First.

On this day in 1619, the first representative assembly in America convened in Jamestown, Virginia ...

The General Assembly met in the “quire” (choir) of the what was then the newly-built wooden church at Jamestown on July 30, 1619. Following instructions from the Virginia Company of London, the sponsors of the colony, the Assembly’s main purpose was “to establish one equal and uniform government over all Virginia” and introduce “just Laws for the happy guiding and governing of the people there inhabiting.”