The French first brought the Récollets, a Franciscan order, to minister to the Indians in New France beginning in 1615. The Récollets believed that conversion was the end of a long process of acculturation, in which the Indians would learn to speak and live as Frenchmen. In this they were similar to English missionaries in New England, who insisted that converts abandon their culture, their clothes, their long hair, their names, and often even their homes to live in “Praying towns.” Neither the Récollets nor the English (at least initially) enjoyed any great measure of success.
In 1625, though, the Jesuits—an order founded by a former military man and with none of the passivity of the Récollets—arrived in New France, embarking on what would be a stunningly successful campaign of conversion. This was especially striking given their earlier failure in Virginia, but the Jesuits had learned from their mistakes on the Chesapeake. The “Black Robes” abandoned the idea of civilizing the Indians in the European model before trying to win their souls. Instead, they lived among the Mi’kmaq, Huron, Montagnais, Abenaki (as the Wapánahki came to be known), and other tribes. Instead of depending on Native go-betweens such as Don Luis de Velasco, the priests themselves learned the Indian languages and ways, suffering the same privations and approaching the question of conversion with a shrewd mix of fiery religious fervor, utter fearlessness, and deep pragmatism.
The Jesuits tried to discredit Native shamans and religious leaders, while allowing Indian traditions to color this transplanted Catholicism. Beyond gathering souls for the church, the Jesuits provided a thin but crucial buttress for the French presence (and policy) across the far-flung empire that was New France. Like many of their Protestant counterparts in New England, they had little theological problem with warfare against apostates and heretics. Some of the Jesuit fathers not only incited attacks against the enemies of France, but also participated in the raids themselves.
In many ways, the missionaries found the most chaotic fields to be the most productive; those whose lives were upended by disease, war, and cultural unrest were especially open to proselytizing. Many among the Indians, however, blamed the Black Robes themselves for the evil changes that had come upon them.
They “attribute to the Faith all the wars, diseases, and calamities of the country,” Father Paul Le Jeune said, and “they assert that their change of Religion has caused their change of fortune; and that their Baptism was at once followed by every possible misfortune. The Dutch, they say, have preserved the Iroquois by allowing them to live in their own fashion, just as the black Gowns have ruined the Huron by preaching faith to them.”
While they might not have understood the germ theory of disease transmission, Indians from the Huron in the north to the Timucua in the south recognized that contagion seemed to follow all these newcomers from over the sea. So why not simply abandon their villages, the perceived sorcery of the priests, and the assumed vengeance of the newcomers’ god? Aside from the very human desire to stay close to places and people they knew, by the early 1600s many Indian societies had already become so tightly woven into trade arrangements and military alliances—as well as so closely bound by religious ties—that it would have been difficult or impossible for them to just pull up stakes and move.
The seasonal round of movements, from winter camps to summer villages, from the deep interior to the coast, began to come to an end. Both for the traders and the missionaries, it was better that the Indians live permanently in one place, where schools and churches (and trading posts and military oversight) could be established.
Nor were the Europeans, even from the earliest moments of contact, at all shy about casting their lot militarily with their new neighbors. As early as 1609, Champlain and two of his men joined a mixed force of Montagnais, Huron, and Algonquians to defeat several hundred Mohawk, with Champlain personally killing two Mohawk leaders with a single blast from his harquebus. It cemented early Algonquian loyalty to the French but also cast the die for French-Iroquois hostility that would last for more than a century.
The Mohawk, meanwhile, were receiving support from their Dutch trading partners in their war with the Susquehannock. In turn, the Susquehannock welcomed English colonists from Virginia to their palisaded towns along the lower Susquehanna River—colonists who were already trading with Powhatan’s confederacy, the Susquehannock’s enemies.
