The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race

3 Faith in the Blood

61 chapter three Faith in the Blood Writing a history of English Virginia in 1705, Robert Beverly gave pride of place to two early marriages in the colony. The first, between John Laydon and Anna Burrows [Anne Burras] in 1609, he described as “the first Christian Marriage in that Part of the World: and the Year following the Plantation was increased to near Five Hundred Men.” Although the Laydons were not personally responsible for the colony’s burgeoning English population, Beverly cleverly postulated a connection between this first Christian marriage and the growth of the colony. Marriage, Beverly thought, had been key to the colony’s success . The second marriage Beverly included was that of Metoaka and John Rolfe in 1614. Beverley reproduced for his eighteenth-century readers John Smith’s letter of introduction for Metoaka to Queen Anne, which emphasized Metoaka’s status: “The first Christian ever of that [Indian] Nation: The first Virginian ever spake English, or had a Child in Marriage by an English Man. A Matter surely, if my Meaning be truly consider’d and well understood, worthy of a Prince’s information.”1 The marriages Beverley recognized in his history thus provided two models for the stability of the colony. In one, the colony’s population increased through marriage between English men and women. The other featured the conversion and absorption of Indians into an English polity, through Christian marriage of English men to heathen Indian women. Both Smith and Beverley understood Metoaka’s importance to the English colonial project: the information most valuable to Queen Anne was not necessarily that she had converted or that she spoke English , but that she had “had a child in Marriage by an English man.” The production of legitimate heirs within marriage was crucial to the colony ’s survival. English children inherited their parents’—most critically their fathers’—property, wealth, and the privileges of free Englishmen. Any reproduction that took place outside the confines of duly sanctioned marriage threatened the legitimate lineages upon which status and privilege were built. Beverley was quick to praise Metoaka’s issue, 62 the baptism of early virginia “one Son, nam’d Thomas Rolfe, whose Posterity is at this Day in good Repute in Virginia.”2 The descendants of Metoaka and John Rolfe could claim the benefits of their paternal lineage—Englishness and good reputations . Implicit in Beverley’s account of the union of Metoaka and John Rolfe was the idea that Rolfe’s children inherited his Christianity. Legitimacy , lineage, and Christianity were indicators of status in England’s old and new worlds. Lineage, determined through marriage and legitimate reproduction, defined heritable privileges as well as heritable taints. For seventeenth-century English people, lineage was both familial and collective; it determined the status of individuals and of nations.3 The marriage of Metoaka and John Rolfe was built in part upon the notion that Christianity was transmissible from parent to child.4 In this understanding of lineage and heritability, Metoaka’s marriage subsumed her Indian heathenness and that undesirable quality was not transmitted to her offspring. For the English, Metoaka’s marriage symbolized heathen submission to proper religion and to English gender norms. Yet would unions between English people and Indians or Africans continue that pattern? It was a particularly pressing question in Virginia after the collapse of the Anglo-Indian commonwealth, and after 1660 increasing numbers of births resulted from illicit relationships between English and non-English partners. By the early eighteenth century, almost a third of prosecuted fornication cases were between English women and African men.5 Children from these relationships endangered English gender norms and flouted conventional ideas about legitimacy.6 How Anglo-Virginians came to understand these unions, between Christian and heathen, slave and free, was integral to the process of making race in their new world. Over the course of the seventeenth century, English people living in North America forbade access to Christian marriage for people they defined as heathen and devised new punishments for illicit sex between Christians and heathens. Christianity was a matter of lineage and blood as well as belief, and by the end of the century the English had condemned offspring produced in a union of one Christian and one non-Christian to perpetual paganism. Regulating sex and marriage was therefore a mechanism for defining and controlling lineage and for linking religious affiliation and race. While in England ideas about lineage, blood, and religion were in large part...