The Mysteries of History (May 26 Edition)
Pequot Massacre and War
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, 1905
1637 — Pequot War
public domain image from wikimedia commons
On this date in 1637, five hundred members of a Pequot (a Native American tribe also called by some Pequod) village of both sexes and all ages are massacred by a joint force of white colonists and their allies from the Mohegan tribe.
This pre-dawn raid on the sleeping people at Mystic, Connecticut was followed by similar ones on June 5th and July 28th, the latter genocidal attack bringing the Pequot war to an end and effectively erasing that tribe. The majority of the survivors were sold into slavery; a few others escaped and assimilated themselves into other Native American bands.
The following is what I wrote about The Pequot War in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 1: 1620-1913:
“Why does everything have to have a name?” “So we know which houses to burn.”
— from the play “Bach at Leipzig” by Itamar Moses
“There is always a deeper level of detail than you are currently aware of.”
—Danny Thorpe
“My father is with me, and there is no Great Father between me and the Great Spirit.”
—Crazy Horse, Sioux
“In case you lay siege to a city many days by fighting against it so as to capture it, you must not ruin its trees by wielding an ax against them; for you should eat from them, and you must not cut them down, for is the tree of the field a man to be besieged by you?”
—Deuteronomy 20:19
. . .
At the time the English colonies were starting out in America in the early 1600s, Indians were much more numerous in Virginia than in New England. Epidemics introduced by Europeans had killed perhaps 80% of the Indians in New England from 1617–1619, just prior to the arrival of the Mayflower. That was not to be the only way the Euro-Americans were to reduce the numbers of the natives, though.
A war that would set the tone and stage for many to come took place this year between the Euro-Americans and the Indians. On this occasion, it was the Pequots who were the subject of the newcomers’ attention.
The whole affair had been touched off by the murder of a certain Captain John Stone three years earlier, in 1634. Stone was no paragon of propriety. He was a failed pirate (he had attempted to hijack a vessel in New Amsterdam, as New York was known until 1664), and otherwise a criminal: He had threat ened the Governor of Plymouth Colony with a knife, and had been deported from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for drunkenness and adultery. Addition ally, Indians claimed that Stone had kidnapped some of their tribespeople.
Besides the foregoing, which is a hint that perhaps Stone got just what he deserved, and that the natives may have had just cause to be incensed with him, the Pequots were not the perpetrators of the murder. However, apparently the Niantics, a tribe nominally under Pequot control, were responsible for Stone’s demise.
Bending over backwards to avert a war, the Pequots followed a path of appeasement. They accepted responsibility for the murder and agreed to a punitive treaty with the Massachusetts Bay Colony (who, as was mentioned, didn’t have much use for Stone themselves). The Pequots paid a large fine, relinquished a vast tract of their Connecticut land, and agreed to surrender those of their number who were “guilty” of the murder. They also consented to the demand placed upon them to trade only with the English (to the exclusion of the Dutch).
Time passed and a portion of the fine had been paid. When pressed for the responsible parties, though, the Pequots claimed that all the murderers were unavailable: one had been killed by the Dutch, one had died of smallpox, and two others had escaped. For a time, the colonists did nothing about this “breach of treaty” as they termed it. But then, a new wrinkle appeared: Another English captain, John Oldham, was killed. This time, either the old enemies of the Wampanoags, the Narragansetts (or a tribe subject to them) were the guilty party. A punitive force of white colonists was sent to deal with the Narragansetts. Their goods were to be confiscated, their men slaughtered, and their women and children captured and sold as slaves. But the Narragansetts, expecting just such a response from the colonists, had fled their home on Block Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. Oldham’s frustrated avengers turned their attention to the “next best thing,” attacking and burning Pequot villages outside of Fort Saybrook.
At one point during the war, Captain John Mason led ninety Connecticut soldiers against the Pequots, who had two main forts. One Pequot fort con sisted mainly of warriors; the other was peopled mostly by women, children, and old men. Mason decided to attack the latter.
These depredations set fire to the fox’s tail. The Pequots retaliated, torch ing English settlements throughout the Connecticut Valley. The colonists, predictably, responded with a further escalation of aggression.
Why, though, would Captain John Endecott, the soldier sent to punish the Narragansetts, touch off what would become a long drawn-out holocaust against the Indians? As in so many conflicts, the quest for material advantage was behind it all. The Indians were used as pawns in a competition between the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the settlers of the Connecticut Valley, who wrangled over possession of that valley. Those with dominion over the Pequots, whose country was in the Connecticut Valley, would have a strong legal claim to their territory. The Pequots would not retain the Valley, that was a given; the real question was, which faction of the English would end up with it—those in Massachusetts, or those in Connecticut?
An example of Indians being used as pawns is reported in the book “The First Way of War: America War Making on the Frontier” by John Grenier. “Father” Jean-Louise Le Loutre, a vehemently anti-British Jesuit priest, is recorded therein as having said:
I think that we cannot do better than to incite the Indians to continue warring on the English; my plan is to persuade the Indians to send word to the English that they will not permit new settlements to be made in Acadia…I shall do my best to make it look to the English as if this plan comes from the Indians and that I have no part in it.
The Jesuits were not above stretching facts a smidgen in order to get the Indians on their side. One Indian who was allied with the French, Chief Bomaseen, told an Englishman that he was himself indeed a Christian. He went on to explain what he had been taught by the Jesuits: the Virgin Mary was a French lady whose son Jesus was murdered by Englishmen, had then been resurrected to heaven, and all who wanted to earn his favor must avenge his death.
What the Jesuits did not teach the Indians was perhaps just as bad as the lies they had taught them. The omissions in their Christian education can per haps be inferred from the following account about a raid by French-allied Abenaki Indians on a British settlement in Massachusetts, as recorded in Howard H. Peckham’s “The Colonial Wars: 1689–1762”:
Because the baby cried, a warrior seized it by the feet and bashed its head against a tree…Night and morning the Catholic Indians prayed with their rosaries.
Endecott was not an English soldier per se. That is to say, he was English and he was a soldier, but he was not in the service of England. He was in the employ of the Massachusetts Bay Company. In other words, he was a merce nary. And because the settlers in Connecticut did not want the Massachusetts Bay Company to beat them out in their bid for the Valley’s bounty, those in the Connecticut Valley did not fight against the Pequots at first. The Massachusetts Bay Colony eventually had to enlist the aid of rival Indian tribes to defeat the Pequots—among them the Narragansetts, the very tribe that they had sought to destroy at the start of the debacle.
It should be noted that the Pequot War in New England was not the first war between Euro-Americans and Indians. The colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, had fought a war with the Powhatans in 1609. They also engaged in what is misnamed “The First Indian War” against that same tribe from 1622 to 1632.
In fact, Grenier’s aforementioned “First Way of War” shows that the Euro Americans waged war against the Indians for almost three hundred years, from 1609 to 1890, when the Massacre at Wounded Knee put the finishing touches on a quarter-millennium plus of warfare. This “First Way of War” consisted of what is known today as “guerrilla warfare,” and is marked by an attempt to completely exterminate the enemy (not just defeat them) by destroying their crops and homes and even killing non-combatants. During the late 1700s, at the latest, it was the Americans, not the Indians, who had a reputation for fierceness—for killing men, women, and children in wholesale brutal slaughterings of grisly, gory grotesqueness.
Sometimes, in fact, when the Indians took prisoners it was as a recompense for numbers they had lost—and their captives were at times “adopted” into the tribe, and treated well. On one occasion, when French forces rescued a large number of their landsmen from a group of Iroquois, only thirteen women and children were willing to be repatriated. All of the men refused to return to Canada and “New France”; they enjoyed the free, simple life the Indians led (and, perhaps, the dusky maidens).
This “First Way of War,” which differs from the traditional “European” style of professional soldiers lining up in neat rows on a battlefield and firing volleys into one another’s ranks, has marked many American wars besides those against the Indians. Examples of these are: Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, and the wanton and wholesale destruction wreaked upon any Vietnamese suspected of being in league with the Viet Cong in the 1960s and 1970s. Other “First Way of War” style terrorists included “Bloody Bill” Anderson, William Quantrill, and Jesse and Frank James, when these border ruffians raided around their home state of Missouri and into neighboring Kansas before, during, and after the Civil War.
George Bodge’s “Soldiers in King Philip’s War: Being a Critical Account of That War, with a Concise History of the Indian Wars of New England,” says regarding the Pequot War:
The result of this war was that the Indians of New England were so dismayed at the resistless force of the English soldiers, that for nearly forty years there was no further formidable outbreak, though they knew that they were wronged, cheated, and oppressed in many ways by the colonists. Some time after the war was over, the actual number of the Pequods still surviving was found to be about two hundred. In 1638, a treaty was concluded between the Colonies, Narragansets, and Mohegans, by which the surviving Pequods were equally distributed between the two larger tribes, forced to adopt their names, and drop their own forever.
Questions: Had you ever heard of the Pequots? Are there any people still living who claim Pequot blood? Are there living people who can prove they descend from the Pequots? Are there any modern-day examples of this sort of activity?
