RELIGIOUS FAITH WAS CENTRAL to the colonial way of warfare. It provided ideological glue in times of tremendous social stress, gave its adherents a set of beliefs and assumptions that allowed them to fight for legitimate and worthy causes, and freed them to use methods that would otherwise have been deemed immoral. Here the concept of holy war, grounded paradoxically in the theory of the just war, played a decisive role. Convinced of their own righteousness and their enemy’s evil, in two major Puritan-Indian wars—the Pequot War of 1636–37 and King Philip’s War of 1675–76—the colonists’ bloody tactics rivaled the atrocities found on the early modern battlefields of Europe. For their part, the Indians also fought for their values, beliefs, and religion, and they too waged war without restraint. This was the process that the historian J. H. Elliott aptly describes as war “for the sacralization of American space.”1
War, both literally and as metaphor, was central to the Puritan mind, just as military establishments were central to Puritan society (despite the wary ambivalence some Puritans, such as John Winthrop, felt toward a standing militia). The church and the militia were not competitors, but partners. As John Cotton explained to his congregation during the Pequot War, “the rulers of the people should consult with the ministers of the churches upon occasion of any war to be undertaken.” Although the Puritans’ politics were radical, their instincts were at the same time conservative. They cherished an ordered society and, at the individual level, admired discipline. Above all, they sought devotional rigor and an orderly church, so it is not especially surprising that they viewed the military regiment as a secular counterpart to the church. The English Puritan Richard Sibbes, one of the most influential spiritual mentors to the New Englanders, saw something divine in the strict discipline of the military. “The people of God,” he wrote of his fellow Puritans, “are beautiful, for order is beautiful …. An army is a beautiful thing, because of the order and the well-disposed ranks that are within it. In this regard the church is beautiful.” When it came time to establish a colonial militia, the Massachusetts authorities initially decreed that soldiers must also be members of the Congregational Church.2
But militias were common everywhere in colonial America; the Puritans’ true innovation was to legitimize their use. Whether it was resisting Catholicism in Europe, subduing unruly subjects in Ireland, waging civil war in England, or fighting various Indian tribes in New England, the Puritans legitimized the practice of warfare and broadened its acceptability. True to their educated and disciplined traditions, they justified the expansion of war through their biblically inspired revision of the European just war tradition.
Just war theory covers the two primary stages of warfare: cause (jus ad bellum) and conduct (jus in bello). To satisfy the requirements of jus ad bellum, a nation’s reasons for going to war must be legitimate; and to be legitimate, they must be sanctioned by a duly recognized authority, pursued for a just and righteous purpose, and intended to secure a noble and lasting peace. To satisfy the requirements of jus in bello, a nation must fight with proportionate and discriminate force and must not deliberately target civilians. By the early modern period, just war theory aimed to place limitations, by way of explicit moral boundaries, on why and how people wage war. It is, and has been for centuries, an attempt to impose rules and order on an inherently chaotic and disorderly practice.3
Despite its familiarity to the modern sensibility, just war theory is by no means a recent development. Nor is it necessarily Western or Christian, let alone Puritan: attempts to codify the rules of war were hallmarks of ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy and Hindu spirituality. In the European tradition, just war theory emerged in the fifth-century theology of St. Augustine and was later refined in the medieval writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the centuries that followed, the concept of the just war developed into a sophisticated school of thought that outlined when, why, and how it was morally acceptable for nations to wage war. The Puritans’ contemporaries in early modern Europe, most famously Hugo Grotius, the Dutch legal philosopher and founder of international law, tested and adapted the just war concept along such lines. Many others were Spaniards, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria, who were appalled by their own country’s brutal conquest of the New World. When English Puritans turned their attention to just war theory in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, efforts to limit the scope of warfare, perhaps leading to the end of war itself, had been present in European philosophy, politics, and theology for a thousand years and prominent for at least a hundred.4
