2. the Second Powhatan War: its effect on settlement, formation of Virginia elites, expansion into the Middle Peninsula, the Tobacco Depression, and English colonization as zero sum Indian conquest
Settlements Overflow into Indian Lands: Shredded Community Vulnerability Leads to the Paramount ED Initiative of the Period-the Palisades Project
Now it is time to roll up our sleeves and present several of the more difficult questions and issues associated with English colonization and Native Americans. In past modules, I attempted to be more descriptive than analytical–seeking to introduce the Powhatan to the reader, and to detail the narrative of their dealings with English settlers. We did outline and contrast the two life styles, beliefs, structure of decision-making and practices that came into conflict in the earliest years when dispersion of the shredded community was more limited—mostly along the James.
We did consider several initiatives associated with the Greate Charter that concerned the Powhatan and the federated tribes. If patronizing, and quite insensitive to the cultural differences between the two nations, these initiatives had some potential to be less confrontational. Within a year after they commenced, such initiatives were essentially abandoned after the March attack, and a new and intensive resistance against the Powhatan commenced immediately. Within the month an emergency meeting of the Assembly called for the date of the Massacre to be a Virginia “holiday” each year, so to remind Virginians of what was a very near extinction, averted only by their aggressive counter attacks.
Of special importance to an understanding of the colony’s expansion after 1624 is the Indian problem. The planters, far too many of whom recently had looked upon their dead, now had dropped all thought of missionary work to grapple realistically with a situation that threatened their very existence. They proclaimed a settled policy of relentless warfare upon the natives, and year after year implemented it by organized destruction of [Indian] towns and crops and by other actions calculated to harass the Indians and keep them on the defensive … The chief threat came from Opechancanough, whose warriors held the region up and across the York River [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), pp.172-3
I have little problem with Craven’s summary. As long as the reader realizes it is a “smush” (i.e., collapsed) assessment of a twenty-year period that ended with the Third Powhatan War in 1644-46. Surprisingly, perhaps, it does not seem to reflect the very initial reaction of Governor Wyatt and George Sandys, the official and unofficial Company leadership resident in Virginia, Both had been present on that ill-fated day of the first attack, and both represented the official view of the Company’s position.
The initial attack was on March 22, and very shortly after the “Virginia Council”, presumably the Council of State plus the Governor, with the Governor presiding, This resort to the Governor’s Council immediately after the March attack is very significant, and in my opinion, as near as officially we can make it, set up the Council of State (aka the Governor’s Council) as the principal organ of the provincial government, through which day-to-day gubernatorial executive initiative were debated, amended, rejected, and agreed to. With the governor’s attendance required, it seems participation of those appointed was irregular for most members, but from the start a solid core of attendees participated in most of the critical decisions. Fausz agrees and elaborates on this body and its emergence from informality to the keystone of the colony’s government in Virginia:
‘Plentiful in nothing but want & wanting nothing but plenty the nine hundred or so colonists who survived the 1622 uprising had little choice but to rely on Governor Wyatt’s decimated (six had been killed in the attack (John Kukla)) Council of State as ‘the Instrument to make all this whole againe’ … These surviving leaders were evenly divided between ‘men of Contemplation and discourse’(like Wyatt and Sandys …) and ‘men of action or experience (such as George Yeardley and Francis West…) and they derived their strength by unifying diverse talents under adverse conditions. This motley crew of poets and profiteers, scholars and soldiers, quickly developed into an effective, if unlikely, oligarchy based on their common acquisitive ambitions. By fairly distributing the bountiful spoils of office, and considering it ‘ill nature or worse nurture, to desire contention’ with their fellow oligarchs, Wyatt’s councillors successfully merged public service with private gain and established the proto-type for the seventeenth-century Virginia Council” [99] J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake”, in Colonial Chesapeake Society, Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan and Jean B. Russo (Eds) Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 53
As Kukla observes the period of the councilors-commanders located control over the de facto post Massacre policy system to the Council of State, establishing in the local settlements, hundreds, and shires a military-like command system under local commanders, many of whom were the very members on the Council of State. These are our plantation conquistadors. In this period, we see reference to their military rank in the listing of Council members. In this atmosphere of oligarchic solidarity in the Council, the individual wants and desires of its members were compromised into an agreed upon course of action, such as the Palisades Project, and of note, the Governor and Secretary of the Colony, being a small minority, found it necessary to join in this oligarchy to satisfy their own personal and positional responsibilities as best they could. That will create a heritage of governor-council relations that will underlie the conflict discussed in future modules, the future ouster of John Harvey, and provide what will turn into decades of oligarchical decision-making that will strongly check the power of the royal governor, and lead to the decentralization, the Tilt toward local-county as the foundation of the colony’s colonial policy system :
the decade of Indian warfare after the Powhatan Uprising of 1622 forged colony leasers, regardless of their social origins into what J. Frederick Fausz called ‘an unlikely oligarchy’ that dominated the other colonists, the neighboring Indians, and commerce in tobacco, maize and furs, Beginning in September, 1623, the councilors and commanders monopolized the entire Indian trade along the Chesapeake and its tributaries. Combining their civilian and military offices with commercial connections,, the twenty-eight men who were Virginia Council of State between 1622 and 1632 had powers to issue land patents, regulate indentured servants, set the prices of domestic and imported commodities, administer the estates of deceased colonists, direct the militia, determine Indian policy, control the colony’s gunpowder, and appoint local militia officers. After the dissolution of the bankrupt Virginia Company in 1624, the oligarchs also became ‘guardians’ for the property and servants once owned by the company. The councilor-commander oligarchy of the 1620’s had no challengers. Jon Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia, American Historical Review, (Vol. 90, No. 2 (April, 1985), pp. 283-4
the Narrative
Likely the first action of the Virginia Council was to send a missive to the Company asking for help and lots of assistance. The Company’s response when they heard two months later was both interesting and varied; in any case Oct 7 the Company essentially declared war on the Indians, but also sent limited assistance and relatively small numbers of new settlers, many of whom were diverted to Bermuda because of the lack of corn in Virginia. Already we can see the lack of effective control over the colony by the London-based Virginia Company (it took six months to react), and so we can make the assertion that from the day of the initial attack responsibility for the governance and defense of the colony was left in the hands of the resident Company leadership: principally, Governor Wyatt and Edwin’s Sandys brother and Treasurer of the Colony.
