Wamsutta and Pumetacom insisted that they were friends of Plymouth just like their father. Yet their world was not his. By the time Ousamequin died in 1660, leaving his office to them, English missions, land encroachment, double standards of justice, and colonial interference in Native people’s affairs had strained the historic alliance almost to its breaking point. Wamsutta and Pumetacom represented a younger generation of Wampanoags who came of age well after the dark days of the epidemic of 1616–19 and no longer viewed Plymouth as a source of the people’s strength but as their greatest threat. The Wampanoags were particularly bitter toward Plymouth because it failed to reciprocate Ousamequin’s protection and provision of the colony during its uncertain early years. Instead, it proved to be greedy and power hungry, willing to use any means to reduce its supposed Wampanoag friends to landlessness, subordination, and even slavery. Ingratitude was an especially repugnant quality in the tightly knit, kin-based Indian world in which people were expected to give without restraint and show appreciation to those who did. In the context of English aggression, the charge of colonial thanklessness easily morphed into the accusation of betrayal.
Such widely shared anticolonial sentiments fed a growing sense of common cause among the southern New England tribes. Calls for Indian unity emanating from the Pequots and then Miantonomo in the 1630s and 1640s had failed because intertribal rivalries seemed more pressing than the theoretical long-term danger of the colonies. Yet by the 1660s Indians all across the region could plainly see that the English rose at their expense by using underhanded dealing and military threats to engross Indian land, and divide-and-conquer tactics against Indian polities. Such concerns did not eclipse political fights between or within tribes, which continued apace, or necessarily lead to violent resistance. Some groups decided the best course was to throw in their lot with the English. Yet there was a growing urgency that unless the people pushed back collectively against the burgeoning colonial threat, it would grow too powerful for them to do anything about it. The irony was that Wamsutta and Pumetacom, the very sons of the colonists’ friend Ousamequin, were the ones who picked up this mantle. Their fifteen years of leadership before the outbreak of King Philip’s War in 1675 does not comport with the long peace trumpeted by the Thanksgiving myth. Rather, it was marked by repeated war scares with the English partly as an outgrowth of their attempts to mobilize an anticolonial league.
The brothers might have been subtly indicating this change on June 13, 1660, when they visited Plymouth and Wasmutta explained “that in regard his father is lately deceased … he being desirous, according to the custom of the natives to change his name, that the Court would confer an English name upon him.” The magistrates obliged by evoking names of two prominent figures from Greek antiquity, dubbing Wamsutta “Alexander Pokanoket” and Pumetacom “Philip.” Just what the English meant by these choices is uncertain. The only explanation comes from the Massachusetts minister William Hubbard, who claimed many years later that the point was to mock Pumetacom’s “ambitious and haughty spirit.” Yet this statement, coming as it did after Pumetacom had taken up arms against the English, is suspect. A more interesting question is why the brothers asked the English to rename them in the first place. It was probably no coincidence that they made this request right after airing grievances against the English. They complained that roving hogs from the English town of Rehoboth had damaged the Wampanoags’ corn at Annawamscutt (modern Barrington, Rhode Island) and Kickamuit (just east of Montaup). Wampanoags found colonists hypocritical and hostile for refusing to keep their livestock enclosed on their own land even as they zealously prosecuted Wampanoags who injured the trespassing animals. Wamsutta also objected that the English had bargained with a Narragansett sachem to purchase Wampanoag territory, which was part of a growing pattern of the colonists setting up straw sellers as a step toward browbeating the Indians with legitimate rights into releasing their claims. The brothers’ final order of business before soliciting new names was to seek the colony’s permission to buy gunpowder, despite its ban on sales of munitions to Indians. Plymouth authorities, reluctant to set a dangerous precedent but also wary of insulting the sachems, decided instead to gift the powder to them. None of the English seem to have connected the brothers’ complaints to their request for ammunition and then their assumption of new names, but perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, we should. The sequence might have been a subtle diplomatic threat of a sort common in Indian country, a way for Ousamequin’s sons to hint that they were about to become different leaders from their father. They were prepared to seize on the colonists’ own technologies, resources, and even names to turn back colonial expansion. Ingratitude had its costs.1
WAMSUTTA THE SACHEM, WAMSUTTA THE CAUSE
Wamsutta rose to power as the pressures driving English demand for Wampanoag territory were cresting. The children and even grandchildren of the Great Migration generation were coming of age and producing their own offspring, raising the colonial population of southern New England in 1670 to somewhere between sixty thousand and seventy thousand people, about double the total number of Natives. Like their forebears, their ambition was to establish their own farms, which could only mean expanding at the Indians’ expense. Furthermore, New England agriculture was increasingly focused on exporting beef and pork to feed the slaves of the burgeoning sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Animal husbandry required extensive tracts of cleared pasturage, the best sort of which was located along the banks of creeks, rivers, and salt marshes that marked Wampanoag and Narragansett country. Add to these factors the vast profits that could be earned from land speculation, and it is easy to grasp why the English badgered Wampanoag sachems to part with their territory.2
Yet that does not fully explain why sachems like Wamsutta and Pumetacom decided to sell, particularly in light of their manifest resentment of colonial expansion. Neither of these sachems nor any of the other local Wampanoag sachems who alienated their people’s land during the 1660s and 1670s gave their reasons, but several overlapping possibilities exist. Obviously, like Ousamequin, they coveted the pay that colonists offered, which included not only manufactured goods but, increasingly, wampum. Colonial sources showed no curiosity for why the Wampanoags traded for beads they were perfectly capable of manufacturing themselves, but, once again, we should. In all likelihood, Wamsutta’s and Pumetacom’s followers and tribute payers could not keep up with the brothers’ demand for wampum to sponsor their far-flung intertribal diplomacy about checking colonial expansion. The sachems probably also used wampum from land sales to buy munitions from Rhode Islanders and the Dutch with the expectation that if a pan-Indian resistance movement came to fruition, they would use the arms to seize back land that had purchased the guns in the first place. Not least of all, Pumetacom repeatedly deeded land to to the English to defuse their suspicions that he was plotting against them. He made these concessions to English extortion to buy time and gather strength.
Wamsutta might have sold land to fund a campaign for Indian unity, but the most immediate effect was to alienate Wampanoags and Englishmen alike, including his own wife. Ousamequin had trained his eldest son to handle the responsibility of negotiating with the English by including him in several land transactions during the early to mid-1650s. When Wamsutta took over the public responsibilities of the sachemship from his father in 1657, he tried to establish right away that he was no English lackey. However, it was telling of the extent to which English land encroachment would dominate his short-lived rule that when he pronounced, “I Wamsutta am not willing at present to sell all they do desire,” it appeared in a deed of sale for part of what is now the city of Fall River. The fact of the matter was that ceding land to the English and trying to keep his people quiet about it became a signature of Wamsutta’s time in office. In 1659 his wife, Namumpum (later Weetamoo), the sunksquaw of Pocasset, received a third of the goods he had been paid for the 1657 Fall River grant, with her portion consisting of twenty yards of blue trading cloth, two yards of red cloth, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of stockings, two broad hoes, and an axe. In other deals, he reserved tracts for the Native inhabitants “to plant and sojourn upon.” Despite these measures, his deals sometimes pushed his people too far. On March 8, 1662, Wamsutta released his claims to the west end of Martha’s Vineyard to William Brinton of Newport, Rhode Island, which so spooked the people of Aquinnah that they dropped their previous opposition to the Mayhew mission, apparently in an effort to secure English allies against the sachem’s overreach. They had good reason for worry. Two months earlier, Wamsutta had sold Peter Talman of Newport a massive area bounded in the north by the Seven Mile River in modern Attleborough, extending east to Cockesit in modern West Bridgewater, then south to the shoreline and west to Narragansett Bay, thereby encompassing most of the sachemship of Sakonnet and part of Pocasset.3
Namumpum was not having it. Her marriage to Wamsutta was supposed to be a mutually beneficial alliance between Pokanoket and Pocasset, not an invitation for her husband to market her people’s territory. Thus, on June 3, 1662, she appeared before the Plymouth General Court to complain, accompanied by Tatacomancaah, son of the sunksquaw Awashonks of Sakonnet and probably one of Namumpum’s relatives. It must have been the second time they had raised the matter, for, back in March, Plymouth had deputized the trader Thomas Willet “in case the sunksquaw should be put off her ground by Talman, to see that she be not wronged in that behalf.” This was no act of benevolence, for the colony also charged Willet to use this emergency to urge the Sakonnets to sell their land to Plymouth before Wamsutta did.4
