AS OF 1630, THERE were only several hundred English inhabitants in New Plymouth, but the colony was finally poised for significant growth. Some of the thousands of puritan emigrants to New England headed south into Plymouth’s patent. The colony became a string of communities as newcomers arrived and longtime settlers moved away from the original Pilgrim settlement. Men discontented with Plymouth’s religious and political order had gone their own way since the early 1620s, but now pillars of the community moved out. By 1632, John Alden and Myles Standish had taken their families to the northern end of Plymouth Bay. They were close enough to attend church in Plymouth during the summer and promised to winter in the town to make church attendance possible when travel became arduous. With the congregation’s reluctant consent, however, those to the north formed the town and church of Duxbury. Other settlers moved to what became Scituate, the colony’s northernmost town along its border with Massachusetts Bay.1
Some of the “ancient inhabitants,” as Plymouth’s early settlers called themselves, opposed the dispersal of the town’s population, and the General Court adopted several measures designed to retard it. In 1633, the court revoked the land allotments of settlers who had moved away and reassigned them to “such as do or shall inhabit the said town of Plymouth.” On other occasions, the court granted the use of land to Plymouth townspeople contingent upon their ongoing residence. The court also barred those living outside of the town from coming to its waterways to catch alewives that were used as fertilizer for corn. None of these stratagems succeeded. For instance, the colony granted “good farms to special persons, that would promise to live at Plymouth.” The lands in question lay to the north of Duxbury, and the grantees formed their own community, which became the town of Marshfield. Edward Winslow and his family relocated there later in the decade.2
Native communities and Plymouth Colony townships. (Map by Andrew C. Smith.)
Amid the arrival of new emigrants and the formation of townships, Plymouth Colony remained a trading enterprise. After the Undertakers obtained their 1629 patent for the exclusive right to trade on the Kennebec River, they were in a stronger position to compete for the natural riches of New England. For a brief stretch of time, Plymouth became the dominant fur-trading power in the region, but it had too few men, too little firepower, and too many rivals to maintain its position. Although the Dutch gave way in Connecticut, the French threatened Plymouth’s outposts in northern New England. The foremost challenge to Plymouth’s commercial success, however, came from other English traders and the growing strength of Massachusetts Bay.
The colony’s voting men continued to elect Isaac Allerton as one of the assistants to William Bradford each year, but Allerton’s relationship with his fellow Undertakers was now fraying badly. As Bradford once had alleged of Squanto, so he now asserted that Allerton “played his own game.” He pursued his own trade, borrowing money at high rates of interest and then shipping goods to Massachusetts Bay. Even worse, Allerton was a careless accountant and did not keep his private business dealings separate from those of the Undertakers. Allerton maintained a close relationship with James Sherley, the investor who had facilitated the arrangement with the Undertakers. Working with Allerton, Sherley backed a trading post near the Penobscot River that threatened to undercut Plymouth’s Kennebec trade. The Undertakers felt they had no choice but to join in the Penobscot venture, but they replaced Allerton as their agent with Edward Winslow.3
Had Allerton’s activities produced profits despite his indiscretions, all might have been well. Instead, the Undertakers lost ground. At the start of their arrangement, they had agreed to make nine annual payments of £200 each and had assumed an additional debt of £600. They obtained some fresh loans to finance the Kennebec patent, the transportation of congregants from Leiden, and the outlays needed for their trading operations. Despite cornering a sizeable share of New England’s fur trade, and despite making each annual payment, James Sherley informed Bradford in early 1632 that they now owed nearly £6,000. According to Plymouth’s governor, Allerton had “hoodwinked” them all and had even “screwed up his poor old father-in-law’s [William Brewster] account to above two hundred [pounds].” Allerton’s accounts were such a mess that it was impossible to make any sense of his dealings.4
For Bradford, Allerton’s activities were not merely negligent or duplicitous. They were sinful. He had betrayed his financial partners and broken the covenant that bound together Plymouth’s church members. “The love of money is the root of all evil,” Bradford quoted 1 Timothy 6:10. It became a matter of church discipline, and “the church called him to account for … his gross miscarriages.” Allerton “confessed his fault, and promised better walking.” While Allerton continued to serve as one of Plymouth’s magistrates for several more years, Plymouth’s other leaders no longer trusted him. “The truth is,” Winslow informed John Winthrop, “he loveth neither you nor us.” For a congregation supposedly knit together as the body of Christ, Winslow’s was a serious charge.5
No sources reveal Allerton’s side of the story. Either because of his alienation from his partners, or because he glimpsed richer prospects elsewhere, Allerton left New Plymouth after the 1634 death of his wife. He moved first to Massachusetts Bay, then kept residences for the last two decades of his life in both New Haven and New Amsterdam.
With Allerton sidelined and with their debts mounting, the other Undertakers became more aggressive in their pursuit of furs. They sought to defend their Kennebec and Penobscot outposts from the French and gain a foothold on the Connecticut by outmaneuvering the Dutch. The resulting profits were both heady and deadly.
In June 1632, a French ship sailed into Penobscot Bay. Plymouth’s leading men at the outpost had left to collect a supply of trading goods, and only a few servants remained behind. A Scotsman working for the French—perhaps a captive, perhaps a turncoat—told the servants that his vessel was leaking and asked for permission to repair it on shore. The unsuspecting servants welcomed the French visitors. One Frenchman asked to examine a gun on the wall. Soon the French had the Plymouth servants at gunpoint. When they sailed away, they took £300 worth of beaver skins and everything else of value.6
While the Pilgrim traders struggled to maintain their northern outposts, they also turned their attention to the Connecticut River Valley. The rich furs that Native traders brought down the river stoked competition among several peoples. With the Mohegans to their west and the Narragansetts to their east, the Pequots under their sachem Tatobem exercised fragile authority over a number of river valley communities. In the summer of 1633, the Dutch purchased a plot of land up the river at present-day Hartford and built a fort they named the House of Good Hope. The Dutch wanted to trade not only with the Pequots but with their tributaries and enemies as well. When the Pequots killed several Natives heading toward the fort, the Dutch responded by kidnapping and murdering Tatobem, whose successor Sassacus proved less adept at retaining the allegiance of nearby communities.
The Pilgrims laid plans to wrest the Connecticut fur trade away from the Dutch. In the early 1630s, Plymouth began sending its traders west. Just as Edward Winslow had sailed up the Kennebec to open up Plymouth’s trade in that region, so he quietly made contacts with the Native communities along the Connecticut. Then in July 1633, Winslow and William Bradford visited Boston and conferred with John Winthrop about “joining in a trade to Connecticut.” The plan was to establish an English trading outpost on the river. Winthrop declined, telling Bradford that the “warlike Indians” in the valley made “the place not fit for plantation.”7
Rebuffed by Winthrop, the Pilgrims proceeded on their own. They purchased land from Natawante, an enemy of the Pequots grateful for new allies who talked about restoring him as “the right sachem of this place.” In September 1633, Plymouth sent William Holmes (lieutenant to Myles Standish) up the river with a “small frame of a house” and clapboards in his vessel. As Holmes and his men approached the House of Good Hope, the outraged Dutch trained their cannons on the English bark and threatened to fire if the English proceeded. Holmes did not stop, the Dutch held their fire, and the English hastily palisaded an outpost at a place called Matianuck.8
The Dutch sent word to New Amsterdam, whose leaders dispatched a force of seventy men to eject the English interlopers. The Pilgrims made clear their readiness to defend their outpost, and the Dutch force backed down, not wanting to risk war. For the moment, Plymouth had cornered an incredibly rich source of furs. Back in Boston, John Winthrop estimated that 10,000 skins had been coming down the Connecticut to Dutch traders. Bradford reported that Plymouth shipped 3,366 pounds of beaver fur and 346 otter skins to England that year. At fourteen or fifteen shillings a pound, the beaver fetched more than £2,000.9
The Dutch next countered by sending a small party farther up the Connecticut. The Pilgrim traders did not obstruct their passage, but the Dutch effort failed when an epidemic killed the Indians with whom they had settled. The starving traders sought relief at the Pilgrim outpost. In the spring of 1634, the smallpox ravaged the Indians at Matianuck. Bradford recorded that the Indians died “like rotten sheep,” their skin cleaving to the mats on which they lay and then flaying off of their bodies when they turned. Natawante was among those who perished. According to Bradford, the Pilgrim traders ministered to the sick and buried the dead.10
The Pilgrims “did the Dutch no wrong,” asserted Bradford, “for they took not a foot of any land they bought, but went to the place above them.” When it came to Plymouth’s Kennebec monopoly, however, Bradford had an entirely different perspective on such tactics. In April 1634, John Hocking sailed up the Kennebec, intending to jump the Pilgrims just as Plymouth’s men had jumped the Dutch. Hocking was a fur trader at a small English plantation at Piscataway, in the employ of Lord Saye (William Fiennes) and Lord Brooke (Robert Greville).11
Plymouth magistrates John Howland and John Alden were at the Kennebec outpost when Hocking approached. Howland warned him not to “infringe their liberties, which had cost them so dear.” The Pilgrims had bought the exclusive right to the Kennebec River trade. No one else was at liberty to purchase furs there. Just as Holmes had done on the Connecticut, Hocking kept going and anchored upstream. Unlike the Dutch, Howland was not bluffing. He pursued Hocking, planning to send him back downstream. Hocking threatened to shoot anyone who cut his cables, but three Plymouth men took a canoe, piloted it to Hocking’s bark, and severed a cable. Hocking repeated his warning, and he too was not bluffing. When Plymouth’s Moses Talbot steered the canoe to cut the next cable, Hocking shot him. One of Plymouth’s men then shot Hocking. Both men died instantly.12
John Alden stopped in Boston on his way back to Plymouth. The Piscataway men came as well. They alleged that the Pilgrim magistrates had been too quick to use violence to defend their claim. In this telling, when Howland and Alden sent the canoe to cut the cables, they had ordered their men to stand “in their own pinnace with their pieces charged and ready to shoot.” Massachusetts leaders concluded that Plymouth’s magistrates were culpable in Hocking’s death. They had Alden arrested until they could learn whether or not Plymouth intended to “do justice in the cause.” Myles Standish rushed to Boston and convinced Bay Colony leaders to let Alden go. At the same time, Standish had to post a bond for his own appearance before a Massachusetts court and provide a further explanation of what had transpired on the Kennebec. The Pilgrims, meanwhile, were livid that Bay Colony leaders presumed to exercise authority beyond their charter’s jurisdiction.13
Hocking’s death remained a point of contention between the colonies for several months. In Boston, John Winthrop fretted that the Pilgrim traders “had brought us all, and the gospel under a common reproach of cutting one another’s throats for beaver.” Winthrop feared that once the news reached England, it would redound to the political harm of both colonies by giving “occasion to the king to send a general governor over.” Winthrop wrote a letter to an influential friend of Lords Saye and Brooke. He lamented that Plymouth had occupied all of the best trading spots in New England, which Winthrop knew was a sore point with the lords. Massachusetts leaders signaled their disapproval of Plymouth’s use of violence in other ways. “We refuse to hold communion with them,” Winthrop informed the lords. He added that he hoped to get Pilgrim leaders to “see their sin and repent of it.”14
In July 1634, Plymouth’s leaders traveled to Boston and met with the Bay Colony’s magistrates and the ministers John Cotton and John Wilson. By this point, both sides were more conciliatory. Massachusetts leaders agreed that Plymouth had the right to hinder others from trading on the Kennebec. Not only did they have the patent, but the land had been vacant and no Natives had disputed the claim. By initiative and providence, moreover, Edward Winslow had carried “wampum thither.” At the same time, the joint leaders concluded that in acting precipitously, the Plymouth men had disregarded the Sixth Commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”). They should have preserved their claim by another means at another time. In other words, they should not have killed for beaver. The Pilgrims sent Winslow to London to mollify Lords Saye and Brooke, who let the matter drop.15
The Pilgrims’ audacity had paid off. By 1634, the Plymouth Undertakers had become the most successful fur traders in New England. Winthrop complained that Plymouth had “engrossed all the chief places of trade”: the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers, the Narragansett country, and the Connecticut River Valley. Plymouth had trading houses at each location. Winslow shipped nearly four thousand pounds of beaver pelts that year, most of which the Pilgrims had purchased with wampum. The shipments did not entirely erase the Undertakers’ obligations, but if their success continued, they could look forward to the profits that long had eluded them.16
When Winslow sailed to London in the wake of John Hocking’s death, it turned out that Lords Saye and Brooke were the least of his concerns. Plymouth’s agent arrived precisely as several men joined together in an effort to reorganize New England into a royal colony with a crown-appointed governor.
Chief among those antagonists were Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, whose objectives overlapped but were not identical. England’s wars with Spain and France had occupied the commander of Plymouth Fort in the late 1620s and had prevented him from pursuing his interests in North America. By the time Gorges could resume his efforts, the Massachusetts Bay Company had obtained a royal charter. Gorges complained that the Bay colonists had “made themselves a free people,” governing themselves without oversight by Gorges’s Council for New England. Sir Ferdinando wanted to reestablish the council’s political authority over New England and retain portions of it as proprietary colonies for himself and other gentlemen.17
For his part, Archbishop Laud wanted to bring his anti-puritan campaign to England’s overseas possessions. Whereas previous monarchs and bishops understood colonies as ideal dumping grounds for religious dissidents, it did not sit well with Laud that nonconformists could escape punishment by taking their sedition to New England.
Joining with Gorges and Laud were several men who had clashed with New England’s magistrates. One such individual was Christopher Gardiner, who came to Massachusetts Bay in the spring of 1630 and introduced himself as a European knight of an uncertain order. He brought with him a few servants and a “comely young woman,” whom he passed off as his cousin. The ruse did not fool the colony’s suspicious magistrates. Isaac Allerton and William Peirce arrived with the news that, back in London, they had spoken with two women who both claimed to be Gardiner’s wife. The first wanted him back; the second wanted his ruin. The magistrates decided to send the alleged bigamist back to England, but Gardiner fled, got lost in the woods, and wandered into New Plymouth’s jurisdiction. William Bradford paid Natives to capture him. Once the prey was caught, Bradford obtained a “little notebook” that documented Gardiner’s conversion to Catholicism. He turned his prisoner and the notebook over to Winthrop. Meanwhile, the Bay Colony governor got his hands on a packet of Gardiner’s letters, which contained correspondence with Thomas Morton—the erstwhile “host” of Merry Mount—and Gorges. The Massachusetts magistrates now proceeded more gingerly, realizing that Gardiner could do them political harm. The errant knight went back to England of his own accord, where he joined forces with Gorges and Morton.18
At the end of April 1634, the Privy Council made Archbishop Laud head of the new Commission for Regulating Plantations. When the text of Laud’s commission crossed the Atlantic, Bradford filled two pages of his history with it. Laud and the commissioners could promulgate laws and constitutions governing colonial land, trade, and churches. Those who violated such laws hazarded their liberty and their lives. The commissioners could “displace the governors or rulers of those colonies” and appoint replacements. They could collect tithes to support Church of England ministers.19
At least on paper, the commission posed a severe threat to the religious and political liberties the Pilgrims had claimed at New Plymouth. If Laud and Gorges had their way, the Pilgrims would no longer be able to elect their own rulers and enact their own laws, as they had agreed to do in the Mayflower Compact. Laud in particular might extinguish their “liberty of the gospel,” the ability of covenanted church members to choose their officers and worship according to their understanding of the Bible.
Gorges and his allies had the archbishop’s ear and laid plans to have the king revoke the Massachusetts Bay charter. New Plymouth would have been a sideshow to the conflict. Its settlers were too small in number to disrupt Gorges’s grander plans for New England colonization, and Laud’s opprobrium centered on the ministers and colonists he had harried out of England himself. Still, when Edward Winslow turned up in London a few months after the creation of the new commission, he attracted the attention of the commissioners by petitioning them for a “special warrant” for New Plymouth and Massachusetts to defend themselves against the Dutch and the French. No one in England questioned the right of settlers to fight off incursions from rival powers. Winslow sought to use the Dutch and French threats to gain some sort of official sanction from the commission, a reflection of Plymouth’s political fragility. The Pilgrims still only had the patent from the Council for New England, now even less meaningful given the creation of the new commission. What Plymouth needed was a more secure patent or charter, preferably with the sort of direct royal approval the Bay Colony had obtained. Winslow’s petition was a misstep, however. There was no way William Laud was going to help Plymouth.20
For Gorges, though, Winslow’s petition was an opportunity. He stated that the Pilgrims had become alarmed when King Charles had learned of “their disaffections both to his Majesty’s government and the state ecclesiastical.” Fearing that English officials would punish their sedition, they had conspired with the Dutch. It was nonsense, but Gorges argued that it was “more than time these people [of New Plymouth] should be looked unto.”21
Laud was happy to look into the matter. Using information received from Thomas Morton, the archbishop asked Winslow a series of awkward questions. Was it true that Winslow had preached in church even though he was not a minister? Was it true that Winslow had married couples civilly, based on his authority as a magistrate? What was the nature of Plymouth’s church? What did the Pilgrims assert about England’s church?
Winslow had backed himself into a corner. He drafted an answer to Laud’s queries. He allowed that he had preached and contracted marriages but only because the Pilgrims had lacked a minister for so many years. Winslow did not add that New Plymouth magistrates continued to marry couples civilly even after they had procured a minister. He conceded that the Pilgrims had left England because they “disliked many things in practice here in respect of church ceremony,” but he stressed their unflinching loyalty to the king. Winslow denounced Morton and Gardiner as a “delinquent” and a “Jesuited [Catholic] gentleman,” respectively. Finally, he suggested if the commissioners stripped New Englanders of their “liberty of conscience” and “freedom of government,” it would only assist the Dutch and the French by weakening the English hold on the region.
By liberty of conscience, Winslow did not mean that individuals in New Plymouth exercised freedom of religion but that the Pilgrims had obtained tacit permission to worship and govern their church according to their principles. As for freedom of government, nothing in the Council for New England’s own charter empowered it to make such grants. For the Pilgrims, though, religious liberty and political self-government were inseparable. If the commission and the king sent a governor to New Plymouth, he would invariably “impose the same things upon us we went thither to avoid.” The end result would be a resumption of the persecution William Brewster and others had endured a quarter-century before.22
Laud had no objection to the renewed persecution of Brownists. The archbishop sent Winslow to the Fleet Prison, where the separatist martyrs Henry Barrow and John Greenwood had spent several years prior to their executions. After four months in the Fleet, Winslow—who had some well-connected friends—successfully petitioned for his release and returned to New England late in 1635.
Gorges moved ahead with his plans. The members of the Council for New England decided to resign their patent in order to enable the political reorganization of the region. In 1637, the Privy Council appointed Ferdinando Gorges general governor of New England. At the time of his political triumph, however, Gorges was bankrupt. He sent his cousin Thomas to New England as his deputy in 1640, but Thomas Gorges soon realized he was in no position to direct affairs there and returned home. The elder Gorges died in 1647, never having set foot on the lands that had captivated his imagination for nearly half a century. Sir Ferdinando obtained charters and drew lines on maps while traders, fishermen, and puritans settled New England and exploited its resources.
The Privy Council also ordered Bay Colony leaders to return their charter, threatening that a refusal to do so would lead the king to assume direct royal control of the colony. For several years, Massachusetts Bay had strengthened its defenses for precisely this eventuality, but neither the king nor his council forced the issue. By 1638, Charles, Laud, and their officials were distracted with a rebellion against their attempts to impose a version of the Book of Common Prayer on the Church of Scotland. New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay retained their governments, but the stage was set for future confrontations.
Shared apprehension about developments in England prompted the magistrates of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay to settle their differences about the Hocking case, but the two puritan colonies were rivals as much as allies. In 1635, events in both northern New England and on the Connecticut River brought Plymouth Colony’s newfound trading success to an abrupt end.
That August, the French returned to the Penobscot, this time intending to take more than its furs and goods. Thomas Willett, who had moved from Leiden to Plymouth around 1630, was in charge of the Pilgrim outpost. The French captain, Charles de Menou d’Aulnay, persuaded some of the Plymouth men to board his shallop and pilot him into the harbor. By his own account and Bradford’s, d’Aulnay with impeccable politeness told Willett and his men to take what they could carry with them and leave. Retreating to Boston, the Plymouth traders had the additional misfortune of losing the goods and their boat in a hurricane that pummeled the New England coast.
Plymouth made an attempt to recapture the outpost, but this was not an instance in which Myles Standish could recruit a few men, march in, behead someone, and declare victory. Instead, Standish went to Boston and hired a “ship of force” whose captain squandered his powder at a great distance from the outpost and apparently had no intention of engaging the enemy. Standish returned to Boston and begged its magistrates for assistance, but they had no desire to risk war with the French in order to defend a rival colony’s trade. Even worse, rumors soon reached Plymouth that English traders from Massachusetts Bay were doing business with the French usurpers.23
In an even bigger setback for the Pilgrim Undertakers, Massachusetts Bay traders outflanked them on the Connecticut River. John Winthrop had declined Plymouth’s July 1633 offer to form a joint Connecticut venture, but only because Bay Colony leaders wanted all of the expected profits for themselves. Later that summer, the Massachusetts leaders sent John Oldham on an overland trading expedition to the Connecticut River. Nearly a decade after his expulsion from Plymouth, Mad Jack had become a respectable citizen and church member in the Massachusetts Bay town of Watertown. Following Native paths, Oldham reached an area of the Connecticut River Valley well to the north of Plymouth’s fort at Matianuck. He brought back beaver pelts, hemp, and what Winthrop described as “black lead,” possibly graphite.24
In 1635, a group of Bay Colony traders settled on a portion of the land Plymouth’s traders had purchased two years earlier. Jonathan Brewster, son of Elder William Brewster, informed Plymouth’s leaders that “the Massachusetts men are coming almost daily.” The newcomers were unimpressed by Plymouth’s claim to have bought the land, arguing that it was “the Lord’s waste, and for the present altogether void of inhabitants.” Just as the Dutch had allowed William Holmes to sail past them, Plymouth’s men now grudgingly gave way. As at Penobscot, the Plymouth traders lacked the numbers and firepower they would have needed to defend their claim. In an agreement reached with the Massachusetts settlers, Plymouth retained only one-sixteenth of the land it had purchased. The usurpers provided compensation for the rest. “Thus was the controversy ended,” Bradford commented, “but the unkindness not so soon forgotten.” The Pilgrims had been “little better than thrust out” by their English rivals. The land around Matianuck became the English town of Windsor.25
More English settlers flooded into the region. In late 1635, John Winthrop’s namesake son sent parties to build a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut, named Saybrook for Lord Saye and Lord Brooke, who had obtained a patent for the entire region. The next spring, Thomas Hooker, a minister at Newtown (soon renamed Cambridge), led most of his congregation to Connecticut and founded what became Hartford.
The Pilgrims still maintained their Matianuck fort, but their bid to dominate the river’s fur trade had failed. In fact, Plymouth’s days as a regional trading power were over. The French had taken the Penobscot outpost, and the Pilgrims were now a marginal presence in Connecticut. The Undertakers also gave up on their Kennebec outpost and turned the trade over to the colony as a whole; Plymouth’s magistrates finally sold the claim in 1661. Since 1620, New Plymouth had been a colony, a congregation, and a trading venture. Because of the rapidly growing strength of the Bay Colony, that venture had failed.
The Dutch and English moves up the Connecticut River Valley destabilized the entire region. Relations between the Pequots and Narragansetts were particularly unsettled, as more communities that had paid tribute to Tatobem now switched their allegiance to the Narragansetts. In response to their growing isolation, the Pequots made some unsuccessful overtures toward the Bay Colony’s magistrates. Meanwhile, the devastation from the August 1635 hurricane left many English communities in both Connecticut and Massachusetts hungry and desperate.26
As relations between English settlers and the Pequots frayed, an English trader found John Oldham’s mutilated corpse off the northern tip of Block Island. Bradford identified Mad Jack’s gruesome death as “one ground of the Pequot War.” It was a strange catalyst, because the Niantics on Block Island were tributaries not of the Pequots but of the Narragansetts. At the same time, Massachusetts leaders belatedly decided to hold the Pequots responsible for the death of John Stone, a provocative trader killed in 1633 after he kidnapped two Indians and forced them to guide him up the Connecticut River.27
In August 1637, Bay Colony leaders sent John Endecott to move against both the Block Islanders and the Pequots. Endecott’s orders were to kill the Niantic men and take women and children captive, but the Niantics scattered when the English arrived. The Massachusetts men chopped down the island’s cornfields and proceeded to the second part of their mission. Joined by men from English settlements in Connecticut, Endecott sailed up the Pequot River (later renamed the Thames River). He demanded that Pequot sachems hand over those men responsible for Stone’s death and pay a thousand fathoms of wampum. Endecott also asked for some children as hostages to secure the Pequots’ good behavior. The Pequots hedged and stalled, and Massachusetts Bay soon had the war that its magistrates seem to have wanted.
Over the next year, groups of Pequots raided and besieged English settlements along the Connecticut, while Bay Colony leaders secured alliances with the Narragansetts and Mohegans in preparations for an offensive. In the spring of 1637, then Massachusetts Bay governor Henry Vane asked Plymouth to join in the fight. Still smarting from their setbacks in Maine and Connecticut, Plymouth’s magistrates hesitated. They sent Edward Winslow to Boston with a list of complaints—mostly about Plymouth’s loss of its Kennebec outpost—and demands. At the very least, Plymouth wanted what amounted to a mutual defense pact. Plymouth would help its Massachusetts counterparts if they promised to help Plymouth in a similar crisis.
John Winthrop, just voted back into office as the Bay Colony’s governor, sent a polite but firm response. He would not limit his people’s “liberty” and “freedom” to use their “reason” to assess any future Plymouth plea for assistance. He allowed that Massachusetts Bay could not “wholly excuse [its] failing” pertaining to Plymouth’s conflicts with the French, but he insisted that his government had not authorized any interference with Plymouth’s Kennebec trade. Winthrop also contended that all of the English had a shared Christian interest in the campaign’s success. If the Pequots succeeded, it would embolden them and other Native peoples to “the rooting out of the whole [English].” The Massachusetts governor warned Plymouth’s leaders that if they did not help now, they could not expect the Bay Colony’s assistance in the future. The Plymouth magistrates remained reluctant; Bradford was sure Winthrop was lying about the Kennebec trade. They planned to bring the possibility of joining the war before a general court scheduled for June 7, and the colony’s leaders did not see fit to call an earlier session.28
Before the court met, word came that English forces had slaughtered the inhabitants of a fortified Pequot village situated on a hill overlooking the Mystic River. Led by a much larger number of Native (mostly Mohegan) allies, ninety English soldiers had crept toward the village undetected, divided their forces, and pushed through the fort’s two gates at daybreak. Some of the awakened Pequots fought back fiercely, while others retreated into their homes. Frustrated by his men’s inability to engage their foes, Connecticut captain John Mason grabbed a firebrand and declared, “We must burn them.” Mason began setting wigwams ablaze. Other English soldiers followed his lead, and the village was soon in flames. The attackers shot or hewed down those who attempted to flee. Hundreds of men, women, and children died in what Mason termed “a fiery oven” and what Cotton Mather later likened to a barbecue of human flesh.29
The May 1637 attack on the Pequot fort on the Mystic River, from John Underhill’s Newes from America (1638). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.)
William Bradford had no qualms about the inferno. “It was a fearful sight,” he wrote in his history, “to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same.” The stench was “horrible” but redemptive. Alluding to the Bible’s description of burnt offerings as a “sweet savor,” Bradford implied that the “sacrifice” had pleased God, who had used the English as a tool to punish the Pequots.30
After the decisive massacre, Plymouth finally voted to assist the Bay Colony and the Connecticut settlers “in revenge of the innocent blood of the English.” Plymouth organized an expedition of thirty men led by William Holmes. Winslow informed Winthrop that Plymouth’s men would be ready sooner if Massachusetts helped outfit them. The Bay Colony agreed, but “when they were ready to march … they had word to stay; for the enemy was as good as vanquished.” Massachusetts Bay wanted the blessing of its neighbors, but it did not need their help.31
With the Pequots vanquished, the Narragansetts and Mohegans became southern New England’s most powerful Native peoples. The English, however, treated them as vassals and potential enemies. Much to the detriment of Dutch interests in the region, English migration led to the creation of the colonies of Connecticut, New Haven, and Saybrook, the latter of which merged with Connecticut in 1644.
The Pequot War introduced a practice central to any discussion of liberty in seventeenth-century New England: the enslavement of Natives.32 Motivated by a combination of vengeance and greed, English officers rounded up more than three hundred Pequots—mostly noncombatants—as the spoils of war. For example, militia captain Israel Stoughton sent about fifty Pequot women and children to Boston. He asked to have the “fairest and largest” woman for himself. Bay Colony magistrates distributed or sold the rest. When some Pequots taken to Boston escaped, Native allies of the English recaptured them. Massachusetts officials then branded the runaways on the shoulder. Some captives ended up thousands of miles from their homes. Ship captain William Peirce, the old friend of the Pilgrims, headed to Bermuda with fifteen Pequot boys and two women. When Peirce’s vessel sailed past Bermuda by mistake, he took his human cargo to Providence Island, where the governor referred to the Pequots as “cannibal Negroes from New England.”33
In 1569, the Star Chamber had declared that England possessed “too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” That was not quite true. Merchants and other Englishmen often retained African slaves as their property after keeping them in England for many years, and kidnapped Native men and women also breathed England’s air. Nevertheless, especially when criticizing rival powers such as Spain, Russia, or the Ottomans, the English prided themselves on the absence of slavery in England. At the same time, the English understood human bondage elsewhere as uncontroversial in large part because of its near universality. Whether they traveled to Russia or to Java, English explorers and merchants saw enslaved people. As they developed colonies in Virginia and the Caribbean, English planters did not hesitate to acquire African slaves.34
The Bible offered clear sanction for the enslavement of defeated peoples, as did a host of philosophers and legal theorists stretching from Aristotle to Grotius. In a just war, or at least in a properly declared war, it was permissible to enslave one’s opponents, which was at any rate more merciful than killing them. Accordingly, European powers enslaved prisoners during wartime. The Scottish minister John Knox, for example, ended up as a slave on a French galley for a year and a half. Even so, victors generally did not enslave noncombatants en masse at the conclusion of intra-European wars. The English regarded other peoples as more fit for servitude and slavery, however. In the wake of rebellions against its rule in Ireland, England shipped thousands of men, women, and children to its Caribbean and North American colonies. English settlers also deemed slavery a fitting punishment for Native peoples who fought against them. For instance, after the 1622 massacre in Virginia, settlers there called for reducing the Powhatan to slavery and transporting at least some Indian slaves to Bermuda. Settlers also understood the economic value of Native captives, both as laborers and as commodities who could be sold in the marketplace or exported to the Caribbean.35
None of the New England colonies had any laws about slavery at the time of the Pequot War. A few years later, the Bay Colony codified the enslavement of wartime captives. “There shall never be,” it declared, “any bond-slavery, villeinage and captivity amongst us; unless it be lawful captives, taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us.” According to the law, it was perfectly legal for colonists to enslave and then sell captives such as the Pequots. The language also suggested that settlers might buy and sell previously enslaved Africans. It was the first codification of slavery in any English colony in North America. New Plymouth did not pass any laws regulating the treatment of Native captives for several more decades, and although some Plymouth settlers acquired African slaves, the colony’s statutes remained silent on the matter.36
Both Roger Williams and the Native allies of the English objected to the enslavement of Pequot captives. The Algonquian peoples of southern New England frequently took captives in war, in part to replenish diminished populations. Captives usually performed menial sorts of labor, but they and especially their children assimilated into their new communities. Natives generally did not understand captives as commodities to be bought and sold. Williams advised Bay Colony leaders that “it would be very grateful to our neighbors, that such Pequots as fall to them be not enslaved … but (as they say is their general custom) be used kindly, have houses and goods and fields given them.” Williams agreed that it was lawful according to the Bible for a victor to deprive an enemy of wives and children, but he urged the Massachusetts magistrates not to subject Pequot captives to “perpetual slavery.” Would it not be better, he asked, to set them free after a period of service?37
Despite his criticisms, Williams himself found one captive irresistible. After a pinnace carrying a group of Pequots stopped at Providence, Williams asked Winthrop for “the keeping and bringing up of one of the children” and specifically requested the “little one with the red about his neck.” The boy’s mother and two of his siblings were also among the captives. Winthrop agreed, and Williams sent someone to fetch the boy. Did he see the boy as an adopted child? A servant? (A year later, Williams referred to a Native “servant” named Will.) An object for evangelism? Did Williams ask for the boy in order to spare him from export to the Caribbean? It is impossible to know. Because he sometimes criticized the way that other English colonists treated Indians, historians sometimes attribute benevolent intentions to Williams in the absence of evidence.38
A few Pequot captives ended up in New Plymouth. Nicholas Simpkins, formerly the captain of the Bay Colony’s Castle Island fort, brought his family and an Indian servant to the new Cape Cod town of Yarmouth after the war. Edward Winslow also obtained a servant named Hope, probably a Pequot War captive.
Captive Indians became “servants” of a different sort, with dimmer prospects for eventual freedom unless they escaped and without the legal protections afforded to English servants. Some Indian captives endured terrible mistreatment, as in the case of a woman who fled the household of Boston innkeeper Samuel Cole and sought refuge among the Narragansetts. After her recapture, she told Roger Williams that “she of all the Natives in Boston is used worst, is beaten with firesticks and especially by some of the servants.” According to Williams, a Boston official had “burned [branded]” her “because a fellow lay with her.” The woman reported that she had “refused” the man’s advances. In other words, she had been punished after a man had raped her.39
In 1640, a servant named John Hatch accused Yarmouth’s Nicholas Simpkins of “attempting to lie with an Indian woman,” likely the captive he had received after the war. Plymouth’s General Court dismissed the charge, but it fined Simpkins forty pounds for not having brought his “Indian maid servant” to court. Presumably the court wished to hear her testimony, though it remitted the fine when Simpkins explained that she “neither had shoes nor was in health to come.” What was the nature of their sexual relationship? And why did the court not order Simpkins to properly attire his servant (or slave—it is hard to know which word is most appropriate), as it might have done in the case of an English girl?40
In other cases, English masters educated and evangelized their Pequot captives. Several Pequots gained prominence as Native converts to Christianity and played key roles in the English missions that began in the 1640s. Some served as interpreters and carried messages between the communities of southern New England. Others escaped from their English masters and helped reconstitute Pequot communities.
What about Hope? As of 1647, he was a servant or slave of Edward Winslow. In the late 1630s, the Winslows had moved from Plymouth to what became the town of Marshfield, where they built Careswell, an estate on the site of a former Wampanoag village. It was a large household: the couple’s two children, Susanna’s two from her first marriage, and an unknown number of servants.
In January 1648, a ship’s captain named John Mainfort came to Boston to purchase “provision for the belly” for Barbadian planters. Because the profits in sugar were “infinite,” the planters preferred to obtain their food from New England or elsewhere and not waste their labor on its local production. While in Boston, Mainfort purchased Hope. John Winthrop handled the transaction by the “order and consent” of Susanna Winslow, whose husband was once more in England as an agent for Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. According to the agreement, Hope would serve Mainfort “according to the orders and customs of English servants in the same Island [Barbados], both for maintenance and other recompense, for and during the full term of ten years.” The language suggested that he would be treated like an unfortunate English or Irish servant sent to Barbados.41
Edward Winslow, 1651. (Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts.)
Edward Winslow did not own his English servants. He owned their labor for a set amount of time, and he was obliged to feed and clothe them. Winslow sometimes assigned their labor to other men, but unless one of them committed a serious crime, it would have been unthinkable for Winslow to sell the labor of his English servants to John Mainfort or a Barbadian planter. Yet for an unspecified amount of money (the bill of sale mentions only “good and valuable consideration”), the Winslows sold Hope.
The Winslows are among the best-documented individuals in seventeenth-century New England. Archives and museums preserve scores of Winslow letters, deeds, publications, and other objects. Hope, by contrast, appears in the historical record only at the moment of his sale from Susanna Winslow to Mainfort. When was he separated from his mother and siblings? Or were they dead as well? The bill of sale identifies him as a “man.” Had he been a boy at the time of the Pequot War? What sort of life did he have at Careswell? Did the English servants abuse him? Edward and Susanna Winslow knew what it meant to send a servant or slave to Barbados. Most men and women did not last ten years on the sugar plantations. Who decided to sell Hope, and why?
When he became Mainfort’s property, it was probably not the last time Hope was sold. Mainfort would have sold him to an English planter on Barbados. If Hope survived the ten years of his indenture, his master might have sold him again or have found a way to extend his service. Hope almost certainly died on Barbados.