by Jill Lepore
To a considerable degree, the response of all “true English-men” to the Spanish conquest—compassion, astonishment, and tears—was predicated on acknowledging the Indians as human. According to a contemporary military manual, it was only because all men are “of one Nature, and deriving their originals both from one Roote,” that soldiers “should behold neither mortall wounds, nor the living miseries of their subdued enemies, but with compassion.”42 Since the question of whether colonists and Indians were “from one Roote” was at the heart of what caused King Philip’s War in the first place, compassion for Indians, as for the tortured Narragansett man, could be, at best, only partial.43 He was, Hubbard points out, a “Villain,” treated as one might treat “a slaughtered Beast.” When the Mohegans asked the tortured Narragansett “How he liked the War?” he answered, “He liked it very well, and found it as sweet, as English Men did their Sugar.” For this, Hubbard called him an “unsensible and hard-hearted Monster.” After all,
He might have replyed, as the Scotch Gentlemen did after the Loss of a Battel, that being asked how he liked the Match (sc. with our Prince of Wales, (which then was the Occasion of the Quarrel) made Answer, he liked the Match well enough, but no whit liked the Manner of the Wooing written by such Lines of Blood.44
This awkward, awful attempt at humor reveals Hubbard’s incredible discomfort with the scene. Unaware of the significance of the Narragansett man’s own biting reply, demonstrating his stoicism while mocking English dependence on imported goods (a dependence Stonewall John would have observed while living among the English), Hubbard compared it with a Scot’s double entendre, as if to say that the Indians, even in death, lack the Saxons’ witticism. They, he insisted, are not like us. Whether Indians were fully human is a question writers about the war would take up again and again but would ultimately leave unanswered.
For all its awkwardness, Hubbard’s account of the scene of the torture of a Narragansett man in July 1676 is both complicated and, in a sense, sophisticated. In the century and a half since the Spanish conquest, the proliferation of printing, the expansion of literacy, and the growth of nationalism combined to make for just this kind of sophistication. How these themes express themselves in all of the writing and reading about the war is the subject of future chapters. For now it’s worth noting that the scene as Hubbard wrote it could only have been written when it was, in the immediate aftermath of the war. Forty years later, another English colonist, Benjamin Church, related his recollections of the war, which included a scene that seems, at least initially, very similar to the one in Hubbard’s Narrative. Church’s scene is set in March 1676, and its backdrop is almost identical to Hubbard’s: with their Mohegan allies, the English have just captured an enemy Indian (this time a Nipmuck). In Church’s version, however, it is the English, not the Indians, who first suggest torture, not for delight’s sake but “to bring him to a more ample confession of what he knew concerning his countrymen.” Moreover, instead of “gratifying” this desire, Church “interceded and prevailed for his escaping torture.” Nonetheless, the Nipmuck man was sentenced to die and the Mohegan who captured him “was allowed, as he desired to be, his executioner.” If this scene followed Hubbard’s direction, we would now expect Church to stand by and watch, but once again, Church’s story takes a different turn. While the captured man is “brought before a great fire,” Church, “taking no delight in the sport, framed an errand at some distance.”45 Church refused to form a part of the circle. He simply walked away. A year after this scene took place, after the fighting had ceased, Church was sent on a mission to “scour the woods of some of the lurking enemy.” There he found an old Indian man who had fled from Swansea.
