The only produce being exported was tobacco, and the colonists were barely able to grow any of that. I’m sure they embraced the 1619 price controls with the same enthusiasm that, during the Gerald Ford administration, we all wore win buttons and fervently obeyed the injunctions of the “Whip Inflation Now” campaign.
The Jamestown colonists were the first Europeans to invade the inland of our nation, sending raiding parties up the James River to steal Powhatan crops and occupy Powhatan land. In 1622 the Powhatan Confederacy made the first successful large-scale, tactically coordinated attack on Europeans, killing 347 of them.
The colonists were pushed back into the original Jamestown fortifications. The Powhatan hoped the colony, if it remained at all, would be reduced to a small trading post. The Powhatan thought the colonists had been taught a lesson. The colonists—not a first—hadn’t.
Warfare, sometimes acute, sometimes chronic, continued against ever more numerous and better-armed Jamestown forces. Meanwhile the colonists were deploying our country’s first weapons of mass destruction. Although, to be fair, they didn’t know that their germs and viruses even existed.
* * *
All the tales of American Indian fighter heroics (whether your hero is Crazy Horse or Davy Crockett) turn to ashes in the mouths of the tellers when facts are considered. The New World was conquered by coughs, sneezes, and craps in the woods.
The historian David Stannard, in his thoroughly disheartening book about the death and destruction of the Western Hemisphere’s aboriginal inhabitants, American Holocaust, estimates that the Powhatan Confederacy numbered about 14,000 people when Jamestown was founded. But the germs had arrived before the germy. The region’s population had already been reduced by diseases spreading from the first European contacts in the late fourteenth century, perhaps drastically reduced. By the end of the seventeenth century only about six hundred Powhatan were left, a mortality rate of more than 95 percent.
Germs were the A-bomb. The Indians were militarily skilled and fighting on their own turf. Without germs the British colonists would have met the same fate that the American colonists dealt the British a hundred years later.
And the U.S.A. would be a different country. (Although, given the demographic pressures in Europe, still plagued by illegal immigrants. But they’d be you and me.)
In 1677 a treaty established what amounted to America’s first Indian reservation. This was land “reserved” for surviving members of the Powhatan Confederacy.
The Treaty of 1677 was honored the way treaty rights on Indian reservations continue to be—making fraud instead of fighting the way to get Powhatan land.
Jamestown also had America’s first armed colonial uprising, Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676. Nathaniel Bacon was a rich spoiled young scoundrel from England whose father had kicked him out of the house and sent him packing to America (albeit with £1800 in walking around money). Nathaniel bought two plantations on the James River and got his rebellion named for himself by being elected leader after giving the other rebels a lot of brandy.
What they were rebelling against was the Jamestown colony governor William Berkeley who was either too friendly with (dangerous!) Native Americans or not friendly enough with them to get other Jamestown colonists in on the fur trade (lucrative!) with Native Americans. The issue is—as issues could get to be even before the Internet—confused.
One thing can be said in favor of the rebellion: it was inclusive. Indentured servants and slaves joined with plantation owners in rebelling. It’s heartening to see Americans working together toward a common goal. Although that can also be said of the 1622 Powhatan attack.
Bacon had his rebels point their muskets at Governor Berkeley who (he may have been drinking brandy himself) bared his chest and told them to go ahead and shoot. So Bacon had his rebels point their muskets at the elected Burgesses who—every bit as courageous as today’s House and Senate members—promptly gave in. Although what they gave in to is not exactly clear. Anyway it wasn’t enough because Bacon’s rebels set fire to the House of Burgesses and the entire settlement burned.
Nathaniel Bacon died of diarrhea. Governor Berkeley returned to power in 1677. In yet another first, predating the Salem witch trial mass executions by fifteen years, he hanged twenty-three of the men who had rebelled against . . . the deep state, or whatever.
The Jamestown House of Burgesses was rebuilt but burned again, accidently. By 1699 Virginians had had enough of mosquito-infested, swampy, fractious, flammable Jamestown and moved their capital to Williamsburg. Or, as it is now known, “Colonial” Williamsburg.
Jamestown’s last first would be to usher in the “living history” tourist trap at Williamsburg. This was America’s initial foray into making its history cute—Disneyfication while Walt was still doodling mice.
Colonial Williamsburg was created in the 1920s by the kind of cross section of America that makes the rest of us Americans rather cross. Founders included the local Episcopal minister, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Chamber of Commerce, and a group that went by (and still does) the marvelous name Colonial Dames. And the enterprise was paid for by John D. Rockefeller (whose own history of financial dealing was less than adorable).
A visit to Colonial Williamsburg is at least as informative as a meet and greet with Pocahontas at Disney World. “Pocahontas will pose for photos with you and you can get her autograph. She appears daily at various times. Get the Animal Kingdom guide for exact times during your visit.”
If John D. had read more American history (his higher education was a ten-week business course at Folsom’s Commercial College in Cleveland), he wouldn’t have picked this part of it for “living.”
Or maybe—he was a man of foresight—he would have. Right now America seems determined to relive its early history in every detail of angry perplexity—from Verrazzano-like trade war confusion about the riches of the Orient, to calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas, to an endlessly woke Bacon-type rebellion against everything and nothing, to blog
