One woman and two men produced such differing responses from participants that they must be classified as the most controversial Virginians of the 17th Century.

Pocahontas - also known as Matoaca, and after her marriage in 1614 to colonist John Rolfe as Rebecca Rolfe - is the first. Historian Virginia Bernard wrote, "Few stories in American history are as powerful and pervasive as the story of Pocahontas." Yet that story has been told different ways at different times and for different purposes.

Bernard continued, "Without Pocahontas and her charming ways, Indian-English relations in early Virginia might have been disastrous. Her marriage to the Virginia colonist John Rolfe (along with her conversion to Christianity) was a cultural triumph." Many years later Thomas Jefferson offered this prediction to a group of young Indians: "You will mix with us by marriage . . . your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island." Had Pocahontas not died in 1618 at about age 20, Bernard surmised, Jefferson's words "might have come to pass."

Another historian, Cynthia Kierner, wrote something similar. "Regardless of how much of the legend is (or is not) true," Pocahontas "had remarkable facility with alien languages and cultures and excellent people skills that impressed grandees on both sides of the Atlantic. She's also one of the few early native Americans - and one of perhaps even fewer women from the Colonial period - who had a major impact on how people then and now understood the history of conquest, colonization, and cultural interaction."

Pocahontas was great, Kierner concluded, "in that she seemed to be able to promote peace between Europeans and Native Americans - in the short run, at least - without completely losing her Indian identity (though most subsequent representations of Pocahontas portrayed her as nearly white)."

Deanna Beacham, of the Virginia Council on Indians, and Karenne Wood, of the Virginia Indian Heritage Program, jointly reflected on the life of Pocahontas and its meaning for later generations: "Many of the most popular versions of her story have little basis in historical fact. Some American Indians contend that the story of Pocahontas has been used to justify English occupation of Indian lands and that her character has developed into a stereotype rather than a historical figure. For this reason, she should be considered more controversial than influential."

Another very controversial person from the same period is Opechancanough, the Pamunkey warrior who captured Capt. John Smith in 1607. The war chief of the Powhatan paramountcy, he planned and carried out remarkably effective attacks on outlying English settlements in Virginia in 1622 and again in 1644. His steadfastness in the face of an invasion of illegal immigrants and his great skill in military preparations mark him as a very great man, indeed.

Opechancanough was almost without a doubt the most talented military leader in Virginia before George Washington. Deanna Beacham stated that Opechancanough "is still revered today by Virginia Indians as a hero and early protector of our homelands."

Historian Bland Whitley wrote of Opechancanough that his importance and his influence were profound. He "may not have succeeded in preserving his command over the Tidewater, but he did force the English colonists to see Indians as competitors, first and foremost, and not as potential subjects and laborers." Moreover, "the 1622 attack led directly to the establishment of Virginia as a royal Colony," which changed the subsequent course of Virginia's history.

The other resident of Virginia whose career was important, but whose influence is still much debated, was Nathaniel Bacon, leader of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676.

The rebellion was once regarded as the first organized American resistance to English misrule. A plaque to that effect was placed behind the grand chair of the speaker of the House of Delegates in Virginia's Capitol building.

Historical scholarship since the 1950s has revised that interpretation - although all historians who have studied the rebellion admit that Bacon's motives remain obscure. The causes of the rebellion he led may have had little relation to its consequences.

The Rev. Ben Campbell interpreted the rebellion as "a class revolution, in which the larger and less affluent class of people sought to unseat the small oligarchy ruling Virginia."

Historian Cynthia Kierner also perceived class antagonisms at work in the events of 1676. Regardless of Bacon's intentions, the rebellion "led to political changes that gave the gentry more influence in provincial government and made government more responsive to middling and poor whites. (A big part of both agendas involved solidifying the inferior legal status of enslaved Africans.)

"Second," Kierner continued, "Bacon's seizure of Indian land for white farmers, in violation of earlier treaties, also set the tone for subsequent treatment of Native Americans by white Virginians."

Yet another perspective comes from Bland Whitley, who created a separate category, Worst Virginian of the 17th Century, for Nathaniel Bacon because he established "a precedent whereby opponents of governing elites took out their resentment on those even more vulnerable than themselves (in this case the Indians)." -B.T.