For years Plymouth had heard rumours about an immense river stretching to the northern hunting grounds. Beginning on the Canadian border and emptying into Long Island Sound, it runs through five states, but in the seventeenth century its origins were known only to Indians and trappers. Edward’s ceaseless exploring meant that he was the first Englishman to see the 400-mile stretch of water called Quinetucket, ‘the long tidal river’ – Connecticut, as it became anglicised. His jerkin and breeches constantly wet from undergrowth and streams, he had pushed past foliage to be shown the great river, whose headwaters rise in a hidden lake.
By the early 1630s – thanks to Edward’s network of Indian friends – Plymouth had been contacted by a group of river Indians seeking protection against the most powerful tribe of the area, the Pequots, who had expelled them from their territories. The river Indians were probably linked to the Narragansetts of Rhode Island who wanted to disrupt the Pequot system of alliances with a tributary system of their own.
To have access to a new area held considerable attraction for Plymouth, whose trading posts in north-eastern Maine were coming to the end of their natural life because of competition. In the summer of 1632 the French raided the Penobscot trading house and carried off a very valuable quantity of furs. They claimed the territory as part of Acadia in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, signed that year, which returned control of the French colonies to France after the British had seized them three years earlier.
Edward and his brother John continued to have dealings with the Abenaki Indians on the Kennebec River valley for another twenty years, but the Connecticut River valley offered a chance to break away from an area which was becoming crowded. Plymouth was invited by local Indians to have a trading house there and help the Connecticut Indians to re-establish themselves. Edward led the expedition. He was in the mood for adventure and new vistas. Since around 1628 he had been farming land at Marshfield, twelve miles from Plymouth town. It lay north of Duxbury and he had plans to move there.
Unfortunately the invitation to trade had unwelcome consequences. The countryside seemed deserted but the river valley, which had huge agricultural potential as well as being a conduit to furs, was about to become a battleground for trade rivalries between not only the English and Dutch but also between the Narragansett Indians and Pequot Indians. The great river would be the scene of converging and conflicting designs as the English and Dutch competed to trade with Indians whose lives had been dramatically changed in so many ways by the coming of the Europeans. It would also be the site of a horrible war.
The rivalry was exacerbated by a relentless new smallpox epidemic in 1633, heralded by what Bradford described as ‘a great sort of flies, like (for bigness) to wasps, or bumble bees’. They came out of holes in the ground and were probably some kind of locust which stripped all green leaves from the trees. Plymouth’s Indian friends told them sickness would follow, and it did. What they did not appreciate was that this plague made not only the colonists ill, but it would go on to kill a staggering eighty per cent of the southern New England tribes in the next fifteen years. The Narragansetts had escaped the earlier plague which had depleted Massasoit’s men, which was how they had become his overlords. But now the Narragansetts and the Pequots suffered hideously. Vast numbers of Indians died and Bradford described how ‘they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering, and running one into another, their skin cleaving (by reason thereof) to the mats they lie on; when they turn them, a whole side will fly off at once’.
The Narragansetts’ chief Canonicus correctly attributed the coming of smallpox to the English, as did the Pequots, although he was thinking in terms of powerful magic or a manitou, rather than it being another of the many contagious European diseases to which the Indians had no immunity.
The net effect of disease was to increase pressures on the Indian leadership, which was already searching for responses to the English settlements. It made the tribes unsettled and insecure, as did the threat to their territories when the English and Dutch began to move into the valley. The Narragansetts were proprietorial about the lower reaches of the Connecticut River because the shells from which wampum was made proliferated there. Being the manufacturers of wampum made them the most wealthy and powerful tribe in New England. They were, as historian Karen Kupperman has described them, the ‘mintmasters of New England’. Just as the Europeans needed the Indians to reach the furs of the interior, the Indians needed European manufacturing skills: the use of iron tools had already speeded up the production of wampum unquantifiably.
Although the Narragansetts were the most numerous tribe, they were also the most peaceful and Canonicus was determined to keep relations with the English amicable. He spread the word of peace amongst the New England tribes who were his tributaries, partly because he realised that a struggle with the English would be unequal, and partly because he had the natural confidence of a member of the royal family of the area, and assumed that life would continue as it had for many centuries. The fact the Narragansetts escaped the first plague which hit Massasoit so badly was believed to be due to their superior priests’ burning ritual in a great temple hidden in the depths of their territories in Rhode Island.
However, the Pequots had become powerful middlemen, frequently insisting on a cut on transactions, to the Narragansetts’ indignation. Moreover, the 1633 epidemic made the Narragansetts less confident about their powwows’ magic as their numbers rapidly declined from over 30,000 to 4,000 in the next fifteen years.
