The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia - Softcover

Schmidt, Ethan A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607325241 ISBN 13: 9781607325246

Publisher: University Press of Colorado, 2016

Synopsis

In The Divided Dominion, Ethan A. Schmidt examines the social struggle that created Bacon's Rebellion, focusing on the role of class antagonism in fostering violence toward native people in seventeenth-century Virginia. This provocative volume places a dispute among Virginians over the permissibility of eradicating Native Americans for land at the forefront in understanding this pivotal event.Myriad internal and external factors drove Virginians to interpret their disputes with one another increasingly along class lines. The decades-long tripartite struggle among elite whites, non-elite whites, and Native Americans resulted in the development of mutually beneficial economic and political relationships between elites and Native Americans. When these relationships culminated in the granting of rights―equal to those of non-elite white colonists―to Native Americans, the elites crossed a line and non-elite anger boiled over. A call for the annihilation of all Indians in Virginia united different non-elite white factions and molded them in widespread social rebellion.The Divided Dominion places Indian policy at the heart of Bacon's Rebellion, revealing the complex mix of social, cultural, and racial forces that collided in Virginia in 1676. This new analysis will interest students and scholars of colonial and Native American history.

About this title

About the Author

Ethan A. Schmidt was assistant professor of history at Delta State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Divided Dominion

Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia

By Ethan A. Schmidt

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-524-6

Contents

List of Figures, 
List of Maps, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: A Tale of Two Uprisings, 
1. Being All Friends and Forever Powhatans: The Early Anglo-Powhatan Relationship at Jamestown, 
2. Hammerers and Rough Masons to Prepare Them: The First Anglo-Powhatan War, 1609–14, 
3. Subduing the Indians and Advancing the Interests of the Planters: the Second Anglo-Powhatan War, The Tobacco Boom, and the Rise of the Tobacco Elite, 1614–32, 
4. If You Did but See Me You Would Weep: Expectation versus Reality in the Lives of Virginia Immigrants, 1609–40, 
5. The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: The Rise and Decline of Sir William Berkeley's Golden Age, 1642–74, 
6. "To Ruin and Extirpate All Indians in General": The Rebellion of Nathaniel Bacon, 
Epilogue: White Unity and Indian Survival, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Being All Friends and Forever Powhatans

The Early Anglo-Powhatan Relationship at Jamestown

In 1570 a group of Spanish Jesuits attempted to establish a mission among the Algonquian-speaking peoples of Tsenacommacah in the area now referred to as the Virginia coastal plain. An Algonquian captured nearly ten years before by other Spanish invaders had guided them to the area. The man's Algonquian name is lost to us, but his captors renamed him Don Luis. Don Luis had spent most of the previous decade living as a servant in the households of many of the most important military and spiritual leaders of the Spanish Empire, in places such as Madrid, Havana, and Mexico City. When approached first by a group of Franciscans and then by the group of Jesuits to assist them in their endeavor to establish a mission among his people, he readily accepted.

Eventually, the Jesuits decided to settle in the York River area to be near the increasingly powerful leader of the local Algonquian groups. At that time, Don Luis made the decision to leave the Jesuit camp and return to his people. Despite the Jesuits' assumption that during his years of captivity Don Luis had completely shed his Algonquian life for that of a lowly Spanish servant, he almost immediately reconnected with his family (who thought he had returned from the dead) and determined to live up to his kinship responsibilities to them by staying to help them weather the effects of a six-year drought that had plagued their homeland. The Jesuits responded by demanding that Don Luis return to them and use his connections to local Algonquians to procure food for the progressively famished mission. According to the account of a Spaniard named Alonso, a child witness to the events, Don Luis did return to the mission after a party of three Jesuits had been sent to retrieve him.

On the Sunday after the feast of the Purification, Don Luis came to the three Jesuits who were returning with other Indians. He sent an arrow through the heart of Father Quirós and then murdered the rest who had come to speak with him. Immediately Don Luis went on to the village where the Fathers were, and with great quiet and dissimulation, at the head of a large group of Indians, he killed the five who waited there. Don Luis himself was the first to draw blood with one of those hatchets that were brought along for trading with the Indians; then he finished the killing of Father Master Baptista with his axe, and his companions finished off the others.

