Virginia

The first permanent English colony in America, founded as a business and saved by a drug. Jamestown was planted in 1607 by the Virginia Company, and it nearly failed - the starving time of 1609 and 1610 killed most of the settlers, some of whom resorted to cannibalism. What rescued it was tobacco, which John Rolfe began cultivating from Caribbean seed in 1612 and which within a decade was the colony's entire economy. Tobacco is labour-hungry and exhausts soil, so it produced two things: continuous expansion inland at the expense of the Powhatan confederacy, and a demand for workers that was met first by indentured English servants and then by enslaved Africans, the first of whom arrived in 1619, the same year the House of Burgesses met as the first representative assembly in the Americas. Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, in which poor whites and Black labourers rose together, is often taken as the point at which the colony hardened racial slavery in law to prevent such alliances. Virginia supplied four of the first five presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, and also Nat Turner's rising and the capital of the Confederacy at Richmond. Loving v Virginia struck down interracial marriage bans in 1967. Northern Virginia is now dominated by federal employment. Richmond is the capital and Virginia Beach the largest city. The state was named for Elizabeth I. It calls itself a commonwealth. Eight presidents were born there, more than any other state. West Virginia separated from it in 1863 rather than leave the Union. Monticello and Mount Vernon are World Heritage or national landmark sites.

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