Читать книгу The Punishment Monopoly - Pem Davidson Buck - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

Tales of a Mythical Ancestor, Punishment, and Diarchy

Back when I began envisioning this book, I assumed my cousin’s family mythology was that elusive concept called “truth.” We believed that our first Radford ancestor was named Benjamin, one of the early settlers at Jamestown. And “early” we all took to mean within the first few shiploads. My cousin, visiting Jamestown with her children and husband, swears she saw the name Radford engraved on a monument. But when I began genealogical research as well as research on early Jamestown, I found no Radford. Eventually my husband and I went to Jamestown. We had a lovely vacation, and I learned a lot about Jamestown and life there for the English—though much less for the Powhatan—but found no Radford on a monument or anywhere else. It wasn’t until several years later that I ran across what might be the source of the mythology of Benjamin Radford, in an old book on the history of Christian County, Kentucky, where the Radfords who were part of my family eventually moved. There, in black and white, it refers to Benjamin Radford, “one of the first Jamestown settlers in 1607.”¹ And yet, according to the records of Jamestown, no such person existed. Further, if he did exist, there is no link between him and John Radford, who really did arrive in 1652, and thus is very unlikely to have been the son of a supposed Benjamin of 1607. Family history, I think, has gotten garbled and created a more glorious past for itself than reality warrants.

So, a dilemma. I had become hooked on the research I had begun on sovereignty, state formation, and punishment as they related both to the Powhatan and the English at Jamestown, and to the role of religious authority in both systems. What we now call the relationship between church and state seemed critical to both, and to the later Jacobite rebellion that propelled Alexander Davidson to the colonies. But still, I had no Radford available to ground this discussion. My solution: let us suppose, for the sake of this chapter, that family mythology is right. Some Radford arrived in Jamestown between 1607 and 1620. We’ll call him X Radford, not Benjamin, since it is another century and a half before the name shows up in family records. After all, there were unnamed people—John Smith’s account refers to “divers others” after naming the more important people—who came with that first expedition and on later ships.² So we will pretend there was an X, just so I can write about the Powhatan and early Jamestown.

When X would have arrived, the struggle over control of the use of force, and with it the ability to enforce the right to punish, was in crisis for both Powhatan and English. We’ll pick up the story later, with the John Radford of 1652, who is documented—although there is some doubt about whether the genealogical links are all correctly in place to make my cousin and me his many-generations-later granddaughters. And then again, there is the “so what?” If those Radfords weren’t our ancestors, they certainly were somebody’s, and the weaving of the tale of punishment in state formation can be carried by someone else’s ancestors just as well as by my own. The “truth” in this tale is obviously already having a hard time.

And there is another area where truth is going to have a hard time. I want to talk about what was going on with the Powhatan at the time X Radford would have shown up on the Chesapeake Bay. But all we have to go on is what anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians have pieced together. Their work has had to depend largely on what people like John Smith, or what someone like X himself, said about the Powhatan. We have the perceptions of those English who kept records, wrote reports or letters, or wrote books for public consumption—much of it propaganda—about Virginia, Jamestown, and the Powhatan. What the Powhatan had to say about their lives, their social structure, and about the English, is recorded only as interpreted through English eyes, obviously not the most reliable source. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians today strive to interpret the documents and the clues left buried in the ground, crosschecking back and forth.³ Do clues from one discipline support or contradict theories developed in another? How can we use those clues to interpret what might have been going on when, for example, Pocahontas threw her body over John Smith, assuming his account is true? From here on, I will use what we do seem to know about the Powhatan, but bear in mind there are inevitably varying interpretations and disagreements among the experts. So what I am going to do in this chapter is interpret all these interpretations to tell a story of states, almost states, punishment, and two peoples at the time when X Radford—himself an interpretation—might have dragged his exhausted, and perhaps hopeful, perhaps horrified, body through the surf and stood on shaky legs on Powhatan territory.

THE POWHATAN ALREADY HAD extensive knowledge of European people in the early 1600s when X Radford would have arrived. Spaniards had been coming and going for nearly a century, trading, looking for gold, hiding out in secluded bays to avoid English pirates, being shipwrecked and taken in by various Powhatan towns, presumably mixing themselves into the gene pool, preaching Catholicism, and occasionally killing and getting killed. Several high-ranking Powhatan had gone to Spain and brought their knowledge back with them. A bit later the English were also roving around the edges of Powhatan society, although, being mostly Protestants, they weren’t preaching Catholicism. Unlike the Spaniards, they began trying to establish forts that would act as trading centers and would support the English pirates who were after the gold carried by Spanish ships—the Spaniards, being at that time far more powerful than the English, had already grabbed the most lucrative lands for extracting gold and silver from local people in Central and South America.⁴ The Powhatan would have observed the English at Roanoke twenty-five years before X arrived, and surely found the observations instructive for the analysis of English norms and hierarchy. Even closer observation would have been possible if, as one theory has it, those English who disappeared when they abandoned the colony threw in their lot with one of the northern Chesapeake chiefdoms.⁵ Joining a native polity was certainly a choice a lot of people at Jamestown made, much to the disgust of those in charge!

So, when X and the rest would have shown up, Wahunsonacock, the king, paramount chief, ruler, emperor—the English word to translate mamanatowick depends a lot on how you understand Powhatan social structure—would have had a pretty good idea of how to use them in his ongoing conquest of independent chiefdoms on the Chesapeake. The polity over which he presided, Tsenacommacoh, was now much larger than it had been when he inherited it. Each conquered chiefdom became a unit within the larger polity; its former chief, or werowance, became a subchief under the mamanatowick. What the conquered people thought of this we can only guess, but there is at least a little evidence of revolt, and Wahunsonacock did have much less control in the newly conquered outlying territories than at the core of Tsenacommacoh. He demanded tribute from conquered areas, largely of luxury goods like pearls and copper, the items that represented wealth and power, and used it to position himself at the center of the regional trade among polities to the north and west of Tsenacommacoh.

He planned to position the English in this network, apparently as a tributary entity, like the conquered chiefdoms. The English had brought a lot of copper with them—kettles, chains, and medallions, for instance.⁶ And Wahunsonacock had real leverage over the English—they couldn’t feed themselves and were utterly dependent on Powhatan women, the farmers, for their survival. X Radford and the rest sent to labor at Jamestown pretty effectively refused to grow food, and looked for gold instead. This move gained them the opprobrium of the powers that be—the authorities at Jamestown and the investors in the Virginia Company—who described them as lazy, the “very scumme of the Land.”⁷ It took the institution of martial law and spectacular punishing to get them working at all. We’ll get to why X and others would have behaved so apparently stupidly, but for now, my focus is on the fact that the English remained dependent on trading for corn, and used a lot of copper to make those transactions. Which of course played directly into Wahunsonacock’s hands; he controlled this massive influx of copper.