In 1571, Spain and its empire were in the midst of a period often referred to as the Siglo de Oro, or the Golden Century. During the past eighty years, the Spanish had completed the Reconquista, landed in the Caribbean, destroyed and subjugated the Aztec and Incan civilizations, and circumnavigated the globe. Yet they had failed to extend their conquests to Tsenacommacah. To be fair, beyond the opportunity to extend the Catholic religion to the Native people of the area, there was little in Virginia to entice any but the most devout Spaniards to attempt such an enterprise. In addition, in recapturing the boy Alonso from Don Luis's people in 1572, the Spanish reportedly killed at least 20 Algonquians in retribution for Don Luis's attack. However, the Spanish never again attempted to penetrate as far north as the territory of the Virginia Algonquians. Furthermore, the 20-odd Algonquians they did manage to kill represented but a fraction of the approximately 14,000 people already engaged in the process of coalescing into a vast paramount chiefdom under the control of a man known as Powhatan. Contrary to the archetypal story of European colonial expansion, in this case (and in others) Indians clearly held the upper hand in the relationship. In the case of the Powhatans of Virginia, they did so for the first twenty to thirty years of the English colony that followed the Spanish mission.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Virginia Algonquians found themselves in the midst of a vast reordering of their world that had little to do with the small groups of Europeans who sometimes appeared on the fringes of their territory. The process by which Powhatan transformed his initial inheritance of six villages into a great chiefdom that controlled the entire eastern half of what is now Virginia was well under way by the time Don Luis destroyed the Spanish Jesuit mission in 1571. Powhatan's, and his chiefdom's, power and stature only continued to grow after that incident, to the point that their command of both spiritual and temporal power reached heights never seen by their predecessors. On the eve of the Jamestown landing in 1607, Powhatan and his chiefdom, while acutely aware of the threats they faced both internally and externally, rested securely in the knowledge that they were the masters of the Virginia coastal plain and that their access to powerful spiritual forces had made them so. Thus, they approached European invaders, both temporary and permanent, with an attitude of superiority and an expectation that only those willing to accept Powhatan's leadership and prove themselves useful to his chiefdom would be suffered to remain.

There is general agreement that Indians have inhabited Virginia since the end of the last ice age nearly 10,000 years ago. Whether these early peoples represent direct ancestors of the people the English called Powhatans is harder to pinpoint. However, the anthropological and archaeological literature agrees on at least two basic facts. The first is that the Algonquian cultural and linguistic characteristics shared by the Indians of the Virginia coastal plain in 1607 did not originate there but instead in the Great Lakes region. Second, the mass migration of Algonquian peoples and cultural traits into the area occurred either toward the end of the Middle Woodland period (100 — 200 CE) or during the beginning of the Late Woodland period (500–1000 CE).

Whatever the case, we do know for certain that sometime during the mid- to late sixteenth century the man known as Powhatan came into his inheritance of six villages located near present-day Richmond. Throughout the rest of the century he added to his territory using a mixture of alliance, intimidation, and outright force. We know very little specific information about this process, especially regarding the groups he added to his domain during the early years of his leadership. However, two instances — the destruction of the Kecoughtans and the Chesapeakes — both of which occurred in the period just before the English landing at Jamestown, provide excellent examples of his methods.

In the mid-1590s Powhatan assaulted the village of Kecoughtan, located at the extreme southeastern tip of the peninsula between the James and York Rivers. The Kecoughtans' refusal to willingly place themselves under his orbit seems to have sealed their fate. Powhatan seized the opportunity presented by the death of their weroance, the Powhatan term for a village or district chieftain, to make an example of them. In 1612 William Strachey included the event in his History of Travel into Virginia Britannia: "Upon the death of an old Weroance of this place some 15 or 16 years since (being too powerful neighbors to side [with] the great Powhatan) it is said Powhatan taking the advantage subtly stepped in, and conquered the people killing the Chief and most of them." To ensure the complete integration of the Kecoughtan survivors, Powhatan relocated them to villages intensely loyal to him. By 1608, the strategy seems to have worked. When Powhatan destroyed another recalcitrant Algonquian group, this time the Piankatanks, he allowed the remnants of the Kecoughtans to resettle their lands.

