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

by Bernard Bailyn

  2. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, Conn., 1934–38), I, 37, 45, 102–3; Wesley F. Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 (Baton Rouge, La., 1949), 82–92; Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise & Empire … 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 378.

  3. Alexander Brown, comp. and ed., The Genesis of the United States (1890; New York, 1964), I, 352, 342, 340. On the supposed “surplus” of population, see Mildred Campbell, “ ‘Of People Either Too Few Or Too Many’…,” in William A. Aiken and Basil D. Henning, eds., Conflict in Stuart England (London, 1960), 171–201.

  4. William Strachey, comp., For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, etc. ([London, 1612] David H. Flaherty, ed., Charlottesville, Va., 1969), xvi; Brown, ed., Genesis, I, 342, 350, 353.

  5. Ibid., 241–43, 260–77, quotations at 263, 272–73.

  6. William R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of … Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, England, 1910–12), II, 251–52; Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, 90; Craven, Southern Colonies, 102–3; Brown, ed., Genesis, I, 317.

  7. Andrews, Colonial Period, I, 113n; Brown, ed., Genesis, I, 355, 356, 354, 252, 248; Darrett B. Rutman, “The Virginia Company and Its Military Regime,” in Rutman, ed., The Old Dominion (Charlottesville, Va., 1964), 6–8; J. Frederick Fausz, “An ‘Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides’: England’s First Indian War, 1609–1614,” VMHB, 98 (1990), 30, 37–38, 41; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution (Cambridge, England, 1988), 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57.

  8. James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York, 2005) [hereafter: Horn, Jamestown], 189; Brown, ed., Genesis, I, 409, 410, 412.

  9. Horn, Jamestown, 184–85.

  10. Ibid., 185–86; Percy, “Trewe Relacyon,” 252, 253–54; Fausz, “ ‘Abundance of Blood,’ ” 34.

  11. Percy, “Trewe Relacyon,” 255; Fausz, “ ‘Abundance of Blood,’ ” 35–37.

  12. Figures for ships and passenger arrivals are based on a comprehensive list of annual arrivals, 1607–60, compiled by Barbara DeWolfe from all available sources; file retained by author.

  13. On the spread of settlement, see Charles E. Hatch, Jr., The First Seventeen Years: Virginia, 1607–1624 (Baltimore, Md., 1993), 34ff. On Dale’s grand design, see Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), 41–43.

  14. Darrett B. Rutman, “The Historian and the Marshall,” VMHB, 68 (1960), 284–94.

  15. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, 34, 35.

  16. Billings, ed., Old Dominion, 44; Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, 3–25; E. R. Adair, “English Galleys in the Sixteenth Century,” English Historical Review, 35 (1920), 510–12; Craven, Southern Colonies, 106–7.

  17. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, 40–101; David T. Konig, “ ‘Dale’s Laws’ and the Non-Common Law Origins of Criminal Justice in Virginia,” American Journal of Legal History 26 (1982), 356.

  18. Ibid., 357–69; Konig, “Colonization and the Common Law in Ireland and Virginia, 1569–1634,” in James A. Henretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley Katz, eds., The Transformation of Early American History (New York, 1991), 81–92; William E. Nelson, The Common Law in Colonial America, I (Oxford, England, 2008), 14–18.

  19. Billings, ed., Old Dominion, 43.

  20. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford, England, 1987), 27; Sigmund Diamond, “From Organization to Society: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” American Journal of Sociology, 63 (1958), 467; Craven, Southern Colonies, 107; Percy, “Trewe Relacyon,” 262.

  21. Billings, ed., Old Dominion, 41; Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” WMQ, 30 (1973), 582; Fausz, “ ‘Abundance of Blood,’ ” 3–4, 33. Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia (Lincoln, Neb., 1997), 11, 36.

  22. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund, eds., The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612) by William Strachey, gent. (London, 1953), 24; Melanie Perreault, “ ‘We Washed Not the Ground with Their Bloods’: Intercultural Violence and Identity in the Early Chesapeake,” in Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault, eds., Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives (Lanham, Md., 2006), 30–33.

  23. Fausz, “ ‘Abundance of Blood,’ ” [6], 40–42; Percy, “Trewe Relacyon,” 261.

  24. Fausz, “ ‘Abundance of Blood,’ ” 44–48, 50, 53. For an elaborate discussion of the practical and symbolic significance of Pocahontas’s supposed reprieve of Smith, her marriage to Rolfe, and her conversion to Christianity, see Cynthia J. Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford, England, 2008), 74ff.