But he didn’t control it alone. He was not the sole ruler, sovereign in his own right. In most instances he couldn’t exercise the authority required to punish on his own. He was dependent on the religious authority provided by his partner in sovereignty, the priest, or quiyoughcosough. What the Powhatan had, and what the English and the rest of Europe had until not too long before X Radford left it, is a form of governance called diarchy, or dual sovereignty.

Diarchy has been a widespread, highly complex and sophisticated form of governance, in which sovereignty is carried out through the convergence of spiritual authority and worldly power.⁸ Diarchy means joint rule, usually by a priest and a king, who are complementary (but inherently unequal) representatives of religious authority and secular power. One legitimizes action, the other acts. The priest (for instance, the pope for the English until 1534 when Henry VIII made himself head of the church, or the priest for the Powhatan) speaks for the gods and legitimizes the king’s exercise of power. The king or queen carries out the will of the gods as expressed by the priest; his or her actions are defined as legitimate because they carry meaning within a religious context. When people have to hand over crops, or money, or wealth items to elites—lords, aristocrats, kings—they need a good solid reason for believing that they are doing the right thing, especially if they have to work extremely hard or half-starve themselves and their children in order to give enough. While this degree of exploitation wasn’t the case for the Powhatan, if Wahunsonacock had his way that might have changed.

Religious ideas about the will of the gods can go a long way toward convincing people. And if they object, or if they steal or otherwise mess with the orderly regulation of wealth and behavior, there is the threat of punishment, well advertised in spectacular public displays of maimings or deaths. It becomes quite obvious that you should think twice before taking the risk of similar treatment. However, making such punishment acceptable to those punished and to their families and communities, so that they submit to this treatment without revolt, is not easy. And here again, the king—the secular power—is dependent on the priest as the spiritual legitimizer. If the king as punisher is merely the tool to interpret and carry out the will of the gods, then he has to punish or he himself will be upsetting the gods, and all will suffer. So, the punishing becomes sacred—a sacrifice for the gods to keep them benevolent—disobedience to the king is sacrilege, a sin, and the whole social hierarchy, with its extraction of wealth for the few from the work of the many, gains a sacred aura, ordained by the gods.

Now, to make this all work, ordinary people can’t know much about the spiritual forces. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need priests to tell them what offends the gods and what might regain their protection. In societies that are not so unequal, where there is no wealthy elite, where everyone has the right to use the resources they need—as probably the chiefdoms included in Tsenacommacoh had been several generations earlier—religious knowledge is pretty widely available to all. Nobody needs special priests, and thus there is no way of holding the will of the gods over people’s heads. But as a society consolidates power in fewer hands, knowledge of the spiritual forces becomes secret, passed on and accessible only to specially trained and appointed religious authorities. In both diarchic England and diarchic Tsenacommacoh the religious authorities made a lot of the decisions about who had transgressed against the gods and the social order, and thus about who needed to be punished. But the priest can’t punish alone, any more than the king can; the priest can’t actually force people to submit to punishment. It is the king who has guards and armies—people to carry out violence. So the priest, though superior to the king, is nevertheless dependent on the king for material support—food, shelter, temple maintenance, and protection—and because the priest has no coercive power and cannot carry out the wishes of the gods without the king. Neither can function without the other. Without the priest, however, the king has no right to exist: the king’s legitimacy and ability to rule come from the priest.⁹

For both the English and the Powhatan, the sacred was the source of all authority.¹⁰ The Church for the English, the shaman for the Powhatan, spoke for that authority. In England, as in other Christian-ruled countries, it had, until the Reformation, taken the Pope or his representative to perform the ceremony that made a king a king. Consecration made him king “by the grace of God,” no longer merely a natural human, and invested him with the power to act.¹¹ Thus for centuries in England, as in other countries ruled by Christians, sovereignty was a two-part enterprise, with the king exercising power, but only by the authority granted him by God by way of the Church.¹²

For aristocrats, both English in the centuries preceding Jamestown and Powhatan shortly before Jamestown, diarchy had been a useful tool, lending spiritual authority to their accumulation of wealth through tribute in money or valuables and through requiring labor or produce from ordinary people who had nothing to give but their labor or the fruits of that labor. The hierarchy that determined who gave to whom, and everyone’s position in it, was set by birth; it was God-given and natural. The spiritual authority in dual sovereignty does not necessarily have to provide justification for the extraction of wealth by an elite. However, if state formation is underway, the structure of dual sovereignty is easily amenable to that role. Threats to the legitimacy of the developing state and to elite extraction of wealth can be defined as sin, an offense to the gods and a threat to the well-being of the people. The king is then obliged to take action. The secular power carries out the punishment of sin, backed by the legitimizing spiritual authority, so that challenges to elite rule are less likely. Both the developing Powhatan empire and the English feudal state were based on such ideas.

However, as the kings in Europe in the centuries leading up to Jamestown generally began trying to get more of the wealth produced by ordinary people, this system became an annoyance. Although the backing of the Church was critical to the king’s legitimacy in exercising what force he could, there was a downside for kings and lords. Lower-level elites and the Church could keep too much of the wealth, so less got passed up the hierarchy to the king. In a diarchic structure, economic and political elites don’t have full control even if they do own the means of production; religious elites carry considerable influence and are in a position to manipulate the ideology that supports the power of kings and lords, potentially a threat to elite control. The king must, like Wahunsonacock, rule within the bounds of tradition and live up to the expectations of the priesthood and nobility for religiously defined correct kingly behavior—he is, to some extent, held in check by their interpretation of what a godly king should do.