Willet had another mission as well: to inform Wamsutta that Plymouth did not take kindly to him selling land to Rhode Island. Yet Wamsutta continued to do as he pleased, including a bargain conducted just days after Willet’s visit in which he ceded Providence a tract of land between the Seekonk and Pawtucket Rivers in exchange for one hundred fathoms of wampum and other goods. Six weeks later, he provoked Plymouth again by confirming a sale to a group of men from Hingham, Massachusetts, to a fifteen-mile-square tract along the Bay colony’s border with Plymouth. Under the circumstances, Namumpum and Awashonks must have submitted their protests against Wamsutta to Plymouth knowing that the colony would leap at the chance to assert its authority along the contested boundary with Rhode Island. Little did any of the polities grasp how far this dispute ultimately would go.5
What happened next was and is shrouded in mystery and controversy. The agreed-on details are as follows: In the summer of 1662, Plymouth summoned Wamsutta to appear in court, but the sachem ignored it. In response, Plymouth sent out ten dragoons under Major Josiah Winslow to arrest him. This squad tracked down Wamsutta and a group of his men at a hunting camp at Monponsett Pond near the head of the Taunton River, took him into custody, and brought him in for questioning. Suddenly, the sachem fell ill and the English released him, only for him to die shortly after. Beyond this broad outline of events, surviving accounts disagree on nearly all the specifics. First, there is the cause of the English summons. Plymouth’s official records mention only the issue of Wamsutta selling land to Rhode Islanders, but three other accounts written by colonists right after King Philip’s War also cite rumors of the sachem conspiring with the Narragansetts. The most dependable one is a private letter written in early 1677 by the Plymouth minister and missionary John Cotton Jr. to provide information for Increase Mather’s history of Indian-colonial relations in New England published later that year. Though Cotton did not move to Plymouth until 1667, five years after the events in question, he personally knew the officials who carried out the mission to retrieve Wamsutta, spoke Wampanoag himself, and had regular contact with Wampanoag people, who would have had their own perspectives on these matters. He had no discernible reason to invent reasons for Wamsutta’s arrest, and he was unequivocal that Plymouth’s cause was a “report being here that Alexander was plotting or privy to plots against the English.” Precisely what that report said, Cotton did not relate. However, it likely charged that the sachem had been in secret talks with the Narragansetts and storing up arms, for in future years the English would make similar accusations against Wamsutta’s brother, Pumetacom, and widow, Namumpum.6
English sources also differ on the sequence of events leading to Wamsutta’s arrest. Mather and William Hubbard painted a dramatic scene in which Winslow and the dragoons surprised the Wampanoags, seized their muskets, then demanded Wamsutta’s surrender, with Winslow pressing a pistol against the sachem’s breast and declaring “that if he stirred or refused to go, he was a dead man.” Cotton related a much calmer exchange, which Mather apparently rejected for his published history because it was insufficiently theatrical. In Cotton’s telling, the Wampanoags saw the English coming and were so unalarmed that they did not even bother to interrupt their breakfast. Instead of Wamsutta fulminating at Winslow, Cotton had him calmly explaining that he had delayed appearing at court because first he wanted to consult with his friend Captain Thomas Willet, who was away in New Netherland. There was no gunpoint arrest. Rather, “Alexander freely and readily without the least hesitancy consented to go.” Cotton’s version has the greatest ring of truth to it, even as he might have sanitized it. Winslow had an aggressive streak, but he would have understood that drawing a weapon on a sachem as powerful as Wamsutta and then dragging him before English authorities was a surefire way to start a war. It would have been unprecedented. That said, on the eve of King Philip’s War, Pumetacom recalled bitterly about how the English had “forced” his brother “into court,” though he might have been referring to the presence of the armed soldiers rather than Winslow drawing his pistol. The actual events must remain unknown.7
Pumetacom believed that the English used foul play to kill Wamsutta while he was in their company. After the encounter at Monponsett Pond, Wamsutta, his followers, and the English troops proceeded to the house of Magistrate William Collier in Duxbury. They then agreed to split up and reconvene later at Winslow’s estate in Marshfield so Governor Thomas Prince (or Prence), who had to be summoned from his home on the outer Cape, could attend. Wamsutta voluntarily reappeared after two or three days, as promised, but unexpectedly fell ill as talks began. The English seemed genuinely concerned about him, as they rushed him to a certain “Mr. Fuller” so he could administer the sachem “a potion of working physic [medicine].” Yet Wamsutta only grew worse after this treatment. His men tried to rush him back home to their own doctors, but it was too late. He died shortly after his arrival at Montaup, “as they judged, poisoned,” as Pumetacom later put it. With this, Wamsutta went from being the Wampanoags’ sachem to their martyr.8
“East Monponsett Lake, Halifax, Massachusetts,” SAILS Digital History Collections, accessed February 8, 2019, https://
In 1662, an English force led by Josiah Winslow intercepted the Wampanoag sachem, Wamsutta (or Alexander), at a hunting camp on Monponsett Pond and took him into custody to answer a Plymouth court summons. Contemporary accounts disagree whether Winslow used threat and force. Regardless, Wamsutta fell fatally ill while in English custody. Some Wampanoags suspected that Wamsutta died from English poison. Pumetacom (or Philip) succeeded Wamsutta as sachem and later led his people to war against the English.
POISONED RELATIONS
If there had been any question about whether Pumetacom supported a multitribal resistance against the colonies, the suspicious circumstances of Wamsutta’s death appear to have answered it. Not only was Pumetacom enraged, but so were his people, thereby giving him a popular mandate to undertake such a bold and perilous initiative. If English sources are correct, he got to work right away. It took only until August 1662, just weeks after he took office, before the colony heard rumors “of danger of the rising of the Indians against the English.” Pumetacom denied it all in “a large and deliberate debate of particulars,” and even volunteered to surrender another brother, perhaps Sonkanuhoo, as a hostage until the magistrates could investigate, which they declined. So instead the new sachem offered up something greater, emphasizing that he did “earnestly desire the continuance of that amity and friendship that had formerly been between this government and his deceased father and brother.” As proof, he pledged to keep the peace and sell land only to Plymouth.9
Despite the sachem’s avowal of the alliance, the English were onto something with their concerns about the strange new pattern of Wampanoag-Narragansett relations. Back in 1660 Wamsutta had led his men in war against Uncas and the Mohegans, the Narragansetts’ longtime archenemy. Wamsutta’s main goal was to assert his tributary claims to the Quabaug Nipmucs, which Uncas challenged, but he was certainly aware that the Narragansetts would welcome Wampanoag-Mohegan hostilities. Rumors of Wamsutta plotting with other Indians surfaced two years later, leading to the events surrounding his death. Perhaps not coincidentally, in October 1663 Pumetacom complained to Plymouth that Namumpum, Wamsutta’s widow, along with her new husband, “Quiquequanchett,” had been hosting Narragansetts without his permission. Namumpum’s actions seem like a continuation of Wamsutta’s intertribal diplomacy; indeed, she and Wamsutta might have charted this course together from the beginning. Her quick remarriage appears to have been part of that outreach, given that her new spouse was probably Quequegunent, son of the Narragansett sunksquaw Quaiapen and nephew of Ninigret, the Niantic-Narragansett sachem. Ninigret had a history of trying to foment a multitribal resistance movement against the English, largely because of their protection of the Mohegans, while Quaiapen would emerge as one of the Narragansetts’ most militant leaders during King Philip’s War. Namumpum’s efforts to forge an anticolonial Wampanoag-Narragansett alliance harked back to her father Corbitant’s campaign in the 1620s to break with Ousamequin and rally the two tribes against Plymouth. Pumetacom did not explain this context to Plymouth because he was only opposed to Namumpum overstepping him rather than to the coalition building itself. For once, English authorities should have been more alarmed than they were. Their only response was to affirm Pumetacom’s primacy in foreign affairs while urging him to return some mishoons he had seized from the Narragansetts when they were visiting Pocasset.10
The rapid pace of Pumetacom’s land sales to Plymouth during these years probably had something to do with his outreach to the Narragansetts insofar as the payments in trade goods and wampum enabled him to bestow impressive gifts as part of this diplomacy, while keeping the English happy decreased the chances of them probing too deeply into his business. In 1664 the sachem sold William Benton of Rhode Island the area of Mattapoisett Neck (or Gardiner’s Neck) near Montaup, thereby violating his earlier pledge to deal only with Plymouth. Just four years later he ceded his English neighbors an eight-mile-square tract northwest of Swansea, followed by another sale of all the meadowland just north of Montaup. This was not a case of the sachem going rogue against the will of his people. A number of these deals recorded the explicit consent of a roster of his counselors and other leading men. Nevertheless, each transaction drew English settlements closer to Montaup and, with them, a rise in the sort of disputes over territory, resources, and jurisdiction that fueled Pumetacom’s effort to organize Indians against the colonies in the first place.11
Pumetacom’s mark, March 16, 1668. Courtesy John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
Pumetacom (or Metacom, Metacomet, Philip, King Philip) put his mark to a number of land deeds between 1662 and 1675, which, combined with the sales of Ousamequin, Wamsutta, and other sachem contemporaries, effectively surrounded his base of Montaup with English claims and towns. It appears that Pumetacom used a number of these sales to acquire wampum for intertribal diplomacy and munitions for his warriors, all in anticipation of a war with the English that he hoped would return this land to his people.
