Indian Peoples, Nations and Violence in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
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CERTAINE BOUNDES: INDIAN PEOPLES, NATIONS AND VIOLENCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHESAPEAKE By JESSICA TAYLOR A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2017 © 2017 Jessica Taylor To Mimi, you are worth so much ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my advisor, Juliana Barr, for her thoughtful and sincere support. I am so glad to have her in my life. My committee members Marty Hylton, Jon Sensbach, Elizabeth Dale, and Paul Ortiz each offered different paths to new thoughts and perspectives. My co-workers, students, and friends at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program helped me gain the confidence to pursue new ideas and goals. I thank all of the wonderful people who have read drafts of chapters and talked ideas through with me including Jeffrey Flanagan, Matt Saionz, Johanna Mellis, Rebecca Lowe, David Shope, Roberta Taylor, Robert Taber, David Brown, Elyssa Hamm. Thank you to Eleanor Deumens for editing my footnotes and offering wonderful suggestions. I thank the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture for their financial support of my research for this project. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................ 8 2 THE ALGONQUIAN MARITIME WORLD ............................................................... 23 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 23 Establishing Networks............................................................................................. 26 Negotiating with Outsiders ...................................................................................... 32 The Rise of Powhatan............................................................................................. 39 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 44 3 INCORPORATING AND SURVEILLING THE ENGLISH, 1607-1622 .................... 46 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 46 Context for Contact ................................................................................................. 48 Settling In ................................................................................................................ 54 The Price of Dependence ....................................................................................... 61 Creating and Controlling Interlocutors .................................................................... 69 Reining in Boundary Crossers ................................................................................ 76 English Expanding Outward .................................................................................... 83 The Algonquian Response ...................................................................................... 88 4 A SHIFT IN POWER AND BOUNDARIES, 1622-1644 ......................................... 102 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 102 Transforming Algonquian Warfare, 1622-1632 ..................................................... 106 Transforming an Algonquian Landscape .............................................................. 113 Claiborne, Fleet, and Rumors, 1631-1640 ............................................................ 120 Marylanders Enter the Bay ................................................................................... 128 Appropriating Indian Power on the Border, 1635-1644 ......................................... 139 5 EXPLORATION, SURVEYING, TRANSFORMATION, 1640-1660 ....................... 147 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 147 The Third Anglo-Powhatan War, 1644-1646 ......................................................... 149 New Trades .......................................................................................................... 164 Trading for Land ................................................................................................... 172 Surveyors and Violence ........................................................................................ 188 Escalation and Failure .......................................................................................... 195 5 6 VIOLENCE AND FRACTURE, 1660-1676 ............................................................ 204 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 204 Geographic Coexistence in the 1660s .................................................................. 208 Economic Connectivity.......................................................................................... 217 Local Roads under Colonial Law .......................................................................... 226 Communication Falls Apart ................................................................................... 238 A Different Strategy on the Eastern Shore ............................................................ 247 The Rebellion ........................................................................................................ 260 7 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 272 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 278 Primary Sources ................................................................................................... 278 Secondary Sources .............................................................................................. 286 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 299 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CERTAINE BOUNDES: INDIAN PEOPLES, NATIONS AND VIOLENCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHESAPEAKE By Jessica Taylor December 2017 Chair: Juliana Barr Major: History This dissertation examines the Native perspective on development of boundaries, and communication and connection across boundaries, in the seventeenth- century Chesapeake. Many Native places were gradually appropriated, and as a consequence Indians’ knowledge of the Virginian landscape maintained political relevance, and their intelligence regarding English movements provided new means of exerting power. Archaeology, land and court records, and official correspondence demonstrates that both official and illicit English movement across the Chesapeake depended on Natives for support. This project explores how some Indians, Africans, and Englishmen pursued trade, war, freedom, and diplomacy beyond Virginia’s borders by following long-established Native lines of communication and travel. In so doing, they undermined colonial attempts to establish boundaries of all types—between Indians and Englishmen, between colonies, between property owners—and delegitimized colonial authority. 7 CHAPTER 1 BACKGROUND In 1690, Stafford County officials in the northwestern reaches of the Virginia colony captured and interrogated a group of Indians over the deaths of a cow and a mare. “The chiefest of the Prisoners” was the “king of the Doegs,” though he might have preferred the Algonquian language term for a leader, “werowance,” over “king.” The county official began with the simple question, “by what means he being a stranger came here?”1 No Englishmen in the courtroom had seen him before, raising suspicion that he might be a foreign raider. The king began his story fourteen years before, when Virginia’s war against a neighboring group called the Susquehannocks became doubly complicated for the Chesapeake’s Algonquians when Nathaniel Bacon led an indiscriminate and frightening rampage against any nearby Indians.2 “Senecar” Indians—probably the Iroquois or the Susquehannocks among them—captured the king from his home among the Doegs’ neighbors, the Nanzaticos, near the Potomac River. He remained an adopted kinsman of that foreign nation for thirteen years, during which the Iroquois made war on Native and European groups from Virginia to New France. Then, “about fourteen months agone” he had left the Iroquois and planted corn among the Nottoway Indians, a hundred miles to the south of Stafford County. He left “in this summer before corn was Ripe,” and arrived back home intending to live among the Nanzaticos “with whom he had lived and conversed before.” Having established his identity and his well-traveled past prior to capture by the English, the Doeg leader 1 "Notes from the Records of Stafford County, Virginia, Order Books (Continued)," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 44, no. 1 (October 1937): 277-78. 2 “Narratives of Thomas Miller, Sir Peter Colleton, and the Carolina