The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

77John Winthrop, Jr., to Major Savage, July 12, 1675, MHSC, 5th ser., 8 (1882): 172.

  78Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), ch. 9; Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 55-56. On the French Jesuits’ similar attitude toward the Iroquois see Richter, “War and Culture,” 528. See also Thomas S. Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War,” Anthropologica 34 (1992): 3-20.

  79Barbara Donagan, “Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War,” AHR 99 (1994): 1139.

  80Roger Williams to Robert Williams, April 1, 1676, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie (Providence: Brown University Press, 1988), 2:720. Emphasis mine.

  81Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 28. See Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1991).

  82John Freeman to Josiah Winslow, July 3, 1675.

  83Walker, “Captan Perse,” 82.

  84The Indians “very suddaynely and violently fell upon our neighbouring people, first robing and burning their houses, and after in a sculking, unmanly way, destroying many of our people” (Josiah Winslow to John Winthrop, Jr., July 29, 1675).

  85Samuel Gorton to John Winthrop, Jr., September 11, 1675, MHSC, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 627.

  86Roger Williams to John Leverett, October 11, 1675, PCR 10:453-55.

  87Urian Oakes, The Soveraign Efficacy of Divine Providence: … As Delivered in a Sermon Preached in Cambridge on Sept. 10. 1677 (Boston, 1682), 26. On Europeans’ disdain for Indian strategies to limit their fatalities (strategies Europeans called cowardly) see also Richter, “War and Culture,” 536; Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape,” 6-15; John E. Ferling, A Wilderness of Miseries: War and Warriors in Early America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 34-36.

  88At a Council Held in Boston August the thirtieth 1675 (Cambridge, 1675), brs.

  89Hubbard, Narrative, 1:15.

  90This is a question that Vitoria, writing about the Aztecs, had not even identified, since he failed to consider the possibility that Indians might have had their own “law of nations,” different, but no less developed than that of Christian Europeans. As Johnson has observed, “Instead of using the new knowledge of Indian customs to modify European understanding of natural law, [Vitoria] tended to fall back upon European customs, vouchsafed by the belief that they had been ratified by revelation, to criticize certain of the Indians’ cultural practices: these he declared to be the result of invincible ignorance” (Johnson, Just War Tradition, 76-77). It would seem that just as he argued that the Indians had a form of religion (however inferior to Christianity), Vitoria might have argued that they had their own form of international law. After all, the Aztecs had complicated diplomatic and military relations with other Mexican tribes. But this kind of cultural relativism would have been impossible for Vitoria and is in fact probably irreconcilable with the idea that there exists such a thing as natural law. As Tzvetan Todorov has shown, discovery-era Europeans were able to see Indians as either the same and equal or different and inferior; different and equal was not an option (The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Harper & Row, 1987]).

  91While this argument has traditionally been made by scholars from the “innatist” school, who argue that people are born with an instinct to fight (e.g., Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfelt, The Biology of Peace and War [New York: Viking Press, 1979]), I am here using it to make a cultural rather than a biological argument.

  92Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 218. John Leverett to “All People unto whome these prsente may come,” September 12, 1676, Stewart Mitchell Papers, MHS.

  93Wheeler, Thankefull Remembrance, 255. Emphasis mine.

  94Samuel Gorton to John Winthrop, Jr., September 11, 1675, MHSC, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 627.

  95Benjamin Batten to Sir Thomas Allin, July 29, 1675.

  96Later, when an edited version of Batten’s letter appeared as the lead story in The London Gazette, it was acknowledged that the trial “probably may have incensed him” (The London Gazette, August 16-August 19, 1675).

  97Josiah Winslow to John Winthrop, Jr., July 29, 1675, MHSC, 5th ser., 1 (1871): 428. Emphasis mine.

  98Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Jr., June 25, 1675, Correspondence of Roger Williams 2:693; Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Jr., June 27, 1675, Correspondence of Roger Williams 2:698.

  99Easton, “Relacion,” 11.

  100Ibid., 9-12.

  101Peter, the son of the “squaw sachem” Awashonks, was seeking English protection (PCR 5:202). For a typical interrogation, in which the only information sought was about the location of enemy Indians, and testimony about who was involved in certain attacks, see the Connecticut Council’s examination of Menowniett (“halfe a Moheag and halfe a Naragoncett”), August 1676 (CCR 2:471-72).

  102On the two cultures’ different practices and ideologies of war see Adam J. Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England,” JAH 74 (1988): 1187-1212; as well as Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America, especially 146-70. For an interesting treatment of Iroquois warfare see Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” WMQ 40 (1983): 528-59. For a somewhat outdated but influential treatment of Indian warfare see M. W. Smith, “American Indian Warfare,” New York Academy of Sciences, Transactions, 2nd ser., XIII (1951). Most of these works, however, emphasize the practice of war rather than the reasons and justifications for it. In this regard see especially Malone, The Skulking Way of War.

  103Richter, “War and Culture,” 528-29.

  104John Underhill, News from America; or, a New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638); reprinted in MHSC, 3rd ser., 6 (1837): 27.

  105Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, 1602-1625 (Boston, 1841), 221. Traditional Indian warfare also spared women and children (Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures,” 1191).

  106William and Joseph Wannuckkow and John Appamatogoon to the Massachusetts Council, September 5, 1676, Mass. Arch. 30:216-17. A warrant had been issued for their arrest on August 11, 1676 (Massachusetts Council to the Constable, August 11, 1676, Mass. Arch. 30:210a), and they had been apprehended on August 14 (Constable to the Massachusetts Council, August 14, 1676, Mass. Arch. 30:210b), whereupon they confessed (Joseph Indian and others to the Massachusetts Council, August 14, 1676, Mass. Arch. 30:211). Thomas Danforth wrote to Governor Leverett for advice on how to handle the case (Danforth to Leverett, August 14, 1676, Mass. Arch. 30:212a), which suggests that he might have intervened and suggested the argument by which the Indians subsequently defended themselves.

  107The defense employed by these seventeenth-century Indians is probably most familiar to us in its more modern, distorted form, used during the Nuremberg trials in an attempt to exonerate Nazi war criminals. This is a jarring familiarity, and an unlikely resonance between King Philip’s War and World War II, but it serves to illustrate that the principal components of just war doctrine have an astonishingly long history, and, all told, have remained remarkably consistent.

  108M. W. Smith, “American Indian Warfare.” On nonwar-related mourning rituals among New England Indians see Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 48-49.

  109Richter, “War and Culture,” 536.

  110Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures,” 1190. Wendell S. Hadlock, “War among the Northeastern Woodland Indians,” American Anthropologist 49 (1947): 204-21. Alden Vaughan: “The Indians, of course, had fought among themselves before Europeans arrived in America and continued to afterward. But Indian wars had seldom incurred heavy mortality; most tribes were too small to bear high losses without jeopardizing their survival, and the relative abundance of land and shortage of material goods virtually eliminated wars of conquest. Accordingly, Indian warfare, compared with European, require
d less destruction and more symbolic satisfactions—such as the torture of some captives, the assimilation of the rest, and occasional ritualistic cannibalism” (Vaughan, New England Frontier, xx). See also Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 41-42, 46, 70-71, 229; and Jennings, Invasion of America, 155-59.

  111Jennings, Invasion of America, 158.

  112Quoted in Jennings, Invasion of America, 158-59.

  113What happens when a state society wars against a nonstate society? Usually we call that conquest. Anthropologists rarely study wars of conquest (R. Brian Ferguson with Leslie E. Farragher, The Anthropology of War: A Bibliography [New York: H. F. Guggenheim Foundation, 1988], iv), and historical studies of such wars are often terribly burdened with moral judgments (e.g., Jennings, The Invasion of America, 298). For another discussion of Algonquian and English ideologies of restraint in warfare see James Drake, “Severing the Ties That Bind Them: A Reconceptualization of King Philip’s War” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1995), 202-48.

  114The distinction was introduced by Henry Holbert Turney-High in 1949 (Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts [Columbia, S.C., 1949]); in 1967 the American Anthropology Association officially changed “civilized” to “modern,” and today “tribal” has replaced “primitive” (R. Brian Ferguson, ed., Warfare, Culture, and Environment [Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1984], 26). For a summary and review of what has come to be called the “anthropology of war” see John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 84-94 and Jonathan Haas, ed., The Anthropology of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  115Mason, “Brief History of the Pequot War,” 41. Williams quoted in Hirsch, “Collision of Military Cultures,” 1191.

  116Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  117Walker, “Captan Perse,” 91.

  118Unfortunately, evidence that would contribute to an understanding of Indian warfare rituals is extremely limited and, where available, difficult to interpret. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 59-60.

  119Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 8.

  120Farther Brief and True Narration, 3-4.

  121Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 94.

  122William Ames, Conscience, with the Power and Cases Thereof “(London, 1643), 184.

  123The colonists may have made some distinction between “grounds” and “provocation” for war. In a letter to the squaw sachem Weetamo, Josiah Winslow first wrote that Philip had begun war “upon no ground nor unfairness in the least from us,” but later crossed out the word “ground” and substituted “provocation” (Josiah Winslow to Weetamo, June 15, 1675, Winslow Papers, MHS).

  124John Russell to the Massachusetts Council, October 6, 1675, Mass. Arch. 67:288.

  125Mather, Exhortation, 174.

  126Michael Puglisi has argued that the colonists’ failure to attend to Indian motives made the experience of the war all the more traumatic. “Perhaps if New Englanders had been able to recognize the real issues which drove Metacom’s Wampanoags to hostilities, the trauma of the Indian war might have affected them less seriously. They could have made ‘a Business of the War,’ defeated the natives, healed their own wounds, and put the whole affair behind them” (Puglisi, Puritans Besieged, 25-26).

  127Saltonstall, Present State, 44. Emphasis mine.

  128Easton, “Relacion,” 17.

  129Roger Williams to Robert Williams, April 1, 1676. Emphasis mine. The attack on Providence is also related in Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 44-46. Christian Indians fighting with the English, however, insisted that God was on their side. When an English soldier said it was useless to shoot at a fleeing enemy Indian (he being too far away), William Nahauton told him to try “and God shall direct the bullet,” whereupon he fired and shot the Indian down (True Account, 7).

  130Nowell, Abraham in Arms, 2yd. On the importance of the Artillery Election Sermon see Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, eds., So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676-1677 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 259-60.

  131Moodey, Souldiery Spiritualized.

  Chapter 5 • COME GO ALONG WITH US

  1In April 1677 Mary and Joseph Rowlandson and their surviving children moved to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where Joseph had been appointed minister. Three days after preaching his final sermon, on November 21, 1678, Joseph Rowlandson died. By 1680 Mary had remarried; she outlived her second husband, Captain Samuel Talcott, and died in her early seventies in 1711 (David L. Greene, “New Light on Mary Rowlandson,” EAL 20 [1986]: 24-38).

  2For the most persuasive speculation on when Rowlandson wrote her account see Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, “Puritan Orthodoxy and the ‘Survivor Syndrome’ in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative,” EAL 22 (1987): 83-84. See also Robert D. Diebold, “Mary Rowlandson,” in American Writers before 1800, ed. James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 1246.

  3Numerous historians and literary scholars have marked Rowlandson’s narrative as a “foundational” American text. See, for instance, Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significance of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 19 (March 1949): 1-20; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), chs. 4-5, pp. 257-59, 326-30, 384-93, 440-59, 518-39. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom argue that “Rowlandson’s book is … to be taken not only as the creation of a Puritan myth, but as the starting point of a cultural myth affecting America as a whole” (So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676-1677 [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978], 302).

  4James Printer had joined the Natick church, was educated in Cambridge, and worked closely with Eliot in translating and, more importantly, in setting the print for the books that would form the “Indian Library.” In 1659 Printer was apprenticed to Samuel Green, Sr., and probably worked with him at the Cambridge Press until sometime in 1675. Printer returned to Hassanamesit after the war, where he lived until his death in 1717. See Samuel Gardner Drake, Book of the Indians (Boston, 1841), 2:50-51; Hugh Amory, First Impressions: Printing in Cambridge, 1639-1989 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 41.

  5Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 325. Contemporary accounts of the attack on Lancaster can also be found in Mather, Brief History, 117-18; News from New-England, 3-4; True Account, 1; Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 83; Gookin, “Historical Account,” 490; Hubbard, Narrative, 1:165-66. The devastation to the town is evaluated by Jacob Farrar in a letter to the Massachusetts Council, March 3, 1676, Mass. Arch. 68:156.

  6Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 365-66. Goodwife Thurston of Medfield echoed Rowlandson when she told her neighbors that “all her afflictions was swallowed up in the loss of her poore child gone into Captivity” (Noah Newman to John Cotton, March 14, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS).

  7[Edward Cressy], Captivity Improved to Spiritual Purposes, or Spiritual directions, Given to Prisoners of all sorts whether Debtors or malefactors, principally designed for the use of those who are Prisoners in those prisons which are under the Jurisdiction of the city of London, as Newgate, ludgate, the Counters, c. Though also applyable to others under the like circumstnces else where (London, 1675).

  8Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 366. Emphasis in original.

  9For a related reading of Rowlandson see Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 258-62.

  10Derounian argues that Rowlandson was affected by what clinical psychologists call “survivor syndrome” (“Puritan Orthodoxy,” 82-93). A related argument is made by Mitchell Breitwieser in American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief and Ethnology in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative (Madi
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), where he claims that Rowlandson’s narrative was motivated by a need to commemorate the dead.

  11Yet even the vividness of her nightmares only caused her to give greater thanks to God for his mercies. “When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but His who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awfull dispensation of the Lord towards us, upon His wonderful power and might, in carrying us through many difficulties, in returning us to safety, and suffering none to hurt us” (Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 365).

  12Ibid., 325.

  13Ibid., 324-25.

  14Ibid., 325.

  15Although there is little scholarship that focuses particularly on the Algonquian practice of adopting captives, useful comparisons can be drawn from other works, many of which have focused on Iroquois cultures. See especially Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” WMQ 40 (1983): 530-34; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage, 1979), 101-3; John E. Ferling, A Wilderness of Miseries: War and Warriors in Early America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 50-51. See also James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 302-27; and John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

  16If any parallel exists to John Eliot’s missionization program, the Algonquian practice of taking captives comes the closest. Both were strategies aimed at cultural conversion (although English captives were accepted by Algonquian communities in ways that Christian Indians were never accepted by the English).

  17Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 325.

  18Mather, Exhortation, 174-75.

  19Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 328, 333.

  20Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 335. Signs of English habitation could be not only intoxicating but also life-saving. Another returning captive, a young boy, claimed to have made his way back to the English by following an English plant: “Though the Boy knew not a step of the way to any English Town … yet God directed him aright and brought him to the sight of Plantane (the Herb which the Indians call English-foot, because it grows only amongst us, and is not found in the Indian Plantations) whereupon he concluded he was not far from us” (True Account, 3).