The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
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