“Nits Make Lice”
Genocidal Violence in Colonial America
When Europeans first settled in the New World in the seventeenth century, they came with an inherited set of ideas about how to subdue those whom they would soon declare to be savages. In ancient times, it was not uncommon for enemy combatants to either exterminate their foes or enslave them.1 First encounters in the New World included deep-seated fears that the Native population would plot revenge or attack a European colony that was already on the threshold of calamity. Those fears drove a mentality based on an “us versus them” dichotomy that demanded action. Such fears led to the death of thousands of Native people—men, women, and children—who were seen as collateral damage in what English colonialists viewed as “just wars.”2 Colonists also believed in a divine right to exterminate those whom they deemed uncivilized, and they compared their struggle with that of the Israelites. Increase Mather, preaching to his Puritan congregation in Boston in 1710, argued that “there are Just Wars which the Lord Himself calls men to engage in. . . . God has put a principle of self preservation into his Creatures.” Mather also used the example of the Israelites’ war against the Ammonites to show how “battles fought with the Enemies of God” should be waged: “Therefore the Children of Israel fought against them and slew them with a great Slaughter: This was just.”3 The colonists, determined to secure lanes of commerce, control, and jurisdiction, enacted the royal command to keep any group that might oppose British imperialism in check and to make those perceived to be in the way of progress “stand in fear.”4
Uniquely fashioned ideas about just warfare and its necessary tactics and casualties were fundamentally sustained by greed. The more the fledgling colonies prospered and cities grew, the more a culture of violence came to undergird the economies of the new settlements. What began with the enslavement of Native Americans in the early decades of English colonization quickly expanded into a system of institutionalized slavery that imported labor from Africa. The natural resources, climate, and landscape of the American South allowed the development of a networked agricultural economy producing primarily rice and tobacco and eventually cotton, which depended on an enslaved workforce. Such a system, sustained by exhibitions of violence, brute force, and dehumanization, became normalized for its executioners, even as it became symbolic of their own underlying fear of annihilation.
Wars of extermination were not born on American soil but were practiced in Western Europe before colonists crossed the Atlantic.5 The English waged wars of this type against the Irish over land, religious and cultural factionalism in the aftermath of the Christian Reformation, and mercantile interests in the new economy of the mid-sixteenth century. The slaughtering of hundreds of “manne, woman and childe” during the first Desmond Rebellion in Munster, Ireland, in 1569 was rationalized by Thomas Churchyard, an English author and soldier of fortune in the sixteenth century, as the most expedient way to end conflict, since “terrour . . . made short warres.” For after “thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freendes, lye on the ground before their faces,” the people would be reformed, and “universall peace, and subjection” would prevail. Churchyard further explained that killing the women of Irish soldiers was particularly effective because it ultimately led to the starvation of the “menne of warre,” who were incapable of taking care of “their Creates . . . their victualles, and other necessaries.”6 Churchyard was no doubt referencing the brutal policies of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the appointed governor of Munster, a pioneer of proprietor colonization and an English soldier who was known for piling the slaughtered heads of men, women, and children along the pathway to his tent after battle. In 1566 Gilbert placed the entire village of Munster under martial law. Indifferent to the townspeople’s surrender, he ordered their decapitation to set an example of what other Irish people might expect if they resisted English rule.7
Despite English tactics of slaughter, which they believed had “subdued the country,” many Irish did not concede defeat, and this led to even greater atrocities.8 For the English, the brutality of the wars in Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s was justified by claims that those fighting against colonization were barbarians and savages and therefore culturally inferior. Ideas of Irish barbarity and paganism were used to rationalize the imposition of martial law.9 To the English Privy Council, the Irish remained outside the realm of European standards of civilization. It was, they claimed, the duty of England to civilize barbarian people, as Rome had the ancient Brits. Ireland was a nation of “rebellious people” to whom “nothing but feare and force can teach dutie and obedience.”10 But even when they did comply, the Irish were ruthlessly murdered. Despite making unconditional submission to the Earl of Essex, and after three days and nights of “peace, sociality, and friendship” between Brian, the son of Felim Bacagh O’Neill, and the earl in 1574, “Brian . . . and all his people [were] put unsparingly to the sword, men, women, youths, and maidens. . . . This unexpected massacre . . . was sufficient cause of hatred and disgust of the English to the Irish.”11
This type of warfare was not reserved for those who were enemies of the English. As another incident in 1577 attests, “a horrible act of treachery was committed by the English of Leinster and Meath . . . upon that part of the people of Offally and Leix [Ireland] that remained in confederacy with them, and under their protection . . . they were all summoned to shew themselves . . . and on their arrival at that place they were surrounded on every side by four lines of soldiers and cavalry, who proceeded to shoot and slaughter them without mercy, so that not a single individual escaped, by flight or force.”12 And when the Irish remained loyal to Catholicism, despite the establishment of the Protestant Church of England, their loyalty fueled further ideas that they could not or would not assimilate. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this meant that the Irish faced either banishment from their lands or extermination until they respected the political will and cultural authority of England’s Queen Elizabeth I.
