The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  But it wasn’t just being literate that made Sassamon untrustworthy; it was how he got that way in the first place. Learning to read and write, and especially learning to read and write English, were among the very last steps on the path to cultural conversion. Steps taken earlier along this same path were considered not nearly as corrupting. Many New England Indians were bilingual; speaking English was useful for trading, among other things, and did not necessarily signify any particular loyalty to the English. Dressing as an Englishman and worshiping the Christian God were of course much less ambiguous; those practices clearly marked an Indian as having a compromised relationship with the English. Still, many Indians lived and attended church in praying towns simply because they needed the food and shelter, and then only temporarily, taking off English clothes as easily as they put them on. Literacy, however, was a special kind of marker, one that branded its possessor, perhaps most especially in his own eyes, as an Indian who had spent years and years with the English and whose very “Indianness” was thus called into question. After King Philip’s War began, Indian interpreters like Sassamon became even less trustworthy, and colonists feared they would join the enemy at the first opportunity. In September 1675 John Allyn advised Fitz-John Winthrop, “beware of haveing any linguist in your company, least he so hide himselfe as that you leave him behind you!”85

  In the end, although John Sassamon “was observed to conform more to the English Manners than any other Indian,” the facts of his life are by no means clear on the question of whether his primary attachment was to one people or the other.86 What is clear is that it was his linguistic skills, and especially his literacy, that made it possible for him to switch sides with such facility. But those same skills, and the untenable position they put him in, eventually led John Sassamon to his death, a death that signaled the failure of the English and native peoples to live together peaceably, the gradual loss of native political autonomy, and the eventual extinction of the Massachusett language. And, by the war’s end, the Algonquian population in New England had been drastically and permanently reduced.

  King Philip’s War also marked the decline of English attempts to convert and educate the Indians; in some ways, Eliot’s missionary program died with Sassamon.87 The imprisonment of Christian Indians on Deer Island in Boston Harbor for the duration of the war spoiled not only their allegiance to the English but also their links to the Puritans’ religion. As Eliot wrote in his diary, “When the Indians were hurried away to an iland at half an hours warning, pore soules in terror thei left theire goods, books, bibles, only some few caryed their bibles, the rest were spoyled & lost.”88 By the war’s end, only a tiny number of copies of the much-celebrated Indian Bible survived. Dutch traders who ran into Eliot three years after the war asked him for a copy of the Indian Bible, but Eliot apologized that “in the late Indian War all the Bibles and Testaments were carried away and burned or destroyed, so that he had not been able to save any for himself; but a new edition was in press, which he hoped would be much better than the first one, though that was not to be despised.”89The best explanation of the mystery of the disappearing Bibles is that, in their fury, Algonquians hostile to Christianity seized the books as a symbol of the pernicious influence of English culture and destroyed any they came upon.90

  Although Eliot was able to secure the funds for a new printing of the Bible, the Society for the Propagation of the gospel became more and more reluctant to publish any more works in the Indian language, instead urging missionaries to simply teach the Indians English. While a handful of praying towns, including Natick, survived into the eighteenth century, they soon lost first their religious zeal, next their political autonomy, and finally their ability to preserve their native language. In 1698 the church membership at Natick had dropped to seven men and three women; by the 1720s the largely secular community was no longer self-governing. The Massachusett language also languished. In 1710 Cotton Mather would write,

  It is very sure the best thing we can do for our Indians is to Anglicize them in all agreeable instances; and in that of languages, as well as others. They can scarce retain their language, without a tincture of other savage inclinations, which do but ill suit, either with honor, or with the design of Christianity.91

  By 1720 the paucity of books written in Massachusett made the preservation of the language increasingly difficult, even for literate Indians.92 In 1745 one observer claimed that there were fewer than twenty families of Massachusett speakers, “and scarce any of these can read.” Of the Indian Bible, he would ask, “Cui bono?”93 And at Harvard, the building so hopefully erected as an Indian College in 1655 was soon put to other purposes. By 1677, two years after King Philip’s War ended, the Indian College building’s only use was to house the Cambridge Press. Originally imported by Eliot to print Indian Bibles and save Indian souls, the press at Cambridge was soon put to another, altogether different use: to print the colonists’ war narratives, damning Indian devils.94

  V

  MURDER MAY HAVE silenced John Sassamon, but something else silenced John Eliot. In his diary at the end of 1675, Eliot looked back at the year’s devastations, “the history whereof,” he wrote helplessly, “I canot, I may not relate.” Much later, after the war had ended, Eliot recalled, “I desisted fro[m] this work of recording p’ticular matters,” partly because “I thought not my selfe so fitting.” Moreover, “knowing that it was comited to othrs,” Eliot explained, “I declined it.”95 Short of the printers and the licensers of the Cambridge Press, John Eliot was probably more familiar with the workings of the press than any other colonist in New England. And the man who supervised the printing of an entire Indian Library no doubt knew that any account he might write of the war would not be printable.

