Powhatan Confederacy

Before the Emperor

formationDrafted from Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

When the English colonists who founded Jamestown in 1607 began exploring the rivers around their new settlement, they found a political order already old and already vast: some thirty tribes of the Virginia Tidewater, each under its own werowance, all of them answering to a single paramount ruler the English called Powhatan. His own court stood at Werowocomoco on the York river, where visitors found him seated before a fire on a bedstead-like throne, wrapped in a robe of raccoon skins with all the tails still hanging from it, a young woman on either hand and two long rows of men and painted women lining the house behind him. No European power had built this confederacy or given Powhatan his authority over it. The English had arrived, without quite grasping it at first, in the middle of another empire's own established order.

Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) · Robert Vaughan · Public domain

John Smith learned exactly how established it was in December 1607, when a Powhatan hunting party captured him while he explored the Chickahominy river and marched him from town to town before finally bringing him to Werowocomoco itself. More than two hundred of Powhatan's court stood watching him as though he were a monster. After a long consultation, two great stones were brought before the ruler, and as many hands as could reach him dragged Smith to lay his head upon them, clubs raised to beat out his brains.

A daughter's intervention

By Smith's own account, it was Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas - described as the ruler's dearest child, no more than ten or twelve years old at the time - who stopped the execution: when no pleading could move the assembly, she took Smith's head in her arms and laid her own upon it, and Powhatan relented, content instead to have Smith make hatchets for him and beads for her. Whatever the full truth behind the moment, it marked the start of a relationship the confederacy and the colony would spend the next fifteen years unable to settle into anything permanent - alternating between trade, war, and, eventually, a peace bought with a second and far more lasting captivity.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford · Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) · Gts-tg · CC BY-SA 4.0

A kettle and a captive

expansionDrafted from Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

Trust between the confederacy and the colony never survived long after Smith himself left Virginia in 1609. Word reached Powhatan - by way of English deserters living among his people - that the colony's leadership meant to surprise him and seize his stores of corn, and rather than wait to find out if the warning was true, Powhatan abandoned Werowocomoco entirely, carrying away his provisions and building a new residence the English would have to find all over again. When an English party did arrive at his old capital with exactly that plan in mind, they found empty houses and a population too hostile to risk lingering among.

Years of raids, ransoms and running skirmishes followed, with neither side able to force a lasting settlement. It was Captain Samuel Argall who finally found the opening the colony needed - not against Powhatan himself, but against his daughter. Learning that Pocahontas was staying at Patawomeke, Argall enlisted an old acquaintance named Japazaws to lure her aboard his ship with the promise of a copper kettle, a bribe Japazaws found irresistible enough to stage-manage his own wife's tears to make the invitation convincing. Once Pocahontas was aboard and the kettle delivered, Argall told her plainly, in front of her weeping hosts, that she would not see her father again until her captivity had bought peace between his people and the colony.

Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) · Johann Theodore de Bry · Public domain

A father who would not come in person

Powhatan's reply took three months. When it came, it carried seven returned Englishmen, ineffective muskets by way of restitution, and a promise of corn and lasting friendship in exchange for his daughter - an offer the colony judged insufficient and answered by keeping Pocahontas regardless. Silence followed for months more, until Sir Thomas Dale sailed up Powhatan's own river with a hundred and fifty armed men and the captive herself, met by four hundred of Powhatan's warriors at a town called Matchot who dared the English to come ashore and then, having made their show of defiance, simply asked to confer instead. Powhatan did not come to negotiate his own daughter's ransom in person at any point in the standoff - it was two of his sons, sent to see their sister, who opened the path to the peace that would settle the matter for good.

The peace of a marriage

peakDrafted from Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

The peace that finally held was built on an attachment that had nothing to do with ransom negotiations. John Rolfe had fallen in love with Pocahontas during her captivity, and she with him; when Rolfe's intentions reached Powhatan, the old ruler's consent came almost immediately - within ten days he sent an uncle and two of his own sons as his deputies to attend and confirm the wedding, held about the first of April 1614. From that marriage, the English colonists recorded, came friendly trade and commerce with Powhatan and all his subjects for the first time since Smith's own departure five years before - and a secondary peace besides, as the neighbouring Chickahominy, watching the reconciliation, sent their own messengers offering to become subjects of the English crown rather than remain outside the new arrangement.

Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) · Simon van de Passe · Public domain

It was the high point of the confederacy's dealings with the colony: a marriage confirmed by the paramount ruler himself, a former enemy tribe volunteering its allegiance, and years of raiding replaced, for a time, by trade neither side had to force out of the other at gunpoint. Powhatan never travelled to Jamestown to see the peace his daughter's marriage had built, remaining at his own residence and governing his confederacy exactly as he always had - only now without an English colony demanding satisfaction from him every few months.

