The Jamestown Experiment (25 page)

The colonists were required to observe the Sabbath and attend services of the official Anglican religion. Shirkers would be fined and punished. This common impingement on liberty was seen as necessary for the morality and virtue of the individual colonists and the good order of the colony. To this end, the assembly also laid down rules regulating personal behavior, such as excessive drinking, idleness, and gambling.

The assembly regulated the price and quality of tobacco, interfering with the operation of the private market. The members were concerned about the consistency of the quality of tobacco it shipped to England as well as the reputation of that tobacco, since the price would depend on it. But English and European consumers would have given the growers the incentive to uphold the quality of the tobacco they sent or suffer a drop in demand. The assembly also followed the will of the company by encouraging the development of diverse crops and commodities. The company’s elusive search for economic diversification was thwarted by a simple fact: individuals could make a lot of money raising tobacco and almost nothing in other endeavors. It was the simple and pure logic of economic self-interest.

From these humble origins, self-government was born in America. It was a special inheritance of Englishmen with their traditional liberties to bequeath to America. Ordered liberty under law and self-government provided the foundation for the protection of private property. The distribution of land grants to settlers allowed them to pursue their own happiness as they determined their own destinies. They were working for themselves rather than for the government under martial discipline.

In August, shortly after the first representative legislature met,
a Dutch man-of-war,
The White Lion
, and another privateer,
Treasurer
, arrived at Jamestown with a supply of Africans that they had plundered from the
São João Bautista
. John Rolfe reported that they “sold us twenty-odd Negroes.” The Africans’ status was vague, but they were probably treated as indentured servants because of the demand for labor. When their terms expired, they held the same property and voting rights as the English, and the successful among them could afford to purchase other indentured Africans and eventually slaves. In the ensuing decades that status would tragically shift from freedom to slavery, and Africans would be denied the most basic liberties and right to the fruits of their labor that were guaranteed to the Europeans.
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The results of the land grants and self-governing assembly were startlingly successful. Finally enlarging the Jamestown colony after a decade of failure and frustration. In 1618, the first significant shipment of tobacco—twenty thousand pounds—reached England and fetched £5,250. Investors finally realized some return on their hefty investments. While this sum of money did not put the colony in the black or turn around the company’s fortunes overnight, it was a propitious watershed that boded well for future shipments by colonists and future investments by Londoners.

The land grants, expansion of personal liberties, and cultivation of tobacco spurred the kind of migration that Thomas Dale had demanded from the company by force of will. The promise of land and profit led almost four thousand settlers to sail for Jamestown between 1618 and 1621 on an increasing number of ships: six in 1618, fourteen in 1619, thirteen in 1620, and almost two dozen in 1621. Common husbandmen, middling tradesmen and artisans, and some religious dissenters went to Virginia for liberty and opportunity.

Still, the company complained that the colony lacked economic
diversification. The leadership of the colony worried that a tobacco craze had seized the people, and as a result the plant was cultivated in “the marketplace, the streets, and all other spare places.” John Pory lamented, “All our riches for the present do consist in tobacco.” The sudden wealth contributed to a rise of an unlikely conspicuous consumption in a colony that suffered such inhumane conditions only a few years before. Commoners who in England barely eked out a living now walked around Jamestown dressed in “flaming silks” and “fair pearl hatbands and a silken suit.” Tobacco was returning a princely profit to many colonists who never would have had such opportunity or riches in England.
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Sir Edwin Sandys summed up the effect on the work ethic and financial success of the colonists at Jamestown: “All of them followed their particular labors with singular alacrity and industry, so that through the blessing of God…within the space of three years, our country flourished with many new erected plantations from the head of the river to Kecoughtan.” The colonists enjoyed greater prosperity because of tobacco.
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The industry shown by the colonists’ raising and shipping the profitable commodity was rewarded with great financial returns. In 1620, their harvest reaped some £40,000 to £50,000. Two years later, the amount increased to £60,000 and kept growing rapidly. Moreover, the value of their land increased as additional settlers acquired land and participated in the tobacco bonanza.