Genocidal warfare reached new heights as the English sought intentionally to achieve high casualties through military strategy in the seventeenth century. Historical accounts of the Irish rebellion against colonization and religious oppression in 1641 assert that from the beginning, the English Parliament, under the leadership of King Charles I, pressed for a war of extermination. By 1644 the Parliaments of both England and Scotland, which were engaged in civil war, passed ordinances that “no quarter be given to any Irish who came to England to the King’s aid.”13 There was brutality on both sides, and noncombatant populations were in constant jeopardy of becoming casualties of war.14 Nevertheless, the unprecedented and intentional slaughter of Irish people is well documented: “In one day eighty women and children in Scotland were flung over a high bridge into the water, solely because they were the wives and children of Irish soldiers” who were held there as prisoners of war. People from several villages in Ireland were deliberately trapped by fire in an enclave and “all burnt or killed—men, women, and children.”15 British ferocity was particularly memorable in the massacres of Drogheda and Wex-ford. Under the severe discipline and leadership of Oliver Cromwell, the lieutenant general of the English army in Ireland, at least three thousand people, “some women and children . . . were put to the sword on September 11 and 12, 1649.” Cromwell would later claim, “I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs.”16 John Nalson, an English clergyman and historian, was told by a captain in the English army that “no manner of Compassion or Discrimination was shewed either to Age or Sex, but that the little Children were promiscuously sufferers with the Gulley [large knife], and that if any who had some grains of Compassion reprehended the Soldiers for this unchristian inhumanity, they would scoffingly reply, Why? Nits will be Lice, and so would dispatch them.”17 It is at this point that “the saying ‘Nits will make lice,’ which was constantly employed to justify the murder of Irish children,” became part of English vernacular.18 The extermination of children was the ultimate solution in war, for it thwarted the possibility of revenge and made space for the settlement of a superior English race. It helped fulfill “the grand object of the Revolutionary Party . . . to carry out the wild scheme of unpeopling Ireland of the Irish, and planting it anew with English.”19 The antecedent of these war tactics began nearly a century earlier, but the English policies that sanctioned the final conquest of Ireland, that legitimized possession by force and colonization as God’s will, would continue to be employed in the subsequent conquest of America.20
When the first settlers came to America, they anticipated that there would be trouble in the region. Historian Patrick M. Malone states that “the transmission of concepts of total warfare from Europe to America” was evident as early as 1637, but it began much earlier.21 Continuity is evident in 1578, when Queen Elizabeth gave Sir Humphrey Gilbert a six-year patent to “discover, finde, search out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreys and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people . . . to have, hold, occupie . . . forever.”22
Theories about natural “rights and liberties” that prevailed during the English Reformation were conspicuously absent from the rhetoric concerning colonization of the New World.23 What emerges instead is what historian Francis Jennings called the “conquest myth.” Europeans claimed that the New World was “virgin land” settled by savages who were not Christians. Native people were “demons” and “beasts in the shape of men,” and Europeans often refused to recognize them as fully human.24 The designation of indigenous and eventually African people as savages by clergy and government authorities alike profoundly loosened the boundaries of just warfare. Because “savages” were viewed as “irrational” and uncivilized people, they were seen as committing senseless acts of “perpetual violence” rather than being capable of practicing the “rational,” organized form of violence that the English claimed defined European warfare.25 These differences—much like race—were used to justify not only conquest but also enslavement and extermination, and many English settlers who gained their military experience in Ireland had the confidence and formula for how they would induce the “lesser breeds” to cooperate.26
The clergy in the seventeenth century reinforced ideas that connected savagery to violence and heathens to damnation. From William Symmonds in England to Increase Mather in what is now Massachusetts, religious leaders were central to shaping and affirming conceptions of war in the American colonies. In 1609 King James I ordered church ministers to use their pulpit to encourage the English to Christianize North America by settling in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Rev. Symmonds was one of the first ministers to do so in England. He preached that a missionary impulse should guide colonization and that, like “Worthy Joshuah and most worthy David,” England, the country of God’s chosen people, had a moral mandate to expand so that its “dominion should be from sea to sea.”27 In another sermon, the English reverend Robert Johnson argued that the intent was not to remove the “savages. . . . Our intrusion into their possessions shall tend to their great good and in no way to their hurt, unless”—and here is the conundrum that indigenous people faced—“as unbridled beastes, they procure it to themselves.”28 Rev. Robert Gray, however, rather bluntly outlined the theocratic justifications and militant intentions for English settlement. Gray claimed that the English had always been “more warlike” than other nations and that “we may justly say, as the children of Israel say here to Joshua, we are a great people.” Joshua, “a faithfull and godly Prince,” responsible for Israel’s holy conquest and the annihilation of the idolaters settled in the land of Canaan, seemed to Gray emblematic of the mission that English adventurers faced in Virginia. Their task was to “bring the barbarous and savage people to the civill and Christian kinde of government, under which they may learne how to live holily, justly, and soberly in this world . . . rather then to destroy them, or utterly to roote them out.” If that did not work, however, Gray, who had never been to America, made clear that “we are warranted by this direction of Ioshua, to destroy wilfull and convicted Idolaters, rather then to let them live, if by no other meanes they can be reclaimed.”29
The mission to encourage settlement in Virginia was effective, and the English arrived in the Americas with a “crusading mentality.”30 God had given them, as superior people, the right to conquer those without religion and without civilization. Through these culturally driven beliefs and religious interpretations, the English believed themselves to be like the Israelites, and they believed that God, as described in the Old Testament, was a “man of warre.” If indigenous Americans caused trouble and resisted European settlement through violent means, God directed them, as he had the Hebrews, to “save alive nothing that breatheth.”31
The fact that there was no central authority governing and shaping policy in the early colonies enabled the colonists to determine the ways in which warfare was waged and how English expansion was rationalized. As such, wars fought in colonial America were distinctive for their brutality. They were more violent and terroristic in nature than wars in Europe and “were waged with a macabre intensity not seen in Europe for generations after the seventeenth century.”32 The English saw Native Americans as dangerous foes “who seemed to possess some strange form of animal cunning, who treated prisoners cruelly, and who would not fight in expected ways.”33 These differences in military culture had a profound impact in shaping future English attempts to decimate and remove entire indigenous populations and ultimately led to Europeans giving up their organized crusade to Christianize Native Americans. As early as 1697, Virginia governor Edmund Andros remarked that “no endeavors to convert the Indians to Christianity have ever been heard of.”34
Jamestown, Virginia, was developed in 1607 through a charter granted by King James I to a joint stock company, the Virginia Company of London. These early colonists intended to settle on the land, trade with indigenous peoples, and search for commodities and raw materials to export.35 The subsequent European invasion of the region created a hostile environment that resulted in a rise in Native American military organization.36 Ultimately, Native Americans in Virginia were almost entirely extinguished from the region through either disease, wars of extermination, or enslavement. The few who survived and remained in the region became marginalized and subsumed by legislation that lumped Native peoples and Africans together as savages and racial others.
