The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
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White and his colleagues, their labor rewarded by the sight of converts “in crowds” and hopeful that a “most desireable harvest” would soon follow, staged a dramatic baptism of the converted tayac and his family. In a bark chapel built for the occasion, a formal baptism was performed, after which the tayac and his wife were properly married, their names changed (to the royal Charles and Mary), and a “great cross” was borne aloft and fixed at a proper place with the physical help of the tayac, the governor, and the colony’s secretary, while Fathers White and Altham “chanted before them the Litany of Loreto in honor of the Blessed Virgin.”44
But frustrations and disappointments began to weigh heavily on the mission. The harvest of souls at Piscataway, which spread to the central Potomac village of Portobacco and was said to bring appeals for conversion from the Anacostans farther up the river, had to be curtailed when White fell ill and returned to St. Mary’s and when Altham died of a foot infection that spread through his body. Further, a famine drained the vitality of the Piscataways and their neighbors; their tayac, whose conversion had so vivified the entire mission, died in 1641; and the hoped-for reinforcements were never sent from England. Severely restricted in manpower, confessedly slow in learning the natives’ difficult languages despite White’s efforts to compile a dictionary and grammar, the missionaries could no longer hope to set up a network of inland stations from which the Word might be spread, and so they resorted to “excursions.”45
In these flying visits, as described in the missionaries’ annual reports, a priest, an interpreter, and a servant would set off in a pinnace, two of them rowing when the wind fell, carrying with them food, holy water, and “the sacred utensils,” including a makeshift altar for performing the mass and wine for the ceremony. They carried too a chest filled with “little bells, combs, fishing-hooks, needles, thread” to be given to the Indians “to gain their good will.” Arriving near a village in the evening, they would set up camp on the river shore, light a fire, erect a tent or hut if it rained, seek out the local people, entice them with trinkets, and begin the preaching they hoped would end in conversion. Given the size of the territory they hoped to cover they could not tarry long at any one spot, and so bringing pagans to Christianity in this fleeting manner and with the “humble fare and hard couch” they had to endure was difficult, especially as they still could not themselves speak directly with the Indians. Even their interpreter was “so imperfectly acquainted with their language that he sometimes excites their laughter.” At times they were tempted to despair, but, they reported to their superiors in England, “by patience we make progress with them and are gradually bringing them over to what we desire.”46
But there were deeper problems than the difficulty of conversing in the Algonquian dialects and failing to share the Indians’ lives for extended periods. The Jesuits’ whole missionary enterprise, especially its material foundation and legal status, came into question before the first decade was out, and the main challenger was their erstwhile patron, Lord Baltimore himself. The financial security of his colony and his family’s personal fortune rested on his ownership of the colony’s land, and that in turn rested on the survival of his chartered rights, increasingly likely to be questioned by the rising tide of anti-Catholicism at home.
Anticipating challenges, he had long since ordered full toleration for all Christian worship and had required Catholicism to be practiced privately. But the Jesuits posed special and very difficult problems. Not only did they actively proselytize among the colony’s Protestants, a practice that was quickly reported to the authorities in England, but they insisted on having all the privileges their order was accorded in Catholic Europe and Hispanic America: that as a society they be allowed to own property, that they be free of ordinary taxation, and that they be subject only to the laws and courts of the Church. The problem was compounded by the fact that they had been responsible for bringing over a very large number of servants—perhaps sixty-five—which led to claims to 28,500 acres, and also by the fact that the Indians had given them the land on the Patuxent that they called “Conception,” bypassing the proprietor’s ownership and authority.47
As a result, while the ordinary settlers struggled with a multitude of problems, the colony’s leaders, Catholics all, were embroiled in conflict with the Jesuits and the higher authorities of the order in England and Rome. Antagonisms rose, friendly relationships soured, and bitterness seeped into the leadership of the Catholic enterprise as Baltimore realized how seriously the Jesuits “threatened the delicate balance that he sought between English and Catholic loyalties.” We are suffering, the Jesuits insisted, “from those from whom we rather expected aid and protection, who in anxiety for their own interests, have not hesitated to violate the immunities of the Church.” Lord Baltimore’s increasingly hostile attitude might be excused, they said, as an excess of material self-interest, but Lewger, the colony’s secretary and Baltimore’s personal agent, was, it was observed, a recent convert and no doubt was still driven by deep-seated Protestant prejudices. Their land threatened with confiscation and taxation and their claims forced into the secular courts, they appealed for support to the Society of Jesus’s Vice-Provincial of England, who in turn appealed, in an eloquent memorial, to the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome.
