The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  Algonquian attacks on Christianity could be symbolic as well as verbal. When Goodman Wright “had a strange Confidence, or rather Conceit, that whilst he held his Bible in his Hand, he looked upon himself as secure from all kinde of Violence,” the Indians who killed him “deriding his groundless Apprehension, or Folly therein, rippe[d] him open and put his Bible in his Belly.”29 Retreating Indians might also leave particular objects behind, objects that could be made to operate as powerful symbols: books, goats, hoes, cows, clogs, aprons, church bells. When used by Indians to leave a trail of signs, even these everyday objects, like a “Hat shot through” found in the road, could become terrifying.30 In June 1675, for example, English soldiers were tracking the enemy in Rhode Island when, “after they had marched about a Mile and Half, they passed by some Houses newly burned: not far off one of them they found a Bible newly torn, and the Leaves scattered about by the Enemy in Hatred of our Religion.” But this was just the beginning. “Two or three Miles further they came up with some Heads, Scalps, and Hands cut off from the Bodies of some of the English, and stuck upon Poles near the Highway, in that barbarous and inhuman Manner bidding us Defiance.”31 First the houses, then the pages of the Bible, and then the body parts themselves. Scenes like this seemed to carry the Indians’ message within them: We will first take away your shelter, then your beliefs, and only then will we take your lives, leaving you, not as men, but as bare, butchered flesh. As one colonist aptly put it, “Our Enemies proudly exault over us and Blaspheme the name of our Blessed God; Saying, Where is your O God?”32

  II

  JUST AS Increase Mather claimed he never had “the least thought” of publishing his account of King Philip’s War, he also maintained that he never had any intention of writing about “the Grounds of this Warr, and the justness of it on our part,” since such a discussion would make his Brief History “too voluminous.” In the end, of course, Mather found the space to “adde a few words” on the subject.33 According to his version of events, the English had worked for peace even after the first Wampanoag attacks on Swansea. On June 25, 1675, a delegation of colonial diplomats traveling to Mount Hope to negotiate with Philip was stopped in its tracks by the bodies of “divers Englishmen on the ground, weltering in their own blood, having been newly murdered by the Indians.” Appalled by the sight, “they could not proceed farther” and decided that “a Peace now could not honourably be concluded after such barbarous Outrages.” The next day, the earth’s shadow eclipsed the moon and English soldiers marching to Swansea feared the worst. “Since the Enemy did shed the blood of some of ours who never did them … the least wrong,” Mather concluded, “no man can doubt the justness of our cause.”34

  Yet doubt it they did. “It is never safe to take a Dog by the ears,” William Hubbard warned. In other words, avoid war at all costs. During his Election Day sermon in May 1676, Hubbard preached that Christians everywhere should beware of waging “an unnecessary war” because while war is on both sides a judgment, it is always on one side “an hainous evil or murder.”35 Hubbard disagreed with a purely providential interpretation of the war (epitomized by Mather’s preaching), and, to a certain extent, condemned the war on practical and even ethical grounds. He was not alone. Perhaps with a resolve weakened by listening to Indian taunts, many colonists in New England were plagued with doubts about the justness of their war, especially early on. “Uncomfortable & dishonorable reports” had made it “very difficult dissatisfying, & uncomfortable to conscientious parents and other Relations, to send out their children, & other dear relations unto the war, where many of them were slain, & all in danger of their lives.” Even more importantly, perhaps, was the worry that “the dishonor would redound to the Name of God, if N.E. should goe to war in a bad cause, or not every way justifiable in the sight of God & all the world.” To some colonists, one sign from God was more distressing than all the others: they worried that “our bad Success: did exspres: our bad cause: & unjust war.”36

  Criticism of the war seemed to come from all quarters, both divine and human. As Josiah Winslow complained, not only Indians but also many English colonists were “pleased to sensure us highly as if wee had ungroundedly enterprized this warr.”37 And Edward Randolph, an agent for the Crown, reported that Massachusetts magistrates had provoked the war by repeatedly calling Philip to court on contrived charges.38 Such criticism caused the colonial authorities to justify their actions at great length, offering confused and even contradictory accounts of the origins and progress of the war.

  From the very start of the war, both sides insisted that their cause was just. As Roger Williams had observed, “all men of Conscience or Prudence, ply to Windward & wisely labour to mainteine their Wars to be defensive.” The Wampanoags claimed “thay had dun no rong, the English ronged them,” while the English just as vehemently insisted that the Indians’ “unmanly barbarous practices” came from “no provocation nor unfairness in the least from us.”39 Since many colonists continued to doubt “whether our English were wholy inocent on that account, viz. our freinds of Plimouth parts,” Governor Winslow found it necessary to insist that, “as respecting the enemy … wee stand as innocent as it is possible for any person or people to be towards theire neighbour.” Nonetheless, in July 1675 John Eliot was still waiting for a satisfactory explanation from the Plymouth authorities. “What the causes of the warre were,” he grumbled, “I suppose Plimoth will declare.” Three months into the war, Winslow was sufficiently agitated to write a “Narrative shewing the manor of the begining of the present Warr with the Indians,” in which he attempted to demonstrate how “slow were wee and unwilling to engage ourselves and Naighbours in a warr,” but that, provoked by Indians “of whose hands wee had deserved better,” war had become unavoidable. Soon those with doubts began to resign themselves. Although in August he was still “of a differing mind from our friends,” John Pynchon considered his objections no longer worth mentioning since “it is now too late, a war being already begun.”40

