The houses were neglected, the palisades suffered to rot down, the fields, gardens and public squares, even the very streets of Jamestown were planted with tobacco. The townspeople, more greedy of gain than mindful of their own security, scattered abroad into the wilderness, where they broke up small pieces of rich ground and made their crop regardless of their proximity to the Indians, in whose good faith so little reliance could be placed.4
Given that the good faith of the natives, while it may not have been assumed, certainly was exploited, it was perhaps inevitable that relations between colonist and native deteriorated, resulting in a massacre in March 1622, in which more than three hundred settlers perished. Even after this, the colonists still put tobacco production before self-preservation, unwilling to allocate men to the defense of the colony. In the year after the massacre, it was noted that in Virginia, there was still “noe Comoditie but Tobaccoe” and little attempt at all to plant those “staple Comodities” so necessary to the colony’s future. In the following year, 1624, the Virginia Company’s was declared bankrupt and Virginia became a royal colony. Its merchant-founders’ dreams of New World riches had, quite literally, “vanished into smoke.”5
The end of the Virginia Company did not mean the end of English settlement on the Chesapeake, or the termination of tobacco production there. Conveniently for the Jamestown colony, although the English Crown under James I and then Charles I was vehemently opposed to the consumption of tobacco, such opposition took the form of granting a monopoly to Virginia for its importation into England. The Crown thereby gained revenue as the inhabitants of London flocked in increasing numbers to the tobacco shops then beginning to appear across the city and to a new vice whose economic value eased its entry into English society. For Virginia, therefore, the demise of the company that had inaugurated the settlement meant little in practical terms. It was very much a case of business as usual, except in one major respect. As far as the native populations were concerned, the period after 1622 witnessed a clear shift not only in native-white power relations within Chesapeake society, but in white attitudes toward the “Indian.”
John White’s illustrations for Thomas Hariot’s, Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590) had sought to stress the essential similarities between the Algonquian peoples and the British as a means of rendering the unfamiliar familiar. The Virginia Company sought to take this idea to its logical conclusion in its instructions regarding the indoctrination of native children, and later families, to English norms, to render the different domestic, in effect. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, an exclusive cultural dialectic was emerging, in which the unfamiliar became the exotic and, ultimately, the other. The Second Charter of Virginia (1609) had included - although in conclusion and almost as an afterthought - the importance of “the conversion and reduccion of the people” of Virginia “unto the true worship of God and Christian religion,” but profit had always trumped piety on the Chesapeake.
By turns reliant on and destructive of the native populations, English settlers swiftly replaced the idea of conversion with the imperatives of conquest. Although the Virginia Company had, up to its demise, highlighted as crucial the transformation of the Algonquian into the Anglican, on the Chesapeake itself the process degenerated into one where cultural exchange became commoditization. With the white male settler the default dominant position in the colony, women, natives, and Africans occupied an uneasy middle ground in the transition from transient colony to fixed settlement. Whereas white women, in time, came to be seen as crucial components of the colonial project, neither natives nor Africans fitted easily into the evolving vision of a little England across the Atlantic.
The 1622 massacre, along with later attacks in 1644 and 1675, only reinforced the image of the “Indian” as treacherous savage, which, from a cynical English perspective, proved perfectly convenient. As John Smith recognized, many colonists regarded the massacre as “good for the Plantation, because now we have just cause to destroy them by all meanes possible.” The secretary to the Virginia Company, Edward Waterhouse, was blunt enough about it at the time. The English “may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us,” he enthused, “whereby wee shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious Mattocke into the victorious Sword (wherein there is both ease, benefit, and glory) and possessing the fruits of others labours.”6 Ultimately, Waterhouse concluded, “the way of conquering” the native populations “is much more easie then civilizing them by faire means,” and he revelled in the opportunity not just to acquire “those commodities which the Indians enjoyed as much or rather more than we,” but in the prospect of violent conquest. This, he asserted, could be achieved
by force, by surprise, by famine in burning their Corne, by destroying and burning their Boats, Canoes, and Houses, by breaking their fishing Weares, by assailing them in their huntings, whereby they get the greatest part of their sustenance in Winter, by pursuing and chasing them with our horses, and blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to teare them.... By these and sundry other wayes, as by driving them (when they flye) upon their enemies who are round about them, and by animating and abetting their enemies against them, may their ruine or subjection be soone effected.7
Assuming that some natives would be left standing after the English had done their worst, Waterhouse proposed that they “be compelled to servitude and drudgery” and provide the labor needs of the colony.8 In fact, the natives proved an unreliable coerced workforce, but on the Chesapeake that turned out to be less of a problem than it might have been; there was, after all, a fallback option - African labor.
The development of an economy and a culture constructed on the basis of unfree labor needs to be placed both in the context of labor, class, gender, religion, and race relations in Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in comparison with other settlement projects in America in that period. Many, although not all, of the problems that had beset the Virginian venture were replicated elsewhere in America. For the native populations all along the eastern seaboard, from Florida to New France, the arrival of Europeans was an unmitigated disaster. Even if the Europeans in question stuck to the original plan of conversion rather than conquest, the diseases they carried with them effected irreparable damage among the New World populations. France’s ambitions for North America in the seventeenth century were spearheaded not just by traders but by several Jesuit expeditions conceived as a means of extending both the political power of France and the spiritual power of Christianity over the Algonquian and Huron populations in the New World. The reports from New France, however, confirmed that since “the Faith has come to dwell among these people, all things that make men die have been found in these countries.”9 Yet “Faith” drew increasing numbers across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, many of the settlers prompted not just by the desire to spread the gospel, but to secure a safe haven from religious persecution in their home countries.