Colony of Virginia

The Colony of Virginia was the first enduring English settlement in North America, planted in 1607 and grown into the richest of the thirteen colonies by 1776. After the lost Roanoke venture of the 1580s, the Virginia Company sent three ships to Chesapeake Bay, where the settlers built Jamestown among the towns of the Powhatan Confederacy. The colony nearly starved in its first winters; it was saved by supply ships, by Captain John Smith's hard bargaining, and then by tobacco, which John Rolfe learned to cure for the London market. Tobacco fortunes built great plantations worked by enslaved Africans, a house of burgesses that practised self-government, and a planter elite that led the American cause: Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry were all Virginians. When the thirteen colonies broke with Britain in 1776, Virginia was the largest, richest and most populous of them, and its soil would grow four of the first five presidents of the new republic.