In the old English feudal structures, control was exercised locally; punishing power was in the hands of local lords, authorized by the local church. The state in this system was a weak one, without a full monopoly on the use of force, and the religious institution was particularly strong, as least in comparison with modern states.¹³ Since successful exploitation depends on the ability to punish, the power to punish would have to move into the hands of the king if the king were to exploit directly, rather than through regional lords. To take more for himself, a king needed to curtail the power of the local lords.¹⁴ So when a king wanted to strengthen his position, a very likely consequence was an ongoing struggle among king, lords, and church over who has the right to punish, along with an interconnected struggle between strong church and weak state, between pope and king.¹⁵

In England, the feudal system of control broke down as the Crown began to break the power of the local lords, but when, as a result, lords could no longer enforce punishment, the king had a law and order issue.¹⁶ The king did not have a secure grip on the use of violence and therefore couldn’t punish effectively enough to keep public order, and was as dependent on honor, magnificent display, and the pageantry of office as on force to maintain his position—as was Wahunsonacock.¹⁷ Both had a plurality, not a monopoly, on punishment and on the use of force it entails, although punishing power in England was consolidated further up the hierarchy than it had been in the Powhatan polity before Wahunsonacock’s manipulations of the system.¹⁸

WHEN THE ENGLISH FIRST ENCOUNTERED Wahunsonacock and his entourage, they described him as imperial, ruling over a large number of subordinate polities, with all the splendor and power they associated with kingly behavior. He was a man of regal bearing surrounded by a deeply respectful populace who regarded him with “great fear and adoration,” a man of a “Majestie … which oftentimes strkyes awe and sufficient wonder in our [English] people.”¹⁹ There is no doubt that they saw him as royal in the same sense that they saw their own King James. Had they arrived maybe a hundred years earlier, things would have been different. They would have found instead of Tsenacommacoh a number of small independent chiefdoms, each with its own diarchic structure. Each would have its own werowance and priest exercising joint sovereignty, together making decisions about punishment and war, and collecting tribute. A lot of that tribute would have returned to the commoners who produced it, in exchange for labor, and as feasts and as gifts associated with assembling a fighting force when needed. Other gifts would have been acquired through trade; the werowance would in turn give them to high-ranking people, thus helping to ensure their loyalty.

However, sometime before Wahunsonacock, this structure had begun to change—there are a lot of arguments among scholars as to why, but it does appear that trade with Europeans or the presence of a few colonies did not initiate the change.²⁰ However, once started, the consolidation of small chiefdoms into larger polities may have accelerated through a kind of ripple effect related to the European presence. Those polities that had to deal most directly with Europeans may have consolidated in defense; or perhaps consolidation occurred because gaining control of trade with Europeans gave one polity the clout to conquer the neighbors. For thousands of years, control of trade had enabled some polities to gain dominance over others. Their power had waxed and waned over the course of history, just as happened in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. The arrival of Europeans was at first just another source of potential trade and power. But as one polity became stronger, others may have also consolidated power, a kind of Cold War effect: if you have dangerous neighbors gaining strength, you may try to keep up. Another theory about the Powhatan consolidation is that epidemics of European diseases preceded the actual arrival of the English in the Chesapeake, and that with such a diminished population, a werowance needed to control more people to gather enough tribute. However, there is no actual evidence either way about whether epidemics had hit the Chesapeake chiefdoms.²¹

For whatever reason, by the time Wahunsonacock inherited his position, he reigned over at least six chiefdoms, not just one. From that base, he went on, through conquest, negotiation, and intimidation to control almost the entire Chesapeake Bay region, thirty-some chiefdoms. He became the imperial figure who so impressed English people like X, laborers and gentlemen alike. Tsenacommacoh was on the verge of state formation, one of the most complex polities on the East Coast of North America at that time, perhaps in all of what is now the United States.²² Getting to that point, however, meant some real changes in social structure and with them the growth of the solidified class structure that characterizes states.²³

INEQUALITY WAS SOLIDIFYING INTO inherited class in Tsenacommacoh by the time X arrived. There were clear distinctions between chiefly families, the respected and wealthy families of the “better sort” as the English put it, commoners, and “the poor.”²⁴ These distinctions existed even though all free members of the polity had rights to use land for farming as portioned out by the local werowance, and all could hunt in the territory claimed by the polity. There were also servants, although little is said about who they were, and there were slaves who were war captives. Local werowances, who once had shared sovereignty only with their priests, now were no longer independent; they and their priests were inserted into the new, larger hierarchy somewhere below the top. Perhaps there was a certain amount of resentment at the loss of sovereignty. Again, we don’t really know.

Within this system Wahunsonacock as mamanatowick was the paramount secular authority. He didn’t yet have a true monopoly on the use of force, although in the early 1600s he was making progress on this front. The first step in the process was to get punishing into the hands of the local elite families and out of the hands of clan leaders and individuals. He was shifting punishment, particularly for murder and stealing, to local werowances who were answerable to him, who owed him tribute and ideally obedience. In some cases, it appears that he actually bypassed the local werowance and priest to take charge of punishing himself. Acting as judge is a very concrete demonstration of authority.²⁵

Before the English arrived, Wahunsonacock had gained a “plurality,” rather than a monopoly, on the use of force. While absolute in the sense that what he ordered did happen, including punishment, subchiefs also had the ability to punish on their own authority, although they could not override Powhatan. Local werowances could still punish on the authority of their priests, and clan leaders and even individuals could take revenge for personal affronts.²⁶ Nevertheless, by coming closer to confining punishment to elites he could control, Wahunsonacock clustered punishers higher up the hierarchy, closer to himself. People were losing local control of punishment. This was a dramatic extension of power over local people, a move toward the monopoly on force that is part of state-making.

But whenever power to punish is being concentrated, there must be beliefs to legitimize it, beliefs that make people’s behavior, good or bad, a matter of concern, not just to their neighbors and kin, the people directly affected by it, but to a larger polity. Additionally, punishment needs to be defined as the correct response to transgression. Antisocial behavior in non-state societies gets dealt with by peer pressure, by manipulation on the part of local elders and leaders to bring about a change in an individual’s behavior, or maybe even by a locally-sanctioned killing. The goal is not punishment, but the restoration of community balance. To centralize the power to punish, that goal has to change. Certain behaviors must be redefined as a transgression worthy of punishment—retribution becomes the goal, not just the restoration of community balance. The behavior of individuals has to be made to carry meaning beyond the local group, so that transgressions can no longer be dealt with locally. An individual’s behavior becomes relevant to a much larger entity ruled by those gaining power within the developing state, who may feel their ability to extract wealth is threatened by certain behaviors that they therefore define as transgressions.

The Powhatan legitimized this move by a very common shift, gradually establishing an elite-controlled religion. Earlier beliefs could then be extended to claim that certain behaviors were so offensive to the gods that their protection could be withdrawn, not just from the offending individual or local group, but from the entire polity. Thus the authority for this transition came from a higher source, from the gods. Expanding the earlier diarchic structure, so that transgression came under its purview—not under the purview of clan or neighbors, with issues of revenge and honor to be handled, not by those who were injured, but by authorities representative of the polity-wide hierarchy—helped to accomplish this goal. Whether such a shift means that actual perpetrators are more or less likely to be the ones picked for punishment is an open question, but it is clear that the decision is now made by people further up the hierarchy. Priests can identify the behavior relating to the entire polity that will offend the spiritual forces. Punishment becomes a religiously mandated sacrifice, performed for the benefit of the entire polity, to be handled by the spiritual and secular power of the polity itself. A king or a paramount chief in this system is merely the tool to interpret and carry out the will of the gods, and his power comes directly from the religious authorities. The king’s exercise of power thus takes on a sacred aspect, and disobedience takes on the aura of “sacrilegious transgression”; there is a corresponding “sacralization” of the social order itself.²⁷

Transgressive behavior becomes more a sin than a crime, an offense to the gods, not to the state, and such sins are seen as indeed threatening the entire polity, not just the local group, through displeasing the gods or upsetting the balance of spiritual forces. Mixed in and disguised by the mantle of sin is behavior that is actually threatening to the elite ability to extract wealth. Refusing to give tribute, for instance, becomes an offense against the gods, as does a king’s refusal to redistribute some (usually relatively small) portion of that wealth in rituals that promote the well-being of society.²⁸ Beliefs about sin, figuratively speaking, provide a smoke screen.

