IN 1664, KING CHARLES II sent four commissioners to North America on a twofold mission.1 The first task turned out to be easy. At a time of renewed tension with the Dutch, the king asked Richard Nicolls—one of the commissioners—to conquer New Netherland. Nicolls stopped in Boston, asked its wary magistrates to lend assistance, and then proceeded with three frigates and three hundred soldiers to New Amsterdam. After brief negotiations, Petrus Stuyvesant reluctantly surrendered. Nicolls became the colony’s first English governor, and he recruited Plymouth Colony’s Thomas Willett as New York City’s first mayor. The Dutch-fluent Willett was an ideal choice, as his many commercial visits to the city had earned him the trust and respect of its population.2
The second task was much harder. The commissioners were to assess conditions in the various New England colonies and make reports about their loyalty—or lack thereof—to the king. Charles was well aware that the puritan colonies had favored the cause of Parliament during the English Civil War, and the commissioners anticipated that Massachusetts Bay would resist measures designed to promote religious toleration and fidelity to the crown. They were right. The Massachusetts General Court had no intention of complying with requests to alter the colony’s laws or to declare annual days of thanksgiving celebrating the king’s restoration. The leaders of Connecticut and New Plymouth also feared interference with their established churches and governments. At the same time, they worried about attempts by Massachusetts Bay to encroach on their jurisdictions. Thus, the magistrates of the smaller colonies and the commissioners more readily established good relations and found common ground.
The commissioners chose New Plymouth as the recipient of their first official visit. It was a shrewd choice, as Plymouth Colony’s legal standing was more precarious than that of its neighbors. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island all had obtained new charters or royal confirmation of their charters shortly after the Restoration. By contrast, New Plymouth’s privileges of self-government and even the settlers’ property deeds rested on the flimsy basis of the patent William Bradford had obtained from the long-defunct Council for New England. Unlike their counterparts in other colonies, Plymouth’s settlers had not sent an agent to England in the early 1660s.
When commissioners George Cartwright and Robert Carr came to Plymouth in February 1665, the General Court gave them a respectful welcome. Cartwright and Carr delivered a letter from the king, who asked the colony’s leaders to require all householders to take the oath of allegiance; to accept men as freemen irrespective of religion; to grant all orthodox men and women free of scandal access to the sacraments, either by admitting them into established churches or by allowing them to form their own congregations; and to repeal any laws derogatory to the king. Plymouth’s leaders asked Cartwright to help them obtain a royal charter or at least a confirmation of their patent from the king. In accordance with private instructions from the crown, Cartwright responded that the king would look favorably upon their request if they agreed to permit the crown to appoint the colony’s governor. They could even suggest three names from which the king would choose. The commissioners hoped that if New Plymouth agreed to this arrangement, it would pressure the other colonies to accept it as well.3
Plymouth’s leaders professed their loyalty and politely told the visitors that the General Court would discuss the king’s requests. In May 1665, the court approved a cagey response. The magistrates observed that the colony’s oath of fidelity already included a profession of loyalty to the king, though that oath bore little resemblance to the much more exhaustive oath of allegiance. On the second point, the General Court promised to welcome as freemen all honest, orthodox men, fully aware that the colony had passed laws excluding Quakers from the franchise. The third point was the trickiest and required the most equivocation. The magistrates suggested that Christians of “different persuasions respecting church government” might establish their own congregations, provided they paid taxes to support the established ministers. It would be better, however, if dissenters went to Rhode Island. The magistrates also promised to repeal any laws repugnant to the king, though they hastened to add that they saw nothing wrong with the United Colonies confederation, which the commissioners understood as an expression of independence from England. With as much politeness as they could muster, New Plymouth’s leaders had rejected every single one of the king’s demands.4
The next month, the General Court discussed the idea of a royally appointed governor and voted that the “particulars be referred to future consideration.” It was the most tactful way to reject the king’s proposal. New Plymouth’s freemen and magistrates emphasized their obedience to the king, but they would not sacrifice the freedom to choose their own governor for a charter that might have further restricted their liberties. Cartwright was piqued, but New Plymouth faced no consequences for its resistance, in part because Massachusetts leaders were far more intransigent. Cartwright reported that the Bay Colonists sheltered regicides, persecuted religious dissenters, and flouted English laws, but he reassured the king of New Plymouth’s loyalty.5
The commissioners’ visit intersected with an important modification to New Plymouth’s religious establishment. In 1666, Richard Nicolls wrote Governor Thomas Prence to ask why the General Court had invalidated Rehoboth’s election of John Myles as the town’s preacher. During the Interregnum, Myles had formed a network of Baptist churches and conventicles centered around the south Wales town of Ilston, near Swansea. “Have we not seen with our eyes in many places of this land,” Myles rejoiced, “where Satan’s seat hath been for many ages together, that since the enjoyment of our precious liberty … many thousands are come to the profession of the Gospel.” That liberty came to an end with the Restoration. Myles had been a staunch supporter of Cromwell and an opponent of episcopacy. He was now ejected from his parish and wisely chose to leave England.6
After Myles, his wife and children, and some of his parishioners came to New England, he received an invitation to become an assistant minister in Rehoboth alongside the Harvard-educated Zechariah Symmes. The town had hired Symmes in 1663, probably on a probationary basis, as was customary prior to a ministerial call. Either because of ill health or because he did not prove satisfactory, the town granted Thomas Willett the privilege of finding an assistant for Symmes. Willett selected Myles, who arrived in late 1665 or early 1666, quickly gained a sizeable following, and stoked a conflict between supporters and opponents of infant baptism. (Back in 1649, Obadiah Holmes and a dozen other men and women in Rehoboth had separated from its Congregational church over the issue of infant baptism.) In the spring or summer of 1666, the colony’s magistrates blocked an attempt to replace Symmes with Myles. Willett asked Richard Nicolls to intervene on his friend’s behalf.7
