Our Family's Colonial Era, Part XVIII

by Glenn N. Holliman

Why the Holyman's were Caught in the Middle of Bacon's Rebellion

The painting at right is Sir William Berkeley (1606 - 1677), a well-educated Englishman appointed by Charles I during the English Civil War to govern the colony of Virginia. He was successful when he arrived in 1642 to defeat the latest Powhatan Indian attacks and usher in a period of peace. Turned out in the early 1650s by the Commonwealth, he returned with the Stuart Restoration. He grew old in the position and became content with loyal assemblymen from a House of Burgess that sat from 1661 to 1676. Bacon's Rebellion resulted in the burning of his capitol, Jamestown, the loss of his post and eventually his recall to London. He died in 1677 before he could defend his actions before the Court.

In the 1671 Surry County, Virginia Record Book, p. 2 is this fascinating insight into our family and the Virginia colony on the eve of a great civil rebellion. It is recorded in George A. Holleman's original history of Hollymans in 1952.

"Att a courte houlden att Southwarke for he County Mar. 5, 1671...Upon complaint of Christo Holiman itt manifestly apearinge that the Coppahunck Indians have kild two hoggs of ye said Holiman. Itt is ordered that Capt. Pipsicoe within thee months make payment unto ye said Holiman of Six Buck and Six doe well drest Skins & in Case itt doe apeare heere after that any Indian shall Kill any hogg or hogs of ye English that they shall pay for every Hog by them Kild twnety Buck skins."

Well, what to make of this?

1. Surry County, founded from James City County in 1647, lies just north and west of Isle of Wight County.

2. The parish of Southwarke was located across the Isle of Wight County line. The plantation of Christopher Holyman straddled the county lines, and his theft occurred in Surry County. Many Holyman descendants will move into Surry County and from there to Johnston County, North Carolina in the 1700s.

3. The Indians were Quiyoughcohanocks (Cohanocks), allied with the Algonquian Powhatan Confederacy. This tribe had participated in the Good Friday Massacre of 1622 which almost wiped out the Virginia colony.

4. Subsequently, the Virginia House of Burgesses had passed draconian legislation that any Indian who crossed the Blackwater River could be shot on sight! The Holyman plantation was (and parts of it still are) adjacent to Surry County and the Blackwater River.

5. The 1670s saw considerable Indian unrest up and down the eastern seaboard. In 1675 the tension burst into King Phillip's War in New England. Thousands, both white and red, died in the greatest outburst of violence to that date in the English colonies.

6. As in New England, the increasing dissatisfaction with the population increase of the English settlements, let to Indian resistance in Maryland and Virginia. The population of Virginia more than doubled from 15,000 to over 30,000 by the 1670s further encroaching on Indian lands.

7. The theft of hogs from the Holymans was a typical incident between the English and Indians. The English,  who went armed and hunted deer for food and hides (a valuable commodity), evidently had little sense they were reducing the caloric intake possibilities of Indians. Indians felt that since whites could enter their hunting lands, and take game, they were entitled to enter English farms and take livestock! Tit for tat one would say.

The Hollimans and other colonialists did not see it that way.

Multiply these incidents by the dozens, add indiscriminate murders by both colonists and Native Americans, mix with land hunger by the English and decrease of hunting land by the Indians, and one has the recipe for another Indian War. In fact a murder of Nathaniel Bacon's overseer near Richmond, Virginia triggered a vigilante response led by Bacon. A peaceful Indian village near the North Carolina border was wiped out, and Indian women and children brutally murdered by Bacon's irregulars.

This was in defiance of Governor William Berkeley, a long serving administrator who wanted to build forts rather than unleash the militia. Those living on the edge of the frontier, presumably including the Holymans, desired immediate offensive action against Native Americans. Although Berkeley was furious with Bacon's actions as he had tried sincerely to maintain the peace, the rugged take-charge, take-no-prisoners attitude of Bacon attracted many colonial adherents.

Bacon also demanded reduction of taxes on tobacco, the money crop for almost all colonialists. Tobacco prices had plummeted in the recent decade due to too many settlers growing too much of Nicotiana tabacum. The English Navigation Act of 1663 forbade the colonists from trading with any nations other than the English. With Dutch and Spanish markets cut off directly from Virginia, there were fewer outlets and competition for the increasing supply of tobacco. Yet while income went down, taxes remained the same.

Something had to give.

