Small beginnings remarkable results: here's a look at the 400th anniversary of various things and some really ancient legislatures.

You can't move in Boston without realizing how old the place is. There are whole neighborhoods from the 1800s; a few buildings from the 1700s, for example, Faneuil Hall (no one can pronounce it), the Old State House, and the Old South Church; and even a few survivals from the 1600s, notably the street plan. The town itself goes back to 1630, and so does its legislature, the General Court, as it is called, which organized itself shortly after the original settlers of Boston sailed in from England. Even so, there's an older legislature in English America, the General Assembly of Virginia, which traces its own origins to 1619, well before there was a permanent European settlement in what is now Massachusetts or its vicinity.

Virginia is older than Massachusetts; it was one expression of a wave of European expansion into what are now the United States and Canada in the first decade of the 1600s, with Massachusetts at the end of that particular burst of imperialism.

The first Virginia settlement, Jamestown, came into being in 1607. This was spectacularly celebrated in May this year with concerts, fireworks, specially commissioned music, a golf tournament, reproductions of the ships that brought the first colonists there, and notable visitors, among them Queen Elizabeth II and Ricky Skaggs. Such splendor would have astonished the 17th century settlers. As a town, Jamestown was physically insignificant, poorly situated and subject to numerous indignities, including being burned by the Virginians themselves. It is now mainly an historical site and archeological dig.

Its scant physical remains belie its great importance. The beginnings of complex and conflicted Native American and European relations in the United States, as well as the initial instances of African servitude, can be traced to Jamestown. Early Jamestown saw high hopes for get-rich-quick schemes in finding gold, producing silk, exporting sassafras (not a lasting source of wealth), plus, one that worked: raising tobacco. In the public assembly gathered there in 1619, Jamestown laid the cornerstone of the Virginia General Assembly, the first legislature in what is now the United States.

Jamestown was not the only founding event in 1607. The same impetus that took English settlers to the James River led other Englishmen to the coast of Maine. The winter drove them back to England, but they did manage to build the first sea-going vessel, the Virginia, in what is now the United States, and sailed it home.

It was a busy decade for such efforts. In 1604 the French established their first American colony on an island in the St. Croix River, now the boundary between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick. They too were driven away by winter but in 1605 established another settlement in Nova Scotia, which became Port Royal, the first permanent settlement of French Canada. Quebec was founded shortly afterward, in 1608.

And in what is now New Mexico, Spanish settlers from Mexico created a new capital at Santa Fe, perhaps as early as 1607, certainly no later than 1609.

RIGHT OF CONQUEST 

Small and tentative as they were, these settlements did more than foreshadow change. They expressed patterns of behavior that would characterize the European conquest of North America. The explorers and settlers assumed the right of conquest from the beginning. When convenient, and as strength allowed, they disregarded the inhabitants of the land they were edging into. Inadvertently the settlers brought disease with disastrous effects on native Americans; they read the consequent depopulation as God's hand in clearing the way for themselves.

Exposure to America's vast resources--as humble as fish, lumber and sassafras, or as glorious as the hoped-for gold--made many people reckless in the pursuit of wealth, and helped originate our traits of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. All the glorious opportunities depended on labor being available, which led to a demand for forced labor that brought many Europeans, native Americans and Africans into bound servitude and, soon for the Africans, slavery.

The sense of entitlement led in another direction as well. With traditional patterns of respect for authority very difficult to preserve in English American colonies, legislative assemblies took on airs from very early times. The origin of these assemblies did not express democratic yearnings, as 19th century historians liked to claim. Their creation was highly pragmatic on the part of the people who controlled the colonies. They understood that bringing together the movers and shakers in their little world was the only practical way to build support for the policies they intended to put into effect. Over time, of course, things got out of hand, and those who were intended to endorse policies took to making their own.

How that happened can readily be traced in the long course of the Massachusetts General Court, for which records exist for its entire existence. (Virginia has lost many of its early records to fire and invasion.) The legislature's unusual name, now shared only by the legislature of New Hampshire, preserves business terminology of the early 1600s.

MASSACHUSETTS BAY COMPANY 

Unlike most settlements Europeans founded in North America, Massachusetts was not sponsored by royalty, but instead by a corporation, the Massachusetts Bay Company, which held a royal charter to trade across the Atlantic. By 1629, the company had been captured by religious dissidents who for a mix of religious and business reasons transferred themselves and their charter to what is now Massachusetts. Carrying the charter out of England was probably illegal, but the physical possession of it gave them a great deal of protection. The charter itself has been carefully guarded ever since; you can see it at the Massachusetts Archives.

Like other incorporated businesses of the time, the Massachusetts Bay Company was controlled by what was called a general court, comprising its stockholders, called freemen, who elected officers, called assistants, and a CEO, called a governor. Like the stockholders of a modern corporation, the general court held the power to set and enforce policy for the company and decide whether its internal rules had been violated, or, to put it another way, it held legislative, executive and judicial power over the company.

It was not much of a reach for this corporation's general court to turn into the government of Massachusetts. At the very first, the governor and the assistants ran the new colony, but expediency and prudence led them to allow men who met property and religious requirements to become voters, letting the camel's nose into the tent. In 1634, the voters in Massachusetts' scattered towns were allowed to elect deputies, or representatives, to join the assistants in the general court. The two groups did not agree, and their disagreements led to the first written bill of rights in English America--the Body of Liberties of 1641--and a bicameral legislature in 1644.

At the center of the dispute was the fate of a pig that had been lost by a poor widow and, apparently found and slaughtered by a wealthy and unpopular merchant. While the merchant had won his case in lower church and civil courts, the ultimate appeal brought the case before the General Court. The story has all the drama of a modern soap opera, since the attorney for the widow was, at the time, renting a room from her, leading to scandalous rumors of inappropriate conduct between the two in Puritan Boston. The unpopular merchant eventually won the case, but it caused a permanent breach between assistants and deputies. Some have also suggested that it was the first recorded legislative debate over pork in politics.

At any rate, within 15 years of settlement, Massachusetts had a bicameral legislature with elected members, as cheerfully bumptious and partisan as any legislature can be, already quarreling over highways, taxation and electoral politics. It was a remarkable achievement. Like its earlier counterpart in Virginia, this legislature went on to nourish a notable role of future American leaders: in Massachusetts, Sam Adams, John Adams, John Hancock; and in Virginia, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, George Mason and John Marshall. These are heritages to remember.

NCSL director Ron Snell and Massachusetts Senator Richard Moore are a couple of history buffs.