GUNS

IN DECEMBER 1620, their ship sat at anchor off of Cape Cod. On 5 December, Francis Billington was playing with a gun—“a fowling piece”—and gunpowder in the tiny ship’s cabin where his family resided. The teenager started a fire, which blazed “within four feet of the bed between the Decks, and many flints and Iron things about the Cabin, and many people about the fire, and yet By Gods mercy no harm done.” In relating this brief tale, the unnamed writer mentioned God’s mercy twice. Fires aboard wooden sailing vessels had potentially devastating consequences, and Francis’s play might have destroyed the entire ship. The writer clearly imagined the nearby bedding catching easily, as well as an explosion, caused by the gunpowder, picking up the “many flints and Iron things” to hurl them like shrapnel, killing those nearby. With or without an explosion, once the wooden ship caught fire, the passengers and crew would have had little recourse but to flee. The boy, this author declared, was foolish. At some time—whether then or on an earlier occasion—Francis “in his Fathers absence had got Gun-powder, and had shot off a piece or two, and made squibs,” a sort of firecracker. Once again playing with gunpowder and fire, he might have killed most of the people—both passengers and crew—who had journeyed on the Mayflower.¹ Only ten passengers and a few sailors were then ashore—men exploring in search of a settlement site. Had the ship blown up, everyone else might have died. Certainly, all their supplies would have been destroyed. At the time of this incident, no one in England knew where the Mayflower had touched land; so those on shore would have been stranded, hoping someone would happen upon them. Theirs might have been a second lost colony.

This near disaster might have ended Plymouth Plantation before a settlement site had even been selected. If, as Americans are taught, Plymouth was a founding moment in U.S. history, Francis’s foolishness launched a long history of accidents and near-accidents prompted by children playing with guns. This story also shows that guns came to North American shores with the first English people. Settlers brought both fowling pieces and more substantial muskets, intending to use them for hunting and for fighting. The settlers felt the fear of death or destruction from fire and powder continually, and it was only a few months later that numerous ill people resting in a newly built house barely escaped being “blown up with powder” after a thatch roof caught fire. The “house was as full of beds as they could lie one by another, and their Muskets charged, but blessed be to God there was no harm done.”² As always, observers noted God’s role in protecting them.

In Plymouth, guns took on many meanings: they divided Native and English technologies of both warfare and hunting (although not for long); they had ceremonial purposes; and they became a source of contention among various parties. The first arguments for gun control would be articulated in Plymouth, too, as William Bradford and others tried in vain to keep guns out of Native hands. While the hapless Francis Billington escaped becoming the first young person to kill inadvertently with a gun in New England, his father’s relationship to firearms resulted in far worse: he would be the first convicted murderer in New Plymouth (as the plantation was sometimes called). A decade after his son almost destroyed the Mayflower, John Billington shot and killed John Newcomen “about a former quarrel.” Tried by a jury, Billington died by hanging.³

The people of Plymouth considered guns necessary tools for their undertaking. When Edward Winslow compiled a list of items to bring to a new plantation, he included firearms, either a musket or fowling piece, along with much powder and shot. He also noted that a heavy gun would work, since most of the shooting was done from “Stands,” a stationary position (as when shooting at a flock of birds).⁴ Incidental mentions make clear that the settlers realized the need even before Winslow wrote. A few days before young Billington found his father’s piece and gunpowder, a whale came to float for a long while near the ship. A couple of men prepared to shoot at it “to see whether she would stir or no.” The first man encountered trouble: “his Musket flew in pieces, both stock and barrel.” This mishap saved the whale, who “gave a snuff” and swam away. For the writer, the fate of the man holding the malfunctioning weapon was more important; he declared “thanks be to God, neither he nor any man else was hurt with it, though many were there about.”⁵ The early records make numerous references to fowling, as the Plymouth men were best prepared to take birds of all the varied wildlife that the environment periodically offered. When the settlers finally made contact with the local residents, two men went out to parlay with a group they saw at a distance. Between them, Stephen Hopkins and Miles Standish carried only one gun, which they laid down as a sign of peaceful intent.⁶ Guns, although considered necessary, were not all that numerous, as various mentions of pairs of men with just one between them made apparent.⁷

Plymouth men also used guns for ceremonial purposes. When Standish and Master Williamson went out to meet Massasoit and accompany the Wampanoag leader to the site of the treaty negotiations, they greeted him “with half a dozen Musketeers,” who then escorted the “king” to the rendezvous point.⁸ When Conbatant, another Native leader, questioned Winslow about the practice of saluting dignitaries with shots fired or setting armed men to escort them, he explained that such treatment was considered an “honorable and respective [meaning respectful] entertainment.” Unimpressed, Conbatant declared his dislike of the practice.⁹ Not only Native leaders were honored thus. According to a 1627 visitor, the governor and the preacher (who at this time would have been William Brewster, the ruling elder who led services in the absence of a minister) routinely processed to Sabbath meeting with an honor guard—“each with his musket or firelock.” On the governor’s “left hand, the captain with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand; and so they march in good order.” Once in the meeting place, “each sets his arms down near him.” The Dutch visitor who penned this description approvingly observed, “Thus they are constantly on guard day and night.”¹⁰ The practice kept the community leaders safe, but it was also, as Winslow noted, “respective,” or conveying respect.

In other cases, as Conbatant suspected, guns could be used to humiliate. After John Oldham returned from banishment to taunt the Plymouth authorities, Bradford reported, “They committed him” to prison until “he was tamer, and then appointed a guard of musketeers which he was to pass through, and everyone was ordered to give him a thump on the breech with the butt of his musket, and then he was conveyed to the waterside where a boat was ready to carry him away.”¹¹ This ritual—forcing a man to run the gauntlet while being struck with the butt of many muskets—was intended to cause pain as well as humiliation.