  By fall, even those New Englanders who had initially criticized the war had been drawn into its action. After reading Winslow’s “Narrative,” the commissioners of the United Colonies issued a declaration that “the said warr doth appeer to be both Just and Nessesarie; in its first Rise a defensive warr; and therefore wee doe agree and conclude that it ought now to be Joyntly prosecuted by all the united Collonies.”41 In December the Massachusetts Council wrote its own account of the origins of the war and distributed it in broadside form to be posted on trees, courthouses, and meetinghouse doors all over the colony, no doubt in response to lingering criticism. (They also sent the broadside to officials in England and New York.)42 Nonetheless, for some colonists, war of any kind was to be greatly regretted. Even if Plymouth had acted lawfully, Roger Williams confessed, “I fear the Event of the justest War.”43

  The colonists’ ideas about what made a war just derived, in part, from a philosophical tradition most fully articulated by a Dutch jurist and theologian named Hugo Grotius. (Increase Mather considered Grotius “one of the Learnedest men that this age has produced,” and other sources suggest that Grotius, if not necessarily widely read, was deeply influential on New Englanders’ political ideas.)44 In his De Jure Belli Et Pads, first printed in 1625, Grotius had established the fundamental tenets of what would come to be called international law. Relying on ancient authorities as well as departing from them—and, most especially, rejecting the concept of holy war—Grotius had set out to prove that war is not without law but is in fact in accordance with both the “law of nature” (a set of principles known to all humans who possess reason) and the “law of nations” (a set of legal and moral principles guiding the conduct of sovereign nations).45

  In the tradition elaborated by Grotius, the evaluation of whether a war is just or unjust is based on two criteria: just cause (Jus ad bellum) and just conduct (jus in bello). The first is concerned with why war is waged, the second with how. In the words of the political scientist Michael
Walzer, “War is always judged twice, first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly with reference to the means they adopt. The first kind of judgment is adjectival in character: we say that a particular war is just or unjust. The second is adverbial: we say that the war is being fought justly or unjustly.”46 Belonging, as it did, to their European intellectual heritage, seventeenth-century English colonists commonly made this distinction when they wrote about war. Thus John Leverett, governor of Massachusetts, said that the Indian enemy violated the standards of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello. According to Leverett, Philip, “with others his wicked complices and abettors,” began the war “without any just cause, or provocation given them,” and then proceeded to fight unfairly, perpetrating “many notorious barbarous and execrable murthers, villanies and outrages.”47

  Following the tradition of just war doctrine, New England’s colonists believed that “war, in some cases is lawful and at sometimes necessary,” but “a woe to him that is the unjust cause of them.”48 Colonial writers justifying King Philip’s War always insisted that it was a strictly defensive war, begun only after the Wampanoags attacked Swansea.49 Thus, Thomas Wheeler wrote, “Philip the Sachem of the Wampanogs, lying about Mount-hope, having done some Acts of Hostility against Plimouth Colony by murdering men, burning Houses and killing Cattel: the said Colony was necessitated to warr with him in their own defence.”50 Massachusetts and Connecticut had joined the fight only to aid Plymouth and, when the Narragansetts and Nipmucks allied with Philip, they, too, were fought on defensive grounds.

  Yet, while Wheeler and others explained that the English had fought a just war with a secular cause, many New Englanders also understood fighting Indians in religious terms, worrying, for instance, about whose side God was fighting on. Like their English counterparts, American Puritans also employed warfare as a metaphor when writing about religious conflicts, urging all men to become “spiritual soldiers.”51 New Englander John Richardson preached that war “is an ordinance appoynted by God for subduing and destroying the Churches Enemies here upon Earth,” and in killing Indians Puritan colonists claimed to be acting as God’s instruments, ridding the land of “the perfect children of the Devil.”52 To some New Englanders, King Philip’s War was thus a holy war—that is, a war fought for the goals of the Church and subject to few limits of conduct (since the Indians were infidels, “blud ffor blud shal bee ther portion Just”).53

  As defined by St. Augustine in the fifth century, a holy war “sanctioned by God” was intended to enforce discipline in the Christian world.54 And, as Pope Innocent IV had pronounced in the thirteenth century, Christians could wage wars against infidels solely on the basis of their nonbelief in God.55 Commanded by God, soldiers fighting in a holy war were required to be personally godly (the Massachusetts Court passed “Lawes and Ordinances of warr” outlining punishments for soldiers who blasphemed or skipped church56) but must also be prepared to abandon all moral restraints in the execution of war. A just war was expected to be fair, legal, and limited; a holy war, divinely ordained and unrestrained.