  Eliot also knew that the task of recording the story had been committed to others, to men like William Hubbard and Increase Mather. Meanwhile, as Daniel Gookin leafed through the pages and pages about King Philip’s War written by people like Mather, Hubbard, and Saltonstall, he became increasingly frustrated. Gookin had noticed something disturbing:

  Forasmuch as sundry persons have taken pains to write and publish historical narratives of the war, between the English and Indians in New England, but very little hath been hitherto declared (that I have seen) concerning the Christian Indians, who, in reality, may be judged to have no small share in the effects and consequences of this war.

  Boldly, Gookin decided to remedy the situation and to tackle the job himself, resolving “to give a particular and real account of this affair.” It probably did not occur to Gookin that he might instead have encouraged one of the literate Indians he knew to write such an account; in fact, he did not so much notice the absence of accounts written by Indians as the lack of discussion, in English accounts, about Indians, and here he referred only to converted, Christian Indians. Still, Gookin’s sympathy with the Indians may have been subversive enough—his “Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England,” a manuscript presented to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in London in 1677 and presumably written for immediate publication, was put aside to gather the dust of more than a century. (Gookin had himself at one time been a licensor of the press in Cambridge, but during the war his standing in the colonial community diminished dramatically. In May 1676 he lost a reelection bid for the Court of Assistants.)96 When John Eliot read Daniel Gookin’s account of the war, his measured response hinted at resignation: “Here is enough to give wise men a taste of what hath passed. Leave the rest unto the day of judgment, when all the contrivances and actings of men shall be opened before the seeing eye of a glorious Judge.”97

  The accounts of King Philip’s War that were printed, of course, were rarely to the credit of the Indians John Eliot had long labored to convert. Whether they wrote to justify the war or simply to document it, most colonists who described the war were likely to portray Indians, both Christian and non-Christian, in the worst possible light. Although e
arlier writing about the Indians had emphasized their potential for conversion, the King Philip’s War narratives transformed New England’s natives into irredeemable monsters. In his dedicatory poem to William Hubbard’s Narrative, Benjamin Tompson suggested that the writings of men like Roger Williams and John Eliot had been rightly replaced by Hubbard’s account of the Indians’ barbarity:

  Their grand Apostle [Eliot] writes of their Return [to grace];

  [Roger] William’s their Language; Hubbard how they burn,

  Rob, Kill and Roast, Lead Captive, Slay, Blaspheme[.]98

  Tompson welcomed the replacement of Eliot’s idealism with Hubbard’s realism; Gookin mourned it. Yet, in noticing the war narratives’ neglect of Indians (albeit only Christian Indians), Gookin was not only more perceptive than most of his contemporaries, he was also more perceptive than most of the historians who succeeded him, many of whom failed to consider even the possibility of an Indian perspective. This is an error very recent historians are not likely to make; instead, they usually cite the absence of Indian documents, acknowledge the inherent bias of the existing sources, and adopt one of three approaches to the colonists’ accounts: read them with a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and accept or reject them according to whether or not they are corroborated by other evidence; claim that questions of truth and falsehood are irrelevant and that “verisimilitude” is a more appropriate indicator of a source’s value; or piece together the sparse Indian sources to create a new, Indian-centered narrative.99

  All of these strategies have their merits, just as all have limitations, but they all take the absence of Indian sources more or less for granted. They begin with the assumption that there are few or no such sources because historically people like seventeenth-century Algonquians have had no indigenous writing systems. In this they echo the observations of men like Cotton Mather, who was careful to note the natives’ lack of letters or any written system of recording their past:

  Reading and Writing is altogether unknown to them, tho there is a Rock or two in the Country that has unaccountable Characters engrav’d upon it.100

  Yet, even in an age and in a place where such “unlettered” peoples were taught to read, historians have continued to assume that most were illiterate and hence unable to record the events of their lives. Rates of illiteracy prove this to be true enough. But behind this assumption lies the more troubling belief that these “inarticulate” peoples lacked not only the tools to communicate with us across the centuries but the sensibility as well, that people who lack the ability to read and write also lack historical awareness, the sense of existing on a time line. Yet, contrary to Samuel Purchas’s seventeenth-century contention that writing makes man immortal, and contrary, too, to the theories proposed by anthropologists two decades ago that literacy makes history possible, the story of John Sassamon suggests that literacy might sometimes make history impossible, at least temporarily.

  When John Sassamon learned to read and write he did not magically cross an invisible boundary between orality and literacy; he did not spontaneously abandon mythological concepts and begin to think historically. But with his acquisition of literacy came an extraordinarily complicated and tenuous cultural position as a mediator between two very different cultures. And Sassamon exploited this position in ways that had fatal consequences. The first casualty may have been the Pequot man whom an Indian interpreter, possibly Sassamon himself, shot dead in 1637, furious at being asked the question that haunted him: “What are you, an Indian or an Englishman?” The unanswerableness of this question would eventually kill Sassamon, too. His life, and his death, serve as a metaphor for tensions that would prove fatal to the thousands of literate and nonliterate Indians who died in King Philip’s War. It was not until the Pequot William Apess in 1836 that a New England Indian writer would emerge to write the history of King Philip’s War. If Sassamon had survived the consequences of literacy, he might have written such a history a century and a half earlier.