Indeed, the Puritans formed their own ideas on warfare at the precise historical moment when the just war tradition that had descended from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas through precedent, custom, scripture, and Christian doctrine was forming into a fairly cohesive body of international law and acknowledged if not always accepted practice. Yet while the Puritans were aware of this development—just war theory was debated avidly by English clergy of all denominations, and Grotius was closely read by New England’s churchmen—they chose a characteristically different, self-righteous path. They decided to use just war theory to expand rather than limit the scope of war, and in doing so turned just war theory on its head: if the cause be just, the methods did not matter.5
While this was quite a departure from the just war tradition, the Puritans did not invent offensive war. In fact, for all its intentions to limit the scope of war, at the heart of just war theory lies a paradox: Augustine first devised it in order to legitimate warfare. After all, Christianity is an innately pacifistic religion, and so establishing acceptable rules of making war would enable Christians to fight when their religious beliefs otherwise forbade them from doing so. After Emperor Constantine’s conversion, the newly Christian Roman Empire was not secure enough to allow it to abandon the use of force, and so theology had to find a way to accommodate reality. Several centuries later, the Vatican issued a series of elaborate doctrinal justifications to support the Crusaders’ campaigns to seize the Holy Land from the heathen Muslim. This, for the first time, was the just war as holy war, which justified war without mercy if the enemy proved beyond the outer limits of civilization, and thus redemption. Nonetheless, despite its aggressive uses during the late Roman Empire and the Crusades, by the early seventeenth century just war theorists were attempting to limit the spread of war and constrain methods of fighting. This was certainly the prevailing view, eventually solidified and secularized as the “rule of law” by Grotius toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War. By 1648, the just war had effectively begun to replace the holy war.6
But not among the Puritans. Following the Crusaders’ example, Puritan divines resurrected the idea of holy war against the unfaithful. Belligerent in the name of spreading the sacred and eradicating the profane, holy warriors explicitly called for offensive war. A nation could—indeed, should—initiate war in the pursuit of its mission. For the first time since the Crusades, prominent European thinkers, led by English Puritans, used the concept of the just war to expand, rather than limit, the boundaries of jus ad bellum. War was evil, they acknowledged, but a necessary evil—though as the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, the Puritans began to think of war less frequently as evil and more fervently as necessary. In doing so, they relied on the fire-and-brimstone bellicosity of the Old Testament and ignored Christ’s pacifist teachings in the New. They even began to think of war as a glorious endeavor and of God as the ultimate warlord. “God is an excellent Man of War,” preached Alexander Leighton, and the Bible was “the best handbook on war.” For Puritans, scripture provided literal guidance on all earthly matters, and warfare was no different. There was, Leighton explained, “No better Philosophy, Logick, or Metaphysick, then in the book of God. No better counsel or direction for war or peace … there is to be found.” Unwilling to let their militaristic fervor be diluted by their religious contemporaries, they rejected the antiwar arguments of their fellow Protestants, particularly Anabaptists, Baptists, and Quakers; in the 1640s, the Massachusetts General Court felt it necessary to pass a law directed against Baptists for denying “the lawfulness of making war.”7
But the Puritans did not simply argue that war was lawful; they viewed it as a sacred duty to campaign against the enemies of God, with whom there could be no neutrality or lenience. In the European context, this meant extending Protestantism at the expense of the satanic Catholic conspiracy, both internal (recalcitrant Catholics in the British Isles) and external (France, and especially Spain). Leading Puritan ministers in England, such as Leighton and William Gouge, argued the case for waging war in the name of God, which in the 1620s meant intervening in the Thirty Years’ War. God, according to the Puritan minister Thomas Sutton, was closest to those who would wage war in his name. “Above all creatures,” Sutton preached, God “loves souldiers; above all exercises, commends fighting; above all actions, he honors warlike and martiall designes.” Even Christ was a warrior, and the angels his army. Evil was a fact of life, a daily presence, but this did not mean one should simply accept its existence. Indeed, it was the Puritan’s duty to identify evil and eradicate it ruthlessly.8
The extreme turn in the Puritans’ views on war had as much to do with the polarization of political and religious life in England, a dynamic that by the 1640s would explode in the incendiary violence of the English Civil War. In particular, the first decades of the seventeenth century witnessed the renewal of English Catholicism, the refusal of the Church of England to reform, and the increasing persecution of the Puritans themselves, especially after the rise of Bishop Laud in the 1620s. Against this backdrop, Puritan justifications for offensive holy war reached a crescendo in England at precisely the moment Winthrop and his colleagues were planning to set sail for America. Had they not emigrated when they did—say, several decades earlier, or after the Stuart Restoration in 1660—it is doubtful they would have carried with them such an intensely radical worldview.9