  25. For the fortunes and transformation of the Virginia Company in the paragraphs above, see Craven, Southern Colonies, 108–9, 114, 116, 118, 121; Wesley F. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932), 33–35; Andrews, Colonial Period, I, 124–26.

  26. Craven, Southern Colonies, 109, 115, 121–24.

  CHAPTER 4

  Recruitment, Expansion, and Transformation

  1. Wesley F. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932), 46, chap. 3.

  2. A Declaration of the State of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia… (London, 1620), in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to … the Colonies in North America… (Washington, D.C., 1836–46), III, no. 5, 3–5. On land distribution, Craven, Dissolution, 56–57. Praise of Sandys’s program and of the great prospects for Virginia was privately circulated in high places, as in John Pory’s letter (1619) to Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Netherlands, in Lyon G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York, 1907), 282–87.

  3. Ibid., 282, 284–85.

  4. Kingsbury, VC Records, I, 220; III, 115–17, 240, 278, 279, 102, 161, 470; “Old Kecoughtan,” William and Mary College Quarterly, 9 (1900), 86; Frederick W. Gookin, Daniel Gookin, 1612–1687 (Chicago, 1912), 38–42; Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New York, 1898), 474, 562, 335–36. For a summary of Capt. William Norton’s complicated negotiations to bring over Italians to man the glassworks, see Craven, Dissolution, 188, 191 (details in Kingsbury, VC Records, I, 484, 499, 507, 512–13, 566). For the highly funded, short-lived effort at iron manufacture, see Charles E. Hatch and Thorlow G. Gregory, “The First American Blast Furnace, 1619–1622,” VMHB, 70 (1962), 259–77.

  5. Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 240, 278, 314; IV, 23–24; CSPC, 498; Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618–1622,” in Howard S. Reinmuth, Jr., ed., Early Stuart Studies (Minneapolis, 1971), 137; Robert Hume, Early Child Immigrants to Virginia, 1619–1642 (Baltimore, Md., 1986), 1–30.

  6. CSPC, 23; Johnson, “Transportation of Vagrant Children,” 139–40, 142, 143–44; Peter W. Coldham, comp. and ed., The Complete Book of Emigrants, 1607–1660 (Baltimore, Md., 1987), 16.

  7. Johnson, “Transportation of Vagrant Children,” 142–43, 146, 150; “Kidnapping Maidens to Be Sold in Virginia, 1618,” VMHB, 6 (1899), 228–30.

  8. Coldham, ed., Complete Book, 18, 20, 23; Thorpe to John Ferrar [May 15, 1621?], Ferrar Papers, FP239, Magdalene College, Cambridge (Virginia Company Archives Online, http://www.virginiacompanyarchives.amdigital.co.uk).

  9. Craven, Dissolution, 96–97; Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 115–16.

  10. Tyler, ed., Narratives, 286; Irene W. D. Hecht, “The Virginia Colony, 1607–1640: A Study in Frontier Growth” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1969), 335–36, lists fourteen vessels that left England for Virginia in 1619; Avery E. Kolb, “Early Passengers to Virginia: When Did They Arrive?” VMHB, 88 (1980), 412, 409, 408. On the arrival of the Africans, see Wesley F. Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville, Va., 1971), 77–82; Engel Sluiter, �
��New Light on the ’20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” WMQ, 54 (1997), 395–98; John Thornton, “The African Experience and the ’20. and Odd Negroes’…,” ibid., 55 (1998), 421–34; Martha W. McCartney, “An Early Virginia Census Reprised,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 54 (1999), 178, 179. The various accounts of the arrival dates and numbers of passengers arriving in Virginia differ. I have used Hecht’s list (App. II), which is documented, checked against Kolb’s, which is not.

  11. Hecht, “Virginia Colony,” 335–45, App. IV.

  12. David R. Ransome, “ ‘Shipt for Virginia’: The Beginnings in 1619–1622 of the Great Migration to the Chesapeake,” VMHB, 103 (1995), 447–449, 451–52.

  13. David R. Ransome, “Wives for Virginia, 1621,” WMQ, 48 (1991), 7–15; Ferrar Papers, FP306; Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 493, 505, 640; IV, 231.