A portrait of European conquest and warfare with the Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia can be found in the narrative of George Percy, a wealthy nobleman from England. In A Trewe Relacyon, Percy stated that he and his men followed the orders of Thomas West, 12th Baron de La Warr and the first governor of Virginia, to attack the Paspahegh and Chickahominy people in 1610. Driven by revenge, they killed men, women, and children and captured the “Quene and her Children” in a brutal campaign. Although Percy expressed reluctance to killing the captives, he acquiesced under great pressure from his fellow officers and allowed them to kill the children by throwing them “overboard and shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water. Yett for all this Crewellty the Sowldiers weare nott well pleased and I had mutche to doe To save the queens lyfe for thatt Tyme.” Upon reaching shore, de La Warr, who had served as a soldier in Ireland, seemed displeased that the queen had been left alive and thought it best to “Burne her.” Percy, who claimed to be sickened already by the amount of “Blood shedd that day,” then agreed to “geve her a quicker dispatche” either by shooting her or by the sword.37
The manner in which the English settlers treated the Native people was not without its consequences. In the context of broad-scale European pressures for land and the development of tobacco as an export crop, the murder of a revered and important leader named Nemattanow, or Jack the Feather, of the Powhatan Confederacy fueled an already tense situation that erupted in 1622 with a counterattack by the Pamunkey against the English. Approximately one-third of the Virginia settlers were killed in what was called a massacre. The English were infuriated that “under the bloudy and barbarous hands of the perfidious and inhumane people, contrary to all lawes of God and men, of Nature and Nations, three hundred forty seven men, women, and children [were killed], most by their owne weapons; and not being content with taking away life alone, they fell after againe upon the dead, making as well as they could, a fresh murder, defacing, dragging, and mangling the dead carkasses into many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision, with base and brutish triumph.”38 The 1622 massacre shocked the Jamestown colony and eventually contributed to the collapse of the Virginia Company of London. Public confidence also waned in England in response to rumors of continued conditions of near starvation and devastating diseases in the colony.39
The subsequent retaliation for the attack, however, was considered not only justified but also a blessing for the English, as Native Americans, “these beasts,” were viewed as an obstruction and nuisance to white settlement and expansion.40 As Edward Waterhouse, the Virginia Company secretary, put it in his report: “Our hands which before were tied wit gentlenesse and faire usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Sauvages, not untying the Knot, but cutting it: So that we . . . may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us.”41 Capt. John Smith, however, a soldier of fortune in Europe and former president of the council in Jamestown, disagreed. He believed that although the settlers did “have just cause to destroy them by all meanes possible,” for the good of the settlement it would be better to avoid having to subjugate the Native Americans. Yet Smith admitted that it would be easier to “civilize them by conquest then faire meanes; for the [first] one may be made at once, but their civilizing will require a long time and much industry.”42 In retaliation, armed forces were sent out to destroy all Indians residing in the areas of the James and York Rivers. Two years later it was customary for colonists to attack Indian settlements every November, March, and July with the hope of “rooting them out for being longer a people upon the face of the Earth.”43
Through oral tradition, a man known as Uncle Moble Hobson’s father, who admitted he had not been a witness, nonetheless transmitted the story of how Native American people along the York and Poquoson Rivers were eliminated after “de white man come.” Hobson, a former slave of mixed descent, relayed that his father told him, “Dis whut de white man do. . . . Well, dey cross de Potomac an’ dey has to fight de injuns an’ dey cross de York an’ fit some more tell de kilt all de Injuns or run em’ way. When de cross de Poquoson dey fine de Injuns ain’t aimin’ tuh fight but dey kilt de men an’ tek de injun women fo’ de wives. Coursen dey warn’t no marryin’ dem at dat time.”44 The exact time frame of Hobson’s story has not been verified, but the Poquoson River was named after an Algonquin group affiliated with the Powhatan Confederacy that had inhabited the area before its colonization by the English. The Algonquins, who were supposedly hostile to the English, would certainly have had good reason to be antagonistic, as the colonists apparently opened Algonquin land for English settlement in 1628. Poquoson became part of York County in 1642–43; this is when the name of the Charles River was changed to the York River. It is conceivable that what Hobson relays is the removal of the Poquoson inhabitants through the retaliatory campaigns in the aftermath of the 1622 massacre, ending with what appears to be unrelenting English aggression.
At face value, the assertion that the atrocity committed by the Pamunkey tribe forced the English to retaliate appears justified, except that many historians concur that at that time, Native peoples did not generally practice exterminatory warfare. After contact with Europeans, however, Native Americans learned quickly that it was in their best interest to operate in what would become the “American way”: applying English techniques of massive slaughter that indigenous people themselves frequently experienced during English attacks.45 Although chronicler and writer William Strachey asserts that Powhatan exterminated the Chesapeakes and many of the Piankatanks due to a divine prophecy, the fact that Powhatan did so does not negate the fact that it was culturally viewed as wrong and against their currently practiced traditions, in which women were valued for their agricultural skills and as mothers.46 Strachey supports this analysis by further noting that “they seldom make warrs for lands or goods, but for women and children, and principally for revenge. . . . [T]he weroances [officers or commanders], women or children, they put not to death, but keep them captives. They have a method in warre.”47 Although archaeological evidence suggests that Native Americans did practice indiscriminate violence against women and children in the past, it is not clear that the reasons for the carnage were generated by ideas of extermination. What is clear, as Christina Snyder argues, is that when the English colonists arrived in North America, these practices had changed as a result of heightened intertribal warfare and plunging Native populations due to European diseases. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, most women and children were either captured for sale or held as captives by other tribes to ensure the survival of various Mississippian clans.48 By the seventeenth century, the tribes had evolved, and the Native American approach to warfare common to the Eastern Woodland nations became known as the “Law of Innocence.” It did not allow for the killing of noncombatants—women, children, and elderly people. Europeans were not responding to savagery; they were creating an environment in which it thrived. And Native American people living in the eastern part of North America, from the Great Lakes region to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Great Plains, learned to come to terms with an enduring environment of hostility.
Despite the fact that, collectively, Native Americans in Virginia were substantially weakened by the persistent aggression of Europeans and the threat of Native tribes from bordering regions, the English continued to rationalize exterminatory warfare against the indigenous people in the region and foment fear in cultural and racial terms. In 1666 the English government ordered the militia to exterminate the Doeg, Nanzemond, Portobacco, and Patawomeck tribes residing in Rappachannock County because of their apparent harassment of a few settlers in the upper portions of that region. According to Governor Sir William Berkeley, this was “for revenge,” and he ordered that “for the prevention of future mischeifs that the towns of Monzation, Nanzimond and Port Tobacco with the whole nation of the Doegs and Potamacks [Pata-womecks] be forthwith prsecuted with war to their utter destruction if possible and that their women and children and their goods . . . be disposed of.”49 This action followed a 1655 law that made it legal to kill Native Americans if it was perceived that they were up to “mischief.”50 It is impossible to know the full outcome of British efforts, but there is evidence that whoever was left of the Patawomeck tribe abandoned their homeland, and there is no further mention of the Patawomecks in the extant historical documents of English colonial history.51 Some Nanzemond, however, appear to still have been in Virginia in the late 1670s.52 And enough of the Doeg Indians apparently survived to continue their aggressive resistance against white settlement on their lands in July 1675.53
The rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon, an English colonist, in 1676 was, at its core, a call for racial extermination as a tool to resolve the problems of continued contestations between Native Americans and Europeans over land. In this first of civil actions against English imperial power, Bacon led a coalition of disgruntled white yeoman farmers against the colonial royal governor of Virginia, William Berkeley. Bacon and fur trader William Byrd I, who had lands along the James River, charged that Berkeley was not sufficiently concerned with protecting the Virginia frontier homelands from Doeg and Susquehanna attacks because of his trade monopoly with Native Americans in the region. Berkeley’s purported neglect of the colonists’ needs heightened the pressure on an already diminished indigenous population.54
At the center of this conflict, though, was whether it was appropriate for the colonists to be at “war with all Indians which come not in with their armies, and give Hostages for their fidelity and to ayd against all others.”55 If those who were left of a once-sizeable and influential confederation of peoples, 2,900 members of the Powhatan tribe, did not comply with British demands, then the burgeoning English population of over 30,000 threatened, “We will spare none.”56 Native Americans would have to completely surrender themselves to British rule or else face certain destruction. The killing of Bacon’s overseer during one of the Doeg and the Susquehanna raids perhaps made the issue a personal one for Bacon. But most of the English citizens siding with Bacon believed in the “law of nature,” which required that “wee defend ourselves before they oppose us . . . take their usual advantage . . . and soe destroy us.”57 Perhaps promises of freedom encouraged the involvement of the eighty slaves and twenty servants who also participated.58 Nevertheless, the “common cry” that there was no distinction between “Friend or Foe Soe they be Indians” fostered what historian Kathleen Brown calls an “ethic of racist violence” that pushed all Native Americans outside of the protection of English law.59
Bacon and his army of three hundred were able to only moderately make good on their promise to kill “those that will destroy us,” but what the records do reveal is that his army killed men, women, and possibly children60 In one altercation, Bacon and his rebels were successful after stumbling upon Pamunkey Indians who “did not at all oppose, but fled, being followed by Bacon and his Forces killing and taking them Prisoners.” The queen of Pamunkey, Cockacoeske, fled with a ten-year-old boy, fearful of returning to her village because “shee happened to meet with a deade Indian woman lying in the way being one of her own nation; which struck such terror in the Queene that fearing their cruelty by that gastly example shee went on her first intended way into wild woodes where shee was lost amd missing from her people for ffourteen dayes.” An unidentified elderly Indian woman who was the queen’s nurse had been killed earlier after Bacon ordered “his soldiers to knock her in the head, which they did, and they left her dead on the way.” Perhaps this was the woman left in “the way” that the queen encountered while making her escape. This woman had remained loyal to her queen by not guiding Bacon and his rebels to the queen’s encampment; instead, she led them around for more than a day until at last they discovered her attempt to impede their efforts. In another incident, a “half starved” Native American woman apparently met a similar fate, as did a handful of men and an equal number of women who were attempting to flee from their encampment. Bacon managed to come away with forty-five captives, which he proudly held as plunder.61 Despite the rebels’ limited success in locating the Native American camps, the Pamunkey population was seriously decimated after Bacon’s Rebellion62 Ironically, Bacon believed that it was the Pamunkeys’ committed friendship with the English that made them the greatest threat, “being acquainted and knowing both the manners, customs, and nature of our People, and the Strength, Situation and advantages of the country and so capable of doing hurt and damage to the English.”63
Bacon was the standard-bearer for all the English hopes “of destroying the Heathen,” which continued even after the rebellion was put down. One petition from Isle of Wight County requested that the subsequent commissioners sent by the king continue Bacon’s efforts of “war with the Indians that we may have done with them.” In Nansemond County, the petitioners also advocated that “all Indians ought to be killed.” In their view, this was not only a border issue but also a problem that everyone within the province of Virginia wanted addressed: the removal of Native Americans who were “all of a colour.”64
After 1676, and because of Nathaniel Bacon’s perseverance, the way of life for Native American communities in Virginia fundamentally changed. A series of laws were passed that curtailed the liberties of Native Americans. Deprived of protected status as indigenous people, terrorized Native Americans faced the options of death or enslavement. Voluntary exile was their only alternative. Now Native communities became racialized, as communities of color, and indigenous people engaged in war were to be made slaves if captured. Enslavement made war profitable for Jamestown and incentivized those soldier-citizens who might have previously been reluctant to join in initiatives like Bacon’s Rebellion.65 By 1682 any Native person traveling or living in Virginia could be legally enslaved.66