Champlain Fights the Mohawk
From the very beginning, Native leaders and colonists found themselves enmeshed in alliances and tangled in feuds—between imperial rivals or tribal enemies—whose implications they rarely understood. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain and several hundred Montagnais, Huron, and Algonquian allies fought a pitched battle against Mohawk warriors along what the Frenchman dubbed Lake Champlain. The wheel-lock harquebuses carried by Champlain and his two French companions proved decisive, killing several Mohawk leaders and demoralizing their battle-hardened warriors, but the victory sparked generations of conflict between New France and the Iroquois League. (Library of Congress)
European traders immediately noticed that the Indians sought some items in their inventory more eagerly than others. Anything blue or red was snapped up—cloth, ribbons, beads—while white or other light-colored material was usually scorned. Small mirrors, metal bells, and cheap jewelry were prized, often over utilitarian objects such as knives or axes. “Generally covetous of Copper, Beads and such like trash,” John Smith dismissively said of Virginia’s Natives, but this may not have been simple (or simply due to) taste. European objects, at least initially, were thought to embody the supernatural power of these new beings. Even years later, the language of the Montagnais-Naskapi in Quebec and Labrador reflected the connection between məntu’—a sense of the magical and inexplicable—and these new objects: məntu’wian for cloth, and məntu’ mines’it for beadwork.
One thing the Indians especially wanted were European weapons. Powhatan, squeezing the hungry colonists at Jamestown during one of their early famines, traded twenty turkeys for twenty swords, and he rarely missed an opportunity to bargain for weapons thereafter, although the English tried to limit those acquisitions. (Opechancanough’s Pamunkey, having acquired a bag of gunpowder in those initial years of contact, tried to plant the dark grains as though they were seeds.)
The real prizes were firearms, which, despite the cumbersome nature of matchlock muskets, gave the Europeans an overwhelming advantage of distance and accuracy, especially when musketeers were assembled in ranks. Gaining guns became a fixation of both Powhatan and Opechancanough, when he took the reins of the confederacy after Powhatan’s death in 1618.
Opechancanough’s ascendancy marked a striking change of fortune. In 1609, he’d been humiliated in front of his people when John Smith jammed a pistol into the werowance’s ribs and stole his corn—an indignity reinforced later by a beating that Smith gave Opechancanough’s son. Thereafter, the Indian leader endured a long period of diminished prestige among the werowances of Tsenacommacah, even losing one of his favorite wives to a political rival. But he slowly rebuilt his power base, and the aging Powhatan relinquished to his younger brother more and more of his authority, until Powhatan’s death brought to Opechancanough the mantle of mamanatowick.
By then, the English presence had grown dramatically. None of the original attempts to make Jamestown profitable for its investors—including experiments with minerals, silk, tar and pitch, and glassmaking, among other endeavors—had yielded much profit. So in 1616, the Virginia Company in England opened the colony to privately backed “particular plantations.” Typical were Warresquioake, about sixteen miles downriver from Jamestown, where sixty freemen and African slaves worked the fields, and Martin’s Hundred, on the north shore about seven miles below Jamestown Island.
Settled in 1620 by more than two hundred immigrants, Martin’s Hundred encompassed 21,000 acres, with its daily life centered on Wolstenholme Towne, a small cluster of wood-framed, wattle-and-daub houses with thatched roofs on a bluff above the James River. The lay
out of the village was one any English colonist, from Virginia to Plymouth to Popham in Maine, would have instantly recognized. In fact, English and Scottish settlers displacing the northern Irish in Ulster were using the same town plan, which featured a palisaded fort called a bawne.
From the Gaelic word bàdhùn, meaning “cattle fortress,” a bawne was originally a tall fence around a cottage’s farmyard, which served as a nighttime corral in times of peace and as a defensive barrier in times of war. By the early seventeenth century, the concept had grown into a central fort, and many of the investors underwriting plantations issued very similar instructions to emigrants, whether bound for Virginia, New England, or northern Ireland, on how to plan, build, and defend their communities.
The main bawne at Martin’s Hundred was a lopsided log fort with two “flankers” (watchtowers protruding from the walls that gave the defenders a clear line of fire) that protected the leader’s fairly rustic house and served as a refuge in case of attack. A cannon mounted in one of the flankers covered a small complex of company-owned barns, sheds, and workrooms, which, like many of the private homes, had bawne fences of their own.
