The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  14Hubbard, Narrative, 1:4.

  15John Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth (1656), was suppressed by the Massachusetts Court in 1661 (MCR 4:5-6).

  16Mary Pray to James Oliver, January 1, 1676, Mass. Arch. 69:91-92, but also see the transcription in Further Letters on King Philip’s War (Providence: Society of Colonial Wars, 1923), 22-25. John Kingsley to the Connecticut War Council, May 5, 1676, CCR 2:445.

  17Hubbard, Narrative, 1:16.

  18Hall, “The Uses of Literacy,” 20-38; David Hall, Words of Wonder, Days of Judgment-Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 5-7, 18-19; and Chapters 1 and 2. The story of the man who put his faith in his Bible is told in John Kingsley to the Connecticut War Council, May 5, 1676. For other examples and a fuller analysis of New Englanders’ belief in the special powers of the Bible see Hall, Words of Wonder, 24-31. On the monopoly of information held by seaboard cosmopolitans see Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  19Brief and True Narration, 3.

  20For a sample of a manuscript newsletter see the unsigned newsletter dated December 22, 1675, in the Codex Collections of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. The reports in The London Gazette were a digest of two letters by Benjamin Batten to Sir John Allin dated June 29, 1675, and July 6, 1675 (Gay Transcripts, Plymouth Papers, 1:39-46, MHS). Summaries of Batten’s letters were also entered into the Calendar of State Papers (CSP 9:251-53). For a detailed discussion of Batten’s letters and an examination of the gazette’s editorial methods see Douglas E. Leach, “Benjamin Batten and the London Gazette” NEQ 36 (1963): 502-17. As Stephen Saunders Webb has written, “London coffee consumers were as well informed about the origins and progress of the Algonquian uprising in New England as they were tardily and incompletely told of Virginia’s Indian and civil wars. Even The London Gazette reported regularly and extensively on the war in New England” (1676: The End of American Independence [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984], 222). On getting the news in Virginia see Wilcomb E. Washburn, “Governor Berkeley and King Philip’s War,” NEQ 30 (1957). Meanwhile, a pamphlet encouraging migration to New Jersey boasted that while “in New England they are at Wars with the Indians … in this place the Lord is making way to exalt his name and truth” (Robert Wade to his wife, April 2, 1676, in A Further Account of New Jersey, in an Abstract of Letters Lately Writ from thence, By several Inhabitants there Resident [London, 1676], 6-7). On communications between New and Old England more generally see David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 213-34.

  21Mather, Exhortation, 170.

  22Webb, 1676, 222, 240. Among those accounts printed as supplements to The London Gazette were Saltonstall’s Present State (no. A1051); Saltonstall’s Continuation (no. A1091); Saltonstall’s New and Further Narrative (no. A1141, October 23-26, 1676); and Mather’s Brief History (no. 1156, December 14-16, 1676).

  23Saltonstall, Present State, 49-50.

  24Edward Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues, 1668-1709 (London: Edward Arber, 1903), 1:226, 235, 240, and 252.

  25On the popularity of gruesome literature among English readers see Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), 47-49. On literacy and the book trade in seventeenth-century England more generally see H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1603 to 1650 (Cambridge, England, 1970); Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-century England (London: Methuen, 1981); and David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  26Saltonstall, Continuation, 53; Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 77.

  27Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 225-26.

  28Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 77. Though these accounts purported to have been “communicated by Letters to a Friend in London,” some are much more selfconsciously written. Thus the author of A True Account directly addresses his audience, apologizing to the reader for the abruptness of his narrative, and asking his indulgence when he includes some letters written by Indians, containing “Barbarisms” (1, 6).

  29Wharton, New-England’s Present Sufferings, 5.

  30News from New England, 6.

  31The number of booksellers in Boston rose dramatically during the decades during and after King Philip’s War. According to James Hart, “From 1642 to 1661 Boston had only one bookseller, but in the 1660s there were two, in the seventies there was a jump to nine, and in the eighties there was another great rise to seventeen…. The increase was out of proportion to the growth of New England’s population which rose from some 18,000 to almost 100,000 during this period, and Boston, which had not yet got around to naming its streets, had far more than a normal share of book shops for its 1,500 inhabitants in 1640 or for its 7,000 at the end of the century” (James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976]). For a more general portrait of book publication and circulation in colonial New England see Hall, Words of Wonder, 44-52.

  32Wheeler, Thankefull Remembrance, 240. Wheeler’s sermon was probably named after George Carlton’s own Thankefull Remembrance of God’s Mercy (London, 1624). On the colonists’ reasons for writing about the war see also Louis J. Kern, “Savagery, Captivity, and Redemption: Historical Memory and National Myth in Puritan Representations of King Philip’s War, 1675-1678,” paper presented at “Collective Memory and Private Memory in Pre-Industrial America,” University of Paris, February, 1992, 6-16.

  33Term Catalogues 1:266, 507. The London Gazette, December 14-16, 1676. David Hall writes that “the marketplace made room for two quite different understandings of the book, the one that moralists preferred and another that printers and hack writers made their own, a frank embracing of inventiveness and competition” (Hall, Words of Wonder, 55).