Anglo constructions of racial difference that did not distinguish between Native American slaves and African slaves functioned to diminish the Native American community and delegitimize their claims to their ancestral homelands. Just as they were being extirpated from the regions or enslaved, Africans were being imported as a new source of labor. Although the first “20 and odd Negroes” bought “at the best and easiest rate” were able to integrate into Virginia colonial society as enslaved and eventually free people, fourteen of these first Africans were distinguished by race in the 1623 census.67 The forced arrival of Africans in Virginia increased rapidly in the 1680s and 1690s, and this expanding population led to the creation of racial distinctions between unfree and free laborers. The potential growth in the number of racially ambiguous colonists threatened social stability, despite the 1662 legislation that made it unlawful for any Christian to have sexual relations with a “negro.” Statutes already in place established that the children born from these unions would follow the “condition of the mother,” but these laws were hard to enforce. When Virginia lawmakers revisited this issue in 1691, they made the punishment for interracial marriage banishment. This was the first time that Virginia legislators used the word “white,” and they specifically identified that the undesirable partners were “Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians.” These statutes were created to put “all non-whites in ‘their place’” and to prevent mixed-race populations from continuing to grow, which they did anyway, in exponential fashion, from 1690 to the 1720s.68 After 1785 all mulattoes, as they were called, were considered to be mixed with African blood. Any Native Americans who were found to have “become one fourth mixed with the negro race” were by law “treated as free negroes or mulattoes.”69 Moreover, slave owners and traders made no distinctions between African slaves and Native American slaves. Both groups were sent out into the fields, lived in the same quarters, and were employed in trades or as domestics. They were renamed by their masters, wore the same type of coarse clothing and sometimes were without shoes, and generally suffered similar legal and extralegal debasement.70 Both African and Native American males were forced to do work considered women’s work in their cultures, and they hid in the swamps to evade white violence. Both groups were traumatized due to a general disregard for their traditional burial practices, as in their view, the lack of proper burial rituals prohibited the spirit from reaching the afterlife.71 Much like African demographics for the slave trade, three Native people would die for every one Native person that was enslaved. By making all Native Americans who did not voluntarily remove themselves or did not become “pseudowhite” indistinguishable within the categories of “Negro” and “slave,” white Virginians used race and bondage to further usurp indigenous possession of the land.72 Those Native Americans who were considered uncivilizable and African by law were stripped of their title to any land in the American South. They were and in many cases still are no longer regarded as indigenous people.73
Indeed, a 1705 statute sought to close any legal distinction between Africans and Native Americans in Virginia. It specifically allowed that “all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not Christians in their native country . . . shall be slaves.” It further dictated that “all Negroes, mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion shall be held to be real estate.” The statute was later clarified by the court so that executors of an estate could treat “Negroes . . . as no otherwise than Horses or Cattle.” The statute also allowed that the killing of a slave who resisted enslavement was no longer a felony. It became illegal, however, for any Negro, mulatto, or Indian, whether enslaved or free, to fight or strike “any Christian, not being negro, mulatto or Indian.” The enslaved could no longer carry arms, or own cattle, or leave home without permission. Slaves also faced the possibility of “dismembering” as a means of controlling those who would run away by “terrifying others from the like practices.”74 Because the English engaged in and subsequently defeated Native Americans in wars and because of the legal definition of many Native Americans as nonwhites, they as a people were never beyond the reach of enslavement or white fears of a war between the races.
In Notes from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson canonized the idea in 1789 that a state of war always existed between master and slave. Echoing the fears of other colonists, like Col. William Byrd II and the future president, James Madison, Jefferson expressed his belief in the possible “extermination of the one race or the other,” reflecting the view that large numbers of enslaved people were a dangerous threat to those who were their masters and to whites generally.75 Jefferson, however, did not make the distinction between those slaves who were of indigenous descent, those who were of African descent, and those who were of a racially mixed heritage. By 1789 Native Americans who were racially mixed or enslaved had certainly become part of that group that Jefferson and other white colonists found to be an incompatible element of the Republic. And for Jefferson, chattel slavery and racialized ideas of who could be civilized required that certain people “be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”76
The clarion call for the destruction of all Native Americans, defined by colonists as uncivilized heathens who were an obstruction to white settlement in the region, did not go unheeded. English concerns about living amongst slaves did not exclude Native Americans, who, as racial outcasts, found themselves outside the boundaries of colonial law by 1705. By the 1820s Native Americans in Virginia had been completely pushed off most of their tribal lands and into the black community because of white anxiety, which saw black and Native Americans as fundamentally the same, legally and racially.77 That is, both groups were considered antagonistic and resistant to white supremacy. This was true in Virginia and true for the Native Americans in New England as well.
The Puritans arrived in the Northeast with ideas that supported the use of exterminatory warfare against Native Americans, whom the Puritans believed were God’s enemies. The chronicled animosity between Europeans and Native Americans in the South, well established by 1620, influenced the Puritan settlers’ views of indigenous people. Eventually, the Puritans turned a few aggressive actions into a mandate to fulfill God’s glory by waging wars of extermination. Thereafter, a substantial number of the already decimated Native American populations in New England suffered enslavement and removal to other British colonies in the South and the West Indies.
Although the Puritans in America believed themselves to be like the Hebrews, who fought wars for self-preservation, their wars often turned into wars of conquest.78 When Puritan Separatists left England in the pursuit of religious freedom, they dreamed of reestablishing pure Protestantism in the virgin land of North America. They wanted to create a theologically driven civil society based upon the Old Testament, a society they believed existed in “sacred time,” that time before people began to live structured lives (known as “profane time"). As God’s new chosen people, Puritans believed themselves justified in their decisions about what constituted legitimate land tenure and their divine right to Indian lands in Massachusetts.79 The pandemics that decimated the once-populous regions of Massachusetts and Connecticut made, according to the Puritans, large swaths of land available for settlement. And, as had occurred in Virginia, Anglo appropriations of Native land created the environment in which Native peoples sporadically attacked white settlers. Eventually, the increased pressure over land tenure became the catalyst for the first war between Anglos and Indians in Connecticut.
Most of the historical accounts of the Pequot War reveal that it did not differ from other wars between Anglos and Indians in terms of what precipitated the conflict.80 The struggle to mitigate English encroachment, as the English pushed forward to colonize the lands of indigenous people, was the reason wars generally began. What occurred in 1637 was no exception. What is unique, however, is the fact that the leaders of this effort, Maj. John Mason, Capt. John Underhill, and Lt. Philip Vincent, wrote detailed eyewitness accounts about the incident, albeit from the European perspective.
