Chapter 21 The Ruling Elite: The Pilgrim Fathers by Deanna Spingola

 

Chapter 21 The Ruling Elite: The Pilgrim Fathers by Deanna Spingola

 

The Pilgrim Fathers

A group of people referred to as the Pilgrims founded the Plymouth Colony. The group was composed of about 40% adults and 56% of family groupings. Pastor John Robinson, church elder William Brewster, and William Bradford led this congregation of religious separatists. In 1607, after severe religious persecution at the hands of Tobias Matthew, Archbishop of York, in Nottinghamshire, England, the congregation left England and immigrated to the Netherlands. In June 1619, to avoid having their children influenced by the Dutch culture, the Congregation requested and received a land patent from the London Virginia Company, a corporation, which permitted them to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River. They obtained financing from the Merchant Adventurers, bought provisions and on September 6, 1620, they set sail in the Mayflower from Plymouth, England carrying 102 settlers and arrived at Provincetown Harbor on November 11. The colonists wrote the Mayflower Compact (corporate charter), signed November 11, 1620, the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims then sailed to Plymouth harbor, arriving there on December 21, 1620. They used the Mayflower as their headquarters while they constructed their houses. The Mayflower set sail back to England in the spring of 1621.

John Winthrop received a royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company from King Charles I and subsequently led a group of English Puritans to the New World in 1630. The settlers soon discovered, after their arrival that it took an incredible amount of labor to construct a community in a virgin wilderness. Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1639-1648), in a letter to his brother-in-law, Emanuel

Downing apparently complained about these strenuous, demanding challenges. In his response, Downing suggested that the settlers simply initiate a “just war” against the indigenous people in order to seize a commodity, presumably the native people themselves. Then the colonists could trade the natives in the West Indies for something esteemed to be of more value than a non-white “savage.” Downing conceptualized one of the fundamentals of warfare – resource seizure – simply take from others what you are unwilling to expend the efforts to earn for yourself.[756]

A smallpox epidemic afflicted the virgin native population while the English managed to escape the dreaded disease, possibly from natural immunity, due to its prevalence in

England. Governor William Bradford of the Massachusetts Bay Colony reported, “By the marvelous goodness and providence of God, not one of the English was so much as sick or in the least measure tainted with this disease.” The Puritans viewed this scourge and destruction of the Indians as an unmistakable sign of “divine approval” of whatever they did or decided to do to the natives in the future. In 1634, Bradford wrote that the Puritan settlers now numbered about 4,000 people, all in “remarkably good health” because of the “Lord’s special providence.” He said, referring to the Indians, “for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox so as the Lord hath cleared out title to what we possess.”[757]

The British did not hesitate to kill Indian women and children. Their objective, according to John Mason was that “the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.” Another biblical passage said, “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth...but thou shalt

utterly destroy them.” Mason used religion to justify the Pequot War, which they initiated in July of 1636, two years after many New England natives died of smallpox. John Winthrop mandated the slaughter of Narragansett Indians after the colonists found the body of John Oldham, apparently killed by the Indians on Block Island. Though Oldham was an unpopular outcast, in retaliation, the white settlers murdered over a dozen Indians who they discovered close to the crime scene without regard whether they were responsible. The colonists were not seeking justice but rather just wanted to kill Indians despite the promise of the Narragansett’s chief to dispense punishment to Oldham’s murderers. He sent 200 warriors to Block Island to search for the culprits.[758]

Rather than allow the chief to handle the issue, Puritan leaders demanded that armed militiamen attack the Block Island Indians, kill all the men and seize the women and children who would bring a tidy sum in the West Indies slave markets. Horrified, the Indians scattered because they were hopelessly incapable of fighting such a military force. Therefore, the militia destroyed the deserted villages and burned the cornfields. On their way back from Block Island, the troops initiated a confrontation with some Pequot Indians who had nothing to do with Oldham’s death. The Pequots quickly perceived the soldier’s intentions and fled to the forest to avoid a battle. Again, the troops went on a vicious rampage, looting and burning the Indians’ villages and cornfields. After the militia left for Boston, the Pequots engaged in some retaliatory raids, including an attack on Fort Saybrook. These events were a death knell for the local Indians. From then on, the English targeted the Pequot Indians, including the women and children.[759]