The Jesuits in Maryland, the English vice-provincial, Father Henry More, wrote to his superiors, are in worse danger than their brethren in England, situated as they were between the Protestant strongholds of Virginia and New England, and confronted by hordes of savages “who live after the manner of wild beasts.” Lewger, he reported, no doubt still infused with “the leaven of Protestantism,” had submitted a twenty-point exposition of precisely “those dogmas so justly offensive to Catholic ears” and then, consistent with them, had attempted to enact laws “repugnant to the Catholic faith and ecclesiastical immunities,” the essence of which was that “no ecclesiastic shall enjoy any privilege … nor to gain anything for the Church except by the gift of the Prince.” When Maryland’s priests had challenged such rulings, More wrote, Lewger fell into a rage and turned Baltimore against them. The Catholic baron, fearing a precedent that would deprive him of his property and income, had confiscated the land that the Indians had freely given the Jesuits and had appealed to the Sacred Congregation to recall Maryland’s suffering fathers and to replace them as missionaries with secular priests. The Jesuits, More assured the authorities in Rome, were obedient; they would never “refuse to make way for other labourers.” But, he asked, was it expedient
to remove those who first entered into that vineyard at their own expense, who for seven years have endured want and sufferings, who have lost four of their confrères, labouring faithfully unto death, who have defended sound doctrine and the liberty of the Church with odium and temporal loss to themselves, who are learned in the language of the savages, of which the priests to be substituted by the Baron Baltimore are entirely ignorant?
Father Poulton, superior of the Maryland mission, wrote an equally impassioned appeal from the scene of contention. Impoverished, with no help from anyone in America, the Jesuits in the colony, he wrote, now feared that the entire mission might be abandoned. “Certainly the very thought of recalling us or of not sending others to help us in this glorious work of the salvation of souls would in a manner assail our faith in the Providence of God and His care for His servants.” For his own part, he declared, he
should prefer to work here among the Indians for their conversion, and, destitute of all human aid and reduced by hunger, to die lying on the bare ground under the open sky, than even once to think of abandoning this holy work of God through any fear of privation.
The bitterness mounted. The struggle between Baltimore, keenly aware of the threat of England’s Long Parliament, and the passionate Jesuits could not be resolved. In the end, after all the charges and countercharges had been filed and all the urgent appeals to the centers of power in London and Rome had been heard, the pap
al authorities, seeking to avoid further confrontations with England, found it expedient to support Baltimore’s cautious policies. His seizure of the Jesuits’ property on the Patuxent was approved, however reluctantly, and while the fathers in Maryland were not recalled from their mission, they were thereafter subject to the secular power in the colony, except for corporal punishment, just as they were in England; and Baltimore was assured that no additional Jesuits would be sent without his approval.48
BUT THIS CONTROVERSY, which tore at the ideological heart of the colony, was genteel next to another series of conflicts that developed through these early years, conflicts that reduced the colony to a cockpit of “insolencies, rapines, murthers, & other barbarous cruelties.”49
Calvert’s caution in dealing with the local Indian tribes had eased the initial encounters and, with the support of the Jesuits, had accounted for a short period of easy, though vigilant, intermingling of the races. The natives, Father White wrote, were entirely cooperative, instructing the settlers in hunting, fishing, and food preparation; “their women and children came very frequently amongst them.” But the Jesuits’ efforts at converting, hence “civilizing,” the Indian villagers touched only a few points on the fringe of the natives’ world, and those contacts were at best superficial. The apparent welcome the missionaries received, and the general ease in race relations at the start, were largely the result of a temporary configuration of forces that the English only gradually came to understand.50
