Virginia Colonial Wars are introduced with two volumes focusing on English and Native American conflict with “Dominion and Civility” and “Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough”. Bacon’s Rebellion both as Indian war and colonial rebellion is described in “Tales from a Revolution”, and it is put in context of Virginia’s early colonial wars in the social history, “The Divided Dominion”. Colonial and Imperial measures to combat piracy are considered in “The Golden Age of Piracy” and “Pirates on the Chesapeake”. The Seven Years’ War, in America the French and Indian War, is addressed in “Crucible of War” and “The Old Dominion at War”. “Dunmore’s War” looks at the last Indian war of the colonial period taking place as the First Continental Congress convened.
Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (1999) by Michael Leroy Oberg is a comparative history of the Chesapeake and New England, England homeland and North American imperial “frontier” of the eastern seaboard, English versus French, Dutch and Spanish empires.
While “metropolitan” England sought domination, Christianization and trade with native populations, Oberg explains how both Virginia and Massachusetts developed a policy of “exclusion”. The conflicting goals to “civilize” Indians, deliver a profit for sponsors, and maintain security from European and native threats, could not all be met. There are two chapters specifically on Virginia relating wars with the Tidewater Powhatans and Bacon’s Rebellion in the Piedmont.
Over the first hundred years of English colonization, the frontier impulse to settle and expand overcame the metropolitan vision of commercial outposts of regulated exchange. Indians were attached to their cultural heritage even in the throws of epidemics reducing their populations. Virginian soldiery transferred from the Irish wars of conquest developed a frontier attitude that insisted on physical security from the wars of 1609-1614, 1622-1632 and 1644-1646. Learn more to buy “Dominion and Civility” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (2006) by Helen C. Rountree tells the story of three important Native-Americans from the Indian point of view of the “Real People” as the Algonquin Powhatans called themselves. The anthropologist vetted her narrative among members of Virginia tribes before publication.
The first chapters address the Powhatan lifestyle, government and leadership systems, the featured three members of the chiefly family, and the politics of expanding the Powhatan Confederacy. Rountree then describes the impact of European arrival and the lives of her three subjects, Powhatan the peace chief, Pocahontas his daughter and wife of colonist John Rolfe, and Opechancanough the war chief.
War ultimately failed the Indians even while taking more lives, because the English had an expanding, replaceable population and the natives did not. Learn more to buy “Pocahontas, Powhatan and Opechancanough” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (2013) by James D. Rice narrates the outbreak of frontier hostilities with the Susquehannock Indians, Bacon’s mobilization of militias for further Indian war, and the full scale civil war that developed in colonial Virginia.
Rice places emphasis on the early colonial conflict between wealthy planters trading with friendly Indians and poor settlers at risk under unfriendly Indian attack. Colonial leaders trying to strike a balance between the two failed. Though royal Governor Berkeley put down Bacon’s Rebellion, tensions remained, manifesting themselves in Josias Fendall’s 1681 uprising, tobacco-cutting riots in 1682, and Coode’s Rebellion in 1689.
The tale weaves elements of Indian war and rebellion with wider narratives of provincial and imperial transformation in the by the mid-colonial era. Wealthy and poor English bridged their social division in a new social order of Indian exclusion, white supremacy and African slaves. Learn more to buy “Tales from a Revolution” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia (2015) by Ethan A. Schmidt reconstructs moments of diplomacy on both sides during the early Colonial period and their mutual misunderstandings that led to the violence of the three Anglo-Powhatan Wars of 1609, 1622 and 1644.
The book traces incidents of ferocious violence from militias defying their commanders that was characteristic of the 1600s English and Europeans, to the evolution of a colonial permissiveness endorsing Indian killing not only for retribution but for land acquisition.
