NEW ENGLAND’S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY settlers lived longer and healthier lives than their counterparts in Europe. The historian John Demos found that Plymouth Colony men and women who reached maturity lived to an average of sixty-nine and sixty-two years of age, respectively. Infant mortality rates, however, were only slightly better in New England than in many parts of England. The mortality rates for young children also remained stubbornly high. While available records permit only rough approximations, around a tenth of New England infants died before their first birthday, and a quarter did not reach the age of ten.1 Young children were “like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,” wrote the Massachusetts Bay poet Anne Bradstreet after the death of her three-year-old granddaughter.2
The emotions of bereaved parents were similarly brittle. Mothers and fathers were not desensitized to grief because they lost so many children. Instead, each successive death was a heavier blow, and some New England couples buried child after child. Half of Boston merchant Samuel Sewall’s fourteen children died before the age of three. At one point, he dreamed that they were all dead. John Saffin, raised in the Plymouth Colony town of Scituate, outlived every single one of his eight children.3
Plymouth’s John and Joanna Cotton endured several painful losses. Over the first twenty-two years of their marriage, Joanna brought eleven children into the world, the expansion of the family uninterrupted by her husband’s sexual indiscretions and career transitions. The first death came in 1669. The couple left their four-year-old daughter, Sarah, with Joanna’s parents in Guilford, Connecticut. Several months after John’s installation as Plymouth’s pastor, Sarah perished in the midst of an epidemic that also claimed Joanna’s mother and one of her sisters. “Our graves are multiplied and fresh earth heaps increased,” lamented Joanna’s father, Bryan Rosseter. “Coffins again and again have been carried out of my doors.” Weeks later, Joanna learned that she was pregnant again. When she gave birth to a daughter the next spring, they named her Sarah after her deceased sister.4
Five years later, Joanna delivered a son who died one day after his birth. This time, because she was not nursing, she quickly became pregnant again. In August 1675, the Cottons moved to Boston for the remainder of her pregnancy. In all likelihood, they did so because they feared for her health and safety after the war’s outbreak. While away from his own congregation, John Cotton preached regularly at his brother-in-law Increase Mather’s North Church and filled other pulpit invitations. He probably aspired to a more prestigious and better-compensated position in the Bay Colony. Also, his eldest and namesake son had begun his studies at Harvard. In September, Joanna gave birth to another son, whom the couple named Josiah.5
By December, the Cottons and their infant son had returned to Plymouth. They all survived a wave of sickness that swept through the colony that winter, but a “malignant fever” the next year did not spare one-year-old Josiah. During his illness, the Cottons would have maintained a long vigil at Josiah’s bedside. John would have read from the Bible and prayed. Others from the community would have come to pray over Josiah as well, with the belief that if God did not heal him, their prayers would lift his soul into God’s presence. After a death, a midwife customarily washed the corpse and wrapped it in linen. Perhaps Joanna did the work herself in this case. John Cotton probably fasted from Josiah’s death until his son’s burial.6
Some Reformed Protestants rejected graveside services, eulogies, and rituals of mourning as unbiblical, and puritans were especially zealous against anything that smacked of Catholicism. In old England and New England, puritans buried their dead in a timely and simple manner. Things were changing by the time of Josiah Cotton’s death, however. Especially when wealthy individuals died, families staged elaborate processions and then held lavish feasts. The bereaved sometimes sent gloves as invitations to a funeral—or at least provided them for pallbearers and other dignitaries—and gave engraved rings, scarves, and other tokens of grief to those who attended. Ministers prayed before a procession or at the grave, and they delivered eulogies, either during a Sunday service or on the day of the funeral itself. It is unlikely, however, that tiny Josiah Cotton’s burial involved much pageantry.7
After the boy’s death, his father’s ministerial colleagues wrote to express their condolences and offer advice. Barnstable’s Thomas Walley reminded the Cottons that “the affliction you have at present is no new or strange affliction but that which is common to the children of God.” Joanna, however, remained inconsolable ten days after young Josiah’s death. John confided to his brother-in-law Increase Mather that his wife was “most desolate and pensive.” The previous night, she had “fall[en] afresh to mourning, as if she had nothing else to do.”8
John Cotton worried because he knew that Christians were not supposed to mourn, at least not for too long or to excess. New England Congregationalists understood hardships as expressions of God’s sovereign will. Just as God had afflicted the colonies with the scourge of war, God had willed Josiah’s death. God’s will was inscrutable, but puritans reminded themselves that God was merciful. Even the deaths of children were part of that mercy, a painful way that God reminded men and women of their sinfulness and mortality. Josiah was God’s, and God had taken him. Excessive grief betrayed an idolatrous attachment to the things of this world.
