by Jill Lepore
One fine day, years after Philip’s death, Increase Mather’s son Cotton made a pilgrimage to Plymouth to visit the head. There, with an outstretched arm, he reached up and “took off the Jaw from the Blasphemous exposed Skull of that Leviathan.” Wasn’t this a bit much? Philip had already been shot, quartered, and decapitated. Why steal his jaw? Revenge, perhaps. Although Cotton Mather was only twelve at the time of the fighting, he still remembered how “this bloody and crafty wretch” had taught other Indians to “Phitippize in barbarous murders.” (More prolific even than his father, the younger Mather also studied the war and later wrote about it in his Magnalia Christi Americana, published in 1702.)9 But if he was motivated only by vengeance, however belated, why not simply spit at the skull, or smash it to dust? Perhaps Cotton had a more metaphorical motive: to shut Philip up. By stealing Philip’s jawbone, his mouth, he put an end to Philip’s blasphemy (literally, his evil utterances). Perhaps Cotton Mather grabbed the blasphemous bone for the same reason that his father had picked up his pen to write his Brief History—to symbolically silence other versions of the story of King Philip’s War. Just as Increase had tucked his bulky manuscript under one arm and raced down the streets of Boston to John Foster’s printing shop, so Cotton rode out to Plymouth and yanked the decrepit jawbone loose from its skull.
For Cotton Mather, as for his father, King Philip’s War was a holy war, a war against barbarism, and a war that never really ended. Some of the tensions that had brought colonists and Indians to war in 1675 were no more resolved when Increase wrote his Brief History than when Cotton wrote his Magnalia Christi Americana. Questions about the sovereignty of Indian peoples and the legitimacy of English land claims had been more avoided than answered, and, most distressingly, the colonists’ fears about “degenerating” into Indians had only been exacerbated by their own “savage” conduct in the war. The incompleteness of the colonists’ victory meant that preserving the memory of the war, and preserving a particular kind of memory, one that depicted Philip as a barbarous villain, became as desperately critical to the colonists’ sense of themselves as waging the war had been in the first place. Waging the war, writing about it, and remembering it were all part of the attempt to win it, but none of these efforts ever fully succeeded. No matter how much the colonists wrote about the war, no matter how much or how eloquently they justified their cause and conduct or vilified Philip, New England’s colonists could never succeed at reconstructing themselves as “true Englishmen.” The danger of degenerating into Indians continued to haunt them.
Philip was more than dead, but his war still raged.
I
IN HIS DIARY for the year 1676, Samuel Sewall neatly wrote, “Philip-pus exit.” across from that fateful day, August 12.10 Sewall hoped, with Increase Mather, that the war would “dye with Philip.”11 (Richard Hutchinson had even optimistically titled his printed account of Philip’s death The Warr in New-England Visibly Ended.) And, indeed, hostilities did end in southeastern New England—at least temporarily. But the colonists’ victory over the Wampanoags, Narrangansetts, and Nipmucks was far from an unambiguous military success. Although colonial forces and their Indian allies had killed or captured thousands of enemy Algonquians, especially in the six months before Philip’s death, in the end, the greatest killers of Indians had been disease and starvation, not English soldiers.12 And the colonists’ strongest ally was no ally at all; one reason why many Algonquians had submitted to the English in the summer of 1676 was that they had been driven from their western retreats by Mohawks. (Philip may have made a failed effort to form an alliance with the powerful Mohawks, the eastern arm of the Iroquois League and the Algonquians’ traditional enemies.)13 If Philip’s forces had been better supplied and had not had to fight three wars at once—one with the English, one with their Pequot, Mohegan, and Christian Indian allies, and one with the Mohawks—the colonists might well have lost everything. And they knew it. At the end of the war, William Harris claimed that had “the Indeans not bin devided, they might have forced us to Som Islands: & there to have planted a litle Corne, & fished for our liveings.”14 And Increase Mather declared, “as to Victoryes obtained, we have no cause to glory in any thing that we have done, but rather to be ashamed and confounded for our own waves.”15
A page from Samuel Sewall’s 1676 almanac, noting Philip’s death. Courtesy of the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
