Edmund S. Morgan, Marie Morgan: Our Shaky Beginnings
In the procession of anniversary celebrations by which we congratulate our predecessors for begetting us, 2007 is the year to honor our shaky beginnings at Jamestown, Virginia. The 108 men and boys who stepped ashore on May 14, 1607, and the four or five thousand who followed them in the next fifteen years were the victims of a failed business enterprise. But enough of them survived starvation and disease, their sponsors' negligence, and their own mistakes to start the first permanent settlement in what became the United States....
Helen Rountree has long been the principal authority on the outlooks, beliefs, and purposes of the "uncivil" Virginians, the Powhatans, the name she applies to all the tribes under the paramount chiefdom of the man Powhatan. Under the guise of biographies, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough tells the story of Jamestown from the viewpoint of the "Real People." Since they left no written records, she has to rely (as we all do) on John Smith's interpretations. Rountree reduces his name phonetically to what they must have called him, "Chawn-zmit." Her narrative does not depart from his, but she has fun telling it through the eyes of a Powhatan affronted by the stupidity and avarice of the invaders, identified variously as Arrogant Ones, Overdressed Ones, Thieving Ones, Smelly Ones, and so forth. When civility required the wearing of bulky European clothes for months at a time, incivility had its advantages. Since the "native people in Virginia...bathed every day, while their contemporaries across the ocean considered bathing unhealthy," the Powhatans flinched when downwind of the unwashed invaders.
These Smelly Ones were a puzzle. Huddled in their fort, they must have figured in Powhatan reckoning as the clueless ones. The Indians lived by a combination of farming, foraging, hunting, and fishing. They knew not to rely too heavily on agriculture because of Virginia's periodic droughts, but farming was always necessary. And, like foraging for nuts, plants, and roots, it was woman's work. So a shipload of English settlers with only two women was incomprehensible: "Not nearly enough to farm for all those men! Who could understand such demented creatures?" Neither side understood the other's division of labor. In Jamestown, as in Virginia's later plantation society, English women, even as servants, were exempted from work in the fields.
This division of labor was symptomatic of a fundamental incompatibility that the Indians recognized before the English did. It seems likely that an Indian policy of abandoning the English to their own devices would have thinned them out more effectively than raids or even massacres. In 1622 they tried to eliminate them in an all-out attack, but it was too late. The English had discovered tobacco, and the contest over Virginia's tidewater lands was underway. It was fundamentally a contest between two ways of life. A cornfield, in the Powhatan view, belonged to those who grew corn on it, but ownership was contingent on actual use. Corn, like tobacco, exhausted the soil rapidly, and without fertilizer a field had to be abandoned after three or four years. Abandonment made it the common property of the tribe. Powhatan houses were as temporary as their cornfields. The slim poles that held them up and the bark that covered them could be taken down and moved with ease at any time. The English, while not recognizing tribal ownership at all, regarded English land and English houses as private. Once something was officially (that is to say, legally) yours, it remained yours, for you and your heirs.
The civilizing mission that seemed within reach when Pocahontas enthralled England was not, in fact, possible. The company failed, but the colony survived after abandoning all pretense of persuading the natives to civility. When the Powhatans were unable to destroy it by slaughtering a quarter of the settlers in 1622, the survivors adopted a policy of exterminating the natives. In 1616 they had discovered a way of extracting riches from the land: tidewater soil, it turned out, would grow a species of tobacco that commanded high prices in Europe. Tobacco became at once the Virginians' way of living off the land and the only way they cared about. It was worth devoting one's whole time to it while continuing to trade with theremaining Indians for things to eat. Tobacco was the new gold. Virginia survived, indeed flourished, as a kind of open-pit tobacco mine....
Read entire article at NY Review of Books
Helen Rountree has long been the principal authority on the outlooks, beliefs, and purposes of the "uncivil" Virginians, the Powhatans, the name she applies to all the tribes under the paramount chiefdom of the man Powhatan. Under the guise of biographies, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough tells the story of Jamestown from the viewpoint of the "Real People." Since they left no written records, she has to rely (as we all do) on John Smith's interpretations. Rountree reduces his name phonetically to what they must have called him, "Chawn-zmit." Her narrative does not depart from his, but she has fun telling it through the eyes of a Powhatan affronted by the stupidity and avarice of the invaders, identified variously as Arrogant Ones, Overdressed Ones, Thieving Ones, Smelly Ones, and so forth. When civility required the wearing of bulky European clothes for months at a time, incivility had its advantages. Since the "native people in Virginia...bathed every day, while their contemporaries across the ocean considered bathing unhealthy," the Powhatans flinched when downwind of the unwashed invaders.
These Smelly Ones were a puzzle. Huddled in their fort, they must have figured in Powhatan reckoning as the clueless ones. The Indians lived by a combination of farming, foraging, hunting, and fishing. They knew not to rely too heavily on agriculture because of Virginia's periodic droughts, but farming was always necessary. And, like foraging for nuts, plants, and roots, it was woman's work. So a shipload of English settlers with only two women was incomprehensible: "Not nearly enough to farm for all those men! Who could understand such demented creatures?" Neither side understood the other's division of labor. In Jamestown, as in Virginia's later plantation society, English women, even as servants, were exempted from work in the fields.
This division of labor was symptomatic of a fundamental incompatibility that the Indians recognized before the English did. It seems likely that an Indian policy of abandoning the English to their own devices would have thinned them out more effectively than raids or even massacres. In 1622 they tried to eliminate them in an all-out attack, but it was too late. The English had discovered tobacco, and the contest over Virginia's tidewater lands was underway. It was fundamentally a contest between two ways of life. A cornfield, in the Powhatan view, belonged to those who grew corn on it, but ownership was contingent on actual use. Corn, like tobacco, exhausted the soil rapidly, and without fertilizer a field had to be abandoned after three or four years. Abandonment made it the common property of the tribe. Powhatan houses were as temporary as their cornfields. The slim poles that held them up and the bark that covered them could be taken down and moved with ease at any time. The English, while not recognizing tribal ownership at all, regarded English land and English houses as private. Once something was officially (that is to say, legally) yours, it remained yours, for you and your heirs.
The civilizing mission that seemed within reach when Pocahontas enthralled England was not, in fact, possible. The company failed, but the colony survived after abandoning all pretense of persuading the natives to civility. When the Powhatans were unable to destroy it by slaughtering a quarter of the settlers in 1622, the survivors adopted a policy of exterminating the natives. In 1616 they had discovered a way of extracting riches from the land: tidewater soil, it turned out, would grow a species of tobacco that commanded high prices in Europe. Tobacco became at once the Virginians' way of living off the land and the only way they cared about. It was worth devoting one's whole time to it while continuing to trade with theremaining Indians for things to eat. Tobacco was the new gold. Virginia survived, indeed flourished, as a kind of open-pit tobacco mine....