Early Governance in Virginia

Program Information
Transcript
Virginia Standards

Program Information

Program: Judicial Independence in the New World
Segment Number: 3 (Watch entire program)
Duration: 00:04:34
Year Produced: 2009
Description:

King James granted a charter to the Virginia Company that provided a council of thirteen members “which shall govern and order all matters and causes, which shall arise, grow and happen.” All functions of the government, including the judicial process, were the responsibility of the council and they would act in accordance to the law of England.

The court system is an ever-changing and evolving entity, and there are key moments of history when Virginia's people and its judicial system made everlasting impressions on the country. JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE IN THE NEW WORLD tells the story of the development of the court system in the early years of our nation's history. Historians take us back to the Court Days and Pre-Revolution and Post-Revolution periods to explain the rule of law and the basics of the court system we know today.

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Transcript

Narration:
In 1776, our country’s forefathers declared independence from English rule. The newly-formed states needed to quickly establish new governments and Virginia led the way with the first state constitution and the first Declaration of Rights. Virginians such as Washington, Jefferson and Madison are well known for their remarkable contributions. Virginia Judges, George Wythe, Edmund Pendleton and George Tucker may not be as well known, but their influence on the transformation of Virginia's judicial system and the example they set would make significant and lasting changes to the nation's Supreme Court and ultimately affect the world.

Narration:
Jamestown was established in 1607. King James granted a charter to the Virginia Company that provided a council of thirteen members “which shall govern and order all matters and causes, which shall arise, grow and happen.” All functions of the government, including the judicial process, were the responsibility of the council and they would act in accordance to the law of England.

Billings:
The original charter of 1606 which created the colony, envisioned divided governing authority between London and Virginia, and there really was no governor as such, there was a resident council who had some executive responsibility. But the thing to remember about Jamestown when it began, it was not conceived of as a permanent settlement in the sense that there would be families and people with pigs and chickens and all the rest. It was a permanent outpost, predominantly male, where men would come and serve their seven years if they were company servants and then go back. The people they picked to be the leaders were men who had had considerable military experience.

Now there were people like John Smith, who was a yeoman from Lincolnshire who had no great prospects so he made his life as a soldier.

Howard:
There is a provision in the Virginia Charter of 1606. Really, perhaps the most important single provision in that charter. And it says that the colonists who immigrated to Virginia under the Virginia Company would enjoy in Virginia the privileges, franchises and immunities that they would have enjoyed in England. What that meant was, that whatever rights they had as English subjects in the mother country, they would not leave those rights behind when they came to Virginia. They brought those rights with them. The charter also said that they and their progeny, they and their descendants, would enjoy those rights.

Pagan:
From 1609 until 1624, Virginia was a company enterprise. Virginia was run by a for-profit, joint-stock company that sold shares. The Virginia Company was one of many overseas enterprises in which merchants and gentry in England invested in this period. And Virginia was simply one small part of this expansion of English commercial enterprise around the world.

Under the first charter, there was some royal involvement. By the time of the so-called Great Charter in 1618, a large measure of self-government was given to the colony.

Billings:
The great reorganization of 1618, when the Virginia company of London decided to change the model to make it more an agriculturally-based community to provide a greater measure of English law and land tenure. One of the important provisions, of course, was for something that came to be called the General Assembly.

What’s important about that first General Assembly, it establishes the precedent for some sort of representative governance in Virginia.

I always explain the General Assembly, in its original configuration, as a corporate appendage. It was meant to assist by providing local authority in Virginia. It was meant to assist the governance of the corporate body in London.

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