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Jamestown gave Americans the noble spirit of individualism
By Eric Daniels
Posted: June 17, 2007
On May 14, America commemorated the four-hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown,
Virginia. The occasion provides us with an opportunity to understand and celebrate the distinctive,
secular ideal underlying America's freedom and prosperity.
Although many Americans recognize that Jamestown was the first permanent English colony in North
America (predating the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachusetts by over a decade), too many
mistakenly view the religious ethos of the New England colonies as the impetus for America's
flourishing. But the religious colonists, whose moral outlook stands opposed to our ideals of
intellectual and political liberty, merely transplanted Old World ideas to new soil. The New World that
promised opportunity and progress had begun in Jamestown, where the defining spirit of American
individualism was born.
The Jamestown settlement project began, not as a Puritan escape to pursue and enforce a dogmatic
faith, but with a group of profit-seeking investors in London pooling capital in a joint-stock company, a
forerunner of our modern corporations. Members of the Virginia Company had organized with the goal
of uncovering economic opportunity in North America by finding precious metals and possibly a water
route to the Pacific.
The intrepid band of 104 adventurers who survived the Atlantic journey, braved a forbidding wilderness,
established Jamestown, and faced extreme peril. In its first fragile decade, Jamestown lost hundreds
of settlers to disease, starvation, and war, with casualty rates in one harsh winter reaching 80 percent
of the colony. Eventually, under the deft leadership of Captain John Smith, the colony weathered these
trials to emerge with renewed resolve. Smith himself had risen from modest circumstances in
England to lead these adventurers, and he saw America as a land where his kind of self-reliance could
flourish.
Though the Virginia Company found little gold and no sea route to Asia, they soon discovered
something vastly more important--that economic opportunity lay wherever men were left free to work
and create new wealth. In contrast to the rigid class structure and static economy of Jacobean
England, America promised rewards based on individual merit. It was this spirit, and not the Puritan
belief in cosmic predestination and unthinking duty to God, that attracted men to pursue their own
earthly success in the New World.
"Here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land," Smith noted in one of his many
promotional books intended to attract new settlers to America. "If he have nothing but his hands," he
boasted, "he may set up his trade, and by industry quickly grow rich." For Smith and the other early
settlers of Jamestown, the profound significance of America lay in the possibility that a man could
choose, pursue, and realize his own destiny--it lay in a new ideal of individual liberty.
By the late eighteenth century, under the growing influence of that ideal, the colonists began to resist
and protest against British imperial controls on their economic and political freedom, which led to the
American Revolution. In framing our constitutional government, the Founders put individualism into
political practice by protecting individual rights against the claims of any cleric, monarch, or legislative
majority. The new nation's founding ideals had emerged in opposition to the religious morality that
entailed obedience to Biblical teachings and authority, conformity to the group, and condemnation of
worldliness and material success.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the individualist spirit born in Jamestown brought
countless millions to America, each looking to create a better life for himself. Through the years, that
spirit has fostered untold prosperity by encouraging self-reliant innovators like Thomas Edison,
Andrew Carnegie, or James J. Hill. Its legacy lives on in America today, in anyone who believes that
each individual owns his own life and has an inalienable right to pursue his own happiness.
In the centuries since Jamestown, America has thrived because of this distinctive ideal--an ideal in
marked contrast not only to America's religious colonies but also to the rest of the world today, where
duty to the group or to divine command still subjugates millions.
Americans should pause to celebrate the full significance of the Jamestown anniversary as an
opportunity to appreciate and rededicate themselves to America's noble spirit of individualism. Doing
so will help remind us of the need to defend this value from those who would compromise or attack it.
Doing any less would be an act of injustice to those brave men who helped to shape our most
important institutions.
### ### ###
Eric Daniels is a guest writer at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif.
By Eric Daniels
Posted: June 17, 2007
On May 14, America commemorated the four-hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown,
Virginia. The occasion provides us with an opportunity to understand and celebrate the distinctive,
secular ideal underlying America's freedom and prosperity.
Although many Americans recognize that Jamestown was the first permanent English colony in North
America (predating the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachusetts by over a decade), too many
mistakenly view the religious ethos of the New England colonies as the impetus for America's
flourishing. But the religious colonists, whose moral outlook stands opposed to our ideals of
intellectual and political liberty, merely transplanted Old World ideas to new soil. The New World that
promised opportunity and progress had begun in Jamestown, where the defining spirit of American
individualism was born.
The Jamestown settlement project began, not as a Puritan escape to pursue and enforce a dogmatic
faith, but with a group of profit-seeking investors in London pooling capital in a joint-stock company, a
forerunner of our modern corporations. Members of the Virginia Company had organized with the goal
of uncovering economic opportunity in North America by finding precious metals and possibly a water
route to the Pacific.
The intrepid band of 104 adventurers who survived the Atlantic journey, braved a forbidding wilderness,
established Jamestown, and faced extreme peril. In its first fragile decade, Jamestown lost hundreds
of settlers to disease, starvation, and war, with casualty rates in one harsh winter reaching 80 percent
of the colony. Eventually, under the deft leadership of Captain John Smith, the colony weathered these
trials to emerge with renewed resolve. Smith himself had risen from modest circumstances in
England to lead these adventurers, and he saw America as a land where his kind of self-reliance could
flourish.
Though the Virginia Company found little gold and no sea route to Asia, they soon discovered
something vastly more important--that economic opportunity lay wherever men were left free to work
and create new wealth. In contrast to the rigid class structure and static economy of Jacobean
England, America promised rewards based on individual merit. It was this spirit, and not the Puritan
belief in cosmic predestination and unthinking duty to God, that attracted men to pursue their own
earthly success in the New World.
"Here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land," Smith noted in one of his many
promotional books intended to attract new settlers to America. "If he have nothing but his hands," he
boasted, "he may set up his trade, and by industry quickly grow rich." For Smith and the other early
settlers of Jamestown, the profound significance of America lay in the possibility that a man could
choose, pursue, and realize his own destiny--it lay in a new ideal of individual liberty.
By the late eighteenth century, under the growing influence of that ideal, the colonists began to resist
and protest against British imperial controls on their economic and political freedom, which led to the
American Revolution. In framing our constitutional government, the Founders put individualism into
political practice by protecting individual rights against the claims of any cleric, monarch, or legislative
majority. The new nation's founding ideals had emerged in opposition to the religious morality that
entailed obedience to Biblical teachings and authority, conformity to the group, and condemnation of
worldliness and material success.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the individualist spirit born in Jamestown brought
countless millions to America, each looking to create a better life for himself. Through the years, that
spirit has fostered untold prosperity by encouraging self-reliant innovators like Thomas Edison,
Andrew Carnegie, or James J. Hill. Its legacy lives on in America today, in anyone who believes that
each individual owns his own life and has an inalienable right to pursue his own happiness.
In the centuries since Jamestown, America has thrived because of this distinctive ideal--an ideal in
marked contrast not only to America's religious colonies but also to the rest of the world today, where
duty to the group or to divine command still subjugates millions.
Americans should pause to celebrate the full significance of the Jamestown anniversary as an
opportunity to appreciate and rededicate themselves to America's noble spirit of individualism. Doing
so will help remind us of the need to defend this value from those who would compromise or attack it.
Doing any less would be an act of injustice to those brave men who helped to shape our most
important institutions.
### ### ###
Eric Daniels is a guest writer at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif.
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