by Jill Lepore
JULY
8-9 Wampanoags attack Middleborough and Dartmouth.
14 Nipmucks attack Mendon.
15 Narragansetts sign a peace treaty with Connecticut.
16-24 Massachusetts envoy attempts to negotiate with the Nipmucks.
19 Philip and his troops escape an English siege and flee Pocasset for Nipmuck territory.
AUGUST
2-4 Nipmucks attack Massachusetts troops and besiege Brookfield.
13 Massachusetts Council orders Christian Indians confined to praying towns.
22 A group of unidentified Indians kill seven colonists at Lancaster.
30 Captain Samuel Moseley arrests fifteen Hassanemesit Indians near Marlborough for the Lancaster assault and marches them to Boston.
SEPTEMBER
1-2 Wampanoags and Nipmucks attack Deerfield. Massachusetts forces led by Moseley attack the town of Pennacook.
12 Colonists abandon Deerfield, Squakeag, and Brookfield.
18 Narragansetts sign a treaty with the English in Boston. Massachusetts troops are ambushed near Northampton.
OCTOBER
5 Pocumtucks attack and destroy Springfield.
13 Massachusetts Council orders Christian Indians removed to Deer Island.
19 English repel Indians from Hatfield.
NOVEMBER
c-1 Nipmucks take captive Christian Indians at Magunkaquog, Chabanakongkomun, and Hassanemesit, including James Printer.
2-12 Commissioners of the United Colonies order a united army to attack the Narragansetts.
DECEMBER
7 Massachusetts Council prints a broadside explaining the case against the Narragansetts.
19 United colonial forces attack Narragansetts at the Great Swamp.
1676
JANUARY
Philip travels westward to Mohawk territory, seeking, but failing to secure, an alliance.
14 Joshua Tift is captured by the English.
27 Narragansetts attack Pawtuxet.
FEBRUARY
10 Nipmucks attack Lancaster; Mary Rowlandson is taken captive.
14 Philip and Wampanoags attack Northampton. Massachusetts Council debates erecting a wall around Boston.
21 Nipmucks attack Medfield.
23 Massachusetts General Court debates the fate of Christian Indians.
Indians assault sites within ten miles of Boston.
MARCH
13 Nipmucks attack Groton.
26 Longmeadow, Marlborough, and Simsbury are attacked.
27 Nipmucks attack English forces near Sudbury.
28 Indians attack Rehoboth.
29 Providence is destroyed.
APRIL
21 Indians attack Sudbury.
MAY
2-3 Mary Rowlandson is released and returns to Boston.
18 English forces attack sleeping Indians near Deerfield.
30 Indians attack Hatfield.
c.31 Christian Indians are moved from Deer Island to Cambridge.
JUNE
12 Indians attack Hadley but are repelled by Connecticut soldiers.
19 Massachusetts issues a declaration of amnesty for Indians who surrender.
22 Captain Tom is executed in Boston.
JULY
2 Major John Talcott and his troops begin sweeping Connecticut and Rhode Island, capturing large numbers of Algonquians who are transported out of the colonies as slaves throughout the summer.
James Printer surrenders in Cambridge.