Just as the Puritans’ expansion of just war theory made it easier for them to condone and initiate war, so too did it allow them to widen the scope of what was acceptable on the battlefield, or jus in bello. Michael Walzer, a leading just war theorist, has observed that the component parts of just war theory are not necessarily complementary—a nation can launch a just war and yet wage it unjustly, and vice versa. The Puritans simplified matters by expanding what was permissible according to both. In other words, they removed many of the constraints that tended to limit the intensity and violence of warfare. Because their wars would be fought over nonnegotiable religious principles, the Puritans did not, at least in theory, recognize or protect civilian noncombatants. This was not an inconsistency—quite the opposite, for if a Christian saw fit to wage holy war in the name of God, why should he restrain himself when fighting the enemies of God? Though Puritans rejected realism, and claimed that it “is a shame for a Christian” to heed the teachings of Machiavelli, they did believe that achieving a holy end often required the use of unholy means—and even that a holy end legitimated normally unholy means. Accordingly, as England’s warring factions demonized and delegitimized each other, the most brutal, grisly acts of holy war violence intensified the fighting of the Civil War.10
This extremism easily crossed the Atlantic, in both directions—radicals who had migrated to New England in the 1630s rushed to return home to rally sentiment against Charles I a decade later—and it pushed the ideas of many over the edge of civilized discourse. Referring to the Indians and Catholics who already inhabited the New World, John Cotton, one of the most respected and beloved of New England’s ministers, declared that God “would drive out the Heathen before them.” This “course of warring against others, & driving them out without provocation,” he told a group of Puritans departing for Massachusetts, “depends upon speciall Commission from God, or else it is not imitable.” Needless to say, the Puritans felt they had been given such a commission. Later, Cotton defended his English brethren against the shocking and previously unthinkable crime of regicide, telling his Boston congregation that the beheading of King Charles I in 1649 was gruesome but necessary, perhaps even deserved.11
Given the close intellectual and political ties between Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic, and given its easy applicability to conflicts with the supposedly savage, godless Indians of the New World, it is easy to see why the concept of holy war found a receptive audience in New England. The Puritans of New England must “take, kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus,” the Reverend Joshua Moodey preached in 1674 on the eve of King Philip’s War with the Wampanoag Indians, “and not to pity or spare any of them.”12 As we shall see, the colonists proved themselves adept at appealing to God to justify unremitting, unsparing acts of war against their heathen enemies.
WITHIN A FEW years of migrating to America in 1630, the Puritans of Massachusetts had already expanded into Connecticut, in two separate colonies at Hartford and New Haven, and by the outbreak of war in 1636 several new Puritan settlements dotted the shores of the Connecticut River between Hartford and the open water of Long Island Sound. The Pequots, feared even by the other Indian tribes along the Atlantic coast—their name means “destroyers of men”—presented a particular challenge that was military and political as well as economic. After desultory negotiations, which included a 1634 treaty of mutual assistance that went largely unobserved by both sides, the colonists moved to reinforce their settlements by building a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River at what is today the town of Old Saybrook and on land the Pequots considered rightfully theirs. They besieged the fort in the summer of 1636 but could not overrun it. As the siege continued, the Indians of nearby Block Island, allied to the Pequots, murdered John Oldham, an English trader. This had not been the first such killing; indeed, one of the terms of the 1634 treaty was that the Pequots would relinquish the perpetrators of past murders, though they never did.13
Although the actual circumstances of the murder were unclear, this further provocation convinced the authorities in Boston that they had to react. Winthrop claimed that Puritan forces would seek the Pequots “not to make war upon them, but to do justice.” Yet it was a funny sort of justice, purely punitive in nature and in response for the most uncertain of crimes. Motivated as much by revenge as by concerns for safety and security, a raiding party under the command of John Endecott sailed from Boston in August 1636. Endecott was ideally suited to the task. Violent by nature and exceedingly zealous in his Puritanism, he represented the worst of Massachusetts’s moral and ideological absolutism. But his attempts to put it into action failed miserably. Although the Indians had anticipated an attack and hid themselves, Endecott’s men obliterated the Block Island community, razing its crops and burning its houses to the ground. They then sailed to the main Pequot village on the Connecticut shore, with the same result. Dispirited and discouraged, they returned to Boston. All Endecott and his men had done, complained Lion Gardiner, the commander of the Saybrook fort, was rouse the Pequots for an escalation of the conflict.14