Just before the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown, Powhatan completely wiped out the Chesapeakes, who had occupied the territory south and east of the James River near what is now Virginia Beach. The Chesapeakes had never been a part of Powhatan's chiefdom and were traditionally regarded as enemies. Furthermore, this particular act also seems to have been religiously based. Strachey mentioned a prophecy told to Powhatan by his chief priests. According to the prophecy, "From the Chesapeake Bay a Nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his Empire." The Chesapeakes' long-standing refusal to succumb to his rule, coupled with the coincidence of their location and that mentioned by the prophecy, sealed their doom. Therefore, Powhatan "destroyed and put to the sword, all such who might lie under any doubtful construction of the said prophecy." Through tactics such as these, as well as less violent methods of coercion and negotiation, Powhatan managed to bring all of the Algonquian groups of the coastal plain under his nominal control by 1607. In a period of approximately forty years, he had fashioned a powerful chiefdom out of a collection of loosely connected villages. The Algonquian leader the English encountered upon their arrival was a man at the height of his power. However, that power was threatened from within and without. Furthermore, it was rooted in a spiritual worldview the English had very little basis for understanding.

While the paramount chiefdom headed by Powhatan represented the largest group in the area, an examination of the group in relation to its neighbors reveals that the Powhatans were neither monolithic nor unchallenged. Specifically, internal conflict between Virginia Algonquians themselves combined with the external threats of Siouan and Iroquoian invaders to create a pre-contact Virginia characterized by warfare, uneasy truces, and shifting alliances. Even within his own domain, Powhatan did not exercise full control over the various sub-chiefdoms, and beyond the borders of Tsenacommacah lurked various Iroquoian and Siouan enemies who often encroached upon their territory. Aid in the form of guns, metal, and soldiers could easily tip the balance in favor of the mamanatowick, or Great Chief as Powhatan was known, in his struggle not only to preserve the unity of his organization but also to defend it against encroachment from outsiders. In light of this pre-contact reality, Powhatan's post-contact actions toward the English reflect a level of sophistication and diplomatic savvy the English failed to recognize.

The nature of military and foreign relations between the peoples of pre-contact America provides useful insights for unraveling Powhatan's motivations regarding the English. Early observers of Indian warfare in North America dismissed it as motivated only by a desire for flamboyant displays of bravado. According to one early Spanish observer, "Their enmity and hatred spring primarily from a desire for ostentation ... and to gain experience in military science rather than from a desire to obtain the property and estate of another." Such shortsighted early accounts established a tradition in which scholars often viewed Native warfare as largely pointless, personal, and disconnected from the welfare of the larger group.

With the advent of ethnohistory during the mid-twentieth century, scholars began to reexamine these assumptions about warfare in the late prehistoric period. While the desire for revenge, personal status, or military knowledge all remain valid reasons for individual warriors to join a war party, they fail to explain the strategic reasons why the leaders of the group would want to commence such a war party in the first place. For example, soldiers in the US armed forces often cite a desire to serve one's country, gain certain training, earn money for college, or see the world as their motivations for enlistment, but those reasons do not explain why they are sent to specific locations to conduct specific missions. Only the interests of the nation expressed (accurately or inaccurately) through the various levels of the US government can explain the reasons. Similarly, Native American groups in late pre-contact America went to war with one another for a variety of reasons, many of which corresponded with European reasons for warfare.