The belief that Powhatan gods spoke directly only to priests, and the priests spoke only to werowances and influential men, strengthened the process of consolidation. Priests, as in other diarchies, were the most powerful individuals in the Powhatan empire. This despite the fact that Wahunsonacock was seen as half god. It was the priests, not the king, who would know, by way of the gods, if you committed a wrong, and would single you out for sacrifice. Priests thus played a role in directing the use of force internally as punishment. Additionally, personal disobedience to Wahunsonacock or to subchiefs was punishable with a beating or clubbing to death on a sacrificial stone.²⁹ That stealing became punishable by death administered by the werowance perhaps reflects the importance that personal wealth played in Powhatan society. Stealing was much more than merely taking someone else’s stuff. Taking someone’s corn, beads, or copper was seen as a threat to the entire social hierarchy, since it shifted wealth, thereby potentially shifting status. Thus it was as reprehensible as murder, which, by shifting people, likewise threatened the social hierarchy. As the Powhatan social structure became more stratified, both theft and murder could no longer be a matter for individuals to deal with. It was perhaps for this reason that punishing those transgressions became a chiefly function. As if all this was not adequate, the disobedient could look forward to a tormented afterlife, at least according to some accounts.³⁰

As Wahunsonacock gained greater control of punishing, he made himself more and more central to people’s lives. The mamanatowick was beginning to matter even more than the local werowance, who now had to look further up the hierarchy. At the same time, Wahunsonacock began shifting the focus of the aggression men were trained from babyhood to exhibit in defense of their honor. Men now vied with one another for reputations as great hunters, able to give the gifts of skins that satisfied the increasing demand for tribute.³¹ Warfare was another important component of this shift. War in service of the expanding Powhatan empire became the focus of aggression and a source of great prestige. Distinguishing yourself on the battlefield, like being a great hunter, began to replace feuding as the proper way to prove your honor and manhood—aggression was to be expressed externally in war. Internally within the polity, aggression was to be expressed only in competition that served to enrich Wahunsonacock and enable him to exert greater power. Men’s definitions of honor began to mean loyalty to the Powhatan polity and thus to Wahunsonacock.³² Wahunsonacock, in other words, was moving toward a monopoly on the use of force within Tsenacommacoh.

THESE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS, realigning aggression and loyalty, were intertwined with war and conquest. Externally Wahunsonacock was also increasing his ability to use force. His conquest of surrounding polities depended on mobilizing large armies, and that in turn depended on collecting tribute, particularly of wealth items. Charles Tilly, in his analysis of European states, emphasizes the importance of war in making state formation possible; Wahunsonacock’s strategy serves as an illustration of this principle.³³ How important punishing was in mobilizing his armies is not clear.³⁴ But as his empire expanded, so did his access to tribute, thus giving him the wherewithal to recruit larger armies, thus allowing him to expand further or tighten control. A vicious or a benevolent circle, depending on your point of view.

In the early 1600s Wahunsonacock’s control over this empire was not complete, and its boundaries were not fixed. It was tightest in the core areas that he ruled by bloodright. There absolute obedience could be directly enforced with swift violence—whole communities were sometimes wiped out. The punishing consequences of disobedience must have been obvious to their neighbors. This degree of control was much harder to accomplish in the periphery where he ruled only through conquest and control of trade.³⁵ In conquest as in internal affairs, Wahunsonacock had to act within Powhatan customary law. He was dependent on the legitimizing approval of his priests, his primary councilors, for the use of force externally as well as internally. Priests had the final say in a declaration of war.³⁶

There was an additional religious dimension to war. Diarchy in a wide range of societies regularly obliges a king to provide sacrificial victims to ensure the life, the general well-being, of the community. Sacrificial punishment was of significant religious benefit to the polity, protecting it and bringing the approval of the gods. War captives supplemented sinners as sacrificial victims. Thus the king’s exercise of the use of force, both externally in conquest and internally in punishing, was justified religiously as sacrifice needed to keep the favor of the gods for the benefit of all. Not coincidentally, sacrifice strengthened the position of an extractive elite. For the Powhatan, providing sacrifices, whether war captives or transgressors, was the most important thing a king did for the general welfare.³⁷ Sacrificial deaths benefited the polity spiritually, and as anthropologist Margaret Williamson points out, the elimination of transgressors and enemy captives enabled the elimination of threats to the order the king was expected to provide.

With the religious legitimacy for war comes an added benefit—the king or paramount chief can claim legitimacy for protecting people from dangerous enemies. Wahunsonacock, well before Jamestown, appears to have embarked in this direction, using war with enemies to create dangerous Others, and thus people’s need for protection. He could then use the resulting need for war as legitimation for collecting tribute from these Others, some of which he passed on to the subchiefs who fought for him.³⁸ It was that tribute, recycled, and his monopoly on the copper trade, that enabled him to extend his conquests—all legitimized by the production of human sacrifices, spectacularly punished enemies.

Building the Powhatan empire must have led to changing relationships among priests. Each chief, some of whom were women, was associated with particular priests, and as a chief was conquered and subordinated, his or her priests would probably have been subordinated in some sense to Wahunsonacock’s priests. The structure of diarchy as it affected daily lives may have changed correspondingly, so that the local representatives of the sacred lost their power as final authority.³⁹ Local people’s loyalty would then shift more effectively toward Wahunsonacock and his priests, particularly as they became the ultimate punishing authorities.

FOR MANY OF THOSE AT JAMESTOWN, having experienced the chaos in England resulting from the gradual development of capitalism and the disputes between church and state, and now confronted with more chaotic conditions, Powhatan communities must have been tempting. Many, in the early years in Jamestown, wrote home about Powhatan social structure with its order, hierarchy, obedience, and reverence for their king, which seemed to exemplify all that they felt their own society in England and in Virginia had recently lost.⁴⁰ Maybe X was one of those who ran away to join the Powhatan.

