A History of the American People

occurred, the settlers were usually to blame. But not always. The Indians were capable of
unpredictable changes of mood, and downright bellicosity under a certain type of leader. Settler-
Indian relations were complicated by disputes among Indian tribes, which were often in a state of
perpetual warfare with each other.
This was the origin of the Pequot War in the 1630s. It began with a dispute between the
Pequots and the Mohicans in the Connecticut River area, over the valuable shoreline, whose
shells and beads were collected for wampum, the Indian form of exchange. Neither the English
nor the nearby Dutch would come to the aid of the Mohicans and they were beaten. The Pequots,
grown arrogant,' attacked an English sea-captain, John Stone, and his seven companions, who were trading upriver. They were murdered. Two years later, there was another murder, on Block Island, of a New England trader, John Oldham. In response, the Massachusetts governor, John Endecott, sent three armed vessels, which destroyed the two Indian villages believed to have been guilty of these crimes. In May 1637, the Pequots retaliated by attacking Wethersfield, Connecticut, killing nine people and abducting two. This in turn provoked a combined operation by all the militia forces of Massachusetts and Connecticut, accompanied by several hundred Narragansett and Niantic Indians, who together surrounded the main Pequot fort on June 5, 1637, and slaughtered 500 Indians, men, women, and children, within it. The village was set on fire and most of those who tried to escape were shot or clubbed to death. This bloody war against the Pequots, which seems to have ended Indian raiding in New England for a generation, was conducted without any assistance from England. Further south, in the Hudson Valley and Virginia, wars among the Indians, and with settlers over fur and trading, continued sporadically. In June 1644 as many as 350 settlers south of the James River were massacred by the warriors of a chieftain called Opechancanought. This led to large-scale counterattacks by the governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, and the acting governor Richard Kemp. Again, only the local militia was employed. There was a major flare-up in Dutch territory near the Hudson the same year. Near New Amsterdam, 120 Algonquins, fleeing from their Mohawk enemies, were massacred by the Dutch in retaliation for early murders. Various Algonquin tribes then united for a vengeful raid against Dutch settlements, but were defeated when 150 heavily armed Dutch killed 700 Indian warriors near Stamford, Connecticut, in February 1644. In Virginia it was a constant complaint among settlers pushing into the interior that the authorities never provided them with any protection from hostile Indians. The trouble with Virginia, as indeed with other colonies, is that although its latitude, that is its extent along the coast, was fairly accurately determined by original charters, its extension inland was indefinite. There was an early conflict of interest between the large plantation-owners of the Tidewater, who dominated the assembly and ran the government, and the smaller farmers who penetrated into the foothills, or piedmont, of the Appalachian ridges, and beyond them. In fact almost from the start two very different societies began to emerge. On the coast, there was a characteristically Southern' civilization, slave-owning, tobacco-growing, cultured, elitist, leisured, and there was a
much more rugged farming society in the interior-a bifurcation which was eventually to find
constitutional expression when West Virginia hived off from the rest during the Civil War and
formed a separate state.
Early in 1676, the small farmers up the James River became convinced that the plans of Sir
William Berkeley, the royal governor, were inadequate, and that this sprang from the fact that
they were underrepresented in the House of Burgesses, dominated by the Tidewater aristocracy.
They got a wealthy planter, Nathaniel Bacon, to lead them, both against the Indians and to