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The massacre of 1622
On March 22, 1622, Powhatan warriors ambushed and killed 347 people – a quarter of Virginia’s colonists. In just a few hours, the colony was transformed from boomtown into rubble. Worse, it was about to collapse into a second starving time.
Over the next year, 1000 people died. War resumed with the Powhatan, this time led by Opechancanough and his brother, Opitchapam. Governor Wyatt resumed Delaware/Gates/Dale’s tactics of razing Powhatan villages in retaliation for offenses.
In April 1623, the English poisoned and shot dozens of Powhatan leaders and warriors at a supposed peace negotiation. A year after that came the decisive battle, where 800 Powhatan fought 60 better-armed, and armored, Englishmen. Sporadic hostilities continued for the next eight years, but there was no longer any chance of Powhatan victory.
Opechancanough had hoped that the massacre would either kill or drive the English from Virginia. Instead, it galvanized them. The London Company used pro-Protestant fervor to attract new investors and settlers. The English no longer felt the need to try to cooperate or cohabitate with the Powhatan. The new policy was to drive the Powhatan from the land, and take Virginia by right of conquest.
The attack also catalyzed the collapse of the Virginia Company, and the transformation of Virginia into England’s first Crown Colony.
Everyday life in the 17th Century Chesapeake
As a Crown Colony, Virginia no longer had top-down imposition of social structure or economics. It developed naturally, and the society that evolved was extremely unique.
Again, younger sons of noble or landed gentry families started to emigrate. Peasants facing destitution went, too, after exhausting all their options within England. Again, it was a choice between destitution and colonization.
Colonists did all their trading with merchant mariners, so they didn’t develop towns or industry of their own. With no towns, there was virtually no law enforcement, though the Virginia Assembly could still pass laws. Colonists simply lived as they saw fit, without trying to impose their ideas on others. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t.
Instead, people lived within kinship networks. Extended family and friends formed the basis of society. This was a natural extension of noble families in England, though it took a very different form. It also took a form molded by the hardship of society. 40% of new arrivals died during their “seasoning period,” and survivors experienced permanent damage to their health. 75% of children had lost at least one parent before they reached adulthood. Many had lost both. Marriages lasted an average of 7 years before one partner died.
Through the rest of the century, even the richest people in Virginia had a lower standard of living, and access to fewer luxuries, than the poor people of England. There were no towns, taverns, or marketplaces. There was also very little crime.
Fragile though life was, Chesapeake society was strong enough to endure the coming turmoil of war and depression. It survived, and formed the foundation of the American South.
Transcript
Introduction
There was nothing remarkable about the morning of March 22, 1622. Colonists went about their business, and Powhatan came into town to trade and work with people they were now on a first name basis with. They borrowed tools and provisions, and used the settlers’ boats. It was a morning like any other.
Just a little before noon, each one picked up whatever tool or weapon was closest, and killed whatever person was closest. For hours, they then went through the town, knowing exactly where they’d find people, and slaughtering them. They were killed at breakfast tables, in yards, gardens, fields, or as they were running errands, and many were so taken by surprise that they died before they even realized what was going on.
After six years, the Powhatan were completely familiar with the English and their settlements, and they had a good idea of where the Colonists would be at any given time. They could make the attack as deadly as possible, moving quickly from one plantation to another and then disappearing back into the woods before the English could warn each other or regroup into effective fighting units. Locals made the first attacks and were followed by groups of 50 to a few hundreds of warriors who torched settlements and finished off survivors. The warriors were mainly Powhatan and Pamunkey, joined by eight or nine other tribes, including the Appamattocks, Warrascoyacks and Nansemonds. There was one goal – to kill as many men, women and children as possible and destroy their houses, equipment, livestock and property. Any English who escaped would then starve or could be killed later.