At its initial meeting the Virginia Council, according to Powell, decided to launch a 300 man counter attack directly against Opechancanough (that I might add was 20-25% of the colony’s population before the attack; only 180 were mobilized). A palisade was erected at Jamestown. Apparently rejected in the decision was “a suggestion” to retire to the Eastern Shore where Opechancanough was weaker, and the area more easily defended. Powell asserts the suggestion came from “the people”; this was either a demand made by survivors at the various plantations, or by their leadership at the Council).
On April 13, Wyatt appointed “a commander” with absolute powers to take charge of the defense at Charles City (Hundred). At the same time instructions were made to consolidate survivors from dispersed plantations at more defensible spots and similarly powered commanders (William Tucker and Ralph Hamer, for example) were appointed. Commanders were first recognized as early a 1617, and were the logical expression of the Company’s initiative to promote non shareholder direct investment in Virginia—a colony within a colony. At that point the tie of the commander to the plantation’s-hundreds ownership is clear and direct, There is little reason to suspect that had changed significantly by 1622. Indeed, to implement the Greate Charter initiative to diversify the economy, a commander was named to operate and manage the signature extraction initiative, the Falling Creek Ironworks under its owner, John Berkeley. Berkeley was killed in the March attack, along with around twenty of its workers (Craven, p. 167).
In any event, Wyatt’s 1622 enhancement was intended to clearly place the commander as the CEO of the local militia—and to loosely tie him to the provincial government. Wyatt also directly, if only formally, appointed the commander of new settlements and of the concentrated plantations hastily assembled in the immediate aftermath of the March attack. There is little doubt I my opinion that the initial attack of the Second Powhatan War was the kickstart for a sustained provincial effort to create capacity and leadership at the local level—where the action was, and timely decisions and close contact with those involved were imperative [99] Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century pp. 167-8..
While the written records of this time period are understandably scarce, Craven, citing John Smith’s monograph written in reaction to the 1622 attack, suggests that in the first years “expediecy rther than some formal and uniform arrangement was probably the guiding rule” in setting up the local government framework, within which the commander was clearly intended to be the chief operating officer, COO, if not CEO. In 1622, he further asserts that monthly courts (possessing fused power including local law-making, regulation of the parish, judicial courts, and administrative enforcement of mandated actions) were set up in “convenient places”—the clear intent of which was to reduce the dangerous travel to Jamestown. From 1622 on through 1634 a rudimentary court system was extended to geographically diverse plantations-settlements into dispersed but settled geographies. As we shall see in this module series, this will become the foundation for the 1634 formal creation of counties.
Almost immediately after March 22, organized raids designed to counterpunch the Indians and prevent them from further attacks on vulnerable plantations started. In that such raids could steal or destroy Indian corn fields on which the Powhatan were dependent for winter food these raids were continued in the following years through 1626. In June at least four major attacks, led by Sandys, Yeardley, William Powell, and John West were sent—with varying results.[99] William S. Powell, “Aftermath of the Massacre: the First Indian War, 1622-1632 (the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Jan, 1958).
At the end of June Yeardley organized an expedition to the Eastern Shore, spending about six weeks there. He did so under orders from Wyatt to explore and set up a base where about four hundred settlers could be sent. Included in his instructions to Yeardley was a rudimentary outline of the plantation he wished to establish at that location: his preamble stated that [previously] Virginians had become so dispersed’ that they knew neither ‘friendly commerce and mutuall societie’, nor ‘common safety’. To guarantee that the [new] colonists would not be ‘so stragglingly seated’ in the future, each man [would] receive only four acres of land ‘for his particular employment”. [99] T. H. Breen, p-. 117-8
Out of the blue we see a proposal that would have struck deeply into the heart and soul of the shredded community; four acres were not sufficient for tobacco export and profitability and would have severely limited the number of servants in each plantation. Sandys, in the same time period, sent correspondence that reflected that position, and went a step further calling for the Greate Charter reform package to diversify the economy and limit the planting of tobacco. instead, we see it congruent with a 1624 report by John Harvey (a future governor) and John Porys—both close Edwin Sandys’ supporters. It must be noted, however, nothing came of either.