John Cotton’s nephew Cotton Mather later warned against this sin in one of colonial New England’s most poignant sermons. His first child, a daughter named Abigail, died on the morning of December 25, 1687. For New England Congregationalists, who did not celebrate Christmas, it was a regular Sabbath day. Mather preached that afternoon. “A dead child,” he stated, “is a sight no more surprising than a broken pitcher, or a blasted flower.” Even so, he conceded that Abigail’s death was almost unbearable. His heart was “tempestuous [and] rebellious,” but he reminded himself and his congregants that God was the only proper object of their devotion. “It is a blasted banned soul,” warned Mather, “that sets up a creature in the room, [on] the throne of the great God, that gives unto a creature those loves and those cares which are due unto the great God alone.” Furthermore, Christians should remember that it was their idolatrous love for their children that prompted God’s punishment. Mourners should repent. “’Twas that sin that killed thy child,” Mather taught. When he published his sermon, he dedicated it to his friend Samuel Sewall, who was well acquainted with the same grief.9
John and Joanna Cotton received similar counsel after Josiah’s death. “A great part of our obedience,” Thomas Walley wrote, “lies in our submission to the will of God and being graciously quiet under his hand.” When Cotton informed Increase Mather of his wife’s desolation, his brother-in-law instructed Joanna that she needed “patience and moderation in respect of grief … otherwise you will despond … and wrong yourself, your family, your body, your soul, and it may be provoke the Lord.” If Joanna did not quiet her rebellious heart, Mather warned, God might further punish her family. The lives of her other children were at stake. Furthermore, Mather and Walley both suggested that the Cottons should thank God that Josiah did not die at the hands of cruel Indians.10
Puritans are known more for their doctrinal rigidity than for their tenderness. Though they argued among themselves about the finer points of predestination, they agreed that prior to the world’s creation, God had elected some individuals to salvation and others to damnation. In his wildly popular The Day of Doom, Massachusetts minister and poet Michael Wigglesworth summarized the doctrine:
He that may choose, or else refuse,
all men to save or spill,
May this man choose, and that refuse,
redeeming whom he will.
For seventeenth-century Congregationalists, moreover, hell was much more crowded than heaven. God chose to damn most human beings.11
Reformed theologians presumed that infants shared in the human predicament of original sin and thus were among the objects of God’s wrath. John Calvin was adamant on the point. “Even though the fruits of their iniquity have not yet come forth,” he maintained, “they have the seed enclosed within them. Indeed, their whole nature is a seed of sin … hateful and abhorrent to God.” As sinful humans, infants also shared in God’s decrees of salvation and reprobation. This was not cruelty on God’s part, but equity. God treated perishing infants just as he treated all other human beings. In fact, infant deaths proved that God elected individuals irrespective of their merits. He did not save some infants for the good works they would have done had they lived to maturity. God simply picked and chose according to his will and for his own purposes. It was a stark theology, capable of providing hope to sinners already convinced they could not earn their salvation, but also capable of plunging individuals into despair.12
At least some of the time, though, Congregational ministers soothed souls made anxious by these doctrines. Ministers preached that those men and women who faithfully attended God’s ordinances and lived righteously should not despair. Especially because individuals had to testify to an experience of regeneration in order to join churches, church membership conveyed a probability of salvation. “Church membership was not a guarantee that one was elect,” explains the historian Baird Tipson, “but anyone seeking assurance was far better in than out.” Much better. Congregationalists never fully resolved the paradoxes in their theology, but ministers such as John Cotton (of Plymouth) preached comforting messages to church members. “Though you are not so rich in faith as Abraham was,” Cotton encouraged those he termed “weak Christians,” “though you don’t make so much haste as other Christians do, yet if you seriously follow after Christ you shall be crowned. Every true Christian shall get safe to heaven.” Those who had owned the church covenant had testified to God’s work of grace in their hearts. They should trust God.13
In particular, the deaths of children bent Calvinist theology toward mercy. Samuel Stone, Cotton’s theological mentor in Connecticut, affirmed that “election hath no dependence upon prevision, of any gracious qualifications, good works, and grace, faith, or any good in the creatures.” Yet Stone suggested that “God doth constantly convert children … there are more souls of infants in heaven, than of any other age.” Similarly, Michael Wigglesworth referenced
an infant throng
of babes, for whom Christ died
whom for his own, by ways unknown
to men, he sanctified.
Heaven might not be as crowded as hell, but it was full of children. Therefore, ministers reassured grieving church members that their infants and very young children enjoyed God’s salvation.14
“A child is gone,” Thomas Walley wrote to John and Joanna Cotton, “but God is not gone, grace is not gone, nor yet the child lost.” Bridgewater’s James Keith was similarly definite in his encouragement. “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” Keith reassured the Cottons, “hath said suffer little children to come to me, he is the great and good shepherd, who hath a favor for poor children and doth gather the lambs unto his bosom.” In addition to telling Joanna Cotton to restrain her grief, Increase Mather also offered her comfort. “God had made you an instrument,” Mather wrote, “to replenish heaven, and bring forth an heir for the kingdom of God.” Josiah Cotton was not lost. He had preceded John and Joanna into the presence of God.15
A few months after Josiah’s death, Joanna Cotton became pregnant again. She conceived after returning from a trip to visit her relatives in Connecticut, a trip she could not have made during the war. The next winter, she gave birth to a son the couple named Samuel, who died shortly before his sixth birthday. By the time of Samuel’s death, Joanna had delivered two more sons, one of whom she named Josiah after his deceased brother.
