Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  The establishment of the General Assembly in 1619 and the introduction of broad-based property ownership the same year were critical milestones on the path to American liberty and self-government. It is hard to overstate their lasting effect on American political culture, as the bases for the eventual spread of private property and representative government in the English colonies. Once the company had granted those prerogatives, they could not easily be pulled back; moreover, as new commercially oriented colonies were organized in the mid-Atlantic region and the south in later years, their organizers would have no choice but to offer similar prerogatives if they hoped to compete for new colonists.10

  More was planted during the summer of 1619 than the seeds of American democracy, however. By a strange coincidence, no sooner did the first session of the General Assembly close than another American institution had its beginning—one that would prove powerfully malignant. It is too unbelievable to credit, but nonetheless true, that American democracy and American slavery put down their roots within weeks of each other.

  At the end of August, a 160-ton ship named the White Lion arrived at Point Comfort bearing a cargo of “20 and odd Negroes.” The ship, a Dutch man-of-war commanded by a Captain Jope, had met in the West Indies with a ship out of Jamestown, the Treasurer, commanded by Daniel Elfrith or Elfirth. Jope and Elfrith were of like mind and made an informal pact of consortship, that is, they agreed to join together in an attack on foreign shipping and to divide the spoils afterward. The target they then encountered was the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship under Manuel Mendes de Acunha that was en route to Vera Cruz, Mexico. Mendes de Acunha had cast off from the Portuguese colonial capital of Luanda, Angola, earlier in the year with 350 Africans on board. The sponsor of that voyage, Antonio Fernandes Delvas of Lisbon, had contracted to pay 115,000 ducats a year to Spain’s King Philip III in return for a license to import between 3,500 and 5,000 Africans a year to the Spanish New World.

  Jope and Elfrith confronted the São João Bautista off the Mexican coast. They took control of the Portuguese ship without firing a shot. A passenger on the Treasurer later recalled that they “mett with an Angola shippe which had noe goods whatsoever in her and commaunded her to strike saile,” taking Africans and, he added ruefully, “noethinge ells.” Jope arrived in Virginia with a little more than twenty slaves, and Elfrith followed a few days later with just over thirty. Mendes de Acunha reached Vera Cruz with 147 slaves of the 350 he started with.

  Lurking in these numbers is the first of many questions: what happened to the 140 or so slaves who are not accounted for? The grisly answer is that they were probably already dead by the time the São João Bautista reached the West Indies, having starved or fallen ill while crossing the Atlantic from Africa. Indeed, a death rate of around 50 percent would have matched the estimated overall death rate of Africans making that “middle passage” over the centuries. An Englishman who traveled on numerous slave ships in the eighteenth century recounted the circumstances of the chained humans in the holds below:

  Some wet and blowing weather having occasioned the port-holes to be shut and the grating to be covered, fluxes [dysentery] and fevers among the negroes ensued. While they were in this situation, I went down among them till at length their rooms became so extremely hot as to be only bearable for a very short time. . . . The floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. . . . 11

  Governor Yeardley bought the “20 and odd” Africans of the White Lion in exchange for the food that Jope sought for his return voyage. When the Treasurer arrived, Elfrith sought to buy rations from the residents of the borough of Kiccowtan, and then quickly set out again for the Atlantic after they turned him down. Elfrith was likely fearful of lingering in Virginia because, as the captain of an English-flag vessel, he was at risk of arrest for his unlicensed piracy. (The crewmen of the Treasurer would later contend, implausibly and self-servingly, that they had taken part in the raid only because the White Lion had threatened to shoot at their ship if they refused.) During Elfrith’s short stay, at least one of the African women on board either escaped or was sold, and remained in Virginia. That woman was known only as “Angelo.” As it happened, the ship that brought her to America in captivity was the same Treasurer that had brought Pocahontas to Jamestown in captivity.