  On the other hand, he might not have. Even though literate, John Sassamon might never have thought to write a history of his life, his people, or their calamitous war. Because little evidence survives to tell us how he thought, it remains a possibility that Sassamon did in fact lack the kind of “historical sensibility” anthropologists have commonly attributed to literate peoples. An early eighteenth-century missionary on Martha’s Vineyard noted that most literate Indians read only at the “rate that poor Men among the English are wont to do.”101 Frustratingly, we will never know what kind of a writer John Sassamon might have been.102 Certainly several New England Indians (including James Printer) did survive the consequences of literacy, but they can be no more faulted for their silence than Eliot himself: perhaps they, too, chose to “leave the rest unto the day of judgment.”

  War is a contest of words as much as it is a contest of wounds. This connection, between waging war and writing about it, was not lost on New England’s colonists. For some, the war’s injuries were signs from God, as legible as any scriptural text. “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us,” asked Increase Mather, “when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”103 God might write with an ink of blood, but so, too, did John Sassamon, when his decayed corpse fell “ableeding afresh,” as Tobias approached it. And so, too, did Philip. One Englishman said that the war, through the wounds Indians inflicted on English bodies, was Philip’s only chance to be “found in print,” “drawing his own reportt in blud not Ink.”104Maybe dead men do tell tales.

  Chapter 2

  THE STORY OF IT PRINTED

  Increase Mather observed the John Sassamon murder trial with dismay. And, as the fighting began and began to worsen, he came to call it “the saddest time with New England that ever was known.”1 Although Mather had never intended to write a history of the war, he kept careful track of it. “I was not altogether negligent,” he later confessed, “in Noting down such Occurrences, respecting the present War with the Heathen in New-England, as came to my knowledge.” Still, he insisted, with strained humility, “what I did that way, was merely for my own private use.” Never had he “the least thought of publishing” any of his observations of the bloody conflict. But coming across someone else’s version of the story convinced him that publish he must. In early 1676 Mather read an early printed narrative of the war, “which it seems,” he remarked gloomily, “met with an imprimatur at London in December last.” The “abounding mistakes” in this account inspired Mather to pick up his pen to write “a true history of this affair.” No sooner had the Boston minister filled his inkwell than he came upon “another Narrative of this war, written by a Quaker in Rhode Island, who pretends to know the truth of things.” “But,” Mather complained, “that narrative being fraught with worse things than mere mistakes, I was thereby quickened to expedite what I had in hand.”2

  The first account Mather came across was Boston merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall’s Present State of New-England with Respect to the Indian War, printed in London in December 1675; the next, “written by a Quaker in Rhode Island,” was John Easton’s “Relation of the Indyan Warre,” written in February 1676.3 But the competitor Mather came to despise most was the Reverend William Hubbard, who, in addition to writing a narrative of the war, was chosen to deliver the colony’s annual Election Day sermon on May 3, 1676—a sermon Mather had hoped to deliver.4 Two days before Election Day, Mather began writing a history of the war: his May 1 diary entry reads simply: “A.M. wrote Hist of warr Indians. Sic. P.M.” He wrote steadily through the summer, and on August 21 noted in his diary, “A.M. Finished History.” Three days later Mather visited John Foster’s Boston print shop, and within months his “true” story of King Philip’s War, A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New-England, was printed in both Boston and London.5

  Mather must have been elated: he had beaten Hubbard to the presses (Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England was not printed until the spring
of 1677). All things considered, however, both ministers were latecomers, especially to the London publishing scene. Long before Mather completed his Brief History, several accounts of the war had already been published, some within weeks of the first attacks in June 1675. By the end of that year four printed reports were available to anxious readers in London, not only Saltonstall’s Present State (which had so annoyed Mather) but also Edward Wharton’s New-England’s Present Sufferings under Their Cruel Neighboring Indians, the anonymous A Brief and True Narration of the Late Wars Risen in New-England, and Benjamin Batten’s account in The London Gazette. At least three more accounts (by Wait Winthrop, Peter Folger, and John Easton) are said to have been printed that year, though no printed copy survives.6 In the colonies, only one printed narrative appeared in 1675 (the Massachusetts Council’s official broadside declaring the causes and progress of the war), but during the next year, when Mather published his Brief History as well as his sermon about the war, An Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New-England, Benjamin Tompson published an epic poem in both Old and New England, and Thomas Wheeler’s sermon, A Thankefull Remembrance of Gods Mercy, was printed in Cambridge. Meanwhile, in London, readers relished two more installments of Saltsonstail’s chronicle, as well as three more anonymous pamphlets. Between 1675 and 1676 several other colonists wrote accounts that were to remain unpublished: Josiah Winslow and Thomas Hinckley detailed the origins of the war; Daniel Gookin drafted his treatise on the sufferings of Christian Indians; Philip Walker composed a quirky, lyrical poem; William Harris sent an account to the British secretary of state; and a visiting English official, Edward Randolph, sent a report to the lords of the Privy Council.