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

by Bernard Bailyn

  The agreements with Opechancanough were heartening but no less ambiguous than the earlier peace treaty with Powhatan had been. For the English, Opechancanough’s concessions meant, or implied, freedom to expand tobacco planting limitlessly, without fear of attack, and to explore more deeply than before into Indian territory. For Opechancanough they meant a period of stability in which to rally his forces and organize a massive assault that alone, he correctly understood, might save his people’s way of life and guarantee their physical survival. Anticipating this momentous event, he identified himself with the coming military victory by adopting a new name, Mangopeesomon, presumably a war name, and mobilized the forces available to him.3

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  By the time the tidewater Indians returned from their winter hunt early in 1622, Opechancanough’s plan was in place. A combination of ten tribes in the western areas, north and south of the James River, would produce an initial strike force, backed up by other groups in the north. The warriors would wander, casually and unarmed, with provisions to sell, into English settlements where they were well known, and then at a given time they would grab any object they could find—spade, ax, gun, knife, rock, log, tong—and murder every person they could reach, man, woman, or child, and they would burn all the buildings and crops.4

  The utter violence of the plan, its bloodthirstiness and mercilessness, expressed not only a pent-up passion for revenge and fear of destruction but something deeper, something obscure and elementally compelling, which, it has been suggested, may have been related to the death, in late 1621 or early 1622, of the proud, charismatic warrior Nemattanew—“Jack of the Feathers.” His claim to invulnerability, associated with the protection of the gods and dramatized in his magical armor of feathers and wings, had inspired Indian fighters since the beginning of the Anglo-Powhatan struggle. His continuing survival in battle after battle instilled confidence and courage in the face of firearms and steel-clad soldiers and testified to the power of tribal deities. But he was fatally shot—shot rather casually, John Smith explained in his Generall Historie—by two young servants of a settler whom Nemattanew was thought to have murdered. As he died, Smith wrote, hoping, in this ultimate humiliation, to preserve the myth of his invulnerability and all that it implied, Nemattanew begged the servants to hide the fact that he had been killed by a bullet and to bury him among the English. His death was a deeply unsettling blow to Opechancanough, both for the resulting loss of military leadership and for what it suggested about divine protection. On March 22, 1622, he took his revenge in what the poet John Donne called “a Flood, a Flood of Bloud.”5

  WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED if one or more semi-Christianized Indians had not warned the Jamestown villagers of Opechancanough’s plan just before the attack can only be imagined. The warning probably saved Jamestown and also Pace’s Paines and several other plantations nearby. But elsewhere the assault went much as planned. In plantation after plantation from west to east, north and south of the James, the Indians turned on their unsuspecting hosts, in some places while sharing “breakfast with people at their tables,” and with axes, hammers, shovels, tools, and knives slaughtered them indiscriminately, “not sparing eyther age or sexe, man, woman, or childe; so sodaine in their cruell execution that few or none discerned the weapon or blow that brought them to destruction.” Those in the fields or otherwise at work were tracked down and murdered “contrary to all lawes of God and men, of nature & nations.” And the horror was compounded by the attackers “defacing, dragging, and mangling the dead carkasses into many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision, with base and bruitish triumph.”

  Houses were burned to the ground, crops were plundered, equipment wrecked, animals killed, maimed, or driven off. And the Indians’ protectors and advocates among the settlers were, it seems, singled out for attack, as if the acculturation they had sought, with its assumption of divine sanction, was a special danger that had to be utterly obliterated. So the murder of Thorpe—which he faced stoically, “void of all suspition” and confident that the Indians meant him no harm—came to be seen as an act of Christian martyrdom and proof of the irredeemable savagery, the satanic evil, and “unnaturall bruitishnesse” of the Powhatan peoples, while for the natives the murder, mutilation, and utter obliteration of this agent of forced acculturation and alien doctrines was “an act of catharsis,” and a symbol of liberation.

