page_title: First Families of Virginia
section_title: Pocahontas
hierarchical_section_title: First Families of Virginia / Pocahontas
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Pocahontas, wearing a tall hat, and seen at half-length. Around the oval lettering reads: "MATOAKA AĽS REBECCA FILIA POTENTISS: PRINC: POWHATANI IMP: VIRGINIÆ". Below oval "Ætatis suæ 21. Ao / 1616." Below: "Matoaks aľs (alias) Rebecka daughter to the mighty Prince / Powhâtan Emperour of Attanoughkomouck aľs (alias) virginia / converted and baptized in the Christian faith, and / wife to the wor[shipfu]ll Mr. Joh. Ralff." Engraving by the Dutch and British printmaker and sculptor Simon van de Passe. Courtesy of the British Museum, London.
context_page_description: First Families of Virginia were those families in Colonial Virginia who were socially prominent and wealthy, but not necessarily the earliest settlers. They descended from English colonists who primarily settled at Jamestown, Williamsburg, The Northern Neck and along the James River and other navigable waters in Virginia during the 17th century. These elite families generally married within their social class for many generations and, as a result, most surnames of First Families date to the colonial period.
  The American Revolution cut ties with Britain but not with its social traditions. While some First Family members were loyal to Britain, others were Whigs who not only supported, but led the Revolution. Most First Families remained in Virginia, where they flourished as tobacco planters, and from the sale of slaves to the cotton states to the south. Indeed, many younger sons were relocated into the cotton belt to start their own plantations. The Civil War devastated the Virginia economy, and emancipated all the slaves without compensation.
context_section_description: Pocahontas (1595–1617), a Native American, was the daughter of  Chief Powhatan, founder of the Powhatan Confederacy. According to Mattaponi and Patawomeck tradition, Pocahontas was previously married to a Patawomeck weroance, Kocoum, who was murdered by Englishmen when Samuel Argall abducted her on April 13, 1613. Educated among the English of Virginia and converted to Christianity during her captivity in Henricus, Pocahontas married colonist John Rolfe at a church in Jamestown on April 5, 1614. Rolfe had become prominent and wealthy as the first to successfully develop an export cash crop for the colony with new varieties of tobacco. Their only child, Thomas Rolfe, was born on January 30, 1615. He married and had a family: his descendants married into other elite families.
  Pocahontas was much celebrated in London where she was welcomed with great ceremony at the Royal Court. She died young but became legendary as the first Indian from Virginia to become Christian, marry an Englishman, and have a known child from such a marriage. (There were no doubt mixed-race children born to lower-class colonists and Algonquian women, although they may have been neither married nor Christian.) She became an important symbol of friendly Native American-English relations of the Jamestown colony. By virtue of many fictional accounts, her marriage was romanticized and became part of the mythology of early American history.
caption: Pocahontas by Simon de Passe
exif: {}