Volume 1, Chapter 10, Relations with the Indians
The spark that set off the Great Rebellion of 1676 came from the tinderbox of Indian relations.
To explain them, we must first go back to chart the history of Indian-White relations in 17th century Virginia.
First, we may ask, how did the colonists go about the task urged upon them by King James
of bringing the infidels and savages living in those parts, the Native American Indians,
to human civility?
Generally, we must say that the Native American Indians regarded the newcomers with a mixture
of brotherly kindness and eagerness to make contact with the world outside.
This however was countered by hostility based on the well-founded fear that the colonists
were out to seize their lands.
The whites generally regarded the Indians as possessors of land ripe for expropriation.
This attitude of the whites was partially justified as Indian land was typically owned
not by the individual but by the collective tribal unit and furthermore was inalienable
Tribal under tribal law. This was particularly true of the land itself as contrasted to its
annual use. Furthermore, tribal law often decreed land ownership over large tracts of
even unused acreage. Still, however, this land inequity provided no excuse for the physical
dispersion of individual Indians from their homes and from land actually used, let alone
on the plundering of their crops and the slaughtering of the Indian people. Relations with the Indians
were therefore a combination of hostility and friendship underlain by the relentless
white urge to push westward. Thus, from the very beginning of the Virginia colony, the
Indians first attacked the whites only to save the starving infant colony a few months
by coming to its rescue with abundant gifts of bread, meat, fish and corn.
A few years of conflict was followed by the Peace of 1614,
which was effectively wrecked two years later by Governor Yeardley's seizure of corn from the Chickahominy Indians,
an ironic contrast to the Indians supplying needed corn to the infant colony.
From that point on, relations with the Indians began to deteriorate.
Captain Argel, upon assuming his duties as governor, decided that the colonists were too friendly with the Indians and took harsh steps to rectify this error.
He outlawed all private trading with the Indians and prohibited the hiring of Indian hunters for the shooting of game.
Worse still, Argyle decreed the death penalty both for anyone teaching an Indian the use of a gun and for the Indian eager to learn.
Thus, Argyle moved to cripple the economy of the whites and Indians alike.
But perhaps trade and education were not considered part of the civilizing process.
Guns, of course, as in the case of most weapons, can be used for offense or defense, for highly
productive economic, hunting, as well as for martial purposes.
When the Virginia Assembly first convened in 1619, a part of its liberal reforms forbade
any injury to the Indians that might disturb the peace.
The brief period of peaceful coexistence, however, was shattered in 1622 when Opec and Cano,
head of the Powhatan Confederacy, led an all-out surprise attack against the colonists.
The colony survived, but the massacre of over 350 colonists, almost one-fourth of the colony,
embittered the whites from that point on.
Even though the colonists were very quick to wreak vengeance on the Indians, destroying
as many crops, homes, and Indians as they could, the massacre was also seized as one
of the crown's excuses for dispossessing the Virginia Company.
During the crisis, every settled community was placed under absolute martial rule, and
Any communication with an Indian was outlawed except by consent of the commander.
Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the affair for its long-run consequence in poisoning
Indian-white relations in Virginia was the white aggression, later in 1622, against the
friendly Potomac Indians.
The powerful Potomac tribe had refused to join the Powhatan Confederacy plot to massacre
the whites and indeed had helped to save the colony from destruction by warning the colonists
of Opecuncano's plot.
While on an expedition to the Potomacs to obtain corn, Captain Isaac Madison allowed
himself to believe, without proof, the false tale of an exiled Potomac chief and of a renegade
Polish interpreter Robert Poole that the Potomaks were planning to massacre the expedition.
Madison then kidnapped the Potomac king and suddenly attacked and massacred any Potomac
Indian he could lay his hands on.
From then on, savage treachery marked the actions of both sides and relations were permanently
embittered.
Most vicious was the colonist's invitation to the Indians in 1623 for a peace parlay
at which the whites poisoned 200 Indian leaders and shot 50 others, taking home the scalps
of many Indians with them.
Doubtless worst of all, the colonist adopted the barbaric policy of deliberately seeking
out and destroying all Indian plantings of corn.
Civil War by any means was now the watchword, and no peace was even contemplated.
