The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  As early as July 1676 Increase Mather was already warning his congregation against complacency: “Why then should carnal security grow upon us? When some said unto the holy Prophet, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman what of the night? He replyed, The morning cometh and also night.”43 In 1677 Urian Oakes cautioned his parishioners against being lulled into a false sense of peace: “These are not Times wherein the Nations beat their Swords into plough-shares, and their Spears into Pruning-hooks.”44 And then, in 1679, Increase Mather again despaired: “People are ready to run wild into the woods again and to be as Heathenish as ever.”45 After fourteen months of bloodshed, followed by three years of intermittent fighting, the colonists were right back where they started, as “Heathenish,” as Indian, as ever. Philip’s death was only a hollow victory. Depravity still soiled New England. In 1681 an Englishman named Thomas Saddeler fornicated with a mare “in a certaine obscure and woodey place, on Mount Hope,” Philip’s former home. Tempted by the devil, corrupted by the Indian wilderness, Englishmen were still degenerating into beasts. (Saddeler was branded on the forehead with a “P,” not for Philip, but for pollution.)46 In 1692 Cotton Mather would echo his father: “We have [become] shamefully Indianized in all those abominable things,” he warned. “Our Indian wars are not over yet.”47

  II

  IN 1681, five years after King Philip’s War had ended, two men met in the woods outside Providence. One was English, the other Indian. Both carried guns. When the Englishman, Benjamin Henden, saw the Indian (whose name was never mentioned), he ordered him to halt, but the Indian “would not obey his word, and stand at his Comand.” Furious, Henden raised his gun and fired, “with an Intent to have killed him.” Luckily for the Indian, Henden was a lousy shot and missed his target entirely. And luckily for Henden, the Indian was not a vengeful man. “Notwithstanding the said violence to him ofered did not seek to revenge himselfe by the like return; although he alsoe had a gunn and might have shott at Henden againe if he had been minded soe to have done.” Instead of shooting Henden, the Indian man “went peaceably away,” stopping only long enough to use “some words by way of Reproof; unto the said Hernden blaming him for that his Violence and Cruelty, and wondering that English men should offer soe to shoot at him and such as he was without cause.”48

  Had these same two men met in the same woods five or six years earlier, when King Philip’s War was still raging, it is unlikely that both would have survived the encounter unharmed. Henden, if he had traveled at all in Massachusetts, was probably familiar with the law passed in that colony in 1675 dictating that “it shall be lawful for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall finde any Indian travelling or skulking in any of our Towns or Woods … to command them under their Guard and Examination, or to kill and destroy them as they best may or can.”49 But that law was, of course, no longer in effect (and never was in Rhode Island), and for his anachronistic and misplaced aggression, Henden landed himself in court, condemned for his “late rash turbulent and violent behavior.” The case even led the Rhode Island General Assembly to pass “an act to prevent outrages against the Indians, precipitated by a rhode islander shooting an indian in the woods.” In the first place, as the Assembly declared, agreeing with Henden’s intended victim, Henden had “noe Authority nor just cause” to command the Indian to halt. “Noe person,” the Assembly proclaimed, “shall presume to doe any such unlawfull acts of violence against the Indians upon their perrills.” And more importantly, Henden and others like him must learn to “behave themselves peaceably towards the Indians, in like maner as before the warn”50

  That the Rhode Island General Assembly saw fit to pass a law “to prevent outrages against the Indians” implies that Benjamin Henden was not alone in failing to adjust to peacetime. Random, unprovoked attacks on Indians were probably not uncommon in the years immediately after the war. In July 1677, when two captured Indians were brought to Marblehead Harbor, a group of Englishwomen beat them to death, leaving their bodies “with their heads off and gone, and their flesh in a manner pulled from their bones.”51 As a result, those Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuck Indians who survived the war, fearing persecution, enslavement, or execution, were likely to go underground, hiding out with other tribes, or to leave New England entirely “to-quitt their old and seeke new habitations farr remote in the wildernesse.”52 Yet the commonly held assumption that southern New England’s Indians “vanished” in the wake of King Philip’s War is woefully mistaken, an unfortunate product of nineteenth-century romanticism.