  Most or all of the men, women, and children of the São João Bautista are believed to have been captured and enslaved in the course of a Portuguese war of expansion against the kingdom of Ndongo, around 125 miles inland from Luanda. The Portuguese forces alone were not sufficient to achieve the conquests desired by the colonial governor, Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos. The Portuguese found willing native allies, however, in the sinister organization known as the Imbangala, who have been described as “a quasi-religious cult dedicated to evil in the central African sense of violent greed and selfishness.” They practiced human sacrifice of adults and children. Numbering in the thousands, they lived by marauding through one region of the countryside after another, seizing food, livestock, and people as they went. In their symbiotic relationship with the Portuguese, the Imbangala fought the Ndongo kingdom alongside the colonial forces and sold their captives to Portuguese slave traders.

  The Portuguese and Imbangala attacks on Ndongo in 1618 and 1619 resulted in the ensnarement of thousands; they were held in Luanda—now overcrowded by the penned-up humanity—until Portuguese or Spanish ships could haul them away. A total of thirty-six slave ships took captives from Luanda to sell in Brazil, Mexico, and the Caribbean in 1619. Only those of the São João Bautista ended up in Virginia.

  When the Africans disembarked from the Dutch man-of-war and the Treasurer, they would have noticed a number of contrasts between their new environment and their homeland. The intense heat and humidity of Jamestown in August would have seemed particularly harsh to a people such as those of Ndongo, who had formerly made their homes in a cool, elevated territory. The majority of them probably came from Ndongo’s relatively urbanized royal district, populated by twenty or thirty thousand residents living in five thousand or more thatched homes—making it twenty or thirty times as populous as the Virginia colony in 1619. The Africans coming from the two ships were more or less evenly divided between men and women, while the colony itself was lopsidedly male by a ratio of around seven to one.

  The Africans had arrived in the midst of the colony’s tobacco harvest season, and they were undoubtably set to work in the tobacco fields alongside white servants. Although lucrative, the plant was exceptionally labor-intensive compared to corn or wheat. Thousands of acres of plants would need to be cut down, left in the field for the night to “sweat,” and then hung the next day from the rafters of a tobacco house to cure. When the cured plants were brought back down, workers stripped each leaf from its stalk, pulled the largest veins from each leaf, and loaded the leaves into barrels. The harvest was the easiest part of the tobacco cycle, at that—the really backbreaking labor would come during planting and weeding season the following year. “It is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness,” Thomas Jefferson would write 168 years later. “Those employed in it are in a continual state of exertion beyond the powers of nature to support.”

  But what was the Africans’ status? Although it is tempting to assume that these first recorded Africans in English America were also the first slaves, there is evidence to suggest they were not. They may instead have had the legal position of indentured servants, like many of the white newcomers, eligible for freedom after completing a period of service. Clear evidence of hereditary slavery does not appear in the records until the 1640s; the question remains whether this reflects a lack of slavery in the years preceding, or a lack of records. The sparse historical evidence on the status of African Americans in those years has vexed historians for generations.

  John Smith, as already noted, denounced Englishman Thomas Hunt for capturing twenty-seven nativ
es in present-day Massachusetts in 1614 and selling their “poore innocent soules” into Spanish slavery. Of course, Smith would have regarded slavery that way, having worn its iron yoke himself for a time. Yet he was not alone. John Pory wrote of the natives of that territory as “mortal enemies to all other English, ever since Hunt most wickedly stole away their people to sell them for slaves.”

  Virginia law at the time made no provision for hereditary slavery, and the institution had disappeared from England over a century earlier. The Africans from the Dutch man-of-war were recorded in the census of 1620, together with four natives, under the ambiguous title of “others not Christians in the service of the English.” What is known is that some African arrivals of the early years eventually won their freedom—or won it back, to be more precise. One of them, a man who later took the name John Gowen or Geaween, was free by 1641, when he was working as a servant to farmer William Evans. Gowen had a child with a slave woman owned by Lieutenant Robert Sheppard; although Gowen was free, their child became Sheppard’s property.

