Word: englishness
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...five years after the settlers arrived, the weaknesses of the Powhatan started to show. For one thing, after 1610, Chief Powhatan began to feel his age. He became less decisive and more wishful for peace in his last years (he died in 1618). Meanwhile, the English population advantage back home began to take effect after 1610, when a reorganized Jamestown colony with better supply lines began to establish satellite settlements on Powhatan farmland. The squatters, as the Powhatan saw them, became so numerous that they could not be repelled. Even all-out war, which raged twice, did not stanch...
...expansion of English settlements produced yet another disadvantage for the Powhatan: more cleared land, which helped the English weaponry come into its own. The introduction of snaphance guns in the 1620s, eliminating the need for keeping separate matches alight, consolidated that advantage. By then, of course, Powhatan men were taking and using any guns they could lay hands on, but it was too late...
...Powhatan were never obliterated, however. Nor were they pushed into "praying towns" or "removed" westward. Boarding schools to force Indian children to assimilate were few in Virginia. Instead, the nearly landless people reluctantly adopted English ways from their neighbors in the 18th century and went right on surviving in their homeland. They are still with us today: two reservations, plus five nonreservation tribes...
Less than a dozen years after the founding of Jamestown, about 20 Africans from what is now Angola were sold to settlers of the fledgling colony. They found themselves in a raw, chaotic frontier society in which the English settlers were still trying to figure out the best way to survive and turn a profit...
...colony's élite remained committed to indentured white servitude as the backbone of the labor force until at least the middle of the 17th century because indentures were cheaper than African slaves. And since the élite viewed their indentured servants as lazy "salvages"--the very scum of English society not above cannibalism during periods of need and the women little better than prostitutes --it is hardly surprising that no one was especially bothered by the occasional mixed unions...