  After the war, significant numbers of Indians lived among the English, while others lived in small native enclaves. Pequots and Mohegans, who had been allied to the English, remained on their lands in Connecticut (though those lands gradually dwindled). A small Narragansett community continued in Rhode Island. In Massachusetts some Christian Indians resettled primarily in two remaining Christian Indian towns, Natick and Punkapoag, while Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, who had been largely insulated from the war, remained on those islands.53 (Some number of Indians also stayed on land near Assawompset Pond, where John Sassamon died, on a piece of property still known as Betty’s Neck, named after Sassamon’s daughter.)54 Perhaps most importantly, a community of Wampanoags living in the Mashpee area of Cape Cod became a refuge for considerable numbers of Indians from all over New England.55

  How those Algonquians who survived King Philip’s War commemorated and remembered the war is, sadly, mere speculation. Like their colonial counterparts, surely they told stories, visited sacred sites, and cherished mementos. In 1761 Ezra Stiles (a future president of Yale College) visited a Rhode Island settlement of about 350 Narragansetts, where he met “the oldest Indian alive, and who remembers K. Philip’s War and the Swamp Fight, A.D. 1675.”56 Even after the last participants died, however, stories of the war were handed down from one generation to the next and survive today in rich oral traditions.

  Algonquians who remained in southern New England after King Philip’s War found themselves in a different world. Many lived as slaves or servants. Some lived in hiding. But other than on Cape Cod and the islands, few lived outside English supervision. Nonetheless, as historians Daniel Mandell and Jean O’Brien have demonstrated, those Indians who remained in eastern Massachusetts reorganized themselves and even formed a “new Indian identity, based, in part, on their relationship to the land itself.”57 Organized into churches headed, in many instances, by native preachers, and into towns led by sachems, Indians in Massachusetts managed to preserve much of their traditional culture, continuing, for instance, to rely on clan boundaries as the primary form of social organization. While they adopted many English ways, including concepts of land ownership, they often retained native practices. In late seventeenth-century Natick, where the majority of Indians who survived confinement on Deer Island had eventually resettled, Indians attended services at an English meetinghouse and organized their town into English-style house lots, but they lived, by and large, in traditional Algonquian homes, rather than in English clapboard houses.58 Their culture was neither English nor Algonquian, but a combination of the two.

  In the eighteenth century, the external pressures of trespass, poaching, and fraudulent land sales, combined with the internal pressures of alcoholism within native communities, meant that many Indians in Massachusetts came to live more and more like their English neighbors. More spoke only English. By the middle of the century, native languages had more or less died out in New England (though they survived a bit longer in more remote areas, such as Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket).59 Probate inventories and other eighteenth-century evidence suggest that native communities in New England also increasingly adopted English agricultural and subsistence practices and English furnishings and house styles.60 This change is well expressed in a petition written in 1726 by Samuel Abraham, a Christian Indian living in Natick:

  whereas I have a great desire to live more like my Christian English neighbors, than I have hithe
rto been able to do; being weary of living in a wigwam … which I hope I should be able to do with more comfort and satisfaction, if by any means I could be able to build such a house, as the English live in.61

  Elements of native culture survived, however, especially in crafts and trades.62And Wampanoags in Mashpee practiced communal land ownership until well into the nineteenth century.63

  In the century following King Philip’s War, New England’s Indians did not simply vanish. Instead they became increasingly integrated into the wider colonial community. When Ezra Stiles visited Hassanemesit in 1760 he wrote in his diary, “At Grafton, als. Hassimanisco, I saw the Burying place & Graves of 60 or more Indians. Now not a Male Ind. in the Town, & perh. 5 Squaws who marry Negroes.”64 Stiles did not find the “Indians” he was looking for at Hassanemesit, but he simply may not have recognized them. Because there was considerable intermarriage between Indians and free blacks, some Algonquians passed as white and some were considered black. Stiles would not have counted these people as “Indian,” even if they themselves did. In the nineteenth century, census-takers often recorded people of Indian descent as “people of color,” “black,” “negro,” or “mulatto,” and thus continued to underestimate the continued Algonquian presence in New England.65 Algonquians in southeastern New England did not vanish, but at least to whites, they did become invisible.66

