Jamestown, Virginia was the first permanent English colony in North America. It was settled by 104 English men and boys in May 1607. They built a town called Jamestown, in honor of King James I of England. The colony as a whole was called Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth I, the so called Virgin Queen. Initially, and until 1624, Virginia was owned and run as a private business venture, owned by a group of shareholders in England called the London Company. However, within 6 months of arriving in Virginia in 1607, all but 38 of the first settlers were dead. They died of disease, starvation and skirmished with the Indians. More colonists came in 1608.

The English knew about the success of Cortes against the Aztecs in Mexico in 1521, and Pizarro with the Incas in Peru in the 1530s. The English hoped that they, too, would encounter highly developed, urban Indians with gold and silver. They were bitterly disappointed.

The first colonists were not well suited to living in the wilderness. They were artisans, craftsmen, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, jewelers, glassblowers and gentrymen. Some were younger sons of the aristocracy. In England, a gentleman was defined as someone who did not work with his hands. He did not perform manual labor. It was beneath them to work. Work was for the servants, for the peasants, for the unwashed masses. The aristocracy felt that they were "too good" to work. And the soldiers expected to fight, not to have to farm or push a plow or dig out weeds. The early colonists refused to farm or engage in agricultural manual labor. At first the English sent over the wrong people.

"THE STARVING TIME"

The winter of 1609-1610 was a disaster for the Jamestown colony. In late summer 1609 some 400 new colonists arrived. They had survived a hurricane off the coast of Bermuda. They were too sick and weak to work. But they could eat. And they became a drain on the limited food supply. Indeed, for more than a decade, the early colonist never had More than six months worth of supplies on hand. Soon the food was all gone. And the winter of 1609-1610 came to be known as The Starving Time. Between October 1609 and March 1610, the population of Jamestown fell from 500 to 60. In other words, 440 people died.

John Smith reports that "so great was our famine, that a savage we slew and had buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him, boiled and stewed with roots and herbs."

"And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, and powdered her [salted her], and had eaten part of her before it was known, for which he was executed, as he well deserved. Smith adds, "whether she was better roasted, boiled or grilled, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wide I never heard of."

See Warren Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, p. 28; Arber and Bradley, editors, Travels and Works of John Smith, II, p. 498-99.

After this catastrophe, in 1611 the colony was placed under martial law. Thomas gates and then Thomas Dale served as governors (to 1618). The English colonists had to be FORCED to work.

UNHEALTHY CONDITIONS

Jamestown was built down in a swamp, on the coast. The English were afraid to venture too far inland, because they might be ambushed by the Indians. From the island of Jamestown and the coast they could more easily be re-supplied by ship. But the location was extremely unhealthy. In the summer the water became brackish and sluggish. Microscopic parasites called amoebas proliferated in the water. When people drank the contaminated water they became sick with the "bloody flux," or bloody diarrhea, which scientists think was amoebic dysentery. The amoebas burrow into the lining of the stomach and intestines, causing internal bleeding. There was also malaria from the mosquitoes in the swamp.

THE INDIANS

There were Indians in Virginia. The Indians closest to Jamestown included a tribe called the Powhatans, named after their Chief, Powhatan. The English bullied the Indians and tried to trade with them for food, or if the Indians did not want to trade they would threaten and extort them. Powhatan’s daughter was Pocahontas (born about 1595), who was kidnapped by Samuel Argal in 1611 and held as a hostage. She was taught Christianity, and assimilated to English culture. She married John Rolfe, and this marriage momentarily produced a truce between the Powhatans and the English. But she died of smallpox in 1617, and Powhatan died in 1618. Thereafter relations between the English and the Powhatans worsened.

Before the death of Pocahontas, however, John Rolfe began experimenting with tobacco. He exported the first Virginia tobacco to England about 1614. Virginians discovered that the way to grow rich, in Virginia, was to grow and export tobacco.

DEATH TRAP

Early Virginia remained a death trap. Between 1607 and 1622 the London Company sent more than 6,000 settlers to Virginia. But in 1622 only about 2,000 of the 6,000 were still alive. And in April 1622 a relative of Powhatan, named Opechan-canough attacked the colonists and tried to wipe them out. The Indians killed 347 colonists, and they retaliated with a war of extermination. The cornfields and villages were burned, and the Indians driven up above the "fall line" (where there are waterfalls on the rivers). The conquered lands were confiscated, and the Indians driven into the interior.

In 1624 the British Government demanded to know what had happened to 4,000 of the king’s subjects who had gone to Virginia and were now dead. The government sued the company for mismanagement, revoked its charter, and took over Virginia as a royal colony. However, for several decades, if a person went to Virginia, there was a 50-50 chance that he or she would die within five years. The mortality was incredible.

As the 16Teens progressed, the English began to find a way to get farmers (peasants) and people accustomed to manual labor to go to Virginia. But it was fateful that the origin of America was with a colony in which a class of people felt that they were too good to work, and therefore they needed to search for someone else to do the work.

RACISM TOWARD THE INDIANS

And when the Indians would not trade their food or give it to the English, they fought with the Indians, threatened and killed them, and took their corn, beans, squash, and venison. The English looked down on the Indians as inferior savages. But the Indians had plenty of food, and the English who were "oh so smart" and "oh so superior" couldn’t feed themselves and were starving to death. The English response was to lash out at the Indians and kill them.