A group of men was taken from John Martin’s plantation and never seen again. In fact, his plantation suffered the highest losses of any site, with only 22 left alive out of 140. Martin, himself, survived, but soon left for England, permanently. On another plantation, 53 men and women died in desperate hand-to-hand fighting. George Thorpe was warned of the attack, but was so void of all suspicion that he refused to escape. His body was found mangled beyond the point of recognition, as a way of showing pure contempt. Upriver, Thorpe’s ole neighbor John Berkeley was killed along with the entire population of his town. Across the river, the slaughter of 16 men doomed the effort to build a university. Ralph Hamor was shot in the back, but managed to escape and launch a counterattack. He and his men managed to use spades, axes and brickbats until they were relieved by half a dozen musketeers sent from Jamestown. His brother Thomas managed to bring 18 men, women and children to his own place and helped defend them until the attackers left.
William Powell had arrived in 1607, but neither he nor his family survived this. Nathaniel Causey was another of Smith’s settlers. He was seriously wounded, but managed to scatter his attackers by cleaving one of their heads with an ax. A man named Baldwin was able to save himself and his badly injured wife by shooting his musket repeatedly. John Proctor’s wife was a prim and proper gentlewoman, and was able to organize men on their plantation to drive off the Powhatans.
Closer to Jamestown, Yeardley’s plantations lost 27 people. One boy who had been converted to Christianity lived at the plantation of Richard Pace. The night before the attack, his brother visited him, told him about the plot and instructed him to kill Pace. Instead, he informed Pace of the plot, and after securing his own house, Pace rowed to Jamestown Island to alert Governor Wyatt of the impending strike.
Though it was too late to send out a general warning, Wyatt defended the town and warned the nearby settlements. By the time warriors arrived in boats to assault Jamestown, they were driven off by musket fire.
By the end of the day, 347 people, a quarter of the colony’s population, had been killed. Many thousands of pounds worth of damage had been inflicted. Most of the livestock had been killed, and fields destroyed. Only Newport News and Kekoughtan had escaped the violence.
Sporadic attacks continued over the next month, and forced settlers to abandon their individual plantations and find safety in larger, fortified settlements. Only the larger settlements, Kekoughtan, Newport News, Jamestown and the three largest plantations were left populated. As the English abandoned the plantations, warriors came in and completed the destruction of their property.
The attack was six years in the planning. If you’ve been listening since the beginning of this series, you’ll remember that in the first episode, I said Opechancanough was always unique in his approach to the English, and that he was possibly the man the Spanish called Don Luis, who had exterminated a group of missionaries who believed he had converted to Catholicism and wanted to convert his people.
Opechancanough knew he couldn’t beat the English in open combat, and he couldn’t defend his villages against the destructive raids the English used as retaliation for violence. He still felt his people were treated like a subjugated nation, and didn’t approve of that. He knew that to exterminate the English, he had to build their trust, learn the settlements, and strike before they could defend themselves. He had to wait patiently, and then strike hard and fast.
Then, with the English weak, he could force them into another starving time. Months after the massacre, he predicted that “before the end of two moons, there should not be an Englishman in all their countries.”
He had been shockingly effective. One man reflected that “God forgive me, I think the last massacre killed all our country, besides them they killed, they burst the heart of all the rest.”
The colony was devastated. What livestock and crops remained were inaccessible, and the colony was, indeed, dangerously close to entering another starving time. John Rolfe died in this period, though we don’t know exactly how. At the same time, the price of tobacco was falling in England, making it virtually impossible to raise the kind of money needed to fix the plantations. Each major plantation needed around 3,000 pounds to fix it. In one day, the colony had gone from being a boomtown, though an unstable one, to the kind of devastation and failure that hadn’t been seen since 1609. They were forced to trade with the Indians, and still starved.
When news of the massacre reached London, three important things happened. First, the massacre raised a patriotic and pro-protestant fervor that drew new investors. They sent large numbers of settlers to replace those killed, and helped restart long-abandoned projects, like the iron works, viticulture, silk manufacturing and experimentation with other crops and commodities. The word massacre was French for “butcher’s block,” and had acquired its modern definition during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which up to 30,000 protestants were killed in about a week.