According to John Mason, the Pequots were a “warlike people” who were angry that the English had built Fort Saybrook in the Indian territory of what is now known as Connecticut. They attempted to agitate the English by constantly attacking individual settlers and killing their livestock in the hopes that they would be forced to leave the region. Having already signed away their rights to the Connecticut River valley, the Pequots were determined that English settlement would not permanently expand to the mouth of the Connecticut River.81 From 1634 to 1637 the three tribes living in the area, the Narragansetts, the Mohegans, and the Pequots, managed to kill thirty-two colonists and to frustrate the militiamen residing at Fort Saybrook, “keeping almost a constant siege.” This led Mason to conclude that a just war could be waged and that “it pleased God so to stir up the Hearts of all Men in general.” The consensus was that the Pequots had brought the “necessity . . . to engage in an offensive and defensive War” on themselves.82 Mason took ninety militiamen and recruited five hundred Narragansett Indians, who, according to Mason, were enemies of the Pequots, and traveled across Rhode Island in order to surprise them at their “two Forts,” or villages. By the time the Englishled forces arrived in Connecticut, it was too late to attack both “Forts” that day, so they made the decision to attack the closest one first. With Captain Underhill leading half of the men, they entered the “Fort” from both sides with the intention “to destroy them by the Sword.” They did not see many warriors, and the ones they did see fled from them and hid. Captain Mason then decided, “We must Burn them,” and the men immediately set the entire village ablaze. Mason set fire to the west entrance, while Underhill set fire to the south. Everything was consumed by the flames. The men blocked the two exits from the village so that no one could escape the fire, and those who did “perished by the Sword.”83 Underhill noted that other Europeans questioned “why you should be so furious? Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But [Underhill said] I would refer you to David’s war. . . . [S]ometimes the scripture declareth women and children must perish with the parents. . . . We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”84
The English continued to pursue and destroy as many Pequots as they could find in what historian Francis Jennings described as “one long atrocity.” Six hundred to seven hundred Pequots died in what the English called the “Mistick Fight.” In Mason’s view, “it was the Lord’s Doings, and it is marvelous in our Eyes!” The final affront was that the “Pequots were then bound by Covenant, That none should inhabit their native Country, nor should any of them be called Pequots any more.” The intent was to cause the erasure of their bodies and their culture, forever subsuming the Pequots into the “Moheags and Narragansetts,” who took them as payment for helping in the English war.85 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,” Mason proclaimed, who “was pleased to smite our Enemies . . . [who would] give us their Land for an Inheritance.”86 By 1660, Capt. Leif Lion Gardener observed, only “remnants of the Pequot” lived in a town called Groton, where approximately forty Pequots lived on the useless “land reserved . . . [for] them” and where most of them, “mixed . . . with Negro and white blood,” were even “more vicious and not so decent.”87 Their situation would remain marginalized, as Pequot William Apess observed in 1831 “a small remnant left from the massacre of the whites, who are now lingering in a miserable condition.”88 The Narragansetts who fought behind the English in the Pequot War were appalled by what had occurred. They came to Underhill afterward to commend the English on their victory “but cried Mach it, mach it; that is, It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.” From the Narragansetts’ point of view, there was no honor in a war waged in this way.89
Lieutenant Gardener, reaffirming English ideas of exterminatory warfare, remembered that the Pequots queried him and his men before the Mystic battle whether “we did use to kill women and children.” They wanted to know whether extermination was part of traditional English warfare or if it was unique to war with Native people in North America. Gardener declared that “they should see that hereafter.” The Pequots then asserted after some thought that they too “can kill them as mosquetoes, and we will go to Connectecott and kill men, women, and children.”90 They never got the chance. According to the General Court of Massachusetts, the “right of conquest” and “revenge of innocent blood of the English” justified the wars against the Pequots. English law aligned with the desire of the settlers: to engage indigenous people in a type of warfare that allowed for the annihilation of men, women, and children living in the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut regions.91
The fact that there was clear intent by the English to massacre the people within the Mystic River Pequot village demonstrates that a preexisting template for war was in place, challenging historian Adam Hirsch’s assertions that this military culture was only prevalent during “actual warfare,” that it occurred in a moment of passion.92 Extermination was implemented and commonplace in colonial America. It was used by Europeans up and down the Atlantic coast as a strategy for the removal of indigenous people who stood in the way of “civilized progress.”93 The American way of warfare was no longer defensive. It was offensive; it became the way to clear the frontier of “barbarian savages,” to make way for the civilized yeoman farmer and the future triumph of America’s Manifest Destiny.94
The replication of the strategies used in the Pequot War continued well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only in New England and Virginia but also in emerging colonies such as New York, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.95 This was certainly true in King Philip’s War in Massachusetts, where, as Increase Mather pointed out, “many men, women and children were burned in their wigwams” and “Barbikew’d.”96 In fairness, both sides incurred astounding casualties. Several thousand English settlers lost their lives during King Philip’s Pan-Indian effort to prevent the entire colonization of his land. Native people remember King Philip, or Pokunoket chief Metacom, as a “hero” who “died a martyr to his cause.”97 The best estimates suggest that three thousand to six thousand Native Americans were killed. Significant numbers of the Native Americans who eventually surrendered subsequently suffered enslavement. Most were sold to the West Indian plantation market, much to Increase Mather’s pleasure, facilitating the near extinction of indigenous people in New England.98
English settlers in New England effectively propagandized that Native Americans should be condemned for their way of waging war.99 Yet one must wonder at the dissemblance here. When Duke Holland, a member of the Wyandot tribe living near Detroit at the onset of the Revolutionary War, questioned a British order to kill “all the rebels,” even the women and children, believing surely “it was meant that they should kill men only,” he was told, “No, no . . . kill all; nits breed lice.” Holland, however, rejected this idea. He recognized, no doubt, that this practice negatively affected his own people. Thus, honoring his own cultural traditions and the Law of Innocence, which forbade the killing or torture of noncombatants—women, children, and the elderly—he decided not to join the British military against the American patriots, nor did the sixteen tribes under him.100
After the Pequot War and King Philip’s War, many woodland Native Americans were sold into slavery. Warfare practices encapsulated in New England codes of law were used as early as 1641 to affirm that bond slavery was lawful if the persons were “Captives taken in just warres.” The crime of instigating warfare against the Puritan colonists, however, led to the decision that any Indians indulging in “hostile practices” should be removed “either to serve or be shipped out and exchanged for Negroes.”101 This same rationale was used in Virginia to justify Native American (and African) enslavement; but the collision of these ideas, just wars and the enslavement of Native Americans, was most pervasive in the Carolina region.
