1830

Custis, George Washington. Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia, A National Drama. Philadelphia, 1830. (Representative American Plays from 1767 to the Present. Ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1917. 181-208.) This play by Custis, the grandson of President Washington’s wife Martha through her first marriage, is the second extant play on Pocahontas and part of the early cluster of plays about her that includes work by the earlier Barker and the later Owen, Barnes, and Brougham. Through the influence of the last survivor of the previous Virginia expeditions, “the light of Christian doctrine” has already shone on Pocahontas’s “before benighted soul.” “The light of true faith [has] dispell’d the first darkness of [her] mind,” and she immediately perceives Smith’s group “like beings from a higher world,” falling for her “English cavalier” Rolfe in a flash. “Pocahontas the friend of the English” is literally the English soldiers’ password in time of trouble, and the rescue of Smith is the climax of the action, as “rising with dignity,” she assaults her father Powhatan with “Attend but first to me. Cruel king, the ties of blood which bound me to thee are dissever’d, as have been long those of thy sanguinary religion; for know that I have abjur’d thy senseless gods, and now worship the Supreme Being, the true Manitou, and the Father of the Universe; ‘Tis his Almighty hand that sustains me, ‘Tis his divine spirit that breathes in my soul, and prompts Pocahontas to a deed which future ages will admire.” This is a “national story,” and the final vision of the rising glory of America, interestingly, is given to Powhatan. Remember that this is the year of the Indian Removal Act.
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