CHAPTER 15
The British Americans
THEY LIVED CONFLICTED LIVES, beset with conflicts experienced, rumored, or recalled—unrelenting racial conflicts, ferocious and savage; religious conflicts, as bitter within as between confessions; conflicts with authority, private and public; recurrent conflicts over property rights, legal obligations, and status; and conflicts created by the slow emergence of vernacular cultures, blendings of disparate subcultures adjusting to the demands of heightened aspirations and local circumstance.
1
There was never a time, over a half century of settlement, when there was not a racial conflict in one or another of the European colonies in coastal North America—not only random killings on isolated border lands and deadly attacks by ruthless traders, but concerted wars of devastation different from the precontact Indian wars and beyond the rules of civilized warfare, the principles of just war, and Christian moderation, which in some degree had softened the impact of military conflict in Europe. If there were familiar precedents for the Indian wars in seventeenth-century North America, they were the exceptions to the normal practices of European warfare: the merciless slaughter and devastation reserved for conquered towns and cities that refused to surrender when sieged; domestic rebels who openly challenged established regimes; or heretics whose radical doctrines threatened to destroy the stability of civil society. For these, in the wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there had been, and was, no mercy. So in Elizabethan Ireland, where the conquering English were convinced that the natives were utter barbarians who lived like beasts, “more uncivill, more uncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish … than in any other parts of the world” and that their warriors were mere rebels and traitors, there were no limits on the conquerors’ savagery. Again and again whole garrisons were massacred, hundreds of men, women, and children slaughtered whether or not they resisted, and terror tactics were unrestrained. Humphrey Gilbert famously lined up on both sides of the path to his tent the severed heads of some of those he had killed so that those who came to speak with him were forced to see “the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolks and freindes lye upon the grounde before their faces.” Rebels in England suffered similarly brutal fates. And nothing had been more devastating, and better known throughout Protestant Europe, than the Duke of Alba’s savagery in his efforts to suppress the Dutch revolt. The retaliatory executions in the conquered city of Mons, in Hainault, proceeded at a leisurely pace: for a full year “ten, twelve, twenty persons were often hanged, burned, or beheaded in a single day.”1
The experience and knowledge of such extreme but not uncommon events were carried to North America by the many veterans of the Dutch rebellion and the Thirty Years War who were sent to the colonies to protect the settlements and to suppress the Indians’ resistance to presumably legitimate authority. Hundreds of hardened “hammerours,” they were led by professional officers: De La Warr, Kendall, Martin, Wingfield, Ratcliffe, and Smith, in Virginia; Printz in New Sweden; Endecott, Underhill, Mason, Standish, and Gardiner in New England. So closely linked were the incidences of racial conflict, so extended their deadly aftermaths, that one can conceive of a single, continuous Euro-Indian war—precisely the Virginia Company’s hoped-for “perpetuall Warr without peace or truce”—that lasted from 1607 to 1664 and beyond, to reach its climax in the ferocious upheavals, north and south, in the 1670s.
The lines were blurred; encounters merged. So the devastating “feed fights” that followed the bloody massacre in Virginia of 1622—looting and destroying by fire the Indians’ crops in the fields and in storage—were still in progress when the Puritans’ small but efficient army, backed by Narragansett and Mohegan allies, burned alive the hundreds of unsuspecting Pequot men, women, and children, slaughtered all those they found attempting to escape, and hunted the rest down as they fled into swamps and the deepest woods. When the native survivors of that war drifted westward and south they found themselves caught up in the beginning of Kieft’s War, which tore like wildfire through the Anglo-Dutch population. The four years of that eviscerating conflict, in which Underhill repeated his bloody successes of the Pequot War, seared the countryside from the upper Delaware to Manhattan and the settlements on the upper Hudson and touched off revenge assaults on isolated settlements like that of the exiled Anne Hutchinson. At the same time Maryland and its allies, the Piscataways, came under savage attack by the feared Susquehannocks, whose continuous raids wiped out the Jesuit communities and led to severe retaliation by the settlers that in turn helped precipitate the massacre of 1644 in Virginia.2 That bloody effort of the last of the major Powhatan chiefs, Opechancanough, to repel the encroaching English failed, after murdering four to five hundred settlers, but it led to two years of the same kind of retaliatory village burnings, contrived famines, and killings that had followed the massacre of 1622. The Dutch war subsided, but there was no peace, only a respite before the resumption of warfare in the 1650s, now focused on defending New Netherland’s northern communities and the pursuit of the Indians to the west.