  Gowen was able to get his family partway out of slavery’s shadow. At some point, Evans was inspired to give Gowen some hogs to breed, with the proviso that Evans would get “half the increase.” This Gowen did with great success, to the delight and profit of his employer. Gowen used his share to buy his child’s freedom from Lieutenant Sheppard, and so the child was freed by order of the local court. But Sheppard evidently would not part with the child’s mother, who remained in bondage.

  Another member of this early group, who arrived in 1621 and was called “Antonio a Negro,” went on to become not only a free man under the name Anthony Johnson, but a farmer of substantial means. He had 250 acres of holdings by 1651. With Johnson’s prosperity, he evidently came to identify with the white landowning class: he became a slaveowner himself around this time, and in 1654 successfully sued for the return of his slave, John Casor, when Casor escaped and took refuge on a neighbor’s land. 12

  If the Virginia Africans of 1619 were not held as slaves themselves, the pathway to American slavery was already clear. “Mislike me not for my complexion [color],” Shakespeare’s Prince of Morocco feels it necessary to tell Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Unlike their view of the natives of Virginia, the English harbored no belief that the Africans would be white if they merely stopped painting their skin. In contrast with Alexander Whitaker’s proud news of his instruction of Pocahontas, there would be no recorded effort to convert and baptize the black “others not Christians” (who may have already been exposed to Christianity by way of the Portuguese missions in Angola). Notions of black racial inferiority seem to have been firmly in place in the colony from the start.

  A roster made five years later of the colony’s living residents put the matter in stark relief. It showed twenty-two blacks—but where the white residents were generally listed by first and last name, the blacks were listed either by first name only or by no name at all. Ten of the twenty-three blacks were given anonymous listings such as “negors,” “one negar,” or “a negors woman.” A roster made a year later showed much the same pattern. Of the twenty-three blacks in that listing, only four were graced with a first name and a last name, while white servants were almost invariably named in full. Within Jamestown itself, twenty-three of the twenty-four white servants had complete records in the 1625 roster of their names, ages, and arrival dates. For the eight blacks in the capital, the full listing reads “negro men 3 negro woemen 5.” In that single line, the colonists conveyed the Africans’ bitter social position, if not their legal status: colonial officials were already describing the Africans the same way they cataloged commodities.13

  14

  MARCH 22, 1622: SKYFALL

  On May 17, 1620, as the shareholders of the Virginia Company were about to hold their annual election of the company’s chief executive, King James sent a messenger to the meeting with his directions. Out of His Majesty’s great care for the colony, the messenger related, the king wished the company to choose from his own list of four names, “Sir Thomas Smith [Smythe, the former treasurer], Sir Thomas Roe, Mr. Alderman [Robert] Johnson, and Mr. Maurice Abbott, and noe other.” The hundreds of assembled officers and shareholders, taken by surprise, decided to postpone the vote until they could figure out what to do.

  The king could not have made it clearer that he did not want his parliamentary adversary, Sir Edwin Sandys, retained as the company’s leader. Soon after the aborted meeting, however, the company sent two members of its council to Whitehall Palace to ask him to give way. Those emissaries—William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton—cautiously reminded the king that he had granted the company freedom of election in his charter. His loving subjects would be grateful, they said, to elect the treasurer of their choice. Possibly His Majesty had received misinformation about Sir Edwin Sandys and the company.

  His annoyance growing by the minute, King James retorted that Sandys was his worst enemy. He could scarcely hold a good opinion of anyone who was Sandys’s friend, he told Herbert and Wriothesley. “In a furious passion,” the two men later recalled, the king broke off the conversation by thundering, “ ‘Choose the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys.’ ” The company proceeded on June 28 to elect Wriothesley himself, who operated as a front for Sandys in practice.1

  The Powhatans in Virginia had also seen an unorthodox change in leadership. Upon his death in 1618, Chief Powhatan had been succeeded by his brother Opitchapam in the usual manner. But Opitchapam—now “decrepit and lame,” in the words of an English observer—lacked the physical vigor expected of a Powhatan chief of chiefs. Whether by amicable agreement or otherwise, Opitchapam was soon displaced from power by his brother Opechancanough, the next in the line of succession. Opitchapam remained leader in name, while Opechancanough became leader in fact.