To say that Pumetacom had popular support for his sales does not mean that there was no opposition. A number of Wampanoag people voiced their concern that he had lost control over the process. In 1668 Tom Pawpawino, Tom Aththowannomit, and Tom Mothohtom of Mattapoisett Neck begged Plymouth not to accept any offers for their territory, “for we are afraid that our sachem will dispose of our land without our consent, which is a very unjust thing.” This petition might have been the impetus for Pumetacom’s own undated request for Plymouth not to pressure him for any new cessions for seven years. Yet that was asking too much. Even Roger Williams wondered aloud whether land lust was becoming the puritans’ false idol, writing, “God Land will be (as now is) as great with us English as God Gold was with the Spaniards.” Accordingly, it took only until 1669 for Pumetacom to alienate another five hundred acres just above Mattapoisett Neck to the town of Swansea. Then in 1672 he transferred a four-mile-square tract south of Taunton, and another three-by-four-mile parcel southwest of the Three Mile River. In barely a decade, he had literally surrounded his home base of Montaup with English land claims.12
Pumetacom was hardly the only sachem involved in runaway land deals with the English, which would have come as cold comfort to the Wampanoag people. Up the Taunton River, the sachems Josias Wampatuck, Pamantaquash, and his son, Tispaquin, were also alienating the timbered, well-watered lands in and around Titicut and Nemasket, bringing the English ever closer to the Wampanoags of Assawompset Pond. The colonists were so relentless that Pamantaquash, in an effort to protect his successors, petitioned “that neither Tispaquin nor his son be pressed to sell lands by any English or others whatsoever.” Once again, it was wishful thinking. During the 1660s and 1670s, colonists also prevailed on the local sachems of Buzzards Bay to make nine different sales of lands along the very estuaries that the Wampanoags needed for their subsistence. Meanwhile, similar patterns were playing out among the Nipmucs to the north and the Narragansetts to the west. Increasingly, nowhere was safe from English swarming.13
Indian resentment over these developments naturally extended from the colonists’ growing unwillingness to abide by the letter or spirit of joint-use agreements. Imagine the Natives’ frustration when they returned to spring fish runs to find the streams dammed up or fenced off, or cattle grazing on their planting fields, or woods they depended on for fuel and building materials cut down, or their dogs killed for threatening the colonists’ sheep. Such incidents mounted with every passing year without resolution. For instance, on March 3, 1663, a group of Englishmen in Taunton acknowledged that some of their townsmen had violated the “long practiced” custom of tolerating the Indians planting their corn in the “remote parts of the community … to their [the Indians’] great impoverishing.” The following year, Pumetacom accused the English of Rehoboth with felling his timber. Yet the greatest strain on joint use was English livestock or, more specifically, the unwillingness of colonists to fence in their animals. Practically every year complaints poured into Plymouth from every corner of Wampanoag country about English cattle, horses, and pigs devouring the people’s crops. Sometimes the animals even swam around fences the Wampanoags had built across peninsular necks of land to keep them out. When the Wampanoags killed the trespassing animals, or when their dogs attacked them, or when livestock wandered into Indian deer traps, colonists sued for damages. It made Wampanoags wonder why the English valued Indian property so little yet expected their own wandering four-legged private property claims to carry such weight.14
Indians found it even more astonishing that when they experimented with raising livestock, especially pigs, the English refused to share pastureland and obstructed Indian competitors from selling pork on colonial markets, contrary to their admonitions that Indians should live in a “civilized” manner. In 1669 the Rhode Island town of Portsmouth even demanded Pumetacom to remove pigs he had put to feed on the aptly named Hog Island, a literal stone’s throw from the sachem’s village, arguing that he had already sold that exclusive right to the Englishman Richard Smith. The plague of English beasts was so bad that John Eliot considered it to be one of the greatest obstacles to propagating Christianity because it left Indians infuriated toward colonists and unwilling to live near their towns. Yet for some English that was precisely the point: the more difficult it became for Wampanoags to share space with colonial neighbors, the more likely they were to withdraw and sell the contested territory.15
When English herds failed to drive Indians off the land, some colonists turned to outright fraud, occasionally with an assist from rogue Wampanoags who wanted to line their own pockets and grab power. Pocasset was a prime target for these schemes by virtue of its rich meadowlands and location within the contested jurisdictional claims of Rhode Island and Plymouth. After Namumpum’s 1662 protest of Wamsutta’s sale of part of her territory, Captain John Sanford and John Archer of Portsmouth convinced her to sign over the land to them, purportedly so they could guard it until the emergency had passed and then return the title to her. Obviously, she had faith in these men. Yet they were unworthy of her trust. Sometime before October 1667, Archer tried to use Namumpum’s temporary grant to erect a homestead at Pocasset, which the Wampanoags could only see as a first step toward an influx of English claimants. Before matters went too far, “several Indians” confronted Archer, “abusing of him by dispossessing him of his house and otherwise at Pocasset.” A subsequent investigation uncovered that Archer was the culprit rather than the victim. Portsmouth residents Richard and Mary Sisson testified that Archer had confessed to them that his deed “was a cheat … to deceive Namumpum of her land.” He and Sanford had even admitted that their swindle left them “troubled in conscience,” though not enough to abandon it.16
This kind of treachery cut the Wampanoags deep. Namumpum’s daughter, Weetama (whose name Namumpum would later adopt, probably after her daughter’s death), and her husband, Josias Wampatuck, complained that Namumpum had followed Sanford’s advice because she trusted that he was her “great and good friend.” She did not mean to sell her land, quite the contrary. She only wanted “to preserve her interest from Alexander’s [Wamsutta’s] intrusion [or sale of her land].” Making this betrayal worse was that Namumpum’s followers had already “spared so much lands” to the English “upon reasonable terms,” to the point of having “straightened ourselves to the great discontentment of our people … and now to be defrauded and defeated of the small portion we have reserved for us and our people to subsist on, will lose something more than we shall be able to bear.” Citing their ignorance of English law, Weetama and Wampatuck asked Plymouth to appoint an attorney for them and hand over all documents relating to their lands. They no longer had any confidence in their own English contacts because those who claimed “to be most faithful … prove most treacherous and deceitful.” Statements of this sort were becoming so frequent as to constitute a running Wampanoag critique of English colonialism.17
The Wampanoags’ recognition that their sachems’ sale of land was as much a part of the problem as the English purchase of it led growing numbers of them to demand individual title or communal reservations. One of the first instances of this sort arose in 1666 when a man named Watuchpoo complained that his local sachem, Quatchatisset, had sold territory along Buzzards Bay belonging to generations of Watuchpoo’s family. Pumetacom got involved as paramount sachem and proposed that colonists should treat Quatchatisset’s sale as just a preliminary step toward bargaining with common Indians still living on the tract, whom he considered still possessed of the right to decide whether to stay or go. On the Vineyard, this kind of two-tiered system of land claims became standardized because everyday Wampanoags simply refused to vacate the area their sachems had alienated. English land speculators and Wampanoag sachems alike had to concede that the “sachem rights” of Indian leaders and the “planting rights” of regular people were two different things that colonists would have to purchase in separate transactions in order to secure clear title. Wampanoags elsewhere applied this principle selectively, but widely enough for cases to be found in a variety of locales. At Titicut, opposition to the land sales of Josiah Chickataubut was so great that he granted his followers three miles on the east side of the upper Taunton River to enjoy “peaceably … without interruption from me,” which his son, Josias Wampatuck (Weetama’s husband), confirmed with the promise that this tract would belong to the “Titicut Indians and their Indian heirs forever.” Titicut thus became the only Indian reservation in the region that was not a praying town. The people living there, like a growing number of Natives across southern New England, would need it.18
MURDEROUS
Jurisdictional fights went hand in hand with English expansion as colonial courts tried to establish their authority over a growing range of Indian-colonial and even Indian-Indian affairs. During most of Ousamequin’s lifetime, the colonies tended to address such issues through the sachems in diplomatic settings rather than courtrooms. Yet, during Wamsutta’s and Pumetacom’s tenures as sachem, all the New England colonies began empowering their magistrates to seize Indians with overdue debts to English creditors. In 1659 Rhode Island went so far as to authorize the sale of Indians into overseas slavery when they were convicted of theft or property damage and failed to pay restitution, fines, and court costs, particularly when they had demonstrated “insolency” to English officers. No colonial magistrates ever dared attempt to wield this power, but courts in Providence and Newport did try sixteen cases involving fourteen Indians over the next decade. Plymouth also became more assertive in extending its jurisdiction over Indians. In 1665 it established “select courts” in every town with the power to adjudicate minor civil suits and issues of Indian-English property damage. Its colony-level courts also began aggressively prosecuting Indians accused of thievery and assault and meting out harsh punishments, including whipping, branding, and forced servitude. Such measures would have been unthinkable in Ousamequin’s day.19
As one would expect, murder cases were particularly charged, given the high stakes and wide cultural gulf between Wampanoag and English ways of handling this crime. Colonists insisted on carrying out capital execution against the guilty individual, consistent with English legal tradition. By contrast, Indian custom was for the leaders of the perpetrator and victim to negotiate compensation or punishment or else leave it to the victim’s kin to exact revenge against the murderer’s kin, thereby putting pressure on families to keep their members in line. Generally, sachems appear to have been ambivalent about the English insistence on punishing Indians who committed murder against colonists within colonial towns. Perhaps it seemed pointless to contend over this issue, given how easy Indians found it to break out of jail and escape to safety, which seems to have been common. The greater question was whether the English were so bold as to try to assert their jurisdiction over murders between Indians, particularly those committed in colonial settlements.20
Two such cases arose in 1674. The first, in Plymouth, involved two obscure figures and ended without incident after an English jury returned a verdict of minor manslaughter and set the accused free. The second case was potentially more combustible because it concerned intertribal as well as Indian-colonial affairs. In it, a Wampanoag known as Quaoganit/Poagonit or Old Man stood accused of killing his Narragansett wife and her Narragansett lover in or around Providence. The Narragansetts demanded the execution of both Quaoganit and an additional Wampanoag chosen at random, asserting that it was their custom to have “two to put to death for the said two killed, and out of Philip’s men, for that the murdered were related to the Narragansetts, and the murderer to Philip.” English authorities would consent only to the punishment of the murderer himself. Ultimately, something of a compromise was reached. A Rhode Island jury, which remarkably included three Indians, found Quaoganit guilty and ordered him executed by hanging. After carrying out the sentence, the colony delivered the body to the Narragansetts as a self-preserving courtesy. Yet it was not enough to satisfy the Narragansetts, who “showed great indignation” that “before the English came, they could do what they wished with Philip’s [Pumetacom’s] party.” We are left to imagine Pumetacom’s reaction. The colonies’ assertion of the right to try and execute his followers did not bode well for the sanctity of any sachem’s jurisdiction or any Indian’s life in the face of ongoing English expansion.21
There were other festering intercultural tensions that rose to the surface during Quaoganit’s trial. The case prompted Rhode Island’s General Assembly to debate whether juries should consider an Indian’s testimony as legitimate as an Englishman’s. Ultimately, it ruled that Indian witnesses were permissible in this instance, but only because it concerned Indians alone, not colonists. Indians were privy to such discussions and easily grasped the bigotry behind them, as evident in Native people’s complaints that “the English slighted their witnessing” just because they were Indians. The distrust cut both ways. Colonial authorities found it difficult to prosecute Quaoganit because “Indians have been reluctant to come in and give testimony in legal proceedings for fear of being arrested themselves.” Indian indebtedness to English creditors had become so widespread, and the colonies’ prosecution of it had grown so aggressive, that Indians feared the English would exploit every opportunity to seize them and force them into servitude. Clearly, Ousamequin’s alliance with the English was in shambles.22
A TIME OF CRISIS, NOT PEACE
Pumetacom faced a herculean task to transform Indian fears of the English menace into a broad resistance movement. First there was the challenge of convincing rival sachems that their shared grievances against the English were more important than their many differences. Beyond that, he had to forge a consensus on what to do about it and foster trust that everyone would stay true to the end. The grinding diplomacy involved him sponsoring conferences at which he would present gifts to visiting sachems and their counselors to open their ears to his message. Everyone would feast, smoke, and dance together in the name of peace and solidarity. Then they would speak their minds about his proposals. Afterward, the delegates would disband to consult with their home communities before returning for additional rounds of talks. Yet, before they did, Pumetacom, even as he advocated for the common cause, would warn that any sachem who did not go along with his plans risked losing their supporters and tributaries to him.
This threat applied particularly to the Narragansetts, given their shared border and history with the Wampanoags. Pumetacom signaled as much in 1666 by making a “promise” to support Pomham, sachem of the Narragansetts’ tribute-paying community of Shawomet, if the Narragansetts tried to force him off his lands. Shawomet fell within the once contested Narragansett-Wampanoag border region from which Canonicus had driven Ousamequin after the epidemic of 1616–19. In subsequent years, the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomo had given the English permission to form the town of Warwick in Shawomet territory despite Pomham’s vocal opposition. Subsequent fights between the Shawomets and neighboring colonists over joint use and jurisdiction grew so disruptive by the 1660s that the Narragansett sachems Pessacus and Ninigret demanded Pomham and his followers to hand over all of Warwick Neck to the English. Enter Pumetacom, who had a rival claimant to the Shawomet sachemship, named Nawwushawsuck, living under his protection. Pumetacom contended that a united Pokanoket and Shawomet “will be too great a party against those two [Narragansett] sachems.” In this, Pumetacom was doing more than just asserting his ancestral rights to the area. He was setting himself up as a protector of aggrieved Narragansett tributaries and, ultimately, recruiting them against the English.23
That same year, Pumetacom also lent his support to the Montauketts and Shinnecocks of Long Island in their long-running campaign to free themselves from the Narragansetts’ tributary demands. The offer came, fascinatingly enough, in an English-language letter written by Pumetacom’s Harvard-educated Wampanoag scribe, John Sassamon, and addressed to the chief officer of the colonial town of Southampton. The sachem wanted the English of that community to warn “your neighbors, the Indians” that Ninigret was about to launch another raid against them. “Tell them from me,” he implored, “that they shall not pay any more tribute to Ninigret.” He counseled the Long Island Indians to fortify themselves against the assault and, when it finally came, to call for his aid through the Manisses of Block Island. The Manisses, he explained, would not “anyway align with Ninigret, for they are as I am.” In other words, they were already a part of his growing coalition of disaffected Narragansett tributaries. Pumetacom wanted the English to think that he was only trying to buy time for Native Long Islanders so they could present their case to royal officials. The real point, though, was to bring the Montauketts and Shinnecocks into his fold. Pointedly, Pumetacom emphasized that the Long Island Indians would not just be substituting one oppressor for another by aligning with him. What made his leadership appealing was his promise that “as for myself, I will not lay my hands upon you.”24
Pumetacom finally provoked a Narragansett response when he convinced the Nipmucs of Quantisset to cut off their tribute payments to Quaiapen, Ninigret’s sister. Quaiapen had just succeeded her deceased husband, Mixano, as leader of a series of Narragansett villages near what is now Exeter, Rhode Island. Unwilling to brook Pumetacom challenging her authority so soon after it began, she responded furiously with a September 1667 raid against Quantisset in which her men destroyed houses and plundered wealth. It was telling of the shadowy, multilateral politics of this contest that Quantisset appealed to Pumetacom for help, only to have Ninigret divert him by stoking a crisis between him and the English. Pumetacom, Ninigret charged, had been conspiring with the French and Dutch to go to war against the New England colonies, “and so not only to recover their lands sold to the English, but to enrich themselves with [the colonists’] goods.” This rumor was especially alarming because England was in the midst of a naval conflict with the Dutch during which it had conquered New Netherland. Additionally, a land war was brewing in Europe pitting England against France and the Dutch Provinces over the fate of the Spanish Netherlands. Though it might seem inconceivable today that Pumetacom was engaged in diplomacy with the French, whose colony on the St. Lawrence River was hundreds of miles away, the notion was not far-fetched given the vastness of the Wampanoags’ networks, which included Abenaki allies of New France. The Dutch threat also rang true, for Dutch colonists remained the majority in the English colony of New York that had replaced New Netherland. Dutch naval forces would even briefly retake the colony in 1673 before finally handing it back to the English. If Ninigret contrived this story, he had done his research first.25
Pumetacom’s letter to the Indians of Long Island, May 7, 1666. Colonial State Papers, 1/20, No. 68, National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew.
As an English-language letter dictated by an Indian leader to an Indian scribe, then sent from one Indian community to another, this document is one of a kind. Pumetacom had his fateful interpreter, John Sassamon, address it to the English of Long Island to deliver to the Long Island Indians to encourage them to reject the tributary demands of Ninigret of the Narragansetts. It appears to have been part of his effort to raise a coalition of indigenous allies for an anticolonial resistance.