Only twice in the long litany of wars, raids, and scorched-earth retribution were there moments of serious doubt and reflection among the Europeans about the moral grounds of the conflicts they were engaged in. For the Virginians, war against the Indians was a matter of survival in a world of treacherous savages who threatened their existence. For the Puritans, war with the natives was a struggle with satanic forces whose “extirpation” was a Christian duty. Only for the Dutch, arguably the most ferocious of the Indian fighters, were the moral issues confronted as such. Mindful that they themselves had been victims of a conqueror’s savagery and proud of their humanist tradition, they could not evade the ethical implications of what was happening in their settlements and on their distant frontier. The Dutch West India Company’s blistering condemnation of Kieft’s War, in which every word carried a freight of distinct meaning—“unnatural, barbarous, unnecessary, unjust, and disgraceful”—was sincere. So too was Stuyvesant, the former theology student, in twice convening his council for formal debates on whether war against the Esopus Indians was justified. Would this be a just war? he asked in 1655. By what reasoning? He spoke of the issues at length and demanded written responses of the councilors. Ideas were exchanged; “just and sufficient causes” were searched for and found. At this point Stuyvesant opposed the war, was outvoted, then equivocated, until pressure from the panicked settlers, fearful for their lives, forced him to launch the war, which, like its predecessors, was fought barbarously and mercilessly—yet not without a sense of guilt and self-reproach. By 1660, after waves of raids and murders on both sides, he justified aggressive, unbounded war on the grounds that the natives were “barbarous savages,” “a species apart,” incapable of, and unfettered by, laws, governance, and rational negotiation. “The story of New Netherland is not a tale of tragedy,” Donna Merwick writes in exploring the moral dilemmas of the Dutch, but “the record of the Dutch encounter with the native population is a tragedy.… The Dutch acted out a betrayal of ideals and accepted values: betrayal of themselves and others. They reaped the shame and the sorrow.”3
By 1664 the Indians’ world in coastal North America had been utterly transformed, their lifeways disrupted and permanently distorted. The demographic losses had been catastrophic. By the 1630s the Algonquian population of Virginia, which once had numbered between 14,000 and 22,000, “was nearing a state of collapse”; by 1656 the once proud overlords of the Virginia plain were reported to be “in absolute subjection to the English”; by 1669 a census revealed that the population had been literally decimated; two thousand survivors, banished from their ancestral lands, were huddled on reservations, tributaries to some twenty-five thousand Europeans. By then 90 percent of the estimated 125,000 Algonquian-speaking natives of southern New England had been wiped out by epidemics related to contact with the Europeans (1616–19, 1633–39) and by warfare that had destroyed at least 10 percent of th
e rest.4
Less palpable, less easily identified, but more widespread—radiating out into the interior—were the indirect effects of contacts with the Europeans, which had begun even before there were permanent settlements: unaccustomed migration patterns due to pressure on land, intertribal warfare in the near backcountry, mergers among displaced groups of Indians, the loss of tribal identity, and the disruption of customary behavior. The natives’ universe of balance and reciprocity in exchanges, material and spiritual, was undermined, and the attempts to Christianize the Indians introduced conflicts within the tribes that reached into the foundations of certainty and generated factions based on variant responses to what has been called “the invasion within.”5 Nor within these altered conditions was a new stability reached in these years. By the end of the period change in the natives’ world was accelerating, not diminishing, stability was increasingly fragile, and one looked to the future with bewilderment and foreboding.