4 Captain Benjamin Church and his soldiers begin sweeping Plymouth for Wampanoags.
11 Indians attack Taunton but are repelled.
27 Nearly two hundred Nipmucks surrender in Boston.
AUGUST
2 Benjamin Church captures Philip’s wife and son.
12 Alderman, an Indian soldier under Church, kills Philip.
Prologue
THE CIRCLE
They first cut one of his Fingers round in the Joynt, at the Trunck of his Hand, with a sharp Knife, and then brake it off, as Men used to do with a slaughtered Beast, before they uncase him; then they cut off another and another, till they had dismembered one Hand of all its Digits, the Blood sometimes spirting out in Streams a Yard from his Hand … yet did not the Sufferer ever relent, or shew any Signs of Anguish. … In this Frame he continued, till his Executioners had dealt with the Toes of his Feet, as they had done with the Fingers of his Hands; all the while making him Dance round the Circle, and Sing, till he had wearied both himself and them. At last they brake the Bones of his Legs, after which he was forced to sit down, which ’tis said he silently did, till they had knocked out his Brains.1
July 1676. King Philip’s War is almost over. Houses have been burned, children murdered, men beheaded. Hatred has accumulated. And here, it seems, is a typical account of a typical torture—the inexorable slowness of it, the mocking. The torturers are Mohegan Indians. “Making a great Circle, they placed him in the Middle, that all their Eyes might at the same Time, be pleased with the utmost Revenge upon him.” The typical spectacle, the typical torments; we can almost see the writhing English colonist, surrounded by men he considers barbarians, suffering stoically. But our imagination, swelled by too many Saturdays spent watching Westerns, has carried us away. The man in the middle is not an Englishman. The account itself might have tipped us off: “‘Tis said” that the finger-less, toeless man sat down silently while his torturers knocked his brains out. Said by whom? The Englishman whose words we read writes in the third person; he is not that fingerless, toeless, ultimately brainless man. Nor is he a captive forced to watch a gruesome preview of the fate that awaits him, only to be rescued at the last minute. He has only heard this story, secondhand, from someone who witnessed the scene and lived to tell the tale. Who, then, is the man in the middle, and where is the Englishman who watched him die?
The fingerless, toeless man is also nameless. He is called only “a young sprightly Fellow, seized by the Mohegins,” though his sprightliness will soon fade. He is no Englishman; the English despise him. He is a formidable foe. “Of all the Enemies” of the war, “this Villain did most deserve to become an Object of Justice and Severity.” He is, at first, boastful, too, and brags of shooting nineteen Englishmen dead and then, “unwilling to lose a fair Shot,” killing a Mohegan to make an even twenty. “With which, having made up his Number, he told them he was fully satisfied.” The Mohegans, after all, are allies of the English, and he who would kill one would as easily kill the other. The man in the middle of the circle could, perhaps, be a Frenchman, enemy to both. But instead he is a “cruel Monster” who has fought to oust the settlers from New England. The picture becomes clearer. The man in the middle, it turns out, is an Indian, a Narragansett.
But if both the sufferer and his tormentors are Indians, where, in this scene, are the English? They are watching, and paying close attention. Aided by the Mohegans, the English have just captured more than three hundred enemy Indians and now they must “gratify” their allies, who ask that this Narragansett man “be delivered into their Hands, that they might put him to Death” and thereby “sacrifice him to their cruel Genius of Revenge.” The English quickly consent, “lest by a Denial they might disoblige their Indian Friends,” and also, they admit, because they are curious for “an occular Demonstration of the Salvage, barbarous Cruelty of these Heathen.” The English, then, have made this torture possible, and now they form part of the “great Circle” of onlookers to the event.
Truly the English are in a difficult position. Being the man in the middle, however horrifying, makes more sense to them, to their sense of themselves, than forming the circle. If they are to think of themselves as different from “these Heathen” whom they condemn for their “barbarous Cruelty,” how can they consent to it? How can they stand shoulder to shoulder with Indians and watch as a man is tortured to death, knowing, as they do, that watching is the chief sport of it? Although they insist that the Narragansett man is tortured simply to humor the Moheg
ans, his suffering seems sublimely satisfying to the English as well. They never look away; this is the “occular Demonstration” they’ve been waiting for. In many ways, theirs is a safe pleasure. Their enemy is killed, yet they do not have to kill him. They are allowed to witness torture, yet they need not inflict it. Nor are they themselves physically threatened—it is not their legs that are being broken.