Wyatt’s tentative innovation in June and summer of 1622, exposed a critical difference between the Company’s future for the colony, and that seemingly embraced by the seated leadership of the planters and other resident Company officials. By the end of the year the Company lost its charter, so the gap mattered little, save leaving a stain on Harvey, and a rather stubborn resistance of the Virginia domestic leadership to break with tobacco, tobacco plantations and the headright. In its place a relentless war against the Powhatan commenced, intensifying each following year, curtailing “trade” in favor of compulsion, and permitting the displaced plantation owners to reestablish their abandoned plantations, apparently tolerating their filing for new claims for expanded acreage to compensate them for their losses in the Massacre.
Hence, we see ample reason to believe from the day after the initial attack, the resident Company leadership took charge and pursued policies not always congruent with the beleaguered Company’s position. To the point, the resident Virginia Company officials were wedded to the tobacco and plantation economy, resistant to any disruption to their personal economic holdings, and willing to include in their elite new men, selected plantation owners who would lead the struggle against the Powhatan. This is early in the “game” to be sure, but , the positional distinction was evident.
Yeardley, according to Powell, was Wyatt’s second in command and successor. I confess it is not clear to me if this choice was in essence forced on Wyatt or his personal preference. The two were not friends, indeed the opposite in the period after 1623-4. Through the course of 1622, Yeardley made several other major expeditions to secure corn, and put pressure on the Powhatan, William Powell, and William Tucker, under the direction of Yeardley led their own expeditions as well. Each year after 1622 a series of “expeditions” and projects were carried out by an increasingly selective group of young, non-Company official plantation owners. We will discuss them later in detail; they constitute the grouping we label plantation conquistadors, and was we shall see they will dominate policy-making for the next thirty to forty years.
The Tobacco Monoculture Spills into the Middle Peninsula
To the English colonist, always insensitive to how they were regarded by the Powhatans, the March 1622 attack was a “Pearl Harbor date of infamy” that embedded itself in the Virginian mindset. The London Company eventually followed suit. The destruction and disruption, the dramatic loss in population—and the diversion during the planting through harvest season caused by large-scale militia expeditions, and the continued reluctance to abandon tobacco to raise staples, created another, arguably as bad “starving” season” that reduced the population still further, and intensified the raiding of Indian fields for their staples. By the end of the year over half of the settlers perished. The few supplies sent over by the Company and the King were not sufficient to their purposes, and so 1623 was another dramatic and brutal year of Indian fighting
Having pushed the colony to the edge of its existence, however, after 1622 Opechancanough held back, and did not follow up with the with a coup de grace. It has been said that was the style of Indian warfare, war which did not seek extinction of one’s enemy. If so, during the two-three years after 1622 the English pushed back, captured Opechancanough and his son, held him hostage–weaponizing him in their Indian campaigns whenever possible. The decentralized tribal network, inhibited coordinated reaction to new English intrusions; that usually met each step deeper into the hinterland did not risk an overwhelming response from the tribe, reducing if nothing else, the perception of risk by the average Virginian..
No better the plight of the isolated homestead plantation settler a year after the Massacre who wrote that hearing of multiple deaths still occurring, and that the Powhatan had somehow obtained more firearms, increasing the vulnerability of Settlers working their fields–
“so that they may now dteale upon us and wee Cannot know them [Indians] from English till it is too late … and then there is no mercie’ … Our Leiftenant is dead, and his father and brother …we are but 32 to fight against 2,000 if they shoudld come …[and] the nighest helpe that Wee have is ten miles of us, and when the rogues over came this place [Martin’s Hundred during the Massacre] they slew 80 Persons, how then shall we doe for wee lye even in their teeth” [99] T. H. Breen, pp. 119-20
Amazingly, George Sandys acknowledged his lack of control, complaining a year after the Massacre that settlers were reclaiming their exposed and devastated plantations and already pushing still further into the vulnerable James River hinterland and its tributaries. Lamenting, yet again, his dislike of a tobacco monoculture, he protested its expansion, and pledged that if he could get his way, he would cease its production. Interestingly, however, he never stopped tobacco production on his plantations. The tobacco steamroller rolled on, picking up strength each succeeding year.[99] T. H. Breen, p. 119 This is testimony that previous to its charter revocation the Company, certainly its Treasurer, had no ability to stand in its way. The monoculture was out of control before 1625 when the Company lost its charter.
“Almost from the day of the massacre [Virginians} had debated the possibility of clearing the Indians from the lower peninsula, and in 1629 steps … [would be] taken to put that policy into effect. Several of the more prominent planters [Mathews, Yeardley, Claiborne, and Tucker] by an arrangement foretelling a major feature of Virginia’s [expansion-to the north in the heart of Powhatan territory}… agreed to provide a specified number of men for occupation of a pint on the York River, above modern Yorktown known [then] as Cheskiak in return for a grant of fifty acres of land for each man provided. [99] Frank Wesley Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 173-4.