They had settled at the embattled core of the Piscataway “empire,” a group of loosely affiliated tribes whose domain, centered on the populous village of Moyaone (near the present Mount Vernon), stretched across a broad inland strip on the north shore of the Potomac, from as far west as the present District of Columbia east to Chesapeake Bay and across the Bay into Maryland’s Eastern Shore. When the English arrived at this confederation of palisaded villages, which may have contained seven thousand tribute-paying inhabitants, it was under severe pressures from all sides and threatened with destruction. On the south, from Virginia, they were repeatedly attacked by their traditional rivals, the Patawomekes, whose raid, a decade earlier, had been supported by ninety militiamen from Virginia who hoped, with the Patawomekes’ help, to encircle the Powhatans from the north. On the northwest and northeast, Iroquois tribes harassed the Piscataways’ border areas—Senecas, Eries, and Nacotchtanks coming in from the west to hit the villages along the upper Potomac and to press the Susquehannocks, at the mouth of the Susquehanna River, down both sides of the Bay. And as the Susquehannocks, linked to the League Iroquois on the Great Lakes, pressed south into the Eastern Shore, they drove the Nanticokes, themselves aggressive raiders, west across Chesapeake Bay into the Potomac entrance of the Piscataways’ “empire.”51
For a few years the English settlers, welcomed by the Piscataways as valuable allies, helped sustain a balance of power in this tangle of belligerent forces. But by the early 1640s, the stability was weakening. Trouble started at the margins—on the north along the Patuxent; on the Eastern Shore; and west around St. Clement’s. There and elsewhere the settlers’ “cattle” (mainly hogs), allowed to roam freely in search of food, foraged around Indian encampments and were killed as game. Charges were brought against such depredations; repayment was demanded; and fencing—which violated the natives’ most elemental sense of the proper use of land—was demanded at the exposed borders. In 1638, in response to the Nanticokes’ murder of a Virginia trader, Calvert sent a force to the Eastern Shore to impose justice.
With charges and countercharges and sporadic retaliation multiplying between people lacking shared values, laws, or customs, a sense of violation rose on both sides. Random murders of isolated traders—Richard Thompson’s entire family, wife, child, and seven servants, living alone on Poplar Island, south of Kent, was wiped out—and demands for punishment further heightened tensions, which grew more dangerous as traders began to roam through the whole region. Their operations spread quickly, out of control. Baltimore’s legal right to license all Indian traders and the requirement that traders post bond for good behavior were ignored; there was no way that the thousands of square miles of the Maryland colony could be policed. Traders were everywhere, ruthless in their search for furs, ready to peddle not only trinkets and clothes but liquor and guns. Some were isolated individuals, some worked in partnerships, some in biracial teams. Most traders set up movable bartering camps, some so deep into the interior that the authorities in St. Mary’s knew of them only by rumor. Father White’s proposal that all trade be confined to three official trading posts could not be seriously undertaken. A few of the most active in the gun trade worked their way north from Virginia into Maryland; others came south from Swedish settlements on the Delaware and from Dutch Manhattan. But most of the illegal traders were associated in one way or another with Claiborne’s private trading center on Kent Island.52
Claiborne—irrepressible, tireless, ruthless, a freebooting entrepreneur—had become a key figure in the life of the Susquehannock Indians, controlling as he did the fur trade at the head of the Bay and supplying a local network of tribes and their affiliates far inland with European goods on which they were increasingly dependent. His settlement on Kent Island had quickly expanded, first into a busy trade center, then into a plantation, then into a biracial community that included approximately 175 English men and women. Radiating out from the Kent Island headquarters, Claiborne’s contacts stretched across the Atlantic world, from the mercantile exchanges in London to the Hurons’ fur traps on the shores of the Great Lakes.
