In the Fall of 2021, I checked off a bucket list item. I walked the streets of Jamestown, VA. This was not a visit to a place but an encounter with a time. I journeyed back to 1696 when James Emmanuel Dees arrived in Jamestown. He had traveled from Monikie, Angus, Scotland. He represented the last trickle of indentured servants who immigrated from Scotland to Virginia to start a new life.
At the time, Scotland was in turmoil between Protestant and Catholic, the English Monarch William of Orange, and the Jacobites who wanted a return to the Stuart line and a Scottish King. Political, religious, and economic uncertainty made it difficult for a 20-year-old man to establish himself. The landowners in Virginia were still paying a few people to travel from Scotland and pay off their passage with seven years of labor on the tobacco plantations. However, the practice was dying as the plantation owners found the enslavement of Africans to be more profitable. Enslavement meant they could “breed” their labor supply rather than rely on poor people from Europe. A young Emmanuel stepped off the ship at the Jamestown Harbor. He began his 7 years of service to Thomas Nesham and established himself and his name in North America.
In 1921, when we arrived at Historic Jamestown, I felt a sense of kinship with my 6th Great-Grandfather and the journey he had completed 227 years before. I doubt that he was thinking about the next two centuries. He was intent on shaking off the uncertainty of Scotland and was ready to embrace his new home here on the James River. He was surrounded by people from Scotland, Wales, England, the Dutch Republic, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Switzerland, and France. They had all come seeking new lives, free from the chaos of the old country. They worked together, intermarried, and became part of a great Western migration that would continue for the next 150 years. They established villages and towns across Appalachia and beyond. They became the vast working class of farmers, housewives, tradespeople, merchants, and soldiers. They built homes and schools, shops and saloons, courthouses and churches. They became the vast middle class of the American South.
Many met and married people whose families had immigrated through New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and the Texas Gulf Coast. Even though their ancestors had turned their backs on Europe, they brought many of the same attitudes and beliefs that fostered the chaos, uncertainty, and bloodshed that caused Emmanuel and his cohort to leave.
They remained unrepentant racists despite seeing first-hand the cruelty of the enslavement of Africans. They served as Overseers on plantations and supported the capture and return of people who sought freedom through escape. Later, they would apply these attitudes and treatment to Mexicans, Vietnamese, and every immigrant group that followed them to these shores, seeking refuge from the uncertainty of their own homeland.
They became the backbone of small towns across the South doing, in the words of George Bailey, ”…most of the living and dying…” They became our Great-grandparents, Grandparents, Parents, Uncles and Aunts, Sunday School Teachers, Auto Mechanics, Public School Teachers, Civil Servants, and everyone else who was part of our growing up. They struggled to pay the bills, raise their families, and make life better for their children. They did not recognize their privilege in society. Still, they fiercely defended their way of life, declaring they lived in the “greatest country the world had ever known.”
They were saints and sinners. They were “just folks” making their way in a new world. Like their ancestors, they did their best as they saw it at the time and went to their graves with both regret and gratitude. And, like their descendants, they had neither the wisdom nor inclination to give their ancestors absolution for not solving all the problems that would plague their children and grandchildren. Among them were eight generations of people named Dees who made their way through North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas in pursuit of a better life for themselves and their children. A few would scatter a bit further afield, but the core of the family became part of the small towns along the way. Those same small towns became part of their identity. They found their place, for good or ill, among the other children of immigrants from Europe.
Emmanuel and his descendants were with me as I walked across the boardwalk over the Back River Estuary that separates Jamestown from the mainland. When I reached Jamestown proper, I walked the old streets of Jamestown. I listened to the voices of new arrivals as they explored their new home. I heard them bartering for a room and a meal. I hear Emmanuel introduce himself to Mr. Nesham’s Overseer. I could hear people telling their stories to anyone who would listen, looking for connections “back home.” There were a few tears over family left behind and laughter when connections were made with other immigrants.
As I made my way to the wharf where Emmanuel first stepped ashore, I heard the rattle of carts carrying goods from Europe and the hesitant shuffle of footsteps, unsure of where they needed to go. The salty air smelled of fresh fish and people who had not bathed in weeks. The dusty streets were filled with a bustling city, the capital of Virginia. A church bell rang on the corner. As the new arrivals blended into the busy population, their “differences” melted away, and they became citizens of a new city and future nation. All it took was for them to step off the boat, and they were welcomed “home” as long as they did their best to fit in.
My trip to Jamestown has helped me understand that I, too, am an immigrant. These are not my ancestral lands. I am the recipient of the gift of a home because of a man named James Emmanuel and the thousands of people like him who sought a new life in a new country. They were fortunate to find people who shared their language, skin color, and history to welcome them. They did not endure becoming commodities bought and sold in slave markets. They were offered the dignity of what a later generation would call “inalienable Rights.” My citizenship in the United States of America grows out of this gift of a home paid for with the lives of James Emmanuel, Toby, Maria, Nguyen, and countless others. I respect their gift when I recognize it as a gift. I honor it most profoundly when I welcome others seeking out our shores for the same reasons: to provide a better life for themselves and their children.
There was no whispering involved on this day in Historic Jamestown. They and their modern-day counterparts in Laredo, San Diego, and Miami cried out to me with every step I took along the James River that day.
History is crying out to us! Are we listening?
Bob