Emotional Subjects: Terror and Trauma in Anglo-Susquehannock Politics, 1660–77

     This paper is about the emotional basis of political thought and practice among Virginian colonists and Susquehannock Indians. Both societies had come under increasing strain by the time that hostilities erupted in 1675. In Virginia, a ruling oligarchy restricted the opportunity for freemen to achieve the material basis for independent manhood, provoking class tension and a crisis of legitimacy for the government. For the Susquehannocks, decades of violence during the Iroquois Wars left them displaced, exhausted, and vulnerable on all sides. The Anglo-Susquehannock War, which quickly sparked the civil insurrection known as Bacon’s Rebellion and ended in the reconfiguration of the English empire and the dissolution of the Susquehannocks as a distinct people, was rooted in the collision of these two societies in social and political disarray.

     This paper investigates that collision as parallel histories of trauma. It treats embodied emotions—particularly fear, pain, suffering, and grief—as the elemental components of individual experience during frontier warfare. Such emotions formed the basis for political desires and thus the impetus behind collective action. I argue that the terror of frontier warfare was a disempowering trauma that, by challenging the patriarchal basis of household and state governments, mobilized Virginia colonists against both their Indian neighbors and the colonial government. Likewise, the trauma of betrayal encouraged Susquehannocks to seek social healing by inflicting violence on their erstwhile allies. In both cases, the politics of neighborhoods and nations was enacted by political subjects—both Indian and English—constituted by embodied experiences of violence and dislocation.