It was relatively easy for church members to leave the salvation of infants and very young children in God’s hands. As sons and daughters matured, though, parents worried about their spiritual development. On both sides of the Atlantic, books about pious children were popular and served as both an inspiration and a warning to parents. Scituate’s John Clap, who died at the age of thirteen, served as an exemplar in one such manual. Although free from any obvious transgressions, Clap mourned his sinfulness, and he longed to be with Christ. When he worked in the fields with his father, he asked questions to deepen his knowledge of God. When he came to church, he stood for the entire two or three hours in order to better concentrate on the sermon and prayers. Clap then patiently bore a long illness, showing no distress even when he could no longer open his mouth. Just before he breathed his last, “his teeth were opened,” giving him a final chance to rejoice in Christ’s blood and commend his own spirit to his Lord. Clap then “quietly breathed his soul into the arms of his blessed savior.” Urian Oakes, minister at Cambridge and president of Harvard College, praised the strange lad as a “young old man, full of grace, though not full of days.”16
Few children died like John Clap, and fewer lived like him. Many parents had a keen sense of how far their own children fell short of such ideals. The Cottons, for instance, repeatedly heard troubling news about their eldest son, John. In July 1675, Increase Mather recorded in his journal that his son Cotton was “being abused by John Cotton and some other scholars at the college.” Apparently, upperclassmen expected freshmen—such as Cotton Mather—to run errands for them and beat or otherwise abused them if they refused. Increase Mather, a nonteaching fellow at Harvard and intimately involved in the college’s administration, summoned the younger John Cotton and told him to stop the practice.17
Mather kept his Plymouth relations informed about their son, and late in 1676, John and Joanna received word of something that brought “much grief and bitterness.” It is not clear what their son had done, but the couple regarded it as a serious transgression. Joanna worried about her son’s soul, though she found some comfort in the New Testament’s promise that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Her anxious husband asked Mather to invite his son for a weekly chat. Even better, perhaps young John could live with the Mathers that winter or spring. That way, he would be under Mather’s “roof and eye.” John Cotton sent a barrel of beef to his brother-in-law and promised to pay any expenses that his son would incur. “Who knows,” he wrote, “but God may make you his father?” Ministers often placed their sons with their colleagues, who became surrogate fathers and mentors to the next generation of clergy. The Cottons went to great length to promote their children’s spiritual well-being.18
While John and Joanna Cotton mourned Josiah’s death in January 1677, they had two Native boys with them as temporary members of the household. Increase Mather had asked John Cotton to obtain a captive Indian boy and groom him as a servant. As it turned out, Cotton acquired two boys: a “little one” from Benjamin Church and a six-year-old named Jether from New Plymouth’s treasurer, Constant Southworth. Cotton informed Mather that Jether was “a pretty little boy,” but that it would be “some time before he do you service.” In the meantime, Cotton was instructing him in the basics of Christianity. “I hope he will be soon capable of good instruction,” Cotton wrote. “He can truly answer that question: who made him?” Cotton’s facility with the Wampanoag language made him ideal for this role.19
Two months later, Cotton reported to Mather that he had returned the other boy to Church but that Jether was “now fit to cut your wood, and go to mill.” Cotton was uncertain whether he should send him to Boston or await word from Mather, and he apologized that in his wife’s absence, he could not properly clothe the boy. Joanna was with her relatives in Connecticut. “I received him meanly clad,” Cotton explained, “and cannot put on him more than these black rags for want of my wife.” It is a strange comment. Plymouth’s minister could surely have arranged clothing for Jether had he cared to do so.20
In July, Increase Mather asked for the “Indian lad” to be sent to him on the “next vessel.” Mather had arranged for Jether to serve a family in Dorchester for a few months and then enter service in his household. “By that time,” Mather wrote, “I hope he will be able to speak English.”21
Jether left the Cotton household. Did he indeed go to Dorchester and then Boston? Did he survive an epidemic of smallpox that caused John Cotton to bring his namesake son home the next winter? Did he run away from service? In his short life, Jether had known little but disruption and tumult. What macabre sights had he witnessed during the previous two years? Were his parents slaves in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean? Was he an orphan? Did he have siblings? Known documents offer no insight into his experiences or background, a sharp contrast with the abundance of materials that chronicle the lives of the Cottons and the Mathers.