English sources on the ground also perceived that the Wampanoags were up to something. Thomas Wilmot of Seekonk informed Rhode Island’s assembly that “the deportments of the Indians, especially of Philip … giveth great occasion of suspicion of them, and their treacherous design.” When Plymouth sent Josiah Winslow to Pokanoket to investigate, he found “the first reporter” of the rumor “to be one of Philip the said sachem’s men, who freely and boldly did avouch it to his [Pumetacom’s] face.” It was enough to make colonial New Englanders fear that they were “like to be hazarded by the invasion of the common enemy, or by treachery from amongst the Indians.” Rhode Island went so far as to order any Indians in English settlements to be disarmed, arrested, and interrogated. Clearly, many colonists believed the threat was real.26
Pumetacom, of course, claimed total surprise and innocence and even volunteered to surrender his weapons until the matter could be resolved. He pledged to have always upheld his father’s “faithfulness to the English, by whom he and his progenitors had been preserved from being ruined by the Narragansetts.” If such spurious rumors destroyed his people’s historic relationship with Plymouth, it would be “little less than death to him, gladding his enemies, grieving and weakening his friends.” Why, he asked, would he ever ally with England’s imperial rivals? He claimed that they were his foes, too, citing an incident from a year earlier in which a French or Dutch ship seized eighteen of “his people” from the Vineyard. (A French man-of-war had, in fact, been spotted off the island in July 1666.) The entire war scare, he charged, was nothing more than a scheme by Ninigret, who had hired a Wampanoag agent to make the false accusation before Winslow’s party. Roger Williams himself testified that the accuser was known to have been “a very vile fellow formerly.” Pumetacom even produced a letter from an unnamed Narragansett sachem backing his version of events, though under direct questioning that source “utterly disclaimed that he had or could say any such thing concerning Ninigret.” Plymouth finally concluded that the crisis was a mere result of Pumetacom’s “tongue … running out” rather than an actual plot. Despite issuing the sachem a fine of forty pounds to pay for the expedition to Pokanoket and resolving to “keep a watchful eye over him,” the colony decided “to continue terms of love and amity.”27
That love and amity was sorely tested yet again in 1669 as rumors flew back and forth that the Pequot sachem, Robin Cassacinamon, had hosted a great dance attended by long-standing archrivals Ninigret and Uncas. Their joint presence startled the English because, as the interpreter Thomas Stanton put it, they had “durst not look at each upon [the] other this 20 years but at the muzzle of a gun or the pile of an arrow.” By this, he meant that they had always been enemies in a fight for tributaries and revenge over Uncas’s execution of Miantonomo. Even Cassacinamon had often been at odds with Ninigret and Uncas in his quest to secure the Pequots’ independence from Narragansett and Mohegan dominance. Now, for some reason unknown to the English, these three rivals were meeting face-to-face. More alarming still, the dance reportedly included “northern Indians” associated with the French. Other rumors had Ninigret, once the scourge of the Long Island Indians, suddenly presenting those people with gifts of guns and wampum to recruit them into an alliance with “as many of the Indians as he could in all parts” to “kill all the English … that they might get their lands from the English.” Ninigret’s daughter, Weunquesh, was said to be traveling throughout the country, inviting Indian delegates to attend another great meeting, “the greatest dance … that ever was in the Narragansett.” Rhode Island heard that seven of Pumetacom’s “ancient men,” including counselors, had been with Ninigret for nine or ten days contriving “a plot or combination among the Indians to cut off the English.” With so many former enemies gathering presumably to discuss their common interests and common threats, Stanton proclaimed, “It’s not far from as great a hazard as ever New England yet saw.”28
For weeks, war seemed imminent until Ninigret went before a Rhode Island investigatory committee and convinced it that the colonies had overreacted. The sachem claimed that his dances had been merely ceremonial. Most of his “Wampanoag” visitors were not Wampanoag at all but his own men who had just been living temporarily at Pocasset (which, for some reason, the English did not think to question). The rest were simply craftsmen teaching the Narragansetts how to “make bark houses.” He attributed the damaging rumors to a Long Island Indian who wanted to scuttle Ninigret’s real purpose, which, he stressed, was to promote peace between former enemies. The panic was just a misinterpretation of innocuous activities. Rhode Island agreed, finding “no just ground of jealousy as to [Ninigret’s] intentions,” a conclusion that was probably motivated by a desire to keep the United Colonies from sending an army through Providence and Warwick into Narragansett country, but also convincing enough to defuse the crisis.29
Ninigret might have been so persuasive because he had given up hope for a successful multitribal resistance after being rebuffed by the Mohawks, who were indispensable. Not only did the Mohawks boast the most formidable warriors in the region, but they controlled access to Albany, easily the most important market in the region for guns and ammunition. Additionally, if coastal peoples rose against the English, they would need the Mohawks to open their territory west of the Hudson River to serve as a refuge for their noncombatants. During this war scare, Pequot leaders had even intimated “that they must go to the Mohawks’ country to live for they had so much trouble here that they was wearied out with it.” For years, Ninigret had cultivated the Mohawks as the Narragansetts’ counterweight to Uncas’s alliance with the English. He knew better than anyone that, without the Mohawks, even the united tribes of southern New England had little chance of rolling back colonial expansion.30
Yet 1669 was a bad time for such entreaties to the Mohawks. English New York had recently replaced Dutch New Netherland as the Mohawks’ main supplier of European goods, including arms. The Mohawks could not risk alienating its new trade partner by warring against its countrymen in New England, particularly at a time when the tribe was already overstretched, battling with New France and Indian enemies. Thus, when Connecticut’s John Mason, a thirty-year veteran of Indian-colonial affairs, wrote the Mohawks urging them to keep out of the anticolonial plot, they responded favorably that they would not “meddle with these [matters], they say, for fear [of] displeasing the English.” Rather, they pledged, “they will prove our real friends.” This answer, which the coastal sachems certainly received as well, was a devastating blow to the prospects of New England Indian unity. With it, Ninigret abandoned the cause, and over the next several years his and Pumetacom’s men engaged in several clashes, even amid Wampanoag rapprochement with the rest of the Narragansetts. No one explained the source of this trouble, but there is a likely explanation: Ninigret, who had always seen the Mohawks as the key to a large-scale Indian resistance to the colonies, had rejected Pumetacom’s league in the absence of Mohawk support.31
Nevertheless, events in 1671 suggest that Pumetacom was far from abandoning his vision. In a vague incident that February or March, a group of Wampanoags nearly came to blows with neighboring English over the colonists’ trespassing animals. When Pumetacom ignored a summons from Plymouth to explain, the colony dispatched Hugh Cole to investigate, only for him to stumble on a community seemingly preparing for war. Twenty or thirty Wampanoag men brandishing clubs intercepted Cole at the entrance of Mount Hope Neck, declaring that they would resist any English attempt to arrest their people for trial. Cole did not doubt their resolve, particularly after entering Pumetacom’s village to find the people busy making bows, arrows, and spears and putting their firearms in working order. There were also foreign Indians present who struck Cole as “better armed than I have usually seen them.” Suffice it to say, Cole beat a hasty retreat back to English territory without fulfilling his mission. A few days later, Pumetacom and an estimated sixty gunmen marched to the outskirts of Swansea, then turned back without doing any damage. Their unmistakable point was that they were ready to fight if the English continued to engross what little land they had left, torment them with wandering livestock, and then threaten them with invasion, fines, and even capital execution when they defended themselves. The sachem and his people had reached the limits of their patience.32
Over the next month, English authorities received a string of startling reports that the Wampanoags and Narragansetts were preparing jointly for war against the colonies. The Massachusetts governor, Richard Bellingham, heard that “multitudes” of armed Natives were marshaling, “instigated by the devil and evil-minded English and French.” The word from Rhode Island was that both tribes were in “warlike preparations” and threatening their colonial neighbors by asking “why they came from their own country and wished them to be gone [or else] they would flay them as they do cattle.” Pumetacom and “the squaw sachem,” probably Weetamoo (who had just changed her name from Namumpum), were said to have delivered five baskets of wampum to the Narragansetts to secure an alliance. Amid these “continuous rumors of invasions from the Indians,” the town of Newport once again declared a round-the-clock state of defense. Newporters lived in such close proximity to the Wampanoags and Narragansetts that they could literally witness the back-and-forth mishoon traffic and even shoreline assemblies that informed these startling reports.33
Plymouth called for a treaty conference to be held in Taunton on April 10, 1671, claiming that it hoped to avert violence, though doubtless it was also motivated by the prospect of fining Pumetacom to wrest another land cession from him. The meeting was nearly sabotaged, however, by an explosive rumor that two hundred Indians planned to capture Governor Prince and his men en route and hold them for ransom. Josiah Winslow’s understanding—and he did not name his source—was that Indian forces had already assembled for this mission, when “one wiser than the rest” convinced the others to call it off because the English “were now awakened.” The Wampanoags reportedly decided that it was better to let the colonies “grow secure again” before reviving such ambitious plans. Another informant claimed that nothing but “foul weather” had prevented the Indians from striking, which would have been followed by “the cutting off of Taunton, Swansea, and Seekonk.”34
