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Illustrated Episode · Volume I, chapter 3 · 30 July 1619

America's first elected voice

Men in dark doublets and white collars stand bareheaded in wooden pews inside a small timber church, heads bowed, while a seated man at the far end faces a minister in a white surplice, daylight slanting through small windows.
Jamestown, 30 July 1619. In the quire of the timber church, some twenty burgesses stand bareheaded in their pews while the minister prays. Governor Yeardley sits in his chair before them. It is the first representative assembly in America. Rothbard says it came hand in hand with the milder laws, part and parcel of easing the Virginia Company's old tyranny. Chapter 3 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

On 30 July 1619 Governor Sir George Yeardley opened the first General Assembly of Virginia in the quire of the timber church at Jamestown, the most convenient room the colony had. John Pory, the Speaker, described the scene: the governor in his chair, the Council beside him, the Speaker before him, and the elected burgesses in their pews, two from each of eleven plantations, until Mr. Buck the minister prayed that God would guide their proceedings. Virginia had lived for years under the Company's brutal Dale's Laws. The milder code was already in hand, Yeardley's Great Charter of November 1618, and Rothbard treats the Assembly as the other half of the same turn: "The introduction of representation thus went hand in hand with the new policy of liberalizing the laws" (CiL, p. 51). The burgesses sat six days, to 4 August, and made laws for the colony. Not all of them were liberal. Rothbard notes that they fixed the price of tobacco and ordered "inferior" leaf burned. The governor kept his veto and the Company's orders still bound the colony. But Virginians now had an elected voice in their own laws, and they would raise it again against a royal governor in 1676 and against the king in 1776.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. I, ch. 3, pp. 43-54. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. John Pory, 'A Reporte of the manner of proceeding in the General assembly convened at James city', 30 July to 4 August 1619 (National Archives, Kew, CO 1/1), transcribed in Encyclopedia Virginia, 'The General Assembly Convenes (1619)' and by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. Primary source
  3. Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, 'The 1617 Church Site' and 'History of the 1617 Church', Historic Jamestowne (accessed 2026-09-29). Secondary source
  4. Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, 'The Virtual 1617 Church', Historic Jamestowne (accessed 2026-09-29): close-studded frame, chairs and a table in the chancel, pews in the quire, a bar, benches, bell tower. Secondary source
  5. Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, 'Historical Clothing' (accessed 2026-09-29): doublets, breeches, falling bands, linen cuffs; 1622 outfit list with falling bands and Monmouth caps. Secondary source