Tobacco was driving the expansion of Martin’s Hundred and the rest of the Virginia colony. The Indian crop had become all the rage in England, and after so many commercial failures, it was responsible for the budding success of Jamestown and its surrounding settlements. It was also consuming more and more Algonquian land, at a time when virgin soil epidemics were ravaging the people of Tsenacommacah and reducing their numbers. The balance along the Virginia tidewater was rapidly shifting in favor of the white tassantassas, and Opechancanough decided to move before it was too late.
For years, English missionaries had tried to convert the Powhatan people, with marginal success. Opechancanough, playing a cunning game of political chess, finally agreed to let young Algonquian men learn the new religion—if they were also schooled in musketry. The Indian stockpile of guns had slowly but steadily grown, and with it the sophistication to use the new technology.
For their part, the colonists were smug and complacent—“settled in such a firm peace, as most men there thought sure and unvoidable,” Smith’s history recounts. “The poore weake Salvages being in every way bettered by us, and safely sheltered and defended, whereby wee might freely follow our businesse.” An emissary visiting Opechancanough in the middle of March was told by the grand chief that “he held the peace so firm, the sky should fall or he dissolved it.”
The sky fell a week later, on March 22, 1622—Good Friday morning, a day Opechancanough knew had special significance for the tassantassas. Up and down the tidewater, unarmed Indians appeared outside the bawne walls of towns and the dooryards of isolated houses, holding up game. There was no sign of danger, for the Indians bore no weapons.
“They came unarmed into our houses, without Bowes or arrowes, or other weapons, with Deere, Turkies, Fish, Furres, and other provisions, to sell, and trucke with us, for glasse, beades, and other trifles,” wrote Edward Waterhouse, recounting the coordinated, simultaneous assault on dozens of plantations and villages along both sides of the James River.
Yea in some places, [they] sate downe at Breakfast with our people at their tables, whom immediately with their owne tooles and weapons, eyther laid downe, or standing in their houses, they basely and barbarously murthered, not sparing eyther age or sexe, man, woman or childe . . . And by this meanes that fatall Friday morning there fell under the bloody and barbarous hands of that perfidous and inhumane people, contrary to all lawes of God and men, three hundred forty seven men, women, and children, most by their owne weapons.
The surprise was not universal—one farmer, tipped off by an Indian with whom he had grown friendly, rowed his small boat furiously across the river in the middle of the night, alerting Jamestown and some neighboring plantations—but most outlying settlements had no warning. When the carnage was over, nearly 350 people—a third of the English colonists—were dead. Fifty-two were killed at Warresquioake alone, although a few men were able to barricade themselves and their families inside, defending themselves with musket fire. Among the handful of survivors was “Antonio the Negro,” a newly arrived slave, who would go on to gain his freedom, move to the Eastern Shore, and become one of the largest black landholders there.
At Martin’s Hundred, virtually the entire settlement was burned, and about 80 of the 140 people who lived there were killed. Victims who had been bludgeoned to death with their own garden spades were mutilated, scalped, and left among the smoking ruins. Many of the survivors were taken captive.
As they had been a dozen years earlier, the English were pushed to the wall. But when Opechancanough tried to evict them completely, he failed. The colonists regrouped, abandoning the smaller outlying farms and consolidating the survivors into five or six strongly defended plantations. (The authorities had to threaten to burn the property of one Mistress Proctor before the “proper, civill, modest Gentlewoman” would consent to move.) And then they struck back with a ferocity that may have surprised Opechancanough and his werowances.
War raged for three more years, including a massive two-day battle in which the Indian musketeers proved themselves the equal of their English counterparts. The English also tried a grand deceit of their own, inviting the Indians to a peace parley, then serving poisoned liquor that killed hundreds. Eventually, both sides grew fatigued with the fight and, after years of sporadic violence, made peace in 1632.