From the very beginning, English colonists engaged in warfare in South Carolina to foster Native American enslavement. Traders in Native American slaves followed a market-driven approach that was not only uniquely gendered but also attentive to age. As greater numbers of colonists settled the region, Native Americans resisted the loss of their women, children, and land. They became an enemy who required not only subjugation through enslavement but also complete decimation and removal.
When King Charles II issued land grants to reward eight of his loyal supporters after his restoration to the throne in 1663, he also intended to monopolize the wealth that the eastern part of America had to offer. After the English removed the Dutch from the mid-Atlantic region and the provinces of New York, New Jersey, and later Pennsylvania and Delaware were established, Carolina became the southernmost region of settlement. White colonists, Charles II believed, would provide a buffer against the possibilities of Spanish and later French invasion. Thus, the English hoped to establish control over trade with the powerful Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations.102
Carolina’s founding occurred just as the interest in buying and selling slaves in the colonies intensified. The region quickly surpassed the other colonies in the exportation of Native American slaves for use in other British territories and in response to the high demand for slaves in the West Indies. Exports of slaves exceeded imports in South Carolina until 1715.103 Yet, according to plantation owner Robert Southwell, Carolina was particularly dependent on slave labor due to the difficulty of obtaining white labor, especially Irish labor. Apparently, the Irish feared returning to or becoming entrapped in labor agreements with the English that might echo their experience as unfree laborers in the West Indies after the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford.104
Eventually, as the Native American population along the coast diminished and as the demand for labor on the islands and in South Carolina increased, the colonists pushed farther into the interior. They encouraged Native Americans to fight each other and to betray previous alliances in order to find additional Natives for sale. Although slavery existed among southern Native Americans, they only enslaved “others” who were outside their clan. Slavery, however, took on a “new” dimension after Western contact, as did the Native American enslavement of prisoners of war.105 Southern Native American nations—the Westos, Savannahs, Apalachees, Lower and Upper Creeks, Yamasees, Tuscaroras, and others—became deeply invested in the slave traffic. Much like the West African nations across the Atlantic, they too exchanged slaves for guns, powder, knives, hatchets, and rum.106 Over time, the English in Carolina became more active in the sale of slaves than the English in any other colony.
In the first two centuries of English contact, many thousands of southern Indians became slaves. The exact numbers are not calculable because there are few extant records of their sale or export to the West Indies in the early colonial period. Native Americanist Alan Gallay estimates that thirty thousand to fifty thousand southern Native Americans were sold in the British slave trade from 1670 to 1715.107 What we know for sure is that within fifty years of settlement, from 1663 to 1715, 50 percent of the southern indigenous population had disappeared due either to death, exportation, or enslavement.108 Historian Gary Nash asserts that South Carolina was singular in its “naked exploitation of the indigenous people.” Dr. Francis Le Jau, a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in South Carolina, observed in 1712, however, that the intention of the English was more problematic than exploitation. Le Jau admitted that “we think to destroy the whole nation, that is kill the Men and make the women and children slaves, this is the way of our Warrs upon the like.”109
Although Native women were also valued for their agricultural skills by Europeans, the enslavement of predominantly women and children in Carolina was to have the same effect as extermination. Since enslaved Native American women would not have children born within their own ethnic bloodline and raised within their own community, racial and cultural extinction would occur over time.110 Not only were their descendants not viewed as indigenous people, many of the Native children in the slave system became categorized as Negro, reflecting Anglo ideas about race. A law passed in South Carolina in 1719 required that “all such slaves as are not entirely Indian shall be accounted as negroe.”111
Former slave Susan Hamilton of South Carolina understood the implications of how Native Americans and Africans became a racially mixed community: “De white race is so brazen. Dey come here an’ run de Indians frum dere own lan’, but dey couldn’t make dem slaves ’cause dey wouldn’t stan’ for it. . . . [D]en dey gone to Africa an’ bring dere black brother an’ sister. Dey say ’mong themselves, ‘we gwine mix dem up en make ourselves king. Dats de only way we’ll git even with de Indians.’”112 Hamilton seems to suggest that racial mixture was another way that the English sought to conquer Native American peoples, an extension of a policy of cultural and racial extermination. She also appears to have an informed understanding of how Native Americans experienced enslavement as something they wouldn’t stand for. Indeed, many Native Americans sent out of South Carolina as slaves were known to be “troublemakers and instigators.”113
The low percentage of Native American children held in captivity also correlates with the fact that on the frontier, infants and very young children were seen as a nuisance to traders and others involved in the market for slaves procured through wars. Native slave traders also killed indigenous women and children in wars for slaves, although their deaths may not have been intentional, despite their position as “sustainers of life” by Native American societies.114 Slaves who were children had little value to Europeans and were “generally perceived to be a liability” up until the end of the eighteenth century.115 Native American slave babies and very young children were even more in jeopardy than were adults as casualties of war and in the commerce of human trafficking.
