 Joseph Kelly joins us again on Liberty Chronicles for part two of our interview about his recent book Marooned, Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America's Origins. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of Libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. Shifting our narrative over across the water back to Virginia, it's a mess. It's a total mess. It's definitely a failing colony. People are starving. The population is disappearing, the English population. The Native Americans are doing just fine. There are rumors that John Smith wants to set himself up as sort of a pirate king of Virginia along the James River. Tell us about what is going on in Virginia, especially with the attention to the fact that, really, this is still Sena Comoco or Native American territory. It's barely Virginia. Right. Right. Yeah. So this is, you know, while all these events are taking place in Bermuda, and even as the ships are sailing or getting ready to sail from England, it's a meanwhile back at the ranch situation in Virginia. From the very get-go, the Virginia company governance had proved itself to be incompetent in Virginia from April 1607 when they first come into Chesapeake Bay. By the time we get to the fall, half the people have died, mostly of disease. Of course, that disease is exacerbated by their malnutrition. The president, of course, John Smith himself began the plantation of this colony in chains because he had been suspected of sowing rebellion even before they arrived in Virginia. His chief kind of opponent was Edward Mariah Wingfield, who becomes the first president. When they get to Jamestown, Wingfield suspects him of insurrection even before they get there. So they put him in chains and Wingfield actually wants to execute him in Nevis when they stop in the Caribbean islands, but Newport prevents it from happening. When they get to Jamestown, they break open the secret box, which is going to tell everybody who the counselors are, who are going to be governing. They don't know whose names by the company until they get there, and they break it open and lo and behold, one of the names on the list is John Smith, so they basically have to let him out of his imprisonment and allow him to help with the governance of Virginia. But there's factions from the get-go, and within six months, Wingfield is deposed by a faction that John Smith is a part of. Settler counselor is executed. The faction that deposed President Wingfield splits into two factions, the Smith faction and the Ratcliffe faction. So from the whole first two years of Jamestown is this history of factionalism that contributes to their incompetence in providing for the settlers. So from the very beginning, the settlers could recognize this, and they saw that this was a disaster, and they begin deserting. From the very first summer, they are deserting to Indian camps. And so down there on the grass roots, the English settlers have these fantastically friendly and productive relationships with the Indians, even as some of the Native Americans are attacking the fort and some of the, you know, the English are fighting some of the Native Americans. Here on the grass roots, there's a black market going on, and there's all sorts of interactions. There's probably a lot of sexual interactions between the English and the Algonquins, because we know, from what we know of Algonquin society, unmet young women were sexually active, and there's no taboo against that. So there's all sorts of unofficial ties going on, on the low level, on the grass roots level. And these continue on for two years, and what's remarkable about, when John Smith eventually gets dictatorial powers, when he becomes president, what's remarkable about his presidency, he kind of puts an end to this. He starts actually billeting his people in Indian villages, but he knows where they are. He can't feed them in Jamestown, so he starts putting them in Indian villages. And essentially what John Smith is doing is what Wingfield had accused him, and Wingfield was afraid that he was going to be doing this, was at setting up his own kingdom on the James River. I don't think, again, this is maybe a kind of controversial interpretation of John Smith, but I think the evidence makes it pretty incontrovertible that John Smith, he doesn't set himself up basically as a pirate king. I think the analogy, the best analogy would be, he sets himself up as a werewolf. He's a paramount chief in the same way that the structure of Algonquin society on the Chesapeake was set up. The man we know as Palhoutan, of course, is a paramount chief of maybe high thirties, maybe thirty-five to forty different districts on the Chesapeake. Most of what we know as the James, the York, and the Rappahannock, and even half the Potomac Rivers were under his jurisdiction, if you will, as a paramount chieftain. And what John Smith does is he sets his own paramount chieftain up on the James River. He separates the districts, the Native American districts on the James River, from what's sometimes called the Palhoutan Confederacy. So he becomes a rival to Oahu-Sanacaca, the man we know as Palhoutan. So it's not really a pirate king, but he sets himself up as his chief and he has pretty much dictatorial powers. But because he acts as a dictator, he's got a lot of those grassroots settlers are very disgruntled with his rule. And they are, they're deserting. They continue their desertions and they aid Palhoutan in his attempts to overthrow, get his districts back from John Smith. So essentially there's like a civil war going on on the Chesapeake. And John Smith is allied with some Indian districts. And there are several English and other settlers, some German settlers as well, who are allied with Oahu-Sanacaca on the York River. So it is just as crazy what's going on in Jamestown as what was going on in Bermuda, except with larger, because there's more people involved. So this is the situation, well, you know, eventually John Smith, he loses his own power struggle to the English. And that's what, you know, the famous starving time that leads to cannibalism happens after James Smith, who has been wounded and what was probably an assassination attempt, has back to England. The failure of the Sea Venture, which got shipwrecked in Bermuda, the failure of it to arrive in Virginia begins the starving time. They didn't get the provisions that they expected from the Sea Venture because John Smith has gone, their relationship with the Indians completely deteriorate. So Jamestown stars. And this is what, you