When the Virginia Company leaders expressed shock at this despicable method of making
war by breaking treaties, poisoning peace negotiators, and so forth, the Virginians
replied,
Whereas we are advised by you to observe rules of justice, we hold nothing injustice that
may tend to their ruin with these enemies. Neither fair war nor quarter is ever to be
held. For years after the massacre, the attitude of the whites was continued aggression against
the Indians who were simply considered unreconcilable enemies. Laws were passed prohibiting any
trading with the Indians. Peace for a time was unthinkable. As we have seen, one of the
The main charges against Governor Harvey was making peace with the Indians. Finally, however,
the advantages of peaceful and mutually beneficial trade with the natives began to become evident,
and the law to be ignored by enterprising individuals in the colony. During the first
Berkeley administration, a treaty of peace and friendship was made with the Indians in
1642, and the laws against trading with the natives were repealed.
Unfortunately, the fair prospects for genuine peace were once again ruptured by the old
chief Opec Uncano, the very man responsible for the tragic massacre twenty-two years earlier.
Opec Uncano was a hard-liner who would settle for nothing less than total victory over the
whites whom he regarded as invaders of the land. He certainly had a point. The whites
Coexistence were indeed adept at land grabbing, but the point was not good enough. A genuine
climate of peaceful coexistence could have permitted voluntary purchase of Indian lands
and white settlement on lands which the Indians, while grandiously claiming them, were not
really using. But Opec and Cano, hearing of civil war in England, decided that now was
It was his time or never to root out all the English and drive them into the sea.
Again in April 1644, Opec and Cano organized a surprise massacre that killed 500 settlers,
a greater number than earlier, but of course a vastly smaller proportion of the colony.
One of the problems of a hard line is that it begets hard lining by the other side, and
This massacre came at a time when genuine peace seemed at hand.
The English quickly counterattacked, burning Indian villages and destroying their corn.
Opec and Cano was taken prisoner and shot in the back by one of the Virginia soldiers.
The Indians then sued for peace, but unfortunately the Peace Treaty of 1646, instead of providing
for Peaceful Trade and other contacts between the two peoples forced the Indians to cede
territory and drew arbitrary boundaries beyond which the Indians were forbidden to come.
Moreover, neither the Virginians nor the Indians were permitted to go into each other's territory
on pain of very heavy punishment and trading could only be conducted at certain specified
and therefore monopolized forts.
This type of quasi-peace greatly restricted white exploration and settlement of Virginia
west of the fall line, as well as fruitful trade with the Indian people. Since a few
military forts were given the monopoly privilege of all trade with the Indians, the commander
of each fort now occupied a highly lucrative and privileged position in the colony. The
Virginia government not only built the forts, but granted them and their surrounding land
to their commanders. Typical was Captain Abraham Wood, a former indentured servant of Samuel
Matthews, who was placed in command of the most important of these forts, Fort Henry,
at the Appomattox Falls. Settling there for 30 years, Wood exploited his position as sole
authorized trader for the area. Often he had to guard his pack trains against the use of
was forced by rival traders, understandably resentful at Wood's compulsory monopoly of the Indian trade.
The town at the fort took the name of Wood and Wood acquired over 6,000 acres of plantation land in the neighborhood.
He was also for many years a counselor of the colony.
Yet the inexorable march of settlement westward could not be halted
and once again the English came to settle near the Indians.
The arbitrary peace terms of the 1646 treaty clearly needed revision.
Happily, after 1656, an Indian found without a badge in white territory was no longer liable to be shot
and all free men were allowed to trade with the Indians.
Other provisions of the new law constituted a rather limited advance.
For example, Indian children, kidnapped as hostages, were not to be treated simply as slaves, but to be trained as Christians and taught a trade.
Other policies were so arbitrary as to deal unjustly, not only with the Indians, but also with the white settlers.
Thus in 1653, as supposed compensation to the Indians, lands in York County were set aside and reserved for them.
Even though this meant that already existing white settlers had to be forcibly removed.
However, peace and justice to the Indian, as always, went only so far.
In 1656, several hundred Indians settled near the falls of the James River,
which the whites had decided was to be barred from any Indians, even peaceful settlers.
The assembly sent Colonel Edward Hill with an armed force to drive out the Indians. Though joined by Indian allies, the attacking force was smashed by Indian defenders near the present site of Richmond. Hill met not with sympathy for his defeat, but with an angry assembly that tried him and unanimously found him guilty of crimes and weaknesses and suspended him from his post. The relatively
The compound peace of 1656 with the Indians was shattered by the onset of the second Berkeley administration.
It is not surprising that Berkeley's onslaught on the liberties and rights of Virginians should have extended to Indian relations.
His first step in 1661 was the suppression of free trade with the Indians and the reviving of tradie monopoly.
The Assembly decreed that henceforth, no one might trade with the Indians without a commission from the Governor, who, of course, would license only persons of known integrity, rather than the diverse, ill-minded, idle and unskillful people currently engaged in the trade.
