David Loth

Captain Samuel Argall brought the good ship George to anchor of Point Comfort on a calm May morning in 1617, and saw Opportunity lurking in the mists that lent the Virginia coastline a pleasant vagueness. Other men who had passed that way — Raleigh, Lord de la Warr, John Smith and their like — had also seen the vision. But to them it had appeared in a golden haze shot through with precious stones.

Captain Argall's dreams were of a more practical nature. He proposed as Governor of Virginia to achieve riches by prosaic administration of that post in the English manner. He had not been privileged to acquire experience in civil service, but he was an observant man. He had watched the King's servants rise from poverty to wealth in positions that ostensibly offered no more than a living wage, and he had longed for the chance to put the lesson into practice.

Thirty-odd years of an adventurous life had fitted him, he flattered himself, to make the most of his opportunities. Fifth son of a country squire, he had grown to manhood in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, absorbing the spirit of businesslike adventure that so distinguished the Virgin Queen's sailors. Navigating unknown seas, exploring uncharted shores, fighting or negotiating with savage tribes, he had kept constantly before him the goal of all his efforts — increased trade for England and a share of the spoil for Captain Argall.

So now, perspiring gently inside his breastplate, he impatiently hastened preparations for going ashore to wrest a fortune from the wilderness. In the process, and quite unconsciously, he established upon a new continent the principle of personal gain in public office, which was in his day as firmly fixed an element of British government as the English tradition of liberty. Both bloomed luxuriantly in the fertile soil of the New World, reacting so persistently upon each other that their development was inseparable.

Corruption, stemming from the early English model, but modifyed and amplifyed to meet the changing problems of exploiting so vast a territory, made possible some of the more generally admired features of our civilization. Its contributions to progress and reaction rather than its expositions of individual greed are the factors that demand serious consideration of the system in any study of the country's rise to greatness. Argall was the first of a long line of men who turned American politics to the service of personal interest. Without an understanding of their activities, the history of the United States is a meaningless tale.

Later generations have applied the term “graft” to the wages paid by the entrepreneur (whether streetwalker or wizard of finance) to the servants of the state (from the policeman on the beat to the elder statesman in the Cabinet). We have scorned the grafter while offering profound homage to the triumphs of industrial and financial giantism which his graft protected and nourished. Corrupt politicians betrayed the noble sentiments which the people claimed as their ideals, but the betrayal was a necessary help in rearing that network of private enterprise to which they attributed their material progress. Whatever the popular slogan of the moment, the grafters and the “rugged individualists” have always moved hand in hand to create the massive, complex machinery of modern capitalism by which the world lives.

It was, therefore, more than a mere historical oddity that the first of the Thirteen Colonies, the first English settlement overseas, should have been the creation of a joint stock company organized for profit. English civilization in America was rooted in the commercial character of the Virginia Company of London and nurtured in the conflicts that made up the inglorious reign of James I.

Merchants, emerging from the status of medieval guildsmen, were introducing a progressive force into the static society to which conservative courtiers clung. Trading vessels fared forth in ever larger numbers from the mouth of Thames, carrying the products of a stimulated English industrial life. They returned freighted with the riches of the world, putting into the hands of their owners an economic influence which the merchants themselves were slow to realize. As yet the City men were content to exercise power indirectly, glad to depend upon the good will of titled gentlemen who had the ear of the King or the King's Ministers.

Ever since monarchs first surrounded themselves with cabinets and courts, the influence of these officials had been for sale. In England they reckoned their places as worth so much a year in gifts and fees. Many jobs were in the open market, passing from hand to hand like shares in a trading Company. The price was fixed by the graft that went with the post, the salaries being negligible, and the politicians considered their offices as a form of private property. In prosecuting claims through the agency of these persons, merchants trod a path worn smooth by generations of landed gentry before them. No one questioned the propriety of offering a purse of gold, a share in a profitable voyage, a pipe of wine or a service of plate to the public man who could facilitate deals between business and the state. Success in these fields led the wealthier commercial figures to recognize their dominant role in making their country a world power.

And, such is the ingratitude of man, as soon as they felt their strength they became resentful of limitations upon it. The familiar arguments about an Englishman's freedom were suddenly applied to his business as well as to his land or his person. A new conception of property rights rose to confront the vested interests of autocracy. Within a generation it was to sweep Britain into civil war. Meanwhile it found expression in graft.

The Virginia Company of London, chartered in the first decade of the seventeenth century, was an outgrowth of this movement's early phases — and of the lamentable ignorance of its incorporators. America to them meant the treasures of Mexico and Peru. Many of the shareholders were old enough to remember that a single one of Drake's voyages had paid a dividend of 4,700 per cent to the lucky persons who financed it. Vision of an annual Virginia plate fleet freighted with gold and silver, pearls and diamonds, floated enchantingly before the bemused merchants of London as they threaded the narrow streets from 'Change to counting house.

King James was brought to share the pleasant delusion. He freely bestowed upon the new venture his blessing, prayers of the Church of England and the North American continent between North Carolina and Maine. The promoters of the Virginia Company were not the men to belittle the princely gift in the telling. As they poured forth their eloquence to prospective buyers of stock, the carved wooden housefronts of the City seemed to become magically gilded with a precious American veneer. Shares were snatched at £12 10s. The salesmen, by no means novices, had already organized in similar fashion that model of corporate power, the East India Company. Samuel Insull [1] and Jay Gould [2] could have taught them nothing in the way of “conserving assets for the investing public.” They were the authors of England's commercial supremacy, inheritors of the traditions of Italian and Hanseatic merchant princes, realists whose heirs would be able to smile at a Sun King's [Louis XIV of France] juvenile boast, “L'état, c'est moi!” [I am the State].

The earliest effective administration in what was to be the United States was conditioned by the conception of public service which the bourgeois pioneers would have applied in London had they dared. Their dawning belief that government should be in the interest of trade met no opposition in the wilderness, as it did at home, for government and trade were vested in one body — the Virginia Company.

Notes

[1] Samuel Insull (1859 - 1938) was a British American business magnate. He was active in setting up an integrated electrical infrastructure in the United States.

[2] Jay Gould (1836 - 1892) was an American railroad magnate and financial speculator. He is generally identified as one of the robber barons of the Gilded Age.