Letters to the Editor

Abstract

To the Editor: At one level I feel it might be more appropriate to allow John Grenier to defend his argument about the nature of the Virginian “feed fight.” Professor Fausz raises some interesting points of great interest to me, however, and so I will respond. Professor Fausz is surely right that Virginian expeditions against the Powhatans did on occasion take corn, or perhaps even harvest and keep the Indians' corn, rather than merely burn it. As he says, the poem “Good Newes from Virginia” undeniably states that corn was part of the pillage of Indian towns (“Good Newes from Virginia, 1623,” William and Mary Quarterly, July 1948, pp. 351–58). I might point out, though, that any poem from 1623 purporting to tell of “good” news surely had a propagandistic intent and was clearly seeking to reassure investors or potential immigrants that they would not starve. That said, I must disagree with the absolutist quality of his statements. Among other problems, standing corn can only be harvested (or even burned) at certain times of the year. While the Virginians recognized late summer as the season in which they could most easily harm the Indians through attacks on food supplies, that was also the season in which militiamen resisted serving (William L. Shea, The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century, 1983, pp. 40–41). In short, not all expeditions were timed so as to catch Indian corn in the fields, ready for harvest. One letter suffices not only to indicate this problem, but also to show how frequently Indian food stores were actually burned and not just “cut down.” A letter from January 1623/4 noted that a Virginia force had “Cut downe theire Corne in all places,” but immediately followed up that comment with the intimation that they would have done even more except that the troops had run out of food, explaining that it was the “tyme of our gretest scarcitie, & noe reliefe to be founde amongste the Enemyes.” Furthermore, in the same letter, a later expedition claimed to have “burnt theire Howses, with a marvelous quantetie of Corne carryed by them into the woodes” (Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols., 1906–1935, IV, p. 451). They admitted that they could not carry it to their boats, but that proves yet another logistical truth: not all plunder could always be carried away and that which could not be carried was destroyed. (For an instance of some corn being destroyed and some carried away, see ibid., IV, pp.9–10.)