The Indian nations seldom embraced the economic and political aspirations exhibited by the British invaders who waged war to achieve their ambitions. The Indians engaged in warfare as a retaliation of a personal insult or inter-tribal aggression. They preferred negotiation to avoid war or accepted the payment of tributes to the victors to satisfy any injury. The tribes did not attempt to dominate each other, a trait generally connected to European-style warfare and conquest. Furthermore, Indian warriors could elect not to fight in a particular battle. If enough warriors decided not to fight, the battle ended. Indians viewed warfare in a very personal way whereas American and British soldiers see warfare in the abstract, an ideological compulsion that often leads to “indiscriminate, casual, unceremonious killing.”[760]

The Connecticut General Court declared war against the Pequots. John Mason, commander of the Connecticut troops, led the military in an assault on the main Pequot village. The Indians realized that Mason planned to massacre the whole tribe and attempted to withdraw. Mason and his men attacked the Indians under the cover of darkness. The British invaded the Indian encampment and killed everyone and everything that moved. There were few warriors in the village at the time. Mason and his men torched the wigwams. It was, according to the witnesses, like a fiery oven; it was a ghastly sight as most of the sleeping Indians died in the flames. Mason and his men used their swords on those who tried to escape. Many of the young soldiers had never seen battle before. The sight of so many people bleeding, gasping and dying on the ground overwhelmed them. Yet, the youthful murderers, obedient to their superiors, continued the work of death. Of course, it was not actually battle because the Indians were helpless and unarmed.[761]

Governor Bradford described what the British saw – the Indians were frying in the fire and there were streams of blood and the stench of burning flesh filled the air. The British viewed the victory as a sweet sacrifice and they praised God who they felt had helped them to “enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.” Cotton Mather celebrated the event years later in his Magnalia Christi Americana, “In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.” Mason counted the dead Pequot Indians who totaled six or seven hundred. The British took seven captives and seven escaped. Mason said, “It was the just Judgment of God.”[762]

The Virginia Company

In June 1606, King James I chartered The London Company, also called the Charter of the Virginia Company of London, for a group of London entrepreneurs as a joint stock corporation charged with establishing an English settlement in the Chesapeake region of North America. On December 20, 1606, Captain Christopher Newport, a former privateer, with 104 settlers sailed from London in three ships, the Discovery, the Susan Constant and the Godspeed, with instructions to settle Virginia, find gold, and seek a water route to the Orient. They arrived on Jamestown Island on the banks of the James River, sixty miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on May 14, 1607. The corporation was empowered with the right to appoint the Council of Virginia, the Governor and other officials. The corporation also had the responsibility of providing settlers, supplies, and ships for the venture. Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, a veteran of the English campaigns against the Irish, arrived at Jamestown on June 10, 1610 with fresh supplies and men. De La Warr became governor for life. Initially, people viewed the prospects favorably until the mortality rate increased and the prospects for profit decreased. Given the challenges, the king revoked the charter in 1624, after what the settlers refer to as the Indian Massacre of 1622. The Virginia Company then became a Crown colony.

The Algonquin natives, despite rhetoric to the contrary, lived peacefully, were generous, trustworthy, and practiced egalitarianism. These characteristics were conspicuously absent from English social relations of the time. A small minority of British observers recognized and appreciated the native people of Virginia. The Indians rarely assimilated with the colonists while there were a large number of whites who chose to live with the Indians, much to the chagrin of the colonial governors. In 1612, the deputy-governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale had some of those who preferred to live among the Indians, hunted down and executed. He had some of them hung, others he had shot and some he had burned at the stake. The Indians enjoyed close family relationships between parents and children; the parents suffered incredible grief when the whites separated them from their children, a strategy that the British unhesitatingly exploited. Captain John Smith, former mercenary and a member of the governing Council of the Colony (September 1608 to August 1609), and Sir Ralph Lane regularly kidnapped Indian children from their villages and held them hostage.[763]

In Roanoke, local government policies mandated that when an Englishman accused an Indian of stealing an item and not returning it, the British would attack the entire Indian village. They would torch the community and the corn-bearing fields surrounding the town. In the seventeenth century, this disproportionate response to any minor infraction allegedly committed by an Indian was typical for the British. In 1610, in Jamestown, Governor De la Warr demanded that chief Powhatan (proper name was Wahunsonacock), father of Pocahontas and leader of the Powhatan tribe, return some runaway Englishmen that the chief was sheltering – probably so the governor could have them executed for preferring to live among a more civilized group of people.[764] Chief Powhatan’s tribe was part of a confederacy of tribes speaking the Algonquin languages. Other tribes included the Pamunkeys, Chickahominies, Naunsemonds, Rappahannocks, Paspaheghs and several smaller tribes, composed the “Powhatan Empire,” of perhaps 100,000 or more people. The settlers relegated each of these tribes to destitution, homelessness, starvation and disease.[765]

Chief Powhatan refused to relinquish the men to a certain death. In retaliation, the governor directed George Percy to launch a military campaign against Wahunsonacock and his people. Percy, the brother of the Earl of Northumberland and second in command to the governor, marched against the village and immediately killed fifteen to sixteen men. Other Indians fled but the soldiers managed to capture the queen, her children and an Indian brave. Percy ordered one of his soldiers to decapitate the brave. He then had his men torch the village and the crops adjacent to the town. After destroying the one town, Percy

directed his men to lay waste to another Indian town. He initially allowed the queen and her children to live and placed them on one of his boats. His troops complained so he held a meeting and they all concluded that they would throw the children overboard and shoot them in the head. When Percy returned to Jamestown, the governor was displeased that the troops had allowed the queen to live. They were going to burn her alive but Percy decided to be merciful and just stab her to death.[766]

Understandably, the relations between the English and the Indians diminished into hostility. However, the Indians attempted to make peace by taking food to the English settlements because the British seemed incapable of growing enough to feed themselves. Instead of gratitude, the Englishmen captured the Indians, accused them of being spies and executed them. Other times, the English invited the Indians to their settlements under the pretense of making peace. The British then killed the trusting, unwary Indians. The whites offered peace treaties, to put the Indians off guard, always with the intentions of breaking them. Despite the fact that the British benefitted from the agricultural efforts of the Indians, they regularly destroyed Indian crops. Thereafter, the British were determined to either enslave all of the indigenous population or exterminate them because the British rationalized, the Indians tried to destroy them. Additionally, as Edward Waterhouse joyfully indicated, the British wanted all of the Indian lands – retaliatory warfare was merely the ruse to seize the cultivated, fertile land, their initial objective.[767]

In 1614, Chief Wahunsonacock had agreed to peace after the English captured his daughter Pocahontas. However, more colonists arrived and seemed determined to destroy the Indians and their culture. In 1622, the non-Indian population of Virginia totaled less than 4,000 whites in addition to a few African slaves living on scattered plantations. On March 21, 1622, a native informer alerted the English that the Indians were planning a massacre the following day, giving the whites in remote settlements sufficient time to retreat to Jamestown.[768]

Finally, the Indians retaliated in the Powhatan Uprising of March 22, 1622 and killed 347 settlers during warfare that lasted about an hour. Waterhouse, a secretary for the Virginia Company, stated in the Declaration of the State of the Colony that the “Relation of the Barbarous Massacre” took the lives of seventy-seven people at Martin’s Hundred, a 20,000-acre private plantation founded by investors headed by London attorney Richard Martin. However, Waterhouse overestimated the number slain as the Indians captured several women who Waterhouse presumed were dead. Fifty-eight colonists actually died at the plantation.[769]

