Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  • The invading Poles recognised as tsar an obscure minor noble, Grigory, who claimed to be the son of Ivan IV by one of his later wives. Grigory is sometimes known as the first False Dimitry.

  • Grigory converted to Catholicism, but that only hastened his demise. After a year he was overthrown and murdered. His ashes were loaded into a cannon and fired in the general direction of Poland.

  • The throne was then seized by Vasilly, who first won a civil war against an army led by a former Ottoman slave and then fought off a pretender who had married Grigory’s widow (the second False Dimitry).

  • The Poles invaded again, and proclaimed Vladislav of Poland tsar.

  • Vasilly turned to Sweden for help. The Swedes sent him a force of English and Scottish mercenaries, but he still lost.

  • The Poles installed a new ruler, while the Swedes contented themselves with seizing Novgorod again as a consolation prize.

  • Finally, in 1612, the Russians rose up against their invaders and pushed them all out.

  Casting around for a new tsar, the Russians alighted on the family of Ivan the Terrible’s first wife, Anastasia. After years of total chaos few could have expected the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov to last for long. Not only did he remain on the throne for thirty years, but the Romanovs survived from the time of the Tudors right up to the twentieth century. Ivan’s choice of Anastasia not only brought a virgin bride to his bed but brought the Romanov family to the centre stage of Russian history. The Russian monarchy lasted for 333 years after Ivan the Terrible’s death, and for all but the first twenty-nine of those years a Romanov held the throne.

  Michael Romanov assumed the throne in 1613, six years after the founding of Jamestown and seven years before the sailing of the Mayflower. His accession gave Russians a chance to develop along a different path to the barbaric routes of the Mongols and Ivan the Terrible. Similarly in Massachusetts the English had the chance to avoid the barbaric paths of slavery and genocide along which the colonies to the south were soon to be firmly striding. The Romanovs, to some extent at least, succeeded. The Massachusetts colonists, to a large extent, failed.

  CHAPTER 4

  LEGACY OF THE MYSTIC MASSACRE

  Ivan the Terrible threw all the resources he could command into the cause of empire. He was determined that Russian imperialism, like everything else in his realm, would be controlled from the centre. The tsar himself decided when and where the Muscovite state would attempt to push out its borders. By contrast the English crown had a far more casual approach. The slowly developing English colonies in the Caribbean and on the mainland grew at their own speed. In Russia dreams of empire preceded conquest. In America conquest led to dreams of empire.

  Those who organised the settlements in Barbados and Virginia may have done so in the name of the English monarch, but they were motivated more by profit than patriotism. They hoped to make themselves rich. One group of English colonists was different, travelling as servants of their Lord, dedicated to creating a kingdom in His name. History remembers them as the Pilgrim Fathers, and for them dreams did precede conquest. Spreading out from Boston, they were determined to bring the love of the Lord to the New World. What they brought instead was a terror as bloody as Ivan the Terrible’s, a terror that paved the way for empire.

  Frying Natives

  In the annals of terrorist atrocities 5/27 should resonate with Americans as much as 9/11. The events of 27 May 1637 changed the American psyche for ever. History has yet to show that 9/11 will have anything like as seismic a long-term impact. In both cases an act of unprecedented carnage was coldly planned and callously inflicted. In both cases the victims were ‘civilians’ perversely regarded as ‘combatants’ only in the eyes of men blinded by religious bigotry. In both cases the objective was to terrorise populations who had no comprehension at all of what was happening to them or of what could possibly be motivating their attackers. In both cases surprise was total.

  The villagers of Missituck (now Mystic), Connecticut, had gone to bed as usual on 26 May. Many of the menfolk were away but four hundred (in some versions seven hundred) women, children, elderly and infirm remained. They could have had no idea that all but five of them would never see another sunset.

  Just before dawn an English militia leader, Captain John Underhill, looked down on the sleeping village with grim satisfaction. As the first rays of the new day’s sun tinged the eastern sky he gave the order to attack. The killing began. Seven years after the founding of Boston ethnic cleansing had arrived in New England. ‘Down fell men, women and children,’ Underhill wrote triumphantly in his journal, Newes from America. ‘Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that had never been in a war, to see so many souls lay gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along.’

  Underhill returned to Boston a hero. William Bradford, the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers, gave praise for the ‘sweet sacrifice’ of natives ‘frying in the fire’. Seven years later, when the Dutch, who had founded a colony on the Hudson, needed to cleanse their own land they called on Underhill’s services again. This time he was even more ‘successful’, killing more than 500 Algonquian in a single raid on a native village. But it was the Mystic Massacre that had the most profound impact on the development of America. From that moment European settlers realised that the continent was theirs for the taking.

  The first Puritan settlers in New England were alarmed by the presence of native tribes around them. They knew nothing of the fate of the early Viking immigrants, but they were certainly well aware of the savage native wars that had erupted in Virginia. They set up local militias to defend themselves against marauding natives. These militias were known as ‘trayned bands’, because the volunteers were usually placed under the command of someone who had received military training before emigrating. The band at Boston was commanded by Underhill, who had come out from England specifically to take charge of the defence of the new settlement. He quickly established that the best form of defence was offence. The area surrounding the colony had to be cleansed of any threats, and the first of these threats were the Pequot.

  In 1634 an English pirate named John Stone had kidnapped several natives and demanded ransom. The native response was to fall on Stone and his crew and kill them all. The English authorities decided that the Pequot were responsible, and demanded that they hand over the heads of Stone’s killers. Stone may have been a pirate, but he was a white man doing what white men had the right to do. Even as early as 1634 the settlers had realised that making natives pay ‘tributes’ was an effective way of funding their colonies; Alan Taylor has succinctly characterised the practice as a protection racket. Some settlers took to holding native children hostage to ensure that their parents paid their tributes. When the Pequot refused to co-operate hostilities broke out.

  The native tribes throughout North America were frequently at war with each other, but war to them was quite different from war as understood by Europeans. The objective of native wars was not primarily to kill their enemies but to capture them. The captives swelled the size of the tribe and made it more powerful; the number of people in the tribe also determined its wealth. A few warriors would be killed, often with sickening savagery, but women and children were scrupulously protected: they were the prize. Having no concept of property, the natives had no concept of war fought for territory.

  Underhill was used to the norms of Europe, to total war. He insisted in his journal that the Scriptures decreed that women and children must perish with their menfolk. Employing the classic British imperial strategy of divide and rule, he recruited Mohegan and Narrangaset natives as allies. They led him to Mystic and participated in the subsequent massacre, although Underhill in his journal notes that they cried out that the onslaught was ‘too furious and slays too many men’.

  When the English arrived in New England there had probably been around eight thousand Pequot, but in 1633 smallpox had halved their numbers. In
a matter of months the Pequot War (as this cynical exercise in ethnic cleansing was called) virtually wiped out the 3,000 remaining Pequot – who were killed, shipped off to slave plantations in the Caribbean or sold as slaves to other more friendly tribes. Proportionate to their population the Mystic Massacre was equivalent to more than a million New Yorkers being killed in the barbarism of the Twin Towers attack. Like 9/11 the trauma extended far beyond the massacre site itself.

  The Pequot War had two important consequences. First it terrorised and transformed the native population already reeling from the impact of European disease. They had no idea what the Mystic Massacre was about: the concepts of owning land and seizing territory were totally alien, as was the shock and awe of European ‘total war’ waged against civilian populations. The Mystic Massacre sent a message to all the native peoples, friend and foe, that life would never be the same again: 27 May 1637 marked the end of freedom and independence for the Native American.

  The second similarly profound impact was on the whites. Until the Pequot War the Puritans had seen themselves as a tiny group of God-fearing souls in permanent danger of being overwhelmed by the mass of heathen savages by whom they were surrounded. As dawn broke over Missituck on that late spring day the balance of power changed for ever. It really is a date as important in US history as 11 September 2001. The Puritans’ glorification of their ‘victory’ had all the resonance of Osama Bin Laden’s rhetoric three centuries later. As the American Alfred Cave in his work on the Pequot War puts it, ‘Celebration of victory over Indians as the triumph of light over darkness, civilisation over savagery, for many generations our central historical myth, finds its earliest full expression in the contemporary chronicles of this little war.’

  Central as the Pequot War may be to understanding the American psyche, it has largely been written out of conventional history; not by state dictat of the kind that tried to write the Vikings out of Russian history, but simply because the facts of the Mystic Massacre do not fit the picture that most Americans have of their past. The myth of noble Puritans overcoming vicious savages is so ingrained that any contrary examples are assumed to be so atypical as not to be worth recording.

  Samuel Eliot Morison was for many years the doyenne of US historians. He was convinced that the ‘roots of everything we have today’ could be traced back to the colonies of the late seventeenth century. But his view of that period was conditioned by his perceptions of modern America. In his monumental Oxford History of the American People published in 1965 there is no mention of the Mystic Massacre, and the Pequot War itself is referred to only in reference to a later conflict, when Morison writes, ‘Hitherto, New England had suffered but one Indian war, a short, sharp and decisive conflict with the Pequots in 1637, which saved the land from savage warfare for nigh forty years.’ (Interestingly he then goes on to describe the later conflict as a ‘war of extermination’, but rather than implying that the colonists wanted to exterminate the natives he uses the term to mean that the natives wanted to exterminate the colonists – something that was undoubtedly true but not the end result. As Morison records, at the end of the war the native ‘women and children were parcelled out to white families as servants, warriors were sold as slaves in the West Indies and on the Barbary Coast of Africa’.)

  What differentiated the Mystic Massacre from ethnic cleansing in the southern colonies was the religious fervour of the New Englanders, a fervour that created a whole new moral underpinning for conquest. The religious dimension of colonisation in New England is what made it unique, and what makes later American imperial expansion so difficult for many Europeans to understand.

