Powhatan Attack on Virginia

March 22, 1622

Opechancanough, brother of the dead Powhatan chief, coordinated a dawn assault on English settlements up and down the James River that killed nearly a third of the Virginia colony in a single morning. The war that followed ended any pretense of Anglo-Powhatan coexistence. The tobacco frontier advanced anyway, expanding over the graves of the fallen into lands the Powhatan had tended for generations.