Jether was among the many hundreds of Native men, women, and children who had surrendered or been captured during the closing months of the war. English jurisdictions across the region distributed and sold captives. In Providence, for instance, Roger Williams presided over a court that condemned one man to immediate execution, sold others, and then sent the remaining prisoners to Newport for sale. Existing records do not reveal any slave auctions within Plymouth Colony. Field commanders such as Benjamin Church distributed or sold prisoners on their own. The colony’s magistrates also sent large numbers to Boston. There, captives were held in some sort of slave pen and auctioned off.22
Bay Colony treasurer John Hull presided over several sales of captives. On August 24, 1676, Hull sold approximately one hundred captives for just over £160. Healthy adults, boys, and girls fetched about £2 each, while one group of thirteen “squaws and papooses wounded, one sick” sold for £20. The Boston merchant and mariner Thomas Smith was the biggest buyer. He purchased three men, one girl, two “lads,” eleven “squaws,” eight “papooses,” and four “little children,” twenty-nine slaves in all. One month later, Hull recorded another sale, this time of around one hundred captives. Thomas Smith bought forty-one of them for £82.23
African slaves sold in Boston or Newport fetched much higher prices. “Our Negroes, men and boys,” Governor Josiah Winslow informed English officials in 1680, “are valued at twenty, twenty-five, [or] thirty pounds per head as they seem to be better or worse.” Why were Indian captives sold for a fraction of that cost? New Englanders understood that for Africans, slavery was a permanent and inheritable condition. There was consensus across New England that Indian captives should be reduced to servitude, but—especially in the case of children—perhaps only for a fixed number of years or until they reached a certain age. The flood of captives seized in the closing months of the war also lowered their value.24
Further depressing prices was the fact that some Caribbean colonies closed themselves to Native slaves. In mid-June 1676, Barbados not only outlawed the further import of New England Indians, but also required masters to send away within six months any they had previously purchased. Barbados’s assembly declared that Indians from New England were “of a subtle and dangerous nature and able more cunningly to contrive and carry on those dangerous designs which our Negroes of their own nature are prone unto.” The previous year, white Barbadian planters had learned of a planned African slave revolt and had executed several dozen alleged conspirators. They feared that New England Indians would make their slave population even more rebellious.25
Despite the news from Barbados, Thomas Smith crammed nearly 200 enslaved Indians into the hold of his ship, the Seaflower. Of these, 110 came from New Plymouth; the others were Bay Colony captives. In order to protect Smith and prospective buyers from charges of man-stealing, governors Josiah Winslow and John Leverett provided certificates that explained that Philip and other sachems had rebelled against the authority of the king and had broken their covenants with his colonies. They had committed “murders, villainies, and outrages” and had intended to utterly destroy or expel all English settlers. Therefore, the governors concluded, “by due and legal procedure the said heathen malefactors, men, women, and children, have been sentenced and condemned to perpetual servitude and slavery.” The governors authorized Smith to sell them in any English colony or in “the dominions of any other Christian prince.” Smith apparently tried to sell his human cargo in the Caribbean, then sailed to Tangier.26
The fate of one captive prompted an unusual debate. Shortly before Benjamin Church’s forces tracked and ambushed Philip, they had seized Philip’s wife and son. Church stated that Philip’s son was nine years of age; his name is unknown. In other instances, magistrates sold the children of enemy sachems and shipped them out of New England. Philip, though, represented all of New England’s enemies and all of its people’s afflictions, making his son a special case. Plymouth’s leaders asked the colony’s ministers if he was a “child of death.” In other words, should they kill him?27
John Cotton and Marshfield’s Samuel Arnold voted for execution. True, the Bible instructed that children should not be “put to death for the fathers” but rather that “every man shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16). Cotton and Arnold did not think that magistrates should execute the children of ordinary capital criminals. Philip, however, was no ordinary criminal. Instead, he had been among the “principal leaders and actors in such horrid villainies … against a whole country, yea the whole interest of God.” Philip had been God’s enemy, and the “sword of justice” might slay his son. The ministers pointed to several instances in the Bible in which the Israelites killed the children of their enemies, sometimes on God’s command.28
Increase Mather, John Cotton’s brother-in-law, urged that “some effectual course be taken” with Philip’s son. He pointed to the biblical example of Hadad, “who was a little child when his father, chief sachem of the Edomites, was killed by Joab.” During the reign of King David, the Israelites under the command of Joab had spent six months killing all of the men in Edom. Hadad escaped to Egypt with some of his father’s officials and later became an adversary of David’s son Solomon. Had he been in a position to do so, surely David would have acted with prudence and killed Hadad in order to forestall future trouble. Likewise, Philip’s son might seek vengeance if Plymouth’s magistrates spared his life.29
James Keith at Bridgewater dissented from the position of his fellow ministers. He acknowledged that Psalm 137 posed some difficulty (“Blessed shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy children against the stones”). Nevertheless, Keith suggested that Plymouth should follow the example of King Amaziah, who out of obedience to the Mosaic Law did not slay his enemies’ children.30
Plymouth’s magistrates could not decide what to do, so Philip’s son languished in jail over the course of the winter. Finally, in March 1677 they settled on what they probably regarded as an act of mercy. They enslaved the boy instead of killing him. “Philip’s boy goes now to be sold,” John Cotton informed Increase Mather. In all likelihood, Plymouth’s authorities arranged for their enemy’s son to be exported far from New England.31
In the first months of the war, Plymouth’s magistrates did not distinguish between captured noncombatants and those Wampanoags who had voluntarily surrendered themselves. Likewise, even as the war came to an end, colonial leaders enslaved and exported noncombatant children alongside their parents. It was simpler—and more profitable—to enslave and export as many Indians as possible. As the immediate English thirst for vengeance and profits waned, however, distinctions emerged among different categories of captives.