For the settlers, who suffered less in terms of fatalities, the constant violence, the unpredictability of sudden attacks, and the sight of atrocities reminiscent of the worst excesses of European wars bred an ever-present anxiety, a sense of dread and apprehension that permeated everyday existence. Twenty years after the Pequot War, Lion Gardiner, one of New England’s most experienced soldiers, a veteran of the wars in Europe, prayed for a “naturall” and honorable death, “not [in captivity] to have a sharp stake … thrust into my fundament and to have my skin flaid of[f] by piecemeale and cut in pieces and bits and my flesh rosted and thrust down my throat as thes[e] people have done.” Beyond such manifest fears lay a general anxiety, that in this perilous borderland world the normal rules of civility were being suspended, that human relations were being reduced to atavistic struggles, and that the Europeans were threatened with what Cotton Mather would call “creolian degeneracy.”6
So in the New Haven colony, a cluster of eight hamlets in southern Connecticut, elaborate provisions were made to arm and train every man sixteen to sixty years of age. Watchmen were on the alert all through the night. The colony was divided into squadrons commanded by captains elected for “all martiall affayres,” one squadron designated to attend every Sabbath meeting “completely armed, fitt for service with att the least 6 charges of shott and pouder” and with the matches of the patrolling sentinels’ muskets lit at all times. Fines were liberally imposed to strengthen military preparedness—fines for any citizen’s “defect in armes,” for coming to prayer without guns, for sleeping on the watch, for coming late to military exercises.7
There was much to suggest to future chroniclers of early British America that this was a bucolic world of peaceful settlers at work in a quickly developing economy, effectively re-creating European folkways. There were flourishing plantations in the upper south, which boasted orchards and gardens; public offices and institutions were being created in all of the colonies; and the elaboration of kinship and neighborhood networks, especially on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, suggested a stable, structured world. Similarly, well-organized villages were multiplying in the north, fields were being cleared, crops were being sown and harvested, livestock were increasing, and capital was being created that would result, eventually, in new wealth and remarkable productivity and population growth. Further, sermons were being preached, written, published, and discussed, ideas were circulating, and in places the life of the mind was flourishing. But this was not a peaceful world, evolving steadily and naturally into the civil society of the eighteenth century.8
The sense of stability and confidence in the future were shaken by the fear of lurking plots and sudden upheavals. Sensibilities coarsened when brutality grew commonplace. The desecration of bodies, so much a part of the Indians’ search for reciprocity in warfare and diplomacy, became for the Europeans a search for domination. Just as the Indians in Virginia were seen “defacing … and mangling [the colonists’] dead carcasses into many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision,” so the Virginians “ransaked their Temples, Tooke downe the Corpes of their deade kings from of[f] their Toambes,” engaged freely in scalping, and did not hesitate to decapitate their enemies in campaigns of terror. (Percy, casually: “I cawsed the Indians heade to be Cutt of[f]”; Kiefft, coolly: ten fathoms of wampum for a Raritan’s head, twenty for a suspected murderer’s.) Extreme episodes were not forgotten. Just as Captain Davis in Virginia, under pressure from his superiors, had stabbed an Indian “queen” to death as a merciful alternative to burning her alive, so Captain Underhill was thought to have been considerate when he shot to death at point-blank range a captive Pequot being torn to pieces, limb from limb, by vengeful Mohegans. There was no peace after the slaughter of the Pequot War, whose bloody climax had left Captain Mason in a dream-like state of jubilation. The colonists’ victory in that “contest of terror” sentenced them to “years of fear and paranoia” and a legacy of “suspicion, fear, and additional violence.” Massachusetts claimed that some of the murderers of Englishmen, undoubtedly Pequots, were still at large (the tolerant Roger Williams, who knew the local tribes intimately, kept a private list of suspected killers deserving of punishment) and offered bounties for their capture and execution. Day after day native allies seeking to demonstrate their fidelity and mutuality of interests with English power appeared in Boston with the severed heads and hands of their common enemies, gestures that the English took as signs of submission and of the legitimacy of their conquest. Dismembered body parts—heads, hands, scalps, and torn-off strips of skin—had become commonplace objects among such gentle people as the Pilgrims, as they had been for centuries among such militant people as the Narragansetts. The well-informed Roger Williams, who understood the Indians’ elemental passion for balance and reciprocity, dutifully passed on to Winthrop the severed hands of three Pequots because failure to do so, he believed, would be an insult to the donors.9
2
Conflicts with the native Americans had been continuous, barbarous, and degrading for both peoples. Conflicts with authority, public and private, had been problems distinctive to the settlers’ world. But they too had been continuous and destabilizing—sources of bitter personal disputes and communal disarray.