So, looking at the English—weak, disorganized, dying at an enormous rate, and loaded with copper—Wahunsonacock and his priests must have seen a marvelous opportunity and taken action accordingly. John Smith would have seemed to the Powhatan to be the secular power, the active partner in a diarchy. Captain Christopher Newport, the highest authority in Jamestown, like the Powhatan priests, did not travel much, and appeared to be the spiritual authority, judging and legitimizing John Smith’s activities outside the fort. Smith was captured and put through a ritual that may well have been intended to make him into the werowance of a territory that was offered for the use of the English. Located near Wahunsonacock’s principal town, it could be easily subjected to surveillance.⁴¹

Pocahontas’s legendary move to save Smith from actual execution by throwing her body over his was instead probably part of this process, a symbolic death and rebirth as kin in her lineage. Powhatan social structure was matrilineal, so women would have been necessary in placing him within that structure. Pocahontas, a youngster at the time, would have been acting as a representative of her matrilineage—perhaps obeying the older women in it, working in concert with her father, Wahunsonacock. He couldn’t induct Smith into his own matrilineage, but Pocahontas could bring him into her mother’s. He could then be treated as the English werowance. Wahunsonacock sometimes removed the werowance of a conquered chiefdom and installed a new one with ties to himself. Smith’s position would have been similar.⁴² Smith, as English werowance, would be expected to submit to Powhatan expectations, copper would flow to Wahunsonacock, and the English would quit misbehaving, cease killing and stealing, and conduct proper exchanges of gifts according to status.

The English, knowing little of Powhatan norms and social structure, and with a very different understanding of governing and kinship, didn’t get it. Furthermore, they believed they were in charge, despite the respect they had for Powhatan elites. Wahunsonacock, according to their orders from England, was to swear allegiance to the English Crown and acknowledge that his right to rule came to him from James I of England. Ultimately, an even weightier problem was that the English were there simply to make a profit for the English investors. They somehow had to extract wealth from the Powhatan and other Native polities to transfer to England.

AND THAT THE ENGLISH NEEDED to make a profit was why X Radford would have been standing on sea-weary shaky legs on Powhatan territory, fresh off the boat. Growing tobacco on the Chesapeake was like growing money: it served as currency in Virginia. And as an export crop to sell to England, it was proving to be far more profitable than hunting for gold or trading with the Powhatan. But to grow much tobacco, landholders needed more than their own labor, and there was a severe shortage of labor in the colony. Thus, the importation of indentured servants, followed by a very few Africans. Perhaps X was hopeful, perhaps horrified, about what might lie ahead, but even more likely he was emotionally exhausted, simply putting one foot in front of the other in a numb acceptance of fate. If he was typical, he had most likely already been traumatized by life in England. So we need to take a look at the life he left behind.

The “quickening pace of commercial and agrarian capitalism” in England meant that X Radford would have lived in a society undergoing dispossession—landholders absorbing into large-scale agricultural holdings the commons and waste land once used for foraging and pasturing by tenants and villagers.⁴³ This process, known as the enclosure movement, resulted in massive unemployment as the land people had depended on was fenced in by private landowners bent on profit. The poverty that typically accompanies the dispossession that capitalism engenders was rampant. Those who did manage to stay on the land as tenants had little left after landowners took their bite. Consequently, “the ranks of the poor steadily swelled.”⁴⁴ Capitalism, though causing dispossession, was insufficiently developed to absorb all the dispossessed as wage labor—those who, like our invented X Radford, were suffering the direct or indirect effects of the enclosure movement. Cities did offer some opportunity for employment, but not nearly enough for all who needed it. People apprenticed their children and indentured themselves to work for years in return for nothing but food and a place to sleep, and sometimes the training that might allow them, with luck, to set up eventually in a skilled craft.

Hunger and illness took an enormous toll. For those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the consequences were devastating. Many resorted to petty theft in an attempt to keep body and soul together, to feed their children, simply to survive. Women had the additional option of prostitution, and many took it. Others wandered, hoping for work, and sometimes getting a little, as they went from town to town. But, cutting off virtually the last option, the Poor Laws of the 1500s made wandering without visible support illegal. It was called vagrancy, and, like theft, meant you risked joining those in the already overflowing prisons. Some chose “voluntary” exile instead. Poverty made risking Virginia, selling yourself for (usually) seven years, look like a reasonable choice.⁴⁵ Few chose to go because they were ambitious and hopeful; they went in hope of staying alive—an ironic hope, given the extraordinary death rate in Jamestown. By 1624, all but 1,200 of the 6,700 colonists sent to Virginia were dead.⁴⁶ Perhaps they would have chosen differently had they been better informed, but staying in England was hardly a healthy option either. Yet even the likelihood of starvation in England did not produce enough willing volunteers to satisfy Virginia planters’ desire for labor; death in Virginia was too likely.⁴⁷

Meanwhile, as more and more people were driven into poverty, the charity burden on parish coffers became heavier and heavier. English politicians, some of the Virginia Company investors, and some of the Jamestown gentry, began to suggest that they could relieve England’s problems—rising crime, vagrancy, prostitution—by sending the glut of the dispossessed, the poor, and the unemployed to the colonies. Hence, involuntary workers joined the so-called voluntary transfer of England’s dispossessed to the colonies.⁴⁸ The gentry who supported this proposal insisted the dispossessed would work off their punishment and become useful, docile, and eventually free and productive members of an orderly society. Not everyone was in favor of this solution. Some Jamestown leaders protested that more “scum” was not what they needed—they had enough trouble controlling the ones they already had. To be sure, in the early days they had at least as much trouble controlling the “swaggering great” as the laborers; all pretty much refused to work for the good of the Virginia Company investors in England.⁴⁹ But in any case, the proposal took hold.

Force would be needed, given that not enough people were “volunteering” to go. So laws and policies were established to provide it, including the criminalization of vagrancy, the punishment of Scots and Irish “traitors,” and the elevation of petty crimes to hanging offenses—eventually there were 300 crimes carrying a death penalty. Since the king had no authority to sentence people to transportation, it was offered as a “merciful” option. The poor were swept up on vagrancy charges; prisons were emptied of able-bodied inmates. The poor thus joined the criminal—although as historian Peter Linebaugh makes clear, that was often a meaningless distinction since it was impossible for so many to survive legally.⁵⁰ The entire way of life of the dispossessed—the poor, the jobless, the homeless—had been made illegal.

