How Virginia's House of Burgesses Became America's Blueprint for Democracy

More than 150 years before the Declaration of Independence, the House of Burgesses in Virginia laid the foundation for representative democracy in America. The modest assembly, which first met in Jamestown in 1619, included 22 representatives directly elected by the Virginia colonists.

In the 18th century, the Virginia House of Burgesses included members like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Patrick Henry, and it quickly evolved into an instrument of revolution.  

The Virginia colony started out as a private enterprise. Jamestown, the first English settlement in America, was founded in 1607 by the Virginia Company of London, which received a royal charter to profit from the region’s vast resources. Instead, the first decade of the Virginia colony brought disorder, debt and death.  

Governing the colony was one of the greatest challenges, says Kelly Brennan, a historian with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. The Jamestown settlers, hardened by warfare with Native Americans, starvation and disease, bristled under the rule of colonial governors and far-off company officials.  

“The Virginia Company was having tremendous difficulty trying to put laws in place, because the Virginians kind of didn't care,” says Brennan.  

The idea for a general assembly in the colony came from Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the founders of the Virginia Company. Sandys never set foot in Virginia, but he saw that martial law wasn’t working. In 1618, he proposed a series of reforms that became known as "The Great Charter of 1618.” In it, settlers would have private land ownership and local representation in a “general Assemblie.” 

The charter called for two men to be elected “by pluralitie of voices” from each of Virginia’s 11 “plantations” or jurisdictions. These 22 “burgesses”—the term at the time for a free male landowner chosen by voters in his local settlement—would serve in the assembly under a company-appointed governor and six counselors.  

The General Assembly of Virginia, later known as the House of Burgesses, wasn’t intended to be a “little parliament” equal in authority to the Virginia Company. It was merely a way of giving the disgruntled Virginia colonists a greater say in their affairs.  

"In creating an elected body, there's more buy-in,” says Brennan. “Decisions are being made by people who are actually there and that makes a huge difference.” 

In 1619, Sir George Yeardley arrived in Jamestown as the newly appointed governor of the Virginia colony. On July 30, the general assembly met for the first time in the Jamestown church, the only building large enough to accommodate 22 burgesses, six counselors and the governor.  

It was a hot and humid Virginia summer, and the newly elected burgesses—dressed to impress in their finest wool suits—sweated their way through six days of meetings. Two men became ill from the stifling conditions in the church and on the third day someone actually died “by reason of extreme heat.”  

Nevertheless, the first meeting was considered a success, and in 1621, the Virginia Company passed an “Ordinance and Constitution” authorizing the House of Burgesses to “make ordain & enact such general laws & orders for the behoof of the said colony and the good government thereof” and to do so “by the greater part of the voices then present.” By that measure, the Virginia House of Burgesses was the first freely elected representative body in the British colonies. 

When John Rolfe introduced a strain of Spanish tobacco to Virginia, the Virginia Company finally had a cash crop, but the company’s good fortunes were short-lived. In 1622, a violent uprising by the Powhatan chief Opechancanough decimated the English population. In 1624, King James I decided to dissolve the Virginia Company and turn Virginia into a royal British colony.  

The House of Burgesses grew in authority under British rule. In 1643, Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley allowed the General Assembly to meet as a separate body without the governor or his counselors. In effect, this created the first bicameral legislature in Virginia. For a short time after the English Civil War, the House of Burgesses was even given power to appoint the governor.  

During the 17th century, the House of Burgesses met annually and mostly concerned itself with taxes, Indian affairs and local disputes, but it also passed legislation with lasting consequences. The Virginia Slave Codes, first passed in 1662 and revised in 1705, declared that all non-Christian servants entering Virginia were slaves. Enslaved Virginians had no rights in court, were treated as property, and plantation owners could punish them—to the point of death—with no legal repercussions. Virginia’s dehumanizing slave codes set the model for the treatment of enslaved people in the other colonies.  

Several prominent Founding Fathers and American revolutionaries began their political careers in the Virginia House of Burgesses. George Washington served in the assembly from 1758 to 1775 and Thomas Jefferson was elected at 26 years old. But one of the most prominent voices in the House of Burgesses was Patrick Henry, elected from 1765 to 1774.  

When Parliament passed the controversial Stamp Act in 1765, Henry introduced strongly worded “resolves” to the House of Burgesses challenging the legal right of Parliament to levy taxes on the colonies. Henry insisted that the Virginia general assembly possessed the “sole exclusive Right & Power to lay Taxes & Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony” and that any attempt by Parliament to violate that right “has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.” 

Colonial Virginians were used to paying taxes, Brennan says, but only those imposed by local county officials and their elected representatives in the House of Burgesses.  

“From their perspective, the idea of ‘taxation without representation’ is that taxation is done by the people who represent us,” says Brennan. “And the people who represent us are the people we've elected, not the people who sit in Parliament.”  

After the Boston Tea Party in 1774, Parliament passed the punitive Port Act, which shut down all commerce in the port of Boston. The Virginia House of Burgesses responded by calling for a day of “fasting, humiliation and prayer” for the “hostile invasion of the city of Boston in our sister colony of Massachusetts Bay.”  

Governor John Murray of Virginia was furious and immediately dissolved the House of Burgesses. Undaunted, assembly members continued to meet in secret locations around Williamsburg—the colonial capital since 1699—including the Raleigh Tavern.  

In May 1774, former members of the House of Burgesses formed the First Virginia Convention to prepare for the prospect of war with Britain. The first act of the convention was to appoint seven delegates to represent Virginia at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, including Patrick Henry and George Washington.  

On March 23, 1775, during the Second Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry stood at the pulpit of St. John’s Church in Richmond and delivered his immortal speech: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”