In 1633 some Pequots spotted a group of Narragansetts tracking towards the new Dutch trading house north of Hartford: they took the quickest method of prevention and murdered two of them.
The Pequot attack on the Narragansetts was dealt with harshly by the Dutch traders. With no possibility of help from Holland thousands of miles away, these hard men living in the forest were not going to have the Pequots dictate who they traded with. The Narragansetts were especially valuable to them as the manufacturers of wampum.
The Dutch kidnapped the Pequot chief, Tatobem. Anguished and alarmed, the Pequots spent the equivalent of millions on wampum to pay the ransom on him. But the Dutch showed the utmost contempt for regional custom. They kept the ransom, handed up by the Indians from their canoes where they were patiently waiting their leader’s release. Then they threw out the dead body of the Pequots’ mighty chief.
Thanks to their good relations with Massasoit the Pilgrims had never experienced Indians on the warpath. But now blood called for blood.
Shortly afterwards a disreputable alcoholic English privateer trader named John Stone outrageously kidnapped two western Niantics – a tributary tribe of the Pequot – and forced them to show him the way to the Connecticut River. Unlike the Wampanoags and other coastal Indians, the Pequots were not used to differentiating between European nationalities and assumed that Stone was the same nationality as the Dutch murderers. They killed him in direct revenge for the murder of Tatobem. Stone was a drunken good-for-nothing, an adulterer and possibly a thief – but he came from Massachusetts, and his murder could not be allowed to pass.
Tatobem’s successor, Sassacus, attempted to placate the Bay with a huge gift of beaver and wampum. More importantly he offered access to Pequot areas of the Connecticut Valley, and his blessing to establish a plantation on Pequot land. The Pequots would thus have a good new defender against the Dutch, and indeed against the Narragansetts. But this was not part of the Bay’s plan. Winthrop insisted they would not be the Pequots’ protectors, though they would trade with them. To the Bay’s intense annoyance, meanwhile, the Pequots refused to hand over the murderers. Inconclusive negotiations proceeded between the Pequots and Massachusetts for two years. In the meantime, increasing numbers of English settling in Connecticut ramped up the unrest amongst both Narragansetts and Pequots. In today’s terms of immigration, the flood of English into the Connecticut valley was small, but it was threateningly large for the Indian tribes.
Into their hunting grounds came the settlers for Hooker’s new town at Hartford, as well as Plymouth’s trading house at Windsor under William Brewster’s son Jonathan. The Puritan rebels Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke had also planted a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Called Saybrook after its owners, the fort was designed and manned by a caustic but commonsensical engineer named Lion Gardiner who had worked for the House of Orange in the Thirty Years War.
* * *
In the mid-1630s, the new colonies of Massachusetts and its satellite Connecticut leapfrogged the longer-established but tiny Plymouth to become the dominant English power in the region. They changed the Indian/English dynamic. By the end of the 1620s, Plymouth’s population was officially estimated at 300; ten years later it was around 2,000, but Massachusetts had thousands more, and their colonists were very different people who saw things in categorical and absolute terms. For them the plague was another clear sign that their God wanted the country to be free of Indians.
Previous generations of historians assumed that the Pequots were attacking the English as a first act in a deliberate war. But modern authorities are now convinced that the Pequot attack was a knee-jerk reaction without thought of its long-term consequences. Official Pequot policy towards the Europeans was peaceful. The Indian tribes and their leaders were just as anxious to use the Europeans’ technology as the Europeans were anxious to gain access to the Indian fur trade. Pequot numbers meant they could have attacked various European trading posts at any time in the early 1630s, but it was not in their interest. Most historians today believe the Pequots could easily have destroyed the vulnerable new settlements on the Connecticut River had they wanted to, likewise Plymouth’s trading post. They did not.
The Pequots were legendarily fearsome warriors. The Massachusetts government, on the other hand, had only been in America for a few years and was ignorant of Indian behaviour, unlike Edward and the Plymouth colonists, who were well used to the manners of the New World. Aggressive behaviour did not necessarily mean the Indians had any intention of launching a full-scale war against the English. The male Indians were a sporting, heroic, warlike people who, like the Spartans, trained their young people to be fit for battle. Being on the warpath was an activity they enjoyed. Like their athletic competitions, it gave them an opportunity to demonstrate their powers.
Aggressive stand-offs were second nature to the Indians. As Roger Williams, who had studied the Indians and lived among them, put it, Canonicus, ‘the great Sachem of the Narragansetts’, and Massasoit, ‘the great Sachem on Plymouth side’, were ‘at deadly feud and enmity’. Williams’ need for shelter in the disputed lands meant he had been forced to win the ‘agreement of these two great mortal foes’.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony felt acutely vulnerable. Their settlers were surrounded by Indian tribes as far as the eye could see. Analytical and learned, the people of the Bay were not open to the wilderness. They were also determined to impose their own ideas on its inhabitants.
