On March 22, 1622, Indians of the Powhatan Confederacy in eastern Virginia killed around 347 English colonists, nearly a quarter of the entire English population in Virginia. This well-planned, coordinated attack, which the English called a "great massacre," resulted from numerous causes and had a lasting impact on the direction of English-Indian relations in colonial America.

Ever since the Virginia Company established the Jamestown colony in 1607, the settlers had sought a

Engraving of the Jamestown Massacre, 1634. © BETTMANN/CORBIS.

moneymaking product that could be extracted from the Virginia environment. By 1613 John Rolfe (who married Pocahontas in 1614) had developed a new strain of tobacco that gave the colony its first real source of revenue and committed Virginia to a farming and plantation economy. Jamestown colonists quickly expanded their settlements to grow tobacco, but tobacco leached nutrients out of unfertilized soil in just a...