As the years passed Claiborne proved to be a bristling phenomenon in the emerging world of Anglo-American exploitation, a relentless infighter, an insidious intriguer, and a fierce partisan, determined to keep possession of his island and its trade. Financed by his London sponsors, he became a frontier baron, as easy in the company of the gentry of Kent and sophisticated Londoners as he was with the Susquehannocks he courted.53 Though his claim to Kent Island was clearly in violation of the terms of Baltimore’s charter, he continued to defy the Maryland authorities, violently when necessary. A climax was reached in 1638 when he attacked a Maryland vessel trading along the Eastern Shore, killing one of the crewmen. Calvert promptly charged him with piracy, murder, and treason and took the opportunity to seize Kent Island by military force. He then confiscated property that Claiborne estimated at £10,000 and hanged one of his island associates. Escaped to England, Claiborne lined up support from the victorious Parliamentary forces and their Puritan merchant supporters, thus aligning himself with the new, revolutionary establishment. Back in Virginia, he reestablished contact with his allies there, on Kent Island, and among the Susquehannocks. It was his influence, in all probability, that convinced that tribe in 1642 to launch a brief war against his Maryland enemies.54
They did not need much convincing. Raw from harassment by Iroquois raiders from the north and alarmed by fears of what Maryland’s influence might do to the trade they had developed with Claiborne, the Susquehannocks tore into the Piscataway-Maryland borders at two especially sensitive points. They attacked first the central Piscataway village of Moyaone, wiped out the people at the Jesuit mission there, and made off with all the supplies. That blow, which destroyed the Jesuits’ most promising post, was repeated at their plantation on the Patuxent. When on top of that, settlers only eight miles from St. Mary’s Village were killed and eight others elsewhere in the colony were also picked off and their property ravaged, Calvert declared Susquehannocks, Wicocomocos, and Nanticokes official enemies of Maryland, banned all Indians from entering the colony’s territory, and authorized the settlers to shoot any Indians who entered the borders. Elaborate precautions were then taken to defend the colonists against attack. A warning system was devised, routes of escape from attack and “resident fortresses” were created, and officers were appointed to enforce martial law when necessary. Though a small militia army was formed under the command of Cornwallis and Lt. William Lew
is, the Jesuits’ zealous chief steward, Indian raids continued, with bloodshed on both sides. On one occasion and at small cost, these troops routed an ambushing force of Susquehannocks, said to number 250 warriors, but then in 1644 they were defeated. Fifteen Maryland militiamen were captured, and tortured. They were dropped twice into a raging fire intensified by bear fat and pitch, a contemporary reported, then taken out, bound to flaming poles, and slowly roasted until a designated “devil chaser” tore the flesh from their faces, cut out their tongues, cut off their fingers and toes, which he threaded on strings for necklaces and knee bands, and finally tied them to burning bundles of reeds while boys “with a great noise” shot arrows into their smoldering bodies.55
The fighting continued, intermittently, inconclusively, with more hit-and-run raids by the Indians and such indiscriminate shootings by the colonists that Calvert had to withdraw his earlier punitive orders. Large-scale campaigns were planned but failed to materialize. The fighting ground on, though the lines of affiliation began to blur. By 1644 the still-loyal Piscataways were threatening to collaborate with the Susquehannocks and were said to be making approaches to the Virginia tribes which, under Opechancanough, were planning the second great massacre in that colony. The likely outcome, in the late 1640s, was unclear. If the Piscataways submitted to the Susquehannocks and joined with them in an assault on the colony, the result would be devastating even if the colony were fully mobilized and closely unified. But in fact the opposite was true. While Indian affairs remained potentially explosive, demanding close attention and carefully considered decisions, the English were embroiled in a series of tumultuous domestic struggles.56