by Jill Lepore
Philip’s death may have ended the war in August 1676 but it barely slowed the printing spree. In 1677 William Hubbard finally finished his Narrative (printed in London under the title The Present State of New-England), Richard Hutchinson joined the fray with The Warr in New-England Visibly Ended, and Increase Mather added two more tracts: A Relation of the Troubles which Have Hapned in New-England and An Historical Discourse. Then, in 1678, Samuel Nowell, official minister to the colonial army, published his sermon about the war, and finally, in 1682, probably at the urging of Reverend Mather, Mary Rowlandson made public her narrative of captivity among the Indians.7
NARRATIVES OF KING PHILIP’S WAR, 1675-82
Author Brief Title Where Printed
1675 Anonymous A Brief and True Narration of the Late Wars London
Batten, Benjamin (reported in The London Gazette) London
Folger, Peter A Looking Glasse for the Times possibly published
Massachusetts Council To Our Brethren (broadside) Cambridge
Saltonstall, Nathaniel The Present State of New-England London
Wharton, Edward New-England’s Present Sufferings London
Winslow, Josiah and Hinkley, Thomas “Narrative shewing the manor of the beginning … Warr” unpublished
Winthrop, Wait Some Meditations possibly published
1676
Anonymous A Farther Brief and True Narration London
Anonymous News from New-England London
Anonymous A True Account London
Easton, John Relacion of the Indyan Warre possibly published
Harris, William [untitled letter] unpublished
Mather, Increase A Brief History of the War Boston and London
Mather, Increase An Earnest Exhortation Boston
Randolph, Edward “Short Narrative of My Proceedings” unpublished
Saltonstall, Nathaniel A Continuation of the State of New-England London
Saltonstall, Nathaniel A New and Further Narrative London
Tompson, Benjamin New England’s Crisis Boston
Tompson, Benjamin New England’s Tears London
Walker, Philip “Captan Perse & his coragios Company” unpublished
Wheeler, Thomas A Thankefull Remembrance of Gods Mercy Cambridge
1677
Gookin, Daniel “Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings” unpublished
Hubbard, William A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians Boston and London
Hutchinson, Richard The Warr in New-England Visibly Ended London
Mather, Increase A Relation of the Troubles Boston
Mather, Increase An Historical Discourse Boston
1678
Nowell, S. Abraham in Arms Boston
1682
Rowlandson, Mary The Soveraignty & Goodness of God Cambridge, Boston, and London
Eight years after King Philip’s War began, the printing presses finally stiffened to a weary halt. In those eight years, at least twenty-one different accounts had been printed, many in more than one edition, for a total of no fewer than thirty separate printings in London, Boston, and Cambridge. Fortunately, one very revealing letter provides an important clue about the number of copies printed and sold. In early 1677 Richard Chiswell, a London bookseller, wrote to alert the Reverend Mather that his Brief History was not selling well in Old England. Embarrassed, Chiswell admitted that “some people here made it too much their business to cry it downe, & sayd a better narrative was comeing, which did very much disappoint me, so that I never sold 5 hundred of them.” By way of apology and “as a token of my thankfullness to you for your respects,” Chiswell sent Mather two dozen copies of the unpopular book.8 (“And good riddance to them,” Chiswell may well have muttered under his breath.) Chiswell’s letter suggests both that the original (and typical) press run was more than five hundred and that his inability to sell even that many copies of such a book was unusual. Indeed, as the printer explained, Mather’s history failed only because of tough competition in the form of yet another account of the war—Hubbard’s Narrative.
It is difficult to imagine the horror with which Mather greeted this news, but his disappointment is our gain, since Chiswell’s letter suggests that despite the failure of the London edition of Mather’s history, stories chronicling this cruel and bloody war were clearly popular, and at least moderate press runs must have been the rule. Even in an era profoundly less print-oriented than our own, several of the accounts, including Mary Rowlandson’s dramatic captivity narrative, America’s first “best-seller,” probably sold in the thousands.9And even if the runs averaged only a moderate five hundred copies per printing, a minimum of fifteen thousand copies of printed accounts of King Philip’s War would have descended on the very small Anglo-American book market between 1675 and 1682.10 A literal advantage indeed.