Second, the Virginia Company’s public reputation collapsed. It went beyond exposing company finances and colony conditions. Rival factions exaggerated their allegations, and the Virginia Company was flustered enough that it issued possibly the worst response possible. They sent a letter to Jamestown, saying this was divine retribution for their excess, and reprimanding colonists for having left themselves vulnerable to attack, and saying that their request for grain was perplexing, because the company had told colonists last year that the Company’s funds were utterly exhausted. It said colonists would have to rely on their own resources, but that it would send a ship sometime in the next few months, not with corn but with some arms that are outdated and unfit for use in Europe, but which might help against the Indians. It would also send 400 young men. Ultimately, the massacre was the beginning of the end for the Virginia Company, and within a couple years, it had been dissolved completely, and Virginia became the first crown colony.
The third result of the massacre was that the English ended all attempts, and all pretense, of trying to coexist with the Indians. The same civilizational clash that Percy had felt after the starving time became a popular feeling, and the Company’s official London response to the attack stated that “Our hands which before were tied with gentleness and fair usage are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the savages. Now their cleared grounds in all their villages which are situate in the fruitfulest places of the land, shall be inhabited by us, whereas heretofor the grubbing of woods was the greatest labor.”
There would be no more appeasement, no more requirements to buy land from the Indians. Now they could, by right of war, invade the country and destroy the people who had sought to destroy them. There was no more responsibility to civilize an irredeemable people. They could never be trusted. Now they would conquer them. They compared the massacre to a bloodletting in medicine – something painful that would ultimately make the colony stronger. It ordered the colony not to move to another area, saying it would be “a sin against the dead to abandon the enterprise till we have fully settled the possession for which so many of our brethren have lost their lives,” and to back this up with action, it ensured the heirs of those killed could claim their land in Virginia.
Opechancanough expected the English to leave when he demonstrated his strength, but the attack only galvanized the English. Jamestown had never been a matter of pride for England as a whole, but now it was. The English didn’t have to try to balance self-preservation and fairness toward the Indians. Governor Wyatt made expulsion of the Powhatan a priority, saying they had always been at-best thorns in the sides of the colonists. He renewed the tactics of dale and Gates, doing hit-and-run attacks that burned crops and destroyed villages. Combat casualties on both sides were fairly light, in large part because Opechancanough’s warriors didn’t have access to as many firearms, or as technologically sophisticated firearms, as the English. This was demonstrated when musket-armed Pamunkeys managed a successful attack on a raiding party.
This made it all the more alarming when Indians successfully captured a pinnace, shallop and smallboat carrying a large cache of arms. Henry Spelman, by this time married to a Patawomeck woman, was leading the expedition. Spelman was captured and beheaded, and all but one member of his crew killed.
When winter came, the colony entered its second starving time. 400 settlers died, and the poorer people couldn’t afford to survive. Between 1622 and 1623, a thousand settlers had died.
In early April 1623, Opitchapam (who was the official, if not the effective leader of the Powhatan) sent two messengers to Jamestown with an offer of peace, saying enough blood had been shed on both sides, and that many of his people were starving as a result of English raids. He asked for permission to plant at Pamunkey, and in exchange, English prisoners taken during the uprising would be returned. He also said that if the governor would dispatch 10-12 soldiers, he would deliver the rest of the captives and his brother into the hands of the English. He sent a captive from a previous conflict named Alice Boyse, dressed like an Indian queen so that the English would know she had been well treated.
The English knew they couldn’t trust the offer, but they saw an opportunity to end the war, anyway. They met, and both sides feigned friendship and hostility to Opechancanough. They feigned speeches, and bonded. Tucker handed bottles of sac to the assembled chiefs and their men, to drink their health and a new accord, but the Indians insisted that Tucker and his interpreter taste the sac first, to show no treachery was intended. They drank from a different bottle than they poured for the Powhatan, who became sick soon after drinking. 200 fell sick, and in the confusion that followed, Tucker ordered his men to fire into the crowd and they killed about 50 more, including two werowances. He took parts of their heads to Jamestown as proof of their success. People in London criticized the treachery of the attack, but no one in Virginia did. They believed Opechancanough and Opitchapam were both dead, they knew where the Indians were living, both of which were major advantages in the war that continued to rage. Neither leader was killed, but they did disappear for a while.
