People were to be judged by their effectiveness rather than their bloodlines

From Love & Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price. Page 7.

On John Smith.

Smith was ready to embark on his chosen profession. He made his way back to the Continent. In the summer of 1601, he enlisted with Austrian forces in Hungary that were fighting the occupying armies of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the Muslim superpower that had conquered much of Central Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. In Hungary, Smith deployed his signaling torches, his explosives (he called them his “fiery dragons”), and other devices and strategems to lethal effect, earning himself the title of captain. Here he experienced a taste of meritocracy: with individual excellence and contribution came respect and advancement. It made its impression on the young soldier.

His fortunes took a decided turn for the worse on a cold winter’s day in 1602, when he was captured on the battlefield in present-day Romania. He was taken to an auction with others to be sold into slavery—“like beasts in a market-place,” he recalled. Smith ended up on a Turkish farm under a cruel master, where his head was shaved bare and a ring of iron placed around his neck. He found he was joining hundreds of slaves—European, Turk, and Arab—who informed him that escape was impossible. That was all he needed to hear. He was laboring in the fields one day when the master came by on horseback to beat him; seizing his chance, Smith turned the tables, beating the man to death with a threshing bat. Smith then put on the dead man’s clothes and took off on his horse for friendly territory.

Smith wrangled a place in the Virginia expedition several years afterward. The historical record doesn’t reveal why he was picked. The leadership of the Virginia Company probably saw him simply as a hired military hand in case of an attack from the Spanish or trouble with the natives. If so, he proved to be larger than that role. No matter how or why he got the job, it seems obvious in retrospect that he was unusually well suited to become the colony’s leader, as he ultimately did. His adventures in Hungary gave him the experience of dealing with foreigners both as comrades and as adversaries. Those years also shaped his distinctive worldview, one in which ignorance was to be treated as a dangerous enemy, and in which people were to be judged by their effectiveness rather than their bloodlines.

Hence, unlike most Englishmen of his day, Smith believed it was important to understand and deal with the natives as they actually were, not as symbols of primitive evil or virtue. Accordingly, he studied the Powhatan language and culture closely, and indeed, he left behind our most detailed ethnographic writings on those people. With the benefit of that information, he was able to keep Chief Powhatan at bay through a mix of diplomacy and intimidation—not through massacre—at a time when the Powhatan Empire outnumbered the English by well over a hundred to one. It was this record that led several of Smith’s admirers among the colonists to write later, with only slight exaggeration, that “thou Virginia foild’st, yet kep’st unstained”—that is, he foiled the natives in Virginia, but didn’t stain Virginia with their blood.

At the same time, Smith faced the daunting task of whipping his own countrymen into shape, particularly “the better sort” (as gentlemen were often called). They “exclaim of all things, though they never adventured to know any thing,” Smith groused, “nor ever did anything but devour the fruits of other men’s labors.” The gallants, he added with a sneer, were were discontented because they didn’t have “any of their accustomed dainties, with feather beds and down pillows, taverns and alehouses in every breathing place, neither plenty of gold and silver and dissolute liberty as they expected.” Once they were truly under Smith’s thumb, as he moved from serving as a council member to colony president, he gave the “better sort” reason to squirm with his decree that “he that will not work shall not eat.”