Why ‘Four Hundred Years’?
This blog is a partial mirror site, run by some contributors to The Jamestown Project’s ‘Democracy Spot.’ The Jamestown Project (JTP) is a think tank that takes its name from the Jamestown colony, the first permanent settlement in the English colonies that became the United States. That settlement in some ways marked the beginning of the story of American democracy, and the public launch of JTP was one of the many events that marked the 400th anniversary of the settlement’s founding.
We look back to the Jamestown colony in order to highlight the complexity that has come to define so much of the history of democracy in the Americas. The colony hosted the first representative assembly in the English Americas. But no women or servants participated in this assembly, and this all-white affair barely preceded the colony’s first recorded purchase of stolen Africans. Some backers and participants imagined the colony as a more humane alternative to Spanish colonization. But this inchoate humanism soon gave way to years of outright warfare against the surrounding Amerindian peoples. The colony was a genuine beginning, a real moment of political and cultural novelty. But it stands out for people in the US the way it does only because we’ve mythologized it, effacing multiple alternative histories in the process – the histories, for example, of democratic thought and practice among indigenous Americans, of the earlier Spanish origins of what became the US, and of the ties binding what we usually call America to the broader reality of the Americas, from Calgary to Cape Horn.
In these and other ways, the story of America is complex. It is the story of freedom and democracy coexisting with patriarchy, elitism, and slavery; of militarism and imperialism coexisting with humanism and revolutionary ferment; of myth-driven myopia coexisting with sprawling historical and geographical panoramas. We look back to Jamestown in order to remember this fact, and to root the story of American democracy in a moment as full of contradictions and complexity as our history as been.
Starting with the Jamestown settlement also reminds us of the risks that attend the democratic project, and of the ultimate stakes. The colony soon failed, and now exists only as an archaeological site. From this we learn that success is never assured, that democratic living is an ongoing task – a project – that requires constant vigilance and effort, and that our actions today are subject to the verdict of history, and open to the scrutiny of those for whom we’ve prepared, or failed to prepare, the way.