As Plymouth’s destiny became more closely linked with Massachusetts, the cordial relations between the Pilgrims and Indians came to an end. Even the weather seemed menacing. On 15 August 1635 there was a great storm followed by an eclipse of the moon. Thousands of trees were uprooted. The sea below Plymouth swelled to twenty feet high.
Into this highly combustible mix came the ambitious and opportunistic figure of Uncas, a minor chief of the small Mohegan tribe, a subset of the Pequots. For some time Uncas had had his eyes on Pequot territories. The other Indians considered him an upstart; he had been exiled for attempting to seize land from the Pequots, though he was married to the sister of the new Pequot leader Sassacus. The cool-headed Uncas saw his chance. Hungry for power, in effect a poor relation, he was looking to make trouble for the Pequots by stepping into their territories under English protection.
Uncas’s scheming helped destroy not only his kin, the Pequots, but the peaceful relations of the Narragansetts with the English. From 1637 onwards Uncas became the favoured Indian ally of the English. For the next forty years, in order to make himself the dominant Indian leader in New England, he created a situation of perpetual anxiety. Thanks to the stories of Narragansett treachery with which he perpetually provided the Massachusetts government, all tribes other than the Mohegans seemed dangerous. Only Uncas was to be trusted.
The Mohegans’ territories centred on a fort at Shantok, near the small settlement named Windsor which Jonathan Brewster had founded and which now had a number of settlers. Among them was a recently arrived soldier, Captain John Mason, who had eight years’ experience in the brutal Thirty Years War and was now a representative to the General Court. Mason was a man of energy and determination who had recently put paid to the depredations of a pirate named Dixie Bull on the north-east coast. The charismatic Uncas struck up a friendship with the mystical Jonathan Brewster, who had a passion for alchemy and astrology. Both Mason and Brewster found Uncas fascinating and intriguing. Perhaps they were flattered to be taken into his confidence; perhaps Brewster saw him as a mythical figure come to life. Mason became Uncas’s close friend and defender.
The Pequots had found many excuses as to why they had not handed over Stone’s murderers to Massachusetts, one of them being that the killers had recently died of smallpox. It was the perfidious Uncas who assured the Bay that the murderers were alive and the Massachusetts leaders became increasingly nervous about the Pequot obduracy. They now regarded their insubordination as dangerous, rather than merely a disagreement.
Uncas’s machinations were brilliantly successful. In June 1636 he told Jonathan Brewster that the Pequots were sure the English all along the river were going to attack them. Therefore the Pequots were going to attack first. This devastating news terrified the vulnerable new English communities in Connecticut. Intensely alarmed, Massachusetts summoned the Pequots to Boston. If Stone’s killers were not delivered, along with the wampum tribute, the colony would no longer be at peace with them. They would ‘revenge the blood of our countrymen as occasion shall serve’.
As bad luck had it, a few weeks later, there was another death and it was of grave moment to Jonathan Brewster: on 20 July Indians killed his wife Lucretia’s brother, John Oldham. Oldham had become wealthy and respectable. Settling at Watertown, he had been a representative to the General Court at Boston. He was on a trading voyage when Indians boarded his ship. They had cut off his head and were sawing at his hands and feet when an English scout discovered them. The deck of the ship was glistening with Oldham’s blood. It gave Uncas another perfect opportunity to raise the ante with his outraged friend Brewster. Oldham’s murder was a game changer as far as the Bay government was concerned, that they should be on their guard against the Indians.
In fact this murder had absolutely nothing to do with the Pequots. It was the work of the Block Island Indians, allies of the Narragansetts (and at their chiefs’ direction). The Narragansetts believed that Oldham was on a voyage to trade with the Pequots. The murder was not intended to bring on a war with the English. The Narragansett chief Canonicus and his stern, proud nephew Miantonomo wished for their friendship. A quick killing was to make it clear that they did not wish English traders to work with the Pequots, though they denied it to the Bay’s messengers – and were believed. The messengers observed in Canonicus – ‘the conqueror of all these parts’ – ‘much state, great command over his men: and marvellous wisdom in his answers’. Nevertheless the Boston leaders were becoming very jumpy about dealing with the Indians.
To Plymouth’s alarm the Massachusetts government decided their best hope of safety lay in pre-emptive action. In August, amidst an atmosphere of undisguised anxiety, an expedition under John Endecott, who had been so rough with Thomas Morton, set off to Block Island in Narragansett Bay. They were to retrieve Stone’s killers and put all the braves to death, sparing the women and children but burning their homes and fields. Then they were to go west along the coast to an important Pequot village near the Saybrook colony fort and demand tribute.