Knowing they could not defeat the English colonists alone but realizing that the Connecticut River settlements were vulnerable, the Pequots approached their neighbors to the north, the Narragansett tribe in what is today Rhode Island, to form an alliance. The Puritans learned of the negotiations and sent Roger Williams, the Baptist exile from Puritan orthodoxy who was on fairly good terms with the Narragansetts, to prevent the alliance from happening. Not only did Williams succeed in splitting the Pequots from the Narragansetts, he secured an alliance between the Puritans and the Narragansetts against the Pequots. Puritan observers credited divine intervention with this turn of events. John Mason, the commander of Connecticut’s forces, said that God, “by a more than ordinary providence,” had kept the Indians divided at a moment of colonial vulnerability.15
The alliance waited until the following spring to assault the Pequot settlements. As they prepared, the Puritans turned to God’s grace for protection and the tenets of holy war for instruction. One minister assured Mason’s troops that they were acting on the will of the Lord and thus had every right “to execute those who God, the righteous judge of all the world, hath condemned for blaspheming his sacred majesty, and murthering his servants.” They should, he preached, “execute vengeance upon the heathen [and] binde their Kings in chaines, and Nobles in fetters of Iron [and] make their multitudes fall under your warlike weapons.” The normal restraints of civilized warfare, in other words, were now removed. The Pequots had proven themselves capable of evil that lay beyond what a Christian could rightfully accept; they were nothing but servants of the devil and could be treated as such. Thomas Hooker, the spiritually stalwart minister who had founded Hartford, urged Winthrop and his colleagues in Boston “to hasten execution” of war against the Pequots and “not to do this work of the Lords revenge slackly.” In sermons, he exhorted the soldiers of Connecticut to do the same.16
With hearts thus hardened, and with the Pequots isolated thanks to the diplomatic heroics of Roger Williams, the Puritans taught the Pequots, and all other Indian tribes in the region, a harsh lesson in divine justice. The colonial authorities in Massachusetts and Connecticut raised small but sufficient armies totaling 250 men. In the spring of 1637, they marched under the guidance of their Narragansett allies toward the Pequot village of Fort Mystic on the Connecticut shore. Though outnumbered, the Puritans had the element of surprise, and they quickly breached the village’s fortified walls. After wreaking havoc, they lit the settlement ablaze and withdrew from the walls of the village where they could kill anyone fleeing the inferno. It was a grisly scene, the first time that fighting in North America matched the brutality of European warfare. It was, in fact, uncommonly savage even for the supposed savage Indians, and the Narragansetts, bitter enemies of the Pequots and now allied to the Puritans, begged the English to stop. Many Pequots, from Fort Mystic and neighboring settlements, fled further west along the shore, away from the Puritan fighters and the Narragansetts’ home territory in Rhode Island. But the Puritans tracked them down outside New Haven, where hundreds of Pequots were hiding in an impenetrable swamp. The Puritans offered safe passage for any noncombatants who left the swamp voluntarily; about two hundred did so, mostly women and children who were later sold into slavery. Unable to escape and unwilling to surrender, the recalcitrant warriors who remained were annihilated by the musket fire of the surrounding Puritans, whose advanced military technology proved too much for the Indians. A handful of the Pequot leadership fled during the tumult, but they could not escape the fact that, as a people, the Pequots had effectively been eradicated. It was, exulted the Reverend Thomas Shepard, a “divine slaughter.”17
The Pequot War was undoubtedly a conflict over land and resources, a clash between two peoples who distrusted each other but wanted to occupy the same geographical space. Yet as Shepard acknowledged, from the Puritans’ standpoint it was also a religious conflict, a holy war for control of spiritual space that the Puritans believed to be divinely sanctioned and, despite its violence, eminently just. Captain John Underhill of Massachusetts, who had previously fought with the English volunteers defending Protestantism against Spanish Catholic forces in the Netherlands, later reflected on the conflict’s ferocity. Underhill acknowledged that “it may be demanded” of the Puritans: “Why should you be so furious … should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?” They should—but only if their enemy was similarly inspired by the word of God. “I would referre you to Davids warre,” he argued, “when a people is grown to such a height of bloud, and sinne against God and man” that they lose all claim to honorable treatment. The Pequots had behaved not as men but like evil spirits (“wicked imps”) and animals (“roaring lions, compassing all corners of the country for their prey”). By contrast the Puritans, brutal as they had been, had acted honorably and righteously. Claimed Underhill: “We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”18
