In 1747 some of the planter elite in the Northern Neck area of Virginia, led by Thomas Lee and including members of the Carter, Washington, and Mason families, joined with London merchant John Hanbury and the duke of Bedford to form the Ohio Company of Virginia to acquire lands in the Ohio country for later sale to settlers. Living along the Potomac River and near the Ohio frontier threatened by French and Indian claims, the planters developed a pugnacious and self-serving imperial vision that asserted their rights as Englishmen to expand their enterprises across the Appalachians, if necessary by military force. In 1749 the
Crown granted the company’s request for 200,000 acres near the forks of the Ohio River on the condition that it would settle 100 families there within seven years and build a fort to protect them.
In 1750 the company dispatched surveyor Christopher Gist to the Ohio country to seek suitable lands for settlement. To forestall Virginia’s expansion, the French constructed a string of FORTS in the Ohio country, causing Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, a company stockholder, to send George Washington and Gist to convince the French to leave. Unconvinced, the French and their Indian allies captured the Company’s Fort St. George at the forks of the Ohio, expelled the English settlers, and built Fort Duquesne. In 1754 the French defeated Washington’s militia at Fort Necessity, which the Virginians had built to counter the French. This clash between the expansionist interests of the Virginia elite and French imperial policy helped ignite the Seven Years’ War.
Their settlement efforts frustrated by the Seven Years’ War, then Pontiac’s Rebellion, and finally the Proclamation OF 1763 (see Volume III), the Ohio Company eventually merged in 1770 with the Grand Ohio, or Vandalia, Company, whose colonization efforts were interrupted by the Revolutionary War. In 1779 the Virginia legislature extinguished the patent of the original Ohio Company on the pretext that it had never surveyed its lands.
Further reading: Marc Egnal, “The Origins of the Revolution in Virginia: A Reinterpretation,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (1980): 401-428; James Alfred Procter, The Ohio Company: Its Inner History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959).
—James G. Bruggeman
Opechancanough (1545?-1646) chief of the Powhatan Confederacy
Opechancanough, or Mangapeesomon, was kin and successor of Powhatan and became the “great general of the Savages” who engineered the Powhatan’s political, military, and cultural renaissance after their defeat by the English in the first Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-14). Opechancanough led an unremitting resistance to English conquest and colonization of Tidewater Virginia until his murder in English captivity in 1646.
Although his origins are shrouded in mystery, Opechancanough first appears in 1607 as the werowance of the Pamunkey, the largest tribal group in Powhatan’s domain. In December 1607 Powhatan dispatched the Pamunkey leader to capture John Smith. After Smith’s release Opechancanough chafed under Powhatan’s conciliatory and assimilationist policies toward the English but, out of deference to his overlord, stoically suffered English aggression and insults to his dignity, including manhandling by Smith himself. Opechancanough took a leading role in the first Anglo-Powhatan War, and it was only after a fierce attack by English musketeers on his Pamunkey villages near present-day West Point, Virginia, that Powhatan reluctantly sued for a humiliating peace in 1614.
Even before Powhatan’s death in 1618, Opechancanough seized effective leadership of the remnants of Powhatan’s once powerful chiefdom and began a process of political consolidation and military rejuvenation. He focused on acquiring English firearms and spiritual revitalization in alliance with his principal adviser, Nemattanew, or “Jack of Feathers,” a charismatic prophet intent on preserving Powhatan religious beliefs as well as a powerful warrior skilled in the use of English muskets. Convinced that there could be no Anglo-Powhatan relationship based on peace, Opechancanough prepared for war, masking Powhatan rearmament and lulling the English into complacency by disingenuous promises of Christian conversion and surrender of Powhatan land. The murder of Nemattanew by the English in March 1622 galvanized Opechancanough into launching a surprise attack on English settlements, almost eradicating the colony and killing 320 colonists before a defense could be mounted. The ensuing second Anglo-Powhatan War ground on for a decade, resulting in a qualified victory for the Powhatan. They temporarily preserved their way of life, even though their resistance tipped even sympathetic English authorities toward what would become a long-standing policy in British America of expelling Indians from lands coveted by whites and segregating them from white colonists.
English settlers, hungry for land on which to grow highly lucrative TOBACCO, continued to encroach on Powhatan territory, causing Opechancanough to lead yet another desperate attack on the English plantations in 1644, killing some 500 colonists. Then more than 80 years old, so infirm he had to be carried into battle on a litter, the great Pamunkey werowance, after two years of brutal warfare, was captured by forces under the command of Governor Sir George Yeardley, put on public display, and murdered by his English guards in 1646.
There has been speculation that Opechancanough may have been kidnapped as a youth or perhaps transported voluntarily from Virginia to Spain, thereby acquiring some knowledge of Europeans before the Jamestown settlement. However, the existing evidence is insufficient to support that contention.
Further reading: Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
—James Bruggeman and Billy G. Smith
Osborn, Sarah Haggar Wheaten (1714-1796) religious leader
Few people today have ever heard of Sarah Osborn, but by the end of her life in 1796, she had become one of the most respected female religious leaders of her time. Born in London in 1714 to devout Puritan parents, Benjamin and Susanna Haggar, she came to North America in 1723 with her family, eventually settling in Newport, Rhode Island. Her life was marked by recurring tragedy: She eloped in 1731 at the age of 17 with a sailor, Samuel Wheaten, who died two years later, leaving her with a one-year-old son to support; remarried a tailor, Henry Osborn, a widower with three children, who suffered a breakdown that left him unable to work; and toiled long hours as a schoolteacher and a seamstress in order to pay her family’s bills. Despite her constant battle to achieve economic security, she remained so indigent that her name never appeared on Newport’s tax lists. Her only child, Samuel, died in 1744 at the age of 12. Through everything, she suffered chronic bouts of illness.
Despite these tragedies, Osborn was so charismatic that many people in Newport sought her spiritual counsel. Inspired by the sermons of Gilbert Tennent, during the revivals of the Great Awakening, she devoted the rest of her life to spreading her Calvinist faith. Reputed to be gifted in prayer, she became more popular than any of the ordained ministers in her town. During the winter of 1766-67 as many as 500 people—including more than 100 slaves—flocked to her house each week for prayer meetings. Although she remained poor, strangers from as far away as Canada and the West Indies sent money to defray her expenses, eager to help a woman who had become virtually a Protestant saint.
Under the cloak of anonymity Osborn published one of the earliest theological tracts written by an American woman: The Nature, Certainty, and Evidence of True Christianity (Boston, 1755). Like many Congregationalists, she kept a voluminous diary in which she examined her life for evidence of God’s grace. Although the majority of her manuscripts have been lost, more than 1,500 pages of her diaries and letters have been preserved in various archives. After her death her pastor, Samuel Hopkins, published two edited volumes containing extracts from her writings: Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn (Worcester, Mass., 1799) and Familiar Letters, Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn and Miss Susanna Anthony, Late of Newport, Rhode Island (Newport, 1807).
Further reading: Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714-1796),” Church History 61 (1992): 408-421; Mary Beth Norton, ed., “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine Activities,’” Signs 2 (1976): 515-529.
—Catherine A. Brekus
World History
