Today, the Jamestown Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin remembers the attack of 394 years ago.
From Lester’s History of the United States in 1883 by Charles Edwards Lester:
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The Great Indian Massacre, March 22, 1622. —
Powhatan had now been dead four years, and the ashes of the red-man’s friendship slept in the grave of the honored chief.
A younger brother, who succeeded to his rank and possessions, had never looked complacently upon the encroachments of the pale-faces, and he stealthily organized a plot for their complete extermination.
The natives within sixty miles of Jamestown hardly exceeded six thousand, and they numbered only twenty-four hundred warriors.
They lived chiefly in scattered villages of wigwams clustered around the skirts of the white settlements; nor till nearly at the last moment had a suspicion of their deadly purpose been breathed into the ear of one of the four thousand colonists whose homes dotted the banks of the James for a hundred and forty miles, and stretched far away towards the Potomac.
The day and the hour fixed on had come; and as the sun of the 22d of March reached the meridian, the wild yell of the savages rang out on the still air, and the tomahawk fell upon the helpless and unsuspecting dwellers at the same instant in every settlement of the colony of Virginia.
The bolt and the flash came together, and there was no mercy.
Mothers and babes were cleft down by the same blow.
Missionaries of peace, and benefactors who had shown kindness, were murdered alike at their hearth-stones.
Death itself could not satiate their ferocious vengeance.
They sprang upon the still bleeding corpses, and tore them into fragments like wild beasts.
Within that fatal hour three hundred and forty- seven Anglo-Saxons lay mangled and dead.
But for the noble though tardy act of a converted Indian, who stole into Jamestown under cover of the previous night, and revealed the plot to a settler whom he wished to save, the ruin would have been complete.
Heaven averted so awful a calamity.
The conflict and obscurity of the various records leave the exact number of the victims undetermined.
We only know that of the four thousand on the morning of the massacre, the entire colony, one year later, counted only twenty- five hundred!
This atrocious deed sealed the doom of the native races of Virginia.
They could no longer live among the pale-faces.
They fled from the ashes of their wigwams to the depths of the forests.
The bloody story was told in London, and the heart of all England went out to their stricken friends in Virginia.
Help reached them as quick as relief ships could cross the ocean: men, money, provisions, and implements of death were the freight.
We are prepared for the result which history always records of the indomitable Anglo- Saxon — the blood of the victims, says Stith, became the nurture of the plantation.
Missionary zeal had suddenly cooled, and for a considerable time we find no account of Rolf-Pocahontas nuptials in our little log temple at James town.
But we do hear of two other facts that occurred about this time:
1. The Bishop of London collected and paid over a thousand pounds to begin the foundation of a University in Virginia,
2. Cotton seeds began to be planted, and they came up plentifully.
We need have no more solicitude for Virginia.
She had brave men and devoted women, which gave her a commonwealth too well founded ever to be overthrown — tobacco, for export, which gave her commerce and wealth — Indian corn, and sweet-potatoes, which gave her bread — a fertile soil and a genial climate — a steady flow of emigration — the seeds of a university — and, above all, citizens to sustain the structure of a Christian civilization.
When we again, return to Virginia we shall find her grown into a splendid commonwealth, and giving birth to a race of statesmen who, when the hour came, were to light the fires of National Independence.
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The Jamestown Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin shows with an image of Powhatan in his feather headdress, circa unknown.
