Celebrations Today – September 10
Holidays and observances
- Amerindian Heritage Day (Guyana)
- Children’s Day (Honduras)
- Christian feast day:
- Gibraltar National Day
- Saint George’s Caye Day (Belize)
- Teachers’ Day (China)
- World Suicide Prevention Day
Celebrations Today – USA: September 10
National Swap Ideas Day
National TV Dinner Day
National Pet Memorial Day – Second Sunday in September
National Hug Your Hound Day – Second Sunday in September
National Grandparent’s Day – Sunday after Labor Day
National Blame It on the Large Hadron Collider Day
International Creepy Boston Dynamics Robotic Horse Day
International Make-Up Day
National Sew Be It Day
World Suicide Prevention Day
Today in US History: September 10
John Smith Assumes Presidency of Jamestown
Captain Smith and Pocahontas
U.S. Capitol Frescoes,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
circa 1920-50.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959
Explorer, writer, and cartographer John Smith became the leader of the Jamestown settlement when he assumed the presidency of its governing council on September 10, 1608.* The charismatic and controversial Smith initially had been excluded from the government of the settlement on charges of conspiracy to mutiny en route to Virginia. His comrades’ suspicions notwithstanding, Smith became the de facto leader of the colony during the difficult winter of 1607 and 1608, which visited disease, starvation, and frequent Native American raids upon the settlement.
Portrait of Pocahontas
photograph, circa 1900-20, of painting in the United States Capitol,
copy of 1616 original by William Sheppard, Barton Rectory, Norfolk, England.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
A brash and boldly self-confident figure, Smith brought years of soldiering experience to the Virginia venture. While fighting the Turks in Transylvania, he was wounded, captured, and sold, he claimed, into slavery in Turkey. Smith reported that he eventually escaped after receiving assistance from a Turkish woman who had become smitten with him. All this before his adventures in America!
Whether or not Smith’s reportage was accurate, his importance in the survival of the Jamestown colony is undeniable. In Virginia, Smith oversaw the fortification of the fledgling settlement, explored and documented the Chesapeake region, and supervised the production of critically important maps. He approached the native Algonquian Indians with a realism blending wariness and respect, establishing trade relations that enabled the colonists to acquire food from them and engaging them at different times in both friendly diplomacy and armed conflict.
On June 22, 1607, John Smith and five other settlers signed a letter reporting on the status of the colony to the directors of the charter in England. In this excerpt, they expound upon the natural bounty of the land:
We are set down 80 miles within a River,…[a] channel so stored with Sturgion and other sweete Fishe as no mans fortune hath euer possessed the like. . . . The soil is most fruitful, laden with Oake, ashe, Wallnut tree, Popler, Pine, sweet woods, Cedar and others yet with out names that yealds gumes pleasant as Franckumcense, and experience amongest us for great virtue in healing green wounds and aches. . . .“Coppie of a Letter from Virginia, Dated 22d of June, 1607, The Councell Their to the Councell of Virginia Here in England.”
Early Settlement of Virginia and Virginiola . . . ,
African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
In December 1607, Captain Smith was captured and brought before Algonquian paramount chief Powhatan, head of the Powhatan Confederacy. Smith later described how Pocahontas, the chief’s young daughter, saved his life by throwing herself between him and the warriors ordered to execute him:
. . . two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour [Powhatan] was contented he should live. . . .
The tale of Smith’s rescue by the Indian princess Pocahontas first appeared in his own Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, initially published in 1624, and has long since become part of American national mythology. Smith may have romanticized it; in any case, the events he describes, including Pocahontas’ intervention, appear to resemble an initiation ritual familiar to many Native American groups. There is no doubt, however, of the important role Pocahontas subsequently played as an intermediary between her own people and the English, and as a protector of the latter.
The Baptism of Pocahontas, 1614
Oil study for mural by John Gadsby Chapman, circa 1837-40,
Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation Educational Trust.
