From the very first, John Stevens did not like Governor Berkeley and in
a short time learned that he was a tyrant. Berkeley issued his
proclamation against the Puritan pastors, prohibiting their teaching or
preaching publicly or privately.

John Smith Stevens participated in the Indian war in 1644, and saw
Opechancanough, at this time almost a hundred years of age, captured and
brought to Jamestown, where he requested his captors to hold open his
eyes, that he might see and upbraid Sir William Berkeley for making a
public exhibition of him. A short hour afterward the aged chieftain was
treacherously wounded by his guard.

In the year 1648, John Stevens married Dorothe Collier, the daughter of
a clergyman of the church of England. This naturally united him to the
cavalier or church party, while his mother, brother and sister were
Puritans. Sometimes John thought he had the best wife living, at others
he was almost persuaded that she was intolerable. She was a beautiful
brunette, with great dark eyes which smiled when the sky was fair, but
in which appeared the lustre of a tigress when enraged. Love in its full
strength and beauty seldom dwells in the heart of both husband and wife
through all the vicissitudes of life. It was so in John's case. When the
honeymoon waned and practical existence began, the wife became
ambitious for a more showy manner of life and more pleasures than the
husband could afford. He was prosperous; but his wife's extravagance, in
which he indulged her at first, kept him poor. Poverty became a burden
and marriage a mockery. He who had been insanely in love, and who was
unable to live out of her presence, proved an indifferent husband before
the honeymoon was over. Why? John had thought his wife an angel, and
marriage had shattered his idol. His ideal woman had fallen so far below
his expectations that disappointment drove him to indifference. His wife