American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  The simplicity of this seems naïve and even quaint to modern observers, as it did to seventeenth-century Britishers, but it made perfect sense to native peoples who simply did not wage war for the same reasons that Europeans did. “Given ample land and a system of values by and large indifferent to material accumulation,” writes a scholar of military law, “the New England tribes rarely harbored the economic and political ambitions that fueled European warfare.” Instead, an Indian war usually was a response to personal insults or to individual acts of inter-tribal violence. As such, it could be avoided by “making satisfaction for the injury done” (as noted in the quotation above), but even when carried out “native hostilities generally aimed at symbolic ascendancy, a status conveyed by small payments of tribute to the victors, rather than the dominion normally associated with European-style conquest.” Moreover, given the relative lack of power that Indian leaders had over their highly autonomous followers, Indian warriors might choose not to join in battle for this or that cause, and it was even common for an Indian war party on the march to “melt away as individual warriors had second thoughts and returned home.”47

  Prior to the European assaults on their lands, Indians throughout the continent held similar attitudes toward the proper conduct of war. The idea of large-scale battle, wrote Ruth Benedict more than half a century ago, was “alien” to all these peoples. Of the California Indians, even long after they had almost been exterminated by white malevolence, Benedict wrote: “Their misunderstanding of warfare was abysmal. They did not have the basis in their own culture upon which the idea could exist.”48 As for the Indians of the Plains, who have been turned into the very portrait of aggression and ferocity by purveyors of American popular culture (and by far too many serious historians as well), wrote George Bird Grinnell:

  Among the plains tribes with which I am well acquainted—and the same is true of all the others of which I know anything at all—coming in actual personal contact with the enemy by touching him with something held in the hand or with a part of the person was the bravest act that could be performed . . . [This was known as] to count coup on—to touch or strike—a living unhurt man and to leave him alive, and this was frequently done. . . . It was regarded as an evidence of bravery for a man to go into battle carrying no weapon that would do any harm at a distance. It was more creditable to carry a lance than a bow and arrows; more creditable to carry a hatchet or war club than a lance; and the bravest thing of all was to go into a fight with nothing more than a whip, or a long twig—sometimes called a coup stick. I have never heard a stone-headed war club called coup stick.49

  Commenting on this passage, and on the generality of its application to indigenous warfare, anthropologist Stanley Diamond has noted that to people such as the American Indians “taking a life was an occasion,” whereas warfare of the type described “is a kind of play. No matter what the occasion for hostility, it is particularized, personalized, ritualized.” In contrast, by the time of the invasion of the Americas, European warfare had long since been made over into what Diamond describes as “an abstract, ideological compulsion” resulting in “indiscriminate, casual, unceremonious killing.”50

  Not surprisingly, then, the highly disciplined and ideologically motivated British expressed contempt for what Captain John Mason called the Indians’ “feeble manner . . . [that] did hardly deserve the name of fighting.” Warfare among the native peoples had no “dissipline” about it, complained Captain Henry Spelman, so that when Indians fought there was no great “slawter of nether side” instead, once “having shott away most of their arrows,” both sides commonly “weare glad to retier.” Indeed, so comparatively harmless was inter-tribal fighting, noted John Underhill, that “they might fight seven yeares and not kill seven men.”51 Added Roger Williams: “Their Warres are farre lesse bloudy, and devouring than the cruell Warres of Europe; and seldome twenty slain in a pitcht field. . . . When they fight in a plaine, they fight with leaping and dancing, that seldome an Arrow hits, and when a man is wounded, unlesse he that shot followes upon the wounded, they soone retire and save the wounded.” In addition, the Indians’ code of honor “ordinarily spared the women and children of their adversaries.”52

  In contrast, needless to say, the British did very little in the way of “leaping and dancing” on the field of battle, and more often than not Indian women and children were consumed along with everyone and everything else in the conflagrations that routinely accompanied the colonists’ assaults. Their purpose, after all, was rarely to avenge an insult to honor—although that might be the stipulated rationale for a battle—but rather, when the war was over, to be able to say what John Mason declared at the conclusion of one especially bloody combat: that “the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.”53 Because of his readers’ assumed knowledge of the Old Testament, it was unnecessary for Mason to remind them that this last phrase is derived from Deuteronomy, nor did he need to quote the words that immediately follow in that biblical passage: “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. . . . But thou shalt utterly destroy them.”

  The brutish and genocidal encounter to which Mason was referring was the Pequot War. Its first rumblings began to be heard in July of 1636—two years after a smallpox epidemic had devastated the New England natives “as far as any Indian plantation was known to the west,” said John Winthrop—when the body of a man named John Oldham was found, apparently killed by Narragansett Indians on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast.54 Although he held positions of some importance, Oldham was not held in high regard by many of the English settlers—he had been banished from Plymouth Colony and described by its Governor Bradford as “more like a furious beast than a man”—and those whites who found his body had proceeded to murder more than a dozen Indians who were found at the scene of the crime, whether or not they were individually responsible.55 Even in light of the colonists’ grossly disproportionate sense of retribution when one of their own had been killed by Indians, this should have been sufficient revenge, but it was not. The colonists simply wanted to kill Indians. Despite the pledge of the Narragansetts’ chief to mete out punishment to Oldham’s murderers—a pledge he began to fulfill by sending 200 warriors to Block Island in search of the culprits—New England’s Puritan leaders wanted more.

  Led by Captain John Endicott, a heavily armed and armored party of about a hundred Massachusetts militiamen soon attacked the Block Island Indians. Their plan was to kill the island’s adult males and make off with the women and children; as with Governor Berkeley’s later scheme in Virginia, the venture would pay for itself since, as Francis Jennings puts it, “the captured women and children of Block Island would fetch a tidy sum in the West Indies slave markets.”56 The Indians scattered, however, realizing they had no hope against the colonists’ weapons and armor, so the frustrated soldiers, able to kill only an odd few Narragansetts here and there, had to content themselves with the destruction of deserted villages. “We burnt and spoiled both houses and corn in great abundance,” recalled one participant.57

  From Block Island the troops headed back to the mainland where, following the directions of their colony’s governor, they sought out a confrontation with some Pequot Indians. The Pequots, of course, had nothing to do with Oldham’s death (the excuse for going after them was the allegation that, two years earlier, some among them may have killed two quarrelsome Englishmen, one of whom had himself tried to murder the Governor of Plymouth Colony), so when the soldiers first appeared along the Pequots’ coastline the Indians ran out to greet them. As Underhill recalled: “The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, what cheere, Englishmen, what cheere, what doe you come for: They not thinking we intended warre, went on cheerefully untill they come to Pequeat river.”58 It soon became evident to the Pequots what the soldiers had come for, even if the cause of their coming remained a mystery, so after some protracted efforts at negotiation
, the Pequots melted back into the forest to avoid a battle. As they had on Block Island, the troops then went on a destructive rampage, looting and burning the Indians’ villages and fields of corn.

  Once the Massachusetts troops left the field and returned to Boston, the Pequots came out of the woods, made a few retaliatory raids in the countryside, and then attacked nearby Fort Saybrook. Casualties were minimal in all of this, as was normal in Indian warfare, and at one point—presumably feeling that their honor had been restored—the Pequots fell back and asked the fort’s commander if he felt he had “fought enough.” The commander, Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, made an evasive reply, but its meaning was clear: from that day forward there would be no peace. Next, the Pequots asked if the English planned to kill Indian women and children. Gardiner’s reply was that “they should see that hereafter.”59

  For a time small troubles continued in the field, while in Hartford the Connecticut General Court met and declared war against the Pequots. John Mason was appointed commander of the Connecticut troops. Rather than attack frontally, as the Massachusetts militia had, Mason led his forces and some accompanying Narragansetts (who long had been at odds with the Pequots) in a clandestine assault on the main Pequot village just before dawn. Upon realizing that Mason was planning nothing less than a wholesale massacre, the Narragansetts dissented and withdrew to the rear. Mason regarded them with contempt, saying that they could “stand at what distance they pleased, and see whether English Men would now fight or not.” Dividing his forces in half, Mason at the head of one party, Underhill leading the other, under cover of darkness they attacked the unsuspecting Indians from two directions at once. The Pequots, Mason said, were taken entirely by surprise, their “being in a dead indeed their last Sleep.”60

  The British swarmed into the Indian encampment, slashing and shooting at anything that moved. Caught off guard, and with apparently few warriors in the village at the time, some of the Pequots fled, “others crept under their Beds,” while still others fought back “most courageously,” but this only drove Mason and his men to greater heights of fury. “We must burn them,” Mason later recalled himself shouting, whereupon he “brought out a Fire Brand, and putting it into the Matts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire.”61 At this, Mason says, “the Indians ran as Men most dreadfully Amazed”:

  And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished. . . . [And] God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven: Thus were the Stout Hearted spoiled, having slept their last Sleep, and none of their Men could find their Hands: Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies!62

  It was a ghastly sight—especially since we now know, as Francis Jennings reminds us, that most of those who were dying in the fires, and who were “crawling under beds and fleeing from Mason’s dripping sword were women, children, and feeble old men.”63 Underhill, who had set fire to the other side of the village “with a traine of Powder” intended to meet Mason’s blaze in the center, recalled how “great and doleful was the bloudy sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along.” Yet, distressing though it may have been for the youthful murderers to carry out their task, Underhill reassured his readers that “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.”64 Just because they were weak and helpless and unarmed, in short, did not make their deaths any less a delight to the Puritan’s God. For as William Bradford described the British reaction to the scene:

  It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.65

  Added the Puritan divine Cotton Mather, as he celebrated the event many years later in his Magnolia Christi Americana: “In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.” Mason himself counted the Pequot dead at six or seven hundred, with only seven taken captive and seven escaped. It was, he said joyfully, “the just Judgment of God.”66

  The Narragansetts who had accompanied the Puritans on their march did not share the Englishmen’s joy. This indiscriminate carnage was not the way warfare was to be carried out. “Mach it, mach it,” Underhill reports their shouting; “that is,” he translates, “It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.”67 Too many Indians, that was. Only two of the English died in the slaughter.

  From then on the surviving Pequots were hunted into near-extermination. Other villages were found and burned. Small groups of warriors were intercepted and killed. Pockets of starving women and children were located, captured, and sold into slavery. If they were fortunate. Others were bound hand and foot and thrown into the ocean just beyond the harbor. And still more were buried where they were found, such as one group of three hundred or so who tried to escape through a swampland, but could make “little haste, by reason of their Children, and want of Provision,” said Mason. When caught, as Richard Drinnon puts it, they “were literally run to ground,” murdered, and then “tramped into the mud or buried in swamp mire.”68

  The comparative handful of Pequots who were left, once this series of massacres finally ended, were parceled out to live in servitude. John Endicott and his pastor, for example, wrote to the governor asking for “a share” of the captives, specifically “a yong woman or girle and a boy if you thinke good.”69 The last of them, fifteen boys and two women, were shipped to the West Indies for sale as slaves, the ship captain who carried them there returning the next year with what he had received in exchange: some cotton, some salt, some tobacco, “and Negroes, etc.” The word “Pequot” was then removed from New England’s maps: the river of that name was changed to the Thames and the town of that name became New London.70 Having virtually eradicated an entire people, it now was necessary to expunge from historical memory any recollection of their past existence.71

  Some, however, remembered all too well. John Mason rode the honor of his butchery to the position of Major General of Connecticut’s armed forces. And Underhill, as Drinnon notes, “put his experience to good use” in selling his military prowess to the Dutch. On one subsequent occasion “with his company of Dutch troops Underhill surrounded an Indian village outside Stamford, set fire to the wigwams, drove back in with saber thrusts and shots those who sought to escape, and in all burned and shot five hundred with relative ease, allowing only about eight to escape—statistics comparable to those from the Pequot fort.”72

  Meanwhile, the Narragansetts, who had been the Pequots’ rivals, but who were horrified at this inhuman carnage, quietly acknowledged the English domination of the Pequots’ lands—their “widowed lands,” to borrow a phrase from Jennings. That would not, however, prove sufficient. The English towns continued to multiply, the colonists continued to press out into the surrounding fields and valleys. The Narragansetts’ land, and that of other tribes, was next.

  To recount in detail the story of the destruction of the Narragansetts and such others as the Wampanoags, in what has come to be known as King Philip’s War of 1675 and 1676, is unnecessary here. Thousands of native people were killed, their villages and crops burned to the ground. In a single early massacre 600 Indians were destroyed. It was, says the recent account of two historians, “a seventeenth-century My Lai” in which the English soldiers “ran amok, killing the wounded men, women, and children indiscriminately, firing the camp, burning the Indians alive or dead in their huts.” A delighted Cotton Mather, revered pastor of the Second Church in
Boston, later referred to the slaughter as a “barbeque.”73 More butchery was to follow. Of these, one bloodbath alongside the Connecticut River was typical. It is described by an eyewitness:

  Our souldiers got thither after an hard March just about break of day, took most of the Indians fast asleep, and put their guns even into their Wigwams, and poured in their shot among them, whereupon the Indians that durst and were able did get out of their Wigwams and did fight a little (in which fight one Englishman only was slain) others of the Indians did enter the River to swim over from the English, but many of them were shot dead in the waters, others wounded were therein drowned, many got into Canoes to paddle away, but the paddlers being shot, the Canoes over-set with all therein, and the stream of the River being very violent and swift in the place near the great Falls, most that fell over board were born by the strong current of that River, and carryed upon the Falls of Water from those exceeding high and steep Rocks, and from thence tumbling down were broken in pieces; the English did afterwards find of their bodies, some in the River and some cast a-shore, above two hundred.74

  The pattern was familiar, the only exception being that by the latter seventeenth century the Indians had learned that self-defense required an understanding of some English ideas about war, namely, in Francis Jennings’s words: “that the Englishmen’s most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart,” so for once the casualties were high on both sides.75 There was no doubt who would win, however, and when raging epidemics swept the countryside during the peak months of confrontation it only hastened the end.