The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  By October word of these teachings had circulated widely, and when the colony’s ministers gathered for the General Court’s meeting they held a private session with Cotton, Wheelwright, and Hutchinson. Cotton, ever conciliatory, “gave satisfaction.” But Wheelwright and Hutchinson, while conceding that sanctification “did help to evidence justification,” stuck to their belief in the “indwelling of the person of the Holy Ghost,” to the extent, in Hutchinson’s view, of “a personal union.”34

  This was no satisfaction. While Cotton’s parishioners became more and more excited in their “free grace” enthusiasms, conservatives like Winthrop and Boston’s pastor, the Rev. John Wilson, felt more embattled, and the clergy elsewhere were increasingly convinced that they were faced with nothing less than a “Familist” upsurge in Boston that would blast away the theory and practice of preparatory stages toward redemption and end all respect for customary norms and the law and authority of both church and state. By December, with the young, emotional governor Henry Vane, respectable as the son of the comptroller of the king’s household but close to Cotton in his theology, threatening to leave the colony if the “free grace” views were not endorsed, a formal clerical convocation was summoned to settle the disputed issues.

  The December 1636 meeting of the colony’s elders was a formal board of inquiry, and they issued to Cotton a list of sixteen interrogatories probing his views once more and requesting “humbly and earnestly” that he return “a short and plaine Answer.”35

  An answer they soon did receive, but it was neither short nor plain. To explain whether the doctrine of sanctification was or was not “a Covenant of Works” (question XIII) required an answer of seven complex “propositions,” in all some five thousand words. When the elders sorted through this tangle, they conceded that “some doubts [were] well cleared,” but others were not. So they went at it again, replying point by point in some six thousand words to Cotton’s responses, which in turn elicited a final rejoinder by Cotton. This document was a virtual treatise of some twenty-seven thousand words that stretches over seventy-two pages in modern print and includes references not only to innumerable biblical passages but to the writings of Calvin, Piscator, Foxe, Ames, Perkins, Augustine, and the Catholic controversialists Catharinus and Bellarmine.

  How convincing all this was to the elders is not clear, but by late January 1637 the troubles had escalated. On the nineteenth of the month, Wheelwright struck out boldly in a Fast Day sermon aflame with violent language. Christ’s own people, he declared, those under a covenant of grace, base their faith on direct revelation; those who do not, those whose faith rests on behavioral sanctification and contractual relations with God, no matter how holy their behavior, were under a covenant of works and therefore ultimately enemies of true religion. They were, in fact, he declared with rising passion, nothing less than partisans of the Antichrist, and therefore it was the obligation of the children of God to take up arms against them. There would be—there would have to be—a decisive struggle between them. God’s true, “graceful” children must have their “loynes girt and be redy to fight” for Christ. Despite the odds, true Christians “must lay load” upon the unredeemed: “we must kill them with the word of the Lord … breake them in peeces as shivered with a rod of yron.” Truth cannot prevail by “peace and quietnes … we must be willing to lay downe our lives, and shall overcome by so doing.” Thus “Moses seeing an Egiptian striving with his brother, he came and killed him. Acts 7.24.25.26.”

  But will this not cause “a combustion in the Church and comon wealth”? Yes, Wheelwright declared, but “never feare combustions and burnings.” For Christ came “to send fire upon the earth,” and as it is prophesied in Malachi 4.1, “the day shall come that shall burne like an oven and all that do wickedly shall be stubble.” “The whore must be burnt, Revelation 18.8.” Nothing else will serve the Lord: “this way must Antichrist be consumed.”36

  It was a sweeping and portentous judgment. Not only was Wheelwright condemning the entire magistracy and all the clergy save Cotton, but he seemed also to be threatening some kind of violent action. Was he not stirring up another Münster? Later he would insist that he had been speaking only of spiritual combat and that his language was figurative. But some did not take it so. The Rev. Thomas Weld, introducing Winthrop’s summary account of the antinomian struggle (his Short Story, 1644), epitomized the common clerical reaction. Wheelwright, Weld wrote, spoke for those who sought “a faire and easie way to Heaven, that men may passe without difficulty,” and who would live without law or concern for sin or prayer. His sermon cast dung on the clergy; it was as if he had discharged “halfe a dozen pistols” at their faces. And beyond even that, he was urging violence. He may have spoken in figurative terms of spiritual not physical combat, but Münster proved how close the two in fact were. And—Weld added in a sentence that went to the heart of the deepest anxieties at work—“We had great cause to have feared the extremity of danger from them, in case power had beene in their hands.”

  Winthrop’s attack was even more severe and his language, usually moderate, more vivid. Wheelwright, he wrote, claimed that all who disagreed with him on the path to salvation were Antichrists, Herods, Pilates, and persecuting Jews; and in his Fast Day sermon, he had urged his followers “to fight with [their opponents], to lay load on them, to burne them, to thresh them, to bind them in chaines and fetters, to kill them and vexe their hearts,” and those who refused to get involved would suffer the “paine of the curse of Meroz.” Wheelwright might have spoken spiritually, but he should have known “how dangerous it is to heat peoples affections against their opposites.” The bloody wars in Germany may have originated in different beliefs, but the sword of spirit had turned into the sword of steel. So it had been in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, and between Calvinists and Lutherans. Such violence might be reasonable in confronting Turks or papists, but those who opposed Wheelwright were Christian compatriots sharing in the establishment of this Puritan refuge. There could be no doubt about it: Wheelwright “did intend to trouble our peace, and hee hath effected it.” “All things are turned upside down among us”—the church, family, decorum, even civil order.37

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  And in this Wheelwright was not alone. Others too were disturbing the peace with even more blatant violence. His inflammatory sermon, all fire and combat, came at a time when troops were being assembled in Connecticut and Massachusetts to put down the Pequot Indians and their allies, and these, everyone knew, were truly agents of the Antichrist. They fought like beasts, they were both cowardly and merciless, and despite the offering of Christian redemption, they remained irremediably pagan. Their ferocity had been mounting. Skirmishes with the settlers were commonplace, and in 1634 the Indian trader Capt. John Stone and his crew had been murdered along the Connecticut River. Though in life something of a miscreant—privateer, smuggler, drunkard, and adulterer—who had been banished from the Bay Colony, Stone had become notable in his death, which the Puritans were determined to avenge. More recently the more respectable Capt. John Oldham was murdered and partly dismembered by the Narragansetts on Block Island, precisely when doubts about Cotton and Wheelwright were beginning to disturb the colony. An expedition to the island (August 1636) to revenge Oldham’s murder failed, but news of bloody attacks continued, and fears grew that the Pequots, who refused to give up Stone’s murderers, were planning an attack. In October, just when the first of the clerical confrontations with Cotton took place, word reached Boston of the fate of the river trader Joseph Tilly. The Pequots had captured him and had “tied him to a stake, flayed his skin off, put hot embers between the flesh and the skin, cut off his fingers and toes, and made hatbands of them.” Somehow, in agony, he had survived for three days, yet, Winthrop proudly noted, “he cried not in his torture.” Surely, the Puritan Capt. John Underhill wrote, this barbarous cruelty was enough to move “the hearts of men to hazard blood, and life, and all they had, to overcome such a wicked, insolent nation.”


