Eastern North America, 1622–1842
THE ACME OF guerrilla skill is to spring an ambush on a completely unsuspecting foe—something that the Indians of North America managed to accomplish on too many occasions to count. The most famous such ambush occurred on July 9, 1755, when a combined force of French soldiers and Indian warriors caught a column of British and colonial soldiers in the woods near Fort Duquesne, the site of present-day Pittsburgh. Some 600 men, out of 1,469, were killed, including the British commander, General Edward Braddock. His aide de camp, a young officer named George Washington, barely escaped this debacle. The massacre at the Monongahela was particularly notable because the Indians’ enemies were armed soldiers who should have been ready for battle—but weren’t.If even large bodies of troops could be caught unawares, it should not be terribly surprising that farming communities on the frontier were regularly caught by surprise. One of the first and most devastating such attacks occurred near Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, located near modern-day Williamsburg.
The English colonists suspected nothing amiss on Friday morning, March 22, 1622. Powhatan Indians were showing up in great numbers on the outlying plantations scattered for eighty miles around Jamestown. Those plantations had sprung up in recent years to farm a lucrative new crop—tobacco. There was nothing unusual about such visits. The Indians would bring deer, turkey, fish, fruit, and fur and in return would get beads and other trinkets that they valued. It was a clash of cultures, with the English in their cumbersome woolen clothes and leather shoes while the Indian men wore nothing but loincloths and moccasins, their faces brightly painted, heads half shaved, and elaborate earrings dangling from their ears. But by then each side was familiar with the other. The Indians were unarmed, so they aroused no suspicion.
Relations between settlers and Indians had been tense initially when the first ships of the Virginia Company had arrived fifteen years earlier carrying a hundred or so settlers to establish what would become the first permanent English colony in North America. Clashes were frequent, and in the early days the English would never have permitted the Indians to roam around their colony as they did in 1622. But peace had generally prevailed since 1614. The preceding year the English had kidnapped Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan, founder of an empire of ten thousand Indians stretching around Jamestown like a vast human necklace. Pocahontas converted to Christianity and married a settler, and her father reached an accommodation with his new in-laws.
In 1618 Powhatan died but his successor and half brother, Opechancanough, promised to continue friendly relations. He told the colonists that “he held the peace concluded so firm as the skies should sooner fall than it dissolve.” Many of the English believed that they were in “a happy league of peace and amity” with the natives and “that the fear of killing each other is vanished away.” Only too late would they realize this was “treacherous dissimulation” on the part of a clever chieftain who nurtured deep-seated hatred of the newcomers, who were encroaching on his lands and trying to convert his people to an alien religion. Opechancanough had concocted an elaborate plot to destroy the invaders before any more ships could arrive to swell their ranks even further.
On the morning of March 22, 1622, all of the Indians appeared to be friendly. Some even sat down to breakfast with their hosts. The colonists were going about their normal routines—planting corn and tobacco, gardening, building, sawing. Without warning, wrote John Smith, one of the founders of the colony, the “cruel beasts . . . slew most barbarously, not sparing either age or sex, man, woman, or child, so sudden in their execution, that few or none discerned the weapon or blow that brought them to destruction . . . most by their own weapons.” Those weapons ranged from swords to axes, knives, hammers, and saws. Picking up these crude implements, the Indians went on a marauding rampage, killing every European they could find, including women and children. “And not being content with taking away life alone,” an official report noted, “they fell after upon the dead, making as well as they could a fresh murder, defacing, dragging, and mangling the dead carcasses.”
Jamestown itself was on guard because it had been warned in advance by a Christian Indian, but the attackers moved so quickly from farm to farm that there was no time to organize a general defense against what one Englishman described as this “viperous brood” and another called “those hell-hounds.” The attack wiped out more than one-fourth of the colonists—347 out of 1,240—and put the entire colony on the brink of extinction.
Yet Captain Smith, who had long counseled a hard line against the natives, perceived a chilling bit of good news in this disaster: “Some say [this massacre] will be good for the plantation because now we have just cause to destroy them by all means necessary.” Sir Francis Wyatt, governor of Jamestown, agreed on the need to “pursue their extirpation.” But he realized that a straightforward assault would be unlikely to succeed. “It is most apparent,” he wrote, “that they are an enemy not to be suddenly destroyed with the sword by reason of their swiftness of foot, and advantages of the wood, to which upon all our assaults they retire.”
Instead he proposed to wipe them out “by the way of starvings and all other means.” Punitive expeditions were sent to burn the Powhatans’ towns and steal or destroy their corn, thus bringing them to the brink of starvation the following winter. Two months after the initial attack, on May 22, 1623, a party of Englishmen lured the war-weary Indians for peace talks and served them poisoned wine. The peace negotiators then fired a “volley of shot” into the incapacitated Powhatan, killing two hundred of them. On their way back to the colony, the Englishmen shot fifty more Indians “and brought home part of their heads.”
The pattern was set for almost three centuries of what the Virginia Company directors would describe after the Jamestown uprising as “perpetual war without peace or truce.” Perpetual it was, but it was not war as understood on the battlefields of Europe. It was a frontier style of fighting that was marked by treachery and surprise and massacre on both sides. In other words, it was guerrilla warfare, a phrase not usually associated with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial history.
