Jamestown, Virginia, March 1622. After fifteen years of tension, open war between English colonial settlers and their Indian neighbors had finally come to Virginia. Relations had never been friendly and violent clashes were common since the English colonists had managed to establish themselves along the tidewater peninsulas of the Virginia shore. In the five years leading up to 1622, when the proprietors of the Virginia Company discovered the lucrative crop of tobacco, the colony’s population stabilized, and then tripled. With the population surge came the expansion of colonial farming, including the need for pastureland to raise pigs and cattle. Alarmed at this invasion, the Powhatan Indians who had long dominated the region decided to eliminate the threat once and for all. Catching the English settlements of Virginia by surprise on March 22, 1622, Indian attackers swiftly killed 347 colonists—roughly a third of the colony’s population—and completely destroyed several villages and farms.1
While the ensuing war, which lasted intermittently for a decade, pitted against each other two groups of people seeking to inhabit the same territory, it was much more than a competition for land. The colonists and the Powhatans were two very distinct groups of people, divided by language, custom, technology, race—and probably above all, religion. Christianity was utterly foreign to the Powhatans, incomprehensible, even nonsensical. They resented the colonists’ promises to win them to Christianity as much as they did the crowding of their space. Not only did the Indians already have their own indigenous faith, they realized that conversion to Christianity was the first step toward total assimilation and the loss of their traditional way of life. Understandably, the Powhatans feared and hated the English nation and the Protestant faith in equal measure. The famed Pocahontas, after all, had involuntarily converted to Christianity, married an Englishman, adopted an English name, and moved to England—where she died in 1617, less than a year after arriving.2
And the Powhatans had reason to fear. The Virginia Company had been established with an intense Protestantism typical of the religious hothouse that was seventeenth-century England. As God’s chosen people, their faith gave the English confidence that the land they settled in the New World was rightfully theirs. “The first objection,” the Reverend Robert Gray preached in a 1609 sermon to christen the Virginia Company’s initiative, “is by what right or warrant we can enter into the land of these Savages, take away their rightfull inheritance from them, and plant ourselves in their places, being unwronged or unprovoked by them.” Believing that only the Devil stood in their way, the English assumed that the Indians were in league with the forces of Hell. “Satan visibly and palpably raignes there, more then in any other known place of the world,” claimed one settler. Another concluded that the Indians had “great witches among them” and were “very familiar with the Devill.”3 Thus when war broke out in 1622, it promised to be a holy war, a contest over identity as well as land.
While the Indians possessed the element of surprise, the colonists had the greater advantages of superior military technology and a steady transatlantic supply of provisions and reinforcements. Because the colonists had believed they were at peace with the Indians, a deep sense of betrayal fueled their anger. The “miserable wretches,” railed one, had “despised Gods great mercies” bestowed so kindly by the Virginians. No longer. Reeling from a single-day loss of a third of their number, the colonists held little back in retaliating. They were careful not to exterminate the Indians entirely—their annual corn harvest was too valuable a source of food—but over the next ten years Virginia militiamen waged a war of societal attrition by burning Indian villages and crops and targeting Indian noncombatants as well as warriors. In one infamous episode, after inviting several hundred Powhatans to negotiate peace terms, English officials poisoned the tea drunk to celebrate the signing of a treaty. Over 250 Indians died.4
In a war fought with little regard to limits, the use of faith to outline the objectives and methods of fighting was in keeping with the religious traditions of early colonial America. Protestantism provided the colonists a mental map of the world, both Old and New, and helped them navigate the cultural and physical challenges of their transplanted society. Faith also provided a bedrock of moral support through incredibly trying times. Both before and after the 1622 war, Virginia’s authorities declared holy days—of fasting and thanksgiving—to celebrate victory, remember the dead, and praise God for deliverance. But the Indians could also use Christianity as a weapon against the colonists. The next (and last) large-scale war between Virginians and Indians came in 1644, when Powhatan warriors gained total surprise by attacking on Maundy Thursday, a holy day before Easter when they knew the colonists would be at rest and unprepared. The Indians knew just how central religion was to colonial society.5
Exemplified by Virginia’s wars with the Powhatans, the first decades of English colonization established some of the foundational principles of what would later become American foreign relations. The English who agitated for the establishment of American colonies, and especially those who actually sailed across the Atlantic to build a new society, were motivated by a set of core assumptions about the value of who they were and what they did. These assumptions, what might be called an ideology of securing liberty and prosperity through expansion, acted as an extremely powerful motor that drove the colonists’ engagement with the wider world. Most crucially, the English settlers believed, much as their American descendants would for centuries afterward, in their own exceptional virtue. They thought of themselves as more enlightened not only than the native peoples of the New World, but also their fellow Europeans, especially Roman Catholics. Just as important, this sense of innate moral superiority led the English to perceive their motives and actions as defensive, magnanimous, progressive, even benevolent. Often they were, but just as often these exceptionalist attitudes justified the expansion of empire and the most brutal means to achieve it.
Though religious faith varied widely throughout England’s American colonies, the fundamental faith-based ideology of expansion was not all that different in Boston than it was in Jamestown or Charleston. Indeed, despite its diversity in detail, a shared Christian faith was in general the only thing that tied virtually all the British colonists together. The (mostly) Protestant colonists believed themselves to be on a holy mission, blessed by God, to spread the Protestant faith through their own migration, the conversion of Indians, and the containment of Catholicism. English Protestants saw themselves as a chosen people destined to preserve their liberties by cultivating a new England overseas. The most important result of this endeavor was that it led the English to conflate the survival of a religious ideology—specifically, Protestantism—with the survival of the nation. Their own sense of physical security, in other words, became inextricably bound up with the fate of an idea. England could only be its true self if it remained Protestant, and it could only remain Protestant in a world where it was protected from the domineering ambitions of the Catholic Church. Should Catholicism prosper or Protestantism suffer, anywhere, the very security of England itself would be in danger—hence the “Protestant Cause” of solidarity between the English and their beleaguered fellow Protestants in Europe. Inhabiting the world’s one true bastion of political and religious liberty, the English had both a moral imperative and a defensive duty to spread their way of life as widely as they could. They owed themselves—and the world—no less.6
This Protestant exceptionalism would continue into the eighteenth century—the subject of Chapter 3—in a series of wars between Great Britain and its Catholic and Indian enemies that would last from 1689 to 1763. In the process of forever destroying the threat of the Catholic Antichrist and the Indian Satan, the British American colonists would begin to devise a more general theory of liberty, uniquely American in its conception and application, that married a libertarian Protestant church to a free republican government. Not coincidentally, the wars for empire unfolded within a framework of religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening.