Colonists, enraged at declining tobacco prices and higher taxes, sought a scapegoat in local tribes who still periodically sparred with settlers and lived on land they hoped to obtain for themselves.Ī July 1675 raid by the Doeg tribe sparked retaliation, and when Governor Berkeley set up a meeting between the two quarreling parties, several tribal chiefs were murdered. In 1676, economic problems and unrest with Native Americans drove Virginians led by Nathaniel Bacon to rise up against Governor William Berkeley. The New Town area of Jamestown continued to grow, and the original fort seems to have disappeared after the 1620s.īacon’s Rebellion was the first rebellion in the American colonies. In an effort to take greater control of the situation, King James I dissolved the Virginia Company and made Virginia into an official crown colony, with Jamestown as its capital, in 1624. The attack hit the outposts of Jamestown the hardest, while the town itself received advance warning and was able to mount a defense.
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In March 1622, the Powhatan made a major assault on English settlements in Virginia, killing some 350 to 400 residents (a full one-quarter of the population). Under Powhatan’s successor, Opechankeno, the Algonquians became more and more angry about the colonists’ insatiable need for land and the pace of English settlement meanwhile, diseases brought from the Old World decimated the Native American population. Pocahontas’ death during a trip to England in 1617 and the death of Powhatan in 1618 strained the already fragile peace between the English settlers and the Native Americans.
READ MORE: 5 Myths About Pocahontas Powhatans After Pocahontas They worked as indentured servants at first (the race-based slavery system developed in North America in the 1680s) and were most likely put to work picking tobacco. That same year, the first Africans (around 50 men, women and children) arrived in the English settlement they had been on a Portuguese slave ship captured in the West Indies and brought to the Jamestown region.
In 1619, the colony established a General Assembly with members elected by Virginia’s male landowners it would become a model for representative governments in later colonies. "And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpse out of graves and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows." George Percy, the colony’s leader in John Smith’s absence, wrote: Some Jamestown colonists even resorted to cannibalism. Firsthand accounts describe desperate people eating pets and shoe leather. Though skirmishes still broke out between the two groups, the Native Americans traded corn for beads, metal tools and other objects (including some weapons) from the English, who would depend on this trade for sustenance in the colony’s early years.Īfter Smith returned to England in late 1609, the inhabitants of Jamestown suffered through a long, harsh winter known as “The Starving Time,” during which more than 100 of them died. Settlers also lived under constant threat of attack by members of local Algonquian tribes, most of which were organized into a kind of empire under Chief Powhatan.Īn understanding reached between Powhatan and John Smith led the settlers to establish much-needed trade with Powhatan’s tribe by early 1608. The settlers left behind suffered greatly from hunger and illnesses like typhoid and dysentery, caused from drinking contaminated water from the nearby swamp.