31.8 America: a.d. 1601 to 1700  (Page 8/16)

The Virginia Company was reorganized in 1619 and a new leadership was established. Captain George Thorpe, a pious Anglican, who had started to build a college in Jamestown, might have risen to leadership, but in 1622 Opechancanough, successor to Chief Powhatan, rebelled and massacred some 300 whites, burying an axe in Thorpe's skull. Thereafter the settlers waged a relentless war against the Indians, burning and pillaging their villages and cutting down or carrying off their crops. This also gave the opportunity for capturing slaves, which the English, as the Spanish before them, did with enthusiasm, using them locally or sending them to Bermuda or Barbados. A treaty was negotiated with the rebellious tribes in the Potomac River area in 1623. After a toast was drunken symbolizing eternal friendship, the Chiskiack chief and his sons, advisers and followers totaling 200, abruptly dropped dead from poison and soldiers put the remainder out of their misery. It was perhaps from this encounter that Captain William Tucker and his men brought back 50 Indian "heads", presumably scalps, though somewhat more may have been included. The second and last major conflict in the Tidewater was the 1644 massacre, plotted again by the aged Opechancanough, with more than 500 colonists killed. One out of every 16 Virginians perished. (Ref. 267 )

In the meantime in 1624 Virginia had become a crown colony with a governor and council appointed by the king and it was well governed and prospered. Although the Indians had grown and smoked tobacco for centuries, their variety was too bitter for the whites and John Rolfe imported a new species from the West Indies and perfected a method of curing it. This was the tobacco that was to be exported. The transplanted English soon imported or manufactured locally their own wampum, the blue beads which had become standard trade items. An aboriginal canoe in 1624 was worth 10,000 blue beads, a stack of mats brought 20,000.

The most serious Indian conflict in the latter half of the century was the fighting associated with Bacon's rebellion. Susquehannocks had moved into the Potomac area and although they at first were treated badly, Governor Berkeley had them protected by scattered forts.

But whites continued to be killed, including the overseer at the plantation of Nathanial Bacon, Jr., so Bacon and his neighbors denounced the governor for depending so much on the frontier forts and implied that he had a secret interest in Indian trade. Bacon's men surprised the Occanechees, who were allies of the Susquehannocks, burning and capturing their fort and shooting or burning to death almost all the Indians. Hostilities flared all along the frontier and Governor Berkeley finally in June of 1676, authorized a full campaign against the natives, with Bacon as commander. When Bacon became sick and died, however, Berkeley regrouped and had Bacon's followers executed and their property confiscated. Although he then negotiated still another treaty with the Indians, the whites continued their destruction so that by 1700 there were only approximately 1,400 aborigines left in the Tidewater. Near the end of the century the depleted Powhatans were led by the good Queen of Pamunkey, who actually accepted a tributary status to the whites. The English policy of encouraging tribal rivalries, of dividing and conquering, had succeeded. Farther inland the Tuscarora, Cherokee and Seneca warriors, although possibly never seeing a white face, were well aware of their presence in the Tidewater because of the commerce and the small-pox epidemics that reached them. (Ref. 267 )