Prence informed Nicolls that the vote for Myles had come from “a promiscuous [male and female] assembly of servants” who had voted for a stranger and against a man to whom the church and town had made prior promises. “Such a liberty to call ministers we conceive will hardly be found in old England or new,” Prence observed. Plymouth’s governor did not question Myles’s theological orthodoxy, but he argued that Myles was unsuitable as a town minister. As both Prence and Nicolls knew, English ministers and officials often criticized New England’s churches for their stringent membership standards and for leaving most children unbaptized. How then could Nicolls sympathize with Myles, who would not baptize any children at all? Nicolls did not pursue the matter further.8
The next year, Plymouth’s General Court fined Myles, his Welsh congregant Nicholas Tanner, and James Browne for organizing their own religious meetings in Rehoboth. Browne, whose father had supported religious toleration in the 1640s and 1650s, was twice elected as an assistant to the governor “but not sworn,” probably because of his support for Myles. At this point, however, Plymouth’s leaders proposed a creative solution. With the support of Willett, who controlled large amounts of land in the western portion of the colony, the court invited the Rehoboth Baptists to organize their own town. They accepted the offer, moved south, and established the town and church of Swansea. In 1668, the church proclaimed a day of thanksgiving “to return praise to our god for preserving our liberties.” New Plymouth now had a string of town-supported Congregational churches, a single town-supported Baptist church, and several unauthorized Quaker meetings.9
Aside from its rejection of infant baptism, Swansea’s church closely resembled the colony’s Congregational churches. In his understanding of liberty of conscience, John Myles echoed William Bradford and Edward Winslow rather than Thomas Helwys and Roger Williams. The new town’s settlers informed Willett that they would bar anyone from their township who denied the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, or the authority of the Bible. Individuals who favored transubstantiation (or consubstantiation) or “any merit of works” were also unwelcome. Some of the above provisions targeted Quakers, but to make themselves abundantly clear, Swansea’s settlers added that they didn’t want anyone in the new town who would not remove his hat in the presence of a magistrate or who opposed using public money to pay the minister.10
By the time that New Plymouth’s General Court established Swansea and its Baptist church, Nicolls, Cartwright, and Carr were back in England, and the king’s interest in his New England colonies had waned. Plymouth had not tried very hard to obtain a royal charter and still had no legal basis for its government outside of the Bradford patent. At the same time, the colony’s magistrates—helped by the surly behavior of Massachusetts officials—had rather deftly convinced the commissioners of their loyalty. They subjected themselves to the king with their words, but not with their actions.
While New Plymouth’s magistrates bristled against the prospect of greater royal control, they expected Wampanoag communities within their patent to act like subject peoples. This expectation strained and eventually broke the alliance that the Pilgrims had formed with Ousamequin. While some Wampanoags created new bonds with the English through their acceptance of Christianity, the Pokanokets and other western Wampanoag communities resisted both the English religion and English claims to political supremacy.
The Pokanoket sachems now made Montaup (Mount Hope) their chief place of habitation. A fertile peninsula to the south of Sowams, Mount Hope was relatively sheltered from the problems that accompanied the growth of English settlements across the region, such as the trampling of Native crops by English pigs, cattle, and horses. After Ousamequin’s 1660 death, his sons Wamsutta and Metacom reaffirmed their friendship with Plymouth and adopted the English names of Alexander and Philip, respectively.11
Wamsutta, however, soon alarmed Plymouth’s leaders by selling an enormous tract of land to a Rhode Island settler named Peter Tallman. The deed included all of Sakonnet and a portion of Pocasset, whose sachem, Weetamoo, was Wamsutta’s wife. The land in question fell within both Plymouth’s patent and Rhode Island’s charter. Pocasset and Sakonnet, meanwhile, were home to large Wampanoag communities. While they acknowledged Pokanoket leadership, the Pocasset and Sakonnet sachems did not think that Wamsutta could dispose of their land.12
Plymouth’s magistrates were not upset that Wamsutta had sold the land, only that he had sold it to Tallman. For decades, Plymouth’s leaders had harbored their own designs on Sakonnet. In 1639, the colony’s General Court had allowed the “purchasers, or old comers”—William Bradford, Edward Winslow, and John Alden, among others—to choose three large tracts of land. Making their selections, the old comers reserved the area around Sowams and Mount Hope for the Indians as their “chief habitation.” For themselves, they selected a sizeable portion of Cape Cod and a large parcel of land that included part of Sakonnet. For two decades, the latter claim was merely aspirational, but in 1661 the General Court stated that servants who had obtained their freedom could acquire land in Sakonnet.13
When it learned about Tallman’s deed, New Plymouth’s General Court instructed Thomas Willett to intervene on Weetamoo’s behalf, asking him to confront Wamsutta and Tallman. Willett either could not find Wamsutta or could not get a satisfactory explanation from him. Then in June, Weetamoo and a Sakonnet sachem named Tatacomuncah traveled to Plymouth to lodge further complaints. The magistrates promised to do their best to void the deed.14
Within weeks of Weetamoo and Tatacomuncah’s visit, Wamsutta died after his own trip to meet with the colony’s leaders. According to two later accounts, the magistrates had deputized Josiah Winslow to bring Wamsutta before them and to use force if necessary. Massachusetts Bay minister William Hubbard related that Winslow’s party surprised Wamsutta and his men after the Pokanokets had returned from a hunting expedition. After ordering his soldiers to seize their guns, Winslow informed the sachem “that if he stirred or refused to go he was a dead man.” Increase Mather, another Bay Colony clergyman, added that after Wamsutta flew into a “raging passion” at Plymouth’s presumptuousness, Winslow pointed his pistol at his breast and demanded a polite and positive answer. For their part, Plymouth’s leaders insisted that Wamsutta’s visit had required no coercion. Regardless of how Winslow fetched him, Wamsutta fell ill while meeting with the magistrates. The sachem died, either after he returned home or on the way. Philip (Metacom) later claimed that his brother “came miserably to die by being forced to court, as they judge poisoned.”15
The accounts of Wamsutta’s death leave unresolved questions. Why had Plymouth summoned the sachem? Both Hubbard and Mather stated that Plymouth’s leaders had learned of a conspiracy between the Pokanokets and the Narragansetts. No contemporary records support this claim. The issue at hand was Wamsutta’s “estranging land, and not selling it to our colony.” Plymouth’s magistrates regarded the Tallman deed as an economic and political threat. Did they resort to murder in response? Probably not. In all likelihood, the colony’s leaders would have tried other means of making Wamsutta and Tallman more pliable.16