King Philip’s War did not end with King Philip’s death. No peace treaty was signed after August 12, and in many ways the fighting simply became less intense, less organized, and, from the perspective of colonists living in more populated seaboard towns, more distant. In October even Samuel Sewall admitted that while “most Ring leaders” were dead (“having themselves had blood to drink”), “Yet there is some trouble and bloodshed still in the more remote Eastern parts.”16 Related fighting went on for months, especially in Maine, where Abenakis (later also known as Penobscots) systematically attacked English settlements well into 1677. Meanwhile other groups, both Iroquois and Algonquian, would continue to assault frontier towns throughout New England until at least the French and Indian War some seventy years later. In 1704, towns in the Connecticut River Valley that had been partially rebuilt after 1676 were again destroyed in Indian fighting. As a result, historians today are unable to agree on when King Philip’s War actually ended. Some consider Philip’s death merely a convenient marking point whose military significance was wishfully exaggerated by the colonists themselves and has been similarly exaggerated ever since.17 Meanwhile, other scholars have argued that King Philip’s War never ended because, in a figurative sense, it was the archetype of all Indian wars to follow.18
To English families living in southeastern New England, however, Philip’s death made a difference. It marked an end to the destruction even if, in some places, it turned out to be only a temporary respite. But when displaced colonists returned to their ravaged homes, reminders of the war were everywhere: in still-abandoned neighboring towns, on gravestones, at battle sites, in the wounds on people’s bodies.19 The war proved impossible to forget; it would take the colonists more than three decades to rebuild what had been destroyed.20 Writing in 1677, Increase Mather recalled, “we cannot but remember, how near this Tree was to cutting down a year or two agoe.”21 In the years to come, captives taken during the war continued to return from captivity, adding fresh stories to those already being told around firesides all over New England. War mementos—bullets, arrowheads, hatchets, and even body parts—were probably widely collected and passed around at family and community gatherings. Meanwhile, church sermons no doubt dwelled on the lessons of the war, especially on important anniversaries. And accounts of the war would continue to be published in 1677, 1678, and 1682, and to be read and circulated long afterward. Many printed chronicles made their intention clear: “This shall be written for the Generation to come,” read the title page of Mather’s Historical Discourse, quoting from Psalms 102:18. Several also quoted from Exodus 17:14: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua.”
All over New England, colonists commemorated the end of the war even as they relived its brutalities. When Samuel Sewall wrote the words “Philip-pus exit” in his almanac, it must have calmed him to contemplate this momentous event in somber Latin syllables (a far cry from the more emotional responses of Church’s soldiers, who gave “three loud huzzas”; of Church himself, who damned Philip “to rot above the ground”; and especially of the Indian executioner who told Philip “he would now chop his arse for him”). Yet Sewall soon found quiet, cerebral celebration inadequate to the powerful feelings the end of the war had provoked in him. Seeking a more emotionally cathartic celebration, Sewall probably attended one or more of the public executions of captured Indians that took place in Boston in August and September 1676—he noted several of them in his diary (including that of Captain Tom). And after one of those executions Sewall, alon
g with his friend the poet and physician Benjamin Tompson and five other doctors, conducted an anatomical dissection of “the middlemost of the Indian executed the day before.” Standing above the split corpse, one of the men reached into the abdomen and, “taking the heart in his hand, affirmed it to be the stomack.”22Sewall might have laughed at the wittiness of the remark. The joke, purposefully mistaking an Indian’s heart for his stomach, mocked Indians’ supposed heartlessness (who have only guts), and, knowingly or not, echoed Benjamin Tompson’s own couplet (“Indians spirits need / No grounds but lust to make a Christian bleed”). Marking Philip’s death in his calendar in Latin might have satisfied Sewall’s intellectual need to document the end of the war, but in dissecting the corpse of an executed Indian, Sewall staged for himself a physical encounter with the “remains” of the war and a vivid verification of the colonists’ victory. He, too, needed to soak his hands in blood.
