Powhatan’s people stayed in contact with the English settlers but maintained their distance. The Virginia Company boasted that the settlers bought from the Indians “the pearles of earth [corn] and [sold] to them the pearles of heaven [Christianity].” In fact, few Indians converted to Christianity, and the English devoted scant effort to proselytizing. Marriage between Indian women and English men also was rare, despite the acute shortage of English women in Virginia in the early years. Few settlers other than John Smith bothered to learn the Indians’ language.

Powhatan’s people regarded the English with suspicion, for good reason. Although the settlers often made friendly overtures to the Indians, they did not hesitate to use their guns and swords to enforce English notions of proper Indian behavior. When Indians refused to trade their corn to the settlers, the English pillaged their villages and confiscated their corn.

The Indians retaliated against English violence, but for fifteen years they did not organize an all-out assault on the European intruders, probably for several reasons. Although Christianity held few attractions for the Indians, the power of the settlers’ God impressed them. One chief told John Smith that “he did believe that our [English] God as much exceeded theirs as our guns did their bows and arrows.” Powhatan probably concluded that these powerful strangers would make better allies than enemies. As allies, the English strengthened Powhatan’s dominion over the tribes in the region.

The colonists also traded with Powhatan’s people, usually exchanging European goods for corn. Native Virginians quickly recognized the superiority of the intruders’ iron and steel knives, axes, and pots, and they eagerly traded corn to get them.

But why were the settlers unable to feed themselves for more than a decade? First, as the staggering death rate suggests, many settlers were too sick to be productive. Second, very few farmers came to Virginia in the early years. Instead, most of the newcomers were gentlemen and their servants who, in John Smith’s words, “never did know what a day’s work was.” The proportion of gentlemen in Virginia in the early years was six times greater than in England, a reflection of the Virginia Company’s urgent need for investors and settlers. Smith declared repeatedly that in Virginia “there is no country to pillage [as in New Spain]. . . . All you can expect from [Virginia] must be by labor.” For years, however, colonists clung to English notions that gentlemen should not work with their hands and that tradesmen should work only in trades for which they had been trained, ideas that made more sense in labor-rich England than in labor-poor Virginia.

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The persistence of the Virginia colony created difficulties for Powhatan’s chiefdom. Steady contact between natives and newcomers spread European diseases among the Indians, who suffered deadly epidemics. To produce enough corn for trade with the English required the Indian women to spend more time and effort growing crops. But from the Indians’ viewpoint, the most important fact about the always-hungry English colonists was that they were not going away.

Powhatan died in 1618, and his brother Opechancanough replaced him as supreme chief. In 1622, Opechancanough organized an all-out assault on the English settlers. As an English colonist observed, “When the day appointed for the massacre arrived [March 22], a number of savages visited many of our people in their dwellings, and while partaking with them of their meal[,] the savages, at a given signal, drew their weapons and fell upon us murdering and killing everybody they could reach[,] sparing neither women nor children.” In all, the Indians killed 347 colonists, nearly a third of the English population. But the attack failed to dislodge the colonists. Instead, in the years to come the settlers unleashed a murderous campaign of Indian extermination that pushed the Indians beyond the small circumference of white settlement. After 1622, most colonists considered Indians their perpetual enemies. As an Englishman declared, the “murdered carcasses” of the colonists “speak, proclaim, and cry, This our earth is truly English, and therefore this Land [of Virginia] is justly yours O English.”