Being human in early Virginia

Abstract

While there have been many important studies of English perceptions of the people they called ‘Indians’, all see, or at least imply, an unbridgeable chasm between the more positive descriptions and the seemingly more denigratory ones. Yet, the apparently vast differences between accounts actually converge under a more fundamental unity. Even if they sometimes disagreed over its exact implications, the English firmly agreed among themselves that the Indians were in fact fully human and rational and that the best proof of this was their conformity to the basic duties and precepts of the law of nature. Their often overstated disagreements were due to tensions within this understanding of humanity over the relative importance of reason and revelation for the affairs of the world. Regardless, from their early abortive ventures in Roanoke in the 1580s through to the so‐called ‘Massacre’ of 1622, the English enjoyed a consensus that the natives of Virginia had, at least in potential, a concept of the divine, language, civil society, and a reasonable amount of self‐control over their passions and appetites.