It is no contest:  William Claiborne was the greatest 17th-century Virginian,
because he represented, more than any other colonist, the American dream
of a self-made man who enjoyed a long and successful life from the Company
era (he arrived at Jamestown in 1621) to the end of Bacon's Rebellion (he
died
in 1677).  He survived both the 1622 and 1644 massacres; held every top
office
in the colony; raided hostile Pamunkey Indians as general of militia (making
alot of New Kent County his own as a reward), but ALSO pioneered the English
fur trade in the Northern Chesapeake with hospitable Susquehannock Indians;
founded his own colony on Kent Island and, if he had had his way, would have
extended the borders of "Greater Virginia" at least to the Pennsylvania border
(eliminating Maryland, sorry).  He played a prominent role in unseating two
royal governors--Harvey and Berkeley--and he was preeminent in obtaining the
support
of leading London merchants in even more grandiose plans to control the
beaver trade from the Chesapeake to Nova Scotia to Quebec.  He was bold and
decisive, leading a Parliamentary force in the 1650s that occupied and changed the
governments of both the Virginia and Maryland colonies--an effort at unified
governance that could have prevented some of the most perplexing problems of
the later 17th century Tobacco Coast.  Claiborne was nothing if not a
perceptive,
far-sighted, global thinker, and his sponsorship of intercultural interest
group alliances from the boardrooms of London to the beaverdams of America was
the most original idea of any 17th-century Virginian--having the potential to
produce colonial profits without dispossessing (or killing off) indigenous
populations.  He
was also the first gentleman planter to demonstrate the iimportance of being
a
trained and savvy surveyor!

Claiborne fits my criteria to a tee:  a commoner, not a royal governor;  an
intelligent innovator well ahead of his time, who used his wits and talents
to
transform his era; someone who left descendants across many generations and
many frontiers down to the Louisiana Purchase era; and someone who found
wealth IN America, by UNDERSTANDING America, which had eluded him in
Kent, England.  Whether as a raider, trader, farmer, fur merchant, royal
office
holder, and rebel against royal governors, Claiborne, above all, EMBRACED
CHANGE, a real American trait, and oversaw critical transitions and transfor-
mations in the history of ALL the Chesapeake.

NOTE: A real "Virginian" almost by definition should post-date
1622, when the term first became popular and some colonists made the commit-
ment to STAY permanently, despite (or because of ) the Massacre (unlike the
temporary sojourners and hired Company hands (like Capt John Smith), who
returned to and died in England.

Fred Fausz
St. Louis


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