In 1622, in Jamestown, Virginia, Powhatan warriors launched a surprise attack against English settlements. In terms of the percentage of a group or tribe killed in a single massacre, the 1622 attack was the deadliest attack committed by either side – Native Americans or English settlers – in early American history. The Powhatan attempted to wipe out every English person, combatant or non-combatant. They killed at least one-quarter of the English in the Jamestown region. Historians label this event a ‘massacre’ or ‘uprising’, which are inaccurate analytical labels. Scholars have not analysed the 1622 attack within the appropriate framework of genocide. To remedy that omission, this article reexamines the attack within the un Genocide Convention framework. The Convention provides methodological, empirical, and normative benefits for understanding past conflict. In planning and executing the attack, the Powhatan had the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the English colonists as such.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
James Mooney, ‘The Powhatan Confederacy, Past and Present’, American Anthropologist 9(1) (1907), 129–152, 146.
Benjamin Madley, ‘Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods’, The American Historical Review 120(1) (2015), 98–139, 103, 132 (asserting that the u.n. Convention provides ‘a useful analytical tool: a frame for evaluating the past and comparing similar events across time’, and directly applying the Convention’s language to the killings of Pequot and Yuki Indians). Part 3 infra discusses of the methodological, empirical, and normative reasons for applying the Genocide Convention to historical conflict.
John P. Reid, ‘Law and History’, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 27(1) (1993), 193–224, 202.
Kiernan, ibid., 12.
Russell D. Edmunds, ‘Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895–1995’, American Historical Review 100(3) (1995), 717–740, 723, 725 (‘During the 1960s, the study of Native American history was transformed . . . this new scholarship has endeavored to present an ‘Indian-centered’ perspective: an account of Indian-white relations that analyzes this interaction from the Native American point of view’). For a seminal example of this point of view, See Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1975), 30 (‘The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers’).
Fred Anderson, ‘The Role of Native Peoples in Early American History’, in AP United States History: White-Native American Contact in Early American History: 2008 Curriculum Module (2008), 2–12, 4, available athttp://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/AP_CurricModUSHist.pdf (observing that ‘the work of the ambitious and gifted historians who followed Jennings was broadly consistent with the general narrative as he had defined it’).
J. Frederick Fausz, ‘An “Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides”: England’s First Indian War, 1609–1614’, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98(1) (1990), 3–56, 4.
Richard E. Redding, ‘Sociopolitical Diversity in Psychology’, American Psychologist 56(3) (2001), 205–215, 206 (citing numerous studies finding that ideological bias affects research and undermines independent intellectual inquiry). Based on a sample of 800 social psychologists, Inbar and Lammers found that academics in that field openly admitted they would discriminate against conservatives in hiring, distributing grants, and reviewing papers. Yoel Inbar/Joris Lammers, ‘Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology’, Perspectives On Psychological Science 7 (2012), 496–503, 500–501.
Alfred Cave, ‘The Origins of Genocide against Native Americans: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century’, Global Dialogue (online) 15(1) (2013), 86–96, http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=550 (Jamestown ‘embarked on a decade-long genocide with regular times each year set aside by law for the hunting and killing of Indians who were part of the Powhatan Confederacy’); Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Knopf 1990), 292 (claiming that, in response to the massacre, the London Company called for what we ‘would recognize as genocide’); Gary B. Nash, ‘The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind’, William and Mary Quarterly 29(2) (1972), 197–230, 219 (arguing that, subsequent to the massacre, an English ‘writer gave clear expression to his genocidal intent when he reasoned that the Indians had done the colonists a favor by sweeping away the previous English reluctance to annihilate the Indians’).
Wayne E. Lee, ‘Peace Chiefs and Blood Revenge: Patterns of Restraint in Native American Warfare, 1500–1800’, The Journal of Military History 71(3) (2007), 701–741, 705.
Ibid., 101.
Fausz, ibid., 4.
Karen O. Kupperman, ‘Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown’, The Journal of American History 66(1) (1979), 24–40, 25.
George Percy, ‘“A Trewe Relacyon” Virginia from 1609 to 1612’, in Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine Vol. 3 (1921–22), 259, 271–272.
Percy, ibid., 272.
Fausz, ibid., 363.
Michael A. McDonnell/Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas’, Journal of Genocide Research 7(4) (2005), 501–529, 501 (‘[W]hat Lemkin’s manuscripts reveal is that early modern and modern colonialism was central to his conception of genocide’).
McDonnell/Moses, ibid., 502.
Chalk/Jonassohn, ibid., 27.
Kiernan, ibid., 9.
Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2d ed., 2010), 12.
Jennifer Trahan, ‘Why the Killing in Darfur is Genocide’, Fordham International Law Journal 31(4) (2007), 990–1057, 997–1054 (applying Convention framework to violence in Darfur).
David L. Nersessian, ‘Contours of Genocidal Intent: Troubling Jurisprudence from the International Criminal Tribunals’, Texas International Law Journal 37 (2002), 231–276, 265 (stating that intent is clearly shown ‘where it is the genocidist’s purpose to destroy all or part of the protected group’); Alexander K.A. Greenawalt, ‘Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-Based Interpretation’, Columbia Law Review 99 (1999), 2259–2294, 2264 (‘As regards the question of intent, the prevailing interpretation assumes that genocide is a crime of specific or special intent, involving a perpetrator who specifically targets victims on the basis of their group identity with a deliberate desire to inflict destruction upon the group itself’).
David Alonzo-Maizlish, ‘In Whole or in Part: Group Rights, the Intent Element of Genocide, and the Quantitative Criterion’, New York University Law Review 77 (2002), 1369–1403, 1387.
Fausz, ibid., 359.
Ibid., 358–59.
Wesley Frank Craven, ‘Indian Policy in Early Virginia’, William and Mary Quarterly 1(1) (1944), 65–82, 72.
Sibylle Scheipers, ‘Is the Law of Armed Conflict Outdated?’, Parameters 43(4) (2013–14), 45–56, 46 (‘The concept of asymmetric warfare implies that a weaker opponent with fewer military capabilities and resources is pitted against a powerful state actor’).
Kupperman, ibid., 39. See also Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2014).
H. S. Tucker Jr., ‘President’s Address. Jamestown – Paradise or Pest Hole’, Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association 86 (1975), 1–10, 6.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 5688 | 1015 | 282 |
Full Text Views | 492 | 20 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 302 | 52 | 1 |
In 1622, in Jamestown, Virginia, Powhatan warriors launched a surprise attack against English settlements. In terms of the percentage of a group or tribe killed in a single massacre, the 1622 attack was the deadliest attack committed by either side – Native Americans or English settlers – in early American history. The Powhatan attempted to wipe out every English person, combatant or non-combatant. They killed at least one-quarter of the English in the Jamestown region. Historians label this event a ‘massacre’ or ‘uprising’, which are inaccurate analytical labels. Scholars have not analysed the 1622 attack within the appropriate framework of genocide. To remedy that omission, this article reexamines the attack within the un Genocide Convention framework. The Convention provides methodological, empirical, and normative benefits for understanding past conflict. In planning and executing the attack, the Powhatan had the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the English colonists as such.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 5688 | 1015 | 282 |
Full Text Views | 492 | 20 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 302 | 52 | 1 |