The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

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  With this unpromising mixture of “quality,” unruly, idle vagrants, and combat veterans, De La Warr began his effort to rebuild the colony. He set out the rules of government and sent some men to fish, others to revive the neglected cornfields and gardens; he saw to it that Jamestown’s church, palisades, and some of the houses and barracks were rebuilt. He also started the construction of two forts near the mouth of the James River and sent out expeditions to find provisions. In that, he was somewhat encouraged. The land, he found, was rich, and if the “mischeivous” Indians stood in the way of the company’s harvesting the nearby grain fields, he would master them “ere long, and … thresh it out on the flores of our barnes when the time shall serve,” for he was “irreconsilable” in recalling the Indians’ “late injuries and murthering of our men.” But the workers he had available, he wrote, were such “deboisht [debauched] hands … of such distempered bodies and infected mindes” that no example of goodness or threat of punishment “can deterr [them] from their habituall impieties or terrifie from a shameful death.” In their apathy, bewilderment, and disorientation—driven to labor as they never had been before and under punishing physical conditions—they quickly succumbed to despair and disease. In the first six months after De La Warr’s arrival, one-third of the settlers had sickened and died or were killed by the Indians.8

  Conflict with the natives began almost immediately, when the governor demanded that Powhatan stop his attacks on the English settlements and that the warriors who had recently killed four settlers be punished or handed over, together with all captives and stolen arms. He was careful to remind the paramount chief that he was a subject of King James. When Powhatan ignored the message and ordered the English to remain confined in Jamestown or be killed, and when a captured soldier was tortured to death before his companions’ eyes, conflict erupted and quickly escalated.9

  DE LA WARR ORDERED Gates to take revenge on the Kecoughtans, which he did with guile and savagery. His soldiers, mimicking an Indian gesture of hospitality, lured the Kecoughtan villagers into the open with the piping, dancing, and drumming of a young taborer, then killed fourteen of the men, women, and children who had come out to watch, and looted their lodges and fertile maize fields. A month later De La Warr sent Percy and seventy men to avenge the Paspaheghs’ failure to return arms and captives. Nothing and no one was spared. Percy’s troops killed fifteen or sixteen natives on the spot, burned down the village houses, and destroyed the crops. Returning downriver with the tribe’s “queen,” her children, and a male Indian captive in tow, Percy, criticized by his troops for burdening them with these encumbrances, “cawsed the Indians heade to be Cutt of[f],” and then was persuaded by his troops to allow them to kill the children, which they did by throwing them overboard and “shotingge owt their Braynes in the water.” The queen, for the time, was spared. After a foray inland to burn another village’s houses and crops and to destroy their “Spacyous Temple, cleane and neatly kept” though it was, Percy arrived back in Jamestown, to be told that the governor was “discontente” because the queen had not been disposed of. De La Warr thought it best, Percy was told, “to Burne her.” But “haveinge seene so mutche Blood shedd thatt day,” Percy “desired to see noe more,” and in any case, burning, he felt, was not “fittinge.” He therefore decided that if the queen was to be murdered it should be “by shott or Sworde to give her a quicker dispatche.” So Capt. James Davis, a remorseless “taskmaster” at the forts, took the woman into the woods and “putt her to the sworde.” The next episode in the series of summer raids was an expedition north, to the Chickahominies, whose houses the attackers burned and whose corn they confiscated. Then, quickly turning back across the James, they did the same to a nearby tribe on the south side of the river.10

  After these initial strikes, a troop of soldiers and some of the colony’s miners were sent west in search of a river passage to the South Sea and the location of rumored mines. Far from their base and from possible reinforcements, they came under constant attack and were lured to a feast among the Appomattocs. There, unsuspecting, they were attacked and either slain or badly wounded. Only the drummer boy of the Kecoughtan raid escaped. The fighting escalated, and the atrocities multiplied. When De La Warr suspected that some natives visiting the Jamestown fort were spies, he “caused one to have his hands cutt of[f], and so sentte [him] unto his fellowes to geve them warneinge for attemptinge the lyke.” By 1611 the conflict had taken on the aspects of a crusade, as religious fervor inflamed the already heated fears and passions. The Powhatans, for their part, appealed to their god of war, Okee, for support and for rescue from the fearful prophecy of extinction by an alien force from the east. The English, increasingly convinced that the natives were impelled by devilish spirits, attempted to redeem Christianity itself against “the gates of hel” and targeted especially “sathan’s owne brood,” the shamans, while tearing into the “temples” or whatever other religious manifestations they could find. But the Powhatans continued their deadly raids, celebrating their victories and mocking the cries of their tortured captives. Signs of mutiny appeared. When a group of miners was found to be conspiring to flee the colony, De La Warr promptly hanged the ringleader. But his effectiveness was weakening as his health deteriorated. When in March 1611 he became seriously ill, he left the colony, turning over control to Percy until the newly appointed deputy governor, Sir Thomas Dale, could join Gates in the new leadership.11