  34On narratives sent to the king see Massachusetts Council to the King of England, April 6, 1676, Mass. Arch. 68:199-201; Commissioners of the United Colonies to the King of England, August 25, 1679, PCR 10:407-9.

  35John Hull to Edward Hull, October 20, 1676, John Hull’s Letterbook, AAS. Next Hull wrote to Burfoot, explaining, “Excuse my not former answering you[r] request about the war[.] I waited untill our first edition [was] printed” (John Hull to Samuel Burfoot, October 20, 1676, ibid.).

  36Samuel Sewall to Stephen Dummor, 1684-1685, and Sewall to Nathaniel Dummor, February 2, 1685, transcribed in Samuel Jennison, ed., “Letters of Chief Justice Sewall,” NEHGR 9 (1855): 287-88.

  37Joseph Eliot to John Winthrop, Jr., August 16, 1675, MHSC, 5th ser., 1 (1871): 430.

  38On the circulation of books within New England and between New and Old England see Thomas Goddard Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620-1730 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1920), 25-61, 110-36, and, more important, David Hall’s arguments about the shared print culture of England and New England (“The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 166-80).

  39“Yours I received & the bookes, 7 of those which came first are sold at Bridgewater; I will endeavour to sell as fast as I can” (John Cotton to Increase Mather, October 20, 1677, quoted in Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 219).

  40Richard Blinman to Increase Mather, August 24, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 329. Jonathan Tuckney to Increase Mather, April 3, 1678, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 351. James Forbes, in England, thanked Mather for sending him the narrative of the war, along with two sermons, “for which I return you heartie thanks, and I do interprete it as an expression of your friendlie respects to me, at so great
a distance, and after so long a silence” (James Forbes to Increase Mather, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 [1868]: 581). “Yours I received with the book concerning the warr, but it was long before the book came to hand. I heartily thank you for it. … I shall be glad to hear that the warr with the Indians is at an end” (Samuel Petto to Increase Mather, August 31, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 [1868]: 341). “I thank you heartily for the History of the wars you sent to Mr Petto for me …” (John Westgate to Increase Mather, May 8, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 [1868]: 577). “i received from you, your Relation of the Troubles in New England from 1614 to 1675, & a sermon therewith which were very acceptable to me, & heartily thank you for them” (Samuel Petto to Increase Mather, May 4, 1678, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 [1868]: 342). See also Samuel Petto to Increase Mather, August 31, 1677.

  41John Bishop to Increase Mather, July 8, 1676, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 299. Later, in April 1677, Bishop would write again, “I am glad to hear that the History of N.E. is on foot & processe been made so far” (John Bishop to Increase Mather, April 13, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 [1868]: 300).

  42William Goffe to Increase Mather, September 8, 1676, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 156.

  43Nathaniel Mather to Increase Mather, February 26, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 7-8.

  44For full titles of the narratives see the Abbreviations.

  45Saltonstall, Present State, 24. This “true account” of the war’s origins he later revised: “In my Last I also gave you (at First) an Account of the Reasons of the Rise and Original of these unhappy Wars, in which, my Information was not so Perfect, but that there was somewhat amiss; although at that Time, the Account thereof was generally receiv’d, an the Alteration is not much …” (Saltonstall, Continuation, 54).

  46Brief and True Narration, 3. Hubbard, Narrative, 1:16.

  47True Account, 1.

  48Wheeler, Thankefull Remembrance, 240

  49Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 18. Noah Newman to John Cotton, March 14, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS. Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 221. Harris echoed Saltonstall, who wrote, “The Dispensation we lay under was Cloudy and Affrighting, Fresh Messengers (like Job’s Servants) howrly arriving to bring the Doleful Tidings of New Massacres, Slaughters and Devastations committed by the Brutish Heathens” (New and Further Narrative, 78).

  50Joseph Moody to John Cotton, May 1, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS. Nathaniel Brewster to unknown, July 12, 1675, Winthrop Papers, MHS. Unknown to unknown, May 18, 1676, Gay Transcripts, Plymouth papers, MHS, 1:53.

  51John Winthrop, Jr., to Fitz-John Winthrop, July 9, 1675, MHSC, 5th ser., 8 (1882): 170. William Leete to John Winthrop, Jr., September 21, 1675, MHSC, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 577-78.

  52Samuel Gorton to John Winthrop, Jr., September 11, 1675, MHSC, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 627. John Pynchon to John Winthrop, Jr., July 2, 1675, The Pynchon Papers, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh and Juliette Tomlinson (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1985), 1:136-37.

  53Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 16. John Pynchon to John Winthrop, Jr., August 12, 1675, Pynchon Papers 1:143-44. Daniel Witherell to John Winthrop, Jr., July 29, 1675 (but misdated as 1677), MHSC, 3rd ser., 10 (1849): 118. John Kingsley to the Connecticut War Council, May 5, 1676.

  54Samuel Hooker to Increase Mather, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 337. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, June 27, 1675, Winthrop Papers, MHS.

  55Massachusetts Council to Indian Sagamores, March 31, 1676, Mass. Arch. 68:193.