In Virginia, no public authority had been sustained for long in the eighteen years of the Virginia Company’s existence. The contentious, erratic rule of aristocratic adventurers had given way to that of hard-bitten soldiers of fortune, which had been superseded by a military regime, which in turn had been followed by the dominance of would-be reformers. Magistracy had been unsettled, transitory, ineffective. Personal disputes among competing officials had become public challenges that led to arbitrary trials, drumhead convictions, and at least one public execution. The chaos of authority under the company’s jurisdiction subsided when the Crown took over the colony directly. But its authority had not prevailed. The first royal governor, Sir John Harvey, cautious, conservative, and faithful to his charge to rein in the planters’ excesses, was “thrust out” of office by a phalanx of ambitious planters seeking ruthless expansion of settlements, aggression against resistant natives, and absolute guarantees of titles to the property they claimed. Harvey’s immediate successors prevailed to the extent that they conceded to such demands. The longest-serving governor, Sir William Berkeley, was dismissed by the commonwealth government and returned to England, only to end his career back in Virginia in the great upheaval of Bacon’s rebellion.
The Calverts’ authority in Maryland was never secure, often vacant, challenged by the Protestant majority in the colony, by various claimants to their land, and by shifting powers at home. Legitimate authority collapsed entirely during Ingle’s devastating raids, which were succeeded by open civil war against the Calverts’ surrogates, four of whom were executed. When some degree of stability had been restored, the colony’s leadership remained a contentious assortment of Catholic associates of the Calverts, newly arrived relatives and agents of London merchants, quarrelsome local Protestants, and scheming Vi
rginians. The “instability, incoherence, and frequent turnovers” in Maryland’s leadership continued unabated.10
In New Sweden the “furious and passionate” disgraced military commander Johan Printz, having quashed a murderous rebellion that denounced him for brutality and avarice by executing the supposed ringleader by firing squad, quit and, without authorization, left the colony in the hands of his overbearing daughter Armegot and her compliant husband Papegoja. When the competent and enterprising Johan Risingh finally arrived to begin a complete renewal of the colony, the small settlement was so factious, conflicted, and defiant that Risingh succumbed to morbid paranoia before acceding to the Dutch conquest. There never had been a stable authority in Sweden’s colony; nor was there in New Netherland before Stuyvesant. Until then, the exercise of public authority had been erratic and arbitrary, as one incompetent and dictatorial director followed another, tolerating elective councils (the Twelve, the Eight, the Nine) only when it pleased them, which was seldom. Three such directors had preceded the disastrous Kieft, who barely escaped assassination. Stuyvesant—bolder, more competent, more rational and decisive than his predecessors—was in power only two years before he was faced with the formidable challenge of Van der Donck’s elaborate Remonstrance, which, voicing the fears and complaints of the colony’s main leaders, condemned him personally and brought into question the entire jurisdiction of the West India Company. That body, it was claimed, stood between the people and the rights they deserved as loyal Dutch citizens. And there were other challenges as well: in 1653 both the formal, contemplative Remonstrance of the Long Island villagers and Underhill’s rash and insurrectionary “Vindication”; in 1657 the eloquent Flushing Remonstrance, in defiance of Stuyvesant’s suppression of the Quakers; and through the entire seventeen years of Stuyvesant’s directorship, a seething resentment at his authoritarian rule despite his co-optation of his main opponents.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 62
