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  • The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia by Ethan A. Schmidt
  • Michael A. LaCombe
The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia. By Ethan A. Schmidt. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. Pp. [xviii], 208. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-60732-307-5.)

Ethan A. Schmidt’s The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia covers some well-trodden ground: the early years of the Jamestown settlement, the Anglo-Powhatan wars, the establishment of Virginia’s tobacco elite, and Bacon’s Rebellion. With such scope and just 185 pages of text (excluding the index and bibliography), The Divided Dominion makes no claim to have uncovered new source material or to have explored previously slighted territory. Instead, Schmidt’s book claims to recast our understanding of the period by arguing that “to unite dissatisfied Virginians across class, geographic, political, and social boundaries” required “a call for the extermination of all Indians” (p. 2).

Schmidt briskly describes the ways Virginia’s planter elite consolidated power, land, and labor at the expense of those below them in the social hierarchy. The indentured servants and others on the lower rungs of Virginia’s social order were left landless, exploited, and fighting for survival. And yet this social polarization itself did not lead to concerted opposition. The missing element, Schmidt claims, was “Indian hatred,” the belief that “constituted the critical element around which all other disaffection in Virginia coalesced” (p. 8). In search of the roots of Virginians’ Indian hatred, the book’s introductory chapters cover the violent years of early Jamestown. Schmidt describes “the lingering animosity” these events “projected into the late seventeenth century” (p. 51). He also argues that English violence was motivated by ideas about “holy war” rather than reprisal (p. 55). He does not engage with the literature on race.

For Schmidt, Bacon’s Rebellion was “the logical outgrowth of the social relations established in the early decades of the colony” and can best be understood by comparing it with the Lawne’s Creek plot of 1673, which lacked Nathaniel Bacon’s call for violence against Indians and fizzled out as a result (p. 2). Although we end in familiar territory—Bacon’s Rebellion as a pivotal event in Virginia’s political history—Schmidt is not interested in linking it to later events as a turning point: he sees the rebellion as the culmination of class conflict sustained by hatred of Virginia’s Native population.

Schmidt’s endnotes situate his argument selectively, with detailed attention to Wilcomb E. Washburn, Edmund S. Morgan, and E. P. Thompson but no mention of Peter Rhoads Silver’s Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008), hardly an obscure text and certainly relevant. By resolutely maintaining a focus on what he views as the origins of Bacon’s hatred of Indians, Schmidt overstates the common ground between the early and late seventeenth century, while ignoring the common ground between Bacon’s and his contemporaries’ views of Indians. If Bacon’s indiscriminate hatred of Indians was always present, Schmidt faces difficulty in describing periods that did not experience widespread violence. [End Page 395] After the slaughter of 1622, for example, English leaders “removed the shackles of restraint they had placed on the populace since the marriage of John Rolfe and Pocahontas” in 1614 (pp. 77–78). Rather than a simple chafing at the “shackles” restraining them from violence, Virginia’s planters witnessed the origins of the head-right system, the arrival of enslaved Africans, the origin of the House of Burgesses, and the beginnings of tobacco cultivation.

Schmidt’s language itself suggests some doubts about his claims. Are we examining the origins of “a free-born and inviolable right” of “Virginians to use violence against Native Americans whenever they deemed it necessary” (pp. 79, 171)? Or are Schmidt’s claims more limited, to the “[o]ne issue in particular [that] united poor, middling, and even some elite Virginians in 1676, and that was their desire to open opportunities for western settlement and trade by driving the remaining Indians from the colony” (p. 149)? This latter formulation suggests a more complex...

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