  56Sam Namphow to Massachusetts Council, October 12, 1675, Mass. Arch. 30:182. On the reason for Namphow’s mission see Douglas Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958; reprint, East Orleans, Mass.: Parnassus Imprints, 1992), 83-84.

  57Saltonstall, Present State, 44; John Pynchon to the Massachusetts Council, September 30, 1675, NEHGR 38 (1884): 431.

  58Saltonstall, Present State, 31. See also Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed. John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), ch. 32.

  59John Russell to Increase Mather, September 15, 1675, transcribed in Mather, Brief History, 74. On marking trees see “Narrative of the Captivity of Quentin Stockwell,” in Samuel Gardner Drake, ed., Tragedies of the Wilderness (Boston, 1846), 61.

  60Richard Jacob to unknown, April 22, 1676, NEHGR 40 (1886): 391-92. Similarly, Mary Rowlandson reported the Indians returning to camp after burning Medfield and “by their noise and whooping they signified how many they had destroyed (which was at that time twenty-three)” (Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 330).

  61Mary Pray to James Oliver, January 1, 1676.

  62Thomas Whalley to John Cotton, July 18, 1676, Davis Papers, MHS. Thomas Whalley to John Cotton, October 9, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS. John Freeman to Josiah Winslow, July 3, 1675, Winslow Papers, MHS. Connecticut Council to John Pynchon, August 9, 1675, CCR 2:349 (emphasis mine).

  63Nathaniel Brewster to unknown, July 12, 1675, Winthrop Papers, MHS. Noah Newman to John Cotton, March 14, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS.

  64Jane Hook to Increase Mather, August 12, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 261. Christopher Whichcot to Isaac Waldron, July 4, 1676, Jeffries Papers, MHS.

  65Stephen Dummor to Henry Sewall, May 24, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS. John Hall to Rebeckah Byley Hall Worcester Symonds, March 16, 1676, John Hall Letters, 1663-85, AAS.

  66John Pynchon to John Russell, October 5, 1675, Pynchon Papers 1:156-57.

  67Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 326.

  68John Kingsley to the Connecticut War Council, May 5, 1676. Kingsley’s letter was so moving that the Connecticut War Council responded by sending out a call for donations. See Connecticut War Council to “all Christian friends” (May 30, 1676, CCR 2:445).

  69Mary Pray to James Oliver, October 20, 1675, MHSC, 5th ser., 1 (1871): 105. Walker, “Captan Perse,” 92. Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 217. John Hall to Rebeckah Symonds, June 22, 1676, John Hall Letters, AAS.

  70Daniel Denison to unknown, October 28, 1675, Mass. Arch. 68:30; see also the transcription in NEHGR 23 (1969):327.

  71Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially 133-37. For a slightly different but related argument see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), ch. 5. According to Fussell,

  One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them. To put it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress. Logically there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out, pain and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. Logically, one supposes, there’s no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man’s works. The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. The problem was less one of “language” than of gentility and optimism; it was less a problem of “linguistics” than of rhetoric (The Great War, 169-70).

  At the same time, Fussell argues that soldiers often wrote about the war in high-literary terms: “The point is this: finding the war ‘indescribable’ in any but the available language of traditional literature, those who recalled it had to do so in known literary terms. Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Pound, Yeats were not present at the front to induct them into new idioms which might have done the job better. Inhibited by scruples of decency and believing in the historical continuity of styles, writers about the war had to appeal to the sympathy of readers by invoking the familiar and suggesting its resemblance to what many of them suspected was an unprecedented and (in their terms) an all-but-incommunicable reality” (ibid., 174). Elsewhere, writing about World War II, Fussel
l has written that “Most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were relatively inarticulate and have remained silent” (“Hiroshima: A Soldier’s View,” New Republic, August 22 and 29, 1981).

  72Hubbard (Narrative, 1:16) remarks on the importance of “eye or ear Witnesses,” but see also Noah Newman to John Cotton, December 10, 1675, Bowen, Early Rehoboth, 2:49.

  73Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 220. James Oliver to unknown, January 26, 1676, NEHGR 39 (1885):380.

  74Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 230. Winthrop, Some Meditations.

  75Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 99. Mary Pray to James Oliver, October 20, 1675. Later in the same letter, however, Pray abbreviated her remarks, claiming “It is to[o] much to writ to troubl you to read our sad condition.” William Leete to John Winthrop, Jr., September 21, 1675, MHSC, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 577-78.

  76News from New-England, 4. Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 78.

  77Scarry, The Body in Pain, 60.

  78John Foster, An Almanack of Coelestial Motions for … 1676 (Boston, 1676), 2.

  79Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 18.

  80Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 218.

  81Hubbard, Narrative, 1:144.

  82Ibid., 1:97.

  Chapter 3 • HABITATIONS OF CRUELTY

  1Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 98-99.

  2A powerful discussion of such notions of order can be found in Robert Blair St. George, “‘Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Jonathan L. Fairbanks, ed., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 2:159-87.

  3Wharton, New-England’s Present Sufferings, 6-7. Thomas Whalley to John Cotton, April 17, 1676, Davis Papers, MHS. Saltonstall, Continuation, 78.