Still, there is danger here. “It is a signe of a barbarous and cruell man,” according to an influential English Puritan theologian, “if any one bee given to warre simply desiring it and delighting in it.”2 Or, as Thomas Aquinas had written, “brutality or savagery applies to those who in inflicting punishment have not in view a default of the person punished, but merely the pleasure they derive from a man’s torture.”3 To the extent that the English soldiers enjoy witnessing this scene of torture, they are relishing “savage” pleasures and thereby jeopardizing their identity as “civilized” men. And protecting that identity—as Christians and, most fundamentally, as Englishmen—is why they are fighting the war in the first place. From the time of their first arrival, in the 1620s and 1630s, the settlers had worried about losing their Englishness. However much they wanted to escape England and its corruptions, they still clung to their English ways—ways of walking, talking, dressing, thinking, eating, and drinking.4 Being away from England meant religious freedom, but it also meant cultural isolation. Even while in Holland they had complained that it was “grievous to live from under the protection of the State of England,” likely “to lose our language, and our name of English.”5 If living among the Dutch in a European city threatened English identity, how much more threatening was living among the Indians in the New World. Strange languages, strange people, strange land. Building a “city on a hill” in the American wilderness provided a powerful religious rationale, but on certain days, in many ways, it must have fallen short of making perfect sense. When the corn didn’t grow, when the weather turned wild, when the wolves howled, when the Indians laughed at God, these are the times when the colonists might have wondered, What are we doing here? Discouraged and afraid, thousands of colonists simply left—as many as one in six sailed home to England in the 1630s and 1640s, eager to return to a world they knew and understood.6
But those who stayed eventually learned to grow corn, predict the weather, shoot wolves, and ignore Indian blasphemies. And then they might have wondered, Who have we become?
The colonists’ doubts about their own identity were magnified both by their distance from England and by their nearness to the Indians. Most especially, they worried about the Indians’ origins and the reason for their barbarity. Either the Indians were native to America (and more like an elm tree than an Englishman), or else they were migrants from Europe or Asia (and then very much like the English, who were simply more recent migrants). If native, the Indians were one with the wilderness and had always been as savage as their surroundings. As Roger Williams reported, “They say themselves, that they have sprung and growne up in that very place, like the very trees of the Wildernesse.”7 But if the Indians were migrants from Europe or Asia, then they had changed since coming to America and had been contaminated by its savage environment. If this were the case, as many believed, then the English could expect to degenerate, too. Urging the conversion of the Indians to Christianity, Daniel Gookin had warned, “Here we may see, as in a mirror, or looking glass, the woful, miserable, and deplorable estate, that sin hath reduced mankind unto naturally.”8 Instead of being the stage for the perfection of piety, the woods of New England might in truth be a forest of depravity. Instead of becoming “visible saints” for all of Europe to see, the English might expect to become more savage with each passing year, not only less religious but also less and less like Englishmen. And more and more like Indians.9
By the 1670s, in the years before King Philip’s War broke out, there were many signs that the English had degenerated. Church membership and church attendance had declined. People were settling farther and farther from the coast, nearer to the Indians, and farther from the civilizing influence of English neighbors. Trade and contact with the Indians were increasing, though little of this contact involved sharing the good news of the gospel. In 1674, just a year before the war began, the Puritan minister Increase Mather published a sermon called The Day of Trouble is Near, in which he bemoaned the profligacy of his parishioners and the “great decay as to the power of godliness amongst us.” It had become almost impossible, he complained, to tell the difference between church members and other men.10
Mather’s themes of decay and confusion were common concerns. At the farthest extreme, New Englanders worried that they might degenerate so much as to become indistinguishable from beasts. The same year that Mather published his Day of Trouble, Samuel Danforth printed a sermon on bestiality (occasioned by a young boy’s confession of copulating with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey) in which he condemned the practice as a “monstrous and horrible Confusion” that “turneth man into a bruit Beast.”11 Somewhere between these two fears—of mistaking godly men for ungodly men, or men for beasts—lay the colonists’ principal fear: of mistaking Englishmen for Indians. Earlier English colonizers in Ireland had shared the same concerns, worrying, as Edmund Spenser did, that the English there might follow the fate of the original Norman invaders who “degenerated and growen allmoste meare Irishe yea and more malitious to the Englishe than the verye Irishe themselves.”12 In both New England and Ireland, not a few colonists, after all, had run off to live with the natives, abandoning English society altogether.13 (Nearby, in New France, Frenchmen seemingly “became Savage simply because they lived with them.”14) Perhaps, the English New Englanders worried, they themselves were becoming Indianized, contaminated by the influence of Americas wilderness and its wild people.15
