For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  During the first seventy years of settlement a series of Indian wars severely tested colonial military institutions. The natives’ overall initial reaction to the pale-skinned arrivals was cautious hospitality, but within two decades the whites’ land greed, plus a general cultural incompatibility, created open hostility. Before considering the resulting wars, it is necessary to understand Indian methods of warfare, the problems Indian tactics posed for the whites, and the ways in which the Europeans overcame these difficulties.

  Before the white man’s arrival tribes living along the east coast engaged in endemic warfare, but the fighting was seldom costly in lives or property. To the first explorers and settlers, Indian warfare seemed almost playful or sporting. Roger Williams observed that Indian warfare was less bloody than European warfare, and many whites reacted contemptuously to the mild manner in which Indians fought. For instance, John Underhill affirmed that “they might fight seven years and not kill seven men. They came not near to one another, but shot, remote, and not point-blank, as we often do with our bullets, but at rovers, and then they gaze up in the sky to see where the arrow falls, and not until it is fallen do they shoot again. The fight is more for past-time, than to conquer and subdue enemies.” That is, whites initially encountered Indians who did not wage total war, rarely striking at noncombatants or engaging in the systematic destruction of food supplies and property.

  These original observations were not universally applicable. As with conflicts among whites, the scope, intensity, and magnitude of Indian warfare differed depending on prevailing conditions and ideas and hence varied across time and geography. While some Indian “wars” consisted of little more than persistent low-intensity raids to inflict revenge, acquire plunder, or take captives, others were wars to the death, designed to destroy an enemy, capture prime land, or at least establish hegemony over other tribes. These wars had nothing sporting about them. Instead they featured prolonged campaigns, strict military discipline, pitched battles, fortified positions, sieges, and the unmerciful slaying of women and children.

  Native Americans were shrewd strategists, clever tacticians, and resilient warriors. Since they had no written languages, Indian strategic debates cannot be reconstructed from records housed in some repository but must be inferred from their actions. As for their tactics, the eastern woodland Indians generally fought in small war parties that kept on the move, acted in isolation, and repeatedly conducted sophisticated ambushes and raids. Warriors would move stealthily, spread out over a considerable distance to avoid being ambushed themselves, and rapidly concentrate for a whirling attack—often at night, during storms, or in dense fog so as to catch their adversaries off guard and confuse them. Then the Indians would vanish into the wilderness. Rarely would they stand and fight if hard pressed; their warrior ethic lacked the European concept of holding a piece of land no matter what the cost in casualties. These hit-and-run tactics baffled and angered the English, who did not lack “courage or resolution, but could not discern or find an enemy to fight with, yet were galled by the enemy.”

  Indian hit-and-run tactics were dangerous enough when executed with bows and arrows but became even more deadly when mated with flintlock muskets. Ironically, the Indians were more proficient than the colonists at using flintlocks. Having been taught hunting skills and the use of aimed fire with bows and arrows since childhood, the Indians readily adapted flintlocks to their guerrilla warfare. Colonial legislatures passed laws banning the firearms trade with the natives, at times even imposing the death penalty for violators, but Indians managed to acquire European weapons, often through illegal trade. And at least in New England, they learned how to cast bullets, replace worn flints, restock muskets, and make a variety of other repairs. Only one technical capability continued to elude the Indians: They never mastered gunpowder production and therefore experienced frequent powder shortages.

  In contrast to the Indians, few whites had been hunters in the Old World or knew how to shoot well. Moreover, the colonists were steeped in formal battlefield tactics, which included firing unaimed mass volleys rather than aiming at individual targets. These may have worked well on Europe’s open plains but were virtually useless in the dense North American forests against an enemy that neither launched nor endured frontal assaults. Yet most colonists made little effort to adjust to Indian-style warfare. On muster days militiamen practiced the complicated motions and maneuvers prescribed by European drill manuals. One commonly used drill book described fifty-six steps for loading and firing a musket. In battle many militiamen never lived to crucial Step 43: “Give fire breast high.” And despite blundering into ambush after ambush, colonists persisted in marching in close order, so that, as one Indian said, “It was as easy to hit them as to hit a house.” The settlers’ reluctance to adjust to New World conditions was partly psychological. They considered Indian warfare barbaric; if Europeans fought in the same way, would they not also be barbarians?

  The English compensated for the militia system’s weaknesses by employing Indian allies, by waging ruthless warfare against the foundations of Indian society, and at least in a few cases by adopting Native American methods. Colonists learned—often the hard way—that Indians were the only match for Indians. Whites were so inept at forest warfare that launching an expedition without Indian allies invited disaster. The English especially needed natives as scouts to keep from blundering into an ambush, but native allies were also invaluable as spies, guides, and sometimes fighters. Fortunately for the whites, Native Americans were not united but consisted of tribes, subtribes, and quasi-independent bands. Virtually every tribe considered itself “the People”—not “a People” but “the People”—and various tribes and subtribes held such deep-seated suspicions and hatreds toward one another that they constantly struggled over territorial rights, power, and the loyalty of potential allies. This intertribal enmity allowed the whites to divide and conquer, for they invariably found Indians who wanted access to European goods and welcomed Euro-American assistance in fighting traditional foes. When Europeans paid their Indian allies, gave them weapons, and fought alongside them, the recipients considered themselves fortunate. European largess, firepower, and reinforcements allowed one tribe to strike more effectively at another tribe with which it was already at war.

  Rarely did whites fight Indians; instead, Indians killed Indians, or whites and some Indians fought other Indians, or some whites and some Indians battled other whites and Indians. Determining exactly who was exploiting whom in these conflicts was difficult. Europeans, of course, realized that intertribal tensions could be exploited. But many tribes perceived that they could exploit animosities among white people and cleverly manipulated the British, French, Spanish, and (eventually) Americans against one another and against their native enemies for their own purposes.

  Even when augmented by friendly Indians, colonists had a difficult time bringing the quick-moving warriors to decisive battle, and the real objective of colonial strategy became enemy villages, food supplies, clothing, and noncombatants. In a trend that continued for nearly three hundred years, white settlers waged war against Native Americans with remorseless, extravagant violence. Gratuitous devastation and killing was not unique to North America; the English perpetrated similar atrocities in Ireland, and the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) at times seemed to be little more than a long roll call of atrocities. Nor were the Indians always on the side of the angels; ferocity, savagery, and barbarous behavior were common to both sides. Shepherded by Indian scouts, often guided by Indian informers, and invariably accompanied by Indian warriors, colonial forces struck at Indian villages, killing old men, women, and children, scalping and raping, burning homes, and destroying crops and food caches. Men who believed they were fighting to protect their own homes and families from savage heathens eagerly torched Indian dwellings and slaughtered noncombatants. They pursued survivors ruthlessly, executing or enslaving captives, and many fugitives died of starvation and exposure.

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p; Along with Indian allies and their terror tactics, the settlers had another advantage, one that nobody at the time understood: Disease. Europeans spread Old World diseases such as typhus, cholera, tuberculosis, measles, and smallpox. Because Native Americans had no immunity against these unseen killers, a tribe was often reduced by 50 to 90 percent, leaving survivors demoralized, and sometimes even suicidal, as they watched loved ones die painful, rotting deaths and their communities, tightly woven together with bonds of kinship and clan, disintegrate. As just one example, in 1633–1634 a smallpox epidemic reduced the once-powerful Pequot tribe from 13,000 to 3,000, rendering them vulnerable to retribution from Indian foes and conquest by the Puritans.

  Waging war against society rather than against warriors was new and shocking to the Indians. Captain Underhill, who was so condescending toward the gentleness of Indian warfare, recorded the reaction of native allies who watched the English destroy an enemy Indian community. The Indians expressed astonishment at the way the English fought, crying out that it was wicked “because it is too furious, and slays too many men.”

  Nevertheless, when Indian and European military cultures collided, an acculturation process took place as the adversaries adjusted to each other’s technology and methods. By the late 1600s the colonists had shed such cumbersome accoutrements as armor, pikes, and swords. And while formal militia training had not changed, some expeditionary forces began to employ Indian guerrilla techniques, including the use of cover and concealment and aimed fire. Meanwhile the Indians embraced certain aspects of European technology, including the flintlock, and quickly accepted the colonists’ “war to the death” mentality. Although Indians had fought with each other long before whites arrived in the New World, the newcomers taught them how to wage war more ruthlessly.

  Fighting for Survival

  At dawn on Good Friday, March 22, 1622, Virginia was at peace. Just a few months before, Opechancanough, the chief of the Indian confederation in the Tidewater area, had assured the whites that “he held the peace so firme, the sky should fall [before] he dissolved it. . . .” Relations between Indians and settlers seemed amiable. Suddenly the Indians fell upon the unsuspecting whites and, as one contemporary put it, “basely and barbarously” murdered them, “not sparing eyther age or sex, man, woman, or childe.” This surprise attack was an excellent example of Native American strategic thinking, as Opechancanough orchestrated simultaneous assaults against farms and villages scattered for eighty miles across the landscape, certainly no easy task in an era without modern communications. Within hours the Indians had killed 25 percent of Virginia’s population. Terrified survivors abandoned outlying plantations and huddled together in fewer settlements, where they planned a counterattack despite their meager resources. Fewer than two hundred men remained for active service, and arms and ammunition were in short supply.

  The colonists enlisted the Potomack Indians’ aid against Opechancanough’s warriors, appealed to the King for weapons, and through a mighty effort launched military expeditions. For ten years the First Tidewater War ravaged eastern Virginia. Throughout the hot, humid summers and the cool, dreary winters the colonists, guided by Indian allies and defectors from Opechancanough’s forces, struck at enemy villages, cornfields, and fishing weirs. Although it inflicted severe punishment on the Indians, this continual effort imposed tremendous strains on colonial society. By the early 1630s both sides approached exhaustion, and in 1632 the governor signed a peace treaty with the major tribes in the enemy confederation.

  The peace was short-lived. In 1644 Opechancanough, now nearly a hundred years old, directed another surprise attack reminiscent of 1622. His warriors killed nearly five hundred colonists during the first morning, more than had fallen on Good Friday in 1622, but the effect was not as devastating. Instead of striking a feeble outpost as they had two decades before, the Indians now attacked a rapidly maturing society of some eight thousand settlers with a much greater ability to defend itself. In the Second Tidewater War, which lasted only two years, the Indians suffered a decisive defeat, as colonists pursued their previous strategy of destroying the foundations of Indian society. Colonists captured Opechancanough; after he spent a short period in captivity, a soldier shot him. His death symbolized the demise of any future resistance to white expansion in the Tidewater area.

  The importance of the Tidewater Wars transcended the fact of ultimate Indian defeat. Equally significant was the resultant attitude toward the natives. When Englishmen settled in America, they had a dual image of Indians. Viewing the natives as noble savages, some settlers felt a sense of mission to convert them to Christianity and bring them the blessings of “civilization.” But other settlers considered the Indians ignoble savages, brutal heathens prone to treachery and violence. Although some people continued to advocate moderate treatment of the Indians, the 1622 attack, seemingly without provocation, confirmed the ignoble savage image in the minds of most settlers, ensuring that the predominant attitude toward Indians would be hatred, mingled with fear and contempt. It also released white inhibitions in waging war. Facing what they perceived as an inhuman enemy, Englishmen responded with extreme measures. Many spoke of exterminating the natives. For example, the Virginia Company urged “a sharp revenge upon the bloody miscreantes, even to the measure that they intended against us, the rooting them out from being longer a people uppon the face of the Earth.” At the least, settlers wanted to subjugate the Indians completely, since, as the Virginia assembly repeatedly declared during the war, relations between whites and Indians were irreconcilable and the natives were perpetual enemies.

  After 1622, then, whites responded ruthlessly to any Indian provocation. The colonists punished the offending tribe (or tribes) severely and, just as important, terrified other tribes into submission by setting a frightful example of what happened to natives who aroused colonial wrath. A perfect illustration of this occurred in New England in 1637. In the early 1630s, before being devastated by new diseases, the Pequots were the most powerful tribe in New England. They had a well-deserved reputation for ferocity, gaining the enmity of both their white and Indian neighbors. When a complex series of events led to war between the Pequots and the English, practically all other natives in the area joined with the whites.

  The major “battle” of the Pequot War took place at a palisaded Pequot fort along the Mystic River. Colonial troops commanded by Captain John Mason of Connecticut and Captain Underhill of Massachusetts Bay, accompanied by several hundred friendly Indians, attacked at dawn. Barking dogs alerted the Pequots, many of them women and children, who briefly put up a stout defense until Mason and Underhill personally set fire to the wigwams inside the fort. Within half an hour all but a handful of the Pequots had been put to the sword or had burned to death, fouling the air with a sickly scent and, as Mason put it, “dunging the Ground with their flesh.” Accounts differ as to how many Indians perished, but the number probably approached four or five hundred. The attackers lost only two dead and twenty wounded.

  The slaughter at the Mystic River fort broke the back of Pequot resistance, and survivors sought asylum with neighboring tribes or fled northward toward the homeland of the Mohawk Indians. But mere victory did not satisfy the colonists. Having learned from Virginia’s misfortune in 1622, they thirsted for annihilation. Aided by Indian allies, New Englanders systematically hunted down the fugitives. The Mohawks were especially helpful, capturing the Pequot chief, Sassacus, and forty of his warriors. The war reduced the once fearsome Pequot tribe to impotence, and other tribes warily pondered the totality of the colonists’ victory that, ironically, they had helped achieve.

  Following the Pequots’ destruction, New England experienced nearly forty years of uneasy peace before King Philip’s War erupted in 1675. The war took its name from the chief of the Wampanoag Indians, Metacomet, upon whom the English had conferred the classical name of Philip as a symbol of esteem and friendship. They treated Philip with respect because he was the son of Massasoit, who had sign
ed a peace treaty with the English in 1621 and faithfully adhered to it until his death four decades later. But Philip was not Massasoit. Seeing his people increasingly subjected to English domination, he became restive, and gradually Wampanoag hospitality turned into hostility. Some evidence indicates that Philip tried to form an Indian confederation to launch a coordinated attack against the whites, but whatever his intentions, the war began before any widespread conspiracy had matured. Philip fought as one of several important chieftains, not as the leader of an intertribal confederation.

  The war began in a small way in a limited area but eventually engulfed New England, bringing suffering to nearly all its English and native inhabitants. In June 1675, a few Wampanoags looted and burned several abandoned buildings in a frontier community. The destruction was more an act of vandalism than a military attack, but as so often in the relations between whites and Indians, seemingly inconsequential events had momentous consequences. Plymouth colonists mobilized to retaliate, the Wampanoags prepared to defend themselves, and before long a war was in progress. Almost immediately the conflict took an adverse turn for the English when the Nipmuck tribe joined Philip’s warriors. Fearful colonists wondered how many other tribes would join the Wampanoags and especially worried about the Narragansetts, the most powerful tribe in the area and the Wampanoags’ traditional enemies. In 1637 the Narragansetts had helped eliminate the Pequots, but in the intervening years they became truculent as whites encroached upon their Rhode Island homeland. Now English efforts to elicit a firm pledge of friendship from them gained only an equivocal response.