Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722

Most scholarly work on colonial Virginia has been written as if Native Americans were central to English colonial life during the Jamestown era (1607–24), but of only marginal importance after English victories in the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–32) or, at the latest, after the Anglo-Powhatan War of 1644–46. Kristalyn Shefveland contends, however, that one cannot understand post-1646 Virginia without fully incorporating Native Americans into the narrative; thus, she takes 1646 as the starting point of this analysis of the colony’s Anglo-Indian relations. Building on recent work by Robbie Ethridge, C. S. Everett, April Hatfield, Paul Kelton, Matthew Rhoades, and others, Shefveland demonstrates that Native people continued to be of central concern, and of critical structural importance, to Virginia society well into the eighteenth century. “Anglo-Native interaction,” she convincingly argues, “determined English settlement patterns, trade, and diplomacy,” and “many of the powerful families that emerged to dominate Virginia’s history gained their start” in the late seventeenth-century Indian trade (3).Indian slavery, according to Shefveland, was of critical importance to Anglo-Indian relations in Virginia. One of the major (if late-breaking) developments in early American historiography in recent years has been the story of Indian slavery in eastern North America: the captivity and enslavement of Native people, we now know, was more than a failed experiment in forced labor, but rather a critical element in the ground-level workings of colonialism, the functioning of colonial economies, and the practice of war and diplomacy. Although much of this scholarship focused at first on the Southeast, particularly South Carolina, more recent work has demonstrated the centrality of Indian slavery in seventeenth-century New England, New France, and the Caribbean. Shefveland follows the story to Virginia, a key location in broader patterns of war, diplomacy, exchange, and enslavement throughout the eastern woodlands.Shefveland’s freshest insights come in the chapters focusing on the midcentury rise of the Indian slave trade and of Indian traders such as Abraham Wood and William Byrd. These chapters implicitly address several persistent methodological problems in the study of Indian slavery: the dearth of comprehensive records such as censuses or ships’ manifests (since most were transported over land); the customary status or even illegal nature of Indian slavery, which discouraged leaving paper trails; and the ambiguous status of many enslaved Indians, who often began as “servants” or “apprentices” but were never freed. Shefveland addresses this problem not by making some dramatic discovery of previously unknown sources, but rather by accumulating a small mountain of anecdotes drawn from a wide array of sources. What is most striking about these stories is that their tellers—merchants writing letters, clerks of the court recording testimony in civil suits, government officials trying to smooth over diplomatic incidents—consistently treat Indian slavery as unexceptional, normal, and clearly visible to the naked eye even as it went systematically under-recorded in the types of sources that survive today.Anglo-Native Virginia is not without flaws, including a sometimes confusing narrative structure, fitful engagement with the secondary literature, and a scattering of distracting factual errors (for example, Francis Nicholson was not New York’s governor in 1693). In the end, though, Shefveland successfully demonstrates that Indian slavery was pervasive in seventeenth-century Virginia and that Native Americans profoundly shaped Virginia politics and society even into the eighteenth century.