The decisive battle took place the following year, in July 1624. Wyatt took 60 armored men up the Pamunkey River into the heart of Opitchapam’s territory. 800 bowmen and other warriors attacked the English in open field, but despite their numbers, English firepower overcame them. The English had a newer form of musket than they’d had when they first arrived, and one that was far more effective. Even Wyatt, who had condemned the Powhatan as a cursed people after the massacre, noted the bravery and valor of the Powhatan soldiers. Ultimately, though, they had sustained heavy losses and gave up, watching as the English, who had suffered only light casualties, cut down their corn. Sporadic hostilities continued for the next eight years, but Opechancanough knew he was defeated that day.
By that point, Virginia was a royal colony. Waves of people were arriving, including members of prominent families which had battled in Parliament over the Colony’s future. George Sandys, brother of the London Company’s leader, and treasurer of the colony who had documented its struggles during this time, returned home and became one of the best known poets in England under the patronage of Charles I. The Virginia structure of the colony would remain the same, but the controversial and often inept leadership of the London Company would no longer have a say in its affairs. It would keep its Legislative Assembly, and all colonists would keep their lands.
When James died in 1625, Charles took the throne, and 18 years to the day after Jamestown was founded, confirmed Virginia’s status as a crown colony. He affirmed that he would maintain all leadership in the colony, and noted that he would not use Virginia as a pawn in diplomatic negotiations with Spain. The colony’s population was almost as large as before the uprising, and the damage was less visible every day. 1218 men, women and children were now living in Virginia. They built a physical barrier to keep the Indians out of 300,000 acres of English land, and Virginia was coming to be known as a sanctuary of the Christian world. It was a symbol of resistance to Spain, and the anchor of an English America in the Spanish Atlantic. The tobacco trade was thriving, and so was the colony’s economy.
Life continued in much the same way as we’ve already discussed. People grew tobacco, and when prices were good, the colony did well. When prices were low, it struggled. Life was hard, and poor, and illness continued to kill large numbers of settlers. Indentured servitude made up the bulk of manual laborers, with people serving seven year terms. A handful of blacks lived in the colony, working alongside other servants. They could buy their freedom and enjoyed some level of social mobility. Powhatan were mostly banned.
The people who would act as governors in coming years have familiar names – Wyatt, Yeardley, West and Berkeley.
As the colony stabilized, both in London and Virginia, it also emerged, finally, with the character and unique Tidewater culture which would live through generations of Virginians and, later, Marylanders. It had been an aristocratic adventure, a military camp, a trading post, a boomtown, and a struggling outpost. Now, it was a stable colony, and the beginning of English Chesapeake culture.
Most people who came to Virginia came through London and Bristol, two of England’s major port towns. 17% came from the cities themselves, and the rest from smaller towns, with nearly half coming from rural villages. Emigration followed a pattern. When people found themselves with no prospects, they moved to the nearby market town, but if they found no opportunities there, they went to their nearest major city. From there, they either decided to go to Virginia, or to London. If they didn’t find opportunities in London, they also looked to Virginia. Poorer people went to America as servants after exhausting all their resources. Servants came from all over England and Wales, from unruly forests and exploited cloth producing towns.
Wealthy business interests linked Virginia with specific parts of England. This included the port city of Bristol, and later Liverpool. Yorkshire and Wales soon began to contribute large numbers of settlers, too. It wasn’t dominated by the merchant class, but by the middle class gentry and upper class, as well as lower class servants. It was no longer a concerted effort to take people to Virginia – it was a step in migration patterns, an option for people forced out of English society. Many of them were socially conservative, embracing the values of old-fashioned life: thrift, self-sufficiency, honesty, neighborliness.
Land in Virginia was cheap and there was no longer a dictated settlement pattern, so colonists with enough money bought large tracts of land near convenient shipping routes. That way, they could trade directly with English merchants, both selling their tobacco and buying manufactured goods, liquor and servants. This meant that settlement was extremely dispersed, and no real market towns emerged. It remained a very rural society without urban communities, and really with no local government to dictate or regulate aspects of their lives. The Assembly of course existed and could pass laws, but for the most part people lived on their own plantations in their own communities, living as they saw fit and not imposing their ideas on others around them.