Meanwhile, many Algonquians had come to suspect the reverse, worrying that they themselves had become too much like their new European neighbors. Not only had the English taken Indian lands and disrupted traditional systems of trade and agriculture, but they also had corrupted the power of native rulers, or sachems, and attempted to eradicate the influence of powwaws, native religious leaders. When coastal populations became decimated by European diseases, many Indians had even decided to convert to Christianity and to live among the English. Those who resisted the influence of the English commonly attributed all of their people’s problems “to the Departure of some of them from their own heathenish Ways and Customs.”16Philip himself believed that too many Indians had been Anglicized and Christianized, praying to an English God and even learning to read and write. During negotiations with several colonists from Rhode Island, Philip and his counselors claimed “that thay had a great fear to have ani of their indians should be Caled or forsed to be Christian indians. Thay saied that such wer in everi thing more mischivous, only disemblers, and then the English made them not subject to their kings, and by ther lying to rong their kings.”17Clearly, the boundaries between the two peoples had become blurred.
A day of trouble was indeed near, as Increase Mather had warned. “Ye shall hear of wars, and rumours of wars,” he preached, quoting from Matthew 24:6. Calamities showing God’s judgment were almost always at hand in Mather’s mind, but this time, in 1674, he had a point. It is not entirely clear just exactly how or why the war started when it did, in June 1675, but from the firing of the first shots, both sides pursued the war with viciousness, and almost without mercy. “Christians in this Land have become too like unto the Indians,” Increase Mather would later write, “and then we need not wonder if the Lord hath afflicted us by them.”18 The Indians, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Nipmucks, as well as Pocomtucks and Abenakis, attacked dozens of English towns, burning as many houses and killing as many inhabitants as they could. And the English, with occasional help from Mohegan, Pequot, Mohawk, and Christian Indians, burned wigwams, killed women and children, and sold prisoners into slavery. Both sides practiced torture and mutilation of
the dead.
New England’s Algonquians waged war against the English settlers in response to incursions on their cultural, political, and economic autonomy and, at least in part, they fought to maintain their Indianness. Meanwhile, New England colonists waged war to gain Indian lands, to erase Indians from the landscape, and to free themselves of doubts about their own Englishness.19For many colonists this was a struggle ordained by God, in which He “in wisdom most devine” would “purg ther dros from purer Coyne.”20 But if the English hoped to do away with enemy Indians by torturing some, killing most, and selling the rest as slaves, there was a catch: that was what the Spanish had done. And to behave as the Spanish had would again jeopardize the colonists’ identity as Englishmen.
Frontispiece of Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Tears of the Indians, trans. J. P. (London, 1656). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Spain’s brutal conquest of Mexico was widely known in both Old and New England, largely through a work titled The Tears of the Indians and commonly referred to as “Spanish Cruelties,” but actually a translation of the Spanish friar Bartolomé de Las Casas’ sixteenth-century treatise “In Defense of the Indians.” Las Casas had spared no details in documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the conquistadors, and “Spanish Cruelties” invited English readers to define their colonial ventures in opposition to that model. In the seventeenth century, the widespread printing and distribution of works such as “Spanish Cruelties” fueled the growth of nationalism in Europe, a development that was predicated on the invention of the printing press.21 As one New England colonist wrote in 1676, “all men (of reading) condemne the Spaniard for cruelty … in destroying men & depopulating the land.”22 Translations of Las Casas were, in fact, part of a propaganda war among the competing imperial powers, Spain, Holland, England, and France, much of which, from the English perspective, centered on proving who was most Christian, and most civilized, in their interactions with Americas native inhabitants.23 When Richard Hakluyt listed for Queen Elizabeth the reasons for planting American colonies, he suggested that the English might easily win the favor of Indians desperate for liberation from Spain’s cruelties: