Early Virginia Research Articles

The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia

The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia

Disappointment, Grievance, and Violence in Early Virginia

Disappointment, Grievance, and Violence in Early Virginia

The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen

Reviewed by: The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen L.H. Roper The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660. By Misha Ewen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. What can we learn from another book on Jamestown? Actually, quite a bit, as Misha Ewen’s study of the first permanent English settlement in North America demonstrates. In the first instance, Ewen has significantly augmented the record of this venerable topic thanks to her visits to a range of British archives customarily ignored by historians of “early America.” The range of evidence she has unearthed provides a fine platform for tracking the connections that English people from all levels of the social pyramid had with early Virginia. These “micro-histories” (3) enable “us to get at the discreet, harder-to-reach corners of early modern society. In myriad unexpected ways, empire building seeped into the everyday life, and the accompanying documentary record, of early modern English society.” (152) Secondly, Ewen irrefutably corrects the still-prevalent view of the Virginia Company, which founded the enterprise in 1606, as an inept entity whose administration lurched from crisis to crisis until the Crown inevitably assumed direct control of Virginia in 1624. Rather, as she relates, the company leadership secured further governmental support for their initiative ranging from approval of lotteries to fund their operations to judicial approval of the transportation of criminals to labor on plantations to sermons promoting American prospects to prospective migrants. The establishment of Virginia helped set the pattern for English colonization by which “private” networks of merchants, aristocrats, and colonials took the lead, drawing upon their own connections, including governmental ones, to legitimize their ventures, raise money and recruit colonists. Ewen demonstrates then how the Virginia Company entrenched the concept of empire in metropolitan minds, just as it entrenched the English presence in America. Her work thus merits careful attention from historians of empire, colonization and seventeenth-century England. More particularly, it examines female investors, such as Lady Cecily West, whose jointure was used to fund the contribution of her husband, Thomas, baron De la Warr and Jamestown governor, but who invested in the colony in her own right, as well as the less elevated Mabel Collymore (35–55). It also chronicles the removal of the indigent to Virginia to solve crime, vagrancy and other social problems; transportation of felons and the indigent provided a ready alternative to hanging and an attempt to alleviate suffering but also manifested an insistence that the poor improve both themselves and a seemingly overpopulated realm (87–116). These accounts illustrate how colonization seamlessly grafted onto social practice. Ironically, though, they indicate the secondary, even epiphenomenal, effect of America on that consciousness. The successful introduction of tobacco cultivation and the end to the long, nasty war with the Powhatans. These crucial developments were underscored by the triumphal 1617 visit to the metropolis by the man largely responsible for them, John Rolfe, and his new wife, the Powhatan “princess,” Metoaka (a.k.a., Pocahontas). The couple’s grand tour (oddly unmentioned in The Virginia Venture despite a chapter devoted to “Creating Capital,” 57–86) included attendance at a court masque and a reunion between Metoaka and the tireless colonizing cheerleader, Captain John Smith, generated fevered interest in Virginia and a recapitalization of the Virginia Company. Its revamped leadership, implemented indentured servitude to facilitate migration and created a colonial House of Burgesses to provide self-government for planters. The devastating Powhatan attack of Easter 1622, though, doused these hopes and expectations. This “massacre” also generated such furious finger-pointing over the management and direction of the colony between clients of the Earls of Southampton and Warwick that the Crown was obliged to intervene. Meanwhile, tobacco proved alltoo-successful: planters in new colonies, most notably in Barbados, joined their Virginia counterparts in cultivating the weed thereby generating a price collapse as buyers of lottery tickets and readers of travel literature turned their attentions elsewhere. Who picked up the pieces? The Virginia Venture leaves open the wider question of who drove English overseas interests, which limits this otherwise fresh analysis; its fifth chapter lapses into the familiar, but misleading, comprehension...

Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia

In a deeply nuanced study, Kupperman deftly crafts a narrative based on her decades of study into the early Virginia colony and the Atlantic world, of the important role of captive children and the exchange of peoples in the settlement process. By highlighting the experiences of Pocahontas, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, Kupperman creates a model for insight into the fraught relationships these youths would have with both their communities of origin and their adoptive kin. The exchange of children in Virginia allowed for language acquisition, as child intermediaries learned the customs and languages of their communities, which in turn allowed them to become interpreters at a young age. This important tool in settlement, however, also placed enormous pressure on these four youths who were still malleable in their adolescence. The desires to please disparate masters led to fraught and tense situations for all involved. For the boys, Kupperman argues that “they were so young themselves that they might not necessarily understand everything about their own cultures and the deeper meanings attached to words and concepts,” leaving spaces for ambiguity that both the Algonquian and English leaders could make use of and manipulate (p. 12).While Pocahontas's story is a focus of some of the book, the greater contribution to the scholarship of early Virginia and the Atlantic World here is Kupperman's focus on Thomas, Henry, and Robert, providing a well-researched and illuminating understanding of their lives in the colony and the pressures they faced. Throughout seven chapters, Kupperman traces not only the history of the Virginia Company (and its failure) but the rise and fall of relationships and alliances, and the interpersonal public and private socio-politics of the era. Interweaving familiar parts of the narrative, including the infamous “rescue” of John Smith, with a close read of archival sources, Kupperman shares the story of the exchange of children caught in a series of wars, disease, trade, and colonial expansion. Within these stories are details of life and interaction; Kupperman asks, for example, about Thomas Savage, “Did he find it liberating to switch to Powhatan clothing, which was so much freer than the English? Or did he find it hard to adjust to being so exposed?” (p. 31).For Pocahontas, Kupperman shares what life was like in London at the time of her visit, describing the drastic change in dress for the young woman, including a “high-bodied” gown with a “large starched collar that was supported by a network of wires. So your clothes poked and scratched you throughout the day, not to mention how heavy it all was” (p. 114). These detailed analyses of the day-to-day experiences and the challenges these children faced provide scholars with excellent materials with which to inform classroom discussions as well as further research. Kupperman suggests the larger trauma that Pocahontas faced under English expectations that she act as an intermediary to convert her people to Christianity, opining that “inner turmoil over what would happen once they were back in Virginia must have been intolerable” (p. 139). Sadly missing from the story are some of the deeper Indigenous perspectives and analyses of the story of her abduction and conversion, a story that many view as one of the first missing and murdered Indigenous women.The last two chapters expand upon the rising tobacco economy and the failure of the Virginia Company as well as the role of young English and Native boys as interpreters, some of whom fared well and others who became casualties of the system as “manipulation and double dealing using young go-betweens happened everywhere in the Atlantic” (p. 173). By focusing on the children involved, their experiences, their losses, and the potential psychological impact of their captivity and exchange, Kupperman has produced an important synthesis of this era that allows a glimpse into a terrifying aspect of the colonial era and brings to life their circumstances and hardships.

Cockacoeske’s Rebellion: Nathaniel Bacon, Indigenous Slavery, and Sovereignty in Early Virginia

The expansion of the plantation complex in seventeenth-century Virginia put Indigenous Virginians at risk of enslavement and land loss. In 1676, Cockacoeske, a Powhatan weroansqua, confronted both physical attacks on her land and legal and cultural arguments about her people’s lack of sovereignty. European travel writing and international law were fertile areas that colonists such as the newly arrived Nathaniel Bacon drew on to claim that Indigenous women such as Cockacoeske had no place as sovereigns and were instead suited to racial slavery. Almost captured and enslaved by Bacon, Cockacoeske rebelled against his racialized arguments for anti-sovereignty and slavery. She signed a treaty with the English Crown after the rebellion that changed the trajectory of Native slavery in Virginia: only Indigenous people whose nations could not establish sovereignty before the crown would be subject to racial slavery. Her successful battle to protect Powhatans shows how Native women like herself had to navigate the distinction between slavery and sovereignty in the early South. Though Cockacoeske was protected from enslavement, the slave trade into Virginia continued from the deeper South, and Indigenous women whose governments could not claim subjecthood or tributary status within the English Empire were successfully racialized and forced to pass slavery on to their children.

Reinterpreting the Virginia Plantation, 1609–1618

AbstractUsing evidence from underused manuscript and archaeological material as well as printed texts, the author demonstrates that the early Virginia plantation was far from a disaster. Focusing on the period 1609–1618, the author situates the colony within the globally connected environments of early modern trade and empire. The author reveals how the expectations of the colony's proponents were met on a variety of levels, and the colony was successfully undertaken through the mediation of global pressures and English corporate culture within the specific local spaces of North America. The Virginia plantation was self-sufficient, economically diverse, and integrated conceptually and practically into the wider activities of its investors and leadership. Through this interpretation, this article contributes to the understanding of practices of colonization in early modern America and the connectedness of English overseas activities and the awareness of the Virginia Company participants’ of the colony's place within wider, global economies.

Black Ecological Vibrations

Black Ecological Vibrations

Foodways and Emotional Communities in Early Colonial Virginia

Abstract This article argues that in colonial Virginia a variety of emotional communities were knitted together by processes of food provisioning, which were themselves inseparable from environmental influences. As a fundamental necessity, a central component of early modern conceptions of community and friendship and crucially as something that was scarce in a colonial context, food had the power to engender a range of emotional relationships, both positive and negative. In the Virginia of the 1620s, environment and emotion became ever more tightly entwined, creating new relationships, antagonisms and connections to the land, developments that would have a lasting impact on the emotional landscape of Anglo-America. At the centre of this entanglement was food.

David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School

David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School

David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals, A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School

David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals, A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School

David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Towards and Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xvi + 292 pages. 110.00 USD (hardback)

David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Towards and Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xvi + 292 pages. 110.00 USD (hardback)

Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

<i>Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School</i> by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

"Pass the Bounds of Verse": Arthur Blackamore's "Expeditio Ultramontana," the Transmontane Expedition, and Forms of Territory in Alexander Spotwood's Virginia

This article examines the intersection of the 1716 Transmontane Expedition across the Blue Ridge Mountains and the formal dimensions of configurations of authority in colonial Virginia during Governor Alexander Spotswood's administration, 1710–1722. Through an analysis of the text and circulation of a poem commemorating the expedition, "Expeditio Ultramontana," the article argues that the poem extends Spotswood's efforts to reinforce territorial claims in and around Virginia, thereby revealing the complex interrelation of land and identity in early Virginia.

Poor Babes, Desperate Mothers: Concealment of Dead Newborns in Early Virginia

In 1624, Parliament passed An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children. The Virginia General Assembly enacted a similar law in 1710. Those statutes treated the concealment of a nonmarital newborn's death as presumptive murder. The essay argues that colonial Virginians' main objective in enforcing these acts was to scare pregnant servants into revealing their condition so that their masters could extract additional service without pay. Convictions for concealment alone, and not willful murder, rarely, if ever, resulted in execution. Deterrence was achieved through show trials and the criminal process, mitigated by a liberal pardon policy.

Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America ed. by Paul Musselwhite et al.

Reviewed by: Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America ed. by Paul Musselwhite et al. Philip Misevich (bio) Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America paul musselwhite, peter c. mancall, james horn, editors Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019 336 pp. Colonial Virginia holds a special place in the history of the United States and the popular imagination of most Americans. Its foundation [End Page 295] rests on two well-known pillars that would seem, at least on the surface, to contradict each other. The General Assembly, the first representative self-governing body in the Americas, illustrates a particular spirit of participatory democracy that animated the colony's early history, at least in comparison to other seventeenth-century settings. The exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants, on the other hand, exposes the brutality and depth of unfreedom that equally defined the character of the settlement. That the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the same year the Assembly was established, makes early Virginia a particularly rich environment to probe the interconnected histories of slavery and freedom and consider how they shaped colonialism in the English Atlantic world. Growing out of a conference that Dartmouth College hosted in 2017, the essays in the volume under review, written by senior and junior scholars, require readers to rethink central themes in colonial American history. They collectively reveal how slavery and freedom were born together, and not by accident. The volume interrogates ideas—about people, gender, space, race, work, community, and the environment—that influenced English perceptions of the Americas and describes the practices that both fueled and disrupted colonists' often-utopian visions of the "New World." Many contributors stick closely to the title's narrow spatial and temporal boundaries; others are more wide ranging in their coverage. The thirteen chapters are not formally organized into larger parts or sections, but they can be loosely grouped according to shared themes. The editors use the introduction to reflect on the meaning of 1619, whose significance, they note, "lies in the extraordinary conjunction of events that ultimately gave definition to the English colonial project and shaped American society for centuries to come" (9). While they acknowledge the uncertainty and messiness that were such prominent realities of colonial decision-making, what emerged in Virginia, they assert, was no mere "jumble of tragic coincidences, but the interweaving of ideology, pragmatic experience, and international rivalries" that "fed into, and were shaped by, local contingencies in Virginia and elsewhere around the Atlantic rim" (12). Situating the colony in such diverse contexts is a complex task that is particularly well suited to an edited collection. Contributions by Peter C. Mancall, Lauren Working, and Nicholas Canny assess, to varying degrees, pre-1619 ideas about Virginia, targeting its natural world, Indigenous inhabitants, and prospects for settlement. In [End Page 296] the wake of England's flailing early efforts to establish a permanent foothold in the Americas, advocates for continued colonial expansion sought novel ways to drum up financial and moral support for their cause. Man-call describes how a simple picture that the younger Richard Hakluyt, one of England's great collectors of information about the wider world, gave to the naturalist Edward Topsell took on new meaning in this context. The gift, an image of a "virginia bird," represented one of the many foreign and exotic objects of which Europeans tried to make sense. Something so seemingly mundane as the discovery of a new bird, plant, or other unknown commodity, Mancall suggests, could transform the calculus of colonization. Working's chapter also considers how the English made sense of the Americas, focusing on English-Powhatan encounters and their impact on English political culture. That Europeans characterized as "savage" the Indigenous American societies they encountered is well documented; Working notes, however, that such perceptions provoked larger concerns in London about the shortcomings of the English settlers who inhabited the colony, too. Knowledge about Virginia filtered back into Europe and gave birth to new discourse informed by English ideas about developments in the colony. Canny adds a comparative perspective. While they had prominent differences...

Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia

Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia

Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia by Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia by Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Who Narrates Captivity?

Who Narrates Captivity? Rebecca Anne Goetz (bio) Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. xi + 233 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $75.00. Andrew Newman, Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacies and Indian Captivities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019. xi + 211 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. About sixty years before Mary Rowlandson wrote her famous book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682), Sarah Boyse also wrote a captivity narrative. Captured by Pamunkeys in March 1622, Boyse was sent home from captivity in 1623 "appareled like one of theire Quenes, wch they [the Pamunkeys] desired wee should take notice of." She observed her captors well: she "reporteth of a great deale of miserie that o[u]r People endure and not least Hunger in wch th'Indians also suffer extreame."1 The Pamunkeys held Sarah and eighteen other English women as captives, but the English were aware they were all alive because her husband John received "a letter from Boyse his wife."2 What information did she include in her letter? We do not know, because her letter does not survive. All that remains is a description of her clothing and her observations on the difficulties of life among the Pamunkeys. But I can begin to imagine what Sarah Boyse's letter might have told us. In addition to her descriptions of hardship and dearth, perhaps like Mary Rowlandson's narrative, Sarah Boyse might have told present-day historians much about Pamunkey politics, about Opechancanough's struggles to hold his confederacy together in the face of unceasing English violence, and the threat of starvation. We might have glimpsed Boyse's piety too, but perhaps without the puritan overtones of Rowlandson's later narrative. The possibility of Sarah Boyse's narrative is one we can imprint with all the things we wish we knew about Indigenous and settler lives in the wake of Opechancanough's devastating attack on English settlements in 1622. [End Page 488] I am able to subject Sarah Boyse to such conjecture because she left only the barest trace in the archive of early Virginia. The Virginia Company did not deem her literacy and her ability to describe her captivity worthy of extensive record. No one archived her (probably handwritten) letter. The men of the Virginia Company happily ignored Boyse's literacy, and thus her narrative. If a woman writes a letter, and no one saves it, does its once-upon-a-time existence matter? Was Sarah Boyse's unloved and unarchived letter a literacy event? Andrew Newman describes literacy events as "the particular activities where reading and writing have a role" (p. 3). In his new book Allegories of Encounter, Andrew Newman delves into one of the most commonly taught and commonly read genres in early American literature: the captivity narrative. In his close reading of the writings of several well-known captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Reverend John Williams, and John Marrant, among others, Newman explores these tales as literacy events, arguing that "captives read and wrote with the presumption that their captors did not—or should not" (p. 7). He describes his approach as "admittedly Eurocentric," and primarily about the "subjective experience of the colonists" who found themselves in captivity, able to return to their colonial homes, and likewise, able to communicate their experience in writing (p. 7). This framing suggests a more limited analysis than the book generally employs, and perhaps does a disservice to Newman's many insightful readings. His focus on settler captives aptly reveals how they used literacy, books, and the written word to distinguish themselves from their Indigenous captors. Newman asks historians and literary scholars to think about the nature of captivity narratives as both primary sources (history) and as texts (literature). The result is a thoughtful meditation on the role of allegory in how settler captives understood their captivity, but also how their captivity narratives expose the "ethnohistorical basis for representations of cultural contact" (p. 16). Newman is...

Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 240. $24.95 (cloth). - Henry Spelman. Relation of Virginia: A Boy's Memoir of Life with the Powhatans and Patawomecks. Edited by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 96. $14.95 (cloth).

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Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia

Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia