“’Seduced & moved by the instigation of the Devil’:
Intercultural Violence and the Courts in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake.” In 1642, a grand jury indicted John Elkin, who they believed was “seduced & moved by the instigation of the Devil,” for the murder of the “King of Yowocomoco.” At trial, Elkin confessed that he shot the Indian in the throat but pled not guilty of murder. After a brief deliberation, the jury returned with a “not guilty” verdict, arguing that “because the party was a pagan,” Elkin could not have committed murder. Instructed that it was still a crime, the jury next concluded Elkin was guilty of murder in self-defense. When informed that this was a contradictory verdict, they deliberated once again and found Elkin not guilty by reason of self defense. Frustrated by the jury’s determination to avoid punishing their fellow colonist and engage in jury nullification, Governor Leonard Calvert dismissed them and ordered that a new jury be gathered to hear the case. This paper examines the growing division between colonial government and popular understandings of intercultural violence in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. The colonial government and the people they governed often had competing interests when it came to prosecuting cases of intercultural violence; the government’s primary interest was to maintain peaceful relations, while local juries were reluctant to punish their peers for acts of violence against people they perceived to be outside their community. Implicit in these cases were fundamental questions of identity and citizenship, as the colonial elite wrestled with the formal legal status of Native Americans while other settlers were primarily concerned with the immediate ramifications of acts of violence. Native Americans were active participants in the seventeenth-century courts as defendants and plaintiffs, where they sought protection from violence perpetrated by English colonists and other Native Americans.
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