  The colony was devastated. In a few hours, in the western and central areas of the colony, between 325 and 330 English men, women, and children were killed. Of the four “corporations” into which the colony had been divided, Henrico, sixty miles west of Jamestown, was most vulnerable and was severely hit: 61 lay dead; the ironworks, in which £5,000 had been invested, was in ruins; and most of the workers killed, as were the tenants on the college lands. From this blow the “sacred bussiness” of the Indian college never recovered. Just to the east, in the relatively well-fortified Charles City Corporation, nineteen sites were attacked and 142 people were killed. Among the devastated plantations were Berkeley, Southampton, and Flowerdieu Hundreds, and among the dead were four members of the colony’s council of state. In James City Corporation 139 were killed; one of the five sites attacked was the model plantation, Martin’s Hundred, with its core settlement at Wolstenholme Town. There 74 colonists were killed—more than were slain at any other single location—and at least 15 women were taken prisoner. The town itself was burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt, and though the plantation itself was reoccupied some months later, its population, a year after the massacre, had fallen from 140 to 22, and of the buildings two houses and “a peece of a church” were left. Only the easternmost corporation, Elizabeth City, was spared, not only because Opechancanough’s forces were weakest there and farthest from their base but also because that much of the colony might be tolerated as a confined enclave.6

  The scenes of individual struggles—frenzied, bloody, deadly hand-tohand fights—would never be forgotten by those who survived them, and they were made vivid to others in letters and publications that conveyed in apocalyptic terms the carnage wrought by those whom John Smith, in his widely circulated account of the massacre, paraphrasing the colony’s official Relation of the Barbarous Massacre, called a “viperous brood,” “hell-hounds,” “more fell than lions and dragons.”

  Captain Nathaniel Powell, one of the original settlers in the colony, well known to the natives whom he had favored, was slain, along with his family, decapitated, and his body “butcher-like, hagled” (mangled). The veteran soldier Nathaniel Causey, one of the few survivors of the “first supply” of 1608, was “cruelly wounded,” Smith wrote, but somehow managed to grab an ax, “did cleave one of their heads,” and drove off the rest of the attackers. Hugh Baldwin, at Bennett’s Welcome, to save his wife who “lay for dead” and others in his house, kept shooting off his musket randomly, until the Indians turned away. Nearby the Indians set fire to a tobacco shed and, as the men ran out to quench it, “shot them full of arrowes, then beat out their braines.” Thomas Hamor escaped because he had delayed going to the fire in order to finish writing a letter. When he finally went out he was shot in the back, raced back to the house, barricaded himself, and then, when the house was set on fire, fled with eighteen women and children under cover of gunfire to the Baldwin place. His brother Ralph, who had lived in the colony for thirteen years, came late to the scene but once there defended himself with “spades, axes, and brickbats,” and with the help of a party of armed mariners that suddenly appeared, escaped, rescued his brother, and with the others at Baldwin’s farm, ran to the safety of Jamestown, passing on the way the smoldering ruins of Martin’s Hundred.7

  But the devastation of the massacre was not only physical; it was psychological as well, and in the end political. The Indians, one planter said, had “burst the heart” of those who had survived. Wandering amid the charred ruins and unburied bodies, the wrecked equipment and broken barricades, was a reduced population in shock. In despair, overcome
with fear and sorrow, devastated by having “to stand and gaze at our distressed brethren fryinge in the furie of our enimies and could not relieve them,” they strugged to explain how the catastrophe could have happened.

  This depiction (1634) of the Virginia Massacre of 1622, by the prolific engraver and publisher Matthaeus Merian in Frankfurt, Germany, is a work of imagination, but it must have been based in part on Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the state of … Virginia: With a relation of the barbarous massacre… (London, 1622), since it illustrates precisely some of the details described in that pamphlet and conveys accurately Waterhouse’s sense of the wild frenzy of the attack and the settlers’ complete surprise. Jamestown in the background is entirely fanciful. (illustration credit 5.1)

  The dispersal of settlement, mandated by the company, had clearly invited trouble: “wee are like quicksilv[er] throwne into the fire,” the scholarly George Sandys wrote, “and hardlie to bee found in so vast a distance.