  III

  ON DECEMBER 31, 1775, the Reverend Nathan Fiske delivered a hair-raising sermon. The American Revolution had begun just months before, and in Brookfield, Massachusetts, just a day’s ride from Lexington and Concord, concerned townspeople sat in rows of pews as Fiske began his sermon. At first he preached not about Tories and patriots but about Wampanoags and Narragansetts. Delivering a commemorative sermon, Fiske marked the centennial anniversary of King Philip’s War. To start, he quoted from Deuteronomy: “Remember the days of old.” Full of fervor, Fiske asked his listeners to give thanks that through God’s mercy New England was no longer in a state of unimproved chaos:

  Instead of a desolate uncultivated wilderness—instead of mountains and plains covered with thick untraversed woods—and swamps hideous and impassable, the face of the earth is trimmed, and adorned with a beautiful variety of fields, meadows, orchards and pastures…. Instead of the smoaky huts and wigwams of naked, swarthy barbarians, we now behold thick set-dements of a civilized people, and convenient and elegant buildings.

  Fiske recalled the brutalities of 1675 and gave thanks that in 1775,

  We are not anxious lest the frightful Savage should spring from his thicket with his murderous tomahawk, or drive the leaden death through our bodies before we are aware; nor lest, when we return home, we should find our dwellings in ashes, our little ones dashed against the stones and our wives carried captive through a perilous, dreadful wilderness, by those whose tender mercies are cruelty.

  And yet, Fiske added ruefully, all is not well:

  … is there not something that imbitters the relish and lessens the value of these possessions and enjoyments? are not the dangers and distresses, the cruelties and sufferings which our forefathers underwent, renewed in part in our day and practised upon some of their posterity? But what do I say? Are the deceased tribes of Indians risen out of their graves with their hatchet, and bows … ? Or has any other nation of a fierce countenance, a hard language, and harder hearts, invaded our territories?

  Of this new enemy, Fiske concluded, “When [our forefathers] purchased lands of the natives, they thought them their own: and when they cultivated them for their children whom they hoped to leave free and happy, they little thought their posterity would be disturbed in their possessions by Britons, more than themselves were by savage Indians.”67

  Philip had been dead for a century, but now the story of his war was put to a new end. With an uncanny sense of political expediency, Fiske and others of his revolutionary generation resurrected the story of King Philip’s War to employ it as a propaganda tool against the British. In depicting the British as more savage enemies than the Indians of King Philip’s War, Fiske had hit on a powerful source of revolutionary rhetoric. He was not alone.68 King Philip’s War had become suddenly popular. All over New England, centennial addresses and sermons were delivered, and beginning in 1770, many of the original narratives of the war were reprinted. Benjamin Church’s narrative had been out of print since 1716, but, along with several seventeenth-century accounts of the war, it gained a new readership in the 1770s when, with added prefaces and illustrations, the original chronicles were updated for the revolutionary generation. In an illustration from a 1770 edition of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, Rowlandson is refashioned as an American daughter of liberty (in a widely used woodcut), and the title page of a 1773 edition shows Rowlandson under attack from men who look more like redcoats than Indians.69

  Frontispiece of A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston: Z. Fowle, 1770). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

  Title page illustration from A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston: John Boyle, 1773). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