This also meant that they had less access to the luxuries of village life, inns, taverns, markets and local trade. In fact, through the end of the 17th century, even the wealthy people of Virginia had a standard of living lower than the poor people in England. It also meant that they couldn’t support the wide range of specialist trades and crafts found in England. It was tobacco or bust, for the most part. This led to a leveling of social status compared to England, with the subtleties of European social hierarchies quickly fading, as did many of the subtleties of life in the Old World.
This translated to a lower crime rate, with virtually no theft taking place in Virginia. Murders and other crimes took place at the same rate as England, and the only crimes which took place more in the Chesapeake than England were related to sex before marriage. County courts addressed pretty much all types of cases as Virginia moved toward the type of government practiced by the English country gentry instead of the military or merchant classes. The vast majority of cases that came before Chesapeake courts involved honor and reputation.
It also led to a society very closely based on ties of kinship, including extended family, and friends close enough to be family. With no centralized communities, social bonds became much more complicated, but overall much closer. This in turn minimized conflict and encouraged cooperation among colonists without the intervention of local or central authorities who wouldn’t have had the power to do anything anyway. So, a friend of a friend, or your cousin, or your uncle’s widow, might welcome you when you arrive, and help you get through your seasoning period and acclimatize to Virginia life.
Huge numbers of people continued to die, though. Virtually everyone who settled in the Chesapeake got sick almost immediately, something they called “seasoning.” It wasn’t a case of “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” though, because even if people survived, their health was devastated and they often never recovered. The land was too swampy, the climate too variable, and there were new germs in the New World, just as the settlers had brought germs from the Old World to North America. Up to 40 percent of arrivals died in their first couple years. People who survived that, and servants who survived their tenure, had a great chance of striking it rich, but most people never made it that far.
Men also outnumbered women by 2-3 to one, and women often married relatively late because they had to finish their terms of service first. Sometimes, it was expedient for women servants to marry the people they were working for, because the man had few other prospects, and it got the woman out of her contract earlier. Coupled with the fact that they were in small communities and close contact, this led to relatively frequent cross-class marriages.
This combination of factors led to an interesting social dynamic. Half of marriages in the Chesapeake lasted fewer than seven years before one partner died. A quarter of children lost at least one parent by their fifth birthday, half by age 13, and 75% by age 21. This meant that children bounced around among family members, step parents, friends and neighbors, growing up largely without parents but within that kinship community network. Families were permanent, but their composition changed rapidly. It was a system strong enough that courts rarely had to intervene, but it was one in which you might live in three different homes before your 15th birthday.
It became a completely unique society, and one strong enough to withstand the political and economic turmoil that would engulf England and its colonies through the rest of the 17th century.
That pretty much concludes our story of Jamestown. It’s not only been a story about the founding of Virginia, but of the New World experimentation of everyone who was interested in colonizing America. We’ve met religious dissenters, destitute workers, wealthy merchants, and aristocrats. It’s the messy, bloody story of the birth of English America. Of course, it’s also the story of the birth of the American South.
Next week, I’m going to take one episode to discuss the politics of the Virginia Company in London. This is for a couple reasons. One is that the Virginia Company was the group calling the shots in Jamestown, and it’s worth understanding why they made some of the decisions that they did. The second is that as we’ve been discussing how England influenced America, it’s also worth noting how America influenced England. Virginia was the source of serious political battles in England, and these battles ended up involving a lot of the same players as the English Civil War. For a while, Virginia was a source of contention between king and parliament, and it even played a role in political negotiation. It’s a story that is in many ways a prequel to what I’d consider of the most fascinating times in history – and a time which would come back and have a dramatic effect on the colonies.
After next week’s episode, we’ll go back in time a little bit to 1619, which was a pivotal year for more than just Jamestown, as it was the year that America’s most famous colony was founded.
Recommended book:
Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake, by James Horn
Fascinating book, if a little dry. Horn’s research is superb and very unique. It forms the basis of the last 10 minutes of this episode, discussing everyday life, though the book obviously goes into a lot more detail, with maps and even anecdotes. It’s not light reading, but if you’re interested in the topic, it’s the best there is.