Unfortunately Endecott’s adventure had the worst outcome, without achieving very much. It put the Pequots into a fury as they were not guilty of Oldham’s murder. Their demand for a parley was rejected. The commander of Saybrook, Lion Gardiner, accurately forecast that the Pequots would now be buzzing like angry wasps round him in his exposed situation while Endecott retreated to the safety of Boston, a hundred miles away. For the whole of the next winter and early spring the Pequots not only imprisoned Gardiner and his fellow colonists in their fort but roamed up and down the Connecticut River attacking the new English towns, killing over thirty people.
The raids on remote settlements alarmed not only Lion Gardiner but other colonists now beginning to spread into outlying towns. The whole of New England felt in danger. The risks especially annoyed Plymouth – Edward wrote that the war ‘did not concern them, seeing the Pequots had not killed any of theirs’.
The Winslows were peculiarly vulnerable, exposed in the newly built town of Marshfield above Duxbury Bay. They had taken the decision to move permanently out of Plymouth that very year. Edward was entirely reliant on his good relations with Massasoit’s Wampanoags. To get to Plymouth and its protective fort, Edward and his family would have to go across the marshes or via Brant Rock out to sea. The Winslows’ new home was built on a peninsula at the edge of a salt meadow backing onto the northern part of Plymouth Bay. Although today the land is flat, then it was more of a bluff. Like those of other early settlers, the house was probably positioned for defensive purposes, especially in light of the rising tensions in New England. The creek which lay at the end of the garden was a navigable waterway, providing a sure escape for Edward, Susanna and their children: Edward’s two stepsons Resolved and Peregrine, and his three children, who included the eight-year-old Josiah and his five-year-old daughter Elizabeth.
There was a distinct possibility the besieged Saybrook garrison could starve to death. Those manning the fort built to house the flower of the exiled Puritan nobility watched as the bloated bodies of their fellow English floated by. Master John Tilly, the operator of a small sailing vessel, was murdered in a particularly grisly fashion. On his way back to Boston from Connecticut he made the mistake of stopping to spend a pleasant afternoon ‘afowling’ near Saybrook. As he ambled about with his piece resting on his shoulders, the Indians rose up from the long grass. He did not stand a chance. He uttered not a word as he was tied to a stake and flayed to death, having first had his fingers and toes cut off in front of Saybrook fort. The Indians admired his courage and shouted that he was a stout fellow.
* * *
In the late summer came news that the unthinkable had happened: the Pequots’ bitterest enemies, the Narragansetts, were thinking of joining their side. Roger Williams had been on Narragansett land at Providence for less than a year but he had become very close to their leadership. The magnificent Miantonomo frequently dropped in without warning, accompanied by his warriors, and spent the night. Such was Roger Williams’ popularity that chief Canonicus himself had measured out the width and depth of his trading house. In old age Williams remembered how ‘I never denied him [Canonicus] or Miantonomo whatever they desired of me as to goods or gifts or use of my boats or pinnace, and the travels of my own person, day and night’. He was often seen transporting fifty Narragansett warriors in his large canoe.
Williams was trusted to be the Narragansetts’ ‘councillor and secretary in all their wars’. Nothing could have been more crucial. When the English corn was ready for harvesting the Narragansetts told him ‘The Pequots and Narragansetts were at truce’. Miantonomo revealed that the Pequots ‘had laboured to persuade them that the English were minded to destroy all Indians’. If the Narragansetts did not join and fight with the Pequots, they would be attacked next.
Determined to stop this alliance, hardly telling his wife what he intended, Williams jumped into his canoe ‘to cut through a stormy wind, with great seas, every minute in hazard of life, to the sachem’s house’. He stayed three days and nights with Miantonomo, side by side with ambassadors from the Pequots whose hands and arms he thought ‘reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them on the Connecticut River, and from whom I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also’.
Williams’ invaluable diplomacy that long autumn and winter meant the Narragansetts were persuaded to remain neutral – though it was touch and go.
With the careless self-confidence of those who for centuries had been born to rule, the Narragansett leaders dismissed the Pequots’ warning. At this point the Narragansetts saw the English as people they could do business with, and assumed they would be able to carry on their usual way of life. It did not mean that they would not enforce their own punishments on English people not abiding by their laws – the Narragansetts were used to having their own way in their dominions.
Miantonomo was summoned to Boston, where, as he had done before, he made a speech protesting his love for the English and pledged loyalty to the Bay. As proof, he offered firstly a great deal of wampum, and secondly – the unambiguous sign of loyalty as far as the Narragansetts were concerned – a severed Pequot hand.
