American Holocaust
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Admiration of Indian ways of living—particularly their peacefulness, generosity, trustworthiness, and egalitarianism, all of which were conspicuously absent from English social relations of the time—led to some eloquent early praise of Virginia’s native people, albeit from a distinct minority of British observers. But if those who spoke with their pens are sometimes regarded skeptically, those who voted with their feet cannot be. And it is especially telling that throughout the seventeenth and on into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while almost no Indians voluntarily lived among the colonists, the number of whites who ran off to live with the Indians was a problem often remarked upon. After a century and a half of permanent British settlement in North America, Benjamin Franklin joined numerous earlier commentators in lamenting that
When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.26
Children brought up among the Indians were not the only problem. Adult men and women also turned their backs on Western culture, leading J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur to exclaim: “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”27 After surveying and analyzing this literature and the narratives of those Europeans who wrote about their experiences with the Indians, James Axtell has concluded that the whites who chose to remain among the natives
stayed because they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity—values that the European colonists also honored, if less successfully. But Indian life was attractive for other values—for social equality, mobility, adventure, and, as two adult converts acknowledged, “the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.”28
The first colonial leaders, however, would have none of this. Most of them were military men, trained in the Irish wars. Whatever they thought of the Indian way of life, they never failed to regard the Indians themselves as peoples fated for conquest. As a counterweight to that relative handful of writers who were praising the native peoples and their governments, these British equivalents of the conquistadors viewed the Indians as, in John Smith’s words, “craftie, timerous, quicke of apprehension, and very ingenuous. Some,” he added, “are of disposition fearefull, some bold, most cautelous [deceitful], all Savage. . . . Their chiefe God they worship is the Divell”29 For men like Smith, having learned how to deal with what they regarded as the savage people of Ireland was a lesson of importance when they turned their attention to the Indians; as Howard Mumford Jones once put it, the “English experience with one wild race conditioned their expectation of experience with another.”30
And so, based on that experience, founding colonial leaders like Smith and Ralph Lane routinely carried out a policy of intimidation as the best means of garnering their hosts’ cooperation. Observing the closeness of Indian parents and children, for example, and the extraordinary grief suffered by Indian mothers and fathers when separated from their offspring, Smith and Lane made it a practice to kidnap and hold hostage Indian children whenever they approached a native town.31 As for those Englishmen among them who might be tempted to run off and live with the Indians, the colonial governors made it clear that such behavior would not be tolerated. For example, when in the spring of 1612, some young English settlers in Jamestown “being idell . . . did runne away unto the In-dyans,” Governor Thomas Dale had them hunted down and executed: “Some he apointed to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to deathe.”32
This was the treatment for those who wished to act like Indians. For those who had no choice in the matter, because they were the native people of Virginia, the tone had been set decades earlier in the “lost colony” of Roanoke. There, when an Indian was accused by an Englishman of stealing a cup and failing to return it, the English response was to attack the natives in force, burning the entire community and the fields of corn surrounding it.33
Such disproportionate responses to supposed affronts was to mark English dealings with the Indians throughout the seventeenth century. Thus, in Jamestown in the summer of 1610, Governor Thomas West De la Warr requested of the Indian chief Powhatan (Wahunsonacock) that he return some runaway Englishmen—presumably to be hanged, burned, “broken upon wheles,” staked, and shot to death—whom De la Warr thought Powhatan was harboring. Powhatan responded in a way that De la Warr considered unsatisfactory, giving “noe other than prowde and disdaynefull Answers.” So De la Warr launched a military campaign against Powhatan headed by George Percy, the brother of the Earl of Northumberland and De la Warr’s second in command. Here is Percy’s own description of what he did:
Draweinge my sowldiers into Battalio placeinge a Capteyne or Leftenante att every fyle we marched towards the [Indians’] Towne. . . . And then we fell in upon them putt some fiftene or sixtene to the Sworde and Almost all the reste to flyghte. . . . My Lieftenantt bringeinge with him the Quene and her Children and one Indyann prisoners for the Which I taxed him becawse he had Spared them his Answer was thatt haveinge them now in my Custodie I might doe with them whatt I pleased. Upon the same I cawsed the Indians head to be cutt of. And then dispersed my fyles Apointeinge my Sowldiers to burne their howses and to cutt downe their Corne groweinge aboutt the Towne.34
With the Indians thus dead or dispersed, their village destroyed, and their food supplies laid waste, Percy sent out another raiding party to do the same to another Indian town and then marched back to his boats with the Indian “queen” and her children in tow. There, however, his soldiers “did begin to murmur becawse the quene and her Children weare spared.” This seemed a reasonable complaint to Percy, so he called a council together and “it was Agreed upon to putt the Children to deathe the which was effected by Throweinge them overboard shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water.” Upon his return to Jamestown, however, Percy was informed that Governor De la Warr was unhappy with him because he had not yet killed the queen. Advised by his chief lieutenant that it would be best to burn her alive, Percy decided instead to end his day of “so mutche Blood-shedd” with a final act of mercy: instead of burning her, he had the queen quickly killed by stabbing her to death.35
From this point on there would be no peace in Virginia. Indians who came to the English settlements with food for the British (who seemed never able to feed themselves) were captured, accused of being spies, and executed. On other occasions Indians were enticed into visiting the settlements on the pretence of peace and the sharing of entertainment, whereupon they were attacked by the English and killed. Peace treaties were signed with every intention to violate them: when the Indians “grow secure uppon the treatie,” advised the Council of State in Virginia, “we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, & cutt downe theire Corne.” And when at last the Indians retaliated strongly, killing more than three hundred settlers, the attack, writes Edmund S. Morgan, “released all restraints that the company had hitherto imposed on those who thirsted for the destruction or enslavement of the Indians.”36 Not that the restraints had ever been particularly confining, but from now on the only controversy was over whether it was preferable to kill all the native peoples or to enslave them. Either way, the point was to seize upon the “right of Warre [and] invade the Country and destroy them who sought to destroy us,” wrote a rejoicing Edward Waterhouse at the time, “whereby wee shal
l enjoy their cultivated places . . . [and] their cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situate in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us.”37
Hundreds of Indians were killed in skirmish after skirmish. Other hundreds were killed in successful plots of mass poisoning. They were hunted down by dogs, “blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seaze them.” Their canoes and fishing weirs were smashed, their villages and agricultural fields burned to the ground. Indian peace offers were accepted by the English only until their prisoners were returned; then, having lulled the natives into false security, the colonists returned to the attack. It was the colonists’ expressed desire that the Indians be exterminated, rooted “out from being longer a people uppon the face of the earth.” In a single raid the settlers destroyed corn sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year. Starvation and the massacre of non-combatants was becoming the preferred British approach to dealing with the natives. By the end of the winter of 1623 the Indians acknowledged that in the past year alone as many of their number had been killed as had died since the first arrival of the British a decade and a half earlier.38
The slaughter continued. In 1624—in a single battle—sixty heavily armed Englishmen cut down 800 defenseless Indian men, women, and children in their own village. And, of course, as elsewhere, British diseases were helping to thin out whatever resistance the Indians could hope to muster. Long before the middle of the century was reached the region’s largest and most powerful Indian confederation, known to historians retrospectively as Powhatan’s Empire, was “so rowted, slayne and dispersed,” wrote one British colonist, “that they are no longer a nation.” At the end, Powhatan’s successor chief, Opechancanough, was captured. An old man now, “grown so decrepit that he was not able to walk alone . . . his Flesh all macerated, his Sinews slacken’d, and his Eye-lids become so heavy that he could not see,” Opechancanough was thrown into a cell in Jamestown and displayed like the captive beast that the colonists thought he was. But not for long. Within two weeks a British soldier shot him in the back and killed him.39
When the first 104 English settlers arrived at Jamestown in April of 1607, the number of Indians under Powhatan’s control was probably upwards of 14,000—a fraction of what it had been just a few decades earlier, because of English, French, and Spanish depredations and disease. (Estimates of the region’s native population prior to European contact extend upwards of 100,000.) By the time the seventeenth century had passed, those 104 settlers had grown to more than 60,000 English men and women who were living in and harvesting Virginia’s bounty, while Powhatan’s people had been reduced to about 600, maybe less.40 More than 95 percent of Powhatan’s people had been exterminated—beginning from a population base in 1607 that already had been drastically reduced, perhaps by 75 percent or more, as a result of prior European incursions in the region.
Powhatan’s Empire was not the only Indian nation in Virginia, of course, but his people’s fate was representative of that of the area’s other indigenous societies. In 1697 Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Andros put the number of Indian warriors in the entire colony at just over 360, which suggests a total Indian population of less than 1500, while John Lawson, in his New Voyage to Carolina, claimed that more than 80 percent of the colony’s native people had been killed off during the previous fifty years alone. In time, a combination plan of genocide and enslavement, as initially proposed by the colony’s Governor William Berkeley, appeared to quiet what had become a lingering controversy over whether it was best to kill all the Indians or to capture them and put them to forced labor: Berkeley’s plan was to slaughter all the adult Indian males in a particular locale, “but to spare the women and children and sell them,” says Edmund Morgan. This way the war of extermination “would pay for itself,” since it was likely that a sufficient number of female and child slaves would be captured “to defray the whole cost.”41
By the time this clever enterprise was under way in Virginia, the British had opened colonies in New England as well. As usual, earlier visits by Europeans already had spread among the Indians a host of deadly plagues. The Patuxet peoples, for example, were effectively exterminated by some of these diseases, while other tribes disappeared before they were even seen by any white men. Others were more fortunate, suffering death rates of 50 and 60 percent—a good deal greater than the proportion of Europeans killed by the Black Death pandemic of the fourteenth century, but still far short of total liquidation. These were rates, however, for any given single epidemic, and in New England’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries few epidemics traveled by themselves.42 The extant descriptions of what life and death were like at times like these are rare, but the accounts we do have of the viral and bacteriological assaults are sobering indeed, reminiscent of the earlier Spanish and Portuguese accounts from Mesoamerica and Brazil. Wrote Plymouth Colony’s Governor William Bradford, for instance, of a smallpox epidemic from which huge numbers of Indians “died most miserably”:
For want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep. The condition of this people was so lamentable and they fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor to fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not be able to get in again.43
While “very few” of the Indians escaped this scourge, including “the chief sachem . . . and almost all his friends and kindred,” Bradford 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.” Time and again Old World epidemics such as this coursed through the veins of the native peoples of the North Atlantic coast, even before the arrival of the first great waves of British settlers, leaving in their wake so many dead that they could not be buried, so many piles of skeletal remains that one early colonist referred to the land as “a new found Golgotha.”44 But it was a Golgotha the Puritans delighted in discovering, not only because the diseases they brought with them from England left the Puritans themselves virtually unaffected, but because the destruction of the Indians by these plagues was considered an unambiguous sign of divine approval for the colonial endeavor. As the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, the Puritan settlers, numbering at the time “in all about four thousand souls and upward,” were in remarkably good health: “through the Lord’s special providence . . . there hath not died above two or three grown persons and about so many children all the last year, it being very rare to hear of any sick of agues or other diseases.” But, he noted in passing, as “for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.”45
God, however, was not enough. At some point the settlers would have to take things into their own hands. For, terribly destructive though the Old World diseases were, some Indians remained alive. The danger posed by these straggling few natives was greatly exaggerated by the English (as it remains exaggerated in most history textbooks today), not only because their numbers had been so drastically reduced, but because their attitudes toward the colonists and their very means of warfare were so comparatively benign.
We have seen in an earlier chapter that the native peoples of this region (as elsewhere) combined in their everyday lives a sense of individual autonomy and communal generosity that the earliest Europeans
commented on continuously. This was a great cultural strength, so long as the people they were dealing with shared those values and accepted the array of culturally correct reciprocal responses to them. However, just as their isolation from Old World diseases made the Indians an exceptionally healthy people as long as they were not contacted by disease-bearing outsiders, once Europeans invaded their lands with nothing but disdain for the native regime of mutual respect and reciprocity, the end result was doomed to spell disaster.
This probably is seen most dramatically in the comparative Indian and European attitudes toward warfare. We already have observed one consequence of the differing rituals that were conventional to Europe and the Americas in Montezuma’s welcoming Cortés into Tenochtitlán in part because Cortés claimed he was on a mission of peace; and one inviolable code of Mesoamerican warfare was that it was announced, with its causes enumerated, in advance. Cortés’s declared intentions of peace, therefore, were supposed by Montezuma to be his true intentions. A similar attitude held among Indians in much of what is now the United States. Thus, as a seventeenth-century Lenape Indian explained in a discussion with a British colonist:
We are minded to live at Peace: If we intend at any time to make War upon you, we will let you know of it, and the Reasons why we make War with you; and if you make us satisfaction for the Injury done us, for which the War is intended, then we will not make War on you. And if you intend at any time to make War on us, we would have you let us know of it, and the Reasons for which you make War on us, and then if we do not make satisfaction for the Injury done unto you, then you may make War on us, otherwise you ought not to do it.46