The Puritans knew this to be true because, time and again, God had clearly favored his chosen people. Just as providence had ensured the survival of the Puritan settlements in the howling wilderness of New England, so too would he protect them against their savage, satanic enemies. A few pious malcontents, such as the free grace, antinomian heretic Anne Hutchinson, opposed the war as unnecessary and therefore unjust. But though these antiwar activists triggered a short-term enlistment crisis, they were very much rare exceptions to the general rule. Armed with God’s righteousness and intent on establishing their unquestioned dominance over all the Indian tribes of New England, the Puritans negotiated the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 with the few surviving Pequots. Their terms were harsh, even by the standards of the time: the Pequot tribe was disbanded forever (even the very name “Pequot” was to be purged from human discourse); all Pequot settlements left standing after the war were razed; women and children were either sold into slavery in the Caribbean or given to other tribes in New England, such as the Mohegans and Narragansetts; and the heads of any Pequot warriors who had killed English soldiers had to be turned over to the colonial authorities.19
In both war and peace, the Puritans had ensured the total destruction of the Pequot nation. But the war’s historical importance goes beyond questions of whether it amounted to an early instance of what we would today call genocide. The Puritans had settled Massachusetts and Connecticut under the sway of powerful myths, centered on faith, about their role in the world. They saw themselves as God’s specially anointed people who had been chosen for their virtue, their faith, and their righteousness. Through its violence but, more important, through its themes of a holy war justly prosecuted, the Pequot War corroborated, even sanctified, these Puritan myths. Rather than wage war indiscriminately, so the Puritans thought, they had done so against a clear threat and according to the clearly defined laws of war. If Puritan exceptionalism had been strong before the war, it emerged stronger afterward.20
IN THE 1640S, another war, this time on English soil, gripped the colonial imagination. It was natural for the English Civil War to command the attentions of English colonists in America, for its central issues, particularly its religious core, were those that had brought them to the New World in the first place. For one thing, the conflict pitted Puritans and other dissenting sects against the Anglican Church; for another, its central cause pivoted upon the issue of political liberty, and whether sovereignty derived from the king’s divine right to rule or from the people. The Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut had been most concerned with such questions that were at once both religious and political. Though the violence of the Civil War was not exported to the colonies—even dogmatic New England Puritans maintained a cautious neutrality knowing that their very existence depended upon London’s prerogative, no matter who was in charge—many colonists took an active interest in its unfolding. The people of New England generally favored Parliament, while largely Anglican Virginia openly expressed its Royalist sympathies. Others, such as Roger Williams, criticized the dictatorial aspirations of both Royalists and Parliamentarians, Anglicans and Puritans. One way of cutting through the distracting calculations of political expediency to measure the colonies’ true loyalties is to trace where the war’s participants took refuge when their side was out of favor: between the regicide of Charles I in 1649 and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Royalist Cavaliers sought asylum in Virginia; after the Restoration, Puritans and Parliamentarians fled to New Haven, where the revolutionary presence of John Dixwell, William Goffe, and Edward Whalley, who had signed Charles I’s death warrant, endures in the names of three of the city’s major thoroughfares.21
Authorities in New England strove to enforce neutrality, but they could do little to disguise the overwhelming sympathy of their people for Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians. Cromwell himself was a Puritan of the same theological and ideological stock as Winthrop and the other founders of Massachusetts. Although many prominent New Englanders refused Parliament’s call to arms despite sympathizing with its cause, others returned to England to support Cromwell and the Puritan cause. In fact, the 1640s and ’50s witnessed more emigration from than immigration into New England, with most leaving for England. Galvanized by the outbreak of war, politically motivated ministers such as Hugh Peter, Samuel Eaton, and Thomas Weld hurried from their pulpits in Massachusetts and Connecticut to sail back across the Atlantic. As one of Cromwell’s closest advisers and the New Model Army’s main chaplain, Peter became the most senior participant from the colonies. He was also something of a one-man Puritan revolution, having fought in Holland against the Spanish, preached in Massachusetts, and marched as a Roundhead alongside Cromwell in England.22
