THE VIRGINIA THAT JOHN RADFORD encountered was far from a peaceful place or a land of opportunity. English policy toward the Powhatan and then toward other neighboring polities added another layer of difficulty to the life of the English in Virginia. It had been only thirty years since Opechancanough and the Powhatan had killed off nearly a third of all the English in Virginia, and just eight years previously had again tried to punish the English into proper behavior, killing about four percent of the population. By 1652, when John Radford arrived, the Powhatan were no longer a force to be reckoned with. However, the expansion of the Iroquois, whose imperial ambitions challenged those of the English and the French, was realigning the East Coast Native nations, both geographically and politically.23 Iroquois conquest pushed other nations, particularly the Susquehanna, up against English settlement in Virginia, predictably leading to conflict with land-hungry English.
Most white Virginians had come to define all Indians as enemies, even those like the Pamunkey, who were allied with colonial governor Berkeley’s government. Berkeley was all for alliances and trade with Indians—but legally monopolized that trade for himself and his cronies, and was called an Indian-lover by poorer English. Consequently, most English Virginians, wanting land, opted not for alliance and trade but for incessant low-level warfare, with occasional flare-ups, along the outer reaches of the colony. And they bitterly resented Berkeley’s failure to provide reasonable protection, despite demanding increased tithes for forts. Those forts were supposedly to protect them, but instead were placed to protect elite holdings, while at the same time Berkeley forbade the local populace from forming militias to protect themselves. It was these resentments that eventually, along with landlessness and poverty among both English and Africans, free and unfree, led to class warfare in the bloody rebellion of 1676. And in the aftermath of the rebellion elites centralized power as they regained control, particularly the power to punish.24 In 1652, those resentments were already bubbling noticeably.
A COMMENT ON THE UNDERSTANDING of colonial history is in order. Scholars have made it dramatically clear that Native American nations were major players in colonial history.25 During the first century and a half the colonies had less military might than many of the surrounding native polities. And the English were competing for colonies with other Europeans—French, Spanish, Dutch. On their own, without Native allies, the English colonies were too weak to protect themselves against other Native attacks or to hold off other Europeans. And just as European polities fought with one another, so also did Indian polities. Alliances made sense on both sides for defensive purposes, but also for trade and for leverage in maneuvering through complex inter- and intra-polity rivalries. Native Americans, like the English, acted in their own interests, in relation to both other Indian polities and to European polities. They were far from being passive victims of European aggression. And the European states were far from being all-conquering. Even their guns did not convey a clear advantage over the bow and arrow.26 Colonies frequently invited tribes to settle close by, or formed close trading partnerships and military alliances.27
As we will see in a later chapter, pan-Indian organizing did not become a reality until sometime in the mid-1700s. Nevertheless, Indian resistance toward the end of the 1600s was fierce. This is the time when numerous Indian nations united in King Philip’s War against the English in New England (and although the English in Virginia probably didn’t know it, the Pueblos were on the verge of their 1680 revolt in which they successfully tossed out the Spanish). Closer to home, the Iroquois had imperial ambitions themselves, and were extending their reach into the Virginia colonial periphery, bringing into question the continued viability of the English and, elsewhere, the French hold on eastern North America. The English were unable to protect themselves against either the French or Indians and certainly not against both at once. They were eventually forced into alliance under Iroquois terms that successfully confined the English to the eastern seaboard, behind a frontier that gradually moved west, but at a speed held well in check by Native American military power.28 That system held from 1676 for well over a hundred years, finally dying with Tecumseh’s death in the War of 1812 and the demise of any real possibility of a sovereign Indian state with frontiers that the US state would have to respect. But that is getting ahead of the story.
SO WE COME AT LAST TO THE PUZZLE of John’s presence in the Chesapeake at age fifty-seven. What was going on in England that made the risks of Virginia attractive to an elderly surgeon, presumably moderately well off, who apparently had a seven-year-old son to care for? Why would anyone voluntarily take such risks, even someone who could avoid indenture, as John did? The answer we were taught in school, “They came voluntarily to better themselves, worked for free for a while to pay back their passage, and then, joining those who were already free and independent, helped make this the land of the free and the home of the brave” is, as we have seen, a serious whitewash. Many English, like Africans, came at the point of a gun. They were rebels captured and exiled, they were vagrants, or hungry, they were criminals, they were kidnapped (a 1680 report says 10,000 were “spirited” annually).29 They were street children and orphans rounded up and shipped off. Or they were women so desperate that they were willing to be sold as wives for 120 pounds of tobacco. The headright system, of course, made procuring servants to ship to the colonies, legally or illegally, a lucrative business. The school version also whitewashes what happened to indentured servants once they were in the colonies. Life for most was one long misery; life after indenture, if you survived that long, was for many so desperate that at the time of John Radford’s arrival, small-scale revolts were becoming common, long before the eruption of the widespread rebellion of 1676.30
So what were the conditions in England that might have driven John Radford to Virginia? There is no identifiable record of his early life in England—or if there is, I haven’t found it—except that he was probably born in Devon, the son of Robert Radford and possibly Alice Leigh. Given the lack of facts, all I can do is put together a likely scenario of maybes, grounded in the history of the times.
When the imagined X Radford headed to Virginia, England, unlike Tsenacommacoh, was already a state, but a relatively weak one, without a clear grip on the right to use force and to keep others from using it.31 The Crown’s attempts to consolidate that grip had been a source of bitter contention for a century or more and, shortly before John Radford’s departure, erupted in a civil war and a royal beheading—Charles I was executed in 1649. Eruptions continued as the English Crown, like Wahunsonacock, struggled to control its borders, particularly with Scotland, a struggle that eventually propelled Alexander Davidson to the Chesapeake. However, unlike the Powhatan strategy, English kings were trying to tame diarchy, to become the dominant partner. The sword, not the church, would determine how and when force would be used, both in war and in punishment. The priest would be the servant of the king; the interests of the state, as defined by the king, would no longer be held hostage to legitimation by the church. What eventually resulted from these power struggles was what is now called a “modern” state, with both the internal use of force to punish and the external use of force to make war and control borders in secular hands.
Both Radfords and, a little later, Alexander Davidson, would have been living with the chaos, both religious and political, created by the power struggle between church and king. And at the same time, they would have been living with the not unrelated chaos that accompanied the deepening grip of capitalism on both economic and social relations. Native Americans who traveled to England invariably were shocked by the desperate