Wahunsonacock’s Gambit: Powhatan Foreign Relations and the Success of Virginia, 1570-1622 By ©2015 Shelby Callaway Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Paul Kelton ________________________________ Jeffrey Moran ________________________________ Adrian Finucane ________________________________ Sara Gregg ________________________________ Stephanie Fitzgerald Date Defended: March 31, 2015 ii The Dissertation Committee for Shelby Callaway certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Wahunsonacock’s Gambit: Powhatan Foreign Relations and the Success of Virginia, 1570-1622 ________________________________ Chairperson Paul Kelton Date approved: March 31, 2015 iii Abstract In an effort to explain the speed with which a small band of English colonists was able to supplant the expansive and powerful Chesapeake Algonquian paramountcy of Tsenacommacah, this work asks why the leaders of the expanding and growing Powhatan Paramountcy allowed English colonists to settle within their borders at all in 1607. By situating this question within the native ground of Tsenacommacah in the early-contact period, instead of focusing on the Anglo- Powhatan Wars of the early seventeenth century, this dissertation seeks to foreground the role of indigenous decision making, politics and economics in the eventual success of Virginia. While previous works have attributed characterized the Powhatans tolerance of hostile outsiders as an indicator of Powhatan curiosity, hubris or ignorance, this work argues the decision to allow the English to stay was based in indigenous political considerations more than anything the English represented or offered. iv Acknowledgements I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Dixie Haggard at Valdosta State University. It was through his guidance and persistence that I found my way to the University of Kansas. I would also like to acknowledge the immeasurable contribution of my dissertation committee from the Department of History at the University of Kansas. I am exceptionally grateful for the guidance and unconditional patience of Paul Kelton, who has defined what it means to be scholar and a gentleman. I would also like to thank my graduate cohort at the University of Kansas. Their continued friendship and dedication to academic excellence has made my experience at KU truly exceptional. I most gratefully acknowledge the Department of History and the Graduate School at the University of Kansas for their financial support. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the immeasurable support of my parents, Larry and Judy Callaway and my fiancé, Stephanie Stillo. v Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Pre-Contact Virginia and the New World of Tsenacommacah ................................... 16 Chapter 2: Tsenacommacah’s European Connections .................................................................. 47 Chapter Three: Wahunsonacock’s Weighting of English Wares ................................................. 80 Chapter 4 – Focused Violence: Wahunsonacock’s Gambit and the Anglo-Powhatan Wars ..... 112 Chapter 5 Disaffected Dutchmen: What English Runaways Reveal about Tsenacommacah .... 177 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 208 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 212 1 Introduction Tsenacommacah, the Powhatan paramount chiefdom of the Chesapeake plain, was a new world even before the arrival of the English in 1607. 1 News of Europeans and the goods they carried filtered into the James River valley by the mid-1500s and were commonplace when Wahunsonacock, the paramount chief more commonly known by the name that more appropriately refers to his polity--Powhatan, began to expand his domains in the 1560s and 1570s. 2 Paramount chiefdoms such as Tsenacommacah grew in the face of threats from indigenous raiders from the north and west of the Chesapeake plain. By 1607, Wahunsonacock knew first-hand from districts in southern Tsenacommacah that both the Spanish and the English might be either promising trading partners or dangerous enemies. As an expanding paramountcy, Tsenacommacah was both surrounded by and composed of chiefdoms looking for a way out of Wahunsonacock’s oversight. 3 When a group of around 100 English colonists set up a permanent camp in the Paspahegh district of Tsenacommacah in 1607, they were unaware of the complex political, military and diplomatic world that surrounded them. Luckily for those colonists, the Powhatan leader, confident in his superiority over the English, worried that the prestige goods and guns they carried might fall into the hands of some of his indigenous rivals. Indeed, indigenous politics, not English grit or even English violence induced Wahunsonacock to allow the English to stay in Tsenacommacah. The paramount chief tolerated the newcomers because, in 1 Tsenacommacah was one of many “new worlds” that emerged in the wake of European contact. See: James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989). 2 Referring to the Powhatan paramount chief by his familiar name, Wahunsonacock, avoids confusion when discussing both the Powhatan people and Powhatan the man. 3 James D. Rice, "Escape from Tsenacommacah: Chesapeake Algonquians and the Powhatan Menace," in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 , ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 106-09; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 117. 2 the increasingly globalized world of 1607 Virginia, he calculated it was too dangerous to risk that the English might ally with one of his real threats. This dissertation attempts to re-insert an element of contingency into the indigenous history of early-contact Virginia. Jamestown survived largely because Wahunsonacock misunderstood the designs for permanent English settlement and, as a result, permitted it to survive. Moreover, the paramount chief rooted his decisions in an indigenous world where violence was a common political tool often used to direct subordinate chiefdoms. Wahunsonacock’s gambit was allowing the English to stay while he tried to bring them to heel as a subordinate district of Tsenacommacah; his failure was in underestimating how willing the English were to sacrifice the lives of their countrymen in an effort to make Jamestown work. Frederick Gleach argues convincingly that the early Anglo-Powhatan relationship was characterized by attempts on both sides to “bring the other to civility.” 4 While Gleach’s assessment is useful, the term “civility” glosses the fact that both the English and Powhatans sought to force the other to civility as well as to submission. In an increasingly globalized world, it is tempting to look for a time and place where distinct frontier lines separated alien peoples and cultures. Early-contact Virginia seems to offer such a meeting of cultures and peoples. Upon closer inspection, however, the early-seventeenth- century encounters between Powhatans and Englishmen in the Chesapeake Bay took place in an interconnected and heterogeneous world where each side’s knowledge of the other was limited, but not absent. Wahunsonacock’s knowledge of Europeans left him with a choice when English 4 Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 3. 3 colonists arrived in Tsenacommacah and began to trade with nearby people from what appeared to be a permanent settlement on the James River. Europeans sometimes brought useful things like iron and copper, but they came in ships equipped with deadly cannons and sometimes killed or kidnapped anyone they lured aboard. Wahunsonacock likely considered killing the English outright, but the lure of English trade goods, and indeed the lure of their cannons, proved too strong. Archaeologists and ethnohistorians point out that paramount chiefdoms such as Tsenacommacah were constantly in danger of collapse due to the fact that they relied on unstable trade networks and imported prestige goods to maintain their authority. 5 Wahunsonacock found the English in Jamestown dis-organized, hungry and, paradoxically, well-supplied with prestige goods. Faced with such low-hanging fruit, the Powhatan paramount chief felt he had to try to control the English trade and incorporate them into Tsenacommacah. Definitions and Explanations Defining who was and was not a Powhatan in the tidewater Chesapeake is difficult. Some scholars gloss all the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Chesapeake tidewater together under the blanket term “Powhatan,” as the peoples who lived there shared a similar culture that combined northern Algonquian language and culture with that of the large paramountcies of the protohistorical southeastern United States. Lumping all the indigenous peoples of the greater Chesapeake together as Powhatans oversimplifies the complex political landscape of