Killing two birds with one stone, England both unloaded its increasingly restive poor and provided Jamestown planters with dispossessed laborers—assuming they didn’t die.⁵¹ Children were among the first to go under this system. Orphans were indentured, transferred from overcrowded orphanages and poorhouses to ships’ captains who sold their indentures in the colonies, a whole shipload in 1619, and some 1,400 to 1,500 in 1627 alone. It is very unlikely that X Radford would have been one of them—only 12 of the first 300 children lived more than three years, and if I consider my cousin’s family mythology true for the sake of this chapter, then he obviously lived long enough to reproduce.⁵² More likely, his master brought him as a servant; even more likely, he was one of the poor on an investor’s estate, sent as a Virginia Company laborer, with or without his consent. Or he might have been accused of vagrancy or theft. Or he might have been kidnapped. Once the head-right system was established in 1618, bringing indentured servants to the colonies became a source of wealth. “Headright” meant that whoever paid the shipping fee for a servant could claim 50 acres from the Virginia Company and, after 1624, from the Crown. Kidnapping quickly became profitable, and joined the legalized methods of providing more workers.

Even if X were one of those who went voluntarily, the choice to go would have reflected his assessment of the conditions under which he was living. For younger sons of the middling gentry, the decision was often based on a lack of financial opportunities: primogeniture laws meant that eldest sons inherited their father’s entire estate, leaving younger sons to fend for themselves. For them the propaganda about Virginia and the wealth to be found there might well have been attractive. (Few women made that choice, and in the beginning few women were sent involuntarily.) Absconding to Virginia was also a way for embroiled younger gentry to escape debt or avoid the clutches of the law. But if X had been one of these, he would have been listed on one of the ship rosters of those early years, and far less likely to be among the many nameless and voiceless in the annals of Jamestown history.

CONDITIONS IN JAMESTOWN WOULD certainly not have relieved X Radford.⁵³ I am going to make an assumption here about X and the others who so infuriated Jamestown leaders and investors by their refusal to work. Their refusal was so intense that had not John Smith and his successors instituted martial law and adopted the spectacular punishments for minor infractions that were already common in England (and among the Powhatan), the colony might have disappeared. My assumption is that these refusers were not stupid or irrational people, nor particularly greedy or lazy, or as unaccustomed to hard work as they are often described. After all, even soft-handed gentry are quite capable of changing their ways and developing calluses if that is obviously the only way to stay alive. Most accounts of Jamestown are written with an underlying assumption that the right thing (for the English at the time) was to make a success of Jamestown—that such success would best serve the interests of English people sent to work in the colony. With this assumption, their refusal to work appears misguided at best, and the leaders appear to have been right, even heroic, in their draconian efforts to force people to work to save themselves. I tend to be suspicious of accounts that assume that leaders who kill, jail, and maim are acting for the good of “the people” rather than for the good of an elite who thereby gain a relatively docile population who permit the orderly extraction of wealth from their labor. And I tend also to be suspicious of accounts that portray those from whom wealth is being extracted as irrational when they don’t cooperate.

As I have shown, forcing people into docility requires control of punishment, which requires a monopoly on the use of force. Ultimately, it requires the punishing institutions that only a state has the power to provide. The English at Jamestown were backed by a state, but it was a relatively weak one, and it certainly was a distant one. The assumption that leaders designated by elites would know what was best for the good of all disappeared. Indeed, the whole hierarchy of duty to one’s superiors fell apart without the class and gender structures that had locked people into obedience in England. To me it seems obvious that, without the accustomed channels to obedience, leaders in Virginia would have looked quite different to many of the laborers and even to some of the gentry. And since access to land was denied in the colony, the incentive of hope for a better future was cut off. I don’t think it would have been at all evident to X and many others that their best interests lay with a successful Jamestown colony and happy investors in England. Especially when they saw what looked to them like paradise—orderly Powhatan fields and villages, and people who apparently loved and honored their leaders, leaders who returned that honor with unparalleled (in English experience) generosity. That the Powhatan were moving toward the centralized control of punishing that characterizes a state would not have been immediately evident, or perhaps even recognized as relevant.

Either Jamestown leaders had to reconstruct state power or fail in their duty to organize the production of wealth for the elites. And without the social structures that normally would legitimize state power, they had nothing to resort to but the raw use of force to punish, and punish they did—publicly, painfully, and lengthily. They also tried to harness the authority that had been created out of ritual and spirituality in England as religion, state, and stratification had developed hand in hand.⁵⁴ Attending church services twice daily was mandatory; once martial law was established in 1612 by the new acting governor, Sir Thomas Dale, missing church three times meant execution. As did blasphemy: in what was presumably seen as a fitting punishment, one man’s tongue was run through by a red-hot poker, after which he was chained to a tree until he died.⁵⁵ The colony itself was said to be God’s will, bringing Christianity to Native people and glory and wealth to England, God’s favored nation.

That none of this was too convincing is clear. By 1612, forty to fifty men had deserted, about 10 percent of those still alive, off to marry and live with Powhatan people. Six others had attempted to reach the Spanish in Florida.⁵⁶ To keep a workforce it became necessary to make joining the Indians or trading with them another crime punishable by death, as was fornication. Considering the lack of English women in the colony, this must have referred to sex with Powhatan women, which was often manipulated to Powhatan advantage. English men could be lured into death traps or perhaps coaxed into an alliance through connection with women who were part of Wahunsonacock’s entourage.⁵⁷ Many other infractions were likewise subject to the death penalty, often administered to elicit maximum fear among the spectators. Lesser infractions involved whipping or such inventive punishments as lying all night with your back arched and your heels tied together and drawn backwards toward your head.⁵⁸ That so many ran off to the Indians, and that it was deemed necessary to so intensely punish those English who, in various ways, consorted with Indians, is testament to the opinion of many at Jamestown: striving for a successful colony was not in their best interests.

Indeed, there was good reason, beyond the harsh punishments, to hold this opinion. Jamestown itself was an unhealthy, swampy site, with dirty water; death from malnutrition, combined with malaria and the intestinal “bloody flux,” was rampant and gruesome.⁵⁹ In addition, leaders very quickly decided that conflict with the Powhatan was preferable to cooperation, raiding better than trading, especially when it turned out that the Chesapeake didn’t have gold or other items of great value to the English. Trade, therefore, wasn’t going to provide the wealth the Virginia Company investors required. But corn grown by Powhatan women was desperately needed, and it quickly became easiest to get it by raiding. So life in the colony was threatened not just by disease, but also by angry Powhatan, as well as by punishment from English leaders. And once tobacco became established as an immensely valuable, but also immensely labor-intensive, crop, laborers began to die of overwork and malnutrition, or even of being whipped to death. If you were one of the convicts shipped after 1619, your indenture, as directed by the Privy Council, was to constrain you to “such heavy and painful works as such servitude shall be a greater terror than death itself.”⁶⁰ And life for non-convict indentured servants was scarcely better; indenture was a form of temporary slavery. You became a piece of property that could be sold or passed on to heirs.⁶¹ But more of this in the next chapter.