Despite their newfound prosperity and plenty, the Jamestown colony was still not the utopia dreamed about for a decade in the company’s promotional literature. The settlers did not, of course, participate equally in the riches of land grants and the tobacco trade. The governors and wealthy gentlemen received hundreds and even thousands of acres while others struggled to feed themselves. Disease also continued to plague the colony, and hundreds died annually.
Richard Frethorne, a servant at Martin’s Hundred, complained to his parents in England, “I am in a most miserable and pitiful case, for want of meat and want of clothes since I came out of the ship. I never ate anything but peas, and water gruel.” He begged his parents to “release me from this bondage, and save my life.”
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Still, no one could deny the remarkable success the colony had experienced over the past few years. The settlers were free Englishmen who enjoyed liberties and self-government rather than martial law. The colony no longer suffered from the political discord and chaos of the early council during the first days of the settlement. It had discovered an unexpected source of wealth in tobacco, and it used the abundant land to attract settlers and allow them to earn their livelihoods.

But, the Virginia Company was in severe straits in London. Although the leaders of the company had found the solutions to the problems of the colony, they fared much worse in governing the company. Factionalism was tearing apart the company at its core. In 1619, Sandys was able to replace Smythe through a series of machinations, including demands for an audit of company finances. Sandys had his work cut out for him, since the company was in the red to the tune of some £9,000 and almost twice that in uncollected subscriptions.

Sandys instituted a series of reforms including large expenditures on ironworks, which was related to a diversification program to offer alternative forms of investment and profit away from tobacco. He also expected lotteries and subscriptions to raise money for the company’s, plans even though they had failed in the past. Sandys’s financial administration was an abysmal failure as his lotteries were implicated in charges of corruption and embezzlement, resulting in their termination and leaving the company without a source of income. Meanwhile, the free colonists in Virginia thwarted all
attempts to regulate their planting of tobacco. Worst of all, it was painfully evident that company was for all intents and purposes bankrupt in 1621.

The colony itself was thriving, but it was hardly free of difficulties. Challenges persisted that tested the settlers’ perseverance. In fact, within only a few years of the beneficent reversal of fortunes, an old danger would threaten to undermine the colony, even as they had found a better model for success.

Chapter Seventeen

T
he tobacco revolution in Virginia led to the expansion of English settlers throughout the fertile farmland along the James River from Elizabeth City up to the falls. And the colonists had recommitted themselves to converting the Indians to Christianity and English civilization. Consequently, they established schools for the Indians with funds from England. Moreover, some Indians were allowed to live among the colonists in order to learn and adopt their ways. In January 1622 the governor happily reported to the company that Virginia was “in very great amity and confidence with the natives.”
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Wahunsonacock had lost his authority. He eventually died in 1618. His brother Opitchapam replaced the great werowance
,
although their brother Opechancanough was the real leader of the Powhatans. Opechancanough openly made professions of peace to the English. The new leader visited Jamestown and indicated that he was interested in converting to Christianity. When his greatest warrior, Nemattanew, was shot to death by a settler in March
1622, Opechancanough promised that he would not seek revenge for the slaying. He stated that the death “should be no occasion of the breach of the peace, and…the sky should sooner fall than peace be broken.” But his public pronouncements were all subterfuge; Opechancanough was tricking the English into believing he had only peaceful intentions.
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In line with their customs, Opechancanough changed his name to Mangopeesomon, and his brother Opitchapam assumed the name Sasawpen, which signaled they were preparing to go to war. The English did not understand the foreboding danger of the name changes. Opechancanough was angry that the English had driven off the Powhatans and their subjects and now occupied the fertile traditional Indian lands along the James River. The war chief knew that he lacked the power to confront the English in a set-piece battle, but unbeknownst to the English, Opechancanough had formed an alliance of tribes who hated the English and wanted to destroy the colony and drive them out of America.