Under such circumstances, the summit barely took place as scheduled, and though no minutes survive, there are enough surviving anecdotes to glean that the English dictated the terms rather than negotiated them, which probably means that they were accompanied by a formidable guard. How else could they have induced Pumetacom and his counselors to concede “that they had been in preparation for war against us … not grounded upon any injury sustained from us, nor provocation given by us, but from their own naughty hearts.” There is no other conceivable scenario under which the sachem would have “agreed” to the humiliating provision to turn over all his people’s firearms, including those he and his men had carried to Taunton. He made clear that he considered the treaty illegitimate by ignoring the terms once he was back within the safe confines of Montaup. By early May, he had relinquished only an additional sixteen or seventeen muskets, some of them unserviceable, even though, according to Governor Prince, “it is well known that he had at least six score [120]” back in March. Prince believed not only that the Wampanoags withheld their guns but that they continued to stockpile them, “not to defend themselves against Mohawks but probably against us if we should attempt to take in their arms.”35
Pumetacom tried to deflect the demands of colonial authorities by assisting them in the arrest of a Nipmuc named Ascook, charged with the killing of an Englishman on the road outside Dedham, Massachusetts. Springfield’s John Pynchon praised Pumetacom for how “industriously active” he was “to discover the murderer,” though he was not blind to the fact that the sachem cooperated “so [the colonists’] jealousy may be removed from him.” As for Ascook, a Massachusetts court ordered him hanged and decapitated, his head left to rot publicly in Boston. Ironically, this execution, carried out with Pumetacom’s assistance, would earn the English more Native enemies and Pumetacom more allies. When the time for war finally came, Ascook’s father, Matoonas, constable of the Nipmuc praying town of Pakachoog, would lead his community in arms against the people who had executed his son, not the sachem who aided them under duress.36
Pumetacom cooperated in the Ascook case because he feared that his dispute with the English was building toward a catastrophic showdown in which Plymouth would attempt to seize his people’s guns by force. Indeed, the colonists’ fear of Indian conspiracy, encouraged by their desire to engross what was left of the mainland Wampanoags’ rich territory, led them to demand the other Taunton River sachemships to disarm, too, based on the charge that they had been “in compliance with Philip in his late plot.” In June, Winslow and his troops successfully forced the issue at Nemasket and Assawompset. Then, for good measure, Plymouth issued William, son of the Assawompset sachem, Tispaquin, a harsh fine for stealing and branding a mare belonging to a colonist of Duxbury, knowing that Tispaquin would have to sell yet more land to pay it. Still, Sakonnet and Pokanoket withheld their guns, which Governor Prince took as a sign that “there is scarce any of them, but would imbrue their hands in the English blood.” He was not going to wait to see if he was correct.37
Soon Awashonks capitulated, faced as she was with the prospect of an impending attack from an expedition of 102 Englishmen and 40 Natives (probably Cape Wampanoags) raised by Plymouth. On July 24, she signed articles of agreement in which she submitted herself and, conspicuously, her Sakonnet lands to Plymouth’s authority. These concessions might have rested in the misplaced hope that the colony would fulfill its reciprocal pledge to protect her office and territory from “such as will not be governed by her.” Yet Plymouth’s decision to levy her a fifty-pound fine for its trouble and expense, which she could only pay through a land cession, revealed that its promises were empty. So did Plymouth’s warning that it retained the option to confiscate Sakonnet territory to pay for the subdual of “incendiaries” who refused the order to disarm. Given that this mission would be led by such figures as Josiah Winslow and Constant Southworth, who were among the colony’s most aggressive land speculators, Awashonks had no cause to doubt that the colony meant what it said on that point.38
While Awashonks folded, Pumetacom raised the stakes, “making unkind carriages toward us,” as Plymouth put it, and hosting “many strange Indians,” especially “diverse Sakonnet Indians, professed enemies to this colony.” In late August, Plymouth issued another summons for the sachem to appear before the General Court, threatening his “reducement by force,” but tried to ease the affront by including his old friend James Brown (son of John) on the team that delivered the message. It did not work. The party arrived at Montaup just as the people were concluding a dance at which alcohol had been flowing freely, including into Pumetacom’s cup. With tempers high and inhibitions low, Brown and Pumetacom exchanged heated words, during which the sachem knocked the hat from Brown’s head as if to demand the same respect due to an English elite. (Brown, as a Quaker, did not doff his hat for any man.) Talks resumed the next day once everyone had cooled off and sobered up, but Pumetacom still rejected Plymouth’s order. Instead, he had decided to accept a last-minute invitation from the praying town of Natick and John Eliot to present his quarrel with Plymouth to the judgment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In fact, the sachem planned to head north immediately to state his case. Meanwhile, Plymouth entered a discussion with Rhode Island about mutually coordinating their defenses, citing “more than ordinary causes to suspect and believe the Indians are treacherously inclined against the English in general.” Plymouth viewed Pumetacom’s appeal to Massachusetts as part of that treachery.39
Pumetacom arrived in Boston dressed to impress and hopeful that he had seized the upper hand. Accompanied by a large, well-armed entourage, he marched through town awing colonial onlookers with his “coat … and buckskins set thick with these [wampum] beads in pleasant wild works [designs] and a broad belt of the same … valued at twenty pounds.” His speech also commanded English respect. After hearing his version of events, Massachusetts admonished Plymouth for its presumption in demanding an independent sachem to answer its summons. Pumetacom was not Plymouth’s subject, the Bay colony lectured, but rather the leader of a separate polity under a shared king. True, he had formerly made pledges of fidelity, but those were no more than “a neighborly and friendly correspondency,” not an acquiescence to Plymouth’s rule over him. Furthermore, Boston warned that “the sword once drawn & dipped in blood may make him as independent upon you as you are upon him.”40
Buoyed by his success in Boston, Pumetacom accepted Plymouth’s suggestion to submit their dispute to a panel of arbitrators from Massachusetts and Connecticut and even to hold the proceedings in Plymouth. He had no idea that Plymouth had already fixed the outcome by convincing Massachusetts authorities that their earlier ruling in Pumetacom’s favor had been wrong on its merits and shortsighted when it came to the colonies’ shared interest to reduce Indian power. Expecting a fair hearing, the sachem showed up on September 29, took his seat, and only then realized that he had walked into a diplomatic ambush. There, on the site of the former Wampanoag village of Patuxet, where Ousamequin had first welcomed the English, the purportedly neutral judges ganged up on their “common enemy,” as Plymouth referred to him, and forced him to yield in nearly every particular. The subsequent “agreement” declared that Pumetacom had indeed been plotting with the colonies’ “professed enemies” and stockpiling arms. Furthermore, he had treated Plymouth’s ambassadors with “great incivility” and tried to alienate fellow English colonies from one another. If he did not “humble himself” and “amend his ways,” the English as a whole would make him “smart for it,” which he did not doubt, given the presence of colonial soldiers. With no good options, Pumetacom did the only thing he could and formally submitted his people not only to the king of England but Plymouth, too. He must have known that this concession gave Plymouth a basis to justify even more aggressive assertions of its jurisdiction and land claims in the future. He probably reasoned that it hardly mattered because Plymouth was going to do whatever it wanted regardless of principle. This affair, like colonization as a whole, was little more than crass exercise of power, not a morality play.41
The other clauses of this settlement proved as much. The sachem pledged to pay an unprecedentedly large fine of one hundred pounds, requiring still more land cessions of the sort that had produced the war scare in the first place. To represent his submission, he would deliver five wolves’ heads to Plymouth each year, if it was possible to get them. The Wampanoags would have found this condition especially offensive, inasmuch as their very name for “wolf” was closely related to their term for “cousin.” The English also stipulated that Pumetacom would refer all future grievances with Plymouth to Plymouth’s own judgment and never go to war or sell land without Plymouth’s approval. Strictly enforced, these provisions would reduce Pumetacom from a paramount sachem to a minor official in the colonial bureaucracy with nominal rule over a nearly landless people. Yet, with a proverbial gun to his head, he and six counselors gritted their teeth and applied their marks to a supposed treaty of peace that might as well have been a declaration of war.42
The spate of Wampanoag land sales following this submission was as much a sign of the people’s determination to resist as it was of Plymouth’s heightened sense of dominance. On the one hand, these transfers were a direct result of Wampanoags’ need to pay fines Plymouth had levied against them for the war scare. On the other hand, it is likely that Pumetacom and his allies used the extra proceeds to replace guns confiscated by the English and to acquire wampum for use in intertribal diplomacy, all with an aim toward building a coalition to fight the colonies and take back the ceded acreage. Long gone were the days of Ousamequin, when Wampanoags could imagine such transactions as part and parcel of an alliance of friendship between equals, and an integration of the English into Wampanoag society.