Yet, despite thousands of books detailing the colonists’ devastating losses at the hands of the cruelest of Indian enemies, Boston poet Benjamin Tompson found New Englanders strangely quiet, so quiet that he felt compelled to ask, “What means this silence of Harvardine quills / While Mars triumphant thunders on our hills?”11 It is an unusual question, made all the more unusual because, to us, the more profound silence, of course, was not the colonists’ but the Indians’. Nonetheless, we would do well to investigate why some colonists wrote so much while others wrote nothing at all.
I
IN HIS DIARY for the year 1675 Simon Bradstreet wrote about a shipboard accident, the trial of an Anabaptist, a nasty summer storm, and the untimely death of a former president of Harvard College. He barely mentioned “the Indian warre begun by Philip in Plymouth,” noting only early on that so far “neer 200 English have been killed.” Admittedly, Bradstreet was a laconic man. If more widely read, his pithy diary entries would humble wordy writers everywhere. Nonetheless, a flair for brevity cannot explain the Massachusetts colonist’s failure to elaborate on the war. Nor can indifference. Simon Bradstreet was far from apathetic about the suffering and destruction around him; on the contrary, he was overwhelmed—too overwhelmed, in fact, to describe it. The war, he remarked grimly, “is a matter of [such] great Importe that I cannot here note it.” In any event, he pointed out, “I suppose a Record of it will be publickly taken & the story of it Printed.”12 Why bother to write a personal account, Bradstreet asked himself, when a “public” record would soon appear?
Simon Bradstreet, deputy governor of Massachusetts, was well acquainted with the public record and with the machinations of men like Increase Mather. Even after beating Hubbard to the presses, Mather had remained obsessed with discrediting the Ipswich minister, especially after his jealousy was further fueled by Chiswell’s letter. Mather had been a licensor of the press since 1674, and it was probably through this position that he obtained a copy of Hubbard’s manuscript in early 1677. Disgusted, Mather passed the manuscript along to his brother-in-law, the Reverend John Cotton of Plymouth Colony, to solicit a critical reading from the Plymouth authorities. Cotton wrote back to Mather that Governor Winslow and others had given the manuscript a “cursory perusall” and “the mistakes are Judged to be many more than the truths in it.” Cotton only wished that he had been able “to have kept your booke a few days longer, whereby it might have bin filled with marginal notes of Erratas.”13
Hubbard, no fool, countered by courting an endorsement from the Massachusetts authorities, who, above Mather’s protestations, stamped Hubbard’s book with an official government imprimatur in March 1677:
The worthy Author of this Narrative (of whose Fidelity we are well assured) by his great Pains and Industry, in collecting and compiling the several Occurrences of this Indian Warre, from the Relations of such as were present in the particular Actions, hath faithfully and truly performed the same, as far as best Information agreeing can be obtained, which is therefore judged meet for publick View.14
Simon Bradstreet was among the signers. In 1675, when Bradstreet wrote in his diary, “I suppose a Record of it will be p
ublickly taken & the story of it Printed,” he had not yet been called upon to endorse Hubbard’s narrative, but surely he knew very well that some accounts of the war would be considered worthier, and more printable, than others.
Although Increase Mather’s campaign to discredit Hubbard’s account ultimately failed (and encouraged Bradstreet and the Massachusetts Council to add their imprimatur), it is nonetheless suggestive of the power wielded by the Puritan elite and offers a simple and important answer to Benjamin Tompson’s question about the “silence of Harvardine quills”: most colonists kept quiet out of deference to the official record. Merchant John Hull demurred on these grounds, too, omitting almost all mention of the war in his diary for 1675-76 and leaving instead only a cross-reference: “See the history of the war, printed 1676.” In his own diary, John Eliot also had declined to write about the war, knowing that it was “comited to othrs.” Like Simon Bradstreet, Eliot had special cause to be familiar with the workings of press censorship: a theological treatise he wrote in the 1650s had been banned and destroyed because of its potentially heretical content.15 And, while prominent men like Bradstreet and Eliot declined to write at length, less powerful colonists were likely to apologize for writing as much as they did. In Providence, Mary Pray excused herself for writing about the war by claiming her grief had compelled her, and when the poor and elderly John Kingsley wrote to the Connecticut War Council begging for aid, he wondered whether he had a right to write at all. “It may be in som of your minds to say, why doe not the he[a]d men write, but onely this ould pore man,” Kingsley apologized. “There is but too [2] that knowes of my writing, & the won descoriged me.”16 Even more than Bradstreet and Eliot, Kingsley and Pray knew that the war was not theirs to narrate.
It was, in fact, rather rare for people like Kingsley and Pray, who had directly experienced the worst of war, to write about it in any detail. Instead it was far likelier for wealthier people living farther away from the most awful scenes of war to write the lengthiest accounts. Surely this has something to do with the relative comfort and leisure of ministers like Increase Mather or Boston merchants like Nathaniel Saltonstall, but it also directs us to an even more obvious answer to Tompson’s question: not all colonists could write about the war, even if they wanted to. As William Hubbard wryly noted, “All Soldiers are not like Caesar, able to describe with their Pens, what they have done with their swords.”17 Or, in this case, all soldiers or noncombatants, however Caesar-like, do not necessarily own pens or even possess the ability to write.
Literacy in early America took a particular, “traditional” form, characterized by its religious context, the scarcity of printed materials, and the habit of repetition. Colonists had contact with a limited number of books—most often Bibles, primers, and catechisms—which they were likely to read again and again, often to the point of committing them to memory. Because reading was taught before writing, many colonists, especially women, could do one but not the other, and as many as 40 percent of men and 70 percent of women could not even sign their own names. Seventeenth-century New England was, at the same time, a “world of wonders” in which belief in the occult coexisted with church theology and in which books were both especially valuable and especially magical: during King Philip’s War one colonist sat in the town common reading the Bible in the midst of an Indian attack, believing he couldn’t be killed that way (instead, he was the single casualty of the day). Not only the presses but other avenues of information were also controlled by the clerical elite and, even to a literate colonist, the idea of writing a personal account of an event of political import would have seemed radical indeed.18
These two explanations—low literacy rates and the elite monopoly of information—go a long way toward answering Benjamin Tompson’s question, but not far enough. In particular, to explain some colonists’ silence by focusing exclusively on the hierarchical nature of colonial society and the role of Massachusetts magistrates and ministers in the workings of the Cambridge and Boston presses would be to overlook the real diversity of contemporary accounts of King Philip’s War. In large part this diversity was made possible by the option nonconforming colonists had of printing their accounts in London, although it had consequences for readers in the colonies as well. To answer Tompson’s question we must look more closely at the printed narratives themselves.