The Captain asked his name, he replied, Conscience. Conscience, said the Captain, smiling, then the war is over; for that was what they were searching for.46
Forty years after King Philip’s War had ended, when Benjamin Church recorded his tales, the stakes had changed. In 1716 Church portrayed himself as a man searching for Conscience, an independent moral agent, acting on the courage of his convictions, more moral than the Mohegans, but also more moral than the English. Benjamin Church had a different story to tell than William Hubbard. Because Church walked away, it is tempting to believe that the circle of spectatorship has been broken, that it no longer invites both eyewitnesses and readers to share in the complex pains and pleasures of cruelty. We are not Englishmen. We have not been influenced by reading “Spanish Cruelties.” But still, in a sense, when we read Hubbard’s account, we stand in that circle today. We can’t help but be drawn into his narrative, but we can try to measure the genuineness of our compassion, the troubling fascination underlying our revulsion, and the curiosity behind our condemnation.47
Chapter 1
BEWARE OF ANY LINGUIST
In the late, chilly days of January 1675, John Sassamon set out for Plymouth. It was only a short journey from Namasket, the Christian Indian town where he served as minister, but for Sassamon, who carried urgent news, the road must have seemed almost unbearably long. Fifteen miles of lonely, snowy trails. At last, arriving in Plymouth, he sought an audience with none other than the colony’s governor, Josiah Winslow. There, finally and feverishly, John Sassamon unburdened himself, whispering to Winslow that “Philip … was Indeavouring to engage all the Sachems round about in a warr.” Perhaps the governor would offer a reward for such valuable information. Perhaps he would offer protection. Sassamon told Winslow he believed his life was in danger, that Philip would surely murder him if his betrayal was discovered. Winslow, alas, neither heeded Sassamon’s warnings nor assuaged his fears. And he spoke of no reward. Instead, the governor dismissed Sassamon’s information “because it had an Indian original, and one can hardly believe them [even] when they speak truth.”1 He sent the minister on his way.
If the road to Plymouth had seemed long, no doubt the road back to Namasket seemed longer still. Sassamon must have been startled by the noise of each cracking twig, each leaping deer. He had good reason to be afraid. Within a week of his meeting with Winslow, John Sassamon mysteriously disappeared. In February his bloated, bruised body was found under the ice at Assawompset Pond, not far from his home, and was buried without further delay. John Sassamon, it seemed, had been walking on thin ice.
All spring, as the ice thawed, rumors abounded. Many colonists and Indians alike suspected that Sassamon had been brutally murdered, as he himself had predicted. But by whom? Philip, of course, was the obvious suspect, but with Sassamon’s death the Plymouth authorities were now more interested in determining whether he really was planning a war. At the end of February Philip voluntarily appeared before the Plymouth authorities to address Sassamon’s allegations. “Upon a large debate” with Philip, the Plymouth Council concluded that there was “great reason to believe that the information against him might be in substance true,” but they had no proof of his plans, and so, “hopeing that the descovery of it soe farr would cause him to desist they dismissed him frindly.”2 There remained the matter of Sassamon’s murder, and on March 1, at its regular meeting, the Plymouth Court interrogated “many Indians” to no avail. Soon after the court adjourned, however, an eyewitness appeared who claimed to have seen three men kill Sassamon. At the next regular court session, on June 1, these three men, Mattashunannamo, Tobias, and Tobias’s son Wampapaquan (three of Philip’s chief counselors), were formally charged:
being accused, that they did with joynt consent, upon the 29 of January …, att a place called Assowamsett Pond, wilfully and of sett purpose, and of mallice fore thought, and by force and armes, murder John Sassamon, an other Indian, by laying violent hands on him and striking him, or twisting his necke, untill hee was dead; and to hide and conceale this theire said murder, att the time and place aforesaid, did cast his dead body through a hole of the iyce into the said pond.3
An unusual jury of twelve Englishmen and six “of the most indifferentest, gravest, and sage Indians” was empaneled to consider the evi
dence. First, there was Patuckson, the eyewitness who, “unseen by those three that killed Sausaman, beheld all that they did to him, and spake of it, so that a Praying … Indian William Nahauton by name, heard of it, and he forthwith revealed what he knew to the English.”4 (Both Patuckson and Nahauton probably testified at the trial.) Second, there was the forensic evidence. Governor Winslow had ordered Sassamon’s body dug from its grave and had commissioned “a Coroners Inquest, to make enquiry how he came by his death: And they found he had been murthered, for his neck was broken by twisting of his head round, which is the way the Indians some times use when they practice murther; also, his head was extreamly swollen, and his body wounded in several parts of it.” Testimony may also have been offered that when the body “was first taken out of the pond, no water issued out of it, which argued that the Body was not drowned, but dead before it came into the water.” Finally, there was the supernatural evidence: the court ordered Tobias to approach Sassamon’s dead body and, as he did, Sassamon’s body fell “a bleeding afresh, as if it had been newly slain.” The experiment was repeated with the same result, supplying irrefutable testimony of the guilt of the accused.5
At the end of the trial, the jury, “both English and Indians … joyntly and with one consent” declared Tobias, Wampapaquan, and Mattashunannamo “guilty of the blood of John Sassamon” and pronounced the sentence of death.6 The execution took place on June 8. “This so Exasperated King Philip,” one colonist recalled, “that from that Day after, he studied to be Revenged on the English.”7 In just three days, on June u, Wampanoags were reported arming outside Plymouth “in a posture of war,” and by June 24 they had attacked Swansea, killing nine colonists.8 Two days later, the earth’s shadow eclipsed the moon. That night, English soldiers marching from Boston to Swansea made camp in the darkness on the banks of the Neponset River and waited for the eclipsed moonlight to creep out again. Staring at the brightening sky they saw a strange black spot, shaped like the scalp of an Indian, or maybe, some said, like an Indian bow. Both were terrible, terrifying omens, portending a deadly war.9 It was three weeks since John Sassamon’s body had spoken from beyond the grave. King Philip’s War had begun.