This led to a early project that brought together the principal conquistadors in a project led by Mathews. In hindsight, we can see the future “Claiborne Clique” move in a different direction, the Middle Peninsula, than the mainstream planter pushed (the James and its tributaries). As such they were pioneers in what would be the main Virginian expansion into and up the Middle Peninsula, the York River in the early Transition Period.. That meant, among other things, communication and control by Jamestown-based elites (on the James) was limited, and the shredded community land pattern was amplified.
That this would seem to be the opposite to good common sense is cited by Breen as one more proof regarding the highly individualistic, high risk-taking tobacco gazelle political culture. It had survived the Massacre and as we move to the mid-decade served as an impediment to any sustained coordinated anti-Indian strategy by the Virginian policy-makers.
Common sense alone seems to dictate that a group of settlers confronted with a powerful Indian confederation and foreign marauders [Spanish] would, in military matters at least, cooperate for their own safety. But our common sense was not the rule of the seventeenth-century Virginian. The obsession with private profits was a more compelling force than was a desire to create a dependable system of self-defense [99] T. H. Breen, p. 116
That project also confirmed the important link between land expansion and workforce headright incentives. Although the population was incrementally rebuilding with new immigrants, it was never sufficient to provide a cheap workforce. Despite the massive use of indentured servants, wage rates were high in Virginia, and competition among the planters to lure and hold their workforce was intense. That incessant compulsion to plant tobacco, despite the vulnerability of the population to Indian raids and a large-scale attack, created an atmosphere where those workers who could resisted involvement with the militia and the expeditions, the work gangs for projects like palisades in favor of exposed household plantations.
It also meant that Virginia governors in this early period issued land patents and headrights as they were required to do. The intense use of land sales, grants, and headrights in the period after the Company lost its charter, however, will play a major role in the insecurity of Virginians toward Charles’s failure to accept and legitimize the Company’s grants, initiatives and incentives, and leaving exposed to eviction any who owned land related to these programs. In any event, there was certainly a shared bond between elites and non-elites in this period, a bond based on fighting Indians and undisturbed expansion of land settlement to expand the tobacco monoculture.
The annual raid combined with irregular but chronic raids on Indian corn fields and villages petered out after 1626. Warfare continued, however, decentralized, leaving no lasting effect on the settlers. By that time it was clear the colony no longer faced an existentialist threat for its existence, but the same could not be said for the Powhatan and other tribes. The cost of war were likely far more keenly felt by the Indians, especially by those tribes adjacent to the hinterland expansion. Disease and starvation hit them hard, and the corn raiding compelled their abandonment of more and more fields and land to the settlers.
But the colony did manage, in the pursuit of a policy, once described as one of ‘perpetual enmity’, to field year after year forces whose task was systematically to cut the Indian’s corn in the field, burn his villages, destroy his fishing weirs, and subject him to every other possible harassment. Through these tactics the colonists kept the area of settlement reasonably clear of Indians, and having established early in the 1630’s a frontier outpost at Chiskiack on the York River [the Middle Peninsula] the government finally allowed the kind of peace that is broken only by individual incidents to return [99] Frank Wesley Craven, White, Red, and Black, p. 55
Low densities and expanded Tidewater settlement sustained English fear and memory of the 1622 attack. The Second Powhatan War that followed and consumed the remainder of the 1620’s. meant annual expeditions and constant formal raids of nearby Indian villages or field continued for about a decade after the Massacre. “After 1622, the settlers made fewer attempts at establishing friendly relations with the natives; no longer was there as much concern for educating or converting them. More than ever the colonists now looked upon the Indians as unfit barbarians who stood in the way of orderly settlement of their newfound homes. These were savages with whom to trade–if the trade were profitable. Otherwise they were to be avoided, or exterminated, as the occasion demanded”. [99] Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century (Ed) Institute of Early American History & Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 209
To this extent the, the Indian conflict served as a “Bunsen burner”, a driver of support by the average settler, for development and institutionalization of a new elite, and the reorientation of company offices and structures into more governmental entities. The chief beneficiaries were obviously the larger plantation owners in each district-hundred-county, the leadership of which almost immediately was assumed by the local commander, and the adventurer “conquistador” who led the raids and annual expeditions against the tribes. It is these three defining characteristics, large-scale tobacco plantations, activist participation/leadership in governance institutions, and continuous leadership in Indian warfare or trade, that pyramided them into Virginia’s Transition Era-First Migration governing elite.
Described as “Chieftains” by their London-based critics who were often scandalized by their behavior, bearings and temperament–so at odds with established English social behavior and background, my plantation conquistadors–and the large planter community they led–most were indeed of a lower social status than had existed even in the Virginia Company, and certainly in English provincial and national government/society [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, Colonial Chesapeake Society (Eds) (the Institute of Early American History and Culture, North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 54. Bailyn observes that higher status Company officials either died or left town, long before 1630 [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia, in 17th-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, James Morton Smith (Ed) (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 93-4
Fausz draws special attention to the “flip side of the conquistador coin”: Indian fighting or Indian trading. Large tobacco plantation owners they certainly were, but with exceptions they made their name fighting Indians, and when tobacco prices fell, finding friendly Indians in areas not torn by the Powhatan wars and trading furs and other goods in well-designed trading posts. Acknowledging that “successful military campaigning enhanced the [conquistadors] reputations as guardians of public safety” he also calls attention that these raids and campaigns also typically resulted in personal profit to the conquistador, and served as rewards to the militia, and general community, that participated in these expeditions.
For the smaller tobacco householders and servant-renter class, Indian raids meant corn and other foodstuffs which allowed them to grow tobacco more or less exclusively, In alerting us to yet another dimension of Indian fighting, Fausz supports our contention that Virginia’s Transition Era settlement strategy nexus was closely wound around displacing and subduing Indians whose land they wanted, and trading with friendly Indians as an important diversification of revenues, while simultaneously legitimizing the role and activities of the plantation conquistadors with the general non-elite population of the colony.
Fausz asserts that Indian fighting served yet another function in the development of the Transition Era conquistador elite. Whatever diversity existed within the Virginia elite, between the poets and men or action, company men or shareholder-incentive receiver, between the high and middling status, it melted away in the desperation of the spring, fall and winter of 1622 and spring of 1623. Over that year the elite was isolated from the Company, left totally to its own devices, and literally, without exaggeration brought to the edge of survival and the collapse of the colony. The conquistador, State Council led, resistance and then aggression against the tribes throughout the 2nd Powhatan War–and after– created a bond, a “Band of Brothers” within the plantation elite of the colony, and importantly among the contentious and ambitions conquistador elite.
It was the brutal success of the March Indian attack, and the spring Indian assaults’ was the “common initiation and shared danger under fire [from Indian attacks and English raids that] further unified Wyatt’s [Council of State] into a cohesive fraternity of leadership”. Pointing out that even poet George Sandys would lead an early raid, as would Yeardley and several others, made such raids a “rite de passage of forest combat” that linked themselves and to the larger community and justified in the minds of the elite and the Virginia community “that the capacity to command was consistent with their warrant [desire] to rule [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake, p. 54.
This sustained and chronic conflict likely occurred because it was to the benefit of the plantation conquistadors who led the opposition to the Indians. Yeardley, in particular, was accused at that time by several Virginia commentators as having personally benefited from corn stolen on raids. It is not likely he was alone. Complicating this was that the typical settler much preferred to plant as much tobacco as possible–and the least acreage to staples-which mean corn-raiding and trading with the Indians became an established feature of the period.
Fausz blames the “Cheiftaines”, or conquistadors and the Council of State for the never-ending war. He suggests they benefited from a low scale war that did not materially interfere with tobacco production. Such warfare perpetuated the flow of settlers to the hinterland, acquired more land for headrights and increased tobacco exports for their plantations, and corn raids, “feedfights” provided staples to live off, as well as profits from sales to settlers.. “By never dealing a deathblow to the Powhatans, Wyatt’s warlords were assured of capital for financing other projects, and a continuing justification for exploiting servant labor under their protection. With captured Powhatan maize keeping them alive, and fear of Powhatan attacks keeping them in line, English laborers cultivated record amounts of tobacco for the Council oligarchs throughout the 1620’s, ever increasing the power and profits of the “Lords of those Lands”. [99] J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake”, in Colonial Chesapeake Society, Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan and Jean B. Russo (Eds) Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 54
By 1627-8, however, such raiding, and the participation in conquistador militia activities were proving itself more burdensome to the settler, who had tired also from the insecurity of the hinterland border areas. Partly, the shift away from war with the Powhatan’s may have reflected the death of the plantation conquistador, George Yeardley in 1627, and the election of the aristocrat Francis West by the Council. West had different ideas about Indian relations and he proceeded to work in that direction. But by now means, the replacement of Yeardley by another oligarchical faction did not translate into a peace movement. Yeardley’s approach to Indian relations was shared by significant elements of the Virginia non-elite, as well as elites.
Despite their having evicted the Indians from these lands, the settlers who took them were just as insecure and fearful as they had always been. Their lack of numbers and physical isolation likely intensified the emotion that sustained the war, and the episodic raids and incited further fueled retaliation—setting off a cycle that was of little benefit to either side. It seems the atmosphere changed from the bottom up and put pressure on the plantation owners and conquistadors to bring the war to an end. The Powhatan had long before reached that point also.
So in 1628 Governor West engaged in negotiations which resulted in a treaty, which he signed; the treaty, it appears lacked any consensus among plantation owners—by this time the Claiborne Clique was heavily engaged in its Kent Island initiative, so it likely was that planation owners still benefited in various ways by maintaining the friction, tension and insecurity. When West stepped down as governor, and left for England, his successor (John Potts) repudiated the treaty, and the previous hit or miss war continued into the Thirties.
Even today some historians credit the Second Powhatan War as ending in 1628, others say 1632. Truth be told, it probably continued at some low level into the 1640’s when it broke out in the Third Powhatan War, complete with yet a new “massacre”. Whether or not any of this constituted a formal war in the modern sense, I am not sure, but the take away as far as I am concerned is that expansion of the monoculture inevitably meant dispersal, eviction and de facto replacement of Europeans on what had been Powhatan land. It was a zero-sum relationship—settlement and expulsion that rule Virginia at least through the 1640’s.
