New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 7 ·
April 26,
2007
Review
Our Shaky Beginnings
Captain John Smith: Writings with
Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English
Settlement of America
by Captain John Smith
Library of America, 1,329 pp., $45.00
by Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press,
408 pp., $29.95
by William M. Kelso
University of Virginia Press, 238 pp.,
$29.95
by Benjamin Woolley
HarperCollins, 496 pp., $27.50
by James Horn
Basic Books, 337 pp., $15.95 (paper)
by Helen C. Rountree
University of Virginia Press, 292 pp.,
$16.95 (paper)
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.
The early Virginians have generally been upstaged by the
Pilgrim Fathers in our national memory. It is not clear how the
Pilgrims, who landed at Plymouth thirteen years after them,
gained the name of fathers, fathers not merely of New England
but of the nation. Perhaps Jamestown lost out because Captain
John Smith, who told the Jamestown saga with himself as the
central actor, did not make a good father figure. He was
twenty-eight when he arrived at Jamestown, left less than three
years later, and never returned. William Bradford, who led the
Pilgrim fathers, was only thirty in 1620, but in his classic
account of the colony he writes like a father, while Smith
writes like the soldier he was. Smith came out of the England of
Marlowe and Shakespeare, Bradford from the England of Milton.
The Library of America has now produced a volume of Smith's
writings. It includes a dozen accounts of Virginia by fellow
founders, but they all fall under his shadow as the man who
mattered and knew it. The same is true of the volumes by modern
scholars reviewed here: Karen Kupperman on the different forces
behind the Virginia enterprise, James Horn and Benjamin Woolley
on Smith's strategies as a leader, William Kelso on
archaeological evidence of what the settlers did under Smith,
Helen Rountree on the way the Indians regarded him. Each of them
offers a different perspective for modern readers, but they are
all, in some sense, commentaries on Smith. And this review, too,
is an interpretation of what his career reveals about American
beginnings.
John Smith was only one of the daring young men of
Elizabethan England who wandered the Continent from Istanbul to
Madrid and on to the coasts of Barbary and Guinea, tasting the
excitement of "heathenish" religious beliefs, casually joining
the armies that fought the Spanish in the Netherlands or the
Turks in Hungary, but coming home ready for whatever ventures
might crop up in the expanding Atlantic sphere. What cropped up
for Smith was a chance to join in a scheme for colonizing
America that was just beginning to take shape. The Virginia
Company of London was a belated attempt by English investors to
capitalize on what had been learned about the New World and its
inhabitants in the preceding century. The learning process had
begun when England's queen turned a blind eye to the sea dogs
who preyed on Spanish treasure ships. Elizabeth transformed
piracy into privateering by declaring war on Spain in 1585. John
Hawkins and Francis Drake won her favor by tapping the wealth of
New Spain, which set their countrymen thinking about other
projects to dismantle the enemy's empire and replace it with one
of their own.
Sir Walter Raleigh had something like that in
mind when he persuaded Elizabeth in 1584 to let him plant a
colony in the land he named Virginia in honor of her celebrated,
and perhaps notional, chastity. Raleigh's colony was designed to
extract the natural resources of a region the Spanish had
written off as not worth the trouble. Its location on an island
within the Carolina barrier reefs would enable Raleigh and his
kind to use it as a base for raiding the Spanish fleets in the
Caribbean. Unfortunately, the settlers he had sent to Roanoke
did not learn to live off the land. They were contemplating a
move to the Chesapeake area when the next supply ship was
diverted to the fleet that sailed out to meet the Spanish Armada
of 1588. When another ship finally dropped anchor at the colony
two years later, its inhabitants had disappeared. Roanoke thus
became the famed "lost colony."
But before that debacle several of Raleigh's deputies had
returned to England with enticing accounts, included in the
Library of America volume, describing Virginia's potential
riches. One of them, John White, had drawn remarkably detailed
depictions of American Indian life that portrayed an attractive
and inventive, if barefoot and scantily clad, people. They
staged dances, made ingenious implements, honored their dead,
grew crops, and smoked fish. Their dwellings, however, were made
of saplings, reeds, and other ephemeral materials.