  The devastation continued. Before that year was out, seven more vessels arrived on the James River with 630 newcomers, bringing the total immigration from the beginning of settlement to just over 1,500, but the total population was only 450. In 1612 at least 122 new arrivals can be identified; in 1613, 30; in 1614, 40; in 1615, 65. By 1616 approximately 2,000 people had arrived under the company’s auspices, but the population had declined to 351.12

  Small as it was, the English population in 1616 was scattered among several settlements and encampments. Dale, upon his arrival, attempted to combine the dirt-raw farms and nascent plantations into five main population centers along the James River, between the coast and the Falls. To realize this plan he moved the center of the colony inland, away from the swampy, vulnerable island of Jamestown to higher, more remote and safer ground. Fifty miles west of Jamestown, at what he called Henrico (near the later Richmond), he built a palisaded village complete with fort, storehouses, and a number of small houses. Three years later it had a few streets, the foundation of a substantial church, and a flourishing field of corn. Across the river from Henrico he established Coxendale, enclosing, within a palisade guarded by four corner towers, one hundred acres of high ground, on which, he hoped, would later be built a parsonage, a retreat, and an infirmary. Further, using traditional English designations in a very un-English setting, he founded several “hundreds” and two “cities.” To the east, near Jamestown, he grouped together a cluster of small riverside clearings (“Diggs His Hundred,” the Upper and the Nether Hundreds, Rochdale Hundred, and West’s Shirley Hundred) to form a unit he called “Bermuda [later Charles] City.” By 1616 Bermuda City, designed as “an impregnable retreat against any forraign invasion, how powerful so ever,” contained 119 people and was the most active and productive center of the colony; it served at times as the colony’s administrative headquarters. Then, at the mouth of the James River, he founded what he called “Elizabeth City,” built out of the two rudimentary forts centered on the site of the Indians’ Kecoughtan, which the natives had had to abandon. And across Chesapeake Bay, on the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, he set up an isolated fishing station which he named “Dale’s Gift,” together with a small salt works.13

  Sir Thomas Dale (illustration credit 3.2)

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  While Dale sought to bring order into the scattering of new farms by clustering them into nominal communities, he directed his energies mainly to two other goals, for the attainment of which his military experience proved crucial. For he was, even more th
an others who had led the colony, a professional soldier. He had served in the Dutch wars, rising from the ranks to a captaincy; then fought in France under Henry IV; then in Ireland under the Earl of Essex; and finally again in the Netherlands, where he commanded an English company in Dutch service and was favored with a knighthood. In both Ireland and the Netherlands he had served together with Gates; at one point both were in active service with the future Lord De La Warr. Thus broadly connected with the Virginia promoters and strongly supported by his patron, Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, Dale was an obvious choice, in the company’s reorganization of 1609, to be appointed the provost of the colony—that is, the military commander and in effect the chief of police—as well as deputy governor.14

  His whole life having been spent in the military (he would die in Java in 1619, after leading a naval victory over the Dutch), Dale, like De La Warr and Gates, believed that the problems Virginia faced could best be solved by military means. The company’s instructions to the new governor and his deputies supported this idea. Not only were they given “full and absolute power and aucthority to correct, punishe, pardon, governe and rule” all the company’s “subjects,” agreeably with the laws and policies of England, but when faced with rebellion, mutiny, and cases of “necessity,” they were to “proceede by martiall lawe,” without bothering with “the nicenes and lettre” of ordinary English law, and in adjudication they were free to act on natural right and equity as a chancellor, rather than a judge, might do.15

  With this mandate, the new leaders were determined to turn Virginia’s ragged and often despairing “crue” of “disordered Persons, so prophane, so riotous, so full of mutenie and treasonable Intendments,” into a disciplined workforce capable of sustaining and defending itself. To do this and to make profitable this wretched “parcell” of humanity, who had been snatched from “riotous, lasie [lazy] and infected places,” whose bodies were now so “diseased and ill used” by sea and climate as to “render them unhable, fainte, and desperate of recoverie,” they proceeded to devise a strict, quasi-military regime. Gates, upon his arrival, published a prepared set of thirty-seven regulations covering everything from attendance at church to murder, blasphemy, sodomy, slander, rape, illegal trade, “disgraceful words,” unauthorized slaughter of animals, dumping of dirty laundry water and doing “the necessities of nature” close to the palisades, failing to keep houses and streets clean, running off to the Indians, failing to report to work “upon the beating of the drum,” robbing gardens, stealing laundry, failing to pay debts, and falsifying weights and measures. The penalties for violations were severe. In eighteen cases the punishment was death; in the others, whipping, tying together of head and heels, branding, loss of ears, and a familiar but seldom used punishment for incorrigibles, who thereby became “slaves”—service in the galleys. That in fact there were no galleys in the American coastal waters and few in England was beside the point. The severity of punishment extended to the limits of punitive imaginings, and the propriety of using English criminals, army deserters, rogues, and vagabonds as galley slaves had recently been reiterated in English law.16

  To Gates’s rules Dale, as provost, added fifty-one provisions of the martial law, regulating every conceivable aspect of a soldier’s life, violation of which in almost every case was to be punished by death. And Dale laid out in addition separate sets of detailed instructions for the behavior and duties of colonels, captains, ensigns, sergeants, corporals, and private soldiers. The whole compilation ended in an elaborate prayer to be delivered morning and evening by the captain of the watch or his deputy.17

  The two together—Gates’s civil regulations and Dale’s drastic code of martial law—comprised the famous Laws Divine, Moral, and Martiall, which the company published in 1612. Though separated into the civil and military areas of life, in practice the Laws merged into a single body of draconian rules. Civilian settlers in this regime were to be, in effect, soldiers under military discipline; soldiers were to be workers—carpenters, sawyers, farmers, and fishermen—in the company’s common cause.