The cessions came fast and furious, often under dubious circumstances. In 1672 Pumetacom mortgaged twelve square miles of land to Taunton to pay off a debt of 83 pounds, followed quickly by the sale of a four-mile-square tract nearby for the sum of 143 pounds. From Sakonnet, Awashonks nearly kept pace, including a 1674 transaction in which she, her husband, Wawweeyowitt, and their son, Samponock, alienated “all their land” to Newport’s James Barker Jr. and Caleb Carr Jr. Yet, whereas Pumetacom’s conveyances were to Plymouth’s advantage, Awashonks’s deals with Rhode Islanders once again threatened the old colony’s claims. In response, Plymouth threw its support to a bid by Awashonks’s son, Mamaneway, to replace his mother as sachem, contrary to its earlier vow to support her rule. Not coincidentally, Mamaneway promptly led a group of relatives in selling Sakonnet Neck to Plymouth’s Constant Southworth. He also began attending the missionary John Cotton Jr.’s sermons at Acushnet, as if to give his and the colony’s crooked dealing the color of Christian righteousness.43
This case was but one of several examples that, if the English had their way, sachems like Mamaneway would become mere colonial placemen to sell all the land from under feet of their followers. Awashonks, though, refused to surrender without a fight and led her people in physically preventing Mamaneway from conducting a ceremonial transfer of the land to Plymouth. Lacking his mother’s following, but enjoying the support of the English, Mameneway could only answer with a lawsuit filed in Plymouth. The fact that the court accepted his motion and awarded him five pounds, legal costs, and confirmation of his title was a direct blow against the Wampanoags’ rights to choose their own leaders and protect their lands. Awashonks’s appeal of the ruling was still in progress when King Philip’s War made the issue moot. In the interim, however, the Englishman Benjamin Church had moved onto Sakonnet Neck in the expectation that soon other colonists would join him. The threat of English encroachment was growing so intense that, in May 1675, Awashonks’s neighbor, Weetamoo, said that she was willing to make do with less land as long as it was bounded by rivers (she probably had the Acoaxet, Assonet, and Taunton Rivers in mind), “by which they have great dependence of fish.” Yet she did not know how to secure even this meager claim because she and her people had “great fear of oppression from the English” and no faith that any of them would respect her title.44
When the English were not propping up sachem pretenders in order to secure land cessions, they turned to lawsuits. In Assawompset, the sachem Tispaquin’s generous grants to the English were not enough to protect his son, William, from charges filed in 1672 by Josiah Winslow for nonpayment of a horse and other goods in the amount of twenty-four pounds. William, having no means to pay, mortgaged a triangular piece of land measuring three miles on the east and four miles on the west. It was probably carved out of the tract that Tispaquin’s predecessor, Pamantaquash, had tried to cordon off from sale to the English. There was only one problem with Winslow’s extortionist scheme: Plymouth law did not permit mortgages to pay off debts. Yet Winslow dispensed with this inconvenience the next year by ascending to the governorship of the colony and having the General Court alter the law in his favor. It was insulting enough to the Wampanoags when everyday colonists behaved like land sharks. Now the very occupant of the seat once held by Ousamequin’s allies John Carver and William Bradford was displaying such aggression, despite being the scion of Ousamequin’s other primary English friend, Edward Winslow. It would only have deepened the Wampanoags’ bitterness that Josiah Winslow had also been at the center of Wamsutta’s controversial arrest and death. An enemy of the Wampanoags was now at Plymouth’s helm. For the sons of men Ousamequin had once trusted to stoop so low symbolized that the Wampanoag-English alliance had truly become meaningless.45
Pumetacom was the greatest target of Plymouth’s relentless efforts to degrade the Wampanoags under the color of law. In 1673 John Allen and Hugh Cole of Swansea slapped Pumetacom with a two-hundred-pound lawsuit for failing to come into court and testify to the legitimacy of a land deed. The very next year, Peter Talman also sued the sachem for a whopping eight hundred pounds, claiming that he had forfeited a 1661 bond for land in what is now the town of Tiverton, Rhode Island. Clearly the English viewed Pumetacom’s formal subjection to Plymouth in 1671 as a fresh opportunity to harass him and his people through the courts, with the apparent goal of reducing them to utter landlessness. None of this legal bullying had anything to do with justice and certainly not gratitude.46
Josiah Winslow, 1651. Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Josiah Winslow (1628–1680) served as Plymouth’s major-commander of military forces in 1656, commissioner to the United Colonies of New England from 1658 to 1672, and governor from 1673 until 1680. With the English population and power growing, he turned away from his father, Edward’s, approach of sensitive Indian diplomacy in favor of strong-arm and underhanded tactics to engross Wampanoag land and subject the Wampanoags to English authority. His aggression contributed mightily to the outbreak of King Philip’s War.
SHIFTING LOYALTIES
The war scares not only inflamed relations between the mainland Wampanoags and the English but widened already deep fault lines between Christian Wampanoags of the Cape and islands and the Taunton River sachemships under Pumetacom. During the mid-1660s, Christian Wampanoags used the occasion of Ousamequin’s death and his sons’ supposed plotting to lobby their English missionaries for help in establishing a Christian magistracy. Their intention, it would appear, was to distance themselves from the impending conflagration on the mainland. The process began in 1665 when the Mashpee Wampanoags appointed six men—Papmunnuck, Keencomsett, Watanamatucke, Nanquidnumacke, Kanoonus, and Mocrust—to serve alongside Richard Bourne as justices and constables. Plymouth approved but was at pains to emphasize “that what homage accustomed legally due to any superior sachem be not hereby infringed.” Time would prove these words to be hollow. A similar reform took place on the Vineyard six years later, in 1671, amid the most serious war scare to date. The Christian Wampanoags and Thomas Mayhew Sr. arranged to have each Native community elect three Christian magistrates to hold formal courts presided over by the local sachem, who would exercise a veto over all decisions. Wampanoags would run the system, but for the meantime they agreed to consult with Mayhew on their choice of officers. Nantucket Wampanoags would adopt parallel measures over the next couple of years. It was precisely as Ousamequin had once feared.47
These steps took the Christian Wampanoags out of Pokanoket’s orbit and halfway into the English fold. On the Vineyard and Nantucket, Wampanoags who appealed the decisions of their own courts had their cases heard by English magistrates, who could rule according to their own definitions of justice. The greater concern for Pumetacom was that if the Christian Indians appealed their disagreements to English courts, they would no longer need him to arbitrate stubborn local cases, thus reducing his authority and tribute. Pumetacom was still fulfilling this role as late as 1665. That year, English authorities charged a group of Nantucket Wampanoags with murdering the passengers of a shipwreck, the victims of which included the Vineyard Wampanoag Joel Hiacommes, who had been on his way back home to pay a visit before his graduation ceremony from Harvard. Faced with the impossible question of whether to turn over the accused to colonial justice, the Nantucket sachem, Nickanoose, headed for the mainland to seek the advice of his “head sachem,” Pumetacom. Afterward, Pumetacom himself appeared on Nantucket, probably to lend his assent to the hanging of the killers while ensuring that the judicial executions stopped there. This is the only case of its kind on record because the trend was toward Christian Wampanoags phasing Pumetacom out of their business entirely. In July 1674, for instance, two Wampanoags from Potonumecut on the outer Cape brought a local disagreement to Plymouth’s courts instead of Pokanoket. No wonder Indian opponents of Christianity charged that “English men have invented these stories to amaze us and fear us out of our old customs, and bring us to stand in awe of them, that they might wipe us off our lands, and drive us into corners, to see new ways and living and new places, too.” From this perspective, the missions were inseparable from the colonists’ appropriation of Wampanoag land, jurisdictions, and livelihoods, which is to say, the English subjugation of Native people.48
Christian Wampanoags did not see it that way. They called themselves “praying Indians” in reference to their distinctive way of petitioning God and Jesus, but the “praying” part of that label appears to have meant more to them than “Indians.” After all, Indian was every bit as novel an identity as Christian. Eventually, Indian identity would become more salient through colonists’ treatment of indigenous people as a single group and the rallying cries of Native militants. In the meantime, however, kinship networks and the face-to-face community carried far more weight in the decisions of praying Indians than any nascent sense of race or even of tribe. Finding Christianity to be a source of spiritual inspiration, comfort, practical skills, English alliance, and especially local solidarity, that is where they turned. Furthermore, they used the faith to reinvigorate old regional ties through back-and-forth visiting for ordinations, baptisms, celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, public confessions, and a host of other religious events. One such “church gathering” at Mashpee in 1670 brought together Indian and English Christians from throughout the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Massachusetts praying towns for a day of fasting and prayer, the installation of church officers, and public agreement to a church covenant of rules and responsibilities. The participants, Indians and English alike, referred to each other as brothers and sisters. They thought they had a rich future together.49
For Pokanoket, that was part of the problem, and it was only growing worse as missionaries targeted even more mainland Wampanoag and Nipmuc communities. By the 1660s the vigorous evangelical work of Cape and island Wampanoags had reached Pokanoket’s threshold. This campaign was given additional impetus by the relocation of the Wampanoag-speaking missionary John Cotton Jr. from Martha’s Vineyard to Plymouth, from which he preached itinerantly as far west as Tispaquin’s and Awashonks’s territory. Joining him in the field was the Harvard-educated Indian John Sassamon, who set up ministry in Nemakset in the early 1670s after years of working as an interpreter and scribe for Pumetacom. The great question was whether the mission would also make inroads among the heavily populated Wampanoag communities of Pokanoket and Pocasset at the Taunton River’s mouth.50
Under Wamsutta, the answer was clearly no. Early on, John Eliot could see that “young Ousamequin [referring to Wamsutta] is an enemy of praying to God, and the old man [Ousamequin himself] too wise [discerning] to look after it.” Yet Eliot was hopeful, probably naively, that Pumetacom might prove more receptive. In the winter of 1663–64, Pumetacom, probably at Sassamon’s urging, solicited Eliot for Wampanoag-language books so he could begin learning to read. Eliot’s son, John Jr., himself an aspiring missionary, used this entreaty as a wedge for him and the praying Indians to evangelize the sachem. John Eliot appears to have drawn on their conversations for a series of semifictional dialogues that he published to raise support for the mission and help train missionaries. In them, Pumetacom explains that his main reservations about Christianity are that “you praying Indians do reject your sachems and refuse to pay them tribute,” that non-Christians would abandon him for other sachems if he took up the faith, and that church discipline obviated his authority. As late as 1674, the Massachusetts missionary Daniel Gookin wrote that “some of [Pumetacom’s] chief men, as I hear, stand well inclined to hear the gospel,” but they and the sachem himself were held back by Pumetacom’s “sensual and carnal lusts.”51
It is no easier to read Pumetacom’s ambivalent weighing of Christianity from this historical distance than it was for his English contemporaries. Perhaps it was a half-hearted gesture to maintain his weakening hold over the Cape and island Wampanoags. It is possible, too, that he was genuinely curious about a religious movement that had galvanized a sizable number of his people. Probably it was camouflage for his anticolonial diplomacy. Whatever the source of his interest, it came to an abrupt end following the 1671 war scare in which the Natick praying Indians’ offer of arbitration led him into Plymouth’s clutches and the Christian Wampanoags showed their determination to continue their experiment in coexistence with the English.