On the morning of March 22, 1622, more than five hundred Powhatan and Pamunkey warriors, along with Appomattocs and other tribes, visited several English settlements as they frequently did to trade deer, turkeys, fish, and other foodstuffs. The Indians had thereby won the confidence and trust of the English. The colonists did not suspect anything out of the ordinary. In fact, they knew many of the traders. The Indians casually spoke and traded with the English in their homes, gardens, streets, and fields. In some places they even “sat down at breakfast with our people at their tables.”
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Suddenly, the Indians seized farming implements, knives, axes, clubs, and other makeshift weapons. The unsuspecting Englishmen, women, and children were bludgeoned and hacked to death. As the massacre began, screams filled the air. Some wounded individuals fought back and grappled with their attackers. Melees broke out
throughout the settlements. Those who were not immediately under attack were frightened, but some women and children managed to grab “spades, axes, and brickbats” and put up a hasty defense and eventually drive off their attackers. The Indians mutilated some of the English and carried off some as prisoners. The captives were never heard from again and were presumably executed. Scores of English colonists and a few Indians were left dead or dying in the afternoon sun.
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Some English settlements received an advance warning shortly before the attack and were able to defend themselves. A young Indian boy who had converted to Christianity was instructed to kill his plantation owner and informed that “in the morning a number [of warriors] would come from many places to finish the execution.” Instead the boy warned the plantation owner, who informed the governor at Jamestown of the impending attack. Soldiers fired muskets and drove off boatloads of warriors attempting to sneak into the capital. The warning saved their lives, but they were not able to issue a general warning to all the neighboring settlements. The Indians murdered 347 colonists—almost a third of the English colonists in Virginia—that day at more than two dozen sites.
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The Indian warriors melted back into the woods after their grisly task was finished, leaving a wake of devastation behind them. In many settlements, only a handful of dazed and confused inhabitants were left alive, reeling from what they had just experienced. In successive days, the Indians came back to finish off the English, forcing the shocked colonists to withdraw to fortified areas. The warriors settled for razing the English homes, burning their towns, destroying their crops, and killing their animals to deprive them of food.

Opechancanough intended the attack to escalate into a war of extermination to kill and drive out the English forever. A few
months after the attack, he stated, “Before the end of two moons there should not be an Englishman in all their countries.”
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He very nearly succeeded after killing almost one-third of the colonists. The fear around Virginia among the English was palpable. “The land is ruined and spoiled,” one colonist cried. “We live in fear of the enemy every hour…for our plantation is very weak, by reason of the dearth, and sickness.”
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The English had suffered a major blow but resolved to endure. Indeed, after nearly a decade of relative peace between the two peoples, Opechancanough had loosed the dogs of war and would learn about the English way of doing battle. The colonists would strike a blow much worse than the offensive that Thomas Dale had led in 1611. The English had science and technology at their disposal, far beyond what the Indians could produce.

