Commonwealth of Virginia

Virginia; Virginea

37.5000° N, 79.0000° W

Occom's Ordination

Occom, Samson. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan. Ed. Joanna Brooks. Oxford: Oxford UP: 2006. Print. http://www.vahistorical.org/what-you-can-see/story-virginia/explore-story-virginia/.http://www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/bacons-rebellion.htm. Geo coordinates from https://www.google.com/#q=geographic+coordinates+of+virginia.

Virginia is a state located on the eastern seaboard in the mid-Atlantic United States. This area was home to several powerful chiefdoms including thirty-two Algonquian-speaking tribes that made up the Powhatan Empire and other nations including the Meherrins, Nottoways, Monacans, Manahoacs, Nahyssans, Occaneechis, Saponis, Tutelo Saponis, and Cherokees. When the English arrived in the late 1580s, they named the region after their virgin queen, Elizabeth I, and in 1607 established the first permanent English colony in the Americas. The Powhatans grew tobacco, and an English colonist, John Rolfe, introduced a new strand from the West Indies, which became a lucrative cash crop of Virginia. Rolfe’s wife, Pocahontas (born Matoaka), daughter of Chief Powhantan, was baptized and taken to London as an example of the possibilities for converted Indians. In the 1700s, the white population in Virginia increased as a result of the influx of German and Scottish-Irish immigrants. Africans were brought to Virginia to work in the tobacco fields, and in 1661, Virginia codified laws that condoned and regulated slavery. By 1776, forty percent of the new state’s population were Virginians of African origin or descent. Wheelock's letters from the 1750s contain several suggestions that his trained missionaries, including Occom, should be sent on missions to Virginia to teach Indians in that colony. In 1758, Samuel Davies of Virginia recruited Occom for a mission to the Cherokee Nation in Virginia and suggested that his ordination happen immediately in preparation (Occom was ordained in 1759 but by Presbyterians on Long Island), although this mission never happened.