On this day in 1606, King James I issued “Articles, Instructions, and orders … for the good order and Government of the two several Colonies and Plantations to be made by our Loving Subjects, in the Country commonly called Virginia and America.” Bedtime reading, if you’re so inclined. Coming a few months after the royal charter and just a month before the Jamestown settlers planned to set sail, it contained some bureaucratic information regarding the governance of the planned colony.
Also on this day, in 1784, James Currie passed along some bad news to his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was then in France. Jefferson’s youngest daughter, Lucy, had succumbed in Virginia “to the Complicated evils of teething, Worms and Hooping Cough.” Her death would lead Jefferson to insist that his daughter Mary immediately join him in Paris; her companion on the voyage, of course, would be Sally Hemings.
IMAGES: James I by Charles X. Harris after Le Jeune F. Pourbus, ca. 1930 (Virginia Historical Society): is it me, or does that right hand of his seem to belong to someone else?; letter from Currie to Jefferson, November 20, 1784, page 1 (i)