  14. A Declaration, 5.

  15. On the fierce polemics of Lawne and Bennett in the sectarian struggles of the English exiles in the Netherlands, see John B. Boddie, Seventeenth Century Isle of Wight County Virginia (Chicago, 1938), chaps. 2, 3; on their establishment and fate in Virginia, Charles E. Hatch, Jr., The First Seventeen Years (Baltimore, Md., 1957), 85–89. On the Bennett family in Virginia: Annie L. Jester and Martha W. Hiden, comps. and eds., Adventurers of Purse and Person, Virginia, 1607–1624/5 (3rd ed., revised by Virginia M. Meyer and John F. Dorman, Richmond, Va., 1987), 109ff. Babette M. Levy, Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies (Worcester, Mass., 1960), 92ff., traces Puritan elements in much of the religious life of the colony during the company years and stresses the company’s tolerance of “Genevan” influences.

  16. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (S. E. Morison, ed., New York, 1967), 356–57.

  17. Craven, Dissolution, 158–61, 163, 174, 179; Kingsbury, VC Records, IV, 151, 161, 162, 174–75, 451; III, 297, 299, 302; I, 513.

  18. Hatch, First Seventeen Years, map of plantations and the dates of their founding, 32–33; Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 104; Ulrich B. Phillips, quoted in J. Frederick Fausz, “Patterns of Settlement in the James River Basin, 1607–1642” (M.A. thesis, College of William and Mary, 1971), 53. The fatal effects of dispersal are a major theme in the letters written home from Virginia.

  19. J. E. Gethyn-Jones, “Berkeley Plantation, Virginia,” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 94 (1976), 7; Hatch, First Seventeen Years, 44–46, 39; William M. Kelso, Kingsmill Plantations, 1619–1800 (New York, 1984), 57; Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire … 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 174, 407; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution … 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 98; Ivor N. Hume, Martin’s Hundred (New York, 1982), 67, 154–55; Craven, Southern Colonies, 123n.

  20. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 95, 103ff.; Craven, Southern Colonies, 161–62; Hecht, Virginia Colony, App. III; James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 20–24.

  21. Theodore R. Reinhart, ed., The Archaeology of Shirley Plantation (Charlottesville, Va., 1984), 215; Jester and Hiden, eds., Adventurers, 12–16, 353, 595; William T. Buchanan, “The Browning Farm Site…,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 35 (1981), 139, 146; H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 2nd ed. (Richmond, Va., 1979), 149, 150, 145.

  22. Hume, Martin’s Hundred, 256–58, 237–39, 46–49, 51. Besides the excellent illustrations in Hume’s book, Richard Schlecht’s paintings of the plantation as he imagined it before and during the massacre of 1622 are reproduced in National Geographic, 155 (June 1979), 735–67, and 161 (Jan. 1982), 53–77. The fort (1621) is visualized in Ivor N. Hume, The Virginia Adventure (New York, 1994), 366. On the hundred’s resemblance to an Irish bawn village, see ibid., 155.

  23. Hume, Martin’s Hundred, 195; Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 197–98, 417; Coldham, Complete Book, 31; Smith, Works, II, 295.

  CHAPTER 5

  “A Flood, a Flood of Bloud”

  1. J. Frederick Fausz, “The Powhatan Uprising of 1622: A Historical Study of Ethnocentrism and Cultural Conflict” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1977), 322–25, 327, 342–46, 303ff., 265, 273; Lyon G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York, 1907), 240, 242; Smith, Works, II, 251. My interpretation of Opechancanough’s intentions follows Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln, Neb., 1997), 34, 35, 37, 51, 156, 158, rather than Fausz’s view that he intended to “annihilate the English” (“Powhatan Uprising,” 351).

  2. Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 102; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 334–335 (cf. Smith, Works, II, 294–95), 295–97, 300–2, 307, 310.

  3. Kingsbury, VC Records, I, 504; III, 584; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 328, 332–41, 349; Ferrar Papers, FP247, Magdalene College, Cambridge (Virginia Company Archives Online, http://www.virginiacompanyarchives.amdigital.co.uk); Smith, Works, II, 295; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People (Norman, Okla., 1990), 73.

  4. Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 362–63; Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 551, 554–56.

  5. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, 71–72, 73, 302; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 346–439, 353–55; Smith, Works, II, 293; John Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginian Plantation…,” in George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds., The Sermons of John Donne (Berkeley, Calif., 1953–62), IV, 271.