  The first New Englanders were convinced that their interests were God’s interests. The terror inflicted on Mystic was God’s holy terror; the muskets that poured death on to native women and children were God’s guns. Ethnic cleansing may no longer be part of American imperialism, but American presidents still see themselves as firing the guns of God. Speaking of the invasion of Iraq nearly four centuries later, President Bush II expressed the spirit of Mystic when he proclaimed, ‘It is not America which wants to free the peoples of the world. It is Jesus Christ who wants to free them.’

  Christianity and the American way of life have become so entwined that it is often impossible to determine which one is inspiring which. The religion of Jesus Christ has been rewritten – not for the first time – to reflect the political ideology of its followers, almost as if the man himself has become an American. The story of the US congressman who insisted that he was not interested in foreign languages – ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me’ – is probably apocryphal, but during a speech in 1999 US Attorney General John Ashcroft made a remark that no European would dream of making about their own country, when he proclaimed that America’s godly and eternal character made it unique among nations.

  Russia, on the other hand, did not see itself as unique. On the contrary, for Russia territorial expansion was a natural consequence of its view of the world as a cockpit of competing powers where the choice was invade or be invaded. For America after Mystic there was no competing power; there were no Mongols, Swedes or Poles, no Napoleon or Hitler on its borders awaiting the opportunity to strike. Just like Russia it accumulated territory and power, but there was no need to flaunt its possessions to awe potential invaders with its imperial glory. For Russia the battle was between weak and strong. To the victor went the glory and the ultimate glory was empire. The Russian tsars were emperors and their creed was imperialism. America’s has been an empire that never proclaimed its imperialism; instead, in the words used by Alfred Cave to describe the Pequot War, Americans believe that theirs was not the triumph of the strong over the weak but of ‘light over darkness’.

  Not everyone approved of Underhill’s method of shining the light. Back in England many people were appalled, and called on the New English to adopt a more Christian approach. In response some New England Puritans, for the first time, set out to convert the natives remaining after the Pequot War. They established ‘praying towns’, where natives who gave up their own culture and adopted the English way of life could live in safety. These settlements appealed to some of the smaller tribes as a way of escaping their larger neighbours, but in the next major conflict in the 1670s the settlers themselves turned on these ‘praying Indians’; they were shipped off to concentration camps both to protect them from genocide and to ensure that they had no opportunity to go over to the enemy: even a Christian native could not be entirely trusted. (There is a myth that concentration camps were first used by the British in the Boer War, but herding the praying Indians on to Long Island and Deer Island in Boston Harbour was in practice no different from the later camps in South Africa. Most of the inmates died of disease or starvation or were kidnapped by slave traders.)

  Thanksgiving

  What was particularly significant about the Pequot War and the Mystic Massacre was where it occurred. The atrocities happened not among the slave fields of Virginia, Jamaica or Carolina, where life was always cheap, but among the farms and chapels of pious New England where the riches of this life were supposed to take second place to the virtues that promised eternal riches in the life to come.

  Colonies like Virginia and Barbados reflected the standard form of English colonialism; to the north a radically different economic model had sprung up. New England was the glaring exception to the general picture of slave-based colonisation. While by 1700 slaves formed three-quarters of the population in some colonies, in Massachusetts they numbered less than 2 per cent. New England presented a fundamentally different approach to colonisation. Almost the only feature it shared with the colonies further south was its attitude towards the natives, starting with an equal dependence on disease to get rid of the native population. When the Pilgrim Fathers landed in 1620 they found land cleared and ready for them, and no surviving natives to defend it.

  The voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers is the abiding foundation
myth of US history. Rather than the slave-holding oligarchs of Virginia and the south, the Plymouth colonists of the north are depicted as the moral bedrock of later American development. (The charmingly named settlement of Cupid’s Cove preceded the foundation of Plymouth by ten years but as it was located in what became Canada it is no longer considered part of ‘American’ history.) These hardy New England pioneers, it is said, lived a life of honest labour and devout prayer, at peace with their environment, their native neighbours and their God. Encouraged by their example, an ever-increasing throng of huddled masses followed them from the poverty of Europe to the endless opportunities across the Atlantic.

  In reality the colony established at Plymouth in 1620 had virtually no economic or political significance. Life was incredibly hard and, even without the malaria and other perils of Virginia and the Caribbean, colonists died at an alarming rate. Half the settlers died in the first year. The local natives, contrary to later folklore, were not particularly welcoming. Not surprisingly the huddled masses back in Europe did not rush to follow the Plymouth pioneers, although by 1630 the colony had a population of around 1,500.

  Nevertheless the mythological and cultural significance of the Pilgrim Fathers is hard to overstate. Every American schoolchild knows how the gallant band of Puritans escaped to religious freedom on the Mayflower, endured unimaginable hardships and eventually survived with the help of friendly natives to celebrate the first Thanksgiving in their Promised Land. It is a heartwarming story of faith, endurance, tolerance and above all triumph. Some of it is even true.

  In an odd quirk of history the Mayflower’s first brush with colonialism was not in North America but much closer to home. The English learnt to colonise in their brutal conquest of Ireland at the start of the seventeenth century. The Mayflower played an important role in that campaign by ferrying supplies to the English occupying forces in Sligo and Donegal just eighteen years before ferrying the Pilgrim Fathers across the Atlantic.