  This merging of soldiers and civilians and the use of degrading punishments were not unique. Martial law was used in other situations believed to be analogous to the settlement in Virginia—in England’s most violent borderlands, Ireland and the Welsh and Scottish marches. And in England itself severe, degrading punishments were commonly used to discipline the unfree, the servile, the base dependents who lacked full legal rights and survived on the benevolence of others. So, conceiving of Virginia’s “wretched and untoward people” as subject to the discipline of martial law and the familiar degradation of the unfree, it was no great leap for Dale to propose, as he did in a letter to Lord Salisbury, that the colony’s servile population be supplemented by a cohort of truly degraded people: convicts under sentence of death.18

  If somehow, Dale wrote Salisbury, he could get two thousand more men with supplies for six months, he would not only achieve all the company’s goals but in addition take “full possession of Powhatan’s countrie,” which, cleared of its native population, would open up “many excellent seates for many a thowsand householders.” Let the Crown, he wrote, send to Virginia all of England’s convicts awaiting execution, and let that be continued for three years. There would be nothing unusual in that. That was the way, he believed, the Spanish were peopling the Indies, and one need not fear the results. Convicts condemned to death were not always “the worst kinde of men” in terms of “birth, spiritts, or bodie.” And such reprieved convicts, unlike the present “crue” who grieved at being in Virginia, would welcome the chance to be there since they would be escaping with their lives, even though they had been justly condemned, and therefore would be happy “to make this their new countrie, and plant and inhabite herein with all diligence, cheerfullnes, and comfort.”19

  His appeal, which, when renewed in later years by others in different circumstances, would produce remarkable results (fifty thousand convicts would eventually be shipped to America), went unanswered. Gates and Dale proceeded with the people they had. Consistent with the goals of the Laws, they organized Virginia’s population into companies “to be exercised and trayned up in martiall manner and warlike discipline.” Each person was assigned specific duties, to be enforced by their company captains. People were to be called to work by drumbeat, leave their work by drumbeat, be led to church by drumbeat, and after prayers and a meal, be summoned again by drumbeat to work until evening prayers. And they were to be punished for infractions as specified in the Laws. How consistently or fully these drastic rules were enforced we do not know, but Percy’s eyewitness account shows that Dale had no hesitation in putting some of the most severe of them into effect. A group of men, “idile and not willeinge to take paynes,” attempted to desert to the Indians. When caught, some were “apointed to be hanged, some burned, some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked, and some to be shott to deathe. All theis extreme and crewell tortures [Dale] used and inflicted upon them to terrefy the reste for attempteinge the lyke.” And then, Percy grimly reported, there were those who robbed the supply store: Dale caused them “to be bownd faste unto trees and so sterved them to deathe.”20

  But there were limits to Dale’s ferocity when directed to the English settlers since his ultimate aim was to preserve them and make their labor profitable. He was less limited in dealing with the Indians. His plan, he explained to Lord Salisbury, was to “over master the subtile-mischeivous Great Powhatan” in such a way as to establish English superiority beyond all doubt. He would allow the paramount chief “no roome in his countrie,” leaving him with the choice of subordinating himself and his people to the English or seeking refuge in a “straunger countrie” among “the neighbour salvadges [now] confining him.” No longer thinking, as Smith had done, simply of the desperate need for life-saving supplies, Dale, a participant in the ruthless slaughter of noncombatants in Ireland on the ground that “terrour … made short Warrs,” launched a program of deliberate
military provocation and savage harassment. His campaign to reduce the natives to the status of subject people and drive them off the most valuable lands was part of what has been called England’s “First Anglo-Powhatan War (August 1609 to April 1614).” That series of bloody clashes, Frederick Fausz, the war’s most careful analyst, writes, “translated England’s ad terrorem tactics from the Irish wars of the late sixteenth century—specifically the use of deception, ambush, and surprise, the random slaughter of both sexes and all ages, the calculated murder of innocent captives, and the destruction of entire villages … [The attacks] neither discriminated between combatant and noncombatant victims nor between hostile and friendly tribes.” Once launched, the struggles intensified, driven by atavistic impulses—by the natives’ passion to maintain the right, hence moral, balance of existential forces and by the invaders’ equally passionate belief in their right to dominate primitive, satanic peoples and take possession of their land.21