anize the
congregations on the Nansemond and Elizabeth rivers. According to
their own account, these ministers met with much success till they
were suddenly stopped in the work by Berkeley, who persuaded the
assembly, in March, 1643, to pass severe laws against Nonconformists;
and under this authority drove them out of the land in 1644.[22]

In the same year occurred an Indian attack which these preachers and
John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts, thought to be a special
visitation of Providence. After the massacre in 1622 the war with the
Indians had continued in a desultory way for over twelve years. Year
after year squads of soldiers were sent in various directions against
the different tribes, and by 1634 the Indians were so punished that
the whites thought it safe to make peace. Now, after a repose of ten
years, the fierce instincts of the savages for blood were once more
excited.

April 18, 1644, was Good Friday, and Governor Berkeley ordered it to
be kept as a special fast day to pray for King Charles; instead, it
became a day of bloodshed and mourning.[23] The chief instigator of
the massacre of 1622 was still alive, old Opechancanough, who, by the
death of his brother Opitchapam, was now head chief of the Powhatan
Confederacy. Thinking the civil war in England a favorable occasion to
repeat the bloody deeds of twenty-two years before, on the day before
Good Friday he attacked the settlers, and continued the assault for
two days, killing over three hundred whites. The onslaught fell
severest on the south side of James River and on the heads of the
other rivers, but chiefly on the York River, where Opechancanough had
his residence.[24]

The massacre of 1622 shook the colony to its foundation, and it is
surprising to see how little that of 1644 affected the current of life
in Virginia. Berkeley seemed to think so little of the attack that
after making William Claiborne general of an expedition against the
Pamunkey tribe he left the colony in June, 1645.[25] He was gone a
whole year, and on his return found that Claiborne had driven the
Indians far away from the settlements. In 1646 he received information
which enabled him to close the war with dramatic effect. At the head
of a body of cavalry he surprised old Opechancanough in an encampment
between the falls of the Appomattox and the James, and brought him,
aged and blind, to Jamestown, where, about three weeks later, one of
his guards shot him to deat