The settlers, as a defense measure, concentrated themselves closer to Jamestown and reduced the number of settlements from eighty small settlements to six larger ones. The settlers appealed The London Company in London that then petitioned the King, both ignored the request for help and left the colonists to their own resources. As summer approached, the settlers concocted a clever plan to deceive the Indians. They extended peace and forgiveness to the Indians and promised them permission to return to their villages and cornfields so they could begin planting. They accepted the offer of peace. However, in the late summer, when the corn was almost ready to harvest, the settlers waged a surprise attack on all the Indian villages. They burned them all down and destroyed their fields leaving the surviving Indians to probable starvation in the coming winter.[770] During one raid against the Indians, the English destroyed enough corn to feed 4,000 people for a year. The British preferred to starve the non-combatant natives. By winter’s end, 1623, as many Indians died in a year as had perished in the last fifteen years.[771]

In 1625, one battle, at Pamunkey, at least a thousand native warriors confronted the English but Governor Francis Wyatt defeated them. In 1628, the settlers tried to persuade the Indians, with promises that they would forgive and forget, allow the natives to resume life in their own villages and cultivate their fields without fear of aggression from the settlers. However, the governor admitted to the settlers that he had massacred the natives as they had done in the late summer of 1622. However, the Indians had learned not

to trust the white man and continued their warfare, despite the fact that the whites had almost completely exterminated them. The colony and the company suffered financially and were close to ruin. In 1684, the Crown revoked the colony’s charter.[772]

By 1624, after two years of war, the colony’s population decreased to 1,258 whites and twenty-two Africans. Before war began, there had been sixteen years of peaceful existence. Over a thousand stockholders had invested £200,000 in the development of the colony. Between 1622 and 1634, the settlers and the native population engaged in guerilla warfare.[773]

Colonists killed hundreds of Indians in repeated military campaigns, mass poisonings, and the whites sent dogs to hunt them down, destroyed their canoes and fishing equipment, and torched their homes and fields. The Indians attempted to make peace and when the British accepted a proposal, the Indians let their guard down and the British would launch more attacks. The English wanted to exterminate the Indians and destroy them from the face of the earth. In 1624, the British entered an Indian village and slaughtered 800 unarmed Indian men, women, and children. The Indians also perished because of the diseases so prevalent among the British. By 1650, the Powhatan nation was almost non-existent.[774]

In 1684, the year the King revoked the charter, he offered peace to the surviving Indians who then resumed their activities – farming and caring for their families under Chief Opechancanough, second brother of Powhatan.[775] The British captured Chief Wahunsonacock’s successor Opechancanough, an elderly nearly blind man, and incarcerated him in Jamestown where, within two weeks, a British soldier shot him in the back, killing him. In April 1607, when 107 British settlers arrived, there were about 14,000 Powhatan Indians, a huge decrease in the population from the previous few decades before. The French, English, and Spanish brought diseases and just outright slaughtered the natives. Prior to their arrival, experts estimate that the Indian population was over 100,000. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were over 60,000 English men and women residing in Virginia while the Powhatan population had shrunk to 600 or less. The British had exterminated over 95% of the Powhatan nation since 1607, a population that the foreign invaders had already decimated by about 75%. This drastic reduction of just the Powhatan nation of Virginia is typical of the other indigenous tribes in the east. In 1697, Lieutenant Governor Andros of Virginia estimated that the number of Indian warriors in the colony was about 360 with a total Indian population of less than 1500. The colonists had slaughtered over 80% of the colony’s natives during the previous fifty years.[776]

Virginia Governor William Berkeley, appointed by King Charles I of England proposed a dual program of genocide and enslavement. People deliberated over whether to kill the remaining Indians or capture and enslave them. Governor Berkeley wanted to slaughter all the adult males and sell all of the women and children in order to pay for the war of extermination, as there was a sufficient number of female and child slaves “to defray the whole cost.”[777]

The Great American Republican Experiment, 1774-1812

The Albany Plan, an Early Model