The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
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