The Assembly followed this with a decree outlawing all trade by Marylanders and Indians north of Virginia with the Virginia Indians, thus further tightening the trading monopoly.
Ironically, the old trade monopolist, Abraham Wood, now a Colonel, was charged with the enforcement of this prohibition.
The next year, Captain Giles Brint, one of the leading planters of the Northern Neck,
hauled the chief of the Potomac Indians, Wahanganocchi, into court on the false charges of high treason
and murder. And even though Wahanganocchi was acquitted and his false accusers forced
to pay him an indemnity for the wrongs suffered, the assembly arrogantly proceeded to require
by the Potomac and other northern tribes to furnish as hostages a number of Indian children
to be enslaved and brought up by whites.
It is no wonder that under this treatment the Indians of Virginia began to get a bit
restive, a restiveness due also as the assembly admitted to violent intrusions of diverse English
into Indian lands.
But this was only the beginning of white aggression.
In 1665-66, the assembly set further arbitrary bounds to Indian settlement, pushing back
the Indians once more.
It also prohibited any white sales of guns and ammunition to the Indians and decreed
that the governor select the chieftains for the Indian tribes.
Militarism was imposed on the white settlers by ordering them to go armed to all public
meetings including church services. Even collective guilt was imposed on the Indians, it being
provided that if an Indian murdered a white man, all the people of the neighboring Indian
town would be answerable for it with their lives or liberties. But this law taxed even
the often elastic consciences of the Virginians of the day and was soon repealed. During the
In the same year, 1666, Governor Berkeley declared war on the Dogue and Potomac tribes,
as an even more massive form of collective guilt and punishment for various crimes committed
over the years by individual Indians against individual whites.
But since this act of slaughter was called war, even its far greater magnitude did not
by the end of the sixties the Indians had been so effectively cowed and suppressed that the administration believed the situation well in hand in the words of Berkeley the Indians are absolutely subjected so that there is no fear of them but Governor Berkeley was soon to learn that the use of terror and
Objection does not always quiet fears.
Particularly aggrieved was the Doag tribe, which had been attacked and expelled from
its lands by the Berkeley administration.
The Doags found new compatriots in the Susquehannocks, a powerful tribe that had been expelled from
its land at the head of the Chesapeake Bay by the Seneca Nation, and had then settled
on Inadequate Lands on the Potomac River in Maryland.
In July 1675, the doves who had also settled across the Potomac found that a wealthy Virginia
planter, Thomas Matthew, refused to pay them a debt, which they were not allowed to collect
in the Virginia courts.
They decided therefore to collect the debt themselves, and a party of doves crossed the
river and took some hogs from Matthew.
The Virginians immediately pursued the Indians upriver and not only recovered the hogs but
killed the Indians. Again, the Indians had no recourse against this murder in the Virginia
courts and so they decided to exact punishment themselves. They raided and devastated the
Matthew plantation, rough if in exact justice, in the course of which one of Matthew's herdsmen
was killed.
Errant self-righteousness and flagrant double standard of morality are often characteristic
of the side with the superior weapons in any dispute, for its one-sided version of morality
can be supported by force of arms, if not by force of logic.
Such was the case with the white Virginians, murdering a group of Indians whose only crime
was the theft of a few hogs, and this justified as the only available means of collecting
in a Debt was, well, just one of those things, whereas retaliatory retribution against the
one white largely responsible for the whole affair was apparently considered so monstrous
that any method of vengeance against the Indians was justified.
When the raising of the Matthew Plantation became known, Major George Brant and Colonel
George Mason, leading persecutors of Chief Wohanga Nochi a decade before, gathered an
armed force and invaded Maryland. Upon finding the Indians, Brent asked for a peace parley,
at which he seized and then shot the dog chief, thus continuing a white tradition of treachery
in dealing with Indians. Brent followed this up by shooting ten other Indians who had then
Berkeley completely ignored the protest of the
by the Maryland Governor Against the Virginia Invasion of Its Territory and the Killing of Innocent Indians.
Instead, on August 31, 1675, Berkeley called together the militia officers of the northern Neck counties led by Colonel John Washington
and armed them with powers to organize the militia and to demand satisfaction or take any other course necessary against the Indians.
This could include attack and such executions upon the Indians as shall be found necessary and just.
The officers duly organized the militia and secured aid from the Maryland government.
A full-fledged war of aggression against the Indians was then unleashed by Virginia and Maryland.
On September 26, the Joint Virginia Maryland Force besieged the main fort of the Susquehannocks on the Maryland side of the Potomac and sought to starve the Indians into submission.