Therefore, these multiple motivations for warfare — some personal, some societal, and even some derived from environmental stimuli — necessitated a very dynamic and fluid sociopolitical landscape. New alliances, polities, conflicts, and enemies appeared and reappeared on a regular basis. Powhatan's paramount chiefdom constitutes a prime example of this phenomenon. As discussed previously, Powhatan did not inherit the paramount chiefdom but rather created it by enhancing his original inheritance of six districts split between the York and James Rivers. The chiefdom Powhatan led in 1607 represented a recent creation forged through the crucible of tensions and conflict that surrounded his initial inheritance.

Elements of the Powhatan cosmology and religion support this notion. In one creation account, the relationship between the primary deity (who appears as a "great hare") and the four gods representing the cardinal directions is one of animosity, jealousy, and conflict. The four deities attempt to eat the men and women created and protected by the great hare. After the hare repulses their initial attack and creates the "great deer," they return in a jealous rage and kill the deer. Finally, at the end of the story, the great hare releases the men and women from his immediate protection and scatters them in different countries, presumably those from whence came the various tribal groupings. Another Virginia Algonquian creation account tells a similar tale in which the great hare protected the first men and women from a great serpent that came into their country to destroy them, after which they were dispersed in the same manner as the people in the previous creation story. These creation accounts seem to parallel the creation of Powhatan's chiefdom itself, which had occurred not long before the arrival of the English.

The huskanaw, the only Powhatan ritual about which we have credible information, reveals the contested and violent nature of pre-contact Virginia as well. Violence, abduction, pain, captivity, and wilderness represent repeated themes in the performance of the ritual. According to anthropologist Helen Rountree, "The Powhatan huskanaw was a product of chiefdom-level societies living in a state of war with their neighbors." Groups not immediately threatened by their neighbors or European invaders seem to have lacked rituals such as the huskanaw.

Beyond the realm of religious symbolism, the political relations among Virginia Algonquians located in different geographies also support the idea of disunity in the immediate pre-contact period. The Indians of the Eastern Shore shared basic Algonquian characteristics with Powhatan's mainland chiefdom. However, their geographic isolation created significant political and cultural fissures between them and their mainland kinsmen. At the time of the Jamestown expedition, Eastern Shore Algonquians only nominally recognized Powhatan's authority.

In addition, the Eastern Shore groups exhibited distinct cultural and political traits that distinguished them from the mainland Algonquians. None of the Eastern Shore groups practiced the huskanaw ritual. Their subsistence systems and political structures differed in many ways from those of the Powhatans. For example, no evidence exists to suggest that the priesthood operated the same on the Eastern Shore as it did on the western side of the Chesapeake. Furthermore, according to both Rountree and Thomas Davidson, some Eastern Shore groups used a political system in which the district weroances ruled together as equals, while others reproduced the Powhatan system in which district weroances remained subordinate to an overall paramount chief. Finally, only the paramount chief who governed the Accomack and Occohannock people swore allegiance to Powhatan.

The various Algonquian groups living in the northern reaches of Virginia near the Potomac River also frequently resisted Powhatan's rule. Their relationship to Powhatan evokes comparisons to the Germanic and Gallic "barbarians" of the Roman Empire. Particularly after the English arrived, these groups' loyalty tended to decline. For example, in 1610 Henry Spelman, a young Englishman who lived among the Powhatans for a time, began to sense that the deteriorating relationship between his countrymen and the Powhatans had placed him in a dangerous position, and he feared for his life. It would seem that his intuition was correct, as Powhatan had decided to kill him. Ultimately, Spelman survived by exploiting one of the existing divisions within the paramount chiefdom. In an act of open defiance, the Patawomecks, one of the Potomac River groups, helped Spelman escape and sheltered him from Powhatan's wrath. According to archaeologist Stephen Potter, "The Patawomecks were the largest and most powerful of the northern Virginia Algonquian chiefdoms and had been key players in the Native trade network before the English invasion." Potter estimates their population at around 1,000. Their considerable distance from Powhatan's seat at Werowocomoco, their military strength, and the considerable wealth derived from their trading activities allowed them to follow Powhatan's directives only when it suited their interests. As English power in the region grew, the Patawomecks increasingly cast their lot with the newcomers and began to defy Powhatan more often.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607325241
• ISBN 13: 9781607325246
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226