Faith-based arguments about political liberty found a receptive audience among New Englanders. One of the most radical arguments in nonconformist politics was that no earthly power had the right to come between God and his people. Owing their ultimate allegiance to God alone, only the people could impose government on earth. Anything else was artificial interference, and contrary to the will of God. Here we find an early expression of American republicanism, with its emphasis on government by the consent of the governed, that would later have a deep impact on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. A radical, subversive group called the Fifth Monarchists, named for the reign of Christ that would follow the overthrow of the Antichrist’s corrupt Fourth Monarchy under the Churches of Rome and England, advanced this argument further than most others dared. Among their leaders were Thomas Venner and William Aspinwall, Massachusetts Puritans who also returned to serve God’s cause in England. By imbibing the heady Fifth Monarchist millennialism that flourished in New England, Venner and Aspinwall’s time in the colonies had been vital in the formation of their religious and political radicalism. Especially important were the sermons and writings of John Cotton, who had written a 1636 legal code for Massachusetts that based the law on the teachings of the church rather than the interests of the state. The Fifth Monarchists’ unorthodox theology would cost them support in Massachusetts (they were unabashed antinomians), but their arguments about the true sources of political legitimacy were an important precursor to the ideas of the American Revolution.23
New Englanders’ revolutionary fervor ebbed as it became clear that Cromwell and the dream of godly reform had failed. Under a new king, Charles II, they did not dare challenge the monarchical rule that could end their very existence. Yet sympathy lingered still. As he passed through Boston on inspection a few years into the Restoration, Edward Randolph, a royal customs official, reported back to the Lords of Trade in London that New Englanders may have reconciled themselves to Charles II’s rule, yet they nonetheless “held fast to the anti-monarchical principles spread among them.” Religious and political liberty had already been intertwined together in the English colonial imagination, but if Randolph’s testimony is reliable, the English Civil War entrenched the ideology of faith-based republicanism deeper still. Though it would lie dormant for years, Christian republicanism would again burst forth a century later to help shape the politics and foreign policy of a new nation.24
WITH THE COLONISTS’ attention turned to events in the British Isles, an uneasy peace descended upon Puritan-Indian relations following the Pequot War. The colonists had demonstrated strength and ruthlessness in battle and the destructive power of their advanced weaponry. But just as important, they felt confident they had proved to the remaining tribes the superiority of their religion and way of life. Although it would take another four decades for open warfare to erupt again, the Puritans moved to take advantage of their newfound preeminence by expanding their settlements and, not coincidentally, playing various other tribes off against one another. Yet when war broke out again, in 1675, it surpassed the Pequot War for its violence, duration, and size.25
The year 1675 began with a single death that would ultimately lead to thousands more. John Sassamon, an Indian who had converted to Christianity and had even fought alongside the Puritans against the Pequots, was an aide to the Wampanoag chief, Metacom, better known to the English colonists as King Philip. Metacom had let it be known that he felt Sassamon had betrayed him, once in the drafting of a will—Sassamon wrote it for the illiterate Metacom and had apparently included himself as a beneficiary—and again by telling the authorities of Plymouth Colony that the Wampanoags were planning an attack. When Sassamon was found under the ice of Assawampsett Pond in January, suspicion naturally fell upon Metacom. With no direct evidence to implicate him, the Wampanoag chief was absolved of any wrongdoing. But several months later, a witness emerged to claim he had seen three of the chief’s closest advisers haul Sassamon away and kill him. Solely upon this flimsy evidence, the advisers were tried, convicted, and executed at Plymouth. On June 24, Metacom’s forces responded with an assault on the Plymouth town of Swansea. King Philip’s War had begun.26
During the sanguinary battles of the summer and fall of 1675, Metacom’s warriors devastated town after town throughout Plymouth; neighboring tribes in Massachusetts soon suffered the same fate. In all, allied Indian tribes attacked fifty out of ninety English towns in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, utterly laying waste to twelve of them. (Though it sent troops, Connecticut escaped the fighting, much to the chagrin of the authorities in Boston.) Colonists were at first stunned by the breadth of the offensive; they were then shocked at the devastation wrought on their godly communities. Into the autumn of 1675, they appeared to be in danger of total destruction.
True to form, the colonists turned to religion for guidance, comfort, resolve—and above all, answers. As they did in their daily lives, they looked for providential signs of God’s will in unfolding events. And for reasons unknown, it became clear they had strayed from the path of righteousness and provoked God’s wrath. As the Massachusetts government, reeling from one defeat after another, declared in proclaiming a “Day of publick Humiliation, with Fasting and Prayer,” the war had been caused by “the Apostacy of many from the Truth unto Heresies.” Another government proclamation lamented the colonists’ “Backsliding” from godly ways, reflected most depressingly in the continually sagging rates of church attendance. “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us,” asked Increase Mather, a prominent minister and writer who informally served as the war’s chief propagandist and apologist, “when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?” Thus the war did not trigger widespread soul-searching of a more reflective kind: land policies were not reexamined, treatment of the Indians went unquestioned. On the contrary, in August the Christian Indians of Massachusetts were ordered confined to the praying towns; in October, those who had not been sold into slavery or hanged were forcibly removed to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where they waited out the war in the most miserable, diseased conditions. In arch-Calvinist fashion, the war was instead perceived as a divine test of the Puritans’ own commitment: to God, and to the survival of their godly enterprise. Along with the Puritans’ lives, the fate of their New Jerusalem was at stake.27
To the Puritans, the Indians served a dark purpose as God’s unlikely messengers. But as displeased as he might be with his chosen people, in the end the Puritans were confident that God would not let them perish. He would teach them a lesson, a harsh lesson to be sure, but one they would survive to learn. The colonists believed they were experiencing their very own “Passions” of suffering, and ultimately redemption, that Jesus himself had endured. Puritan survivors accordingly praised “Gods marsi” in sparing them. “The Lord hath a great Interest in this Land which he will not easily part with,” Mather declared confidently. It “hath pleased the Lord to make us his people.” Despite their suffering, God would not forsake his people.28
The Puritans had sacrificed plenty; now, in the fall of 1675, the tide of battle would slowly begin to turn in their favor. A small success in October, the repulsion of a Nipmuck attack on Hatfield in western Massachusetts, was followed by a major offensive against the powerful Narragansetts of Rhode Island, accused of aiding and abetting Metacom’s Wampanoags, in December. While the charges of Narragansett perfidy were thin, Narragansett provisions were not. To colonists who had lost nearly everything in war and were facing the approach of a harsh winter, the Narragansetts presented a target of opportunity that was simply too good to pass up. A joint force from the colonies moved into Narragansett territory and, aided by a traitorous scout, marched to the Great Swamp near Rhode Island’s southern shore. Inside the secreted, virtually impassable swamp was a large island; on it was an emergency Narragansett village, housing mostly noncombatant refugees fleeing the conflict. The scout was able to guide the English army directly to the island village, connected to the boggy mainland by a single felled log. The colonists penetrated the village, withdrew, set fire to it, and shot all who tried to escape the flames. This strategy ensured a rout—a massacre, really—but it also meant that the objectives of the attack, the food and supplies, were lost. Beset by freezing temperatures and intermittent blizzards, several English soldiers died on the journey home.29
It was a pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless. Yet the brutality of the war continued, with several more English towns coming under attack in the spring of 1676; among other towns, Providence was completely destroyed. By the early spring, the war had become a stalemate. Yet Indian losses, coming from a much smaller population and weaker economic base compared to the colonists’, were becoming unsustainable. Puritan thrusts into Indian territory in western Massachusetts and up from Connecticut into Rhode Island and Plymouth deepened the Indians’ plight. By the summer, it was but a matter of time before the Puritans would prevail. The war finally came to an end in August, when an Indian fighting for the English shot and killed Metacom himself. A grisly war had come to a grisly end.
