Temperate Revenge: Religion, Profit, and Retaliation in 1622 Jamestown

My intemperate claim: the violence characterizing the treatment of native Americans by English settlers in the New World begins on 22 March 1622, the precise moment when temperance breaks its ethical mooring and sails into territory that once constituted its absolute negation.

Jamestown began more propitiously. The Virginia Company of London received its charter from James I in 1606 and launched its first envoy to North America in December of that year. The first group of 104 "adventurers" completed their transatlantic voyage the following May, settling on a riverbank sixty miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay ("History of Jamestown"). This New World endeavor would, of course, satisfy the Virginia Company's pleonexia—first in the exportation of New World crops, which generated an enormous European appetite for novel luxury goods, and later in the slave trade, which infused natural and labor capital into the English economy. But early documents attest that the Virginia Company originally understood its mission as twofold: self-interested in its mercantile dimensions, but altruistic in its religious and political ones. The "Principall and Maine Ends" of "the hopefull Plantations begun in Virginia," according to an official declaration issued in 1610,

weare first to preach, & baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of that Gospell, to recover out of the armes of the Diuell, a number of poore and miserable soules, wrapt upp unto death, in almost invincible ignorance; to endeavour the fulfilling, and accomplishment of the number of the elect, which shall be gathered from out all corners of the earth; and to add our myte to the treasury of Heaven, that as we pray for the comming of the kingdome of glory, so to expresse in our actions, the same desire, if God have pleased, to use so weak instruments, to the ripening & consummation thereof.¹

(Conseil for Virginia, "A True and Sincere Declaration" 2-3)

This passage implicitly acknowledges the material benefits of Virginia settlement, spiritual priorities notwithstanding. The gospel is not merely preached but agriculturally "propagat[ed]" until the "ripening" of the second coming; the elect will be "gathered from out all corners of the earth" in an evangelical form of primitive accumulation; and the English "myte"—that is, a farthing, half-farthing, or other coin of other low monetary value (OED² s.v. "mite," n.2)—proves to be not only contiguous with but even convertible to heavenly "treasur[e]." The passage nevertheless implies, though, that such conversion serves as a horizon of accountability. Only insofar as the English "myte" yields heavenly rather than worldly riches; only so long as "poore and miserable soules" are "gathered from out all corners of the earth" for divine rather than mercenary ends; in short, only insofar as "conversion" describes both a religious change among New World natives and the transformation of worldly riches into divine election—only then will the company rest satisfied by the justice of its colonial settlement. While the 1610 declaration does not soft-pedal the Virginia Company's self-interest, it does attest to the colonists' sense of moral and ethical obligation: a duty to subordinate worldly to spiritual goals, thereby preserving both their right to material success and their difference in kind from their reviled Spanish competitors.³

Along with much else, this rhetorical posture changed dramatically after 22 March 1622, when 347 Jamestown settlers were killed in a surprise Powhatan attack. One of the only events in early colonial Virginia widely reported in England, this episode occasioned an about-face in English representations of the natives: no longer "poore and miserable soules" requiring the compassionate intervention of Christian missionaries, they become the villainous perpetrators of a "Barbarous Massacre in the time of Peace and League, treacherously executed by the Native Infidels" (Waterhouse).⁴ This subtitle comes from the pen of company secretary Edward Waterhouse, who authored the Virginia Company's official documentary response to the massacre, published in August 1622. In that text, Waterhouse describes the company's changed attitude toward the natives as a welcome relief from the burdens of missionary duty and Christian humility:

[O]ur hands which before were...