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aspects of Smith’s warning, the company realized that they had to try something new. This realization was driven home by the events of the winter of 1609/1610—the so-called “starving time.” The new mode of governance left no room for Smith, who, disgruntled, returned to England in the autumn of 1609. Without his resourcefulness, and with Wahunsunacock throttling the food supply, the colonists in Jamestown perished. Of the five hundred who entered the winter, only sixty were alive by March. The situation was so desperate that they resorted to cannibalism.
    The “something new” that was imposed on the colony by Gates and his deputy, Sir Thomas Dale, was a work regime of draconian severity for English settlers—though not of course for the elite running the colony. It was Dale who propagated the “Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall.” This included the clauses
    No man or woman shall run away from the colony to the Indians, upon pain of death.
    Anyone who robs a garden, public or private, or a vineyard, or who steals ears of corn shall be punished with death.
    No member of the colony will sell or give any commodity of this country to a captain, mariner, master or sailor to transport out of the colony, for his own private uses, upon pain of death.

    If the indigenous peoples could not be exploited, reasoned the Virginia Company, perhaps the colonists could. The new model of colonial development entailed the Virginia Company owning all the land. Men were housed in barracks, and given company-determined rations. Work gangs were chosen, each one overseen by an agent of the company. It was close to martial law, with execution as the punishment of first resort. As part of the new institutions for the colony, the first clause just given is significant. The company threatened with death those who ran away. Given the new work regime, running away to live with the locals became more and more of an attractive option for the colonists who had to do the work. Also available, given the low density of even indigenous populations in Virginia at that time, was the prospect of going it alone on the frontier beyond the control of the Virginia Company. The power of the company in the face of these options was limited. It could not coerce the English settlers into hard work at subsistence rations.
    Map 2 shows an estimate of the population density of different regions of the Americas at the time on the Spanish conquest. The population density of the United States, outside of a few pockets, was at most three-quarters of a person per square mile. In central Mexico or Andean Peru, the population density was as high as four hundred people per square mile, more than five hundred times higher. What was possible in Mexico or Peru was not feasible in Virginia.
    It took the Virginia Company some time to recognize that its initial model of colonization did not work in Virginia, and it took a while, too, for the failure of the “Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall” to sink in. Starting in 1618, a dramatically new strategy was adopted. Since it was possible to coerce neither the locals nor the settlers, the only alternative was to give the settlers incentives. In 1618 the company began the “headright system,” which gave each male settler fifty acres of land and fifty more acres for each member of his family and for all servants that a family could bring to Virginia. Settlers were given their houses and freed from their contracts, and in 1619 a General Assembly was introduced that effectively gave all adult men a say in the laws and institutions governing the colony. It was the start of democracy in the United States.
    It took the Virginia Company twelve years to learn its first lesson that what had worked for the Spanish in Mexico and in Central and South America would not work in the north. The rest of the seventeenth century saw a long series of struggles over the second lesson: that the only option for an economically viable colony was to