know, once Governor Gates has built this ship in Bermuda and forced the settlers in Bermuda to get on board and sail to Jamestown, they imagine that they're going to be rescued as they sail into Jamestown and they're going to find a vibrant colony that is flourishing. And instead what they find are, you know, people who are lying in their cot starved to death, another basically skeleton stumbling out of their roofless huts in Jamestown, holding out their hands to these shipwrecked castaways from Bermuda and looking for rescue from the castaways themselves, you know, a horribly ironic situation. So what happens, and immediately then is everybody, even Governor Gates recognizes how really precarious the situation is, he demands that they spend at least a couple of weeks trying to make it a go in Jamestown, but after those couple of weeks, even he has to give in and recognize that this is not going to succeed, that they better sail back to England right away or else they're all going to starve. And they get on the boats and they start sailing down the river. As they leave Jamestown, the settlers desperately want to burn the place down to make sure that they are not brought back to it and essentially, you know, enslaved again. Governor Gates prevents them from burning it down, and that's his little Purick victory as they get on the boats and they start sailing out. And lo and behold, before they make their way out of Chesapeake Bay, the fourth resupply shows up with the new governor who's bringing with him his own retinue of soldiers who forced them all to go back to Jamestown. And then what ensues in the next year is maybe the worst, not for starvation, but certainly for, you know, considering Jamestown a slave labor camp. The new governor is a baron, he's a lord in England, so he's got tons of status, baron Delaware, our Delaware comes from his name, and he spreads the colony out, he's got hundreds of new settlers and a giant contingent goes up to basically around the Richmond area where the falls of the James River are the highest navigable point, and there's a big rebellion up there where every, you know, probably dozens of people are trying to escape to the Indians to escape out of the English jurisdiction, and many of them are caught and they're horribly tortured in ways that are just, you know, just horrific to think about. The worst case is they're chained to trees and made to starve to death slowly, so their fellows can see them starving and therefore be terrorized away from stealing their own labor away to the Indians themselves. So the whole first three years of Jamestown is basically this struggle from common laborers who discover, you know, what the reality on the ground is and who try to escape. Many of them do, many of them do melt into Native America. Others get caught, get tortured, become examples for their fellows who didn't make it out. And that's basically, you know, it's a cycle that goes on and on. There's, I counted 14 different instances of what are described of as mutinies or insurrections by the Virginia Company in the first three years of the Jamestown settlement. And a lot of those will eventually emphasize Stephen Hopkins-like language that essentially we didn't, look, we didn't consent to all this. So then- Exactly. The most amazing thing perhaps about somebody like Stephen Hopkins or him in particular here is that this guy ends up signing the Mayflower Compact. How does that happen? As I said, true stranger than fiction, right? You can't make this stuff up. And again, this is something that people have known, you know, basically since it happened. And yet people don't seem to have made much of it. Even Caleb Johnson, the guy I mentioned to is the biographer of Stephen Hopkins. He does, he kind of suggests that he probably had a hand in the composing of the Mayflower Compact. I think circumstantial evidence demonstrates that he had more than just a little hand. He must have been the one who was dictating the terms of it. If you read William Bradford's of Plymouth Plantation, the way he describes the circumstances leading to the Mayflower Compact is that because the Mayflower had gone off course and it was, you know, they had a patents to settle in territory that was governed by the Virginia Company and they were far north of the territory that the Virginia Company was allowed by its charter. So strangers among them and Bradford describes, you know, the two classes of people on the Mayflower as strangers and saints and the saints, of course, are the people we know of as pilgrims and the strangers are those people, those settlers who are not part of the Pilgrim Congregation. The strangers were arguing that because they were about to settle in territory that was outside the Virginia Company jurisdiction, their contract with the Virginia Company was dissolved, was basically did not apply and once they set foot on land, they would be free to do whatever they chose to do. This is the very language that Stephen Hopkins used to persuade people to his conspiracy in Bermuda. According to William Bradford, that's what triggered the need for the Mayflower Compact and then we look at the language of the Mayflower Compact that, you know, we signees enter into the civil body politic. This is exactly what Stephen Hopkins was arguing that the settlers were going to do if they were able to get themselves off to their own island in the Bermuda Islands and set up their own village, their own little town. So the very language that leads up to the Mayflower Compact and the Mayflower Compact itself is identical to what the disgruntled settlers were trying to do in Virginia. And amazingly, I think this is, I mean, another thing that's not been recognized by historians, which I don't understand why not, is that this circumstance, in order to be thinking the way Stephen Hopkins was thinking, you know, we were entering into a contract or we were governed by a contract, that contract is dissolved. Now we are essentially political pre-agents. That whole concept depends on this confrontation with the wilderness, you know, where you are standing in territory that is not governed by any European power, which is what was the case in Bermuda, of course, and what was going to be the case in Plymouth when the voyagers on the Mayflower set foot on dry land. They were going to be entering into a wilderness that there was no patent for it at all. So they were entering into essentially what we now know of or would describe as the state of nature, man in the state of nature, where each individual is disconnected by any kind of obligations to every other individual and free to enter into any kind of set of mutual obligations where you give up certain rights in order to secure certain protections. So, of course, this is the language that Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are going to use later on in the 17th century, but Stephen Hopkins is pioneering this very concept 30 years before Leviathan is published. 