In July 1676, New Plymouth’s war council resolved to enslave and remove from the colony all men above the age of fourteen who had been captured in battle or who had returned home “in a clandestine way.” Women and children taken in like circumstances were considered slaves for life but were not necessarily banished from the colony. Plymouth’s leaders now extended some mercy to surrenderers. In the summer of 1676, the war council voted to confine the latter group on what amounted to a reservation on land to the east of Dartmouth.32
Children were a more complex case. The war council decreed that the children of surrenderers would be placed with English households as servants until the age of twenty-five, “especially their parents consenting thereunto.” The language suggested that such consent was not strictly necessary. In March 1677, New Plymouth’s General Court required English masters who had received Indian children to sign indentures. The documents would make clear that the children’s servitude would end when they reached twenty-five. The next year, the court forbade settlers from buying and selling “our captive savages.” The ban did not mean that their labor was never transferable. As was the case with English indentured servants, masters might send them to other households or bequeath their remaining years of labor to their heirs. The court’s intention was that the children not become chattel akin to African slaves.33
The statutes left considerable ambiguity, however. What about those Indians condemned to be slaves in perpetuity? Were they like African slaves? Could they be bought and sold? Would Native children inherit their mothers’ condition of slavery? The result of this ambiguity was that many Wampanoags toiled for English households in a murky and ill-defined capacity. Whether their masters called them “servants” or “slaves,” they were in bondage, and they were vulnerable to the machinations of settlers who might circumvent the law in order to retain their labor.
Nearly all of these servants and slaves remain anonymous, but a few diaries and legal records hint at their experiences. In October 1679, the young minister Peter Thacher moved his family from Boston to Barnstable on a probationary basis. Thacher was the son of Thomas Thacher, the pastor of Boston’s Third Church. After the elder Thacher’s 1678 death, the inheritance of his estate stoked tension between his children and his widow. Margaret Thacher’s marriage to Thomas Thacher was her second, and she brought considerable assets to the match, including at least two slaves of African descent. In September 1679, she took legal measures to recover what she felt was hers. “This day mother Thacher arrested me for two Negroes,” Peter Thacher wrote in his diary. Within a few years, the younger Thacher had either recovered the slaves from his stepmother or had acquired replacements.34
Peter Thacher’s household also included his wife, Theodora, an infant daughter (also Theodora), an English servant named Lydia Chapin, and an Indian servant or slave, Margaret. In his diary, Peter Thacher expressed a deep concern for Lydia’s health and spiritual condition. In the spring of 1679, Lydia collapsed and appeared to be dead, then suffered from violent fits all night long. The next winter, Lydia “was ready to draw up deadly conclusions against herself.” Thacher called her into his study and counseled her to resist Satan’s temptation to suicide. A few weeks later, Lydia was so morose or incapacitated that she let young Theodora cry. The Thachers took the baby to bed with them, and Lydia sat up that night in anguish. Shortly thereafter, a relative came to bring Lydia back to Boston. Her family had placed her with the Thachers, but she was not psychologically fit for service.35
Peter Thacher purchased Margaret from Lydia Checkley—the wife of merchant Anthony Checkley of Boston—for ten pounds. She came to the household in June 1679, shortly before the Thachers moved to Barnstable. Margaret helped care for the baby, knitted and sewed, and performed other household tasks. “The Lord make her a blessing to the family,” Thacher wrote, “and her coming under my roof a blessing to her soul that she may learn to know and fear the Lord her master and [her] God.” She at least learned to fear her earthly master. “I came home,” wrote Thacher two months later, “and found that my Indian girl had like to have knocked my Theodora in [the] head by letting her fall.” Thacher punished Margaret by beating her with “a good walnut stick.”36
It is quite possible that Thacher would have beaten any servant who dropped Theodora, but the Thachers did not punish Lydia when she neglected the baby. Indeed, Peter Thacher’s diary documents a stark divide between the experiences of the two servants. Lydia may or may not have wanted to become a servant to the Thachers, but her family retrieved her as her mental health faltered. (Lydia subsequently returned to the family’s service.) By contrast, Peter Thacher bought Margaret. Regardless of how she fared, she would serve the minister and his family at least into her adulthood or until the Thachers sold her. Peter Thacher displayed an unusual solicitude for Lydia’s spiritual well-being, but despite his initial hopes for Margaret’s soul, he made no attempt to instruct Margaret in Christianity. (Massachusetts Bay, but not Plymouth, had a law that required masters to instruct Indian servant children in the “Christian religion.”) In fact, outside of the accident with Theodora, he seems to have paid very little attention to Margaret at all. She was not worth mentioning unless she caused a problem.37