  By the time Hugo Grotius began writing his De Jure Belli Et Pads in 1623, the idea of holy war had become moribund in the Protestant world. Alberico Gentili had declared in the 1590s that “There is no religion so wicked as to order an attack upon men of a different belief.”57 Still, although most Europeans, including the vast majority of Englishmen and-women, had come to find the idea of holy war increasingly anachronistic, reports of the death of holy war were greatly exaggerated for, during Grotius’ own lifetime, some late-sixteenth-and early-seventeenth-century English writers resurrected the idea of a holy war to justify the Puritan revolution.58 For these English Puritans, even offensive wars were just if waged for religion. (Among the writers who endorsed this view was William Ames, an English Puritan minister whose writings exerted a tremendous influence on New England Puritans.59)

  Swayed by the competing traditions of just and holy war, New England’s colonists often seemed at odds with one another when they wrote about war. In part, this confusion, or rather coexistence, of traditions was possible because of Hugo Grotius’ failure to answer a critical question: What happens when a Christian nation wars against a non-Christian nation?60

  In the sixteenth century this question had been elaborately addressed by Francisco Vitoria, a friar and political theorist whose most notable writings defended the Spanish conquest. Disagreeing with Pope Innocent IV, Vitoria insisted that difference of religion cannot be a just cause of war. For proof, he argued that infidels have the natural right to defend themselves against Christians who wage war against them to convert them, in which case, if it is just for Christians to wage such a war, then it would be just on both sides, a most confusing and quite impossible circumstance.61 Vitoria argued that Indians could not be dispossessed of their property simply because they did not know Christ. Indians, he claimed, had “dominion,” which could not be alienated by virtue of their unbelief, any more than it would be lawful to take away the pos sessions of Jews or Saracens. Dominion, as Vitoria defined it, was predicated on whether a people “were true masters of their private chattels and possessions, and whether there existed among them any men who were true princes and masters of the others.” To Vitoria’s thinking, the Indians satisfied both these conditions. They were “true masters,” Vitoria argued, because Thomas Aquinas had proven that “all forms of dominion derive from natural or human law, therefore they cannot be annulled by lack of faith.” Only madmen were not true masters, but Indians, since they had organized societies and a form of religion, were clearly not mad. “If they seem to us insensate and slow-witted,” Vitoria wrote, “I put it down mainly to their evil and barbarous education. Even amongst ourselves we see many peasants (rustici) who are little different from brute animals.” And the Indians also had “true princes,” he concluded, because their social order was observed to be similar to the hierarchical, monarchical systems of Europe. Finally, Vitoria argued that Indians could not be forced to become Christians. “Even if the barbarians refuse to receive Christ as their lord,” he declared, “they cannot for that reason be attacked or harmed in any way” because Christ and Christianity “are things for which they cannot be furnished with evident proof by natural reasonings.” And war, he scoffed, “is no argument for the truth of the Christian faith.”62

  Although Vitoria believed that converting the Indians was an unjust cause for war, he found that the Spanish conquest of Mexico was just on other grounds. He agreed with Aquinas that knowledge of God is not necessary for knowledge of natural law (since natural law can be known through the use of human reason). Therefore, inhabitants of America, who had never heard of Christ, could still know the natural law.63 For Vitoria, the pope had no particular mediating role in relations between nations because he “is not the civil or temporal master of the whole world.” Instead, a universally applicable system of social rights and duties, deducible from natural law, pertained to all peoples. And if the Indians failed to act in accord with the law of nature and with the law of nations, they could be forced to comply. Now, instead of waging war against non-Christians to convert them to Christianity, Christians might wage war to make non-Christians conform to the dictates of natural and international law.64 Unlike Christianity, the law of nations could be demonstrated by reasoning and even if the Indians had not intuited it themselves, once taught by the Spanish, they were obliged to abide by it.65 To wage war lawfully, then, the Spanish had only to demonstrate that the Indians violated natural law by practicing such barbarous outrages as idolatry and cannibalism or that they had violated international law by failing to follow its dictates.66

  Nearly two centuries after the Spanish conquest, Hugo Grotius dismissed Vitoria and writers like him with disdain. “Most of them have done their work without system,” Grotius complained, “and in such a way as to intermingle and utterly confuse what belongs to the law of nature, to divine law, to the law of nations, to civil law, and to the body of
law which is found in the canons.”67Instead of providing a straightforward answer to the question “What happens when Christians wage war against non-Christians?” Grotius instead established two different sets of rules of war, one for Christians and one for non-Christians. Both Christians and non-Christians, Grotius argued, are answerable to the law of nature in the waging of war. Since they do not know God, natural law is all that non-Christians can be expected to know, and in waging war against one another they rely on that law exclusively. Christians, however, must also follow the dictates of Scripture, which impose additional moral constraints. When Christian nations fight one another, Grotius claimed, they supplement natural law with Christian morality.68 Nowhere, however, did Grotius directly address the question of which set of laws prevails when a Christian nation wages war against a non-Christian nation.