Had the Pequots and Narragansetts combined at that date, it certainly could have meant the end of the English colonies. The Pequots could raise around 4,000 warriors. The Narragansett numbers were declining because of the smallpox, but in 1636 they were still a tribe numbering nearly 30,000. At least a quarter were braves who could have fought. The combined English colonies’ official fighting force was under 200 soldiers. Even with Roger Williams’ urgent representations, the New England colonies stood in great danger in the winter and spring of 1637. Pequot ambassadors continued secretly to visit the Narragansetts to urge them to come over to their side, repeating their warnings: if they did not rise against the English now, they would be rooted out of their own land.
New England’s majestic rocky terrain could always assume a stern and threatening aspect. That spring it seemed additionally unsettling. Its high cliffs were the vantage points of hostile Indians. The settlers laboured under an oppressive mood. There was bitter friction between the supporters and enemies of Anne Hutchinson. Many began to question what had seemed the certainty of their mission. The continuous attacks from the Indians meant the settlements were on constant alert. It was no longer clear which Indians could really be trusted, other than Massasoit and Uncas.
* * *
When the siege of Saybrook was finally lifted after some difficulty in March 1637, the Pequots simply went upriver. To the colonists’ horror, on 23 April the riverside settlement of Wethersfield was attacked. Founded only three years before, it was at a fragile stage of development. A local tribe had been angered by Wethersfield occupying land they viewed as theirs. Wethersfield’s citizens had not realised the depths of their resentment and trusted them. Nor did they recognise that their Indian neighbours were affiliated to the Pequots. The settlers had gone out to their fields to work in their usual way. Indians rose up from the shadows, their tomahawks poised to scalp. They killed three women and six men and carried off two young girls. Escaping by water, their canoes with a hundred warriors and the captive girls passed Saybrook fort. The Indians shouted and jeered at the English; imitating the English Puritan custom they used the word ‘brother’ sarcastically.
Plymouth reluctantly came round to Winthrop’s warnings that the whole English presence in New England could be wiped out. The colonies were now in agreement that an ‘offensive and defensive’ war had to be made against the Pequots. By this stage, Massachusetts was not in a state to be very considered in its responses to the Indians. It now appeared to many colonists that Satan was operating against them, both inside the colony and in the wilderness surrounding them. The Anne Hutchinson affair had been the first sign. The presence of many soldiers who had been involved in the religious battles of the Thirty Years War in Europe exacerbated the colonists’ tendencies to encase the conflict with the Indians in eschatological terms, and allow it more menace than it deserved. The learned clergy searched Holy Writ for guidance. In sermons the Indians were portrayed as instruments of Satan and the difficulties the colonies were facing in terms of a struggle between God and Satan. The struggle against the Pequots became a holy war. The New England colonies officially declared war against them on 1 May.
On 10 May John Mason left Hartford, Connecticut at the head of the militia with sixty Mohegans from Uncas to rendezvous with John Underhill, coming from Boston. They were to meet in Pequot country. The path to the Pequot fort lay through Narragansett territory. It was a thorny wild landscape, covered with scrub and undergrowth and completely unknown to them. Mason was courteous and formal, apologising for coming armed onto Narragansett territory. But the Indians were angered, especially since English troops surrounded the Narragansetts’ fort for the night and said anyone passing in or out would be killed. The English were worried the Narragansetts might leak their plans to the Pequots.
The Narragansett leadership viewed an English army on their territory with dismay. Many years later Roger Williams would recall how ‘that old Prince Canonicus who was most shy of all English to his last breath’ had been wary about allowing any English to settle on his land. Williams was only welcomed by Canonicus because he was a friend and because he spared no cost in plying the Indians with gifts. Williams related how Canonicus was not only shy but canny: he was not to be stirred with money to sell his land to let in foreigners. It was true that he ‘received presents and gratuities many of me’ but it was not thousands of pounds or even tens of thousands that ‘could have bought of him an English entrance into this bay’.
Thanks to Williams, Miantonomo gave them crucial information. The key to success was to attack at night. It would take too long to reach the Pequots’ main fort, Weinshauks. They should head for the Indian fort at the mouth of the Mystic River, a rocky eminence dashed by the roaring surf about twenty miles from Saybrook. Miantonomo insisted the Pequot ‘women and children be spared’. There were rumoured to be about 700 Pequots in the fort. Miantonomo said rather slightingly he thought the English numbers ‘too weak to deal with the enemy, who were (he said) very great captains and men skilful in war’.