  The English throughout this wild countrye [Sandys wrote a year after the massacre] planted dispersedlie in small familyes, far from neighbours,…covetous of large poss[ess]ions (larger than 100 tymes their nomber were able to cultivate)…lyve like libertines out of the eye of the magistrate, not able to secure themselves nor to bee releived by others upon any occasion … if they had had anie knowledge of the purpose of the Indians, the most part could not possiblie have prevented their treacheries, but must either have beene beseiged in their houses (and consequentlie famished) or cut of[f] as they followed their labours.

  Further, the whole colony had been weakened by the company’s sending over large numbers of people before provision could be made for their maintenance or safety, and transporting them on overloaded ships “for the lucre & gayne … of the owners.” In addition, Sandys reported, tenants sent over to work “on that so absurd condition of halves” cannot live on half of what they produce and must therefore become so “dejected with their scarce provisions, and finding nothing to answeare their expectacion, that [they] give themselves over and die of melancholye, the rest running so farre indebt as keepes them still behind hand, and manie (not seldome) looseing their crops whilst they hunt for their bellyes.” But beyond all of that, beyond all the errors and evils of the company and of the settlers themselves, the major cause of the massacre, it was universally agreed, was what they called the sheer barbarousness, the ingratitude, duplicity, treachery, and satanism, of the native American people.8

  The rage against the Indians wiped out all thoughts of benevolence and any immediate prospect that the gospel mission would soon be renewed. These “wyld, naked natives,” Edward Waterhouse, the Virginia Company’s secretary and chief publicist, wrote, were instigated by the devil, which they worship out of fear and cowardice characteristic of a people who “flye as so many hares” at the mere sight of a woman holding an unloaded gun. But so shallow is their understanding that they do not see that in the end all of this bloodshed will be for the good of the colony. For, Waterhouse continued in a passage that anticipated the ten-year war that would follow, previously the colonists’ hands “had been tied with gentlenesse and faire usage,” but the treacherous violence of the Indians had now untied the knot. No longer would they be confined to scraps of the Indians’ wasteland: now “by right of Warr and the law of nations” they would turn “the laborious mattocke into the victorious sword,” invade the Indian country, “destroy them who sought to destroy us,” confiscate the most fruitful land, and prevent the Indians from enjoying their indiscriminate hunting. In dealing with such “rude, barbarous, and naked people,” Waterhouse noted, civility has too slow and uncertain an effect. They must be taken “by force, by surprize, by famine in burning their corne, by destroying and burning their boats, canoes, and houses, by breaking their fishing weares, by assailing them in their huntings … by pursuing and chasing them with our horses and blood-hounds … and mastives to seaze them…[and] by driving them (when they flye) upon their enemies, who are round about them, and by animating and abetting their enemies against them.” Thus “may their ruine or subjection be soone effected.”

  All of this the company in London, once the promoter of racial harmony and peaceable conversion, firmly endorsed. Justice cries out for revenge, the company told the governor and council in Virginia, and wisdom demands security. Therefore “roote out from being any longer a people so cursed a nation, ungratefull to all benefitts and uncapable of all goodnesse … let them have a perpetuall Warr without peace or truce and … without mercie too.” Spare only the children, who might later provide good labor and profitable service and whose minds, “not overgrowne with evill customes,” may be reduced to civility and eventually Christianity. So

  pursue and follow them, surprisinge them in their habitations, intercepting them in theire hunting, burninge theire townes, demolishing theire temples, destroyinge their canoes, plucking upp theire weares, carying away theire corne, and depriving them of whatsoever may yeeld them succor or relief, by which meanes in a very short while both your just revenge and your perpetuall security might be certainly effected.

  Public opinion in England supported this mandate for vengeance and racial warfare, which it rationalized in terms of religious obligation. A Christian crusade, a holy war “leaving not a creature / that may restore such shame of man and nature” was justified in flaming sermons, pamphlets, essays, and poems, in which Thorpe’s martyrdom was a centerpiece.9

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  Disorganized, shocked, and still fearful, but determined to save the colony and turn on the Indians in a punishing campaign of revenge, the colonists began to reorganize the settlements for protection and future strength. Seven plantations were abandoned, the fortifications of another seven were strengthened for future defense, and the demographic weight shifted eastward. As panicked refugees fled to the safety of Jamestown and the eastern plantations, commissions were issued to local commanders giving them absolute war powers, and an overall structure of military command began to take form.

  By late spring, two months after the massacre, the war of revenge was well in motion, and it took the form, already seen in the earlier phases of Anglo-Powhatan warfare, of “feedfights,” which have been described as “the ‘fieringe and wastinge’ of the enemy’s food supply, field crops, and habitations to promote dislocation, confusion, and starvation.” Backup raids in the late fall were designed to destroy irreplaceable corn supplies before winter set in. Any canoes that were found were wrecked to reduce the possibility of the Indians’ importing food from outside. Every effort was made to break up the alliance responsible for the massacre, while support was given to the enemies of the combatant tribes in an effort to press the target people between two aggressive fronts.

  No tactic, however ruthless, was ruled out. In May 1623 one Captain Daniel Tucker was commissioned to negotiate the release of prisoners and conclude a peace treaty with the Patawomeke Indians along the Potomac River, who had wiped out a trading mission led by the colony’s best interpreter, Henry Spelman. Tucker succeeded in his mission, and then, to toast the peace, he gave the Indians poisoned wine, which had apparently been prepared for the occasion by the colony’s Dr. John Pott. “Some tooe hundred weare poysned,” the Puritan Robert Bennett wrote his brother Edward from Bennett’s Welcome, after which, he reported, Tucker circled back to the same area and “killed som 50 more and brought hom parte of ther heades … Soe this beinge done yt wilbe a great desmayinge to the blodye infidelles.” Bennett himself planned to go after other tribes as soon as his tobacco and corn could be harvested, “to cute downe ther corne and put them to the sorde. God sende us vyctrie, as we macke noe question [of] God asistinge.”10

  But if God was assisting in the grinding war of attrition, He was not helpful in the domestic plight of the settlers. The usual early spring planting had been impossible in the weeks that followed the massacre, a food shortage quickly developed and deepened despite the supplies plundered from the Indians, and disease began to spread as new shi
ploads of servants and planters, responding to the growing passion for quick tobacco profits, arrived steadily. Close to nine hundred newcomers disembarked from fifteen vessels between March and the end of December, far more than could be effectively housed and supplied. They were easy victims to infectious diseases and the ravages of malnutrition. And then in December, when some signs of recovery could be seen, the Abigail arrived.

  Sent out by the company as a relief ship bearing Lady Margaret Wyatt, the governor’s wife, and some two hundred passengers, the Abigail proved to be a carrier of death. The ship, Lady Wyatt wrote, “was so pesterd wth people & goods that we were so full of infection that after a while we saw little but throwing folkes over boord.” The shipboard epidemic, said to have been caused initially by contaminated beer, spread quickly among the passengers and through the colony after the survivors arrived and scattered among the settlements. The colony’s leaders, desperate not for people they could not support, even healthy people, but for food supplies, arms, and equipment, were outraged. George Sandys, in the course of a savage indictment of the company for its persistent mismanagement, hoped that the brewer responsible for the noxious drink could be hanged and lamented the “extreame sicknes and unheard of mortalitie” that was devastating the land. The death rate rose beyond anyone’s ability to gauge it. At one point Sandys said that five hundred had died in the year after the massacre, “the lyveing being hardlie able to bury the dead,” at another that “the mortalitie of this year … hath dobled the nomber of those wch were massacred.” The mortality continued. An official enumeration listed by name 360 people who had died in the nine months after 1623, leaving a total of 1,274 still alive. It was reasonable to believe, as one planter wrote, that “the Lordes hand hath ben more heavie by sicknes and death then by the sword of our enemyes.”11