JAMESTOWN: A TURNING

POINT

POWHATAN

REASONS FOR ENGLISH

COLONIZATION• English nationalism and Protestantism (religious

fervor) materialized and united in a colonizing impulse.

• Compete with rivals, especially Spain

• Acquire wealth and establish trade routes (build empire, create new markets, obtain valuable raw materials for industry, and find Northwest Passage to Asia)

• Curiosity

• Create a safety valve for rapidly growing populations of “vexed and troubled Englishmen” (landless, idle, criminal, rabble, etc.)

THEORY: OPECHANCANOUGH• Abducted by Pedro Menendez de Aviles and ventured to

Spain in 1561

• Instructed by Spanish missionaries in white ways of religion, diplomacy, language, etc.

• Named Don Luis de Velasco; sailed with Menendez to Mexico (1563)

• Explored Florida (1566) and embarked upon failed colonizing mission to convert natives to Christianity in the Chesapeake that was forced back to Spain (1567)

• Finally helped establish a mission in the Chesapeake near Jamestown (1570), but renounced Christianity, massacred Spanish colonists, and assisted his brother Powhatan in forming the Powhatan Confederacy (32 tribes)

THEORY: OPECHANCANOUGH• Probably early in April of 1607, led Powhatan’s forces in

a massacre of the Chesapeake tribe and some of the “lost colonists”

• Surpassed Powhatan in leadership and talent

• The well-traveled werowance nearly succeeded in his plot to exterminate the colonists of Virginia in the infamous “Massacre of 1622” and the twenty-year campaign to eliminate the English threat.

• Captured and executed in Jamestown (1644)

UNSTABLE FOUNDATIONS

• Unrealistic dreams of liberation and quick, easy wealth

• Believed God reserved Virginia for English freedom and true religion

• Government by gentlemen; fear of “rabble”

• Too few yeoman farmers

• Shortage of labor

• Poor planning, organization, and leadership

• Virginia Company sent a quarrelsome band of gentlemen and servants to bring freedom to the free

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

PRESIDENT SMITH (1608-9)

• Machiavellian

• Dealt more decisively with Indians than with own countrymen

• Subdue “savages” and reduce to slavery

• Relations with Indians based on deception, intimidation, and unbridled force

• Labored to put Englishmen to work and struggled to acquire food from the Indians

• Strict discipline and work gangs

• Savior of colony during hard times

MYTH OR LEGEND

LIVING WITH DEATH

• “Starving time”: the winter of 1609-1610 during which Jamestown suffered a staggering death toll due to various maladies and conflicts with the Powhatan Confederacy

• During this horrific time, ten colonists died for every one that lived.

• Between 1606 and 1624, six people died for every one that lived (6,040 out of 7,289 perished). By 1624 only 1,300 of of the 8,500 who attempted to settle at Jamestown survived.

• Get rich mentality proved disastrous

PERSISTENT VISION• Headright system

• Indentured servants, company tenant farmers, and company sharecroppers

• Indian education program miserable failure

• Historian Edmund S. Morgan writes: “If all had gone as planned, Virginia should have presented an idyllic scene, tenants producing new commodities for the English market, enrich their sponsors while they laid up a nest egg for themselves, Indians learning English technology and religion in the bosom of the English settlement, the two races blending in a new community of good will. Instead, once again, good intentions paved the way to race war, famine, disease, death and tobacco.”

1619: A PIVOTAL YEAR

• Population doubled

• First legislative assembly in New World composed of English colonists covened

• Groups of “willing maids”are sold to planters who could afford a wife; stabilize colony

• First known cargo of people believed to have originated in Africa arrived

• Virginia further developed the system of indentured servitude, which would evolve into a means both for Europeans to come to America and find eventual “freedom” and for Africans to be confined to a harsh system of perpetual bondage.

TOBACCO: A MIXED BLESSING

• Tobacco introduced (1612), becoming staple crop of colony

• Quickly exhausted soil, thus causing settlers to move westward

• Price fluctuations wreaked havoc on economy

• Cultivation required intensive labor, leading to the exploitation of indentured servants and slaves

• John Hammond described indentured servitude in Virginia during the tobacco years: “[Virginia] is reported to be an unhealthy place, a nest of Rogues …[and] dissolute … persons.”

• Not enough subsistence agriculture

• Land of opportunity for ruling class

BOOM

POCAHONTAS

“a mother to us all”

GROWTH

INDIAN POLICY

ANGLO-POWHATAN WARS

• White expansion and pressure on Native life-ways and culture

• Militaristic Indian policy

• “Savagism” vs. “civility”

• Nemattanew, war captain and leader of revitalization movement, murdered by English

• Opechancanough carries out his plans for unified attack on Virginia settlements

• “Massacre” of 1622 wiped out nearly one-third of white population

• English determined to enslave or exterminate the Powhatan and other Natives

“MASSACRE”

THE “AMERICAN

PARADOX”

• Simultaneous rise of slavery and freedom in

America

• Slavery and the displacement and near

extermination of Native Americans

supported the expansion of freedom to a

greater number of whites.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAxtell, James. After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of

Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Bridenbaugh, Carl. Jamestown: 1544-1699.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: WW. Norton, 1975.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Smith, Captain John. A Select Edition of His Writings. Edited by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Vaughan, Alden T. American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia. New York: Harper Collins, 1975.