Sparing the women and children was the last thing on the colonists’ minds. After the attack on Wethersfield none of the English felt very merciful. Moreoever it was unclear how reliable the Narragansetts were – or indeed the Mohegans. Both tribes were rumoured to have Pequots in their ranks. The unaccustomed heat made several English soldiers faint. Although some of Miantonomo’s men accompanied the English towards the Pequot at Fort Mystic, the body of the Indian troops were the Mohegans.
The assault was an almost total success, from the Puritan point of view. A dog barked as they approached. The Indians woke up and shouted ‘Owanux! Owanux!’, meaning Englishmen. But it was too late. Creeping up to the top of the hill, the colonists rushed in and set fire to seventy wigwams. The whole fort started to blaze, in the process killing between 400 and 700 people. John Underhill reported ‘many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children, others forced out, and came in troops to the Indians, twenty, and thirty at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword’.
Mason and Underhill had worried unnecessarily about the untried nature of the militias. Their novice soldiers had been guided by God Himself. The Mohegans provided cover for the English to run back to their boats at Pequot harbour. Meanwhile the Narragansetts hung back and did not really fight – which made the English very suspicious.
In fact the Narragansetts were horrified by what they saw, and expressed the deepest disapproval of the mass murder of civilians. Underhill reported with some amazement how upset the Narragansetts were watching the Mystic Fort burn with the Pequots inside. They shouted, ‘It is naught, it is naught,’ meaning it is wicked or evil. Miantonomo told Underhill that he disapproved of ‘the manner of the Englishmen’s fight’ because it ‘slays too many men’. Despite their fondness for torture, low population levels meant the Indians did not go in for pitched battles. Mason described how Indian war confrontations were for display: ‘they might fight seven years and not kill seven men’ because they did not come near one another. They shot randomly with their arrows. ‘Then they gaze up in the sky to see where the Arrow falls, and not until it is fallen do they shoot again, this fight is more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies.’ Indian tactics were far closer to guerrilla warfare. Miantonomo might have suggested that they crept up on the Pequots, but he had not anticipated the wholesale slaughter and was amazed that they were not negotiated with, as was customary. All of this was outside the Narragansett rules of engagement.
In the Thirty Years War, it had been usual to burn fields and towns, and kill women and children. Now the slaughter of the Pequots had more than a whiff of genocide, even though the English had felt it was a question of ‘us’ or ‘them’. Captain Underhill was asked ‘why should you be so furious’ and ‘should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?’ Unsurprisingly his response was to seek biblical example: ‘sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents; sometimes the case alters: but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings…’
Via Roger Williams the Narragansetts sent messages urging clemency, but the remaining warriors of the vanquished Pequots were killed. A final group was rounded up in a swamp near the Quinnipiac River where the men made a last stand and the women and children surrendered. The leader of the Pequots had fled desperately to the Mohawks, but they killed him and sent his scalp to Connecticut to show their friendship was not with the defeated Pequots. Miantonomo expressly asked that the Pequots who surrendered should not be enslaved. But this was not to be: the women and children were rounded up and sold into slavery in the West Indies or became servants to the English. The name of the Pequots was officially extinguished.
Many historians have seen this as an alarming portent of a future where African Americans were enslaved for two hundred years. Although amongst the Indians slavery of defeated tribes was a consequence of battle – the victors enslaved the defeated – it had a pernicious effect between Indians and English. The Pequots were a different race and different civilisation from the English. Enslaving them entrenched differences between the two peoples, enhancing a superiority complex amongst the English. Indian leaders who were not Pequots took away the lesson that, deep down, the English were not their friends.
* * *
Miantonomo was immensely offended by the aftermath of the war. He had expected far greater rewards. The Narragansetts assumed they would take over much of the territory of the Pequots, and become the dominant tribe of the area. Thanks to Uncas this did not happen.
Uncas’s close relationship with John Mason lasted for the rest of their lives. The portly captain had warmed to him for fighting so bravely during the expedition. In return, Mason was rewarded by much Mohegan land in what had been Pequot territory. Though Mason’s troops became notorious for brutality to the Pequots his ties to the Mohegans were different. By 1671 he had tied up 20,000 acres for the Mohegans in such a way that he believed it could never be touched by other land-hungry English settlers.
After the war even Plymouth no longer acceded to what has been called ‘the Indians’ persistent expectations of equality and reciprocity’. Instead the English dictated. Miantonomo would later say, ‘Did friends ever deal so with friends?’
By the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 most of the Pequot territories went to the Connecticut river towns. Owing to the alliance between Uncas and Mason, the Mohegans received much of the Pequot territory east of the Connecticut River. The Narragansetts got nothing and were forbidden to go anywhere near the old Pequot area. The favourable treatment of the Mohegans was one more insult to Miantonomo. He regarded the Mohegans ‘but as a twig’ in comparison to the Narragansetts: ‘we are as a great tree,’ he said.
