America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (9 page)

Another Puritan minister, Thomas Weld, saw God using the “dev-ilish natives” for his handiwork: “I never heard that Indians in those parts did ever before this commit the like outrage upon any one family, and therefore God’s hand is the more apparently seen herein. To pick out this woeful woman, to make her and those belonging to her an unheard-of heavy example of their cruelty above all others. Thus the Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from this great and sore affliction.”21

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o n e “a f f l i c t i o n ” wa s relieved. But a much greater scourge remained. Every English man, woman, and child had heard tales of the Great Massacre of 1622, when Powhatans attacked a Virginia settlement, killing 350 colonists—a third of the population. In Virginia’s early years, the losses were so profound that members of Parliament demanded an inquiry into what had become of thousands of British subjects.

But colonial America’s “Indian problem” exploded most dramati-cally and violently in Puritan New England. After the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620, Native Americans had coexisted | 63 \

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with the English in relative peace for some fifteen years. During this time, the Indians had helped the first Pilgrims survive—as every schoolchild well knows. Trade with Indians was a significant part of the early New England economy. And many English settlers carving out a life in the New England wilderness had learned the value of such everyday Indian necessities as the canoe, moccasins, snowshoes, and maple syrup.

But in time, relations between Indians and New Englanders soured.

Many strands were woven into these ties, which were far more elaborate than the simplistic “trinkets-for-wampum and peace pipe” view once offered by schoolbooks and Hollywood. Of enormous import was the reality that there were many Indian nations, often divided by deep rivalries and ancient animosities. The first English to settle Massachusetts quickly grasped this truth and learned to play these intertribal rivalries to their advantage.

The Pilgrims’ alliance with Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag, for instance, was more than amiable friendship. The English understood that their firepower could help Massasoit overcome some of his traditional enemies. Welcoming the Pilgrims and joining the first Thanksgiving feast as a goodwill gesture, Massasoit knew all too well that the English advantages of cannon, musket, sword, pike, and powder could just as easily be turned on his people.

Nor were the Pilgrims reluctant to demonstrate that they were ready and willing to use that force. In a raw display of violence, Miles Standish, the
Mayflower
’s soldier-for-hire and military leader—although perhaps best known for his role in the fictitious Longfellow poem
The Courtship of Miles Standish—
had once grabbed the knife of an Indian and slit his throat, a brutal demonstration of the English will to tamp down Indian resistance.

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As with almost all things Puritan, theology played a role in relations with the Indians. Of enormous importance to many Puritan ministers was the hope of converting Indians. The most vigorous Puritan missionary to the Indians, John Eliot, believed that Native Americans might be one of the biblical lost tribes of Israel. Arriving in Boston in 1631, Eliot devoted his life to converting the Indians. After completing a dictionary of the Algonquian language—the most widely spoken language among the northeastern tribes—Eliot set about translat-ing both Old and New Testaments into a phonetic version of Massachusetts, an Algonquian dialect. Completed in 1663, this was the first Bible printed in North America. By then, there was a significant number of converts, known as “praying Indians,” and in 1651 Eliot established the first “praying towns.” Set up across Massachusetts, these villages accommodated these converts, many of whom were willing to assimilate. When Harvard College, founded in 1635, was officially in-corporated in 1650, its charter specified a commitment to educate “the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.”

(Despite the good intentions, only a handful of Indians attended Harvard in its earliest years.) As far as the Puritans were concerned, Richard Francis points out, “the biggest favor they could do the Indians, indeed anybody, was to convert them to Christianity, to their own Puritan doctrines. . . .

Most Puritans believed the Second Coming of Christ was imminent.

It would take place when the scattered tribes of Jews were reunited and converted to Christianity. A place would be made for them in the glittering New Jerusalem that would then come into being. . . . If the American Indian should prove to be the lost tribes of Israel, then it might well follow that the New World, in geographical and historical terms, might prove to be the New World in redemptive terms as | 65 \

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well, the culmination of both earthly and spiritual history, the site of the New Jerusalem. . . . This made the task of converting the Indians one of the utmost urgency: the destiny of Christendom might depend on it.”22

Though not as zealous as Spanish and French missionaries had been in the Americas, some early Puritans, including Eliot, believed converting the Indians was their duty. But they planned to do so without the brutal tactics employed by the Spanish, for whom the threats of slavery and death were early tools of conversion. As part of the “Black Legend,” a long Protestant propaganda war against Catholicism, the English attempted to distinguish themselves from the Spanish by printing the landmark accounts of the torture and mistreatment of Caribbean natives by Bartolomé de Las Casas. A Dominican priest whose 1552
Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
catalogued the brutal subjugation of Cuba, Las Casas had sparked some nominal reforms by the Spanish throne. Using the words of Las Casas, retitled
The Tears of the Indians
and referred to as the “Spanish Cruelties,” the English tried to claim the moral high ground. As historian Jill Lepore wrote, “Part of the mission of New England’s ‘city on a hill,’ then, was to advertise the civility of the English colonists and to hold it in stark contrast with the barbarous cruelty of Spain’s conquistadors and the false and blasphemous impiety of France’s Jesuit missionaries.”23

But as New England villages spread and grew into towns, and as the Puritans pushed further inland and south from their initial coastal toeholds at Plymouth, Salem, and Boston, the number of English settlers exploded. The Indians saw their hunting grounds, farmlands, and sacred territory being overrun. Settlers who sought more acre-age to pass on to their children—the chief reason, alongside religion, that many of them left England—were pressing the bounds of the | 66 \

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frontier further and further west. With increasing frequency, this was accomplished through questionable real estate dealings with the natives, many of whom possessed no tradition of land being bought and sold. Instead they saw land as a shared resource, to be utilized but not owned. Often the sellers had no real right to offer the land. Eventually, some deeds were simply forged; others were obtained after the Indians had been liberally supplied with alcohol.

Assessing this period in English-Indian relations, Colin Calloway observed, “Europeans used a broad repertoire of devices to obtain land, one of which was to encourage Indians to run up large debts in trade.

The tribe’s accumulated bill then could be settled only by cession of territory. Indian leaders sometimes used land sales as a strategy to keep colonists at bay, hoping that this time their land hunger would be satisfied, but the pressure on Indian lands was unrelenting, a constant source of friction.”24

Fueling that pressure was the prodigious fertility of the Puritans, who clearly observed the biblical admonition to “be fruitful and multiply” in their New World utopia. Seven or eight children in a Puritan family was typical, and much larger families—Anne Hutchinson’s fourteen or the Emersons’ fifteen, for instance—were hardly unusual.

“The emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the great migration became the breeding stock for America’s Yankee population,” David Hackett Fischer writes. “They multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries. Their numbers increased to 100,000 by 1700, to at least one million by 1800 . . . —all descended from 21,000

English emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the period from 1629

to 1640.”25

This swelling tide of colonists, doubling and trebling their numbers, threatened the existence of the dwindling tribes, already deci-

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mated by smallpox and other diseases that swept Indian villages with the ferocity of Egypt’s plagues—another biblical connection not lost on the Puritans. Epidemic disease—most likely introduced by the traders and fisherman who had plied North America’s coastal waters well before the Pilgrims arrived—emptied many northeastern coastal Indian settlements in 1616. That was why the
Mayflower
Pilgrims found a deserted village at the site of their Plymouth landing. In the 1630s, another severe epidemic had a similar effect, as Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop reported back to England. “For the natives in these parts, God’s hand hath so pursued them as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox.”26

Eventually this Puritan population explosion pressed the Indians to fight back for survival. The relative peace, first crafted by the Pilgrim fathers and cultivated by later arrivals, was first shattered during the Pequot War of 1636–37, a brief but brutal conflict that was complicated by the intertribal rivalries among several groups: the Pequot, a coastal Algonquian group based along the Connecticut River; their traditional rivals, the Mohegan, based around the Thames River near modern Norwich, Connecticut; and the Narragansett, of Rhode Island. Along with other area tribes, they were struggling to control their traditional lands and the lucrative fur trade with the competing English and Dutch.

The immediate cause of the war lay in the killings of several English traders and sea captains, blamed on Pequot tribesman. Operating in the belief that the Pequot were harboring those responsible for the deaths of these Englishmen, and convinced that a show of force was needed to deter further attacks, a ninety-man Puritan force attacked a Pequot village on Block Island in August 1636, burning it to the ground.

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Leading this army was John Endecott, the fiery Puritan father later described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as “the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock foundation of New England.” Endecott might have been the closest colonial American equivalent to an ayatollah or modern ji-hadist. He had arrived in Massachusetts in 1628 and was made governor of the fledgling Salem settlement established by Roger Conant a few years earlier. When Endecott landed with a fresh group of settlers, Conant turned over the reins of power to the military man.

A veteran of the Protestant wars against Catholics in the Netherlands, Endecott was usually seen carrying his thirty-inch steel blade.

It was the same sword he had used to hack down a “pagan” maypole shortly after his arrival in Massachusetts, a story recounted by Governor William Bradford, retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne in
The Maypole of Merry Mount,
and very much at odds with the traditional view of the first English in Massachusetts.

At the center of the maypole drama was Thomas Morton, a London lawyer and partner in a new crown-sponsored trading venture. Morton was among the colonists with interests that were more commercial than spiritual. He sailed to America in 1624 and quickly decided that life among the Puritans—including the diminutive Miles Standish, whom Morton derided as “Captain Shrimp”—was not for him. Leaving Plymouth with a band that consisted mostly of freed indentured servants, Morton moved to a nearby settlement called Mount Wollaston, renamed it Merry Mount, and soon earned a reputation among the Pilgrims as a libertine. As Pilgrim chronicler William Bradford recorded, “After this, they fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness. And Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained as it were a School of Atheism.”27

Morton also earned the ire of the Pilgrim fathers because he was | 69 \

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trading guns and powder with the Indians. He was arrested, put in the stocks, and later shipped back to London; his Merry Mount settlement was renamed Mount Dagon, after a god of the dreaded biblical Philistines. In 1629, the recently arrived John Endecott raided the town, destroyed the remains of the “pagan idol” maypole, and burned the settlement to the ground. (The site of Merry Mount, or Mount Wollaston, is marked in present-day Quincy, Massachusetts.) Five years later, Endecott argued that the women of the Bay Colony should be veiled in public, harking back to the Apostle Paul’s early church admonition for women to cover their heads. His proposal failed and Massachusetts goodies, as they were known, were spared the colonial-era equivalent of the Islamic chador. But Endecott was undeterred.

That same year, he used his sword to filet an English flag in order to remove the red cross of St. George. Endecott believed “that the red cross was given to the king of England by the pope, as an ensign of victory and as a superstitious thing, and a relic of Antichrist.”28

In 1636, Endecott set out after the Pequot Indians with the fury of an avenging angel. After destroying their village on Block Island, Endecott’s combined Massachusetts Bay Colony and Indian force moved on to the fortified English settlement at Fort Saybrook, Connecticut, and burned a nearby Pequot village before returning to Massachusetts. Endecott may have thought himself victorious. But as soon as his militiamen departed, the Pequot struck back, besieging Fort Saybrook and raiding other Connecticut towns, killing as many as a third of the colony’s settlers. In response to these raids, another militia army was gathered, now joined by Narragansett and Niantic Indian allies, and attacked a Pequot village on the Mystic (Misistuck) River. Most of the village’s warriors had left on a raid, leaving behind six hundred or seven hundred Pequots, most of them women and children.