The Jamestown Massacre took place

On 22 March 1622, Opechancanough, paramount chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, launched a series of coordinated surprise attacks on English settlements scattered along the rivers of colonial Virginia. The strikes targeted plantations upriver from Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America.

The assault was devastating because it was unexpected. Powhatan warriors had been moving freely among the colonists, often arriving unarmed to trade food. That morning they seized whatever tools and weapons were at hand and killed settlers in their own homes, sparing neither women nor children. Roughly 347 people died, nearly a third of the colony’s population, in the space of a few hours.

Jamestown itself was spared, warned the night before by a young Native American who alerted the colonists.

The massacre shattered the fragile peace and ignited the Second Anglo-Powhatan War, a decade of conflict that the English ultimately used to justify seizing Powhatan land.