By J. Frederick Fausz
Susan Juster is one of the few historians researching “sacred violence” in colonial America. In the October 2005 issue of Common-Place, she noted how New England Puritans burned alive several hundred Pequot men, women, and children in 1637 and queried whether that atrocity was “a racial or a religious killing?” We can discount race, since Christian Europeans committed far more horrible atrocities against one another for generations. It is more important to determine how, when, and why such massacres made the transition from Britain to America and from Europeans to Indians. The answers will not be found in New England and not nearly as late as the Pequot War. The first fifteen years of Anglo-Indian relations in Virginia established all of the precedents of religious violence on our shores—including holy war, massacre, martyrdom, and terrorism.
The colony of Virginia was conceived in an atmosphere of Christian violence in the hate-charged aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, only recently acknowledged as the first modern terrorist conspiracy in England. Religious affiliation in that era connoted a host of ethnocentric prejudices designed to differentiate supportive in-groups from suspicious out-groups and to define loyalty and identity in secular as well as sacred contexts. The deadly quest for ideological dominance among divided camps of English Christians achieved a new level of depravity in 1605, because the Catholic conspirators planned the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians on the streets of Westminster when Parliament, government officials, and the royal family were blown to bits. Guy Fawkes allegedly justified the outrageous randomness of victims “under the pretense of conscience,” proclaiming that “a dangerous disease required a desperate remedy.” In 1610 Robert Herring described the abhorrent but aborted plot as the “quintessence of Satan’s policy . . . of inhuman malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled among the savage Turks, the barbarous Indians, [or] . . . brutish cannibals.” The shocking Gunpowder Plot gave militant Anglicanism new ideological ammunition with which to blast its persistently threatening religious enemies. Before the severed heads and quartered limbs of Fawkes and his fellow conspirators had even rotted, the same court officials who had exposed and executed them launched the Jamestown colony. As the final embodiment of old Elizabethan pride, prejudice, and paranoia, Virginia became the pet project of Anglican imperialists intent on exporting the Protestant Reformation to America.
To protect their colony in a Spain-dominated continent, London officials dispatched troops to Jamestown well trained in the vicious, anti-Catholic warfare in Ireland and the Low Countries. In England’s first Indian war between 1609-1614, those “New Israelites” became crusaders for religious conformity in a Chesapeake “Canaan,” sparing neither infants nor the infirm as they burned Powhatan villages, murdered native priests, assassinated chiefs, looted temples, conquered tribal territories, and starved a once-thriving population through harvest-time “feed fights.” Campaigning against “satanic evil” under “the banner of Jesus Christ,” the blood-red cross on the flag of St. George identified militant English “Angels” who merged ferocity with piety. After replicating the “Arms, Harms, Fights, Frights, Flights, [and] Depopulations” of Reformation Europe in Virginia, Anglican crusaders were rewarded with one convert—the captive, Pocahontas—but had succeeded far better in making “Savages and wild degenerate men of Christians.”
“sacred violence”