THE JAMESTOWN SETTLERS were among the first to discover what many Europeans would learn: that Indians excelled at the “skulking style of war.” The Indians of eastern North America were not nomads like the tribes of Inner Asia or the tribes that would come to populate the Great Plains. They lived in permanent villages for most of the year, in birch-bark wigwams sometimes ringed by wooden palisades, and grew corn, squash, and other crops. But farming was considered women’s work. The men were left free to hunt, fish—and make war. Like many other prestate peoples, their hunting skills made them effective killers whether stalking animals on four legs or two. “However absurd it may appear,” wrote George Washington, who as a young man fought with and against Indians on the Virginia frontier, “it is nevertheless certain” that “five hundred Indians” could be a more potent fighting force “than ten times their number of Regulars.”
That was only true, however, when the Indians fought in a stealthy manner. In 1492, when the first Europeans landed in the New World, the indigenous peoples did not have horses, wheels, steel, or firearms. They fought on foot with wooden swords, spears, slings, clubs, axes, and bows and arrows tipped with obsidian, flint, or bone. Thus equipped, they could not stand in the open against the Europeans and their “thunder sticks.”
The explorer Samuel de Champlain and two other French soldiers had enough firepower between them to rout two hundred Mohawk Indians. Just after daybreak on July 30, 1609, on the shores of what is now Lake Champlain in New York State, Champlain calmly walked in front of a group of his Algonquin and Huron allies who were at war with the Mohawk. They were standing in a tight array, wearing wooden armor and holding shields. Champlain raised his arquebus, a primitive musket that had been loaded with four balls, and fired a single, deafening shot that knocked over three Mohawk at once, two of them chiefs easily recognizable by the feathers they wore on their heads. “As I was loading again,” he recalled, “one of my companions fired a shot from the woods, which astonished them anew to such a degree that . . . they lost courage, and took to flight . . . fleeing into the woods, whither I pursued them, killing still more of them.”
Not all Indian societies survived such disastrous initial contacts.10 Some, such as the Caribs and Arawaks of the West Indies, were wiped out altogether by a combination of European weapons and European microbes in what the historian Edmund S. Morgan rightly calls a “tale of horror.” (Morgan explains “the fury with which the Spanish assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them” by arguing that the Indians’ innocence and austerity—they required and wanted little in the way of worldly goods—was an affront to “the Europeans’ cherished assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians.”) Ironically, the most advanced societies—the Aztecs and Incas—suffered the most devastating defeats because, like the Zulus or the South Asians, they were so tightly organized and so hierarchical that they could mass thousands of warriors in the kind of open battle at which Europeans excelled. Moreover, these states were so densely populated that they could transmit smallpox and other plagues “like ink spreading through tissue paper.”And they were so centralized that the loss of a few key leaders could immobilize the rest of society. Less centralized, less populous, less sophisticated societies fared better because they had no choice but to place heavy reliance on guile and subterfuge to resist the better-armed newcomers—they employed guerrilla tactics such as the raid on Jamestown orchestrated by Opechancanough.
Indian ambushes became even more formidable once their warriors learned to make use of the guns, horses, and steel introduced by the Europeans, a process that was just beginning in Opechancanough’s day. Although colonial authorities tried to keep Indians from getting their hands on firearms, they acquired all they needed through trade or theft. While they never fully gave up the bow and arrow, their marksmanship soon exceeded that of most settlers, who were mainly farmers and craftsmen, not hunters or soldiers.The dense woods of eastern North America greatly abetted the Indians because they made the Europeans’ parade-ground formations and volley fire difficult to execute, providing a contrast between the inflexibility of the newcomers, prisoners to imported and inappropriate tactical doctrines, and the shrewdness and adaptability of the natives who developed a way of war ideally suited to their environment. Gliding between the trees, the Indians were able to carry out raids and ambushes that took advantage of what was, to the colonists, unfamiliar terrain. Having no need of cumbersome supply trains, they could survive for extended periods on acorns, nuts, ground-up animal bones, even tree bark, thereby allowing them to move much faster than colonial militias.
Like their settled forebears dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, New England farmers had trouble defending themselves against highly skilled tribal guerrillas. “Scarcely a hamlet of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders escaped a visit from the nimble enemy,” the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman wrote of the French and Indian wars that raged from 1689 to 1759. “[All] were all more or less infested, usually by small scalping parties, hiding in the outskirts, waylaying stragglers, or shooting men at work in the fields, and disappearing as soon as their blow was struck.”
FOR ALL THEIR skill at the art of ambush, the Indians got the worst of the “forest wars” waged along the Eastern Seaboard in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The outcome may seem inevitable in retrospect, but that was not how it appeared at the time. In Jamestown in 1622 the colonists, not the Indians, seemed to be on the brink of extinction. Why did the Indians lose in the end? Principally because of two critical deficiencies—a lack of population and a lack of unity.
Disclaimer: Photos belong to respective owners
No comments:
Post a Comment