  Opechancanough was a large man, and dignified, as Powhatan had been. In the eyes of the colony’s leaders, he seemed to value his friendship with the English. Even though English plantations were taking up ever larger sections of the waterfront on the James, Opechancanough assured them that he and Opitchapam desired nothing more than to continue the state of peace they had enjoyed since 1614. His avowals of peace brought great comfort to the colonists and the company alike: the cultivation of tobacco, and the acculturation of savages, could proceed apace. The company directed hopefully in 1621 “that the best meanes bee used to draw the better disposed of the natives to converse with our people and labor amongst them with convenient reward, that thereby they may growe to a likeing and love of civility, and finally bee brought to the knowledge and love of god and true religion. . . .”2

  The company had already set aside 10,000 acres of land at Henricus, the site of Pocahontas’s conversion, for a college to carry out the instruction of native youths “in true religion, moral virtue, and civility.” An anonymous donor in England, signing himself with the melodramatic name “Dust and Ashes,” had donated £550 toward the creation of a free school for younger native children, and promised another £450 if the company would bring eight or ten native children to be educated in London. A new arrival in May 1620 would lead the colony’s first serious efforts to win large numbers of the natives to the English way of life.

  George Thorpe was officially “deputy for the college lands,” reporting to Governor Yeardley, but he conceived his role far more broadly than founding a new college. Thorpe came to believe that the veterans of the colony wrongly viewed the natives as antagonistic and untrustworthy. Christian kindness was needed, Thorpe argued, to gain their esteem. Virtually all of the colonists, Thorpe wrote, held “a violent mispersuasion . . . that these poore people have done unto us all the wronge and injurie that the malice of the Devill or man cann affoord.” It was time, he said, to put these preconceptions aside, and to make the natives feel loved.

  In my poore understandinge if there bee wronge on any side it is on ours who are not soe charitable to them as Christians ought to
bee, they beinge (espetiallye the better sort of them) of a peaceable and vertuous disposition. . . . They begin more and more to affect English fashions and wilbe much alured to affect us by gifte if the company would be pleased to send something in matter of apparell and househouldestufe to bee bestowed upon them. . . . I thinke likewise the company shall doe well to make some publicke declaration of theire intente and desier of the conversion of this people and there withall a testification of their love and hartie affection towards them....3

  Thorpe had not developed his sympathy for the natives in a vacuum. For two or three years, a native youth, one of Pocahontas’s retinue, had lived as a manservant in Thorpe’s London household. With Pocahontas’s death and Tomocomo’s return to Virginia in 1617, the youth had evidently elected to remain in London with Thorpe. Thorpe had him tutored in reading and writing. That Thorpe and the native developed a close relationship on some level is suggested by the fact that the boy converted to Christianity and was baptized on September 10, 1619, as Georgius Thorp in the church of St. Martin in the Fields. Like Pocahontas, Georgius Thorp was not destined to survive the elements and unfamiliar diseases of England for long; he was near his end at the time of his baptism. Two weeks and three days later, he was buried at the same church, listed as “Georgius Thorp, Homo Virginiae. ”

  As Yeardley’s deputy, and with his backing, Thorpe was in a position to put his ideas into practice. In contrast with earlier days, the natives were now free to enter and roam the colony at will. Having the memory of his namesake in mind, Thorpe was zealous in disciplining any subordinates who caused the natives the slightest offense. After some natives complained to Thorpe of being frightened by English dogs, Thorpe had the offending dogs killed through hanging—a public hanging, so the natives could see for themselves that the animals would trouble them no more. “He thought nothing too deare [costly] for them,” a chronicler wrote a year or two later, “and as being desirous to binde them unto him by many courtesies, hee never denied them any thing that they asked him. . . .”