Schmidt places Virginia colonial Indian policy debates at the center of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the division between elite planters benefitting from Indian trade and frontier non-elite colonists who suffered attacks from unfriendly natives. Bacon’s forces were indiscriminate in their attacks to ruin or annihilate Native Americans whether treaty friendlies, raiding parties or settled farmers. Learn more to buy “The Divided Dominion” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
The Golden Age of Piracy (1969) by Hugh F. Rankin shows that after pirates of the 1600s lost their base for operations in the Caribbean, the favorite haven for English pirates shifted to the Virginia and Carolina coasts. The types of men, their origins and motivation are reported, as well as articles of agreement among themselves, and descriptions of their ships and their harbors.
Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Stede Bonnet, Mary Read and Ann Bonny are featured along with the Virginia colonial armed response under Governors Nicholson, Spotswood and Gooch. Governmental policy towards pirates varied, and during periods of amnesty, pirates who reformed amounted to hundreds of new settlers for the colonies.
Virginia was noted as the most aggressive opponent of buccaneering, perhaps because they had the most to loose. The last year pirates played a significant role impacting Virginia commercial life was 1717. Learn more to buy “The Golden Age of Piracy” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Pirates on the Chesapeake: Being a True History of Pirates, Picaroons, and Raiders on Chesapeake Bay, 1610-1807 (1985, 2008) by Donald G. Shomette looks at the Virginia and Maryland response to both pirates and government sponsored privateers raiding in the Chesapeake Bay. The two colonies and early nation states had small treasuries, few patrol vessels and thinly populated coastal regions. Royal Navy guardships were of assistance while they were on station, although they could not negotiate shallow waters.
Colonial Virginia fought back with Governors Nicholson and Spotswood adding coastal forts, militia and small patrol vessels, augmented with regulars on land and sea. Officials in other colonies were complicit in sustaining the pirate reach into the Chesapeake. British raiders had effect in the American Revolution. The last raider of the book was less a French privateer in 1807, than a Baltimore pirate. Learn more to buy “Pirates on the Chesapeake” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Crucible of War: the Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2007) Fred Anderson is military history with emphasis on political, economic, social and cultural elements of an 18th century world war. It spanned eastern North America, Europe, the Caribbean and briefly West Africa and India.
The British triumphed with a Prussian alliance in Europe, worldwide sea power, treating American colonists as allies for military and financial support, and winning Native-American tribes away from the French. In the aftermath, the British squandered the goodwill of victory among their North American allies by threatening customary freedoms, leading to Pontiac’s Rebellion and the colonial Stamp Act resistance.
North America’s “French and Indian War” did not foretell nor did it necessitate the American Revolution, but it was an “indispensible precursor” to the colonists imagining themselves apart from the British Empire protecting them in conflicts with the French prior to 1754. Learn more to buy “Crucible of War” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (1991) by James Titus explains a great deal about mid and lower social strata in the 1750s. For the first half of the French and Indian War, the Virginia Assembly sought to fight with regiments filled men “drawn largely from the mud-sill of provincial society”. Attempts to coerce them into an effective fighting force failed. However, with cash and land bounties, and a “contract” limited service, then the common people of Virginia enlisted and fought comparably to those in Massachusetts. Learn more to buy “The Old Dominion at War” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era (2017) by Glenn F. Williams analyzes diplomatic and military events of the late 1760s and early 1770s on the frontier where Augusta County Virginia and Westmoreland County Pennsylvania overlapped. Though the violence of the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion had subsided, the Shawnee had no say in the dispositions of their lands made by Iroquois negotiators.
Amidst rival colonial militias, overlapping settler land transactions and legal disputes among the English, the Shawnee began raiding. Williams informs us of the cultural traditions that led to initiating war and its conduct, the evolution of the Virginia militia system by the outbreak of hostilities and Shawnee tactics.
The Virginia colony under the direction of its royal Governor Lord Dunmore in 1774 fought a limited war for defensive objectives, securing a frontier peace at the onset of the First Continental Congress. Learn more to buy “Dunmore’s War” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.