An army of 1,000 whites surrounded 100 Indian braves and their women and children.
On the invitation of Major Thomas Truman, head of the Maryland force, five of the Sesquihannock chiefs came out to parley and seek peace.
When the chiefs asked what the army was doing there, Major Truman declared that they were retaliating for various outrages and he proceeded to murder them on the spot.
Even a silver medal held up by one chief, a token of a supposedly permanent pledge of protection by a former governor of Maryland, was of no avail in saving his life.
The starving mass of Indians finally escaped their tormentors by rushing out at night in a surprise breakout and fled into Virginia, where during January they retaliated against many of the frontier plantations.
One of the plantations rated was that of Nathaniel Bacon Jr., a leading planter and one of the counselors of the colony.
Some writers attribute to this incident Bacon's hostility to the Indians.
But already the previous fall Bacon had seized some friendly Appomattox Indians,
charging them falsely with stealing corn, even though the corn in question was neither his nor his neighbors.
Ready to send out an even larger armed force against the Indian party, Berkeley received word from the Indians that, having killed ten whites for each of their chiefs murdered at the Peace Parley, they were ready to make peace and ask for compensation for damages.
Grateful for a chance to stop the spiraling bloodshed, Berkeley disbanded his new army.
Army. But when Berkeley categorically rejected the peace offer as violating honor and self interest, the Indian raids continued. Instead of peace, Berkeley and his assembly decided on an uneasy compromise, a declaration of war not only against all Indians guilty of injuring white persons or property, but also against those who had refused to aid and assist the whites in uncovering and destroying the
The Large Force needed to garrison these forts was financed by burdensome new taxes, which aggravated Virginia's grievances against the Berkeley regime.
It is another common rule that militarization of a society, ostensibly to bring force majeure against an enemy, often succeeds also, or even only, in bringing that force against the very society being militarized.
Thus soldiers conscripted into the garrisons were to be subject to highly rigorous articles of war.
Any blasphemy, for example, when either drunk or sober, was punished by forcing the soldier to run the terrible gauntlet.
Public prayers were to be read in the field or garrison twice a day, and any soldier refusing or neglecting to attend the prayers or the preaching or to show proper diligence in reading homilies and sermons was to be punished at the whim of the commander.
A great many Virginians, driven forward by war hysteria, by ingrained hatred of the Indians,
and by the desire to grab Indian lands, began to accuse Berkeley of being soft on the Indians.
The softness was supposed to be motivated by economic interest, as Berkeley's monopoly
of the fur trade was supposed to give him a vested interest in the existence of Indians
with whom to trade.
The common expression of the day was that no bullet would pierce beaver skins.
The charge, if charge it be, was probably partially correct, at least insofar as trade
between peoples generally functions as a solvent of hatreds and of agitations for war.
At any rate, in deference to these charges, the Assembly took the Indian trade from Berkeley
and his licensees, and transferred the authority for licenses to the county justices of the peace.
The middle of the road policy of defensive war, however, was probably the most un-politic course that Berkeley could have taken.
If he had concluded peace, he would have ended the Indian raids and thus removed the constant spark plug for war hysteria among the whites.
As it was, the expensive policy of constructing mighty, defensive forts prolonged the war and hence the irritant and did nothing to end it.
The only result, so far as the Virginians were concerned, was a highly expensive network of forts and higher taxes imposed to pay for them.
Furthermore, Berkeley reportedly reacted in his usual tyrannical fashion against several
petitions for an armed troop against the Indians by outlawing all such petitions under threat
of heavy penalty.
With peace still not concluded, the frontier Virginians found themselves suffering Indian
raids and yet being refused a governmental armed force by Berkeley.
They finally determined in April to raise their own army and fight the Indians themselves.
While three leaders of this effort were frontier planners on the James and Appomattox rivers,
they were hardly small farmers.
On the contrary, they were among the leading large planners in Virginia.
The chief leader was the eloquent 28-year-old Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., descendant of Francis
Thomas Bacon, a cousin of Lady Berkeley and a member of the Select Council of Virginia.
The other leaders were William Byrd, founder of the Byrd planter dynasty, and Captain James
Cruz, another large planter and neighbor of Bacon.
The effort quickly emerged, however, not as a new armed force, but as a mutiny against
the Virginia government.
When the three founders and their friends went to visit a nearby force of militiamen
at Jordan's Point in Charles City County, the soldiers decided to mutiny and follow,
bacon, bacon, bacon, and swore damnation to their souls to be true to him.
The Mighty Bacon's Rebellion had begun.