As Kupperman emphasizes, ironically and perhaps fatefully,
early English conceptions of Indian life and character became
intertwined with the justification of another colonizing
venture. Ireland was nominally under English rule, but effective
control did not extend beyond the small district known as "the
Pale," centered on Dublin. The rest of the island was home to
"the wild Irish," who were divided into loose collections of
warlike people with a common interest in defying the English.
With the Spanish seemingly set on ruling the world, England
awakened to the danger that Catholic Spain might take over
Catholic Ireland as a stronghold for invading England.
Subjugating the Irish became a way of forestalling Spain.
Elizabeth began by parceling out the country to her favorites,
Raleigh among them. These English overlords could either tame
their wild Irish tenants or supplant them with a more productive
and tractable population. It was the same problem that Raleigh
faced at Roanoke and the Virginia Company would face at
Jamestown, not to say the problem the United States would face
in its long march across North America.
The Irish shared with American Indians a profound deficiency
that required correction if they were to make proper subjects:
they were not civil. That word carried hidden meanings
and connotations that would reverberate throughout American
history. Civility was a way of life not easily defined, but its
results were visible: substantial housing and ample clothing.
Uncivil peoples were naked and nomadic. Civility required of
those who deserved the name a sustained effort, physical and
intellectual. It did not require belief in Christianity, for the
ancient Greeks and Romans had it; but Christianity, or at least
Protestant Christianity, was impossible without it. The Irish
Catholics and those Indians converted by Spanish or French
missionaries were not, in the English view, either civil or
Christian. The objective of colonization was to bring civility
and Christianity to the uncivil, in that order.
The objective was threatened, indeed civility itself was
threatened, if lazy colonists, coveting the unfettered life of
the uncivil, went native, or, it might be said, went naked.
"Clothes were of tremendous importance," Kupperman notes,
"because one's whole identity was bound up in the
self-presentation of dress. The Scots and Irish—and soon the
American Indians —could not be civil unless they dressed in
English clothes, like civilized people, and cut their long
hair," signs of a capacity to submit to the enlightened
government of their superiors.
England's preferred way of civilizing the Irish was through
force of arms, but after ruthless military expeditions failed to
bring widespread peace, and with it civility, the new solution
was to plant the country with people who already rejoiced in
that condition. Refractory natives would learn by example, or
simply give way, left to a wretched existence on the margins of
a profoundly transformed Ireland. Not long before the Virginia
Company began supplying people to Jamestown for much the same
purpose, the English authorities began settling far larger
numbers across the Irish Sea, an estimated 100,000 by 1641.
Jamestown was small beer by comparison, but
the English experience of the natives at Roanoke suggested that
they would be less of a problem than their Irish counterparts.
Nevertheless, it would not be safe to assume that any uncivil
people would cheerfully submit to the required indoctrination.
The first thing to be built at Jamestown was a crude fort. This
was a sound move, for the Indians had already encountered
emissaries from the world of civility: fifteen years before
Roanoke a Spanish mission had camped in the Chesapeake. The
natives had learned that civil people were far from easy to live
with, so they did not hesitate to attack the next lot of
Europeans. The fort (and its successor) became the heart of the
settlement, both as a command center and as a palisaded exemplar
of civility. There decently dressed Englishmen would erect
respectable cottages that kept out the weather and allowed them
to eat and sleep in comfort while civilizing and Christianizing
"the Salvages." That, at any rate, was the ideological basis of
their enterprise.
It had, of course, a material basis that reflected the
ideological one. It was a joint-stock company expecting to make
a profit from the natives to whom it brought the benefits of
civility. There were about 15,000 of them in eastern Virginia
when the English arrived, organized into a cross between a
federation and a small empire under the direction of a single
chief, Powhatan. Confronting them was a group of Englishmen,
never more than five hundred in the first years, badly in need
of a leadership that only one man among them could provide. In
the face of the company's ambiguous and diffuse delegation of
authority, John Smith took charge and made it his job to win
white ascendancy, or at least acceptance, from a people who did
not relish the role that the English expected them to play. The
fortunes of the Virginia Company were very much in his hands.
