Read A Nation Like No Other for Free Online Page A

was
endowed with a special destiny by God—and as new Israelites, the settlers sought out their own land of milk and honey. Moreover, both settlements overcame initial misdirection from London and developed similar traditions and values emphasizing industriousness, self-reliance, and Godliness. These traits grew into a new, American worldview that found expression in America’s founding documents.
JAMESTOWN
    The Virginia Company of London founded the colony of Jamestown on the James River in Virginia in 1607. The initial financing was entirely from private investors, with settlers promised freehold land in return for seven years of communal labor for the colony. When the first settlers landed, they quickly built a church, signaling their common purpose.
    The harsh environment and dwindling supplies took a heavy toll on the settlers, who became increasingly listless and undisciplined. Unprepared for the physical hardships and demotivated by the requirement for communal labor, many of them moved elsewhere. The deteriorating situation was first reversed when John Smith, who had been elected by popular vote to head the Jamestown Council, announced new work rules. Smith decreed:
    You must obey this now for a Law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by sickness he be disabled:) for the labors of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers. 8
    Smith’s order, alluding to the Biblical passage 2 Thessalonians 3:10, repudiated the colony’s initial feudal structure under which “high-born” colonists had refused to perform much manual labor. It was a profoundly democratic directive and a dramatic breakthrough for equality, as each man was expected to contribute or perish.
    But John Smith was injured and had to return to England in 1609, after only eighteen months in Virginia. Once he departed, conflict with the local Indians combined with demotivating work rules led to a
“starving time” during the winter of 1609–1610 that took the lives of all but sixty of the 500 colonists.
    The colony was revived when a new “high marshal,” Sir Thomas Dale, arrived in 1611 and encouraged individual initiative by establishing private property rights to individual plots of land. Several years later another settler, John Rolfe, pioneered tobacco cultivation, setting the colony on the road to prosperity. In 1619, Jamestown adopted governance on republican principles with a representative and responsible “House of Burgesses” that met in the Jamestown church. Emphasizing the rule of law and a self-governing ethic, the colony affirmed unique principles of liberal governance that dramatically differentiated it from Europe.
PLYMOUTH
    As the Jamestown settlers struggled against the elements, the Pilgrims—a congregation of dissenters and separatists from the Church of England—received a charter to establish their own foothold in America. In 1620, the Pilgrim fathers penned an early draft of the American Creed while en route to the New World on the Mayflower . Having veered off-course from their destination in Virginia, some of the would-be colonists asserted the change-of-course had voided the king’s charter, necessitating a new contract. In the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims mutually agreed to a social contract binding themselves together under God. Plymouth Colony’s governor, William Bradford, preserved the pledge:
    In the name of God, Amen. Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and