Indeed, the killing of children was widespread. Rev. John Heckewelder, a missionary for the Moravian Church who interacted extensively with the Lenni Lenape, related that a man he knew took the baby of a captive Indian woman near Detroit and “taking it by the legs dashed its head against a tree, so that the brains flew out all around.” Mary Jemison, a white woman held in captivity by the Shawnee and later adopted by the Senecas, relayed in her narrative that a man named Ebenezer Allen, a Tory whose “cruelty was not exceeded by any of his Indian comrades,” took an infant “and holding it by its legs, dashed its head against the jamb, and . . . after he had killed the child, he opened the fire and buried it under the coals and embers.” Additionally, in Tom Quick’s narrative, he “dashed out” the brains of a Native American infant to avenge the death of his father. Quick, an icon of American folklore, “thought it good policy to destroy the serpent while it was in embryo . . . [because] nits make lice!” In the massacre of Gnadenhutten, under the leadership of Col. David Williamson of the Pennsylvania militia, thirty-four Lenape and Mohican Indian children, along with twenty-two women and forty men, were killed by striking a mallet upon their heads. Heckewelder argued that these actions went unaccounted for because “it was no uncommon saying among many of the men of whom juries in the frontier countries were commonly composed, that no man should be put to death for killing an Indian; for it was the same thing as killing a wild beast.”116
With a similar intent to decimate Native American populations through the subjugation and extermination of their women and children, in 1704 the former governor of South Carolina, Barbadian James Moore, and fifty other men led a coalition of Creeks, Yamasees, and Apalachicolas out to northwestern Florida, where he confiscated mostly Native American women and children to be sold as slaves. He went on to claim in a letter to the lords proprietors that “I did not make slave, or put to death one man, woman or child but were taken in the fight, or in the Fort I took by storm.”117 In his attempt to verify that what he did was legal in the context of a “just war” against the Indians, Moore admitted that he did indeed kill children.118 Again, there were no consequences.
Killing women and children merely out of convenience also occurred. Along the Gulf Coast, South Carolinian traders organized a force of as many as six hundred, the majority Native American, to attack the Mobilien and Tome Natives in the Mobile region of French Louisiana in 1709. They managed to capture from twenty-s ix to twenty-eight women and children but eventually lost fourteen captives. The Mobilien and Tome men under siege went after the traders in an attempt to rescue their families. The traders then killed the rest of the women and children in their possession “in order to be more free to protect themselves.”119
Although the English practiced a certain brand of exterminatory warfare, they were not different from the Spanish in their strategies of conquest in the Americas. The brutal depictions in Louisiana, the Carolinas, and Ohio echo details of the atrocities committed against Native Americans in Hispaniola described in Bartolomé de Las Casas’s 1542 Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). According to Las Casas, the Spaniards “forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords. . . . They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breast, dashed them headlong against the rocks.” In another example, Las Casas writes that although some of the soldiers attempted “to save some of the children,” others were not so merciful and “galloped about cutting the legs off all the children as they lay sprawling on the ground.”120
Accounts of Native American babies suffering from a distinctly violent death are indicative of how vulnerable babies and young children of slave mothers were at a time when violence was unmitigated by law or custom. Native Americans experienced the trauma of the potential loss of their infant children to white violence. If we add the possibility that indigenous infants and very young children were slaughtered out of convenience as well, then the Native Americans’ rationale for war against the colonists in the South would have been based on more than just unfair practices and ill usage by overaggressive traders: it would have been for communal preservation.
The English fed a brutal, market-driven desire for slaves that resulted in the outbreak of the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars in the 1710s. The barbaric treatment of their women and children, combined with the realization that no tribe was safe from enslavement, forced southern indigenous people to also mount a Pan-Indian effort to rid themselves of the ever-encroaching settlers. It was clear that the English sought to build a commercial empire without any regard for the formal agreements with Native nations that had previously existed.
The first initiative, the Tuscarora War, began in 1711 and ended in 1713 with either the death or the enslavement of the Tuscaroras. The fear of enslavement and greater numbers of German and Swiss settlers to the region at New Bern, North Carolina, brought with it epidemiological stresses and prompted the first altercation, in which 120 English and Swiss colonists lost their lives. For two years, an intense war between Anglos and Indians occurred, with several Indian nations fighting on the side of the British against the Tuscaroras with the expectation that they would profit in guns and plunder and perhaps finally defeat an old enemy.
Like some women in West African communities concerned with protecting themselves from becoming enslaved, even Tuscarora women engaged in combat. Their gender, however, did not protect them from being slaughtered. According to John Barnwell, an Assembly member from Colleton County and leader of the army raised by South Carolina to put down the Tuscaroras, “the enemy were so desperate, the very women shooting Arrows, yet they did not yield until most of them were put to the sword.”121 The casualties and losses were high for the English and the Tuscaroras, yet the demand for slaves in the Americas and the West Indies drove the war to its predetermined conclusion: four hundred Native Americans were killed, and a thousand Tuscaroras and their allies were sold into slavery.122
The Native American slave trade was at its peak when the Yamasee organized attacks at Port Royal, Charleston, and other South Carolina frontier settlements in 1715. Six percent of the white population, approximately four hundred settlers, died in the Yamasee conflict, which ended in 1718. A far greater number of members of the Pan-Indian alliance were killed or sold into slavery and shipped to the Caribbean.123 Le Jau foretold the inevitable when he stated that although “peace will be try’d first with the Cherikees at least,” the Indians, he understood, “must be all cut off Strange and Cruel Necessity!”124 By 1730 the trade in Native American slaves from South Carolina had diminished significantly, and the Pan-Indian alliance had been destroyed. The calculated decision to rid themselves of all people in the colony viewed as Native Americans by law meant that British settlers could now focus on acquiring complete control over their African slaves.
English colonists came to America with a thorough understanding of how to use the tactics of exterminatory warfare after their conquest of the Irish in Europe. This type of warfare was then used to get rid of and then enslave the Native American populations in the Southeast and New England. The authority to do so was sanctified, the English believed, by Holy Scripture and by evolving definitions of race, which sustained already established theories of incompatibility between those who were white and those considered to be savages. Yet, colonists remained fearful of being treated barbarously—just like they had treated Native Americans and how southern Native Americans quickly learned to treat them. Thus, the template for how to deal with “unruly savages” remained fundamental to the colonists’ strategies for survival in this supposed “New World.” Early European efforts to make their African slaves cower in fear, however, were often not successful. As John Locke foresaw, living on the frontier involved a perpetual “state of war.” Indeed, many West African slaves had their own notable history of what Europeans described as exterminatory warfare. They carried that history with them across the ocean via the Atlantic slave trade, causing white fear of yet another enemy who needed subjugation.