Philip now became sachem and immediately received his own summons to Plymouth. After denying his complicity in a plot against the English, he renewed his father’s alliance, declared that he would “forever ever remain subject to the King of England,” promised not to sell or give any of his lands to “strangers” such as Peter Tallman, and returned home. Several years later, despite a flurry of petitions from Rhode Islanders, the royal commissioners left Sakonnet, Pocasset, and Mount Hope within New Plymouth’s jurisdiction. The commissioners also met with Philip and resolved a land dispute between the Pokanoket sachem and the Narragansetts in Philip’s favor.17
Although Philip still perceived benefits from his alliance with the English, the growth of Plymouth’s settlements posed a serious threat to his leadership. Ousamequin’s treaty with the Pilgrims had ended his subordination to the Narragansetts and strengthened the loose authority he exercised over southeastern New England’s Wampanoag communities. Other sachems paid tribute to him, and he in turn sent gifts and promised to protect those communities from attack. Now this political order broke down. More distant Wampanoag communities became detached from the Pokanoket sphere of influence. Ousamequin and his successors stopped sending gifts, and the other sachems stopped sending tribute. The Pokanoket sachems sold distant lands—from Martha’s Vineyard to Dedham in Massachusetts Bay—to the English, sometimes without the consent of the Indians who actually lived on the land. By the 1660s, Philip retained influence over Pocasset and Sakonnet, and over Nemasket, whose sachem Tuspaquin (known to the English as the “Black Sachem”) had married one of Ousamequin’s daughters. The Wampanoag communities on the Cape and the islands, however, declared themselves the subjects of new earthly and heavenly masters.18
For the Mayflower passengers and other early English settlers in New Plymouth, Indian missions were not a priority. At first, the Pilgrims just tried to survive. At most, they hoped that the Indians would admire English ways and take a corresponding interest in their God.
Such hopes proved groundless. In Massachusetts Bay, the minister John Eliot explained that English settlers could get rid of unwanted Indian visitors by turning the conversation to spiritual matters. “Speak of religion,” Eliot explained, “and you were presently rid of them.” Christianity so repelled the Indians that they fled from any discussion of God and Jesus, heaven and hell, or sin and salvation. What Eliot observed of other Algonquian peoples was also true of the Wampanoags. They were not enamored of the English or their God. Ousamequin once inquired “what earthly good things” came with Christianity. He could not see any value in “the ways of God.” Wampanoags had inherited their cosmology and rituals from their ancestors, and few if any of them contemplated adopting English practices, let alone jettisoning their own.19
Despite these substantial barriers to conversion, large numbers of Wampanoags eventually embraced Christianity. This development began not within Plymouth Colony, but on the islands to its south. In 1641, Massachusetts Bay settler Thomas Mayhew purchased a patent to Martha’s Vineyard, along with Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands. Mayhew governed the islands as a proprietary colony, and his namesake son became a missionary to its large Wampanoag communities.
Epidemics followed the arrival of the Mayhews, and about half of the island’s Native population perished. During these years of death, a man named Hiacoomes befriended the younger Thomas Mayhew. Hiacoomes taught Mayhew how to speak Wampanoag, and Mayhew taught Hiacoomes how to read English. Hiacoomes soon converted and began preaching Christianity. At first, his evangelistic efforts produced only scorn. “Here comes the Englishman,” his neighbors said when Hiacoomes entered their presence. Some did more than mock. After reproaching Hiacoomes for his fellowship with the English, one sachem hit him in the face.20
Hiacoomes persisted, and soon his detractors stopped laughing. Nothing the powahs did arrested the epidemics, which happened to spare Hiacoomes. The many deaths called into question the powahs’ authority, whereas Hiacoomes rose in status. For the next four decades, Hiacoomes preached on Martha’s Vineyard, on neighboring islands, and on the mainland. In 1651, he made a celebrity visit to the Bay Colony and was welcomed into the pews of Boston’s First Church. The younger Thomas Mayhew perished at sea in 1657, but the preaching of Hiacoomes and others made steady inroads. Although some sachems on the Vineyard opposed Christianity, by the 1670s the majority of families on the island attended Christian meetings.21
Under very different circumstances, large numbers of Massachusett families also aligned themselves with Christianity. John Eliot began preaching to several Native communities and gathered converts into a number of “praying towns.” Eliot oversaw the translation of the Christian scriptures into what scholars have called Natick, Massachusett, or—more recently—Wôpanâak. These efforts resulted in the 1663 publication of the first complete Bible printed in the New World. The praying towns and the Bible gained Eliot renown as “the apostle of the American Indians.”22
More than the Mayhews, Eliot demanded that residents of the towns adopt “civility” alongside Christianity. Eliot’s code fined women who did not cover their breasts, men who did not cut their hair, and men or women who killed lice with their teeth. It also required men to work in their fields—instead of leaving agriculture to their wives—and attempted to bring Massachusett sexuality in line with biblical teachings and English law. While few of the families who moved to Eliot’s towns desired these elements of English civilization, the Massachusetts had been even more devastated by epidemics and warfare than the Natives on Martha’s Vineyard. The relentless expansion of English settlements in the Bay Colony, with the corresponding loss of traditional means of subsistence, left Massachusett communities with few good options and facilitated the development of the praying towns.23
As English ministers and Native preachers traveled between Massachusetts Bay and Martha’s Vineyard, they evangelized Wampanoags in Plymouth Colony. By 1651, a group of Indians came every week to be taught by William Leverich, then minister at Sandwich. After Leverich left for Long Island, the Sandwich settler Richard Bourne continued the work. Bourne preached at Mashpee (about seven miles south of Sandwich) and traveled to other Wampanoag communities on Cape Cod. He provided support to a network of Wampanoag preachers, who served as evangelists to their own people. One convert, Wuttinnaumatuk, testified that when he had heard John Eliot preach, he “liked not to hear him.” When Wuttinnaumatuk “came among the praying Indians,” however, he too wanted to pray.24
In 1666, Bourne wrote that at Mashpee “and other places near adjoining they are generally praying Indians.” Bourne concluded that it was time for the Mashpee Christians to form a church. New Plymouth’s magistrates and ministers traveled to Mashpee for the occasion, joined by John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew. The prospective Wampanoag members described how God had wrought a change in their hearts. Paumpmunet explained that he began praying after the deaths of his wife and child. Quoting an array of biblical passages, Paumpmunet affirmed his belief that Christ’s death granted life to those who believed in him. “I am become a new creature,” he related, “having new understanding, new will, new faith, new hope, new joy, new memory.” In his allusion to the fifth chapter of Second Corinthians, Paumpmunet implied that old things had passed away. Pachumu, also known as Hope, recalled the elders of his people warning him as a boy that if he did evil, he “should go to the house of Mattanit.” Eliot translated Mattanit as “The Devil.” As he became older and listened to Christian preaching, Pachumu concluded that he “was under Satan’s power and not able to look after God.” Reading the Bible and hearing sermons convinced him that Jesus Christ would liberate him from his bondage to sin and grant him eternal life. For unknown reasons, the formation of the Mashpee church did not proceed until 1670, at which time its members ordained Bourne as their minister. By then, large numbers of Cape Cod Wampanoags attended Christian meetings.25
Elsewhere in the colony, Christianity gained ground after John Cotton became the town of Plymouth’s minister. The namesake son of Boston’s renowned minister was a risky choice, as scandal had cost Cotton his first ministerial position. After Cotton graduated from Harvard, the church in Wethersfield, Connecticut, employed him on a probationary basis. Cotton’s behavior demonstrated the prudence of this procedure. The young minister allegedly talked his way into one woman’s “chamber” by pretending an interest in her furniture. Another woman accused Cotton of “sinful striving.” He defended himself by asserting that she had pursued him much as Potiphar’s wife had pursued Joseph. In March 1662, a court-appointed committee of two magistrates and two ministers found insufficient evidence that Cotton had committed a “more gross act” but criticized his “sinful, rash, unpeaceable expressions.” John Davenport, New Haven’s longtime minister and a close friend of John Cotton Sr., wrote the younger Cotton to tell him how poorly he measured up to his father.26
Boston’s First Church, to which Cotton still belonged, was unambiguous in its judgment. In 1664, the church excommunicated its once-promising member for “lascivious unclean practices with three women and his horrid lying to hide his sin.” Cotton consulted with Increase Mather, the church’s pastor and his brother-in-law. Mather was “troubled.” He wanted to support his relation but did not think he could in good conscience excuse his “carriage and demeanor.” Mather likely urged Cotton to make a full public confession, which he did the next day. The social fabric of New England churches and communities rested not on perfect righteousness, but on the willingness of individuals to confess and repent when they transgressed. The church promptly restored its prodigal son to full membership.27
Attempting to salvage his career, Cotton accepted a post on Martha’s Vineyard. Cotton preached to the island’s small number of English settlers and learned enough Wampanoag to begin preaching to its Native communities. Cotton’s wife, Joanna, also received a stipend from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (or New England Company) for providing medical care to the Indians. The older, autocratic Thomas Mayhew and the young, impulsive Cotton were a poor match, however. The commissioners of the United Colonies soon summoned Cotton to a meeting, where they lamented that “mutual contentions and invectives one against another … undid what they taught to the Natives.” They told Cotton that they did not have enough money to keep paying him. He should find somewhere else to go. The town of Plymouth, without a minister since John Reyner’s departure in 1654, became Cotton’s next stop. Cotton moved there in 1667, managed to avoid contention for two years, and was installed as the church’s minister. In addition to raising a large family, Joanna Cotton worked as a midwife and healer.28
By the time John Cotton arrived in Plymouth, the town’s congregation faced a challenge common across New England in the mid- to late seventeenth century. Only church members could partake of the Lord’s Supper and present their children for baptism. Baptized children did not automatically become full-fledged members of a congregation when they reached a certain age. Instead, they had to meet the same high requirements for membership as any other prospective members. In Plymouth, individuals had to testify to their experience of spiritual regeneration. The church’s practice was for men “orally to make confession of faith and a declaration of their experiences of a work of grace” before the whole congregation. When women presented themselves as prospective members, they dictated statements then read aloud by the minister or elder. The problem was that many baptized children who came of age did not take this step. Instead, they remained “children of the church,” within its covenant and subject to its discipline but excluded from the sacraments. Most glaringly, these men and women could not present their own children for baptism.29
In 1662, a synod of Massachusetts Bay ministers had recommended that churches extend baptismal privileges to the grandchildren of members. This solution, called “large Congregationalism” at the time, later became known by the pejorative term “halfway covenant.” The proposal sparked a long-lasting debate within New England’s Congregational churches, as many laypeople and some ministers maintained that the change imperiled the purity of the churches and was a step back toward the mixed multitude of the Church of England. John Cotton supported the accommodation, but his Plymouth congregation did not. Within the colony, only the church at Yarmouth adopted the practice.30
Especially because of his church’s stance on baptism, Cotton worked hard to bring adult children to full membership. He and Thomas Cushman, the church’s ruling elder, went “through the whole town from family to family to enquire into the state of their souls.” In response, twenty-seven men and women were admitted as members during Cotton’s first year. Cotton did not want overly strict requirements to discourage individuals from advancing to church membership. In his preaching, he regularly emphasized that God brought women and men to salvation through the ordinances of the church, namely, preaching and the sacraments.31
In the fall of 1670, Cotton began preaching to Wampanoags who lived at Manomet, southeast of the town of Plymouth. Within weeks, Cotton recorded the conversions of two men, Occanootus and Wanna. “Occanootus,” Cotton wrote in his diary, “did covenant and promise to walk in God’s ways and to hate sin and to be a praying man.” As had been the case on Martha’s Vineyard, Native converts became the most effective apostles to their own people. Cotton noted that Wanna “exhorted the Indians to open their eyes and ears and hearts to hear and receive what was to be taught them.” The next year, a self-satisfied Cotton reported that although “there was not one praying Indian when I began with them,” there were now thirty. He was also pleased that the New England Company found the money to restore his annual stipend for missionary work.32
In Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard, and in Plymouth Colony, sachems, families, and individuals aligned themselves with Christianity for a wide variety of reasons. Economic and political motives nudged Natives toward conversion, and the prospect of a salary from benefactors in England no doubt prompted some Indians—and settlers—to undertake missionary work. Furthermore, many praying Indians blended old and new ways, and some moved back and forth between praying towns and prior communities. Still, even though reasons for conversion were complex, contemporary accounts stress religious conviction and spiritual power. Many Native Christians displayed a keen familiarity with the Bible, relished the communal singing of psalms, and asked theologically astute questions of English ministers. While many Wampanoag Christians formed congregations modeled on those of Plymouth Colony, others embraced the ideas of Baptists and Quakers. Regardless of which strain of Protestantism they adopted, Wampanoags made it their own.33
Conversions to Christianity reshaped Wampanoag communities. Those who became praying Indians rejected the spiritual authority of powahs and, in some cases, the political and economic authority of sachems. Even if they privately maintained older loyalties, they publicly aligned themselves with the English and their God. Missionaries such as Eliot, Mayhew, and Bourne, meanwhile, promised to help Indians retain at least some of their lands.
While the Cape Cod Wampanoags increasingly accepted Christianity, the western sachems—Philip, Tuspaquin, Weetamoo, and leaders at Sakonnet—were hostile or indifferent to the missionaries and their gospel. John Eliot had tried and failed to convert Ousamequin, and he fantasized for years about converting Philip. In 1664, Eliot asked the United Colonies to provide a stipend for John Sassamon, “who teacheth Phillip and his men to read.” Born in eastern Massachusetts, Sassamon was orphaned and indentured to an English settler, fought for the English in the Pequot War, became a schoolmaster in the praying town of Natick, and studied at Harvard College. Sassamon was one of several Native Christians whose skills enabled the publication of Eliot’s Bible. Then, in the early 1660s, Sassamon left Eliot’s employ and worked for Wamsutta and then Philip. Eliot understood Sassamon as “a means to put life into the work” of converting Philip, and Eliot cheerfully reported that Philip had requested “books to learn to read, in order to [begin] praying unto God.” Although the books were sent, Philip did not start praying. The Pokanoket sachem would not submit to the English god.34
At the same time, Plymouth’s magistrates became more forceful in their insistence that Philip was their subject. In 1667, they summoned Philip to Plymouth to answer charges that he was conspiring with the Dutch or the French in order to recover lands he had sold. Philip rejected the charges, arguing—not unreasonably—that the Narragansett sachem Ninigret had spread the rumors precisely to cause him trouble. He insisted to the colony’s magistrates that he remained grateful that Plymouth had preserved his people from the Narragansetts. Plymouth’s magistrates concluded that although Philip’s “tongue had been running out,” there was no evidence of a conspiracy. They fined him forty pounds but offered to remit it if he could prove Ninigret’s responsibility for the rumor. Philip resented the presumption of Plymouth’s leaders and their pretensions to superiority over him.35
In 1671, more rumors of war very nearly led to an actual war. That February, Hugh Cole went from Swansea to a small neck of land along the Taunton River, which flows past Mount Hope and into Narragansett Bay. Plymouth’s magistrates had tasked Cole with bringing a group of Wampanoags to answer an allegation—the specifics are unknown—brought by another colonist. The Wampanoags in question refused to go with Cole. Philip then sent a message requesting that Cole pay him a visit. When Cole reached Mount Hope, he saw “many Indians of several places” busy making and repairing weapons. Shortly thereafter, Cole heard reports that Philip had marched toward Swansea with sixty men. Cole delivered his alarming news at New Plymouth’s early March General Court.36
Plymouth’s magistrates imagined the worst. Militia commander Josiah Winslow—Edward Winslow’s son—relayed to Governor Prence the highly improbable information that Philip intended to send two hundred men to kidnap them and hold them for ransom. Another magistrate, Barnstable’s Thomas Hinckley, reported rumors that the Narragansetts planned to “kill the men first and then flay the women alive.” If outlying English settlers did not flee, the Indians “would slay them as they do cattle.” Prence agreed to meet Philip at Taunton, roughly halfway between Plymouth and Mount Hope. Hinckley warned the governor that it was not safe for him to travel across the interior of the colony. Philip worried about his safety as well, but the Pokanoket sachem, Plymouth’s governor, and representatives from Massachusetts Bay all came to Taunton on April 12.37
At the conference, Philip affixed his mark to a document in which he confessed that he had broken his covenant with the English “by taking up arms with evil intent.” The sachem agreed to surrender all of his guns and to assist Massachusetts Bay by turning over several men who were suspects in a murder case within that colony’s jurisdiction. The precise language was as important as the terms, however. Philip agreed that the Pokanoket sachems had submitted themselves and their people “unto the king’s majesty of England, and to this colony of New Plymouth.” At least according to Pilgrim accounts, Ousamequin had declared himself “King James his man,” a subject of the distant English monarch. As fellow subjects of English kings, the Pokanoket sachems had seen themselves as equal allies of Plymouth’s magistrates. The Pilgrims and their successors, by contrast, saw themselves as the superior party in the alliance and now forced Philip to acknowledge—at least on paper—that he was their subject.38
At first it seemed that the Taunton conference had averted war. Some of Philip’s men went to Boston and assisted its magistrates with the murder investigation, and the sachem turned over some of his people’s guns. Plymouth and Massachusetts declared a day of thanksgiving on May 12, and Prence thanked God and Bay Colony governor Richard Bellingham for their roles in preserving peace. In coming together at Taunton, Prence wrote, they had thwarted “Satan’s design … to sow discord between brethren.” God had not only inclined “the barbarous Indians to peace” but had sweetened the “brotherly love” between the two English colonies.39
By the end of the month, Prence was no longer thankful. The governor and his assistants received renewed reports of armed gatherings at Mount Hope. It is quite possible that Plymouth’s belligerency at the Taunton conference convinced Philip that he had no choice but to prepare for war. When Plymouth’s magistrates heard that Philip had broken the agreement they had imposed on him, they reached the same conclusion.
