Paper Sovereigns. Jeffrey Glover
the Powhatans, an expansion-minded chiefdom led by a hereditary sachem. They included the Susquehannocks, a commercially driven tribe that had largely remade its economy around markets in European furs. They also included the Patuxets, a group depopulated by epidemic, who pursued treaties with the English in an attempt to reclaim their own land. These groups had widely different politics and goals, but they shared some beliefs about law and diplomacy.
Just as many Europeans believed that laws ultimately came from the Christian God, so did many Algonquians view political and legal power as flowing from a creator.64 In the Chesapeake and Potomac, this figure was called Ahone. In New England, he was Manitowoc. His power was called manitou. Other gods, people, animals, and objects were viewed as embodiments of manitou. Algonquians believed that everything in the world contained manitou to some degree. People, animals, objects, even words, utterances, and movements—all possessed manitou. Roger Williams captured the pervasiveness of manitou in his phrasebook of the Narragansett dialect of Algonquian, A Key into the Language of America (1643). “[T]here is a generall Custome amongst them,” he wrote, “at the apprehension of any Excellency in Men, Women, Birds Beasts, Fish, &c. to cry out Manittóo, that is, it is a God.”65
This notion of manitou in all things was at the center of coastal practices for marking agreement and building political order. For many Algonquian groups, the creator was something of a distant figure. He existed as a force in the universe, seldom communicating with humans directly. This distance necessitated mediators known as quiyoughcosughs, a category of lesser powers that included human leaders such as chiefs, or werowances. Algonquians viewed their leaders both as embodiments of gods and as figures who kept the world of humans in balance with the world of spirits. Relations with foreigners were important to the power of werowances. Goods from distant places were understood as special objects from the spirit world that endowed their holders (and givers) with power. Chiefs created and maintained authority by acquiring prestige goods, demanding them as tribute when others acquired them, and dispensing them as gifts. While these rituals of distribution and alliance were linked to religion (in the same way, perhaps, as Christian teachings informed natural law), they also served more pragmatic purposes. Gifts, the historian Anne Keary writes, “were understood to be as much diplomatic exchanges as exchanges of wealth. They were formalized in oral rituals conducted at large interband gatherings, where marriages were also arranged, religious ceremonies performed, and gifts traded and tribute offered as a sign and seal of an interband alliance.”66 The relationship between werowances and tributary groups little resembled that of princes and subjects in Europe. It had little of the absolutism characteristic of European crowns’ demands of total subjection. Lesser peoples gave werowances goods or access to resources; in turn, werowances promised military assistance or support at times of shortage or crisis. Unlike European subjection, this kind of submission was flexible. Greater or more frequent tribute strengthened relations; a lessening of amount or frequency introduced distance and independence. Smaller groups frequently acted on their own accord, or periodically dropped their affiliation with a chiefly power. Like all political systems the world over, those of coastal peoples were fraught with uncertainty and conflict. Some werowances exercised little power, while others violently compelled tribute. Nor were tributary systems historically static. The introduction of European trade goods in the fifteenth century altered the economies of tribute along the coast. The appearance of European pathogens also profoundly disrupted longstanding political routines, leading to massive reorganizations that offered openings for newcomers.67
When the first English colonists sent home accounts of treaties with Native Americans, they were usually describing exchanges that Natives understood in terms of tribute.68 However, the concept of tribute formed the basis of a wide variety of political practices that varied markedly across tribes and regions. Coastal leaders made oral agreements; they exchanged gifts, trade goods, animals, and hostages; and they marked the landscape with inscriptions and monuments. Though not dependent on alphabetic writing, these ways of performing and documenting agreements were binding expressions of consent, much like signatures in Western cultures.69
When colonists first arrived in the Chesapeake Bay, they documented their participation in such practices in an effort to show that their neighbors were tolerating their presence. A treaty made in coastal fashion, they hoped, was a sure sign the Indians would not attack them, or otherwise challenge their control. However, while colonists and crowns viewed treaties as evidence for their own claims, such rituals only gained meaning in Europe through the written word. It was not enough to cite Roman legal texts or relevant contemporary authorities. Settlers also had to publicize their treaties in a way that would command legal recognition. This meant putting pen to paper, and finding ways to explain the significance of treaty practices many Europeans viewed as strange or barbaric.
Writing Treaties
When drafting treaties with Native peoples, colonists always had government audiences in mind.70 On the first returning supply ship, they usually sent home letters attesting to the sincerity and friendliness of their neighbors. There were few agreed-upon conventions for documenting treaties in America. Vitoria, Gentili, and others had argued that treaties with Indians were good and valid, but colonists had scant precedents to guide them when it came to recording such treaties, especially when they had been ratified in Native fashion. At first, they documented treaties primarily for the councils of the joint-stock companies that funded colonization. These councils wanted to show the crown that they were seizing territory and holding it against potential foreign threats, and treaties supported this aim. Colonists usually reported such treaties in diplomatic relations, or letters to royal authority.71 As a genre that recounted words and behaviors, the diplomatic relation offered a way to describe modes of treaty ratification that lacked any clear analogue in the annals of European practice. Relations captured both official acts of ratification and the many behaviors and negotiations that surrounded them, all of which were understood as potential evidence of consent. Colonists who were out of favor with the crown, or not important enough to merit its attention, turned to other genres and venues. Sometimes, they printed Native treaties in reports or histories, seeking to leverage the publicity of the press to their benefit. After John Smith was ousted from the leadership of the Virginia Colony, he published a dissenting account of Powhatan treaty negotiations on the press at Oxford, hoping to inspire the colony’s stakeholders to throw their support behind him. Religious dissenters such as Roger Williams or Samuel Gorton pursued a similar tactic during the English Revolution, packaging accounts of Native treaties with reformist exhortations in the hopes of influencing Parliament on their behalf.
While colonists usually addressed treaties to royal authorities, they were also aware that others would read what they wrote. European diplomats were one such audience. Foreign agents collected and perused colonial relations and digested them for home governments. Alongside this officially recognized traffic in diplomatic papers, there was also an illicit circulation of narratives and stories about treaties. The Anglo-Spanish War saw the withdrawal of many official diplomatic embassies and an increase in spying and surreptitious written correspondence.72 While England, Spain, and France maintained diplomatic embassies throughout the early colonial era, diplomats often doubled as spies, intercepting documents and cultivating sources among discontented courtiers or religious dissenters. As well as addressing English authorities, colonists wrote for a shadow coterie of rivals. This coterie acted as a surveillance force, spying upon English settlements and intercepting their written communications. Colonists were extremely fearful of such spying. The establishment of the first English settlements coincided with rampant hysteria about Catholic conspiracy, stoked by the Gunpowder Plot as well as by James I’s deeply unpopular attempts to establish a marriage alliance with a Hapsburg princess. While this fear-mongering exaggerated the reality of Spanish power, Spanish ambassadors, Catholic loyalists, and English renegades frequently intercepted accounts of Native alliances and scrutinized them for evidence that Native leaders were less than fully agreeable to English designs. For example, Pedro de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador in London during the early years of Virginia settlement, intercepted letters and narratives from returning colonists and collected information from Irish Catholic spies at Jamestown. He used this information to characterize Jamestown as a piratical venture