and two from each of the company’s four estates or tracts. (Landowning males over seventeen years old were eligible to vote.) Their first meeting was cut short by an onslaught of malaria and July heat. While any decisions they made required approval of the company in London, this was clearly the seed from which American rift platinum representative government would grow. The little assembly had a shaky beginning, from its initial malarial summer. In the first place, the House of Burgesses was not an instant solution to the serious problems still faced by the Jamestown settlers. Despite years of immigration to the new colony, Jamestown’s rate of attrition during those first years was horrific. Lured by the prospect of owning land, some 6,000 settlers had been transported to Virginia by 1624. However, a census that year showed only 1,277 colonists alive. A Royal Council asked, “What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?”