Plymouth’s leaders took steps designed to isolate Philip. They demanded professions of fidelity and submission from Native communities throughout the colony. In June 1671, Wampanoag men from the Cape put their marks to a document in which they conceded that they had lived “as captives under Satan” and in bondage to their “sachems.” In casting off their old bonds, they accepted new forms of subjection. They promised to inform the colony’s magistrates of any Indian “plot or design contrived against the English.” If war came, they would fight on the side of the English even if it cost them their lives. After all, according to the Book of Acts, they and the English were “of one blood.”40
The next month, other Indians who had aligned themselves with Christianity declared their fidelity. Among them was Hope (also known as Pachumu), who had testified publicly about his faith at Mashpee in 1666. From Manomet came Wanna, whose conversion John Cotton had documented in his journal. Hope, Wanna, and another six men submitted themselves to New Plymouth’s government, explaining that their desire for peace stemmed from their acceptance of “the gospel of Christ.” Like the Cape Cod Wampanoags, they promised to fight any Indians who rose up against New Plymouth’s government. In turn, they asked the settlers to protect them should “evil persons” persecute them for “seeking after the knowledge of the true God and his ways.”41
The western Wampanoag communities, which had not embraced Christianity, refused to submit. Aside from Philip, Plymouth’s leaders worried most about the threat posed by communities at Sakonnet. Sometime shortly before 1671, Awashonks had become what the English called the “squaw-sachem” of Sakonnet. The English sometimes called her a “sachem’s wife,” but she wielded authority in her own right.42
Beginning with the 1671 crisis, Awashonks proved a tenacious advocate for her people. That tenacity came from watching the changes in the lands that surrounded Sakonnet. When Awashonks was younger, the English whom Massasoit had befriended were confined to small coastal communities many miles to the east. They did not hazard the paths that led to Sakonnet, and they rarely ventured so far by sea. This was no longer the case. As the English moved closer to Sakonnet, game became scarce, English cattle trampled crops, and settlers began traversing paths on horseback. If Awashonks looked from Sakonnet across the water to the west, she could see the English on Rhode Island. Those settlers eyed Sakonnet, and they also desired Pocasset and Mount Hope. The Plymouth English to her east had formed a town they called Dartmouth. Awashonks knew that the Plymouth settlers and the Rhode Islanders were sometimes rivals, but she also knew that they both envisioned a future in which they planted crops and raised cattle on her people’s land.43
In late May, Governor Prence informed Rhode Island officials that back in March, he had received a letter from Awashonks professing “subjection to the king’s majesty and his authority here in this his colony.” However, Prence continued, Plymouth had since learned that men from Sakonnet continued to plot “mischief” and had appeared in arms at Taunton. The governor had invited Awashonks and other Sakonnet sachems to Plymouth to effect peace, but they had refused to come. Prence concluded that “they give us to understand they are not for peace with us, but war as occasion and opportunity may present.”44
Plymouth’s bellicosity prompted Awashonks to seek new allies. In April, she sold “a small piece of land” to Peleg Sanford of Rhode Island. The Sakonnet sachem intended to use the Rhode Island settlers to check what she understood as Plymouth’s aggression. Given Plymouth’s vigorous response to Wamsutta’s deed back in 1662, Awashonks’s sale probably alarmed the colony’s magistrates.45
After Awashonks ignored repeated summonses, Plymouth’s council of war sent two messengers to Sakonnet in July. They told Awashonks and other Sakonnet leaders that they had four days to surrender their weapons. Furthermore, they were required to come to Plymouth, acknowledge their offense against the colony, and pledge their future fidelity. Expecting its demands to be refused, Plymouth prepared to send Josiah Winslow, one hundred English soldiers, and forty “of our trustiest Indians” to Sakonnet. The magistrates appointed August 9 as a day of humiliation. Citizens should gather in their churches, crave God’s forgiveness of their sins, and ask the Lord’s blessing on the expedition.46
Awashonks hesitated. She did not trust the English, but she was not ready to fight them either, especially given Philip’s own uncertain intentions. In late July, she came to Plymouth and acceded to the council’s demands. The colony’s leaders imposed a stiff fine because of her delayed capitulation. She agreed to pay fifty pounds to compensate the colony for its military preparations. Awashonks also “submitted the disposal of her lands to the authority of this government,” ostensibly to “regulate such as will not be governed by her.” The agreement promised to protect Awashonks should others at Sakonnet attempt to sell land or stir up trouble against the English. At the same time, it gave Plymouth’s magistrates power over land they had long coveted. If Awashonks could not pay the fifty pounds, they might sell her land to cover the fine.47
Plymouth’s magistrates canceled the planned expedition, but they remained wary about Awashonks’s compliance. Word soon reached them that Philip had “lately entertained divers of the Sakonnet Indians that were and are our professed enemies, and will accept of no tenders of peace.” In response, Plymouth’s leaders rescheduled the day of humiliation for August 16 and told Winslow to prepare his troops again. The additional pressure caused another forty individuals from Sakonnet to subscribe their submission. Once again, Plymouth’s governor called off the expedition. Later in the fall, Prence pressed Awashonks to secure the submissions of her brother and two sons.48
After imposing terms on the Sakonnet communities, Plymouth turned its attention back to Philip. “God calls us by force to endeavor their reducement,” Prence wrote his Rhode Island counterpart, informing him that Plymouth intended to send soldiers to Mount Hope. In late August, Plymouth’s council of war ordered Philip to appear in Plymouth on September 13 to answer the charges against him. James Browne, who carried the council’s letter, found Philip and his “chief men … much in drink.” Just as Quakers had offended Thomas Prence in the late 1650s, Philip took umbrage because Browne did not remove his hat. The sachem knocked it off Browne’s head. The next day, Browne brought Roger Williams as his interlocutor. Philip refused to come to Plymouth. Instead, he planned to go to Boston, where John Eliot had invited him.49
Eliot had been intervening on Philip’s behalf for some time. Back in June, he had encouraged Prence to return Philip’s guns, believing that a gesture of goodwill might induce the Pokanoket sachem to finally embrace the Christian gospel. Then in August, Eliot sent emissaries to both Philip and Prence. The delegation consisted of John Sassamon and two members of the Natick church, William Nahauton and a man named Anthony. Eliot urged Philip to accept peace as mediated by the magistrates of Massachusetts, and he cautioned Prence that Jesus Christ, their “great peacemaker in heaven,” would disapprove of Plymouth’s preparations for war. Furthermore, he asked Prence “to consider what comfort it will be to kill or be killed when no capital sin hath been committed.” In other words, rumors of war were not grounds for war.50
Philip had never liked the missionary minister, but the idea that Massachusetts Bay wanted to stop the rush to war made a visit to Boston far more attractive than a summons to Plymouth. Indeed, Bay Colony leaders proved receptive to Philip’s stance. “We do not understand how far he hath subjected himself to you,” Bay Colony secretary Edward Rawson wrote Prence. Philip’s refusal to answer a summons did not justify war, so Massachusetts leaders would not join Plymouth’s planned expedition to Mount Hope. “We do not think it is for the common and public interest,” Rawson stated, “to put ourselves or be put into blood but upon an unavoidable necessity.” He rejected the idea that the Bay Colony’s past commitment to the United Colonies bound Massachusetts to support Plymouth in this instance.51
The Bay Colony’s stance probably had more to do with an ongoing dispute among the puritan colonies than with any matter of principle. The previous year, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Plymouth had begun negotiations to revive the United Colonies confederation. Formed in 1643 during a time of tension with the Narragansetts, the confederation had fallen into a state of dormancy. Plymouth had considered it a breach of the confederation’s articles when Connecticut had absorbed New Haven in 1664. In September 1670, commissioners from the three colonies had agreed to new articles of confederation, but the respective general courts had not ratified them. The point of contention was the proportional contributions of soldiers and funds that each colony would make in the event of war. Plymouth declared itself “very sensible that we are greatly oppressed by the proportion at first settled” and recommended that each colony bring a count of its adult male population to a planned September meeting. Massachusetts, for its part, was willing to contribute more men but wanted its charges reduced, and its leaders refused to attend a meeting until the issue was resolved. The possibility of war against Philip made the negotiations more tense. Massachusetts governor John Leverett recognized that Plymouth “might be the first that may see or feel the inconvenience” if they failed to reach an agreement. Prence, for his part, suggested that some were “slow to tie the knot again before the storm is blown over.” Still, although Leverett urged Prence to avoid war, he reassured Plymouth’s governor that “if trouble come the English interest is but one.”52
Buoyed by his trip to Boston, Philip agreed to a September 24 meeting in Plymouth with representatives of the three colonies. To Philip’s surprise and disappointment, Massachusetts Bay now backed Plymouth’s demands. Either the confederation’s new terms had been ironed out, or Plymouth had convinced Massachusetts leaders of its interpretation of the Taunton agreement. Acting as a tribunal, the English representatives convicted Philip of having broken his past promises. They drew up a new agreement for him to sign. He could take it or leave it. But if he did not make peace now, they warned, “he must expect to smart for it.” Philip placed his mark on the document.53
It was a humiliation. Philip accepted a fine of a hundred pounds, due within three years. He also had to pay five wolf heads each year, as tribute and as a service to New Plymouth. Philip promised not to make war or sell lands without the colony’s permission. Even more explicitly than at Taunton, Philip acknowledged that his people were “subjects to his majesty the king of England, and the government of New Plymouth, and to their laws.” The alliance with the Pilgrims had extricated Ousamequin and the Pokanokets from their subordination to the Narragansetts. Now the sons of the Pilgrims reduced Ousamequin’s son to subjection.54
New Plymouth soon experienced another political transition. Thomas Prence died, and Josiah Winslow succeeded him as the colony’s first New England–born and Harvard-educated governor. Like his Pilgrim father, Winslow was a cosmopolitan merchant and politician respected across New England. Connected to Boston’s wealthy elite through an uncle and to London merchants through a brother-in-law, Winslow had trade interests that extended across the Atlantic and to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. Along with Thomas Willett, Winslow also bought into the Atherton Company, which purchased vast tracts of New England land and developed them into towns and farms.55
Winslow was less interested than his predecessors in the vigorous enforcement of religious orthodoxy, and his election brought about a partial reconciliation with settlers who had lost their civil privileges for sympathizing with the Quakers. Isaac Robinson became a freeman again. Winslow also asked James Cudworth to lead a planned expedition against the Dutch, who recaptured New York in July 1673 (and renamed it New Orange). The now elderly Cudworth, who had lost his militia captaincy because of his opposition to the colony’s anti-Quaker policies, declined the offer. He cited poverty and a need to be home to care for his ailing wife, but Cudworth also made it clear that he had not forgiven Winslow and the other magistrates who had “discharged” him of his “military employ” and “of other public concerns.” Cudworth could have stayed at home in any event, as the English regained New York through negotiations concluded the next year.56
Winslow wanted to mend fences with men such as Robinson and Cudworth, but he did not change his colony’s approach to the Wampanoags. The colony’s leading men—Winslow, Constant Southworth (William Bradford’s stepson), Thomas Cushman, and the younger William Bradford—took every opportunity they could find to purchase lands in Sakonnet and elsewhere. Accordingly, the tensions evident since the early 1660s grew more pronounced.
The terms of the 1671 submissions led to further land sales. Probably because he needed money and English goods in order to maintain his authority, Philip had sold many parcels of land in the 1660s. Although Philip expressed resentment over the loss of land, the one-hundred-pound fine made it necessary for him to continue to sell land. Other sachems faced similar pressures. In March 1672, Josiah Winslow sued Tuspaquin’s son William for the nonpayment of a ten-pound debt incurred the previous summer. William could not pay and was forced to sell a parcel of land in order to settle the debt.57
At Sakonnet, land sales fueled a leadership contest. There were at least two communities of Indians within what the English considered Sakonnet. Awashonks led a community that lived near the western side of what is now Little Compton, Rhode Island. Another sachem, Mammanuah, led a community farther to the east on the Acoaxet River. In February 1673, several of Mammanuah’s brothers affixed their marks to a document recognizing him as the “chief sachem” and “true proprietor” over their lands. Mammanuah aligned himself with the English in ways Awashonks would not. That June, he went to John Cotton’s house in Plymouth. According to Cotton, Mammanuah and one of his followers “became praying Indians and desired preaching.” His conversion surely made him a more attractive partner for English leaders.58
Awashonks tried to outflank her rival. With her son Peter, she signed a deed selling the northern portion of Sakonnet to Southworth and his partners for £75. Not to be outdone, Mammanuah sold overlapping Sakonnet lands to Southworth for £35. At this point, Awashonks and her people confronted Mammanuah directly. They bound and threatened him, trying to force him to relinquish his title to Sakonnet. Instead, Mammanuah sued Awashonks in Plymouth’s court for £500. Plymouth’s magistrates now referred to Awashonks as the “pretended squaw sachem.” After Mammanuah initiated his suit, Southworth obtained Awashonks’s agreement to cede all of her lands if she failed to appear in court to defend herself against the suit. When she did not fulfill the condition, Southworth claimed her people’s land now belonged to him. For good measure, the court ruled for Mammanuah and awarded him £5 and the cost of the suit. In 1671, Plymouth’s magistrates had promised to help Awashonks assert her authority over those who resisted her leadership. Instead, they undermined her and propped up a more compliant sachem. They weaseled, swindled, and browbeat their way into gaining legal title to land they had claimed for several decades.59
Survey of Little Compton (Sakonnet), nineteenth-century copy of ca. 1681 map. (Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library.)
Enlarged section of Little Compton survey. Note the names of prominent English proprietors, including Benjamin Church and Governor Josiah Winslow.
Mammanuah kept selling. In April 1675, he sold all of Sakonnet Neck to Southworth, Josiah Winslow, and other purchasers for £80. This included the land on which Awashonks lived. The sale included islands, ponds, coves, rivers, creeks, brooks, mines, and minerals. It included fishing rights in Sakonnet’s coastal and inland waters. In other words, Mammanuah deeded everything to the English. The previous month, Plymouth’s General Court had granted the purchasers the right to form a township at Sakonnet. They were to oversee an orderly settlement and the eventual establishment of a church.60
In fact, a few English were already there. In the summer of 1674, Benjamin Church began developing a Sakonnet farm. Born in Plymouth in 1639, Church had married Alice Southworth, Constant Southworth’s daughter. The socially upward marriage made Church a key player in the fulfillment of Plymouth’s long-standing territorial ambitions. “I was the first English man that built upon that neck, which was full of Indians,” Church later recalled. Church did not move his family to Sakonnet. Instead, like many land proprietors, he hired tenants. Church oversaw the construction of two buildings, and he brought livestock onto his new property.61
In May 1675, the Sakonnet proprietors met in Duxbury—probably at Josiah Winslow’s Careswell estate—and drew lots, placing names such as Winslow, Church, Southworth, and Almy on eighteen-, thirty-, and fifty-acre portions of Sakonnet. The proprietors reserved a three-quarter-square-mile parcel of land for the use of Awashonks and her people.62
“Before these present troubles broke out,” Josiah Winslow insisted a few years later, “the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony, but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.” Plymouth’s settlers bought land instead of simply taking it, and English purchasers claimed that the low prices paid reflected the unimproved state of the land. More accurately, though, English settlers and magistrates made sure that land they wanted became theirs for next to nothing. If a community rebuffed an offer, the would-be purchasers tried again a few years later. Especially as Rhode Islanders also tried to obtain land in Pocasset and Sakonnet, Plymouth’s magistrates became more aggressive. They fined sachems and then took land to settle the debts. If a sachem refused to sell, the magistrates found someone else who was willing to affix a mark to a deed. Those whom “the English had owned for king or queen they would disinherit,” Philip explained a few years later, “and make another king that would give or sell them their land.” The low prices paid had little to do with the true value of the land but instead reflected the disparities of power between the two peoples. English purchasers paid much more when they bought unimproved “wilderness” from other Englishmen. Certainly some, if not many, purchasers acted with fairness and integrity, and New Plymouth’s courts occasionally upheld Wampanoag complaints. At Sakonnet, however, Plymouth’s proprietors achieved their objectives through chicanery and ruthless determination and displayed little concern for the communities they disadvantaged and displaced.63
Sachems such as Awashonks were hemmed in. English settlers approached and encroached on her lands, and it was increasingly difficult to maintain traditional patterns of authority. Her choices narrowed. She could accede to the dramatic changes reshaping her world and cede her lands and leadership. She could accommodate herself to English ways, embrace Christianity, and hope that English ministers and magistrates would secure a portion of her lands for her people. Or she could fight.