And the story that has dominated our understanding is the
eventful, witty, and in many ways perplexing account he has left
us.
John Smith had all the qualities we associate with the
Elizabethan soldier of fortune: physical and mental toughness,
tactical acumen, deadly skill in the arts of war, and a short
way with naysayers and shirkers. To these martial traits must be
added omnivorous curiosity, fluency in foreign languages,
excellent powers of observation and deduction, and a way with
words. Most of all Smith had two qualities exalted in the Age of
Elizabeth: style and sangfroid. His self-esteem and
self-sufficiency made possible a life of ceaseless travel,
discovery, peril, and controversy. Without Smith's bumptious
pragmatism and ability to command and control men and
circumstances, Jamestown might have suffered the fate of the
Roanoke colony.
If his reports of what he did there are self-serving, how
could arguments in favor of annexing foreign lands and
suppressing native populations for the sake of riches and the
confounding of a nation's enemies not be self-serving? Unlike
other writers (Richard Hakluyt, for example) who claimed
expertise in overseas expansion, Smith could truthfully say,
Of the most things therein, I am no Compiler by hearsay, but
have beene a reall Actor; I take my selfe to have a
propertie in them: and therefore have beene bold to
challenge them to come under the reach of my owne rough Pen.
Marked by a style that is far from rough, the products of his
pen are engaging and illuminating, even now when historians and
the general reader may find many of his attitudes, judgments,
and actions hard to stomach.
The land that John Smith encountered was one
of pleasing prospects. "The vesture of the earth in most places
doth manifestly prove the nature of the soyle to be lusty and
very rich." Virginia's investors hoped for more than lusty soil.
They envisioned a cornucopia of exotic products, many of them
answering to prevailing conceptions of quick and easy wealth.
There were mulberry trees capable of sustaining silkworms that
at first "prospered excellent well" but fatally declined when
the silkworm wrangler fell sick. When the company sent a supply
ship in 1608, it included five passengers identified as
refiners, goldsmiths, and a jeweler, along with "a Perfumer" to
try his skill with another luxury item that might make the
fortunes of the company. Among the cascading disasters that
overtook the first settlers—famine, ambushes, fires, faction,
and betrayal—Smith singled out as the worst "our gilded refiners
with their golden promises." Smith's opponents ("meere
verballists") fired the mania for precious metals until "there
was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine
gold, load gold...."
Unwilling to shift for themselves in the matter of food, most
of the settlers vaguely expected to live off the land, which
meant living off its natives. Despite complaints that the
Indians used their land inefficiently, the English assumed the
existence of large crop surpluses. Because "their victualls are
their chiefest riches," corn (maize) became the commodity of
exchange. The natives knew to preserve meat, fish, vegetables,
and other foodstuffs for their lean times, which could easily
become starving times. Smith's companions, by contrast, could
scarcely realize that lean times follow fat. When food was
plentiful the whites habitually gorged. The succeeding shortages
threatened the very survival of Jamestown. One of the supply
ships, "idly loitring 14 weeks," consumed the greater part of
the food "as was provided to be landed [for] us," then sold what
remained "at 15 times the valew." Once the settlers were rid of
the mariners, they discovered that the ship's rats had also
colonized Jamestown. They ate so much of the "casked corn" that
"this did drive us all to our wits ende, for there was nothing
in the countrie but what nature afforded."
To supply all their deficiencies, Smith became the colony's
governor, strategist, drill master, interpreter, provisioner,
mapmaker, naturalist, and negotiator with the Indians. Until the
company relieved him of command, he did whatever he thought was
needed to keep the colony viable. He could do nothing about
company directors who were three thousand miles away and
"understood not at all, what they undertooke." He did what he
could to curb the settlers' quest for gold, which some of the
natives exploited as a "practise [ruse] for an Ambuscado." He
put the colonists to work building shelters and planting
gardens. But he was at his best (and his worst) when dealing
with the Indians.
