The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia - Softcover

Schmidt, Ethan A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607325241 ISBN 13: 9781607325246

Verlag: University Press of Colorado, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In The Divided Dominion, Ethan A. Schmidt examines the social struggle that created Bacon's Rebellion, focusing on the role of class antagonism in fostering violence toward native people in seventeenth-century Virginia. This provocative volume places a dispute among Virginians over the permissibility of eradicating Native Americans for land at the forefront in understanding this pivotal event.

Myriad internal and external factors drove Virginians to interpret their disputes with one another increasingly along class lines. The decades-long tripartite struggle among elite whites, non-elite whites, and Native Americans resulted in the development of mutually beneficial economic and political relationships between elites and Native Americans. When these relationships culminated in the granting of rights—equal to those of non-elite white colonists—to Native Americans, the elites crossed a line and non-elite anger boiled over. A call for the annihilation of all Indians in Virginia united different non-elite white factions and molded them in widespread social rebellion.

The Divided Dominion

places Indian policy at the heart of Bacon's Rebellion, revealing the complex mix of social, cultural, and racial forces that collided in Virginia in 1676. This new analysis will interest students and scholars of colonial and Native American history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ethan A. Schmidt was assistant professor of history at Delta State University.

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The Divided Dominion

Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia

By Ethan A. Schmidt

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-524-6

Contents

List of Figures, 
List of Maps, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: A Tale of Two Uprisings, 
1. Being All Friends and Forever Powhatans: The Early Anglo-Powhatan Relationship at Jamestown, 
2. Hammerers and Rough Masons to Prepare Them: The First Anglo-Powhatan War, 1609–14, 
3. Subduing the Indians and Advancing the Interests of the Planters: the Second Anglo-Powhatan War, The Tobacco Boom, and the Rise of the Tobacco Elite, 1614–32, 
4. If You Did but See Me You Would Weep: Expectation versus Reality in the Lives of Virginia Immigrants, 1609–40, 
5. The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: The Rise and Decline of Sir William Berkeley's Golden Age, 1642–74, 
6. "To Ruin and Extirpate All Indians in General": The Rebellion of Nathaniel Bacon, 
Epilogue: White Unity and Indian Survival, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Being All Friends and Forever Powhatans

The Early Anglo-Powhatan Relationship at Jamestown

In 1570 a group of Spanish Jesuits attempted to establish a mission among the Algonquian-speaking peoples of Tsenacommacah in the area now referred to as the Virginia coastal plain. An Algonquian captured nearly ten years before by other Spanish invaders had guided them to the area. The man's Algonquian name is lost to us, but his captors renamed him Don Luis. Don Luis had spent most of the previous decade living as a servant in the households of many of the most important military and spiritual leaders of the Spanish Empire, in places such as Madrid, Havana, and Mexico City. When approached first by a group of Franciscans and then by the group of Jesuits to assist them in their endeavor to establish a mission among his people, he readily accepted.

Eventually, the Jesuits decided to settle in the York River area to be near the increasingly powerful leader of the local Algonquian groups. At that time, Don Luis made the decision to leave the Jesuit camp and return to his people. Despite the Jesuits' assumption that during his years of captivity Don Luis had completely shed his Algonquian life for that of a lowly Spanish servant, he almost immediately reconnected with his family (who thought he had returned from the dead) and determined to live up to his kinship responsibilities to them by staying to help them weather the effects of a six-year drought that had plagued their homeland. The Jesuits responded by demanding that Don Luis return to them and use his connections to local Algonquians to procure food for the progressively famished mission. According to the account of a Spaniard named Alonso, a child witness to the events, Don Luis did return to the mission after a party of three Jesuits had been sent to retrieve him.

On the Sunday after the feast of the Purification, Don Luis came to the three Jesuits who were returning with other Indians. He sent an arrow through the heart of Father Quirós and then murdered the rest who had come to speak with him. Immediately Don Luis went on to the village where the Fathers were, and with great quiet and dissimulation, at the head of a large group of Indians, he killed the five who waited there. Don Luis himself was the first to draw blood with one of those hatchets that were brought along for trading with the Indians; then he finished the killing of Father Master Baptista with his axe, and his companions finished off the others.

In 1571, Spain and its empire were in the midst of a period often referred to as the Siglo de Oro, or the Golden Century. During the past eighty years, the Spanish had completed the Reconquista, landed in the Caribbean, destroyed and subjugated the Aztec and Incan civilizations, and circumnavigated the globe. Yet they had failed to extend their conquests to Tsenacommacah. To be fair, beyond the opportunity to extend the Catholic religion to the Native people of the area, there was little in Virginia to entice any but the most devout Spaniards to attempt such an enterprise. In addition, in recapturing the boy Alonso from Don Luis's people in 1572, the Spanish reportedly killed at least 20 Algonquians in retribution for Don Luis's attack. However, the Spanish never again attempted to penetrate as far north as the territory of the Virginia Algonquians. Furthermore, the 20-odd Algonquians they did manage to kill represented but a fraction of the approximately 14,000 people already engaged in the process of coalescing into a vast paramount chiefdom under the control of a man known as Powhatan. Contrary to the archetypal story of European colonial expansion, in this case (and in others) Indians clearly held the upper hand in the relationship. In the case of the Powhatans of Virginia, they did so for the first twenty to thirty years of the English colony that followed the Spanish mission.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Virginia Algonquians found themselves in the midst of a vast reordering of their world that had little to do with the small groups of Europeans who sometimes appeared on the fringes of their territory. The process by which Powhatan transformed his initial inheritance of six villages into a great chiefdom that controlled the entire eastern half of what is now Virginia was well under way by the time Don Luis destroyed the Spanish Jesuit mission in 1571. Powhatan's, and his chiefdom's, power and stature only continued to grow after that incident, to the point that their command of both spiritual and temporal power reached heights never seen by their predecessors. On the eve of the Jamestown landing in 1607, Powhatan and his chiefdom, while acutely aware of the threats they faced both internally and externally, rested securely in the knowledge that they were the masters of the Virginia coastal plain and that their access to powerful spiritual forces had made them so. Thus, they approached European invaders, both temporary and permanent, with an attitude of superiority and an expectation that only those willing to accept Powhatan's leadership and prove themselves useful to his chiefdom would be suffered to remain.

There is general agreement that Indians have inhabited Virginia since the end of the last ice age nearly 10,000 years ago. Whether these early peoples represent direct ancestors of the people the English called Powhatans is harder to pinpoint. However, the anthropological and archaeological literature agrees on at least two basic facts. The first is that the Algonquian cultural and linguistic characteristics shared by the Indians of the Virginia coastal plain in 1607 did not originate there but instead in the Great Lakes region. Second, the mass migration of Algonquian peoples and cultural traits into the area occurred either toward the end of the Middle Woodland period (100 — 200 CE) or during the beginning of the Late Woodland period (500–1000 CE).

Whatever the case, we do know for certain that sometime during the mid- to late sixteenth century the man known as Powhatan came into his inheritance of six villages located near present-day Richmond. Throughout the rest of the century he added to his territory using a mixture of alliance, intimidation, and outright force. We know very little specific information about this process, especially regarding the groups he added to his domain during the early years of his leadership. However, two instances — the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University Press of Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607325241
• ISBN 13: 9781607325246
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar