The Jamestown Massacre of 1622 | English vs Powhatan Wars

The Jamestown Massacre of 1622 | English vs Powhatan Wars On Good Friday, March 22, 1622, the people Jamestown had traded with all winter walked into the fields carrying fish and game, and at a signal they killed. By nightfall 347 English men, women and children were dead, roughly a quarter of the colony, most of them cut down with farming tools still in their hands. This was not one bad morning. The peace was 8 years old, sealed in 1614 by the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, and it wore thin as tobacco fields crept 60 miles up the James onto ground the Powhatan had farmed for corn. Watching every acre was Opechancanough, the aging leader the English dismissed as tired and finished. A young convert named Chanco carried the warning the night before, and the farms upriver never heard it. What Jamestown did after they survived turned trade into a war without end. From the raids of the 1620s to the second rising of 1644 and the old man shot in a Jamestown cell, this walks through how a business colony became a campaign of removal, and why the Pamunkey and Mattaponi still hold the treaties that the English filed away as a frontier nuisance.