So, a dilemma. I had become hooked on the research I had begun on sovereignty, state formation, and punishment as they related both to the Powhatan and the English at Jamestown, and to the role of religious authority in both systems. What we now call the relationship between church and state seemed critical to both, and to the later Jacobite rebellion that propelled Alexander Davidson to the colonies. But still, I had no Radford available to ground this discussion. My solution: let us suppose, for the sake of this chapter, that family mythology is right. Some Radford arrived in Jamestown between 1607 and 1620. We’ll call him X Radford, not Benjamin, since it is another century and a half before the name shows up in family records. After all, there were unnamed people—John Smith’s account refers to “divers others” after naming the more important people—who came with that first expedition and on later ships.2 So we will pretend there was an X, just so I can write about the Powhatan and early Jamestown.
When X would have arrived, the struggle over control of the use of force, and with it the ability to enforce the right to punish, was in crisis for both Powhatan and English. We’ll pick up the story later, with the John Radford of 1652, who is documented—although there is some doubt about whether the genealogical links are all correctly in place to make my cousin and me his many-generations-later granddaughters. And then again, there is the “so what?” If those Radfords weren’t our ancestors, they certainly were somebody’s, and the weaving of the tale of punishment in state formation can be carried by someone else’s ancestors just as well as by my own. The “truth” in this tale is obviously already having a hard time.
And there is another area where truth is going to have a hard time. I want to talk about what was going on with the Powhatan at the time X Radford would have shown up on the Chesapeake Bay. But all we have to go on is what anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians have pieced together. Their work has had to depend largely on what people like John Smith, or what someone like X himself, said about the Powhatan. We have the perceptions of those English who kept records, wrote reports or letters, or wrote books for public consumption—much of it propaganda—about Virginia, Jamestown, and the Powhatan. What the Powhatan had to say about their lives, their social structure, and about the English, is recorded only as interpreted through English eyes, obviously not the most reliable source. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians today strive to interpret the documents and the clues left buried in the ground, crosschecking back and forth.3 Do clues from one discipline support or contradict theories developed in another? How can we use those clues to interpret what might have been going on when, for example, Pocahontas threw her body over John Smith, assuming his account is true? From here on, I will use what we do seem to know about the Powhatan, but bear in mind there are inevitably varying interpretations and disagreements among the experts. So what I am going to do in this chapter is interpret all these interpretations to tell a story of states, almost states, punishment, and two peoples at the time when X Radford—himself an interpretation—might have dragged his exhausted, and perhaps hopeful, perhaps horrified, body through the surf and stood on shaky legs on Powhatan territory.
THE POWHATAN ALREADY HAD extensive knowledge of European people in the early 1600s when X Radford would have arrived. Spaniards had been coming and going for nearly a century, trading, looking for gold, hiding out in secluded bays to avoid English pirates, being shipwrecked and taken in by various Powhatan towns, presumably mixing themselves into the gene pool, preaching Catholicism, and occasionally killing and getting killed. Several high-ranking Powhatan had gone to Spain and brought their knowledge back with them. A bit later the English were also roving around the edges of Powhatan society, although, being mostly Protestants, they weren’t preaching Catholicism. Unlike the Spaniards, they began trying to establish forts that would act as trading centers and would support the English pirates who were after the gold carried by Spanish ships—the Spaniards, being at that time far more powerful than the English, had already grabbed the most lucrative lands for extracting gold and silver from local people in Central and South America.4 The Powhatan would have observed the English at Roanoke twenty-five years before X arrived, and surely found the observations instructive for the analysis of English norms and hierarchy. Even closer observation would have been possible if, as one theory has it, those English who disappeared when they abandoned the colony threw in their lot with one of the northern Chesapeake chiefdoms.5 Joining a native polity was certainly a choice a lot of people at Jamestown made, much to the disgust of those in charge!
So, when X and the rest would have shown up, Wahunsonacock, the king, paramount chief, ruler, emperor—the English word to translate mamanatowick depends a lot on how you understand Powhatan social structure—would have had a pretty good idea of how to use them in his ongoing conquest of independent chiefdoms on the Chesapeake. The polity over which he presided, Tsenacommacoh, was now much larger than it had been when he inherited it. Each conquered chiefdom became a unit within the larger polity; its former chief, or werowance, became a subchief under the mamanatowick. What the conquered people thought of this we can only guess, but there is at least a little evidence of revolt, and Wahunsonacock did have much less control in the newly conquered outlying territories than at the core of Tsenacommacoh. He demanded tribute from conquered areas, largely of luxury goods like pearls and copper, the items that represented wealth and power, and used it to position himself at the center of the regional trade among polities to the north and west of Tsenacommacoh.
He planned to position the English in this network, apparently as a tributary entity, like the conquered chiefdoms. The English had brought a lot of copper with them—kettles, chains, and medallions, for instance.6 And Wahunsonacock had real leverage over the English—they couldn’t feed themselves and were utterly dependent on Powhatan women, the farmers, for their survival. X Radford and the rest sent to labor at Jamestown pretty effectively refused to grow food, and looked for gold instead. This move gained them the opprobrium of the powers that be—the authorities at Jamestown and the investors in the Virginia Company—who described them as lazy, the “very scumme of the Land.”7 It took the institution of martial law and spectacular punishing to get them working at all. We’ll get to why X and others would have behaved so apparently stupidly, but for now, my focus is on the fact that the English remained dependent on trading for corn, and used a lot of copper to make those transactions. Which of course played directly into Wahunsonacock’s hands; he controlled this massive influx of copper.
But he didn’t control it alone. He was not the sole ruler, sovereign in his own right. In most instances he couldn’t exercise the authority required to punish on his own. He was dependent on the religious authority provided by his partner in sovereignty, the priest, or quiyoughcosough. What the Powhatan had, and what the English and the rest of Europe had until not too long before X Radford left it, is a form of governance called diarchy, or dual sovereignty.
Diarchy has been a widespread, highly complex and sophisticated form of governance, in which sovereignty is carried out through the convergence of spiritual authority and worldly power.8 Diarchy means joint rule, usually by a priest and a king, who are complementary (but inherently unequal) representatives of religious authority and secular power. One legitimizes action, the other acts. The priest (for instance, the pope for the English until 1534 when Henry VIII made himself head of the church, or the priest for the Powhatan) speaks for the gods and legitimizes the king’s exercise of power. The king or queen carries out the will of the gods as expressed by the priest; his or her actions are defined as legitimate because they carry meaning within a religious context. When people have to hand over crops, or money, or wealth items to elites—lords, aristocrats, kings—they need a good solid reason for believing that they are doing the right thing, especially if they have to work extremely hard or half-starve themselves and their children in order to give enough. While this degree of exploitation wasn’t the case for the Powhatan, if Wahunsonacock had his way that might have changed.
Religious ideas about the will of the gods can go a long way toward convincing people. And if they object, or if they steal or otherwise mess with the orderly regulation of wealth and behavior, there is the threat of punishment, well advertised in spectacular public displays of maimings or deaths. It becomes