“The Baptism of Pocahontas,”
America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 2 in
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic
Like other seventeenth-century British colonists, those in Virginia were actively encouraged to convert the native population. The Virginia Company’s instructions to its governors required them to make conversion one of their objectives. Pocahontas herself was the most famous early convert. Captured for ransom by the English during a period of hostilities with the native inhabitants, she was baptized by the Reverend Alexander Whitaker after her father refused to ransom her and before her marriage to John Rolfe in 1614. (Contrary to later fantasy, there is evidence of friendship but none of a romantic attachment between her and Smith.) She later journeyed to England with her husband and young son and was presented as an honored princess to England’s King James I and his royal court. She died at Gravesend, England, in March 1617, on the eve of the voyage that would have returned her to her native land.
Released by Pocahontas’ father, Smith himself went on to additional achievements. By September 1608, driven to desperation by poor leadership, personal conflicts, and infighting, the colonists elected Smith president of their local governing council. Under his firm hand, the colony prospered, its self-sufficiency increased, and its death rate plummeted. In 1609, however, new leadership arrived from the Virginia Company in London to replace him. Injured in a gunpowder accident, Smith decided to return to England.
In 1614, Smith made a successful voyage to Maine and the Massachusetts Bay. He mapped the coastline from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod and named the region “New England”—both to promote it to future colonists and to reflect his conviction that there, in contrast to Virginia with its heat and high mortality, Englishmen might prosper in a land similar to their own. His plans for other colonizing and exploring ventures never came to fruition, and after 1617, Smith devoted himself to writing extensively about his adventures in North America and developing guidelines that proved essential, if unacknowledged, to New England’s colonists. He never returned to Virginia or Massachusetts, and died in 1631.
*Because of the then-ten-day difference between the “Old Style” (Julian) calendar used by Englishmen until 1752, and the “New Style” (Gregorian) calendar in use since 1752, the date when Smith became president was actually September 20 in modern terms.
John Smith Memorial
Gamble Hill Park,
Richmond, Virginia,
between 1905 and 1920.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
- Read Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, Edward Maria Wingfield’s Discourse of Virginia, and Ralph Hamor’s True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia in The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925. Browse this collection’s subject, author, or title lists to find other works concerning early Virginia; or search its full text on the exact phrase “John Smith” to find additional materials that shed light on Smith’s role in Virginia’s founding.
- Read Early Settlement of Virginia and Virginiola as Noticed by Poets and Players in the Time of Shakspeare. An account of Jamestown and the Virginia Company by nineteenth-century author Edward Duffield Niell, this history draws upon seventeenth-century English sources and letters. The text provides intriguing depictions of America from the viewpoint of the astonished Europeans, relates the squabbles of the Jamestown colonists, and includes references to plays and poems written on the theme of New World exploration. Although the poem attributed in this work to William Shakespeare is not currently regarded as his creation, excerpts from his play The Tempest indicate Shakespeare had read the account of the Virginia Company’s shipwreck in the Bermuda Islands, briefly known as “Virginiola.”
- Explore the Virginia Records, 1606-1737 within The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress. Jefferson collected and preserved these volumes as part of his personal library, and they form a uniquely important record of the colony’s earliest days, including the era of Smith’s leadership.
- Visit American Treasures of the Library of Congress to see gems from the nation’s earliest foundations. Examine America’s first book and the first complete Bible printed in America, published by Samuel Green in 1663. This bible is printed in the Algonquian language, translated from the English by missionary John Eliot as an aid him to his missionary efforts among Native Americans.
- View the online exhibition Religion and the Founding of the American Republic for an in-depth look at the role of religion in the creation and development of the nation.
- Search the American Memory collections on the keywords Virginia colony and Massachusetts colony to find photographs of historical sites commemorating the early history of the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies.
- See Today in History for May 14 to learn more about the founding of Jamestown, and December 4 to learn about another English settlement in Virginia near Jamestown.
Today in History – September 10-External Links
Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia