Abstract
On the morning of March 22, 1622 in a highly coordinated attack, the Pamunkey Indians of Virginia and their allies fell upon the English settlements that had been spreading alarmingly on both sides of the James River for the preceding four years and wiped out or took captive about a third of the English population. Edward Waterhouse in London compiled the official Virginia Company account of the “Barbarous Massacre in the time of peace and League” out of the letters and personal reports that made their way home. The reports affirmed that the “utter extirpation” of the English had been the Pamunkeys’ goal, “which God of his mercy (by the meanes of some of themselves converted to Christianitie) prevented.” The planters had encouraged “daily familiarity” with their American neighbors “for the desire we had of effecting that great master-peece of workes, their conversion.
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NOTES
Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia (London, 1622), 14–15; Robert Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705, ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 51.
Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys, June 8, 1617, in Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan Myra Kingsbury, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1906–1935), III, 70–73, quote 71.
William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania 1612, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 3, 6.
Waterhouse, Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia, t.p., 11–27; Virginia Company, Instructions to George Yeardley, November 18, 1618, in Records of the Virginia Company, ed. Kingsbury, III, 102; Virginia Company Court, May 26, 1619, ibid., I, 220–221; George Thorpe to Sir Edwin Sandys, May 15–16 1621, ibid., III, 446–447; John Pory to Sir Edwin Sandys, June 12, 1620, ibid., III, 305. On Thorpe see Eric Gethyn-Jones, George Thorpe and the Berkeley Company: A Gloucestershire Enterprise in Virginia (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1982) and J. Frederick Fausz, “George Thorpe, Nemattanew, and the Powhatan Uprising of 1622,” Virginia Cavalcade (Winter 1979), 111–117.
George Thorpe to Sir Edwin Sandys, May 15–16 1621, Records of the Virginia Company, III, 446; Patrick Copland, Virginia’s God be Thanked, or A Sermon of Thanksgiving for the Happie successe of the affayres in Virginia this last yeare (London, 1622), 2, 9–10, 24 and Patrick Copland, A Declaration how the monies (viz. seventy pound eight shillings sixe pence) were disposed (London, 1622); Beverly, History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Wright, 49–50.
For an interpretation of these events see Fausz, “Thorpe, Nemattanew, and the Powhatan Uprising of 1622,” Virginia Cavalcade, Winter 1979, 111–117.
Waterhouse, Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia, 16–17, 21–24.
See Benedetto Fontana, “Tacitus on Empire and Republic,” History of Political Thought, XIV (1993), 28–40; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995), 76–78; Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 144–147.
Cornelius Tacitus, The Life of Agricola, trans. Henry Savile (London, 1598), 196; “A Letter of Sir Samuell Argoll touching his Voyage to Virginia, and Actions there, 1613,” in Purchas, Pilgrimes XIX 92–93; Hamor, True Relation, 4–6; Captain John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1986), II, 243–244.
Hamor, True Discourse, 4–7; Dale to “the R. and my most esteemed friend Mr. D. M.” ibid., 55–56; Whitaker to “my verie deere and loving Cosen M. G.” ibid., 59–60. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), chap. 4.
Gethyn-Jones, George Thorpe and the Berkeley Company, 53–60.
Hamor, True Relation, 38–46.
Tacitus, Life of Agricola, trans. Savile, 189–193; Council in Virginia to the Virginia Company, January 1622, in Records of the Virginia Company, III, ed. Kingsbury, 584.
Smith, Generall Historie, in Works, II, ed. Barbour, 196.
Nipmuck note reproduced in Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 94–95.
Copland, Virginia’s God be Thanked, 28.
Tacitus, The Description of Germanie, trans. Grenewey, 262; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), 203.
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), act 1, scene 3. I thank Barbara Fuchs for bringing this reference to my attention.
Tacitus, Life of Julius Agricola, trans. Savile, 190, 195–196. Benedetto Fontana argues that this “brilliant epigram” may represent Tacitus’s commentary on the consolidation of power within the Roman state itself; “Tacitus on Empire and Republic,” History of Political Thought, XIV (1993), 29. On redescription, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 161–172, esp. 163 note 148. Philip Vincent employed Galgacus’s words as he described the depredations of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, as did Fernández de Oviedo in commenting on the destructive record of the Spanish in the Caribbean; Philip Vincent, The Lamentations of Germany (London, 1638); Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1992), 55.
Thomas Gainsford, “Observations of State, and millitary affaires for the most parte collected out of Cornelius Tacitus,” 1612, MS Huntington Lib. EL 6857, 36. Tacitus’s original is in Savile’s translation of The Life of Julius Agricola, 201.
Waterhouse, Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia, 18; Capps to John Ferrar, March 31, 1623, in Records of the Virginia Company, IV, ed. Kingsbury, 76.
Henry Savile, The Life of Agricola, published in The Ende of Nero and the Beginning of Galba (London, 1591), 241.
Waterhouse, Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia, 25, 27; Tacitus, Life of Agricola, 189.
The Commentaries of C. Julius Caesar, Of his Warres in Gallia, and the Civile Warres betwixt him and Pompey, trans. Clement Edmonds (London, 1655), 106; Gainsford, “Observations … out of Cornelius Tacitus,” 1612, MS Huntington Lib. EL 6857, 62, 66. On native warfare in America see Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Plimoth Plantation, 1991; Baltimore, 1993) esp. chap. 1 “The Aboriginal Military System.”
Beverly, History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Wright, 54. On this tactic see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975)
Tacitus, Life of Agricola, 192; David Thomas Konig, “Colonization and the Common Law in Ireland and Virginia, 1569–1634,” in The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology, ed. James A. Henretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley N. Katz, (New York: Knopf, 1991), 90–92.
Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 337–352, quote 337. See also Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 43.
Donald R. Kelley, “Tacitus Noster: The Germania in the Renaissance and Reformation,” in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, ed. T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 152–167; J. H. M. Salmon, “Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 169–188; and Salmon, “Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989): 199–225. Markku Peltonen, while acknowledging the influence of Tacitus, argues that Cicero’s influence remained strong; see Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 15, 280, 311.
Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), chapter 14.
David Womersley, “Sir Henry Savile’s Translation of Tacitus and the Political Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts,” Review of English Studies, new ser., XLII (1991): 313–314. On Savile’s position, see also Salmon, “Precept, Example, and Truth: Degory Wheare and the Ars Historica,” in Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800 ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17–18.
D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and “The Light of Truth” from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1990), 115–125; Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 136, 206–210; Debora Shuger, “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians,” Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997): 495–497. The core texts are available in recent scholarly editions of the Germania by J. B. Rives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) and of Agricola and Germany by Anthony Birley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Works, ed. Barbour, III, 156. Philip Barbour argues that Smith must have read the Peter Whitehorn translation of Machiavelli (1560) and that his Marcus Aurelius must have been Thomas North’s translation of Antonio de Guevara’s The Diall of Princes (1557), as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius were not available in English until Casaubon’s translation was published in 1634. Theodore Paleologue was riding master to the earl of Lincoln. For comparisons of Smith to Caesar, see Barbour, ed., Works, II, 41, 50; III, 47 (quote). On the way in which men on the public stage studied the art of rhetoric and the classics, particularly Livy and Tacitus, as guides to action, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; Peter Burke, “A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–1700,” History and Theory, 5 (1966): 135–152, quote p. 151, and “Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 484–490; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78; and Alan T. Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism and the ‘Utility’ of Tacitus,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 46 (1983): 127–155. On the use of classical rhetorical form in tracts promoting America see Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Classical Rhetoric in the Literature of Discovery,” unpub. PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1995.
For the argument for Saxon origins, and for the description of the ancient German polity, see William Camden, Britaine, Or A Chorographicall Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610; first pub. 1586), 127–141; Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence: In antiquities. Concerning the most noble and renowmed English nation (Antwerp, 1605), 2 and passim; John Speed, The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (London, 1614), 287–289; ed. Robert C. Johnson, Mary Frear Keeler, Maija Jansson Cole, and William B. Bidwell, Proceedings in Parliament 1628, 6 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977–1983); Commons Debates 1628 II, 330, 333–334, Lords Proceedings 1628, V, 162, 172–173, 180. For modern treatments of the issues see Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982); Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Schocken, 1958); Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 84, 93–95; Woolf, Idea of History in Early Stuart England; Kevin Sharpe, “The foundation of the Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge: an episode in Jacobean politics,” in Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (London: Pinter, 1989); Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 258; Brian P. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England, 1603–1641: A Political Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 91–95; and Arthur Ferguson, Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England (Durham: Durham University Press, 1993), chap. 5.
Nathanael Carpenter, Geography Delineated, (London, 1625), 281–282; Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), chap. 3; Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origin of the American Peoples and the Use of Comparative Methods,” Journal of the History of Ideas, LII (1991): 221–244, esp. 231.
Marc Lescarbot, The Conversion of the Savages Who Were Baptized in New France during this year, 1610 in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, 73 vols. (Cleveland, Ohio: A. H. Clark, 1896–1901), I, 83–85.
R. C. Bald has supplied probable dates of composition in his editions of Fletcher’s Bonduca (Oxford, 1951) and of Middleton’s Hengist (New York, 1938), xiii. I thank Gary Taylor for bringing these plays to my attention.
Cornelius Tacitus, The Description of Germanie: and Customes of the People, trans. Richard Grenewey (London, 1598); Speed, The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans, 287–289. The characterization of the witenagamot is from Camden, Britaine, 177.
On Saye and the issues of the relation between parliament and monarch, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74–75, chapter 6.
Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, Aug. 13 1776, Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 28 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–2000), I, 492; John Adams to Abigail Adams, Aug. 14 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence, 6 vols. ed. L. H. Butterfield et al. eds. (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1963–1993), II, 96–97. Somewhat later, Jefferson remembered his suggestion differently; see Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ibid., 494–495. On Jefferson see Peter Thompson, “‘Judicious Neology’: Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” paper delivered to the Columbia Seminar in Early American History, September 14, 2001.
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 37–46.
Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, 1637, in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, 4 vols. (1844; rept. Gloucester, M A: Peter Smith, 1963): II, 15–18.
Gary Taylor, personal communication.
Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chaps. 3–5, and 190–198. On the political meaning of the notion that the British derived from the Trojan Brutus, see Roger A. Mason, “Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain,” in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Mason (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 60–84; Sidney Anglo, “The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 44 (1961): 17–48; and Richard T. Vann, “The Free Anglo-Saxons: A Historical Myth,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XIX, (1958), 259–272. On denunciation of the Trojan myth see J. H. M. Salmon, “Precept, Example, and Truth: Degory Wheare and the Ars Historica,” in Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, ed. Kelley and Sacks, 28–29. For parallel developments in Scotland see Arthur H. Williamson, “Scots, Indians and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization, 1519–1609,” Past and Present, 150 (1966): 46–83.
I thank Gary Taylor for bringing this play to my attention.
Harriot, “Notes” to woodcuts of John White’s paintings published by Theodor De Bry and printed in The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590, ed. David Beers Quinn, 2 vols (London, 1955), I, 430, 438. On Ben Jonson’s use of the masque form to urge restraint in ostentation, as well as in eating and drinking on the Stuart court, see Martin Butler, “Ben Jonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford, 1993), 91–115. See also Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
Morton, New English Canaan, in Force, comp., Tracts, II, 39.
Jane H. Ohlmeyer, “‘Civilizing of those Rude Partes’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s,” in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicholas Canny, vol. I of The Oxford History of the British Empire, gen. ed. William Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 141–143.
“Observations of State, and millitary affaires for the most parte collected out of Cornelius Tacitus,” 1612, M S Huntington Lib. EL 6857, 13.
Tacitus, Life of Julius Agricola, trans. Savile, 188.
See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 110–118.
This thesis is developed in my book, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
William Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe: A Historical Outline from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Felix Gilbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 149–154; “On the Institutions and Customs of the Barbarian Invaders of the Roman Empire.” This work was the first part of Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769 ).
Strachey, Historic of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 23–24;
Anthony Grafton posits Tacitus as “the intellectual great-grandfather of the concept of the Noble Savage,” New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 43. See also Gordon Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 124.
On Neostoicism see Salmon, “Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989): 199–225 and Tuck, Philosophy and Government. On commentary on contemporary life see Schama, Landscape and Memory, 75–100; Patrick Cullen, Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), Introduction, esp. pp. 1, 6, 10; Peter Lindenbaum, Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment in theEnglish Renaissance (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986). On the georgic tradition see Shuger, “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians,” Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997): 507–522; Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Alastair Fowler, “Georgic and Pastoral: Laws of Genre in the Seventeenth Century,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 81–88. On contemporary concerns about the danger of empire to England see Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire and “John Milton: Poet against Empire,” Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armany Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206–225.
Beverly, History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Wright, 233.
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Kupperman, K.O. (2005). Angells in America. In: Beidler, P.D., Taylor, G. (eds) Writing Race Across the Atlantic World. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980830_3
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