Death, and a peace inherited rather than renewed

Powhatan died in April 1618. His brother Itopatin succeeded him as the confederacy's nominal paramount chief, and both Itopatin and another brother, Opechancanough, confirmed the English alliance Powhatan's own consent had sealed four years earlier. But the peace that followed was inherited rather than actively renewed, resting now on a marriage bond whose author was dead and on a confirmation from men who had not personally negotiated it. Opechancanough, in particular, held real influence in the confederacy's affairs from this point far beyond what his brother's nominal title suggested - and the peace he had only confirmed, rather than made, would prove to be exactly the kind he judged himself free to end.

A single morning

endDrafted from Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

The prologue, by the colonists' own account, was the death of a warrior called Nemattanow - Jack of the Feather to the English, so named for the plumage he wore into battle, and considered by his own people nearly immortal in combat. Accused of murdering a settler named Morgan, Nemattanow was shot by two of the dead man's servants when he returned wearing Morgan's cap; dying, he asked only that his killers not reveal he had been shot, and that they bury him among the English. Opechancanough, by the colonists' account, grieved openly and threatened revenge - and then, within a fortnight, sent back word so full of professed love and peace that the English governor believed the country more settled than at any time since the colony's founding.

It was calculated deception. For weeks Opechancanough's people guided English travellers through the woods with every appearance of friendship, borrowed English boats, and, as late as the evening before the attack, sat down to breakfast at English tables carrying deer, turkeys and fish to sell. On the morning of March 22, 1622, at plantations scattered the length of the James river, Powhatan's warriors turned on their hosts with the settlers' own tools, killing without regard to age or sex before anyone could recognize the blow that struck them down. Three hundred and forty-seven English men, women and children died that single morning - roughly a quarter of the colony's population - and the attackers did not stop at the killing, mutilating bodies afterward and carrying pieces away as trophies.

Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) · Matthäus Merian · Public domain

No ending in sight

What the massacre opened, Smith's own account does not live to close. The war that followed ran on past the point where his narrative, compiled and published in 1624, simply stops giving new events - Opechancanough still very much alive, still the confederacy's effective ruler in all but name, and still, so far as this source records, unanswered for what his warriors had done. The peace a marriage had bought in 1614 was gone in a single coordinated morning eight years later, and nothing in this account suggests either side believed it could be rebuilt the same way twice.

A captive's death

endDrafted from Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (1860)

Twenty-two years after the first massacre, Opechancanough struck again. On the 18th of April, 1644, his warriors fell on the colony a second time, in an attack some attributed to fresh encroachments on Indian land and others suspected - improbably - of having been encouraged by colonists themselves hoping to profit from the chaos of England's own civil war. Whatever the cause, the first blow was not followed up. The attackers' own courage failed them after the initial onslaught, and they withdrew many miles from the settlements, giving the colonists time to gather their cattle, call an assembly, and organize a war of reprisal that the first massacre, twenty-two years earlier, had never provoked.

Carried by his own warriors

Opechancanough himself was by now nearly a hundred years old, his once commanding presence worn down to a body his own men had to carry from place to place in a litter. He could no longer walk, and his eyelids had to be lifted by attendants for him to see at all. It did not save him. Sir William Berkeley moved against him with a troop of horse, surprised him at a distance from his own residence, and brought him prisoner to Jamestown, where he was treated, by the governor's own order, with courtesy.

Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (1860) · Ken Lund · CC BY-SA 2.0

Captivity did not break him. Hearing a crowd gather out of curiosity to see the famous chief, he had his eyelids raised, summoned Berkeley to his presence, and told him plainly that had their positions been reversed, he would never have made a show of his prisoner. About a fortnight after his capture, one of his own guards shot him in the back for private revenge. He lingered a while with the wound before he died at Jamestown - the last paramount chief of a confederacy that had answered the English colony's own arrival, four decades earlier, with nothing but the confidence of a man who ruled thirty tribes outright.

Twenty beaver skins

afterlifeDrafted from Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (1860)

Opechancanough's death brought the peace that decades of war and diplomacy never had. His successor, a chief named Necotowance, took a title that measured exactly how much had changed: not paramount chief of the Powhatan in his own right, but "King of the Indians," a style that named a subject rather than a sovereign. In October 1646 Necotowance signed a treaty formalizing what his own new title already implied - he would hold his authority from the King of England, in exchange for the colonial assembly's protection from his enemies.

The terms went further than a change of title. Necotowance ceded to the English outright all the country between the York and James rivers, from the falls down to Kiquotan, and agreed that any Indian found within that ceded territory without a messenger's badge could be killed on sight. What remained to his own people was the land north of the York, and a hunting ground running from the head of the Yapin to the old Mannakin town - bounded territory, held on English terms, rather than the reach of thirty tributary tribes a single emperor had once commanded. In acknowledgment of the whole arrangement, Necotowance was to deliver twenty beaver skins to the governor every year, at the season when the wild geese departed - tribute, from the people who had once received Captain Smith as a prisoner and decided his life was theirs to give or take.

Boston Public Library · Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (1860) · Virginia Farrer · CC BY 2.0