The 1671 crisis exposed the long-developing rift between Cape Cod and island Wampanoags who had allied with the English through Christianity and Taunton River Wampanoags who still followed Pumetacom. In early June, representatives from the Cape Wampanoag communities of Paomet, Nauset, Satucket, Nobscusset, Monomoyick, Wequaquet, and Mattakeesett appeared in Plymouth to express their fidelity to the colony and promise to reveal anything they heard about conspiracies against the English. Clearly, they wanted to reduce the possibility of the English implicating them in the plot. They and the English were of one Christian blood, they contended, and should settle their differences like men, not wolves. Over the next two months, other communities followed, with forty-five men from Mashpee and other inner Cape sachemships signing articles of friendship in early July, and the Vineyard sachems pledging to Thomas Mayhew “to subject themselves to his majesty, and to fight against his enemies and the enemies of his subjects if called thereto.” Despite their own grievances about English encroachment, the people of the Cape and islands had no desire to end their Christian alliance with the colonies, certainly not based on the politics of mainland communities from whom they had been drifting away for decades. If Pumetacom was going to recruit support for his resistance against the English, he would have to look elsewhere.52
INTERPRETING THE MARCH TO WAR
The interpreter and preacher John Sassamon, like his counterparts on the Cape and islands, was determined to protect himself and his family from the mounting threats of English expansion and war. On March 1, 1674, amid yet another scheme by Plymouth to wrest land from Tispaquin, Sassamon prevailed on the sachem to grant him, his daughter Assaweta (or Betty), and her husband, Felix, a tract at Assawompset Pond. Part of that area is known today as Betty’s Neck. On the surface there was nothing exceptional about this grant. Over the years it had grown increasingly common for sachems to distribute private parcels of land to their followers to get them to concede to other cessions to the English. Yet that does not appear to have been the case in this instance, and Sassamon was no mere follower. Harvard educated and thus trained for the ministry, he probably had a greater command of the English language and literacy than any other mainland Wampanoag. During the 1660s, his talents had earned him the influential job as interpreter and scribe for Wamsutta and then Pumetacom, a position that involved him in numerous land transactions. He had also played a role in Pumetacom’s short-lived interest in Christianity. Ultimately, however, Sassamon and Pumetacom had a falling-out. Sassamon’s evangelizing might have had something to do with it, particularly after the failed intervention of the Natick praying Indians during the crisis of 1671. More certain is that Pumetacom came to view Sassamon as a spy for the English. While tensions in 1671 were at their height, Pumetacom and his new interpreter, Tom, had railed against Sassamon “for reporting that any Narragansett sachems were there” in Wampanoag country. Around this same time, Sassamon was also involved in a vaguely understood incident in which Pumetacom instructed him to draw up a writing to protect the sachem’s remaining land, only to have Sassamon falsely set off some of it for himself. When “it came to be known” to Pumetacom, Sassamon “then … run away from him.” No wonder Pumetacom considered Christian Indians to be lying double-crossers.53
Perhaps Sassamon deserved this characterization. Perhaps he was duplicitous, traitorous, and a fellow worshipper with the English at the altar of God Land. Maybe he manufactured crises between the Wampanoags and the English, attempting, like Tisquantum in the 1620s, to carve out an influential role for himself. Yet there is another possibility. Consider that Sassamon, from his close-up vantage of Pumetacom’s diplomacy, believed war was coming and therefore did what he could to avert it and to protect himself and his kin in the event that his efforts failed. This scenario appears to have been the case in 1674. Less than a year after his receipt of the Assawompset deed, Sassamon made a winter’s visit to the Plymouth governor, Josiah Winslow, to warn that “Philip … was endeavoring to engage all the sachems round about in a war,” a concern shared by colonists living near Montaup. It was the last time the English saw Sassamon alive. His next appearance was as a corpse, discovered by Indians beneath the ice of Assawompset Pond. (His hat, musket, and a brace of ducks were left sitting nearby.) Soon the colony had Indian testimony that some of Pumetacom’s men had strangled Sassamon and staged the crime scene to make it appear that he drowned by accident. Instead of letting the matter go as a purely Indian concern, Plymouth decided to test the limits of its authority in Wampanoag country. It pushed the issue to the breaking point.54
Plymouth’s response in the late spring and summer of 1675, involving the arrest, trial, and execution of three Wampanoags for the murder of Sassamon in Wampanoag territory, and the colony’s seeming resolve to implicate Pumetacom, was the final insult that drove the mainland Wampanoags to war. Certainly we should not have it bear anywhere near the full weight for hostilities, because, as the pattern of the 1660s and 1670s illustrates, the English would have contrived another way to incite the Wampanoags eventually. The power of the Sassamon affair was that it crystallized the long deterioration of the Wampanoag-Plymouth alliance from one of mutual protection to systematic English exploitation of their supposed Indian friends. For decades, the English had by hook and by crook grasped at the Wampanoags’ lands, tributary networks, cultural autonomy, and jurisdiction. English disrespect for Wampanoag sovereignty had grown so brazen that Plymouth now felt entitled to judge and capitally execute Wampanoags for purported incidents that involved only Wampanoags on Wampanoag land. The apparent next step was to arrest Pumetacom himself, or at least to fine him once again, in order to cajole him into ceding what little land and authority he had left, as the English had done to him four years earlier. Unless the Wampanoags were willing to accept this debasement, there was nothing left for them to do but fight.55
The story told here is an interpretation, not a simple relation of facts. It could be and has been told differently. Some historians have concluded that the war scares, and perhaps even the Sassamon “murder,” were figments of the English imagination. From this perspective, the colonists’ view of themselves as civilized Christians and Indians as savage pagans, combined with their ambitions to seize Indian territory and reduce the Indians to subservience, made them quick to see threats in innocuous Indian behaviors and eager to stamp out the supposed danger and collect the spoils.56
This line of argument is unconvincing on several counts. For one, it portrays southern New England Indians as passive victims who were remarkably willing to suffer colonial aggression without defending themselves. Expanding our view continentally shows that multitribal leagues in defense of Indian sovereignty occurred practically everywhere that Indians faced pressures similar to those in New England, producing such conflicts as Kieft’s War (1640–45), the Pueblo Revolt (1680), the Tuscarora War (1711–15), the Yamasee War (1715–16), and Pontiac’s War (1763–64), among others. Dismissing the Wampanoag war scares as self-interested English overreactions also discounts the pattern of Natives making verbal and military threats in the face of English provocations. It paints English colonial society with too broad a brush, assuming that the tangled interests of men who simultaneously speculated in Indian land and held war-making governmental offices drove their entire society. It is certainly true that colonists generally lusted after Indian land, but those living cheek by jowl with the Wampanoags and Narragansetts, such as the residents of Rehoboth, Swansea, Taunton, Portsmouth, Providence, and Newport, also understood the grave danger to their lives and estates of goading their Indian neighbors to violence. Most of them were not eager for war. Yes, the English commonly viewed Indians as deceitful savages, but some of the same figures who sounded the alarms of Indian plotting also knew the Wampanoags as fellow traders and diplomats and possessed a basic familiarity with the Wampanoag language and Wampanoag customs. They could tell when their indigenous neighbors were acting out of the ordinary. Some of them lived so close to Indian communities, or interacted with Indians so regularly, that they could see it with their own eyes, and in Wampanoag eyes.
The thrust of the narration here rests on the premises that Native people collectively grasped the danger that colonial society posed to them and began the slow process of making common cause to address those common threats. This interpretation is a likely case, not a foolproof one. Given the fraught nature of surviving historical sources, it cannot be otherwise. Yet, from this historian’s perspective, Pumetacom was trying to put together a multitribal resistance to colonization during the 1660s and 1670s, building on the diplomacy of his brother Wamsutta and sister-in-law, Namumpum/Weetamoo. Viewed through this lens, colonial accusations that Pumetacom was plotting were less self-interested excuses for an armed land grab, though they certainly doubled as that, than reflections of Indian political and military pushback against clear and present dangers. As Pumetacom himself would explain on the eve of the war bearing his English name, he and his kind had reached the limits of their patience with ungrateful colonists who had betrayed their trust and generosity.