Based on Alfred A. Knopf’s review of Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation by David A. Price.[1]
Fact 1: On May 14th, in the year 1607 A.D., three English ships, named Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed, under Captain Christopher Newport arrived in what would be later named the Jamestown settlement with a total of 105 colonists. That is not exactly what I would call an invasion. Clearly, this was no a conquest of the Indians pursuant to Genocide. These men, like most 17th century adventurers were seeking to circumnavigate the earth and find gold. There was no pre-planned attack. John Smith was trying to find a way to the Pacific Ocean.
Fact 2: Jamestown was founded on uninhabited land.
Fact 3: On May 25, 1607 A.D. the Jamestown settlement was attacked by the Natives, unprovoked. A small English boy was killed and a dozen English soldiers were wounded. The Natives are the ones who drew first blood.
Fact 4: In the Winter of 1607 A.D. Captain Smith left the Settlement to look for gold and a rout to the Pacific Ocean. Instead his men were ambush by Chickahominy warriors and one of them, Mr. Cassen was tortured:
“The natives prepared a large fire behind the bound and naked body. Then a man grasped his hands and used mussel shells to cut off joint after joint, making his way through Cassen’s fingers, tossing the pieces into the flames.”
Again it was the Natives who drew blood. They then captured John Smith. Smith escaped torture by claiming he was a chief. Later, Powhatan (Native Chief) ordered his men to force Smith’s head down on a large rock and dash out his brains. It was then that Pocahontas, the favorite of Powhatan’s many children, threw herself on top of Smith to rescue him from execution.
Fact 5: In 1608 A.D. Powhatan started sending small parties of men to steal from the English. The English at one time caught and imprisoned a dozen of them.
“Smith sent a message to Powhatan, saying that if the spades, shovels, swords, and tools the Indians had stolen were not returned, he would hang the prisoners. The Indians then caught two colonists and proposed an exchange. Smith, his numbers reinforced by a new installment of colonists, went on a punitive expedition, in which he killed no one, but burned villages and destroyed canoes. Powhatan returned the two colonists. Smith learned from his Indian prisoners that Powhatan planned to hold a feast for the English, kill them while they were off guard, and take all their weapons and tools.”
Fact 6: In 1609 A.D. Captain Smith sailed back to England. There were at this time about 500 people in Jamestown. Again, this is no invasion. Many of the colonists were completely incompetent. This played a role in the coming “Starving Time”.
“After Powhatan had met the incompetents who replaced Smith, he began attacking the colony again with surprise raids. His men massacred a party of English who went looking for food, and left their bodies for the others to find. By March 1610, 400 out of the 500 Smith had left behind were dead of starvation or Indian attacks.”
Here we have the fourth act of unprovoked aggression by the Natives. So far from Imperialism, Conquest and Genocide, during the starving times the English colonists became so hungry they resorted to Cannibalism.
Fact 7: In 1613 A.D. Samuel Argall kidnapped Pocahontas, but John Rolfe befriended her, introduced her to Christianity and later married her (1614), creating a bond of peace between the settlement and Powhatan. (Ridpath’s United States: A History)[2]
Fact 8: So far from conquest, the English responded to Pocahontas’s conversion by setting aside 10,000 acres of land to be used as a Christian college for the Natives. George Thorpe even had an English-style house built for Opechancanough, who was the brother of Powhatan who captured Smith. Opechancanough became the new chief after Powhatan’s death in 1618 A.D..
Fact 9: Opechancanough led the Virginia massacre of 1622. So far from genocide and conquest, to have established the conditions that made it possible for the Indians to move about so freely with the colonists to even make the massacre of 1622 possible, the English showed an extremely high level of trust and friendliness, which the Indians brutally betrayed.
The next year was full of conflict as can be understood. The colonists poisoned 200 Natives. I am rebuked by their leniency in this. Things should have gotten very bad for the Natives at this point but they didn’t.
Fact 10: In 1623 A.D. a real peace treaty was signed between the Natives and the English.
Fact 11:Nevertheless, in 1644 A.D. The Natives attacked yet again!
“Amazingly, in 1644, Opechancanough masterminded an identical sneak attack, and this time managed to kill between 400 and 500 people. The impact was not as great, since the colony had grown bigger still, but this time the English did not stop until they had killed a great many Indians, including Opechancanough. In 1646, the Virginia General Assembly noted that the natives were “so routed and dispersed that they are no longer a nation, and we now suffer only from robbery by a few starved outlaws…..For the English to have then so lowered their guard that the same Indian chief could slaughter another 500 colonists 21 years later in exactly the same way, again shows how much the English were prepared to trust their neighbors.”
Contrary to the Liberal claims and the Nation of Islam’s claims that White men can never get along with anyone and continue to push their aggression onto others, we see the exact opposite in the founding of the Jamestown colony and the establishment of English influence in Virginia.
“It is instructive to note that nearly 400 years later, the whites who have now taken possession of the continent have lost none of the illusions of the Jamestown colonists. As whites, in their turn, suffer invasion by aliens they persist in believing that with enough love and generosity, the children of today’s illegal immigrants “will blesse the day when first their fathers saw their faces.” This, of course, was the illusion that led to the massacres of 1622 and 1644. It is only whites who believe in and try to practice multiracialism and peaceful coexistence.”
White people are the ones that go around the word building hospitals and schools for people all around the world. I graduated from Bob Jones University, a Christian University in South Carolina for undergrad and I was confronted with White Christian Missionary families one week after another who were either preparing for or who had already established missions around the globe, building hospitals and schools for savage tribes and nations. I never saw a single Black, Latino or Asian family preparing for this. They were all White. All of them!
These Natives here were heathen savages who showed their asses (In more ways than one) in their first orientation with my ancestors and as we saw, they clearly deserved the displacement they received. Moreover, these people were not taking dominion over the earth and were therefore disobeying God’s law (Gen. 1:28). I will not say that the Natives deserved the treatment they received from the Yankees in the West after the Civil War (Philip Sheridan under the guidance of Jesuit De Smet), but for my part, as a person now living in a previous commonwealth of Virginia (Kentucky), I feel no guilt whatsoever for what happened to the Indians here and see this as the land of my ancestors and hopefully the land of my children and their children after them.
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