out of Virginia a few years before because of the "execrable murders" they had committed.

In the summer of 1675 a party of Indians paddled across the Potomac, and after killing several men, made good their escape back to Maryland. Shortly afterwards people returning from church found a man covered with ghastly wounds lying across his threshold, who managed to gasp out, "Doegs, Doegs." Immediately the alarm was sounded, and a party of thirty or more men assembled on the south bank of the river opposite the Indian reservation under the command of Colonel George Mason and Captain George Brent.

At dawn they crossed over to the Maryland side. Here they divided their forces, Mason leading part in one direction through the woods and Brent the other in another. Brent came upon a cabin full of Doegs. Their chief denied knowledge of the murders, but when he started to run Brent shot him. At this the Indians in the cabin made a dash for safety in the face of a volley which brought down ten of them.

In the meanwhile Mason, too, had come upon a cabin full of Indians, and had killed fourteen of them. But when he found out that they were not Doegs but Susquehannocks, he shouted: "For the Lord's sake shoot no more, these are our friends the Susquehannocks." But they now were their friends no longer. They began a series of bloody raids in Stafford County on the Virginia side of the river and Charles County in Maryland. Governor Calvert was quite right in complaining to Berkeley of the invasion of his province by an armed force to turn friendly Indians into mortal enemies.

Courtesy Cook Collection, Valentine Museum. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Sept. 6, 1866

Bacon's Castle, Surry County, Virginia

From the Church Catalogue
Photo by T.L. Williams

But since it was now too late to restore peace, the Virginians and Marylanders agreed upon a joint campaign to force the Susquehannocks to leave the region and give hostages for their peaceful conduct. It was late in September when the Maryland troops, under Major Thomas Trueman, arrived on the north bank of the Piscataway Creek, the site of Fort Washington. A few days later a body of Virginians under Colonel John Washington, great-grandfather of George Washington, and Colonel Isaac Allerton, landed from a fleet of sloops.

Across the creek, on a low bit of land, protected by patches of swamp, the Susquehannocks had built a fort. Had it been no more than a round stockade, after the traditional Indian style, it could have been taken with ease. But the Marylanders themselves had taught the Susquehannocks the art of fortification. So they had laid out a large square, raised embankments on all four sides, with an outer defence of palisades, and a ditch between. At each corner was a bastion, from which an attacking force could be enfiladed. Lacking artillery to batter down these works the three commanders decided to invest the fort and starve out the defenders.

In the meanwhile Major Trueman invited the "great men" to a parley. When five of them came out, he charged them with recent murders in Maryland. The Indians placed the blame on prowling bands of Senecas. This was an obvious lie, for Susquehannocks had been seen wearing the clothing of some of the murdered whites, and raiding parties had come directly to the fort, their canoes laden with beef. Seeing himself in imminent danger, one of the Indians produced a medal bearing the image of Lord Baltimore, and a paper which he said was a pledge from a former governor of Maryland to protect the tribe from harm. Despite this, and despite the fact that the "great men" had come under a truce to discuss peace, Trueman ordered his men to knock them on the head.

When word of this outrage reached Governor Berkeley he was furious. "If they had killed my grandfather and my grandmother, my father and mother and all my friends, yet if they had come to treat of peace, they ought to have gone in peace," he blurted out. Major Trueman was impeached in Maryland, fined and sentenced to imprisonment, but this did not undo the wrong or prevent the terrible consequences.

The Indians in the fort put up a desperate resistance. Weeks passed, and they still held out. To every suggestion of parley they asked: "Where are our great men?" At last, when "brought to great distress" through hunger, they broke through the encircling English with their wives and children, and vanished into the forest. Making their way up the Maryland side of the river, they crossed over to Virginia, and began a series of raids upon the frontier plantations on the upper Rappahannock and Mattapony rivers.

Within a few days they had killed sixty persons. The fortunate ones were those who fell at the first volley, for the miserable captives were subjected to tortures that would have baffled the imagination of a Dante. "Some they roast alive, offering their flesh to such English prisoners as they keep languishing by a lingering death, pulling their nails off, making holes and sticking feathers in their flesh. Some they rip open and make run their guts round trees."

For the moment the old spirit which had made him so ardent a fighter in the English Civil War and in the battles against Opechancanough flared anew in Governor Berkeley. Calling together a force of horse and foot, he placed them under the command of Sir Henry Chicheley with orders to pursue the murderers. But when all was ready and Chicheley was expecting the order to march Berkeley changed his mind, withdrew his commission and disbanded his forces.

This sudden change has long puzzled historians. Berkeley himself had taken the lead in carrying the war to the enemy following the massacre of 1644; why did he hang back now? It may have been the offer of peace from the new chief of the Susquehannocks, which Sir William was willing to accept but which the Indians themselves ignored. It may have been the fear that Chicheley's men might not discriminate between friend and foe and by attacking some of the allied Indians involve them in the war. He stated later that he would have preserved those Indians so that they could be his "spies and intelligence to find out the more bloody enemies." Certainly in this he was foreshadowing the policy followed by his successors for more than a century. But it did not justify leaving the frontier open to attack, while the murders and torturing continued.

It is not necessary to accept the accusation of Bacon and his followers that Berkeley adopted this policy so as not to interfere with the beaver trade. It might have been effective had not the Pamunkeys, the Appomatox, and other nearby tribes been dissatisfied and resentful. As it was, the governor was soon obliged to abandon it. "As soon as I had the least intelligence that they were our treacherous enemies I have given out commissions to destroy them all," he said. To Colonel Goodrich, when he was about to lead an expedition up the Rappahannock, he wrote: "I believe all the Indians, our neighbors, are engaged with the Susquehannocks, therefore I desire you to spare none ... for they are all our enemies."

Berkeley blamed Bacon and his men for the defection of the allied Indians. It was they, he said, who had driven them out of their towns and forced them "to live remote in the woods." It was only then, when they became