Virginia

Coat of Arms of the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company organized for the colonization of Virginia.

Virginia and English settlement in Powhatan lands

Powhatan Confederation of tribes

To the English the Indians were a less-than civilized “Other.” The Powhatan Confederation peoples had well-established, organized, and prosperous

communities, and complex societies involved in surplus production, trade, and other forms of exchange.

While the English sought surface wealth and land for the production of tobacco, the Indians looked to trade for copper from the English.

The powerful Powhatan chiefdom controlled more than 30 separate tribes and over 200 towns.

Capt. John Smith and the search for surface wealth, land, and harborage.

English-Indian relations were tenuous at best; both sides distrusted the other, yet each possessed things that the other wanted. What followed was a “Middle Ground” system of

exchange and mutual dependency that ultimately benefited the English.

Organized as a business venture, promotional broadsides made the most of the potential for

opportunities and the security of investment.

Brought to England in 1615, Eiakintomino and Matahan were portrayed in English literature as simple “children of nature.” The Indians posed no threat.

Smith’s capture and rescue by Matoaka/ Pocahontas; “rescue” or adoption ritual?

Coronation of Wahunsonacock, performed by the Sea Hawke, Christopher Newport in 1609 at a crucial time when Indian-white relations were strained.

Opechancanough became the sachem of the Powhatan Confederation after Wahunsonacock retired in 1617.

Undertaken largely for diplomatic reasons, the arranged marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe took place in 1614 after her “capture” by the Jamestown colonists. Joined by her brother Uttamatomakkin, she went to England in 1616, where she took the name “Rebecca Rolfe.” On her return to Virginia in 1617 Matoaka-Pocahontas-Rebecca Rolfe died of a fever.

Despite the diplomatic exchanges and efforts to appease one another, long standing tensions between the Virginia Indians and English colonists erupted into violence after Englishmen murdered the nephew of a Pamunkey tribal chieftain. In an effort to rid his country of the English, Opechancanough launched the “Good Friday Attack” on English settlements on March 22,

1622, killing nearly 400 colonists, bankrupting the colony, and causing the government of James I to revoke the colony’s charter in 1624.

The English retaliated with a campaign that attempted to exterminate the Indians in Virginia; in one attack on a Pamunkey village in 1625, more than 1,000 Indians died.

Having subdued the tribes, relative peace followed, that lasted until Opechancanough, at the age of 100 years, led a new war against the English between 1644 and 1645, that resulted in more than 500 English deaths (out of a colonial population of over 8,000), but resulted in the loss of all the lands held by the Powhatan Confederation. Opechancanough was captured and killed by an angry guard at Jamestown in 1646. Within a decade, the Virginia House of Burgesses chose the sachems of the tribes—their autonomy was no more.