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Like many of his contemporaries, Virginian William Byrd grappled with the issue of a continuing Native presence in North America, especially the Southeast . In his account of surveying the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia in 1728, he recorded speci¤c encounters with Indians and described the Native cultures of the region. Byrd shared the widespread Enlightenment view that American Indians did not differ fundamentally from Europeans and that apparent disparities stemmed from environment and education rather than inherent capabilities (Sheehan 1973:15–116). “All Nations of men have the same Natural Dignity,” he wrote, “and we all know that very bright Talents may be lodg’d under a very dark Skin. The principal Difference between one People and another proceeds only from the different Opportunities of Improvement” (Byrd 1967:120). Christian conversion and an English education promised to obliterate this difference. Englishmen, however, had paid scant attention to providing “Opportunities of Improvement” for Indians, even in New England where, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries , evangelical ¤res, at best, only smoldered, and certainly not in the South, where they had never ignited. Even after revivalism stirred the embers and fanned the ®ames in the 1740s, little light or heat reached Native communities , especially in the South. When it did, Indian people had little interest in a religion that killed its god, did not make the corn grow, and emphasized individual salvation over community welfare. Yet Byrd and other eighteenthcentury southern elites advocated the assimilation of Native people into Anglo-American society. The easiest, cheapest, and most likely means to 7 / “A Sprightly Lover Is the Most Prevailing Missionary” Intermarriage between Europeans and Indians in the Eighteenth-Century South Theda Perdue accomplish this goal, they believed, was intermarriage. “For, after all that can be said,” Byrd wrote, “a sprightly Lover is the most prevailing Missionary that can be sent amongst these, or any other In¤dels” (Byrd 1967:3–4). The possibility that the reverse might occur—that Europeans might prefer the life of the Indians—was so ludicrous a thought that few took it seriously. The eighteenth-century experience of intermarriage between Europeans and southern Indians, however, suggests that perhaps they should have. John Rolfe, a prosperous and pious Virginian, became the model for incorporating and transforming Indians through marriage when he took Pocahontas for his wife in 1614, several years after she supposedly saved John Smith. A year before her marriage to Rolfe, colonial authorities had taken the 18-yearold Pocahontas hostage, separating her from her Indian husband and her father , the region’s paramount chief whom colonists hoped to pressure into peace by holding his daughter. During her year of captivity, Pocahontas converted to Christianity, took the name Rebecca, and married Rolfe. Two years later, she and her husband along with their infant son traveled to England where Pocahontas charmed the king and London society; she died just before her return to Virginia. The only portrait done during her lifetime depicts her as a proper Jacobean lady, not an Indian princess, and her son and his descendants ethnically identi¤ed as white even as they boasted descent from Pocahontas (Rountree 2001). In 1705 Robert Beverley lamented the failure of most Englishmen to follow Rolfe’s example and marry Indians. Had they done so, he believed, there would have been far less bloodshed in Virginia, which had been wracked by Indian wars in its ¤rst four decades, and the population would have increased rapidly as a result of lives spared, children conceived, and English immigration expanded (Beverley 1947 [1705]:18–19). The practicality of intermarriage as a solution to a host of problems with the Indians attracted advocates throughout the eighteenth century. Byrd saw intermarriage as a bloodless way to acquire Indian land: “The poor Indians would have had less reason to Complain that the English took away their Land, if they [the English] had received it by way of Portion with their Daughters” (Byrd 1967:4). Edmund Atkin, who prepared a report on colonial Indian affairs in 1755, thought it “prudent to encourage” marriage between soldiers garrisoned on the frontier and Indian women “by which means our Interest among the Indians will be strengthened” (Atkin 1954). Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and 166 / Theda Perdue blend together, to intermix, and become one people” (Jefferson to Hawkins, February 18, 1803, in Lipscomb and Ellery Bergh 1903–1904:10:363). Jefferson and...

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