Hartford was isolated and had tremendous anxieties about its security. It remained distrustful of the Narragansetts. The fact that the Narragansetts had been in conference with the Pequots the whole winter of 1636–7 contrasted poorly with Uncas’s protestations of devotion. The famous diagram of the war to accompany John Underhill’s 1638 book Newes from America shows the fort surrounded by two rings of soldiers, the inner ring being English, the outer being the enthustiastic Mohegans. The Narragansetts were thought to have held back.
Miantonomo was now not permitted to wage war against Uncas without the permission of Massachusetts (which was an attack on the Narragansetts’ cultural traditions and way of life), while his tributary system was already threatened by Plymouth’s protection of the Wampanoags and the loss of the Block Islanders. It enhanced his sense of the shrinking population of the Narragansetts. Uncas, meanwhile, continued to profit from being the official frontier scout against the Narragansetts.
* * *
Letters to John Winthrop show that during the war Edward came to feel bound in what had become perceived as a Christian crusade. John Robinson had hoped for a native church. But Edward became increasingly orthodox under John Winthrop’s influence. It seems he began to adopt the learned Boston clergy’s hostile views, to believe that the testing of the ‘Saints for Christ’ in the wilderness was to be by the Indians.
The Pequots were the ‘accursed seeds of Canaan’, said one of Boston’s most celebrated new ministers, Richard Mather. Edward began to reinterpret relations with the Indians. After a winter of horror he commiserated with Winthrop for Massachusetts’ nightmare. He hoped God would ‘sanctify His hand and fit us for such trials as He hath appointed’. He signed his letter passionately. He was ‘yours till death’.
In the past Edward had been happy to engage in religious argument with the Indians. He had called their leaders ‘discreet, courteous, and humane in their carriages’, ‘scorning theft, lying and the like base dealings, and stand as much upon their reputation as any man’. He had reported back to England on correspondences between Christian worship and the Indians’ religion, and had been at some pains to describe their moral sense. Now a passion for typology (looking for events in the Old Testament which foretold events in the New, or indeed by extension in the present day), combined with sermons and very real danger, radicalised Edward, whose own certainties altered. There was an impatience which had not been there ten years before.
Even though Plymouth saw the war as entirely created by Massachusetts, and even though Hobbamock continued to live at Duxbury with Myles Standish, the trust between Plymouth and the Indians began to trickle away. For all their bluff spirit even Plymouth could not dismiss the memory of Indian attacks during the recent war and current prickling anxieties about their survival thousands of miles from England.
Only Roger Williams resisted. In this context it is mournful to read some of his testimony about Plymouth in the past. According to Williams, Massasoit himself often professed ‘that he was pleased that I should here be his neighbour, and that rather because he and I had been great friends at Plymouth, and also because that his and my friends at Plymouth advised him to be at peace and friendship with me and he hoped that our children after us’.
The person now more in touch with Indian communities was Jonathan Brewster. But he was under the spell of Uncas, the aggressive new actor upon the stage, whose rise to prominence was regarded at first with amazement then indignation by the rulers of the better-established tribes.
Perhaps Edward became alarmed by the very customs he had once found enchanting or perhaps the growing hostility on the part of other Indians began to prey on him. Perhaps he regarded his former attitude to the Indians as not zealous enough, indicating sinfulness. His roaming life meant he was uniquely well informed because of his networks amongst Indians and their English scout and trapper friends who lived deep in the woods. He had detected a level of hatred and defiance that could not be denied. Describing Pequot preparations to defend themselves, he wrote to Winthrop on 22 May 1637: ‘They profess there you shall find them, and as they were there born and bred, there their bones shall be buried and rot in despite of the English.’
Edward was spending an increasing amount of his time in Boston, where the strenuous sense of mission affected him. An autodidact who was thirsty for knowledge, and slightly in awe of the more sophisticated colonists, Edward was increasingly drawn to Winthrop. In the same letter to Winthrop, Edward wrote that the older man’s ‘many and undeserved kindnesses … especially at my being last with you, tie me if possible yet nearer in heart and affection towards you and yours’. Perhaps Winthrop made him think he had had a naïve view of the Indians. Winthrop was quite categorical in his warning to Plymouth: they must look at ‘the Pequots and all other Indians, as a common enemy’ whose intention was ‘the rooting out of the whole nation’.
Edward was a man of strong and independent views, but he was also easily influenced. He was forever being seized by enthusiasm – first in London, then in Holland, then in Plymouth, and now in Massachusetts.
Massasoit himself became more subservient to the English in this new atmosphere. He had lost much of his confidence. On 21 April 1638, in an uncharacteristically late winter when snow was still masking the trees, Massasoit made his way from Sowams to Boston on snowshoes. Behind him on a sledge was the tribute of eighteen beaver skins from himself and various sachems under his rule. He had heard that the Bay was angry with him, because he had sold land at Aquidneck, Rhode Island, to what were evidently their enemies – Anne Hutchinson and some of her supporters. He came to make sure Boston realised he wanted peace. He also asked for Winthrop’s help with the Connecticut magistrates. A letter was duly given.
In 1640 Massasoit repeated the submission to Plymouth he had made so solemnly when they first met in 1621, lest Plymouth should doubt his loyalty. Was it because he was alarmed by a new coldness between himself and Edward that when three Englishmen were arrested and tried for the murder of an Indian boy, Massasoit wanted one of the men to be let off? He ‘must not die for he was Mr Winslow’s man: and also that the man was by birth a Nipmuck man and so not worthy that any other man should die for him’. John Winthrop noted in his diary that Indian witnesses were required, but such was the effect of the war that they were terrified of coming forward ‘for they still feared that the English were conspired to kill all the Indians’. The government of Plymouth insisted justice be done, otherwise it would start another war. William Bradford reported with satisfaction the trial and hanging of English ne’er-do-wells for murdering a tragic Indian boy for his wampum and three coats of cloth. Yet quite a number of the English at Plymouth agreed with Massasoit that it was very severe to hang three men for one Indian.
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A careful study by the leading expert on land deeds, Jeremy Bangs, has concluded that ‘the barbarous cruelty of the English retaliation’ was not forgotten. Bangs demonstrates that in the years that followed the war, Indians in Plymouth Colony sold off ‘tract after tract of land, even when there was no apparent immediate pressure to sell, leaving themselves in the end, almost nothing to call their own’. Plymouth’s old scrupulousness about land ebbed away, encouraged by Massasoit himself, who was eager to sell to remain in favour. He clung on to good relations with Plymouth even though as the years passed the treatment of the Wampanoags by the English became increasingly oppressive. Over the next decade Massasoit and his family and tributary sachems disposed of colossal amounts of their ancestral lands. This was the background against which Massasoit’s sons Wamsutta and Metacom grew up.
There is something inexorable about the march of English towns across the Indian countryside and the records of what they paid for Indian land. In 1637, moving south and west, William Bradford and partners bought the acreage which became the town of Sandwich for £16 19s in commodities. The next year Yarmouth, formerly the Wampanoag area called Mattacheese, was settled. It was acquired for ‘six coats, six pair of small breeches, ten hoes, ten hatchets, two brass kettles … and one iron kettle’. In 1643 Edward and John Brown bought the westerly part of Rehoboth for ten fathoms of beads. Plymouth’s settlements were creeping perilously close to Mount Hope, Massasoit’s ancient home.
In his classic account The Pequot War, Alfred A. Cave summed up its effect in one sentence: ‘Although the Pequot War was a small-scale conflict of short duration, it cast a long shadow.’ Many historians concur with his view, that the image of ‘brutal and untrustworthy savages plotting the extermination of those who would do the work of God in the wilderness became a vital part of the mythology of the American frontier’. After the Pequot War the English emerged not only as victors but more powerful than the Indians. As the celebrated historian Alden T. Vaughan has written, ‘The destruction of the Pequots cleared away the only major obstacle to Puritan expansion. And the thoroughness of that destruction made a deep impression on the other tribes.’
The Narrangansett leadership came to the conclusion that the Pequots had been right when they had told them the English wanted to drive them out of their ancestral homes. Many contemporary descriptions, including Edward’s, make a point of Miantonomo’s ambition. Whereas Canonicus had decided not to engage in any struggle with the English, his nephew was made of different stuff. The English did not like Miantonomo. He was a man ‘who could not be trusted’, according to William Bradford. Edward Johnson called him ‘of great stature, of a cruel nature, causing all his … attendants to tremble at his speech’.
Edward criticised him for being a ‘great aspiring sachem’ and ‘very proud’. Edward had formed a high opinion of the Indians’ natural nobility and leadership qualities when he arrived in America. When push came to shove, though, in reality he preferred an Indian king like Massasoit who was under his control.
The aftermath of the Pequot War set off a slow but unstoppable reaction. It would not make itself properly felt for thirty years, but when it emerged it was an uncontainable and furious tsunami, the rebellion of Massasoit’s son Metacom, or ‘Philip’ as he was by then also known. It is no exaggeration to say that in 1675, King Philip’s War was the direct descendant of the Pequot War.
The only Englishman of influence who represented the Indians’ point of view was Roger Williams. He would continue strenuously to fight their corner.