The savagery of the war astonished observers at the time and has continued to do so ever since. Indian warriors scalped many of their victims alive, while English troops disemboweled and drew and quartered theirs. Both sides adopted a scorched-earth strategy of retributive, total war. Few colonists considered their own brutality to be unnecessarily brutal: their enemies, after all, were servants of the devil and behaved accordingly. In February, a Nipmuck assault on Lancaster, Massachusetts, resulted not only in the deaths of several townspeople but also the capture of Mary Rowlandson. Her captivity, which she later recounted in a bestselling memoir, lasted three months and gave her an unprecedented glimpse into life among the Indians. Her “bloody heathen” attackers were little more than “hell-hounds” and “ravenous beasts” who “went without any scruple” and “acted as if the devil had told them that they should gain the victory.” The Indians committed unspeakably cruel atrocities, such as scalping and skinning their captives alive. To the English, who believed they were the very embodiment of God with faces “wherein the glory and Image of God doth shine forth,” the mutilation of bodies, heads, and faces were acts of blasphemy. The Indians even tortured livestock, the Puritans observed incredulously, on one occasion mutilating a cow by cutting off its horns and cutting out its tongue. It was the fiery Increase Mather who best expressed the Puritans’ view of the malevolent evil of the “vile Indians” that contrasted with their own virtue:
That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant.
What was more, the devilish Indians taunted the Puritans with deliberate blasphemies, such as when a party of Nipmucks taunted a group of besieged colonists to “Come and pray, & sing Psalmes,” or when another attack ended in the Indians disemboweling a Puritan and carefully placing his “Bible in his Belly.”30
Against such an enemy, the Puritans unleashed their righteous fury. The carnage of the Great Swamp was followed by further atrocities, against warriors and noncombatants alike, for the duration of the war. If “God is with us, and fights for us, and will deliver us out of the hands of these Heathen,” as one English captain cried, then anything was justified. But although King Philip’s War was deemed necessary and just, it was not exactly popular; support was broad, but not quite unanimous, and an important minority of ministers and writers raised troubling questions. Their numbers were small, and so they did not exactly constitute an antiwar movement. Moreover, many of them raised initial objections only to rally to the cause once fighting had broken out. Yet some were critical not only of the need for war, but of the Puritan authorities. Quakers, who had suffered under the stern rule of the Puritans, obviously had an interest in pointing out the shortcomings of officials in Massachusetts. (Puritan officials responded in kind by blaming their plight on the heresy of the Quakers.) John Easton, the deputy governor of Rhode Island, and Edward Wharton, a resident of Salem who had been exiled to London, accused the people of Massachusetts and Plymouth, and their intolerant ambition, for bringing the crisis upon themselves. But some Puritans also questioned the need for war at all. John Eliot and others complained that the true aggressor was Plymouth due to its rough justice in dealing with Metacom and the Wampanoags. Critiques such as these came closest to undermining the Puritans’ rationale that theirs was a defensive war. Yet despite such reservations the scale of fighting, and the atrocities committed against the English people and their towns, mobilized all but the most hardened skeptics behind the war effort. And in the end, the image of a just, necessary, and righteous war prevailed.31
The war had been the biggest conflict yet in colonial North America. Approximately 1,250 members of the allied Indian tribes died in the fighting, 625 died later from battle wounds, and another 3,000 died of disease. All told, almost half of the prewar Indian population of 11,600 died during the war; the rest either became refugees or were sold into permanent slavery elsewhere in the English colonies. According to Nathaniel Saltonstall, a Puritan who lived through the war, over 800 English colonists, out of a total population of approximately 50,000—a mere 1.6 percent—died in the fighting. Whether or not the war was necessary and just, it was hardly proportionate.32
In addition to its personal and geographical scars, King Philip’s War left a permanent imprint upon colonial American identity. A vivid and romanticized memory of the conflict would linger well into the late nineteenth century, its legacy shaping an American view of warfare that was grounded in the noble cause and the selfless spread of freedom. In this sense, perhaps the most important legacy of England’s Protestant divines and holy warriors was to supply the raw material for an ideology of American exceptionalism that would emerge much later.33
God’s specially chosen people did not behave as the tyrannical Spanish or the barbaric Indians. Instead, they were permitted to act without virtue under extreme circumstances, so long as they had no choice and fought for righteousness. Ideals and interests—the mix between the two has driven American war and diplomacy since. Christians—that is, proper Christians: Protestants—had been embattled for over a century, first by the Catholic conspiracy in Europe and then the heathen onslaughts in America. But now, in 1676, it appeared that the Protestant New Jerusalem had survived its ultimate trial. Thus tested, it would spend the next century pushing back Catholics and Indians, and all others who would deny them their sacred errand.34