Much of war’s immediate commemoration, like Sewall’s dissection, was bloody. Not only Philip’s head but also other, perhaps less gruesome memorabilia were displayed and distributed throughout the colonies. Josiah Winslow’s affection for what he called “Indian rareties” was neither unique nor novel. From the earliest months of the war, mementos of the enemy, mainly body parts but also bits of clothing, had been cherished by Indians and colonists alike, a practice anthropologists call a “war trophy complex.”23 English colonists paid bounties for Indian scalps, collected body parts as pledges of fidelity, and were willing to travel considerable distances to visit the shrines of English victories. In the days and weeks following Philip’s death, colonists from all over New England journeyed to Plymouth to gaze at Philip’s newly severed head, perhaps meeting Alderman on the road for a look at Philip’s shriveling, scarred hand (or, as Edward Rawson called it, his “paw”).24 The head must have had a reassuring effect on colonists who needed ocular proof that the war had really, finally, come to an end.
Many English soldiers, like their Indian allies and enemies, also relished witnessing the deaths of their enemies. When the Narragansett sachem Canochet was captured he was not immediately put to death but was instead sent to Stonington, Connecticut, where he was treated by Indians in much the same way Church’s company had treated Philip:
that all might share in the Glory of destroying so great a Prince, … the Pequods shot him, the Mohegans cut off his Head and quartered his Body, and Ninnicrofts Men made the Fire and burned his Quarters, and as a Token of their Love and Fidelity to the english, presented his Head to the Council at Hartford.25
Like the English, Algonquians often dismembered English bodies during the war, carrying away body parts as prizes or erecting them as monuments. In July 1675 the Connecticut Council complained that Wampanoags who had killed dozens of Plymouth colonists “still are carrying thier heads about the countrey as trophies of their good succher in their cruell designes against the English.”26 On another occasion, Hezekiah Willet was slain “a little more than Gun-shot off from his house, his head taken off, body stript,” and though the Narragansetts carried the head away with them, they left “the Trunk of his Body behind, as a sad Monument of their inhumane Cruelty.” (Willet’s head was afterward recovered.)27 Similarly, during the siege of Brookfield, a colonist named Prichard ventured out of the garrison but “was Caught by those Cruel Enemies,” who then “cut off his head, kicking it about like a Football, and then putting it upon a Pole … before the door of his Fathers house.”28 Decapitation was the most common form of dismembering, but chopping off hands and fingers was also typical, and, if Nathaniel Saltonstall can be believed, enemy Indians might wear necklaces of human fingers around their necks.29
During the war, the Indians’ purposeful display of body parts was clearly intended to frighten the English, and in this effort it met with indubitable success. When Captain Beers’ company was ambushed, “the barbarous Villains showed their insolent Rage and Cruelty, more than ever before, cutting off the Heads of some of the Slain, and fixing them upon Poles near the Highway … by which Means they thought to daunt and discourage any that might come to their Relief, and also to terrifie those that should be Spectators with the Beholding so sad an Object.”30 When Major Treat’s forces came upon this scene, the Indians’ intended end was achieved: “His men were much daunted to see the heads of Captain Beers’s Souldiers upon Poles by the way side.”31
Much as the English expressed their horror at the barbarity of these practices, they engaged in many of them themselves. When English soldiers came upon English heads on poles, they often simply took them down and put Indian heads in their place.32 Nonetheless, there are critical differences between the Algonquian and English “war trophy complexes.” While Algonquians beheaded almost any enemy, English soldiers were inclined to reserve this punishment for prominent leaders (in England, beheading was a punishment reserved for the nobility).33 And while the English displayed body parts in the commons of colonial towns, where they encouraged the public celebration and commemoration of English victories, Indians placed their displays where English soldiers were likely to find them. Algonquians hoped to terrorize their enemies; the English hoped to cheer themselves.34
Unlike its English counterpart, the Algonquian practice of decapitation had religious significance. Narragansetts believed that the soul (Cowwewonck) resided in the brain. After death, the Cowwewonck traveled to Cautantowwit’s house, a land of perpetual prosperity—good weather, good harvests, good death. To separate a head from its body was to deny the soul entrance to Cautantowwit’s house, to deny it a blissful afterlife. In this sense, beheading enemies was a way of winning the war forever, of beating the English for eternity, especially in cases where Indians dug up English corpses specifically to decapitate them.35 While this meaning was probably lost on the English, it must have had a powerful effect on those Algonquians who saw the heads of their enemies (and later in the war, of their leaders) erected on poles, doomed to restless wandering.