The tactic of burning villages and destroying crops kept the natives off balance, while it allowed the English time to recover from the devastation wrought by years of fighting. A more destructive measure of eradicating the Indian rivals was the extension of the colony’s settled area. As the English colony multiplied the new immigrants put the plow to more land, leaving the natives the choice of moving west into the territories of their [Indian] enemies, or standing to fight once again. [99] Warren M. Billings, Chapter 8, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 209
Uncomfortable with the confinements and anxious to populate, settle more land and establish plantations, the peace terms were finally repudiated outright (January 1629). The explanation for the abrogation of the treaty was “the people of the colony have grown secure and utterly neglected to either stand upon their guard, or to keep their Arms fitt [sic]. The condition of our people being soe wretchling negligent in this kinde that neither proclamation or other strict orders have remedied the same … that all the former treaties of peace be utterlie extinct … a safer course for the community in general [to prevent a second massacre] utterlyie to proclaime and maintyne emnitie and warres with all Indians of these parts”. [99] Martha W. McCartney, Chap 4, in Danielle Morretti-Langholtz, “A Study of Virginia Indians and Jamestown: the First Century (Colonial National Historic Park, National Park Service, December, 2005).
A truce was negotiated with several tribes, principally to secure a portion of their crops through more reliable methods. Essentially this brought to an end the Second Powhatan War around 1632. It did nothing of the sort. “A gruesome pattern had been established in colonist-American Indian relations which was to be repeated elsewhere over the next two and one half-centuries … as settlers numbers increased they became more and more confident, their eyes turned to the native’s land and harmony gave way to intermittent warfare, followed by massacre, after which the remnants of the indigenous inhabitants were either enslaved or confined to reservations where they could be controlled for the convenience of the colonists … In consequence, the way was now open for the colonists to exploit the land more rapidly, especially for the cultivation of tobacco”. [99] Richard Middleton, Colonial America, a History, 1565-1776 (3rd Ed), pp. 62-3
By that time large swatches of land were already settled and in need of protection and security from attack. Constant pressure on hinterland never abated, and the English colonists continued to press beyond the perimeters of each hundred, each and every year. Given the need for Indian corn and fields for self-sufficiency, the intermittent decentralized war-raids continued, certainly through 1632 while new settlement and further push into the hinterland continued–the settlement must have looked to the Powhatans as a slow, relentless and sustained seizure of their homelands, raising their own self-defense needs to higher levels.
Thus the Virginia planters intruded deeply into the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indians homeland. It was during this period that the York River began to develop into a major conduit of shipping and trade. By the early 1630’s, European colonists … ventured into the territory inhabited by the Nansemond Indians … [and] shortly thereafter began streaming into the Chickahominy River basin. As those who seated land along the Piankatank were supposed to pay a barrel of corn a year to Opechancanough [by legislation of the Assembly], the government was fully aware that they were encroaching upon territory the Natives considered theirs” [99] Martha W. McCartney, Chap 4, in Danielle Morretti-Langholtz, “A Study of Virginia Indians and Jamestown: the First Century (Colonial National Historic Park, National Park Service, December, 2005).
No surprise, the Powhatan were either driven from the Tidewater and forced to relocate above the Fall Line, or in areas not yet occupied by other tribes or yet threatened by the English. The advantages of deep-water communications [the Chesapeake Bay] in the marketing of tobacco perhaps were of even greater importance in leading the planters along the waters [rivers and coast] empting immediately into the lower Chesapeake and across it to extend the area of their settlement on the Eastern Shore. [99] Frank Wesley Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 173.
Those that were not able to relocate, the Accomac tribe on the the Eastern Shore for example, were formally restricted by treaty to specified lands. The Accomac were issued a 1,500 acre tract in the late 1630’s and in December, 1640, Jamestown formalized it through a land patent, i.e. title transfer, to the tribe. From that point on they called themselves the Gingaskins, and the tract became known as the Gingaskin Indian Reservation.
McCarthy asserts this was the first English-created Indian reservation in North America. Because the Gingaskins were able to sell their land, over the next decades they did so to help cope with their decline and poverty, and continued pressure from the colonists. McCarthy believes that by 1673 the last of the tribe sold their last parcel. The Encyclopedia Virginia reports the reservation was legally terminated in 1813. Today the area is known as “Indian Neck” [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/geodata/gingaskin-indian-reservation/. She also describes a similar legislative act imposed on a land developer (and Potomac-bound fur trader), Captain Henry Fleet, to pay corn to Openechanough by homesteaders in the newly opening Rappahannock River area. In 1642, the Assembly specifically authorized settlement along that River.
With the Tobacco Depression the Push to the Periphery intensified
Neither security and title of the land, or the legality of Company incentives after Midsummer’s Day 1625, had been confirmed, legitimized or acknowledge by the king until the mid-1630’s. His word or edict could effectively terminate Virginian’s hard-fought, if morally complex, fragile tobacco plantations. Indeed, on their own terms, Greate Charter incentives and land sales legality expired on that Midsummer’s day in 1625. Legally Virginian plantation owners and householders were mere squatters on their own land if the king so wished. Any claims, sales and patents, or headrights after that date had no legal basis, save that of a king who would take no position on the matter and thus allowed the practices to continue.