When the Indians chose not to barter, he got what he could by
means of flattery mixed with threats. If his speeches met with
obdurate refusal, he countered with duress:
Seeing by trade and courtesie there was nothing to be had,
he [Smith] made bold to try such conclusions as necessitie
inforced, though contrary to his Commission: Let fly his
muskets, ran his boat on shoare, whereat they all fled into
the woods.
Aware that his actions would meet with criticism, he
justified them as based in hard experience: "Though I be no
scholer, I am past a schoole-boy." He taxed the Virginia
Company's officers with letting their "desire of present profit"
result in the colonists "over-toyling our weake and unskilfull
bodies."
In later years Smith's publications blamed
Jamestown's misfortunes on the slothful stupidity of the men he
was charged with protecting, yet he had willingly shouldered the
burden of bringing them through their travails. Testimonials by
a number of his fellow colonists in Captain John Smith
describe his masterful handling of one crisis after another. The
company officers he displaced dismissed him as "an ambityous
unworthy and vayneglorious fellowe, attempteinge to take all
mens authoreties from them." By doing what was necessary to keep
the settlers alive, John Smith became the person most feared by
investors and bureaucrats through the ages: the man on the scene
who does not hesitate to exceed his instructions.
Smith was primarily a soldier, but America challenged him at
a level far beyond the military and continued to challenge him.
He saw the continent as an imperial opportunity. Spain had
seized that opportunity in the south, and he wanted England to
take the north before it was too late. Handicapped by humble
birth and small fortune, he could not aspire to become a
northern Cortés. But he could perhaps persuade his countrymen to
make the most of what they began in Virginia. On a scouting
voyage in 1614 he mapped the Atlantic coast from present-day New
Brunswick to Cape Cod. Three of the tracts in the Library of
America volume are Smith's promotional pamphlets for the region
to which he gave the name New England. If his countrymen had
listened to his pleas, he could have been the founding father of
a New England that would be remembered as an offshoot of
Virginia.
Virginians have always been irked by their relegation to
second place. They gained a little more popular recognition when
the National Park Service, in celebration of their 350th
anniversary, undertook an archaeological dig that uncovered
Jamestown's ruins and then built a nearby approximation of the
settlement's buildings. New investigations, begun in 1994, show
that the first buildings at Jamestown were more substantial than
previously supposed. William Kelso describes these findings in
Jamestown: The Buried Truth. He and his staff have
uncovered the footprint of a substantial fort, triangular in
shape and enclosing a space that was 300 feet on two sides and
420 on the third. Each corner had a circular blockhouse for
ordnance. Within the fort were sizable buildings, two of them
stretching over 170 feet in length and having cobblestone
footings. From the cellars, wells, and middens of Jamestown,
archaeologists have taken over 200,000 artifacts that testify to
"the Virginia Company's steadfast commitment to making a success
of their Virginia enterprise."
But if the artifacts show a commitment on the part of English
investors, they cannot dispel the horrors—the diseases, the
starvation, and most of all the fecklessness—of the early years
when civil men showed themselves less capable of surviving than
the natives. The steadfast investors lost their money, and most
of the settlers lost their lives. Of the five or six thousand
sent there before 1625, a census taken that year showed only
1,210 survivors. As Kupperman observes, "The surprising thing
about Jamestown is that the investors and the colonists did not
simply walk away from the project." Only because the settlers
eventually got rid of the people they came to trade with and
unexpectedly put themselves to work did they find (in growing
tobacco) a good reason to be there.
Until that happened, a decade after landing, the settlers
survived—or a fraction of them did—as unwelcome guests in a land
that offered them nothing they had come for. After the company
removed Smith from leadership of the colony, Jamestown suffered
under a series of governors without his imperial vision or any
vision at all, and without his talents for command. Smith
described their tribulations with a certain relish in his later
account of the whole Virginia enterprise, published in 1624.