A few documents trace the movements of enslaved Wampanoags within New Plymouth. In March 1677, Duxbury’s Adam Right acquired a woman named Hannah from Benjamin Church. “Taken and captivated” toward the end of the war, she had been condemned to “perpetual servitude and slavery.” The next winter, Right sold Hannah for four pounds and ten shillings to William Woddell, a Portsmouth (Rhode Island) official who trafficked in Indian servants and slaves. Hannah came with a bill of sale that clarified her status as a slave. She was chattel, property that English settlers could buy and sell.38
Woddell also acquired a Pocasset woman named Meequapew and her two children. Most likely, Meequapew had taken refuge with the Narragansetts during the war. After English troops rounded up many Narragansetts in the closing months of the war, Rhode Island’s government bound her and her children to Woddell. In this instance, he received her labor for three years, that of her fourteen-year-old son, Peter, for ten years, and that of her six-year-old daughter, Hannah, for fifteen years. In contrast to indentures for English servants, Woddell had no obligation to provide his Indian servants with clothing or any other benefits upon their freedom.39
Like the Thachers, members of the Almy family owned both Indian and African slaves. After several decades in the Plymouth Colony town of Sandwich, William Almy, his wife, Audrey, and their children moved to Portsmouth and also acquired land in Pocasset and Sakonnet. When William Almy died in 1677, his estate included an Indian couple and their child. Seven years later, Almy’s son Job bequeathed a number of “servants” to his heirs. One inventory of his estate identified two “Negro servants” valued at £42 and an unspecified number of “Indian servants” worth £35. A second inventory the next year itemized “one negro woman” at £15 and “Indian servants” at £25. Nowhere did the inventories state the number of years the individuals had left to serve. Presumably they were slaves for life. Unless they succeeded in running away, the adults involved would never become free.40
The first person of African descent to appear in New Plymouth’s records is an unnamed “blackamore” included on a 1643 list of men able to bear arms in the town of Plymouth.41 It is unclear whether the man was a slave, a servant, or a free man. Ten years later, a “negro maidservant of John Barnes” accused a man of stealing from her master. She too could have been a servant or slave. As African slavery became more prevalent in southern New England, some of the Plymouth Colony’s wealthiest men acquired slaves. At the time of his 1674 death, for instance, Thomas Willett owned eight slaves, including Jethro. John Myles, whose unnamed “Negro” was one of the first casualties of King Philip’s War, possessed five slaves at the time of his death. Listed on the inventory of his estate right after his pigs, horses, and cattle, they were his most valuable possessions, collectively worth £72. “Our blacks … are very few,” Governor Winslow reported in 1680, “and of them fewer breeders.” That was true in New Plymouth’s eastern towns, but when Rhode Island settlers moved to Mount Hope, Pocasset, and Sakonnet after the war, the number of slaves of African descent within the colony increased.42
Plymouth Colony’s settlers typically acquired African slaves from Newport, New Amsterdam, or Boston. In one instance, however, the Boston merchant John Saffin directed a cargo of slaves to the out-of-the-way town of Swansea. Saffin’s life straddled the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay and intersected with slavery at several points. It was Saffin who had negotiated Jethro’s status at the end of King Philip’s War, and one of his own slaves successfully sued him for freedom at the turn of the eighteenth century. In 1681, he and several of his fellow merchants tried to circumvent the Royal African Company’s crown-granted monopoly on the slave trade. Saffin and his partners sent a vessel—the Elizabeth—to Guinea and directed its master to head for Swansea on his return to New England. Getting wind that Rhode Island officials planned to interdict the Elizabeth, Saffin gave instructions to divert the vessel to Nantasket. He urged the ship’s master to anchor offshore and “take in such Negroes” under the cover of darkness. The fate of the Elizabeth and the slaves it carried remains unknown.43
Other than the laws limiting the terms of service for captive children, New Plymouth did not codify either African or Native slavery. One significant difference between the two types of bondage emerged over time, though. English settlers understood that the children of enslaved African mothers would be slaves, but in the case of Indian slaves and servants, there was no presumption of heritability. Masters sometimes claimed the progeny of their female Native slaves, but some of those children successfully contested such claims in court.
Nevertheless, for the remainder of the seventeenth century there were far more Indians than Africans in various forms of bondage to New Plymouth families. Especially as fewer English servants came to New England, enslaved and indentured Wampanoags provided an inexpensive source of labor for Plymouth Colony households. The 1694 estate of Scituate’s John Williams included three Indian “servants” collectively valued at £60. Even as English settlers sold many Indians out of the colony, they imported others from Maine, from Carolina, from Florida, and from more distant places. For instance, when Scituate’s Anthony Collamore died in January 1694, his estate included a “Spanish Indian servant” worth £20. Native slaves and servants were a ubiquitous presence in English households.44
In June 1677, Governor Josiah Winslow wrote King Charles to assure the crown that New Plymouth’s settlers had not provoked the “rebellion” of Philip and other Native peoples. He promised that his colony had done its utmost to defend the king’s interest in the recent war. As a token of his fidelity to the king, Winslow sent what he termed the “best of the ornaments and treasure of sachem Philip, the grand rebel.” The “spoils” consisted of what Winslow described as Philip’s “crown, his gorge [staff], and two [wampum] belts of their own making, of their gold and silver.” Winslow sent his letter and gifts by way of Waldegrave Pelham, his brother-in-law. They never reached the king. Pelham may have kept them for himself. Alternatively, he or another courier lost them.45
For New Englanders, captives and land were the chief spoils of war, and because of its good harbor and fertile land, Mount Hope was the jewel among those prizes. After King Charles confirmed New Plymouth’s jurisdiction over the peninsula in 1679, Plymouth’s magistrates sold it to a group of wealthy proprietors from Boston. There was a Pokanoket remnant on Mount Hope, but settlers from Rhode Island, Massachusetts Bay, and Plymouth purchased lots, planted crops, and brought Indian and African slaves and servants onto their properties. In 1681, Mount Hope became the township of Bristol.
The situation in Sakonnet was different. Its Native men had fought on both sides of King Philip’s War. While Plymouth’s magistrates permitted both Mammanuah and Awashonks to return to their land, they did not treat the two rival sachems and their respective communities equally. Mammanuah, who had embraced Christianity prior to the war and adhered to the English for its duration, still controlled substantial land at Acoaxet and continued to sell portions of it into the mid-1690s. In keeping with the agreement between Benjamin Church and Awashonks, Plymouth’s magistrates and the Sakonnet proprietors allowed the sachem and her people to remain, but only at their discretion. Unlike Mammanuah, Awashonks soon owned no land at all. Whether they obtained it through purchase or through confiscation, the Sakonnet proprietors divvied up the parcel of land they previously had reserved for Awashonks. In 1682, Plymouth’s General Court declared that Sakonnet would become the township of Little Compton.
Many of the Native men and women who remained at Sakonnet and Acoaxet now aligned themselves with Christianity. According to Cotton Mather, Native missionaries from Martha’s Vineyard traveled to Sakonnet and made many converts. John Cotton also went to Sakonnet. In 1678, he preached twice to a crowd of some 150 individuals. Cotton made a list of more than eighty men and women at Sakonnet who had become praying Indians. In 1680, the English appointed a man named Isaac as “Indian magistrate at Sakonnet,” noting that he gave “good grounds of hope that he is religiously affected.” Even though Isaac had fought against the English during the war, he gained permission from the General Court to carry a gun.46
Awashonks lived at Sakonnet for at least a dozen years after the end of the war. In 1683, colonial authorities brought Awashonks, her daughter Betty, and her son Peter to Plymouth and imprisoned them. They were accused of infanticide, of having murdered Betty’s “young child.” Both Awashonks and Betty insisted that the child had been stillborn. Lacking witnesses or other evidence, the magistrates felt obliged to dismiss the charge of murder.
The acquittal did not end the matter, however. Betty was not married, and Awashonks and Betty had punished another woman—the wife of a man named Sam—who had commented on her pregnancy. At Awashonks’s behest, Sam’s wife had been whipped. For that, the magistrates fined the sachem, her son, and her daughter. They also ordered the “Indians at Sakonnet” to whip Betty for her fornication. Plymouth’s leaders still suspected that Awashonks and Betty might be guilty of the capital crime of murder. They resolved to seek further evidence but apparently never found it. Awashonks was still alive as of 1688, when she made a request through her son Peter for her community’s sixty-seven families to be given land on which to plant crops. The request illustrates the extent of the dispossession experienced by Awashonks and her people. It is unclear whether English officials granted the requested land.47
Words etched into a boulder in Little Compton’s Wilbour Woods commemorate Awashonks as “queen of Sogkonate [Sakonnet] and friend of the white man.” Compared to the statues of men such as Myles Standish and Ousamequin, it is an obscure and crude tribute to one of the most significant figures in the Wampanoag-English conflicts of the 1670s. The etching was made in the late nineteenth century; the words are now barely legible. They are also inaccurate. Awashonks was not a queen but one of several individuals who claimed leadership of Sakonnet communities during these years. Nor was she a friend of the English, who despite her resistance claimed all of her people’s land.
Awashonks rock, Wilbour Woods, Little Compton, Rhode Island. (Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society [RHi X17 473].)