Indentured servants, many of whom thought they would directly receive fifty acres of land for their labor, also realized that their land was held in title by their “owner” until the contract term had expired, was also vulnerable to the King’s future decision. Frustratingly, they understood their potential fortune and household prosperity depended on their landlords and masters, and his watchfulness and actions. This insecurity of future incentives thus compounded the the relationship between property owners and servants; they both were in the same boat, the boat that was under attack from the Powhatan.
Clearly not disposed to challenge their masters under the best of circumstances, the great mass of Virginia residents constituted in this time an agricultural lumpenproletariat, which in today’s woke terminology is termed “structural inequality”. The matter of necessity shifted to Virginia’s political institutions, and their sustained advocacy for a decision from the King. Andrews calls attention to the efforts of their political institutions to raise the issue in London, and to express their concerns;
It is apparent, however, in the years from 1628 to 1638, despite the fact they were holding representative and low-making assemblies each year, the planters in Virginia did not feel quite certain of their right to do so … Therefore, they continued petitions to England. In 1629 Harvey [the royal governor] appealed to the King begging him to authorize the Privy Council “to consider what is fitt to be done for the ratefying of the priviledges formally granted, and holding of a general assembly to be called by the Governor upon necessary occasions therein to propound law and orders for the good government of the people” …In 1632, the Assembly in transmitting its laws and proceedings to the [London-based] Dorset commission [reiterated the same concerns] … [and] in 1634 Governor John West and the council wrote “Wee are continually solicited by the inhabitants to be humble petitioners to your Honnors for the confirmation of their lands and privileges” [99] Charles A Andrews, The Colonial Period in American History: Settlements, Vol. 1, pp. 202-3
The issues associated with the termination of the Virginia Company charter had in fact been a matter raised in the debate raised by the final politics of 1623-4. The Porys Report and the Mandeville board which considered whether to strip the Company of its charter had heard several petitions regarding the matter. The death of King James brought to an end any resolution. Charles had not developed a dislike of the Virginia Company (Sandys was his main target), and he strangely enough was not unwilling to find a compromise that would continue its administration of Virginia. In the meantime life in Virginia continued on as it had, even though its Governor Wyatt lacked a firm commitment as to his job description, and an undefined position regarding the Assembly, the Greate Charter Reforms, and the Incentive initiatives that underlie Virginia’s settlement.
Thus the dialogue on Virginia’s future, land and incentive rights included continued to be discussed—on the table so to speak. For Virginians there was some hope in the years after the charter revocation that their rights would be acknowledged. Sadly, however, Edwin Sandys, and later his brother George, adopted an aggressive set of positions that polarized opposition to solving the problem and reforming the Company. Tobacco, profits, and revenues for the King complicated the problem still further. Issues that arose concerning Massachusetts, a new colony also under a subsidiary joint stock corporation linked to the Virginia Company distracted attention from Virginia.
Former Governor Yeardley was sent to England to argue Virginian concerns to the Privy Council and the King if possible. While there he was named governor to replace Wyatt who wanted out in the worst way. Although Yeardley met with some success with the Privy Council, in the end it was the Sandys faction’s aggressive position, and an adamant opposition to those positions, that prompted Charles to back away from a long-term redefinition of the Company and a legitimation of its past decisions/initiatives, and an acceptance of the former company Greate Charter institutions as royal approved political structures.
Yeardley returned to Virginia, and, perhaps unexpectedly died in early 1627. In the limbo that followed, John Harvey was selected by the King to replace Yeardley as governor; Harvey, however, did not reach Virginia until late 1629, and did not assume office until early 1630.
In this vacuum, the Council of State assert its leadership, and that meant a continuation of established practices, the use of Greate Charter institutions, and the affording of a degree of legitimacy to their decisions—even though the King had made no decision, and exerted little pushback to this exercise of authority. As Virginia political bodies made their decision, usually notifying London of their action, an awkward deference to local decision-making, with intermittent royal input continued through 1630. Indeed, as we shall see, the Palisades Project, described below, would attain an endorsement from the King, and was inserted into the royal instructions to Harvey the incoming governor. In that instance, the King even order the holding of an Assembly, the institution he had not yet legitimized, to approve the project and the expenses associated with it [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, pp. 96-200. But this was no way to run an Empire and the flux continued thru the administration of Harvey.
So we don’t get too far ahead of ourselves, it is best we return to Virginia and finish up our discussion of land, settlement, and tobacco.
Difficult Questions
Several difficult questions or issues follow from this narrative. These issues encompass not just this module, or Virginia chapter, but pervade the entire book, and the volumes that follow. The first is a simple, obvious question as to whether this path could have been avoided. Say it another way, was a zero-sum war against Native Americans inevitable, or was there an alternative that was missed or betrayed? I have no definitive answer. “Just Questions” that I leave for the Reader.
In Pennsylvania, Penn forged a quite different approach to dealing with the Indians Sad to relate after a relatively equitable relationship that lasted for about sixty years, it too ended in the French and Indian War, followed shortly after by Pontiac’s Rebellion. Pennsylvania’s western hinterland, settled principally by non-Quakers, and manipulated by Penn’s sons to make a profit from land sales, dispelled any notion Pennsylvania had a magic solution to the zero-sum take over of Indian land. Also, the Massachusetts chapter arguably presents an even more brutal Indian-relations history than Virginia’s. Things got much worse, when settlers crossed over the Appalachians.