For someone like X, indenture would have been a dismal prospect, with very little to weigh on the other side of the balance. Supposing the colony survived, what was in it for him? At the end of the contracted seven years of labor, you were to receive a share in the Virginia Company—that is, assuming you lived that long, which at first was highly unlikely. As was the prospect of actually receiving anything of value. When the first arrivals came to the end of their contracts, a share in the Virginia Company was worthless. Instead, small parcels of land were made available—company land, on which you could be a tenant. People Governor Dale favored were designated as “farmers,” and had to give two and a half barrels of corn per acre and 30 days’ service to the company each year, while “laborers” instead owed eleven months service per year.⁶² This would have borne little resemblance to freedom for either group. Those who did not run away and finished their indenture but rejected the Company’s continued control of them could (somehow) return to England—or join the Powhatan.

By 1616, keeping a labor force had become a real problem. It required some way of providing better options—a lure to keep people tied in, and again land proved to be the only viable (in the eyes of the elite) resource. Ending the indenture system, or even making it less oppressive, was apparently not on the table. Instead, the Company set aside land to be available for private ownership, with the payment of “quitrent,” a kind of real estate tax. The headright system gave rights to land for however many head (of people) you brought to the colony. This meant that any of the free people who were already there could increase their holdings by 50 acres for each person whose way they paid—which in practice frequently meant buying an indentured servant from the ship’s captain who had provided the servant’s passage, and thus acquiring the headright. In addition, it was now possible to own a private plantation, or to form syndicates to own a plantation. Until 1624, when the Virginia Company was dissolved, the Company also reserved land for its own use, and brought over sharecropping tenants to work it.⁶³

ONE MORE STEP WAS CRITICAl in controlling recalcitrant colonists, beyond providing the hope of land and the wealth that went with large-scale tobacco growing. I mentioned earlier that the gender relations that helped control men and kept them tied into the class hierarchy had fallen apart at Jamestown. This had to be mended. Originally Jamestown was to be a trading post, along the lines of those established by Europeans in Africa and Asia. It was not to be a colony in the sense of families making a life there. It was simply to be the point at which wealth would be extracted from the local inhabitants. The problem was that there was no wealth to extract, or at least nothing that the English recognized as wealth (the Powhatan, with their flourishing exchange of wealth items, must have found this an odd attitude!). The only way for the colony to provide its investors with wealth was by becoming an agricultural outpost. But that entailed settled people doing the labor themselves, rather than simply taking wealth from Indians.

Settling people, convincing them that the long-term investment of hard labor and of capital in making land productive for tobacco was worth it, required giving them private ownership of land, or at least the prospect of it. For such long-term commitment, simply turning loose a bunch of able-bodied young men wasn’t going to work. Women were needed, who would produce children, and even more important, would “civilize” the men and persuade them that cooperation in the present, in the hope of a better future, was worth it.⁶⁴ Women, in other words, would restore the structures of patriarchy. And patriarchy is at least as much about controlling subordinate men as about controlling women. A man who is poor, who is dominated by other men, but who can go home to be king of his castle, where he rules and is served, is more likely to acquiesce to the orderly extraction of wealth and to the class structure that places him toward the bottom. The raw use of force in punishing can then ease off. In Virginia, in a sense, families would act as hostages, as a guarantee of men’s good behavior. Obedience because you don’t want to jeopardize your family’s chances of rising in the social structure feels voluntary, quite different from obedience because of fear of a horrifying punishment. And that is especially true if you have the right to punish your family and servants. The feeling that you are in control at home can enhance your feelings of self-worth, which may well be battered outside the home.

So the Virginia Company decided to reconstruct the patriarchal social hierarchy that prevailed in England.⁶⁵ And Powhatan women definitely wouldn’t do as wives in a patriarchal system. Powhatan women expected, and got, a significant degree of equality with men. Their voices, particularly as elders in their matrilineal clans, were heard and influenced political decisions. Inheritance of position went through the female line, giving women leverage in relation to brothers and uncles and fathers and husbands. Some women were werowances. “[I]n the Powhatan world,” says historian Helen Rountree, “women… were considered intelligent, autonomous human beings just as the men were.”⁶⁶ Definitely not good submissive wife material. Whether the Virginia Company officials considered making it legal to marry Powhatan women I don’t know, but it certainly seems unlikely. Instead, in 1620 the Company began shipping boatloads of poor and desperate women to Jamestown to be sold, as indentured servants were, but as wives instead of servants—another form of unfree labor. The going rate was 120 pounds of tobacco, paid by the husband to the ship’s captain, six times the cost of a male servant. This was so profitable that one company official set up a joint-stock company simply to sell women in the colony.⁶⁷

Perhaps eventually X Radford might have seen land ownership as a real possibility. Perhaps he dreamed of buying a wife. At this point, perhaps he would have decided to throw in his lot with the colony. That certainly was the hope of the planters, who by now were deeply committed to tobacco and desperately needed a labor force if they were to grow rich off the land they had acquired through the headright system. If X didn’t return to England, if X didn’t join the Indians, if X worked hard as an indentured servant—in other words, if he bought into the system because he believed, however mistakenly, that he might someday be a planter, then he would be part of the docile labor force the Company, and the planters, required. As we shall see in the next chapter, this system, although temporarily successful, soon failed. Revolt was in the air, and it wasn’t just English people who revolted. They were joined by the Africans who by that time were laboring in the tobacco fields with them, and undoubtedly by many of Powhatan ancestry who were also held in servitude.⁶⁸

Perhaps at some point X did gain land. If he gained more than he could work himself, and since the point of getting more land is increased production, then he would need an exploitable labor force to reap the benefits of ownership. Perhaps he began importing indentured servants himself. Or perhaps he owned a grandparent of Venis, who, over a century later, would be held enslaved by Alexander Davidson I. If any of this happened, then X would have been developing a stake in the colony; he would be far more likely to “behave.” He would have been sucked into supporting the budding state mechanisms that guaranteed his ownership of private property. The state’s militia would defend his property rights against both Powhatan claimants and the English poor and landless dispossessed, against even his own indentured servants should they revolt. And his right to punish those servants was guaranteed by the state. At the first meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses, masters were given the right to punish servants, with whipping and added years of servitude explicitly included.⁶⁹ Punishment is clearly on the agenda of a state in formation. However, the colony, even with the backing of the Crown and Parliament, did not have a monopoly on the use of force. Even X had the right to use force to control his servants, not just his wife and children. This was a long way from being a strong state.

