Money makes the world go round, right?

Well, back in the day—in the late 1500s, to be more specific—things were no different. England wanted to compete with Spain and Portugal in having lots of land, goods, and power. You know, the normal stuff.

So, tired of being outdone by Spain, Britain decided to get on the Colonies Parade. In 1606, James I chartered the Virginia Company to sail out and set up some colonies in North America. Like any capitalist business venture, the Virginia Company was also hoping to score some gold and silver. The Spanish had to have found it somewhere. They set up shop in Jamestown.

And the English lived happily ever after on American shores, right? Not so much.

Jamestown got off to a very rocky start: despite the delivery of roughly 6,000 settlers over Jamestown's first 15 years, the town counted only 1,200 living residents as late as 1625. And of course, it failed to find the gold and silver its investors wanted. But finally, it struck it rich in another way: by growing tobacco. In fact, the success of tobacco triggered a Gold Rush-like boom that lasted through the 1620s.

For a time—and after conquering the learning curve—Jamestown was the most successful British colony in the New World. It generated a small fortune in import tax revenue and provided English tobacco merchants with a valuable product for re-export throughout Europe. 

However, Virginia achieved its economic success only by introducing slavery to England's North American colonies. (Hey America, you're gonna regret that hundreds of years of later.) 

So, by the end of the century, the slave ships docked alongside the tobacco fleet in the Chesapeake provided a stark reminder of the horrific cost of Virginia's success.

Early Virginia has often been viewed as the dark side of American colonization—the struggling and exploitive antithesis of the righteous Puritan settlement that developed in New England.

• While northern colonists sought religious freedom, as this version of early American history goes, Virginia's settlers sought only wealth.
• While New England was settled by stable and pious families, Virginia was settled by a tumultuous crew of young single men.
• While New England immediately thrived, and within decades built a healthy society filled with churches and schools and participatory local governments, Virginia failed miserably in its first decade even to feed itself.

Last but not least, Virginia eventually survived only by developing a one-dimensional economy that depended upon the ruthless exploitation of servants and eventually thousands of African slaves. Ironic slow clap for Virginia, guys.

We can find a lot that's true within this comparison of the two Anglo-American colonies, but also a lot that's misleading. While the Puritan settlements of New England may have fancied themselves "a city upon the hill," a shining beacon of righteousness in a world full of sin, New England's colonists instigated their own fair share of horrific brutality, too.

More to the point, Virginia was always more than the snake pit of disease, slavery, and exploitation that its critics imagined it to be. The colony's founding vision was more complex, and in many ways, just as utopian as that which sent the Puritans to Massachusetts Bay. 

The founders of Jamestown drew from the theories of Richard Hakluyt and Walter Raleigh in planning a complex, progressive colony that would integrate the Indians, offer opportunities to England's poor, and emphatically refuse to imitate the Spanish Empire's brutal use of African slaves.

In practice, their idealistic vision for the Jamestown colony proved impossible to implement. Hundreds of early Virginia settlers died and the colony teetered on the brink of collapse until its leaders finally abandoned well-intentioned plans that simply didn't work in the swampy reality of the Chesapeake lowlands. 

But eventually, displaying a resiliency and entrepreneurial spirit that might fairly be called quintessentially American, Jamestown's colonists figured out how to sustain their struggling community.

The answer to their woes? The tobacco plant, an intoxicating drug long-favored by American Indians, but a new hot item in Europe.

The booming society that soon grew up around the cultivation of tobacco did have its undeniably horrific elements, obviously: indentured servants were brutally exploited, and by the middle of the 17th century, slavery and the racism that continues to plague America had taken deep root. 

But tobacco also offered unique opportunities for 17th-century Englishmen born into poverty to achieve individual economic advancement. To some extent, the vision of upward mobility later idealized as "the American Dream" was born at Jamestown.

In the end then, the little outpost of English settlers founded at Jamestown in 1607 was no utopia. But it was also no failure, and its history is no less central to the American story than the more familiar tale—celebrated every Thanksgiving—of the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock nearly a decade and a half after Jamestown was founded some 600 miles to the south.

This is the story of the Jamestown colony, the oldest permanent English settlement in America, which failed as a utopia but succeeded as a tobacco plantation. So, what went wrong in Jamestown, and what went right?