Interestingly, despite the bad Indigenous People situation in today’s Canada, the French in early Canada seem to have had more lasting success—until, of course, they were defeated in the French and Indian War, losing Canada in the process. The key to that success I believe lies In the French “trading factory/post” strategy”, which we have explained in detail in several earlier modules. The French Trading Post strategy contrasted starkly with the English “settlement strategy nexus”, the one the Virginia Company had trouble in developing. The key distinction between the two was to trade and export with the Indians in partnership (with minimal immigration and population settlement) and the English let’s resettle our surplus and dissatisfied population on Indian lands.
The economic development strategy adopted by a colonial power, in particular adoption of a permanent settlement strategy, could have played a decisive role in generating Indian résistance and chronic war. In Canada, for example, French colonization decidedly tilted toward a “trading post” strategy that arguably was more peaceful and developed critical trading partners with the Indians. The Dutch more or less did much the same. Still the end result in both instances was more peaceful but similar in displacing Native Americans and relegating them to reservations Today, Canada is dealing with the heritage of its policies toward the Indigenous Tribes.
This raises the question of inevitability–inevitability which becomes more plausible when a permanent settlement strategy nexus becomes the primary goal of the policy system. Said and done, the logic of a settlement nexus is displacement, conquest, restriction to reservations, or genocide. If the Indians “owned” the land upon initial settlement, one cannot escape the fact that any level of settlement involves takeover of Indian land. Settlement is zero-sum, although it can be more humane and even peaceful, if for instance it is purchased and sold willingly–the core of William Penn’s Pennsylvania strategy.
Nevertheless, in the end it injects European law of property and results in ownership by colonists. Or Else. The early English colonial experience did not lend itself to peaceful and sound coexistence, with an eventual mutual long term accommodation. It was yet another version of immigration of an ethnic groups and their conquest, expulsion, and assimilation known through European and Asian history. Like the biblical Hebrew “invasion” of Canaan , the immigration was a conquest, with the dominant motif being site-control. This is not a pretty picture, and I have no way to describe it other than that. I cannot reverse history; I cannot ignore it; and I cannot present a moral answer that satisfies me.
I can learn from it; I can not allow my history to push it aside. It is part of our history of economic development strategy and major initiatives. If one accepts the Virginian Palisades Project was the first American major economic development project, that project was based on, and reflected, the war and land seizures. from the native Indian population—relabeled to the English perspective as self-defense.
As the colonies expanded they inevitably spread into more Indian homelands. Settlement colonialization, to me, inescapably creates a zero-sum relationship with the Native Americans. We are at best left with the logic of ethnic population migrations which have characterized human existence since history was recorded–and likely from its start with Lucy in Africa. Who is right when the Angle-Saxon’s kicked the Celts out of England, or the Germanic tribes on the continent who also did the same. I’m not sure if the Roman expansion fits an ethic definition, but Europe’s conquest under Caesar was likely to be defined as genocide today. Every continent has similar examples; it is not unreasonable to see mercantilist colonial expansion in the same light.
The morality underlying any of these examples is by its nature zero-sum; each side has its moral point of view.
Settlement, perhaps its definition, includes the precondition of site control–and with some rare and temporary exceptions that means the replacement of populations. If the Jews invaded Canaan around 1250 BC, that displacement unleashes moral consequences that will never die or pass–as Arab-Jewish relations testify. If so, how do we deal with this insoluble question? Currently, there is a huge literature on “colonialism”, emphasizing its evils and immoralities. Without doubt those who subscribe to its tenets and conclusions will apply them to this history. That too seems inevitable. I hope some good comes from that dialogue.
These issues and value conflicts are not going away as we proceed deeper into our American colonial history. Arguably, they get a lot worse as we enter into the Early Republic and post Civil War period. In the colonial period, we are “English”, in the latter periods we are Americans. It is not a feasible option to simply ignore them, nor dismiss them with some fiction such as American exceptionalism. Conflict with the Native Americans was a policy area, and one that often rose to the top of the policy agenda; its implications often permeated into the other policy areas such as economic development (as we shall demonstrate in our last section in this module).
Accordingly we will proceed on, including conflict with the Indians as its own policy area and characterizing it as a war that establishes the site control of specific lands and territory–in other words a war of conquest where, to the extent it exists, morality lies with the beholder. The reader is free to apply his or her morality to my observations, while gleaning whatever knowledge and understanding of the affair and policy yields. We can, at least, learn from this brutal policy of site control which permeated the entire of American colonial experience.
As site control applies to colonial Virginia I suggest the reader consider the argument developed by Professor Bernard Sheehan, whose book, Savagism and Civility: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge University Press, 1980). I have employed comments and analysis offered by Dr. Martha W. McCartney, Chap 4, in Danielle Morretti-Langholtz, “A Study of Virginia Indians and Jamestown: the First Century (Colonial National Historic Park, National Park Service, December, 2005) through this and other modules.
Ron W. Coan 