Bacon’s Rebellion Opens The Way Into Caroline And The Virginia Frontier
Part 3 in a series this Holiday Season relating Caroline’s role in the Colony and future Commonwealth of Virginia
Last week, we discussed Virginia’s first people, the Powhatan Indians and in particular their leaders who sprang from the tribe called the Pamunkey. One of those leaders, a granddaughter of the Grand Sachem, Oppecancanough, emerged in the mid 1600’s. She would make the peace which lasted, and is still honored by the Virginia Government today. Her name was Cockacoesque, but she was known to the English as Anne, Queen of the Pamunkeys.
Anne had been chief of her nation for thirty years when one of the worst trials in the history of her people began in 1676. Nathaniel Bacon, a young Colonel who led the first revolt against British authority in the new world, considered the removal of her people his personal mission. He was supported by large numbers of colonists. His rebellion against the Virginia Governor paved the way for others who wished to question the English Crown, but he was a proud, scornful man who hated Native Americans. For years, the settlers had been angered by the continuing movement of the natives eastward, in their attempts to flee the savage Iroquois. Complicating the problem, was the fact that Governor William Berkeley carried out a profitable trade with the Powhatans and other settled tribes, and had no wish to provoke them. With a commission extorted at gunpoint from Berkeley, Bacon lead a number of raids designed to kill unsuspecting natives, including the Pamunkeys.
Fleeing the attack, Anne led her people into the Great Dragon Swamp between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. She commanded her subjects to escape as best they could without raising a hand to the English. Men, women, and children were both captured and killed. In the chaos, the Queen became separated from her tribe and nearly starved to death in the wilderness. The largest battle took place near West Point and Bacon then destroyed their primary seat at Romancoke. It is interesting to note that he chased the survivors up the peninsula between the Mattaponi and Pamunkey River Valley into what would later become Caroline County. While preparing to annihilate those that remained, he received word that Governor Berkeley was on the march with a group of Royalist supporters determined to capture him. Bacon’s immediate departure to pursue the Governor prevented the Pamunkey’s total destruction, but they never fully recovered. Soon afterward Bacon died.
As a child this author was told that just after the death of Bacon, Anne and the survivors of the attack set up a new tribal seat on the river. The story was told that this was at the old site of Cattachiptice, on the confluence of the rivers where the Pamunkey and the North and South Anna enter Caroline. It was here they had come to rest while fleeing from Bacon, but this remains unsubstantiated.
The end of the rebellion in 1677, resulted in the Treaty of Middle River Plantation, the most important existing document recording Virginia’s relationship with Native Americans. Just seventy years after the founding of Jamestown, the leaders of many of Virginia’s tribes came together to sign the treaty, but Cockacoeske, the Weroansqua, or Chief, of the Pamunkey was considered the most important of them all. The Queen had powerful allies in the House of Burgesses, including her paramour, Colonel John West. He was the grandson of Lord De La Warr and the son of a provisional governor. He was also the first European child born along the York River.
While the treaty was a blow to the pride of her people, as Anne agreed to make them a tributary of the English, it also guaranteed certain land rights and human rights to the tribes and reaffirmed the old treaty of 1658 that gave possession of the land between the Mattaponi and the Pamunkey as their hunting ground. The document (and the later revisions in 1680) also granted considerable power to the deeply respected Queen Cockacoeske of the Pamunkey tribe.
In the years to come, the government kept the treaty with Anne, but settlers began to violate it, moving in to live in numbers along both sides of the Pamunkey and the Mattaponi Rivers. The illegal taking of Pamunkey land angered Anne, but she prevented her people from attacking the homesteaders. She appealed to the Royal Government and when none was forthcoming, Anne took it upon herself to ask the government to revoke portions of the treaty. Instead, she requested they patent certain tracts of land to the Native Americans, in the same method as land was given to white settlers.
Agreeing to this, the Government granted land to the tribe as a whole and so in this way Anne won for her people the only lasting agreement ever made with the Native Americans of Colonial Virginia. They now held equal title with the white man. When a settler squatted on Native American land, they were able to appeal to the Colonial Court. The Pamukeys and the Mattaponi still hold this land and the Commonwealth of Virginia honors all agreements attached to the original document.
More than 300 years later, those treaties continue to shape and govern the relationship between the Commonwealth and the eight state-recognized Indian tribes—the Mattaponi, the Pamunkey, the Monacans, the Nansemond, the Chickahominy, the Upper Mattaponi, the Eastern Chickahominy, and the Rappahannock. The treaty restated the old agreement of 1658 concerning the payment of tribute to the Colonial Government of twenty beaver skins. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey Indians, representing the original treaty signers, continue to pay tribute to the Commonwealth today, when each Thanksgiving two slain deer are presented to the Governor. In 2015, the Pamunkey were granted federal recogniction. The Reservations are located adjacent to King William County, with the Mattaponi, encompassing 150 acres and the Pamunkey, 1,200 acres.
Little is known of the Indian Queen later in life. In 1686, an interpreter made an announcement to the Royal Government that she had “lately died.” The Pamunkeys allowed the passage of matrilineal leadership, but Anne had a number of sons. Again, however a woman was chosen to rule. Queen Ann, also known as “Ms. Betty Queen ye Queen,” was Cockacoeske’s niece. She carried on the policy of her aunt and tried to work within the English laws to protect and unite her people.
As a side note, it is interesting that in 1715, the white son of Queen Cockacoeske, John West died and at the time he was a landowner of considerable wealth. Three of his descendants served in the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg between the years, 1752 and 1776 from Fairfax County. This was a critical time leading up to the years of the American Revolution. Three subsequent descendants were also elected Delegates in the new capital of Richmond. The Town of West Point is named for this family.
This story would not be complete without mentioning the actual fate of the other Powhatan Algonquin tribes living in Caroline, however this is a mystery. It is very possible they went to reservations with their parent tribes when Anne made her deal with the government. The Manahoc were nomads of the Sioux and had no permanent place of abode. Those who were not killed by the whites and the Iroquois traveled west of Caroline into the Piedmont.
The fate of the Dogues of Caroline County is also unknown. They lived under the protection of the Pamunkey and the Mattaponi and thus were not actually subjects of Queen Anne. Records indicate they were not included in Anne’s deal and so not granted a reservation. A patent recorded in 1718 by Robert Farrish states that his 1,540 acre grant on the south side of the Mattapony includes the “saidde Dogue Indian Towne.” Two years later, in 1720, there is a reference to the Royal Council granting three settlers, George Braxton, and John and Mary Waller a thousand acres located on both sides of May’s Run about three miles from the Native Americans living in DogueTown. This is the last known reference to the Dogues. After this they disappeared.
The importance of the Treaty of Middle Plantation cannot be underestimated which recognized the authority of the Colonial Government, but also acknowledged property, land use, and hunting rights of the Indians. This treaty set the stage for the future of a permanent peace between Anne’s subject and the colonists. The defeat of the Powhatan Nation cleared the way for English expansion and the doors to Caroline opened.
In two years, the Colonial Council sanctioned the building of a fort on the upper reaches of the Mattaponi, well inside the boundaries of the future Caroline and named the garrison in honor of the river. This area would become the future village of Milford, which is still there today. It is clear at the time that attack from Native Americans who did not recognize the peace was still an issue, because the purpose of the fort was to protect from the Indians and encourage settlement. At the time of the building of “Ft Mattapony,” there were already a few settlers living on Caroline land who had crossed the frontier in spite of the dangers. They are worth mentioning since their actions would certainly set the stage for the official founding of the county and its prominent role in the American Revolution.
The first grant actually patented in land which would become Caroline was recorded twenty-three years before the building of Fort Mattapony on the northeast side of the river of the same name. Major William Lewis must have been brave indeed for this was 1655, years before the official subjugation of the Indians. This track, now known as Millwood, lay just north of the present day Town of Bowling Green on 301. There were several other grants, all on the northeast side of the river to Major Thomas Hoomes and Col Augustine Warner. The Hoomes’s grant would provide the land for one of the most unusual landmarks in the Commonwealth, known today as “Old Mansion,” the birthplace of Thoroughbred horse racing in the new world. By 1669, this property would be called “The Bowling Green” after the Hoomes’s family estate in England and would lend her name to the county seat of the Town of Bowling Green.
All of the original patentees in the upper Mattaponi Valley were military men and the evidence is they built private forts against the possibility of Indian attack. All of these grants were well above the frontier and these, and those similar to it, were the homesteads Bacon was so focused on protecting. Even after his rebellion and the actions of the Pamunkey Queen, a real threat remained with groups that did not recognize the treaty.
As late as 1707, Robert Beverly wrote to the Colonial Governor from his home in Caroline territory, “We are strongly alarmed for fear of an Indian War. I shall take my neighbors for shelter into my fort. I pray you send me arms for their protection.” Captain Lawrence Smith attempted to take up land on the south side of the Mattaponi, but his deed stated that he must take up residence within two years. He wrote to Governor Berkeley for a seven years extension, saying the place was not yet safe to bring his family.
At relatively the same time, from the mid 1600’s on, to the north and east, in the area that is today the Town of Port Royal, the Rappahannock River Valley began to fill with white settlers. Little is mentioned about trouble with Indians. Travel from Jamestown here could have been accomplished, not by traveling overland, but by traveling the waterways. This was, however, a double edged sword. Here, pirates also made use of the waterways. Holland was at this time at war with England and the pirates who harassed the Virginia coast and inland waters were thought to be Dutch privateers. Fear of pirates caused many settlers to seek land grants on small streams back from the river. They felt it would be easier to defend themselves there from those who came by water. Tradition has it that settlers chased one pirate named Peuman” up the Rappahannock and into an ever narrowing stream. When his ship ran aground in the shallow water, they overtook and killed him. This stream to this day is called Peumansend, literally meaning the end of Peuman.
Next week Part four
The Early Rebels of Caroline, The Thorntons, William Byrd the Frontiersman, Robert Beverly the Historian and The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe set the stage for the founding of Caroline County, Virginia, second home to the Fathers of the American Revolution.