Give it did with Bacon's Rebellion, a toxic brew of racial strife, physical fear, land lust and a burdensome tax load. Planters such as the Holyman's had to be sorely tempted to use force to defend the frontier and do something to reduce taxes. Some of the Holyman neighbors did join Bacon, and the result was strife in and around Isle of Wight County.

The Holymans, caught between two forces, remained loyal to the Crown.

Our Family's Colonial Era - Part VII

Conflict with Native Americans – A Clash of Cultures
by Glenn N. Holliman

Between April and June, 2010, I published six articles on the Holliman family in 17th Century Colonial America (they can be found in the archive section of this blog). After having published 23 articles on our English past, I now return to the history of the Virginia English colony and the travails our family experienced.

This was truly a new frontier with both opportunity and premature death. Only the brave or foolish ventured from England to Virginia from the early to mid -1600s. Perhaps our pioneering family of Christopher Holliman, Sr. was a mixture of both.


Michael Mallary in his 2004 work, Our Improbable Universe, makes the point that everywhere farmers went taking their technology and culture, the hunter-gatherers melted away before them. “The high population density that could be supported by agriculture depleted game well below the density that hunters (such as American Indians) required” observed this historian.

This then was the societal reality when Christopher C. Holliman, Sr. with his probable sister, Judith, arrived in Virginia in 1650. The frontier required bravery, a tenacious attitude to attack the virgin forests and a strong constitution not to succumb on the voyage or to disease and malnutrition upon arriving. Fortunately this Holliman family had such attributes, although Anne, Christopher's first wife, died in the 1660s. Mary Grey, perhaps the daughter of a member of the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, became Sr’s second wife.

In only a generation or so, soil exhaustion from tobacco cultivation forced families or young farmers to move to virgin land, to push the American frontier ever westward. The quest for land to grow tobacco and later cotton meant more and more Native Americans were displaced. The result was violence as American Indians naturally resisted encroachment on their hunting grounds and villages. The Indian did not go quietly to his cultural demise in Virginia and greater America.

The founding of Jamestown in 1607 meant the English had come to stay. Unlike the earlier 1580s failed Roanoke experience, this time our Anglo fore bearers mustered the necessary resources to establish a permanent colony. The English Diaspora employed superior technology, organization and the financial resources to grasp and hold an expanding piece of the New World.

Perhaps 15,000 to 25,000 Native Americans lived in Southern Virginia in the early 1600s. Benjamin Woolley’s Savage Kingdom records Captain Christopher Newport’s 1607 initial visit up the newly named James River to the site of present day, Richmond. He sighted numerous Indian villages. John Smith’s adventurous tales record numerous Indian settlements and evidence of many warriors. What English people knew as Virginia, Native Americans called Tsenacomoco.

Although there were numerous skirmishes and at least one large assault on early Jamestown as the two cultures brushed and bruised each other, the English were fortunate the central Indian chief was Powhatan. By and large he was an accommodating weroance (chief) who failed to anticipate the ultimate threat of the English invasion.

At his passing, his brother, Opechancanough, already an old man, recognized the Anglo incursion for what it was – a death threat to Indian culture and territory. On the Christian Good Friday in March, 1622, this war chief unleashed a Pearl Harbor on the small colony. By stealth, Indians conducted well-coordinated attacks on plantations and settlements all up and down the James River on both south and north banks. Over 1/3rd of the English colonists were killed in one day – 347 men, women and children. It was a close run thing if the colony could repel the attacks.

While a tactical victory for Native Americans, the attacks were not enough to drive the English into the ocean. Within a year, the colonists struck back and killed over 200 Indians, although Opechancanough escaped. For two decades the frontier was mostly quiet, but in 1644, now almost 100 years old, ever determined Opechancanough struck one last time. Five hundred settlers died, particularly along the York and Pamunkey rivers. (Records indicate several settlers named Holyman already were living in the colony in the 1630s and 40s. We will explore this in later postings.)

This time under a controversial but stubborn royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, the Virginia militia now much stronger and more numerous than warriors the Indians mustered, captured Opechancanough and destroyed most of his forces. The old chief died in captivity in Jamestown, slain by a vengeful guard. Surviving Native Americans were relegated to a piece a land near the fall line, at present day Richmond.

Of course, beyond the settled frontier, other Indians remained as yet only modestly undisturbed by the ever westward moving Europeans. As yet undisturbed….

Next posting more on our Holliman family and their challenges in a new world.