Meanwhile, English colonists who made the pilgrimage to view Philip’s decaying skull or who butchered the corpses of dead Indians or fingered the beads of a belt once worn by a great sachem, wanted not only to celebrate the end of the war but also to remember it, to keep the memory of the war fresh in their minds. Samuel Sewall in particular wanted no one to forget. Late in 1676 Sewall, who was by then running the Cambridge Press, printed an almanac for 1677, on the final page of which he issued a boldface warning to his readers: “New-England Remember,—Forget not thy last yeares Miseries, Mortalities, Mercyes.”36
Possibly responding to Sewall’s “New-England Remember” command, the Boston printer John Foster went one step farther in encouraging colonists to remember the war: he included the anniversaries of important events of the war on the pages of his almanacs. In Foster’s almanacs there was no need to write in “Philippus exit.” by hand; the printer had done it already. On the page for August in his almanac for 1679, Foster set type to read: “August 12.1676. Philip Sachem of Mount-Hope, who first began the War with the English, was slain by Capt. Church of Plymouth.” The pages of Foster’s almanacs were nearly filled with anniversary notices.37 The March page, for instance, listed the following reminders: “March 13, 1676. Groton surprised by the Indians,
A page from John Foster, An Almanack … 1679 (Boston, 1679). Courtesy of the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
and the greatest part of it burnt”; “March 14.76 Northampton assaulted by the Indians, several houses burnt and some persons slain”; “March 17 1676. Warwick assaulted and burnt by the Indians”; “March 26. 1676. Marlborough assaulted and a great part of it burnt. The same day an hot conflict between the Indians and English on Seaconk-plain”; “28. 1676. Rehoboth assaulted.”38
Foster’s anniversary notations shaped New Engländers’ memories of the war, both by defining which events were important to commemorate and by setting the tone for the way in which they ought to be commemorated. At the anniversary of the Great Swamp fight, Foste
r offered a glib couplet: “Tis fear’d a thousand Natives young and old, / Went to a place in their opinion cold.” Foster had no sympathy for the Narragansetts who died that day, and he expected his readers to feel the same. For January 20, the day Joshua Tift was executed, Foster wrote simply, “O Wretched Tift!”39
But as the years passed, Foster’s reminders became less detailed and less frequent. What had been in the 1679 almanac “September 1.1676. the Indians assaulted Deerfield, and laid waste the greatest part of that hopeful plantation” became in the 1681 version simply “Deerfield laid waste.” Now the events of March were lumped together: “In this moneth Groton, Northhampton war wick, Marlborough and Rehoboth assaulted by the Indians.”40 With time, the war inevitably receded in importance in the colonists’ popular culture.41
Elaine Scarry has argued that the lingering evidence of a war’s destruction documents and reinforces its ending: “The very endurance of the record partly explains why the outcome is abided by.” Without visible signs of the war’s devastation, “etched into their bodies and their material culture,” warring peoples can simply continue to fight from one generation to the next. Visible reminders of war mark its end, Scarry argues, and discourage people from resuming it.42 Yet there is something deeply ambiguous in the early commemorations of King Philip’s War, the etching of it onto bodies and land. Displaying Philip’s skull seems to have kept the war alive as much as it put it to rest. The desperation with which the war’s artifacts were preserved, its memories cherished, seems, if anything, to testify to the fragility of the colonists’ victory.