40 years, 40 years before Leviathan comes out. Now, of course, I'm not suggesting he uses that language of the state of nature, but I think even chore those for Hobbes to conceive of the state of nature requires this confrontation with the wilderness that was taking place during the age of exploration and was being lived out by Stephen Hopkins, both in Bermuda and then in Massachusetts. Yeah, and it seems to me, you know, you go almost two centuries later and Tom Payne is there talking about how this is what America should be. It should be a society built from the bottom up. We have an opportunity to begin government at the right end, just like on Hopkins Bermuda. Yes, and this is why I think this story is so important for us to... Well, for people today to hear this story, it's important for me to tell this story and what I certainly hope is that this book will kind of inspire further research into what is going on in early America. Essentially, what I'm suggesting is we rethink of these settlements as examples of the frontier thesis. You know, the first American frontier, of course, was the coastal plains up to the fall line, whether it's in Massachusetts or whether it's down on the Chesapeake Bay or in Bermuda, for that matter. I think we need to rethink what is the origin story of America, because what's powerful about this story is the notion that we as Americans are the inheritors of this people in the state of nature, who enter into a contract with each other, and we do this in every generation. We need to renew it in every generation so that people here today in 2018, here it is election day, today, right? What are we doing except entering into a contracted mutual consent with each other? That's what's particularly, I think, important and emphasized in the Hopkins story and the story of castaways and maroons, people being hurled into the wilderness. And it's a corrective, I think, for what is pretty much the reigning king of American origin stories, which is the Pilgrim tale. Now, of course, there are people entering into the frontier too, but the myth that we get with the Pilgrims is very different than the myth that I'm suggesting. We ought to think of it as our origin. The central thesis, if you will, of the Pilgrim story is a parallel to Exodus, and this is of course how William Bradford imagines the Pilgrims themselves when he's writing the plantation. God's chosen people who are oppressed to escape their bondage and head out into the wilderness, but the wilderness is a promised land, a land of milk and honey. And they make a covenant with God, the promised, the chosen people. The covenant, and this covenant is actually pretty well articulated in 1630 by John Winthrop on the Arbella as he's coming to settle the Massachusetts Bay colony. The covenant says, hey, if God will prevent us from shipwrecking, if he can keep us from crashing and being hurled into the wilderness, we will remain faithful to him. And that's essentially what Puritan Society of Massachusetts ends up doing, and they end up setting up a theocracy that's city on a hill image. It's a city on a hill because it remains faithful to this particularly kind of strict interpretation of Christianity. And by the second and third generation already people like William Bradford are complaining about the backsliding of the settlers. So the problem with Exodus is not just that we think of ourselves as the chosen people of God, but that whenever you think of yourselves as the chosen people of God, if you think of the foundation of our nation as being a covenant between ourselves and God as opposed to a covenant between each other, a contract between each other, always in the second or third generation, what follows the Exodus story is a Jeremiah. And now the great critic Sakhen Berkovich recognizes back in the 1970s is particularly distinctive former genre of American discourse, American literature and also American political discourse is the Jeremiah where a prophet rises up to harangue the current generation for not being faithful to the past, for not being true to the principles of our forefathers. So when you have the Exodus tale as your foundation myth, that's always going to be succeeded, the sequel to Exodus, if you will, is going to be the Jeremiah. And what that demands of the present generation then is that not that we ourselves make decisions about entering into a mutual contract with each other, but that we ourselves are bound to remain faithful to something in the past. Now, what that thing in the past is or what our image of that thing in the past is is going to vary from generation to generation, which is why you have Ronald Reagan, you know, resurrecting this image of a city on a hill for the United States and describing that city on a hill in terms that would actually be important to the pilgrims themselves. You know, William Bradford bragged about how unfree this society was that he established in Massachusetts. He was very happy that that Plymouth Plantation was less free. There was less liberty there than in England, and that was that's what made the city shine, you know, in his view. So Ronald Reagan, of course, borrows that image. But he says the city is shining because of the virtues of liberty and equality. So the version of the past is going to be different depending on whoever is, you know, who is the Jeremiah crying in the wilderness. And he's going to give us an image of a past that we have to remain faithful to. But in my mind, that's not a very healthy way to think about our democracy. Joseph Kelly teaches literature at the College of Charleston, and I really cannot recommend his latest book more highly enough. Along with good old Benjamin Lay, I say let's go ahead and name Stephen Hopkins another patron saint of Liberty Chronicles. And the Kiss My Arse Guy, too. Gotta love that. It doesn't get much more genuinely American than this. Liberty Chronicles is a project of Libertarianism.org. It is produced by Test Terrible. If you've enjoyed this episode of Liberty Chronicles, please rate, review, and subscribe to us on iTunes. For more information on Liberty Chronicles, visit Libertarianism.org.