The great chiefdom of Tsenacommacah, which once commanded eight thousand square miles, was by then sadly reduced. The flow of colonists increased each year, and the land they now claimed along all the tidewater rivers was expanding at a growing pace. Opechancanough made one last attempt to reclaim the Chesapeake tidelands for his people—another surprise assault in 1644, when the old leader was probably in his late nineties, so infirm his servants had to hold open his sagging eyelids.
The death toll was even higher this time—some five hundred settlers—but the colonies were so populous and firmly entrenched that nothing could move them. In the wake of the attacks, Opechancanough, barely able to walk, was captured by Sir William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia. Berkeley planned to ship the old werowance off to England, but before he had a chance, a soldier guarding Opechancanough shot him in the back, and the last of the great Algonquian mamanatowicks was gone.
PART II
“LET US NOT LIVE TO BEE ENSLAVED”
Chapter 4
“Why Should You Be So Furious?”
From the first attack on the freshly landed Jamestown settlers to Opechancanough’s murder and the eventual collapse of Powhatan’s once great chiefdom, the early history of the Jamestown colony seems like the quintessence of frontier relations between Native tribes and encroaching Europeans, no matter through what prism one views it.
For generations, the massacre of 1622 was considered the epitome of Indian deception and cruelty, and the eventual triumph of the English settlers over these forces of savagery was thought to be foreordained by the divine. “In consideration of Gods most mercifull deliverance of so many in this Cuntrie of Virginia from the treachery of the Indians,” proclaimed Governor Francis Wyatt shortly after the attack, “the 22th day of March . . . forever hereafter . . . be in this Cuntrie celebrated Holy.” More recently, historians have reexamined the strategy of Powhatan and Opechancanough from the perspective of an active Algonquian resistance against an often brutal invasion and blatant theft of land, concluding that Opechancanough in particular was “the archetype of later and better-known patriot chiefs.”
But in many ways, Jamestown was an exception, especially in regard to the immediate and rapidly escalating violence between the two extraordinarily different cultures. A period—often a surprisingly long period—of mutual accommodation and cooperation was the rule along much of the First Frontier. Though ginger and tentative, and fraught with miscalculations, these early relations provide a hint of what might have been, had not greed, hum
an nature, and the overwhelming number of European immigrants eventually become too much for the tenuous peace to bear.
Initially, such coexistence was certainly abetted by a fundamental misunderstanding over land. To Europeans, land was a commodity to be owned outright by one person or entity, and ownership was clear-cut and guaranteed by law. Among the Indians, to the extent that land was “owned” at all, it was held communally and represented a complex web of vital resources both physical and spiritual, bound tightly with the seasonal round of life and in which was deeply embedded intricate social bonds. While boundaries (not only between neighboring tribes but also between clans, bands, and extended families within the same community) might be sharply drawn and at times breached only at great peril, the notion that a single person might buy land and hold it in perpetuity was a profoundly foreign concept.
So when Peter Minuit and a boatload of Swedes dropped anchor along the lower Delaware River in 1638 and negotiated through a translator with the Lenape, it is quite certain that the five sachems with whom they met had no idea they had “ceded, transported, and transferred the said land”—a huge swath of Delaware Bay some fifty miles south from the mouth of the Schuylkill River—“with all its jurisdiction, sovereignty, and rights to the Swedish Florida Company,” much less that they had been “paid and fully compensated for it by good and proper merchandise.”
Minuit had made a similar deal in 1626 for Manhattan Island, and then, as now along the Delaware, the Lenape sachems with whom he met saw the goods he offered not as payment, but as rare and valuable gifts solemnifying an important new relationship. Gift giving was a practice of immense importance in Algonquian culture, and by granting the use of Lenape territory, the sachems were, in their eyes, making a gift of significant reciprocity. They fully expected to continue to use the land themselves, as they always had, exchanging still more gifts as their relationship with these strange newcomers grew. To the Indians, this was good manners. To the Swedes, Finns, and Dutch with whom the Lenape dealt, it was good diplomacy. That these miscomprehensions meshed was a matter of dumb luck, because at least at first, neither side realized how the other viewed matters.
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