Our jury argued to a virtual tie when trying to identify the single greatest citizen of 17th-century Virginia. The two nominees most often identified as the greatest were Captain John Smith and Sir William Berkeley, a governor of the colony. Tiebreakers proved unsuccessful, so they both get the nod - the only tie.

Smith's greatness derived in large part from his famous role in taking command of the fractious colony in its early months and imposing discipline on the colonists. Historian and archivist Ervin Jordan summarized Smith's greatest achievement: "Jamestown would have failed without his decisive leadership during its formative years." Another historian and archivist, Trenton Hizer, added, "[D]espite being in Virginia a short time, Smith led the Jamestown colony through its worst crisis, as well as mapped the area to give the colony a geographical sense of where it was."

Smith also cultivated important relations with the Indians in Tidewater and around the Chesapeake Bay. Smith's books about the colony's early years were also of great importance. As historian John Deal summarized it, they "created early versions of the Jamestown story that persisted for centuries."

Historian Bland Whitley agreed and wrote that Smith was most important, "not for his work in exhorting and disciplining the colony out of immediate disaster (though this was no mean accomplishment). But for his work as the colony's greatest propagandist. His works established the New World as a land of plenty and adventure. His maps made exploration of the interior easier. And his tale of being saved by Pocahontas is the most enduring and mythologized story of the era. We cannot imagine early Virginia without John Smith."

That legend, historian Virginia Bernard commented, "true or not, has become one of the most famous in all American history."

Literary historian Kevin J. Hayes elaborated on the themes that appeared in all the evaluations of Captain John Smith. The captain's A True Relation of Virginia, published in 1608, was the first of his important books, so important that "the work is considered the first book in the history of American literature." Smith published a remarkable Map of Virginia in 1612 and an extended narrative history, The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, that same year.

Smith incorporated both works into his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, the most complete history of the colony by a participant in the colonization. "Overall," Hayes concluded, "Smith personally symbolized many of the most important qualities that would come to define the American national character."

Mayor L. Douglas Wilder concurred. Smith, he wrote, "really fit the mold of being rugged enough to make the settlement in Jamestown permanent." As a result, "He may be the Virginian best suited for being called a 'great Virginian' of the 17th Century."

The other person identified as the greatest Virginian of the 17th century was Sir William Berkeley, governor of the colony from 1642 to 1652 and again from 1660 to 1677. Wilder nominated his predecessor in the office of governor as most influential, writing that even though "Berkeley was not a democrat, in any present or future tense," he was unquestionably influential, "perhaps more influential than most."

Jack P. Greene, one of the deans of American colonial history, wrote at length about Berkeley, "who, more than anybody else during the seventeenth century, helped to give shape to early colonial Virginia society. He was an improver and during his long governorship endeavored to create a political society in Virginia that would incorporate English legal, political, and social traditions into the warp and woof of the rude agricultural world of the Chesapeake.

"He provided the leadership," Greene continued, "for a people focused heavily on private estate building to insure the protection of property and the rule of law and to provide the religious and political institutional foundations for the transformation of Virginia into a recognizably English polity."

Summarizing the arguments that other participants made, historian Marianne E. Julienne wrote that Berkeley was usually a "deft politician who encouraged the House of Burgesses to sit separately from the governor's advisory Council, thereby creating the bicameral General Assembly. He promoted economic diversification in Virginia, although his plan was not ultimately successful. He encouraged trade with the Indians (as well as free trade of colonial goods beyond the English market) and oversaw a lengthy period of relatively stable relations between the colonists and the Indians (at least until late in his career)."

Old and somewhat deaf in 1676, Berkeley failed to act decisively when Bacon's Rebellion broke out in 1676. His indecision made a bad situation worse, and following the rebellion he went on a rampage of hanging the rebellion's leaders and confiscating their property.

The rebellion produced widespread violence. It threatened the stable political institutions Berkeley had helped bring to maturity. It ended the colonists' relatively peaceful relations with the Indians that Berkeley had cultivated. It also jeopardized the economic prosperity and free trade that had been objectives of his policies for decades.

In spite of that failure near the end of Berkeley's life, his accomplishments were so conspicuous they outshine these past-his-prime failures.