The twenty-one separate accounts printed between 1675 and 1682 actually represent several different types of writing, aimed at different kinds of readers. The shorter tracts often take the form of letters written by New Englanders to solicitous friends in London. These were also the quickest off the presses; the earliest, A Brief and True Narration of the Late Wars Risen in New-England, was licensed for printing on November 16, 1675. Even before this account was printed, however, vague news of the war traveled throughout the colonies and across the Atlantic by word of mouth. “Tis not to be doubted,” began A Brief and True Narration, “but that Fame ere this hath sounded in your Ears that the Indians in New England, have, by a late Rupture disturbed the long and orderly Peace, that hath been enjoyed by us.”19 Unprinted, handcopied newsletters distributed in England also supplied news about the war, and on August 16 the first of two reports was printed in The London Gazette.20 As Increase Mather would later write, “the report of poor New-England’s Calamity, hath caused those that are in Lands afar off to be amazed and troubled.”21
These epistolary accounts, clearly written for an inquisitive English audience, were always published in London, often aggressively advertised, and occasionally printed as supplements to The London Gazette.22Nathaniel Saltonstall’s writings are typical of this genre. Appending a postscript to his first letter “to his Friend in London,” Saltonstall explained:
I have here enclosed you as large an Account as I can at Present of the State of this Wilderness, in Respect to the Heathens: I must confess, I was the willinger to take a little the more Pains in the collecting thereof, for the Sakes of those with you, who wish us well. Which if it may answer its intended End therein, the Labour in Writing will be well bestowed.23
Each of Saltonstall’s narratives was announced in the Term Catalogues, the brochure of London booksellers. His books were cheap (“Price sticht,” 6d or 8d) and, in a word, prurient.24 They catered to a London reading public that delighted in tales of executions, cruel murders, and sensational crimes.25To that end, the title pages of Saltonstall’s narratives, probably added by a cunning publisher, emphasized body count: they promised to relate “the true number of the Slain and Wounded,” or “a Catalogue of the Losses in the
News of the war as reported in The London Gazette, August 1675. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
whole, sustained on either side since the said War began.”26 In this regard they borrowed from the tradition of the lists of the dead that had been printed in London during the great plague of 1664 and 1665. As Benjamin Tompson wrote,
When London’s fatal bills were blown abroad
And few but specters travelled on the road,
Not towns but men in the black bill enrolled
Were in gazettes by typographers sold:
But our gazettes without erratas must
Report the plague of towns reduced to dust.27
Nathaniel Saltonstall’s accounts were also published in a large format, the same size as The London Gazette: they looked like news reports. The contents of Saltonstall’s accounts dwelled on brutal acts of torture and the magnitude of casualties. (It was Saltonstall’s entirely secular perspective that so enraged Mather.) In addition, whether at the urging of the printer or by his own accord, Saltonstall’s letters included definitions of Indian words (“Wigwams are Indian Huts or Houses,” “A Sachem is a King, Prince, or Chief”), providing further evidence that he wrote for an English audience, since colonists would have been quite familiar with such terms.28
Many of these published letters were apocalyptic. “This may inform thee,” a nervous Edward Wharton announced to hi
s London correspondent, “that a most bitter Spirit is entred the English, and Indians; in which they greatly endeavour the utter destruction one of another.”29 Others, after pages detailing horrifying battles and terrifying losses, made sure to end on an optimistic note. The printer of News from New-England felt compelled to tack on a final paragraph of late-breaking news before letting a single book out of his shop. The bottom of the last page boldly, if prematurely, reassured readers:
We have Received very late news that the Christians in New England have had very great Victory over the Infidel Natives.
FINIS.30
Of the remaining published accounts, several are sermons, one is an epic poem, one a captivity narrative, and only Mather’s and Hubbard’s are what we would recognize as actual “histories” of the war. Significantly, all of these were first published in Boston or Cambridge, although several were soon after reprinted in London. New Englanders, who acquired their books by borrowing from friends, neighbors, or relatives, or by buying them from itinerant booksellers or at one of the nine bookshops in Boston, evidently had different literary tastes than their English cousins.31 While the letters to London are clearly news reports, many of them critical of the Puritan oligarchy, the remaining narratives are more self-consciously literary, historical, and religious in nature. The Boston and Cambridge publications, endorsed by the Massachusetts government, emphasized the devastation and violence of the war, but always with a simple and much-stated purpose: moral instruction. Thus Thomas Wheeler included a preface addressed to “The Christian Reader” in his sermon A Thankefull Remembrance of Gods Mercy, in which he explained his reasons for writing: “Wherein the Providences of God towards us in his wayes about us were so Remarkable, in our sore Exercises, and gracious Deliverances that they ought never to be forgotten by us, but kept in Remembrance all our dayes.”32