Without land ownership, Awashonks’s people faced a difficult future. By the mid-1690s, Peter, Awashonks’s son, was indentured—or possibly enslaved—to Edward Richmond, who had moved from Rhode Island to Sakonnet after the war. Peter and two other Indians were valued at three pounds each. Awashonks had not been able to save her land, and she could not save her son from servitude.48
While Plymouth’s settlers regarded the western Wampanoags as conquered peoples after the war, most Wampanoag communities had not been conquered. Native men from Cape Cod had fought for rather than against the English, and Wampanoags on the islands to the south had cooperated with English authorities but had otherwise kept out of the fighting.
Christian Wampanoag communities in New Plymouth continued to fare better than their counterparts in Massachusetts Bay. Whereas several of John Eliot’s praying towns disappeared and Natick’s population contracted, the community at Mashpee grew over the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In the mid-1680s, Plymouth’s government promised that the land would belong to the Mashpee Wampanoags and their children forever. As the historian David Silverman has argued, without its people’s embrace of Christianity, Mashpee probably would not have remained Wampanoag land. Rowland Cotton, a son of John Cotton who became minister at Sandwich, counted around two hundred adult members of Mashpee’s church in 1693.49
Although some English ministers and other settlers continued to preach to Wampanoag communities, Native evangelists—as at Sakonnet—usually took the lead. Following Richard Bourne’s death in 1685, Simon Popmonit became Mashpee’s minister for the next thirty-five years. Son of a sachem, Popmonit was respected among his own people and by English magistrates. As sachemships collapsed, churches provided alternative opportunities for Wampanoags to exercise leadership and forge connections with English ministers and settlers. As Wampanoags had once traveled great distances to gather for nickómmos like the one Benjamin Church had witnessed, they now gathered for ordinations or celebrations of the Lord’s Supper.
Wampanoags who embraced Christianity made it their own and kept it that way, a fact remarked on by English settlers and visitors. In 1708, when his ship ran into danger in the shallow waters to the south of Cape Cod, Lord John Lovelace—on his way to New Jersey as its next governor—was forced to put in near Dartmouth. Lovelace met a Christian Wampanoag and asked for the name of the man’s English minister. The man replied that Dartmouth’s minister was “a worthy and hopeful young gentleman” but that he himself had “been under none … but Indian instruction.” His faith came from his own people, not from the English. After Simon Popmonit died in 1720, the New England Company sent Joseph Bourne (Richard Bourne’s great-grandson) to Mashpee as its minister. Because few Mashpee Wampanoags spoke English, they refused to come to church unless Bourne learned their language. The young English minister complied.50
While it provided space for Native leadership and community, Christianity was not a panacea for the challenges Wampanoags faced after the war. As the English population continued to increase, new townships formed on the Cape and elsewhere, and settlers moved onto Wampanoag lands. Many Native enclaves disappeared; their inhabitants moved to larger communities such as Mashpee, which remained vigilant against English encroachment. In 1710, Simon Popmonit petitioned the Massachusetts government (in 1692, Plymouth Colony was absorbed into a larger Province of Massachusetts Bay). He complained that residents of Barnstable had “appropriated to themselves a considerable part” of his people’s land and had begun building houses on it. It is unclear whether the Mashpee Wampanoags succeeded in getting redress, but Popmonit could at least command attention from colonial officials.51
Whaling ship’s figurehead, ca. 1830. (Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.)
Land was only one challenge. As traditional means of subsistence disappeared, Indians faced limited prospects. Many parents indentured their children to English families, and many men found themselves reduced to servitude when they borrowed money and could not repay it. Others worked as day laborers and lived on the outskirts of English towns. On the Cape, Wampanoag men became workers on whaling ships, and debt forced them to remain in such positions indefinitely.52
Some Wampanoag parents wanted to place their children with English families. They understood both the immediate benefits—one less mouth to feed—and the usefulness of language skills and cultural fluency. Devout, or perhaps savvy, Christian Wampanoags were especially keen to send their children to the homes of English ministers. In other instances, Indian servitude was debt peonage orchestrated by settlers eager to obtain cheap labor. Simon Popmonit lamented in a petition that “ourselves and our poor children are frequently made servants for an unreasonable time.” He maintained that Indians sometimes contracted debts out of ignorance or foolishness, and he asked that such indentures be permitted only with the consent of two English justices of the peace. In this case, the Massachusetts government passed the requested law, but two generations later, an English minister reported that most Mashpee boys were indentured to English masters.53
Through their embrace of Christianity and their willingness to fight alongside English soldiers, Wampanoags at Mashpee and elsewhere on the Cape retained their leaders, their language, and at least some of their land. These communities remained vital at the end of the seventeenth century. They were unconquered, and they maintained a substantial degree of autonomy. Over time, though, many Wampanoag men, women, and children found themselves in bondage to English families and whalers. The English did not call them slaves, but they were not free.