The Second Anglo-Powhatan War

By the 1620s the death of the old chief Powhatan and the explosive growth of English tobacco plantations had shattered the uneasy truce around Jamestown. Leadership of the Powhatan Confederacy passed to Opchanacanough, a shrewd and determined war leader who concluded that coexistence with the ever-expanding colony was impossible. On the morning of March 22, 1622, his warriors struck the scattered English settlements in a coordinated surprise assault, killing roughly a quarter of the colony's population in a single day.

The massacre failed to dislodge the English; instead it unleashed a decade of brutal retaliatory warfare in which the colonists deliberately burned Powhatan towns and cornfields to starve their enemies into submission. The fighting ground on until a truce in 1632, but the war marked a decisive turn: the English abandoned any pretense of partnership and adopted a policy of relentless expansion. Opchanacanough would rise once more in 1644, but the Powhatan were never again able to threaten the colony's survival.