  John Boyle, the Boston printer who published the 1773 edition of Rowlandson’s narrative, was an ardent patriot, and in 1775, at the start of the Revolutionary War, he also resurrected and reprinted William Hubbard’s history of King Philip’s War, which had lain dormant since its last printing in 1677.70Tellingly, the preface to Boyle’s 1775 edition of Hubbard, like Fiske’s sermon, drew an analogy between New England’s old Indian enemies and its new British adversaries: “We of this province, with inconsiderable intermissions, from that early period, at unknown expense and loss, have been called to defend our lives and properties against the incursions of more distant savages.”71In the 1770s, due to the efforts of printers like Boyle, colonists looking for inspiration with which to fight their own war could read William Hubbard, Benjamin Church, and Mary Rowlandson. Clothed in revolutionary rhetoric, the memory of King Philip’s War was invoked to urge the colonists to free themselves from the “captivity” they now suffered under British tyranny.72Colonists commemorated King Philip’s War during the American Revolution because of the centennial, and also because the war had a particular resonance as a metaphor.

  Meanwhile, even as seventeenth-century Indians were being used as a metaphor for the redcoats, seen as simply “more distant savages,” many of their descendants were quite nearby, fighting alongside the patriots. Mashpees from Cape Cod, Penobscots and Passamaquoddies from lower Maine, and Pequots and Mohegans from Connecticut all fought on the colonists’ side in the War for Independence. (All also suffered severe losses, casualties that led, in turn, to more racial intermarriage, as Indian war widows married men from other communities.) But since large numbers of native peoples in the colonies, including most Iroquois, fought on the side of the British, New England’s Indians failed to benefit from their service. As historian Colin Calloway has argued, “the fiction that all Indians had fought for the British in the Revolution justified massive dispossession of Native Americans in the early republic, whatever their role in the war.”

  For Indians in New England, the American Revolution signaled not a gain but a loss of liberty. In 1788 Massachusetts repealed a 1763 ruling by which Mashpee had been incorporated as a separate, self-governing district, appointing, instead, a board of white overseers. Pequot and Mohegan soldiers who fought in the Revolution returned to Connecticut only to find whites encroaching on their lands. And the state of Maine gradually claimed most of the Penobscots’ and Passamaquoddies’ lands in the years after the war. Each of these groups petitioned their state governments for redress. Each failed. The Passamaquoddies even argued their case before Congress, employing the rhetoric of revolution and asking “that we may Enjoy our Privileges which we have been fighting for as other Americans.”73 But none of these groups succeeded in winning their cases.

  Perhaps more distressing, American pop
ular culture denied these peoples’ very existence. In 1782, when J. Hector St. John Crévecoeur asked his famous question “What then is the American, this new man?” his answer did not include Indians. While Crévecoeur acknowledged that Wampanoags still lived in Mashpee and on the islands, his general conclusion was that New England’s natives had disappeared:

  They are gone, and every memorial of them is lost; no vestiges whatever are left of those swarms which once inhabited this country … : not one of the descendants of Massasoit, father of Mètacomèt (Philip), and Wamsutta (Alexander)…. They have all disappeared either in the wars which the Europeans waged against them, or else they have mouldered away, gathered in some of their ancient towns, in contempt and oblivion: nothing remains of them all, but one extraordinary monument, and even this they owe to the industry and religious zeal of the Europeans, I mean the Bible translated into the Nattick tongue.74

  For Crèvecoeur, Eliot’s Indian Bible was the only “monument,” the only surviving evidence that there were ever Indians in New England. Just how wide the chasm was between white perceptions of vanished Indians and the lived experience of real Indians had become is suggested in an encounter that took place just thirteen years before Crèvecoeur wrote. In 1769 the missionary Joseph Fish found that Narragansetts in Rhode Island were uninterested in learning to read the Bible; they countered Fish’s argument that Christians needed Scripture to know God by claiming they knew the spirits directly.75Even as whites came to identify Eliot’s Indian Bible as the only surviving monument of Indians in New England (as, in effect, their only “voice” from the past), real Algonquian men and women continued to speak for themselves and even to resist the very culture on which Eliot’s Bible rested: the culture of Protestantism, the culture of literacy.