Kupperman, Woolley, and Horn tell the same story, but with
the benign intention of celebrating those early years as the
beginnings of the United States. Kupperman valiantly attempts to
redeem the blunders as a learning experience, but there is
little evidence of lessons learned. Woolley's Savage Kingdom
cheerfully follows every disastrous move on the ground in all
the detail that the sources allow and in addition traces the
corresponding intrigues and maneuvers in English court politics.
Unfortunately his narrative cannot endow the events with a
continuity of purpose they did not have.
Horn, who chose the selections in the Library
of America volume, has written his own lively account of early
Jamestown. A Land as God Made It can be read as an
introduction to Captain John Smith or as a more objective
summary of Smith's policies and campaigns. Like virtually every
other scholar except Woolley, Horn dismisses Smith's tale of how
the princess Pocahontas saved his life. But Horn also shows that
Pocahontas was a key player in England's attempt to establish
dominion and civility in Virginia. When she married John Rolfe,
converted to Christianity, changed her name to Rebecca, and went
with her husband to England in 1616, she became the cynosure of
all things Virginian. As Powhatan's daughter, she ranked in
English eyes as the princess of a vassal state. A portrait,
quickly painted, engraved, and widely disseminated, showed her
in the elaborate clothing and stovepipe hat of a wealthy
Englishwoman. By this time, as both Horn and Kupperman
emphasize, the Virginia Company had sold itself to the public as
a national enterprise. Pocahontas was paraded as a visible
emblem of its success. "Although she was dressed as an
Englishwoman," Horn writes of the portrait, "it was clear she
was not English, exactly the message the company wished to
convey: It was possible to 'civilize' the Indians and make them
English."
If Pocahontas exemplified the civilizing possibilities of the
English presence in Virginia, Smith recounts a disturbing
counterexample, exhibiting the handicaps that civility had to
overcome in competition with the allure of Indian uncivility.
When the English sent "Adam and Francis (2 Stout Dutch men)" to
spy on Powhatan, they changed allegiance. Moreover, they soon
"obtained 6 or 7 more to their confederacie, such expert theefes,
that presently furnished them with a great many" English arms.
In return they were welcome to live with the Indians "free from
those miseries that would happen [to] the Colony." A number of
colonists (how many is not known) followed their lead.
Smith had reason to fear the worst from this combination of
absconders and increasingly belligerent Indians. Garrison life
had few charms to begin with, and the Smith regime was one of
obedience, drill, oppressive regulations, and heavy labor.
Custom had long exempted gentlemen adventurers from manual
labor. For that matter, the lower ranks of tradesmen, laborers,
soldiers, and boys were not used to working as long and hard as
the governor demanded. The free and easy life of the Indians was
visibly more comfortable than hard labor and short rations at
Jamestown. Powhatan sensed his advantage and withheld from the
colony "all his corne and provision." Smith suspected a plot by
Indians and white renegades to betray the colony to the Spanish.
He responded with an assault in which "6 or 7 Salvages were
slaine, as many made prisoners; burnt their houses, tooke their
boats with all their fishing weares [weirs]."
In the peace parley that followed Smith felt vindicated in
his harsh dealings, but Ocanindge, the Indians' "orator,"
reminded the English that they drove out the Indians at their
peril, because "you will have the worst by our absence, for we
can plant any where, though with more labour, and we know you
cannot live if you want [lack] our harvest, and that reliefe wee
bring you." Ocanindge had a point. Smith and his successors were
caught in the irony that would accompany the triumph of
civility. At first contact it was the civil who felt most
imperiled. They responded to defections with punishments that
can best be described as savage. Smith proposed stabbing for
deserters, and Sir Thomas Gates, a successor to Smith, ordered
more gruesome executions for those he caught. "Some he appointed
to be hanged some burned some to be broken upon wheles others to
be Staked and some to be shott to deathe."
Choosing Indian life over English was an
intolerable insult. The continuing dependence of the English on
corn and other supplies was another insult, one that had to be
borne but could not be confronted squarely. In forays against
Indian villages the whites regularly destroyed the very fields
from which the supplies must come. It was infuriating that these
so-called savages knew how to survive when their white superiors
were perishing for want of food. There was always something that
went beyond rationality in the elevation of civility and
something rational in the Indians' rejection of it.
Pocahontas/Rebecca might have been as thoroughly Englished as
her admirers believed. But her embrace of civility was singular.
If she represented the triumph of civility over savagery, the
deserters from Jamestown gave the lie to her example. For
another two centuries the specter of white men and women giving
in to the seductions of native life and culture was one that
continued to baffle, and outrage, those Americans who saw the
Indians as impediments to the spread of civilization.
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
the remaining Indians for things to eat. Tobacco was the new
gold. Virginia survived, indeed flourished, as a kind of
open-pit tobacco mine.
All the scholarly volumes noticed here treat
Jamestown's survival as an achievement that, in Horn's words,
"mattered for the future of America." Jamestown mattered as "the
first transatlantic site of an empire that would eventually
carry the English language, laws, and institutions across North
America." Kupperman is more specific when she says that "its
true priority lies in its inventing the archetype of English
colonization. All other successful English colonies followed the
Jamestown model."
That statement is worth pondering. If it means the extraction
from the soil of a product valuable enough to make investment
worthwhile, then Jamestown after 1616 may arguably have served
as a model for Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia. But the
first decade of Jamestown was a model of what not to do.
Jamestown before 1616, and Virginia for half a century after,
resembled a collection of undisciplined work gangs more than a
colony. The population was almost exclusively male; there were
few actual families; the population grew almost entirely by
immigration. Most of the arrivals were male servants, bound for
a term of years to whoever paid their passage, until they could
grow tobacco on their own account and possibly import more
bondservants for themselves. Life expectancy was probably lower
than in other colonies and in England throughout the first
century. The effect of these imbalances on developing
institutions made Jamestown an anomalous society, before and
after 1616. Why would anyone have held it up as a model?
There was, however, one respect in which the experience and
practice of subsequent colonies paralleled those of Jamestown:
they dealt with the Indians the same way. Like Jamestown most of
them began with the intention of bringing civility and
Christianity to the natives. But with few exceptions the
intention was not or could not be carried out. The early
decision of Virginians to exterminate their hosts was not a
model that others deliberately followed. It was, rather, a case
of the same clash of outlooks, beliefs, and purposes producing
the same results. Civil and uncivil peoples ended up wishing to
extirpate each other, but civil people proved to be better at
it.
Civility made property, whether in land, clothing, housing,
or offices, an extension of the individual's person. The
indifference of the uncivil to this expression of self was
intolerable to those who valued themselves by it. When white men
chose to go over to the uncivil side, they could expect severe
retribution. But the Powhatans' indifference signified for the
English a dehumanized otherness that justified dispossessing
them of land they did not properly make theirs anyhow. All the
distinctions that later attached to race were already present in
the deep divide between "civil" and "uncivil." Warfare between
Indians and English in all the colonies took on an ideological
intensity that heightened the brutality. In a brilliant study of
King Philip's War in New England in 1676, Jill Lepore sums this
up:
English possessions were, in a sense, what was at stake in
the war, for these—the clothes they wore, the houses they
lived in, and the things they owned—were a good part of what
differentiated the English from the Indians. These were not
simply material differences, they were cultural, for every
English frock coat was stitched with threads of civility,
each thatched roof rested on a foundation of property
rights, and every cupboard housed a universe of ideas.[*]
English civility met Indian incivility first at Roanoke.
Jamestown may not have been the model for later English
colonization, but it certainly embodied the ideas and forces
that would drive relations with the Indians for the rest of our
history. It became United States policy to turn Indians into
full-time farmers, often consigned to marginal lands with scanty
water and inadequate tools. When they disappointed the
government and the public by declining the role or proving not
to have an aptitude for it, they had to give way to civil people
who understood how to make the land truly theirs.
Jamestown was only the beginning.
Notes
[*] Jill Lepore, The Name of
War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
(Knopf, 1998), p. 79.