Thomas Davis (fl. 1619), member-elect of the first General Assembly, may have arrived in Virginia with Captain John Martin in May 1617. He was almost certainly one of the twenty men residing at the captain's plantation known as Martin-Brandon, or Martin's Brandon, at Paspahegh in July 1619. Davis must have been a man of comparatively high social standing, because he was one of the two men chosen to represent that plantation in the first General Assembly and in the record of that body was accorded the honorific styles "Mr." and "gent." One of the references spelled his surname Davys and provided the additional information that he and an ensign had gone out in Martin's shallop to purchase grain from the Indians but instead seized grain by force from an Indian's canoe. Opechancanough complained of the theft to the governor, and the assembly required Martin and his men to conform thereafter to the governor's policy of not making raids on the Indians.

Davis was elected to represent Martin-Brandon in the five-day assembly that met in the Jamestown church beginning on 30 July 1619, but he and his fellow burgess, Robert Stacy, did not serve. In one of their first precedent-setting procedural decisions, the assembly members ruled that the two burgesses from that plantation could not participate until Martin relinquished a provision in his patent from the Virginia Company of London that exempted him and his plantation from regulations that the assembly adopted. Martin refused, and on 2 August "it was resolved by the assembly that his Burgesses should have no admittance."

So far as can be determined, Davis's name does not appear in any extant Virginia records after that date. It is possible that he accompanied Martin back to England about 1621 when the captain unsuccessfully defended his patent before the court of the Virginia Company or that he died in Virginia on an unrecorded date before the compilation of the lists of survivors and victims of the Powhatan attack in March 1622. Several men named Thomas Davis or Davys resided in Virginia during the 1620s and after, but their ages and recorded dates of arrival indicate that none of them was the burgess-elect.

Sources Consulted:
Colonial Office (CO) 1/1, fols. 139–154, Public Record Office (PRO), National Archives, Kew, England, with facsimile and transcription in William J. Van Schreeven and George H. Reese, eds., Proceedings of the General Assembly of Virginia, July 30–August 4, 1619 (1969), 12–13, 18–23, 34–37 (quotation on 36); Warren M. Billings, A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (2004), 9–10; John Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys, 8 June 1617, reporting Martin's arrival, and several undated enumerations, ca. 1619, reporting the number of men and women at Martin-Brandon, all Ferrar Papers, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, England.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Katharine E. Harbury.

How to cite this page:
Katharine E. Harbury,"Thomas Davis (fl. 1619)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2018 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davis_Thomas, accessed [today's date]).

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