  The savagery of the Indians, undoubtedly in league with Satanic powers, and the challenge of the antinomians, Shepard would later recall, were conjoined in their malevolence. Both were manifestations of the Antichrist. They rose together, he noted, and in the end they were doomed to fall together. And both reached climaxes in 1637. In February there were more bloody encounters, this time at the fort in Saybrook, Connecticut—half a dozen settlers badly wounded by arrows; hand-to-hand combat in a tangle of burning weeds; captures and torture; and from the Indians, taunting defiance: we can blot out Englishmen like mosquitoes and will “kill men, women, and children, and we will take away the horses, cows, and hogs.”38

  By March, when from without the very existence of the settlements seemed to be threatened, from within the foundations of civil life were under withering attack. The erosive effects of Wheelwright’s and Hutchinson’s preaching were spreading. Preachers in Boston and elsewhere were being condemned as “legalists” and their ordinations shunned. Church services were being interrupted by questions of the soundness of the ministers’ views; similar challenges were beginning to disturb town meetings; cordial personal relationships were turning rancorous. And the newborn civil state was in turmoil. Governor Vane entered the struggle directly, challenging Winthrop’s argument that banishing the likes of Wheelwright from the colony was justified, indeed necessary. Surely, Winthrop declared, “we are bound to keepe off whatsoever appears to tend to our ruine or damage” and may therefore “refuse to receive such whose dispositions suite not with ours and whose society (we know) will be hurtfull to us.” If, he said, the laws were made specifically to exclude “such as are of Mr. Wheelwright his judgment … where is the evill of it?” The magistrates must have the right to keep out those whose opinions “cannot stand with externall peace” and who would “infect others with such dangerous tenets … and make people looke at their magistrates, ministers and brethren as enemies to Christ and [therefore] Antichrists.”

  But note the effect, Vane replied. Such exclusionary laws would reject not the profane but “those, that are truly and particularly religious, if the magistrates doe not like them.” And furthermore no such power of exclusion is given by the colony’s royal charter, and so the banishment of preachers like Wheelwright was not sanctioned by either king or God.

  But in the end Winthrop and his associates prevailed. At the March meeting of the General Court Wheelwright was convicted of seditious contempt of authority and fomenting discord, and he was ordered upon sentencing to leave the colony.39

  The community was sundered—split as if, Winthrop wrote, “between Protestants and Papists.” And the tumult did not subside. At the Court of Elections in May Vane brought forward a petition on Wheelwright’s behalf and, fearful of losing a majority in the Court, insisted that it be heard before the election votes were cast. Winthrop’s supporters, who expected to prevail in the new election, objected and left the meetinghouse in protest. Congregated out of doors, they were urged on by the Rev. John Wilson (aloft in a tree, it was said). The votes were cast. Winthrop’s group swept the offices, and Winthrop himself resumed the governorship. Vane and his supporters were defeated, but not persuaded or eliminated. They withdrew, Winthrop correctly noted, only because they were outnumbered. The scars were deep. The colony, barely a half-dozen years old, had split into bitterly warring parties whose differences had produced not only “fierce speeches” but riot. Some, Winthrop recorded, “laid hands on others.”40

  VIOLENCE, IT SEEMED, was everywhere. In April word arrived that the Pequots had attacked Wethersfield, Connecticut, killed nine men and women and several animals, and abducted two young girls. At the end of May the colony’s leaders, having succeeded for a time in putting down the enemy within, turned to the enemies without, with results that could properly be called apocalyptic.

  The recruitment of troops had proceeded in both Connecticut and Massachusetts, though claims were made that Wheelwright’s and Hutchinson’s challenges to the authority of church and state had reduced recruitment in Boston to a trickle. Massachusetts, with a hundred or more Narragansett allies and a small troop of militia soldiers under Capt. John Underhill, and Connecticut with a similar number under Capt. John Mason, another veteran of the continental wars, took the battle to the enemy. After a series of treks and feints, the Pequots retreated to an earth-and-timber fort in Mystic, Connecticut, and there the English, ninety in all, surrounded the inhabitants—not warriors alone but several hundred men, women, and children. Surely “the Finger of God” was in all this, Mason later wrote. For the situation was perfectly prepared for what Shepard called a “divine slaughter.” The English cut their way through the tree branches that blocked the entrances, and then, convinced that they must “burn them,” set the brush huts and timbered walls afire and stationed men at the exits to kill anyone who attempted to escape. In what Mason called the “dreadful Terror” that followed, those who ran back, away from the English, went straight “into the very Flames, where many of them perished,” while those who fled through the exits—forty, Mason estimated—“perished by the Sword.” Thus God’s judgment: “in little more than one Hour’s space was their impregnable Fort with themselves utterly Destroyed, to the number of six or seven hundred.”

  There was something strangely ecstatic, trance-like, in the soldiers’ experience, something mystical and transcendent. “We were like Men in a Dream,” Mason wrote, “then was our Mouth filled with Laughter, and our Tongues with Singing; thus we may say the Lord hath done great Things for us among the Heathen, whereof we are glad. Praise ye the Lord!”41 Underhill was equally transported, equally entranced with the ways of God’s vengeance against evil. But he knew enough about warfare to recognize the Indians’ bravery, so he felt the need to ask, “Why should you be so furious?…Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?” The answer was clear: “when a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin against God and man,” there will be “no respect to persons, but [God] harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terriblest death that may be.” And terrible it was. “Great and doleful was the bloody 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 scarcely pass along.”

  Schematic diagram of the English attack on the Pequot fort, 1637. The two blocked exits are shown top and bottom; the English are using guns, the Indians bows and arrows. (illustration credit 13.1)

  But it was left to the gentle Pilgrim leader Bradford to pronounce the most doleful requiem. He too praised 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.” But the horror of the charred and bloody corpses could not be disguised; he could not get it out of his mind. “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire,” he wrote, “and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.”42

  Yet even with God’s bloody vengeance at Mystic, the struggle was not over. The surviving Pequots, demoralized and bewildered, took what vengeance they could on Indian allies of the English, then fled for protection to other tribes, mainly to the dangerous, warlike Mohawks. But they left behind several contingents of their people, who were hunted down relentlessly. One group huddled in a swamp in southern Connecticut. There they were attacked by fresh troops from Massachusetts led by Capt. Israel Stoughton, who flushed them out of their retreat. All the adult males were slaughtered on the spot, and the women and children seized. Some of those spared were handed over to friendly tribes, others were sold to Caribbean slave traders, a few ended up with the settlers. Roger Williams, while he too rejoiced in God’s vengeance on this “miserable drove of Adams degenerate seede,” argued against killing or enslaving innocent captives (“2 Kings 14:5, 6”). Spare the women and children, he urged, use the captives “kindly,” act “like the mercifull Kings of Israell,” have a “
humane Consideracion of so much blood spilt,” and note the likelihood that when enslaved, the captives might “turne wild Irish.” For himself he picked out one small boy—the one “with the red about his neck”—promising to keep him and bring him up personally. But such benevolence was rare, and Stoughton’s troops persisted.

  The main body of survivors, led by their chief Sassacus, struggled on along the Connecticut coast, ending in a “hideous swamp, so thick with bushes and so quagmiry, as men could hardly crowd into it.” Surrounded, some two hundred surrendered, begging mercy, but the rest fought on until most of them were killed by musket fire systematically raking through the thicket. Of the captives, the adult males were killed (by drowning, Cotton Mather said); thirty were given to the Narragansetts; and the rest were divided between the two colonies, the girls to be distributed among the towns, most of the boys sold into slavery in the West Indies. Sassacus escaped, but two months later his body parts and those of his closest companions, victims of the Mohawks’ ferocity, were brought into Boston. Friendly tribes continued to seek protection by delivering the severed heads and hands “of divers other Pequods” that they happened to encounter. Winthrop estimated that in all between eight hundred and nine hundred Pequots had been slain.

  Even so, it was not enough. Obliteration—total and final annihilation—of the Satanic enemy was the ultimate if unobtainable object. Friendly tribes, well rewarded by gifts of captured noncombatants, promised never to shelter enemies of the English and to cut off and deliver the heads of any Pequots they found who were suspected of having killed Englishmen. And all Pequots were then and forever barred from returning to their native country.43