Guns also symbolized European warfare in the interchange with Native America. When the settlement received a snakeskin wrapped around arrows, Tisquantum explained that it was a threatening gesture. The settlers responded by wrapping powder and shot in a skin and sending it back. In this exchange, arrows symbolized indigenous military might, while powder and shot did the same for the English.¹²

Plymouth men believed their guns would keep them safe from the Natives, intimidating them at least and also checking any inclination toward violence. Initially the new arrivals and the local residents kept one another at arm’s length, observing and assessing. At one point, feeling threatened by a contingent of Native men who made noise nearby, Plymouth men “shouted all together two several times, and shot off a couple of muskets and so returned: this we did that they might see we were not afraid of them nor discouraged.”¹³ While it could be doubted that the settlers accomplished much with this show of bravado, it does seem that Native people were hesitant at first around their guns. When Quaddequina came to visit along with a “troup” of men, “he was very fearful of our pieces, and made signs of dislike, that they should be carried away, whereupon Commandment was given, they should be laid away.”¹⁴ On another occasion, Tisquantum urged the men to discharge their guns to impress a group of Native peoples. Later, when Native men traveling with English men expressed fear of meeting their enemies the Narragansetts, the English “bid them not to fear; for though they were twenty, we two alone would care for them.”¹⁵ This scenario, in which Native people looked to better-armed European allies for protection from traditional enemies, suited the English sense that access to firearms ought to give them a decided advantage.

Yet the settlers very soon lost any advantage arising from their exclusive access to guns. With the newly arrived Europeans showing off their guns, Native peoples wanted to acquire them. The Plymouth authorities forbade trade in guns to indigenous residents, a policy that soon earned the backing of King James. The king issued a proclamation in 1622 against trading any “warlike weapons.” The royal proclamation enumerated the metal weaponry that distinguished Native from European tools of war, including swords and pikes as well as guns, along with the accoutrements necessary to firearms, including shot, match, and powder.¹⁶

This fanciful image depicts a group of armed English men guided by a Native man, which was created to illustrate a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem about Miles Standish. Every man in the party carries a gun, including Hobomok, whom Longfellow calls “a friend of the white man.” The image vastly overstates the availability of guns.

The efforts of authorities near and far made little difference, as many Europeans (whether fishermen or traders) offered guns for sale. Sometime Plymouth resident Phineas Pratt later described the small and ill-fated settlement at Wessagussett, in which the starving men received offers of corn from the Natives if only they would trade away their firearms.¹⁷ Bradford wrote, both in his manuscript history and in various letters, a series of blistering attacks on this trade. He attributed the expansion of gun-wielding Indians to “the baseness of sundry unworthy persons, both English, Dutch and French.”¹⁸ Most aggravating were the English men who set up nearby settlements and began trading guns. With a rising competition for furs along the New England coast, indigenous hunters soon learned not to settle for the “trifles” that they had originally accepted and began demanding guns instead. Thomas Morton, a trader, reputedly taught Native hunters to use the firearms, which they then employed in bringing in more pelts to his outpost at Mount Wollaston.¹⁹

It would not be long before Native people near Plymouth obtained firearms. In 1621, when the Plymouth people negotiated terms of a treaty with Massasoit, one clause had each side leaving their weapons aside when they visited the other. The wording made clear the sharp division between the long-time residents and the new arrivals on this score: “That when their men came to us, they should leave their Bows and Arrows behind them, as we should do our Pieces when we came to them.”²⁰ Yet, within a decade, the plan to keep firearms exclusively in English hands had entirely failed, and this neat division between Native men with “Bows and Arrows” and English men with “Pieces” had broken down.

Nothing better captured the failure of the Plymouth scheme to keep guns away from indigenous men than the story told of the assassination attempt on Edward Winslow. In 1641, John Winthrop recorded the tale in his journal. According to Winthrop, the Indians at Kennebec in Maine, learning of a general conspiracy planned against the English, decided to set it in motion by killing Winslow. Knowing he “did use to walk within the palisades” of the trading fort that Plymouth maintained there, a Native man “prepared his piece to shoot him, but as he was about it, Mr. Winslow not seeing him nor suspecting anything, but thinking he had walked enough, went suddenly into the house, and so God preserved him.”²¹ This story—whether true or not—revealed much. It indicated the importance of Winslow, a leading man in Plymouth but also a well-known figure throughout the region. He frequently negotiated with Native communities in New England or traveled back and forth across the Atlantic on business. The incident also made apparent the fact that a Native would-be assassin not only carried a firearm but was well practiced enough to target a man on a distant rampart. Only some twenty years before, Plymouth men, among them Winslow himself, had reassured their Native traveling companions that they had no need to fear their enemies because the guns that English men alone wielded would protect them.

Not only the early English arrivals but also later observers have placed great emphasis on the role of firearms technology in giving Europeans an advantage in the encounter with indigenous Americans. Yet firearms never granted vast benefit. The technology was cumbersome to use and did not routinely give those who had guns a clear edge over those skilled with other weapons. Guns, and especially the powder they required, carried their own dangers, as young Billington amply demonstrated aboard the Mayflower. In addition, firearms were, then as now, not easily kept out of the hands of those who wanted them. Whether for teenagers playing with them or indigenous would-be assassins aiming them at English leaders, guns were accessible. If the English gained any superiority from bringing this technology to Native shores, that advantage proved somewhat illusory.