The Indians had scored a decisive victory based upon their unique fighting style. The psychological effect on the colonists and their supporters in England was profound. The Virginia Company received the news of the sneak attack with a mixture of sadness and anger. The leaders of company expressed their “extreme grief understood of the great massacre executed on our people in Virginia, and that in a manner as is more miserable than the death itself.” Still, it was irate with the settlers for not being better prepared for the attack. They were “deaf to so plain a warning…nor to perceive anything in so open and general conspiracy…and almost guilty of the destruction by blindfold and stupid entertaining it.” Moreover, their collective sin had brought down the punishing “hand of Almighty God.”
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The military victory of the natives proved to be temporary. The English prepared a counterattack according to their own devastating methods of warfare. The Virginia Company instructed the governor and council “to root out from being any longer a people, so cursed a
nation, ungrateful to all benefit, and incapable of all goodness…let them have a perpetual war without peace or truce.”
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The colony was going to remain firmly planted in Virginia, because moving was tantamount to 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.” The company secured the use of thousands of old weapons and armor, which the king released from the Tower of London, and sent them to the colony.
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The company reversed its policy of treating the native peoples better than the Spanish and peacefully converting them to Christianity and English civilization. The company did not want the deaths of so many colonists to be in vain. It now instructed the governor to wage a war of annihilation against the Indians, “surprising them in their habitations, intercepting them in their hunting, burning their towns, demolishing their temples, destroying their canoes, plucking up their [fishing] weirs, carrying away their corn, and depriving them of whatsoever may yield them succor or relief.” In the wake of the massacre, the English view of the Indians as rude, barbarous, brutish, unmanly, and inhumane had hardened. Therefore, the company ordered the colonists to hunt down what they perceived as an uncivilized enemy with bloodhounds and mastiffs to kill or enslave them.
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The English would prove themselves to be just as ruthless as the Indians. During the summer and fall of 1622, Governor Francis Wyatt stated, “Our first work is expulsion of the savages to gain free range of the country for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us.” Subsequently, he dispatched raiding parties against the Indians to “revenge their cruel deeds” by unleashing great destruction of their own. The English utilized the mobility provided by their pinnaces and shallops to swoop down on several Indian peoples and destroy their villages, cut down their corn, and torch their fields.
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The following spring, with some advanced European weaponry in their hands, the Pamunkey warriors managed to attack some Englishmen in small ships, kill several, and seize their armor and weapons. In another incident, Patawomecks on the Potomac River attacked a group of twenty-six Englishmen who were trading for corn. Even though the Englishmen were protected by armor, they were cut off, surrounded, and killed in revenge for an unprovoked attack the previous year. Only five men escaped in a pinnace, fending off their attackers as they sailed back down the Chesapeake Bay. Frighteningly for the English, the Patawomecks seized the victims’ weapons and armor for possible future attacks.

In the spring of 1623 the English succeeded in a deadly ruse to kill off their enemy. Opechancanough’s brother, the elderly nominal werowance Opitchapam, offered peace and friendship because “blood enough had already been shed on both sides.” He asked to return to his burned lands and village along the Pamunkey River to plant food because his people were starving. In turn, he would return some English prisoners who had supposedly survived after being taken in the massacre of the previous year. Opitchapam also promised that if the English sent a dozen warriors, he would deliver Opechancanough, “who was the author of the massacre into the hands of the English dead or alive.”

If Opitchapam was trying to draw some settlers in to slaughter them, the English were prepared with a plan of their own. They feigned friendship with Opitchapam and responded positively to his proffered terms. The governor sent Capt. William Tucker and a dozen soldiers according to Opitchapam’s proposal. Tucker offered to seal the deal with a drink of sack wine and made a show of tasting the wine first. But he then passed a bottle of poisoned wine to Opitchapam and his counselors and warriors. While they were feeling the ill effects of the poison, the English fired several muskets
volleys and killed scores of Powhatans.
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Yet they failed to kill Opitchapam, and Opechancanough eluded capture.

The colonists launched another summer campaign against the various Indian tribes, repeating the destruction they had leveled against their villages and stealing their corn. In response, the desperate peoples under Opitchapam decided to fight the well-armed and armored English in a rare set-piece battle. It was bound to favor the English, regardless of Indian numbers.

In July 1624, roughly a thousand warriors defended their village and crops by attacking “not above sixty fighting [English] men” in open battle. As the respective sides confronted each other in the “open field,” the Pamunkeys bragged loudly about “what they would do” to the English. Over two days of vicious combat, the Indians fought bravely, but English muskets loosed a withering fire against them. The Indians suffered staggering losses compared to the light English casualties. The victorious colonists took the Indians’ corn, and the surviving Indians “dismayedly, stood most ruefully looking on while their corn was cut down.”
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The war that lasted from 1622 to 1624 had dramatic consequences for both the English and the natives in Virginia. The English victory was complete, and they now dominated the area around the colony. They had mastered the Indians in Virginia and could pursue their profitable tobacco planting. Yet after recovering its strength following the Indian massacre two years before, the colony was never in greater peril. The irony was that the threat came from London rather than Virginia, because the bad news hurt the company, which had already suffered internal divisions tearing it apart.