The Fall of the Powhatan Empire
First Contact
May 1607. A chunk of land led by Emperor Powhatan himself is settled and given the name Jamestown. The famous John Smith was the leader of this experiment. Born circa 1547, the Emperor was already sixty years old when the English began to colonize Virginia.
Before Pocahontas, there was Smith’s capture by her brother for disobeying Powhatan. Raids from the Paspahegh, one of the Powhatan clans. When Smith tried to occupy the land of another clan, the Nansemond.
Before giving up, Smith purchased some land in Richmond, right above the main town of Powhatan, from Emperor Powhatan’s son Parahunt. However, he failed to settle it. Next, Powhatan ambushed and killed one of the English captains. Culminating in the colonists beginning to starve to death.
They immediately evacuated. But by sheer coincidence, on their second day of sailing, they sailed into a man named Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr who became a Ramsay Snow figure to Emperor Powhatan after the subsequent sack of the Paspahegh.
The Anglo-Powhatan War
The First Anglo-Powhatan War raged from 1609 to 1614, with colonists under De La Warr launching a brutal attack on the Paspahegh in 1610, decimating their village and executing captives. Further clashes ensued, including an ambush at Appomattoc and Governor Thomas Dale’s establishment of new settlements, while Emperor Powhatan’s control weakened, paving the way for his brother Opechancanough’s rise amid colonial expansion.
Christmas 1611. The colonists continue their expansion, seizing an Appomattoc town at the mouth of their river and stake the neck of land, renaming it New Bermudas. The now aging Emperor Powhatan made no major response.
Christmas 1612. Captain Samuel Argall makes peace with the Patawomeck, a semi-autonomous clan living in the south. They had a previous dispute with the colonists in 1609 when two Patawomeck were beheaded by a white man who then fled to England.
According to Captain Ralph Hamor, on April 13th 1613, for just a copper kettle the commander (weroance) of the Patawomeck traded Pocahontas, daughter of Emporer Powhatan, who had lived with them for three years.
The Mattaponi clan maintain that she was the wife of a man named Kocoum, who was the brother of the Patawomeck commander. The Patawomeck say the couple had a daughter who stayed behind after her father was murdered by Argall’s soldiers and her mother, Pocahontas, was abducted.
Emperor Powhatan called for an immediate ceasefire. While ransoming Pocahontas, the colonists continued to expand south of the rivers, near present-day Hopewell. The Powhatans found themselves stripped of their riverfront dominion along the James. The Kicoughtan and Paspehegh clans lay decimated. The colonists began to infect the the lands of the Weyanoke, Appomattoc, Arrohattoc, and Powhatan, proper. The Arrohattoc and Quiockohannock clans disappeared from history.
Peace negotiations stalled for almost a year. In March 1614, Governor Thomas Dale took Pocahontas to find her father, Emporer Powhatan. They sacked West Point before finding him at his new capital, Matchcot. The first Anglo-Powhatan war ends with Pocahontas’ marriage to John Rolfe and the seccession of the Chickahominy clan, Powhatan’s police force, who became honorary Englishmen.
The Second Anglo-Powhatan War (The Ten Year War)
On March 22, 1622, the Emperor’s brother Opechancanough was to be baptized. Secretly, his warriors surrounded the colonists. He used himself as bait and a distraction while they wiped out a third of the English settlement. Christian Indians, probably half-blood mestizos saved the rest of the colony and doomed the indigenous peoples of Virginia to sure death.
The Powhatan were hoping that what became known as the Indian Massacre of 1622 would drive the English back to where they came from. However, the English decided to start a war that would last ten long years.
The Accomac and Patawomeck clans allied with the English, providing provisions while the English warred with the Chickahominy, Nansemond, Warraskoyack, Weyanoke, Pamunkey, Appomattoc and Powhatan, proper clans.
September 30 1632 — peace was made. The ten years war resulted in the colonists continuing their expansion and Opechancanough leasing more Powhatan land.
Overthrowing of the Monarchy
The United States of America could have had a constitutional monarchy if Opechancanough hadn’t broken the twelve years of peace that came after the ten years war. He only managed to kill 400 or so colonists before his headquarters were stormed. A prison guard murdered him in 1646.
After they murdered Opechancanough, the English selected the commander of the Pamunkey clan, Necotowance to become the king. He was called the “King of the Indians.”
The execution of the previous King and signing of the Treaty of 1646 ended the third Anglo-Powhatan war. The Powhatan Empire was now a confederacy and started paying taxes to the Virginia governor. The Powhatan were then forced to live like Jews in pre-World War II Nazi Germany, on their own indigenous land.
Necotowance was the last true King in North America. Totopotomoi succeeded him as commander of the Pamunkey. He died fighting alongside the colonists in the Battle of Bloody Run.
Attempts to establish royals elsewhere failed. Peracuta was an example of ethnic Powhatans trying to restore Powhatan to its height and consolidate the full power of the empire.
Peracuta was formally recognized as “King of the Appomattoc” by the Virginia General Assembly and Governor Berkeley. Before that he was an unknown warrior who became commander of the Appomattoc clan in the 1660s. However, naming a new king triggered Bacon’s rebellion.
The rebellion was started by a merchant after Governor Berkeley refused to Bacon’s request to drive ethnic Powhatans out of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson was a fan of the lower class revolt, and thought of Bacon as a true patriot. To Thomas, it was a prelude to the American Revolution against the English Crown.
But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on. — Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
The Appomattoc clan was destroyed. And, in 1676, the Virginia colony began to enslave indigenous Virginians, the Powhatan people. The Kiskiack, one of the original four clans that founded the Powhatan empire went extinct while the remainder of the Appomattoc were taken away in chains.
The English Crown gathered representatives from all the Native American kingdoms in Virginia, including the including the Nottoway, the Appomattoc, the Wayonaoake, the Nansemond, the Nanzatico, the Monacan, the Saponi, and the Meherrin. The leaders styled themselves as Kings, Queens and Chiefs.
Their signed loyalty to the English Crown gave them their homelands, early second amendment rights; but stripped them of their royal titles. The former Empire had now become a collection of named “tribes.” This would be called Treaty of 1677.
The Indigenous American slave trade continued until 1750. Indigenous Virginians went uncategorized in the census until 1850. Powhatan slaves were often forced, whether by rape or simply running out of partners, to breed with Africans and Europeans if they had peace. Just before its birth, the United States committed human race transmutation, the practice of forcing what the colonists deemed as inferior races to breed exclusively with each other like livestock.
Thomas Jefferson wrote:
There remain of the Mattaponies three or four men only, and they have more negro than Indian blood in them. They have lost their language, have reduced themselves, by voluntary sales, to about fifty acres of land, which lie on the river of their own name, and have, from time to time, been joining the Pamunkies, from whom they are distant but 10 miles. The Pamunkies are reduced to about 10 or 12 men, tolerably pure from mixture with other colours.
The older ones among them preserve their language in a small degree, which are the last vestiges on earth, as far as we know, of the Powhatan language.
They have about 300 acres of very fertile land, on Pamunkey river, so encompassed by water that a gate shuts in the whole. Of the Nottoways, not a male is left. A few women constitute the remains of that tribe. — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia 1787.
