[1]Woodrow Wilson named the first volume of his History ofthe United States "The Swarming of the English." Wemight go further and compare the colonization and expansion inthe New World to a fissioning process in which individual atomsare torn loose from a former pattern of coherence and fused intonew and strange patterns. The United States, indeed, is still inthe process of fusion following the earlier fission process. It hasnot yet reached the stability that comes to some nations in history,and which is marked by a fixed pattern of population growth,land use, day-to-day habits, and philosophic beliefs. It is, rather,a country in which every generation can look back to a strangelydifferent era that existed before it came of age.
The period 1625-1660 in Virginia history is an important onefor the study of the fission-fusion process in America. Duringthose years Virginia's population increased perhaps twenty-fiveor thirty fold, and the settlements spread from a thin belt alongthe James River to the whole of Tidewater Virginia. Humanatoms were propelled outwards in every direction in an uncontrolledand only feebly directed expansion.
The years 1607 to 1625 had created a base for this expansion.Those had been crucial years and difficult ones. Settlements hadresembled military camps and individual colonists had been commandedlike soldiers. Rigorous administration of justice, fear ofthe Indians, and the strict economic regulations imposed by theLondon Company had served to restrain the potentially expansivenature of the colonists.
The year 1625 saw Virginia under a new King and under anew form of government. The charter of the London Company[2]was made void, and the colony passed from the control of a commercialcompany to the direct control of King Charles I.
The official census of the non-Indian population of Virginiain 1625 showed 1,232 persons in the colony. Nine hundred andfifty-two were males, twelve of them Negroes. Two hundred andeighty were females, eleven of them Negroes. Although thecolony had been in existence for eighteen years the fissioningprocess had hardly begun. But it was beginning. Five years laterthe population had more than doubled to approximately 3,000.In 1640 the population jumped to 8,000, and by 1670 to 40,000,of whom 2,000 were Negroes. Every aspect of Virginia life—political,physical, economic, social, and moral—was to be affectedby this explosive and uncontrolled growth.
Virginia did not develop any cities or even towns during theperiod 16