AND THE POWHATAN WERE DETERMINED to keep the colony weak. There are arguments about what happened in 1622. Was it a genocidal massacre by the Powhatan against the English—a desperate failed attempt to remove from the land the rapacious invaders who by now were arriving in droves and clearly had no intention of anything but total control of more and more land, making life more and more difficult for the Powhatan? Or was it instead a blow against an upstart and recalcitrant subject population delivered by a people who saw themselves as dominant and sovereign? Were the English people who needed to be punished and taught to behave—as Wahunsonacock had occasionally done with other upstart polities? In any case, in 1622 close to a third of the English population was killed in a carefully orchestrated attack in which the Powhatan and their allies imitated English behavior and killed women and children as well as men—but unlike the English, they spared Africans.⁷⁰

Opechancanough, a brother of the now aged Wahunsonacock, acting as the secular power, had apparently spent several years planning this move. Indians had up to this point been coming and going fairly freely in Jamestown and in outlying farms and plantations. Despite the laws, there was actually a great deal of illicit trading, largely corn for copper, iron tools, and guns.⁷¹ And the English had apprenticed Powhatan children, claiming to be teaching them a trade, but generally treating them as indentured servants. This was a situation Powhatan parents soon recognized and vigorously resisted, but by this time, poverty was becoming an issue for some Powhatan people. They were being dispossessed—the English were stealing their corn or were preventing them from using their former clan land. Some became servants, working for the English.⁷² Altogether, the Powhatan presence was pervasive. It was these people, along with an unusual number of Powhatan men, pretending to arrive for trading, who, on the morning of March 22, 1622, suddenly grabbed knives, hoes, their own hidden weapons, and attacked simultaneously many English settlements.⁷³

The colony was a mere 1,200 English and 23 Africans several years after the attack. Nearly a third of the colony had been killed; it took 1,100 arrivals, given the generally high death rate, to bring the population back to its pre-attack level.⁷⁴ Although recovery and growth came relatively quickly as shiploads of people continued to arrive, the attack of 1622 was emotionally a turning point for the English. Far from accepting Powhatan punishment and becoming well-behaved subjects, any lingering doubts about Indian virtues, any thoughts of coexistence, any doubts about their God-given right to sovereignty, all disappeared. The right to punish Powhatan became, in English eyes, critical to establishing their own sovereignty—just as the Powhatan had apparently viewed punishing the English. The English ability to take this stance (which many had long advocated) grew as the colony finally began to produce more of its own food. With the English no longer dependent on Powhatan corn, who had the right to punish those who became a serious bone of contention. The polity that could punish members of the other demonstrated its dominance and, for the English, made it possible to get more work out of Powhatan servants and slaves and out of the unfree laborers sent from England and Africa.⁷⁵ Even worse, the English challenged Powhatan sovereignty by attempting to take over the punishing of Powhatan who had transgressed against each other.⁷⁶

The struggle went on for several decades, with the English having declared all-out extermination of Indians as the only viable policy—a policy that left them without powerful nearby allies and thus vulnerable to the attacks mounted later by the Susquehanna and then the Seneca. The structures that support state power grew for the English and diminished for the Powhatan. Former subject peoples of Tsenacommacoh separated into individual polities, no longer under centralized control. Clan elders and local werowances regained some of their former authority. They took back control of their own punishing, or at least fought with the English, not with the former Tsenacommacoh authorities, over who had the right to punish offenses of one Indian against another.⁷⁷

By the end of the 1600s, long after Wahunsonacock’s death, the English actually gained the power to enforce laws that gave them the right to adjudicate quarrels among the Powhatan. But before that, Opechancanough, in what perhaps was a desperate last attempt to assert sovereignty and the right to use force to punish, attacked again in 1644. This time 4 to 5 percent of the now much larger English population of about 10,000 was killed.⁷⁸ English retaliation was ferocious. Thereafter Powhatan culture continued for a bit, but largely in isolated areas, out of English sight and direct influence—and indeed Powhatan identity continues today.⁷⁹ But Powhatan sovereignty was gone. Tsenacommacoh never became a state, and was never again to challenge English elites’ rights to exploit land and labor, protected by the state structures of control and punishment.

DESPITE THE REMOVAL OF THE POWHATAN threat, the colonial state structures remained weak; opposition by local elites could force the governor and council to back down or skirt issues that had no local support. In 1619, the General Assembly had mandated tithes to provide support for the church and its parsons and required church surveillance of parishioners (and all Virginia colonists were legally parishioners).⁸⁰ The state was enlisting the church in its attempts to control and punish. But at the same time, since the church was controlled by local elites, as we shall see in the next chapter, de facto this move allowed those local elites to wrest power from families and neighbors, who, even so, continued to play a major role in the policing of behavior by reporting and testifying.

Throughout the 1620s the state remained so weak that its authority could be enforced only through the continuation of the horrific punishments that John Smith and then Thomas Dale had relied on—it was either that or give in, evading the challenges posed by disgruntled people. Those dramatic and public punishments are a sign of a weak state, not a strong one whose authority is unquestioned. Authority over ordinary people was strengthened in 1634 by establishing the county court system, which gave power to local elites and only indirectly to the state itself. Justices of the peace had the power to adjudicate a wide range of behaviors deemed illegal or immoral. This process of shifting power to punish from groups of neighbors who policed themselves into the hands of local elites was ongoing. It meant that women lost much of the control over who was to be punished that they had had earlier, when they policed each other and witnessed for or against each other in the court of public opinion, and, if it came to that, in the courthouse where men had to listen to their testimony about other women.⁸¹

Men also lost some control. In 1662, for instance, in John Radford’s day, the General Assembly allowed men to ask the court to have their wives ducked (a procedure a bit like waterboarding) instead of fined.⁸² This was done under the guise of both relieving husbands of the burden of paying the fines imposed on wives convicted of slander and of backing up men’s often rather tenuous grip on authority over their wives. It did, perhaps, increase men’s leverage over their wives, but at the same time it gave the court, and thus local elites, the right to intervene in the husband’s right to punish. In other words, state formation was gradually shifting control of punishment from local informal groups into the hands of a few powerful people—paralleling Wahunsonacock’s move to shift power from local elders to subchiefs.

The diminished Powhatan presence did not at all mean the end of other powerful Indian nations. The next Native challenge was not long in coming. And this time, accompanying war between Native and English polities, was rebellion within the English polity. Local elites tried to wrest power from the colonial government, and a desperate workforce rebelled against the exploitative system those local elites espoused.

What happened to X we don’t know. Maybe he made it through the Powhatan punishing attacks. If so, maybe he participated as an old man in the next uprising. But from here John Radford can pick up this tale.