  6. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, 73–74, 303–4; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 366–67, 370ff., 386, 394, 396–97, 399, App. B (an alphabetical list of the victims); Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 555, 551, 552, 553, 670. The number of survivors at Martin’s Hundred is disputed. Ivor N. Hume (Martin’s Hundred [New York, 1982], 66) sees the plantation’s population of about 140 reduced to 62, all of whom fled; later, 20 returned. One of the survivors listed “butt 22 lefte alive” (Kingsbury, VC Records, IV, 41). Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” table VI, 1, lists 42 settlers known by name to have been at Martin’s Hundred before the massacre, of whom 22 (52 percent) died before August. On the symbolic importance of Thorpe’s death and mutilation, Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 379–80.

  7. Smith, Works, II, 295; I, xxxii, 222, xxxvii, 296 (Causey apparently later told his story directly to Smith: III, 215); Kingsbury, VC Records, III, 542ff., 551, 553; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 390.

  8. Ibid., 403; Kingsbury, ed., VC Records, IV, 24, 25, 66, 70–71, 160, 74 (italics in original).

  9. Ibid., III, 554, 556–58, 672; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 427–28, 422n, 434, chap. 6, pt. 1 passim.

  10. Ibid., table V, 1 (after 400), 448, 450, 457, 458; Kingsbury, VC Records, IV, 221–22; Ivor N. Hume, The Virginia Adventure (New York, 1994), 382–85.

  11. On ship and passenger arrivals, see above, chap. 3, n12; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 464–65. On the Abigail: Kingsbury, VC Records, IV, 65, 228ff. (Lady Wyatt quotation at 232), and Frethorne letters, ibid., 41–42, 58–62.

  12. Butler’s “Unmasked face of our colony in Virginia as it was in the winter of ye yeare 1622,” in Kingsbury, VC Records, II, 374–76. On the document’s provenance, see Wesley F. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932), 255n; Kingsbury, VC Records, IV, 94.

  13. Tyler, ed., Narratives, 412–18; Kingsbury, VC Records, II, 397–99; IV, 231.

  14. Ibid., IV, 41–42, 58–62; Emily Rose, “The Politics of Pathos: Richard Fre-thorne’s Letters Home,” in Robert F. Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, eds., Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (Philadelphia, Pa., 2005), 92–108.

  15. Craven, Dissolution, 176–81. On George Sandys’s detestation of tobacco (“I loath it and onelie desire that I could subsist without it”), typical of the views of the company’s leadership, and on the king’s fervent desire that the planters concentrate on producing wine and silk rather than tobacco, “which, besides much unnecessary expence, brings with it many disorders and
inconveniences,” see Kingsbury, VC Records, IV, 65, 125; III, 662, 663.

  16. Irene W. Hecht, “The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 As a Source for Demographic History,” WMQ, 30 (1973), 70; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 472; William S. Powell, “Aftermath of the Massacre: The First Indian War, 1622–1632,” VMHB, 66 (1958), 58; Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, 77–84.

  17. Hecht, “Virginia Muster,” 78. Fifteen of the twenty-three were located in only two households.

  18. Richard B. Davis, George Sandys, Poet-Adventurer (London, 1955), 231, chap. 9 passim. On this and the following two paragraphs, see Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 93–96.

  19. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 103–12, figures at 105.

  20. After receiving his knighthood, Yeardley, it was reported in London, “hath set him[self] up so high that he flaunts it up and down the streets in extraordinary braverie, wiuth fourteen or fifteen fayre liveries after him.” William S. Powell, John Pory, 1572–1636 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), 74. His arrival in Virginia touched off a protest by some of the “ancient planters” of higher status who feared that his lack of eminence would discourage settlement. “Great actions,” they wrote, “are carryed wth best successe by such comanders who have personall aucthoritye & greatness answerable to the action, sithence itt is nott easye to swaye a vulgar and servile nature by vulgar & servile spiritts.” Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure,” 94n.

  21. Of nearly a million acres patented by 1625, fewer than fifteen thousand were actually under cultivation. Even if the eight hundred thousand acres “alledged” to have been patented by the associates of Martin’s Hundred and the hundred thousand acres claimed by Southampton Hundred are both reduced by half, only 2½ percent of the registered land was under cultivation. Kingsbury, VC Records, IV, 551–59; J. Frederick Fausz, “Patterns of Settlement in the James River Basin, 1607–1642” (M.A. thesis, College of William and Mary, 1971), 61–63.