Historian Edmund Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom, p. 73-74) related the story of how in August 1610 the English colony had no food. Some English colonists ran away to the Indians. The colony asked Powhatan for food. Powhatan declined. So Charles Percy, an English commander, decided to take revenge on the Indians. He and his men attacked another, weaker tribe of Indians, the Paspaheghs. They burned the village and killed most of the Indians, and set the corn fields on fire. The queen and her children were captured. They were put in a boat to be taken back to Jamestown. But the men complained that these prisoners had not been killed too. So the children were thrown into the river, and then their brains were shot out (they were shot in the head). Back at Jamestown the soldiers wanted to burn the queen alive. Percy had mercy upon her, and stabbed her to death instead. And the Englishmen who had run away to the Indians were hunted down and killed.

This hatred of the Indians was the first "racism" of the English in North America. The racial antipathy that the English developed for the Indians would be transferred onto the Africans once they arrived in 1619. Morgan himself writes (p. 90).

"If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages. It was evident in your firearms, your clothing, your housing, your government, your religion. The Indians were supposed to be overcome with admiration…But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. They even furnished the food that you somehow did not get around to growing enough of yourself. To be thus condescended to by heathen savages was intolerable. And when your people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much. If it came to that, the whole enterprise of Virginia would be over. So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority in spite of your failures….But you still did not grow much corn. That was not what you had come to Virginia for."

On p, 130, Morgan continues "It is difficult to identify the first stirrings of racial hatred in Virginia. [but] when Englishmen at Jamestown throw Indian children in[to] the water and shoot out their brains, we suspect that they might not have done the same thing with French or Spanish children…in the rising hatred of Indians, we can begin to discern some of the forces that would later link slavery to freedom."

The Indians presented the English with a challenge to their sense of superiority, and their self-esteem, and their image of themselves. The English came to America already believing that they were superior to everyone else in the world. They already had a superiority complex. They believed that their Protestant religion was "superior" to Catholicism and every other religion. They believed that their English language was "superior." Their Parliament and their constitution and their traditions were "superior." Everyone else was supposed to share a sense of awe at them, and admire and worship them. The English worshipped themselves. But they could not face up to their own failures and their own flaws and their own inadequacies. They could not handle their own damaged egos and their own wounded pride. Given a choice between reconsidering their inflated sense of self-importance, or lashing out at others in acts of displaced aggression, they lashed out at others. They took out their frustrations on other people. They became bullies. And because they had guns, they could abuse power, and take advantage of other people, and trample over other people.

In 1646 the colonists negotiated a treaty with the Indians, promising not to trespass beyond the York River and promising to leave the Indians in peace north of that river. Within 10 years the English broke the treaty, and land-hungry settlers were encroaching on the land of the Indians, leading to new skirmishes and, by 1676, a new war of extermination against the Indians. First the colonists made a treaty, and then they would break that very treaty when it was convenient to do so because they wanted more land. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the history of America's relationship with the Indians is a string of broken treaties.

COMMENTARY

There is little in this story that I can admire or respect. In fact it is shameful, and there is much here to regret and despise. The story of the Paspaheghs might be a microcosm of all of American history. For too long, US history is this same narrative being repeated over and over again. The dates, and the names of the characters, change. We can fill in the slaves, or the Cherokees, or the Lakota, or the Apaches, or Mexico, or Vieques, or Hawaii, or a hundred other situations. But the script remains essentially the same. It is not easy to say when this script did change (maybe the Civil Rights Act of 1964)

In time the Africans would take the place of the Indians as the object of racial hatred. And for centuries to come, hatred and abuse of the racialized Other would become "the American way." It is extraordinary to realize that for much of our history, America was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and on robbery, and stealing, and the theft of an entire continent from the Indians. America was taken from the Indians in warfare, conquest, robbery and theft. Some people celebrate this history of taking what does not belong to us from other people. This is nothing more than gangsterism, and the celebration of gangster values. And of course, someone will say, "but everybody did it throughout history." But that is not a sufficient excuse.

America began as a stolen nation. So did the other countries in the New World (in the Caribbean and in Latin America). But after the land was stolen, the South would still need somebody to do the work. And for that, America would need, or would tolerate, the brutal exploitation of stolen people. Thus one act of theft complemented another. And so Vincent Harding argues, in There Is A River, for centuries, America would become a prison-nation for black people, and a country that was free "for whites only." Not until 1945 did a dozen Northern states, such as New Jersey, adopt laws banning segregation in places of public accommodation, or banning discrimination on the basis of race in employment. Segregation required by law only came to an end in this country, nationwide, in 1964, and the misuse of literacy tests and poll taxes to prevent black people from voting only came to an end in 1965. So it is difficult to see how black people were "free" in America as a whole anytime before 1964. Even after legalized slavery ended in 1865, black people still were not free from segregation and disenfranchisement and job and housing discrimination. Was Amadou Diallo, from the African country of Guinea, free from racism when he was shot 19 times in New York City while reaching for his identification papers and trigger-happy cops thought he had a gun? Was Abner Luoima, a Haitian immigrant, free from racism when he was sodomized and tortured in a police station in New York City by Justin Volpe? Was James Byrd free from racism when he was dragged to death with his ankles chained to a pick up truck in Jasper, TX? Am I free from racism if I get profiled by bigoted state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike for driving while black?

It isn’t just the past. Sometimes the past lives on in the present. I teach about slavery and the persistence of white supremacy, even today, because it is too painful to remember, but too dangerous to forget. Once an evil has been forgotten, it is free to re-enter the world, and start all over again. Therefore we can never forget. And we cannot allow anyone else to forget, either.