I
WHO KILLED John Sassamon?
No doubt most colonists “believed that [Philip] was the Author of [the] murther” and the accused merely “the Actors,” but John Easton, deputy governor of Rhode Island, had cause to wonder whether John Sassamon had really been murdered at all. “Sum English suposed him throne in,” Easton acknowledged, but “sum indians that I judged intelegabell and impartiall in that Case did think he fell in and was so drouned.”10 Patuckson claimed to have seen Philip’s men violently murder Sassamon and then conceal their crime by shoving the body through a hole in the ice, deliberately leaving Sassamon’s hat and gun upon the surface, “so others might suppose him to have there drowned himself.”11 (It was also rumored that the murderers left “sum foulle” by Sassamon’s body to suggest that he had accidentally drowned while hunting.) But the Wampanoags Easton spoke with found this story ridiculous. Although they admitted that “sumtimes na[ugh]ty indians wold kill others,” they had never heard of an Indian who would “obscuer as if the dead indian was not murdered.” Moreover, they suggested that William Nahauton had invented his testimony because he knew “it wold pleas the English so to think him a beter Christian.”12 (Nahauton, a minister at the praying town of Punkapoag, served the English as both soldier and spy during the war; the Massachusetts Council would later refer to him as one of “the cheef of our Indians.”13) Easton’s Wampanoag informants claimed that, far from having been strangled to death and then thrown into the water, John Sassamon had drowned and “the ies did hurt his throat” as he struggled to save himself.14
Murder? Suicide? Accidental drowning? Any reconsideration of this case would be compromised by the potential bias of nearly all the participants: Nahauton and Patuckson might have perjured themselves to gain the colonists’ favor; the six Christian Indians on the jury probably had little choice but to concur with the twelve English jurors; the “intelegabell and impartiall” Wampanoags Easton interviewed might well have misled him about Sassamon’s death to justify Philip’s subsequent actions in attacking Swansea; and Easton, a Quaker, might have made up parts of his story to better condemn the Puritans’ conduct.
Perhaps the most serious bias of all is the possibility that the Plymouth Court wrongly prosecuted Philip’s men to send him a warning or even to deliberately provoke the war. But if so, why go to the trouble of framing three men for a murder that was really an accident or a suicide? If the English wanted to start a war, there were easier, faster, and less ambiguous ways to do it, means they had resorted to before and would again.15 The Plymouth Court might have wanted to provoke Philip, and may even have supplied lying witnesses, but it seems unlikely (and all too unnecessary) that the murder itself was a fiction. The evidence that John Sassamon was indeed murdered is compelling. First, the absence of water in his lungs, if true, proves that Sassamon was dead before he entered the water. Second, both the coroner’s inquest and Easton’s Wampanoags agreed that Sassamon’s throat was severely injured, but people who drown in frozen ponds are usually bruised or cut on the hands, arms, and chest from trying to hoist their upper bodies over the ice’s sharp edge. The universally acknowledged injuries to Sassamon’s neck and throat, in other words, strongly suggest foul play—namely, strangulation.16
To insist that there was a murder at the heart of this matter is not to deny a possible miscarriage of justice. John Sassamon seems to have been killed, but the evidence against Tobias, Wampapaquan, and Mattashunannamo is slim to vanishing. Patuckson and Nahauton appeared on the scene all too conveniently, and neither is an entirely credible witness. Even Wampapaquan’s alleged eleventh-hour confession—just after the noose broke and temporarily interrupted his execution—must be discounted, since he was simply, and quite literally, trying to save his own neck.17 Still, with no other evidence at hand, it is difficult to identify additional suspects. Perhaps the better strategy is to identify not the murderer but the motive.
Why was John Sassamon killed?
At first blush the answer seems obvious: dead men tell no tales. In other words, Philip had Sassamon killed (by Tobias, Wampapaquan, and Mattashunannamo, or by others) either as punishment for his treasonous betrayal or to prevent further leaks of information to the English. Boston merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall claimed that “King Philip suspecting he either would divulge or had already made known this Secret to the English, took Councel to kill this Sosoman.” The Reverend Increase Mather said of Philip’s men that “the main ground why they murthered him seems to be, because he discovered their subtle and malicious designs, which they were complotting against the English.” In Rhode Island even John Easton conceded that “it was reported Sausimun before his death had informed of the indian plot, and that if the indians knew it thay wold kill him.”18
This motive seems simple enough, and yet each of these three observers—Mather, Saltonstall, and Easton—suggested other, broader reasons behind the murder. First among these was Sassamon’s religion: he was a Christian and a minister at the Indian “praying town” of Namasket, not far from Mount Hope, Philip’s home. According to Mather, “no doubt but one reason why the Indians murthered John Sausaman, was out of hatred against him for his Religion.” Saltonstall asserted that Wampapaquan, Tobias, and Mattashunannamo killed Sassamon because they were annoyed at his preaching: “Not liking his Discourse, [they] immediately Murthered him after a most Barbarous Manner.”19 Others claimed Philip had Sassamon killed because he himself was tired of Sassamon’s proselytizing. And Sassamon’s death was also attributed to his greed: he had served as a translator for Philip and had cheated him. The Wampanoags John Easton interviewed said Sassamon “was a bad man that king Philop got him to write his will and he made the writing for a gret part of the land to be his but read as if it had bine as Philop wold.”20
Unfortunately, th
e surviving reports conflict so greatly that it is impossible to determine with any certainty the exact motive for Sassamon’s murder. But the exact motive may not matter. Although the shape and size of the possible motives vary, they cast an identical shadow: behind each of them lies the specter of John Sassamon’s position as a cultural mediator, as a man who was neither English nor Indian but who negotiated with both peoples.21 And for Sassamon, the ability to hold this mediating position was predicated on his bilingualism and his literacy—his skill at speaking, reading, and writing English was intricately intertwined with his loyalty to the English, his conversion to Christianity, his betrayal of Philip, and even his ability to cheat Philip in the writing of his will. In a sense, literacy killed John Sassamon. And herein lies one of the fundamental paradoxes of the waging and writing of King Philip’s War: the same cultural tensions that caused the war—Indians becoming Anglicized and the English becoming Indianized—meant that literate Indians like John Sassamon, those most likely to record their version of the events of the war, were among its earliest casualties.
II
IN THE EARLY seventeenth century Samuel Purchas declared that the “literall advantage” meant that literacy makes history possible: “By speech we utter our minds once, at the present, to the present, as present occasions move (and perhaps unadvisedly transport) us: but by writing Man seemes immortall.”22 Twenty-five years ago, social scientists resurrected Purchas’s argument. Not only does the invention of writing mark the advent of history proper, they claimed, but the ability to write down and record events also creates a “historical sensibility,” an awareness of the “pastness of the past.” People who communicate orally can understand the past only in terms of their present-day face-to-face relationships; thus they create “myths” that emphasize continuity between past and present. Yet literate people, with their written records, cannot fail to notice the distinction between what was and what is. And since there are often inconsistencies between what was and what is, literate cultures invented history to document and interpret change over time. The concept of history, these scholars argued, was thus a direct consequence of literacy.23