by Jill Lepore
In the years since this ambitious theory was proposed, anthropologists, historians, and other literacy scholars have unraveled its frayed edges so that today little of its fabric remains intact. While anthropologists have demonstrated that oral peoples quite self-consciously preserve history through oral tradition, historians have become increasingly aware that literate peoples (including historians themselves) are prone to myth-making.24 Postmodernists are no longer confident in the ability to tell the difference between myth and history. And the “great divide” between orality and literacy, once clearly marked by the boundary between myth and history, has been challenged on other grounds as well. Scholars have insisted that literacy is not simply a technology we acquire but is also a value whose worth is culturally constructed; others suggest that we would do better to look at the “uses” of literacy than at its “consequences.”25
Nonetheless, in the specific case of Native American history, some historians continue to argue, in essence, that while Europeans think in terms of history, Indians think in terms of myth. Unfortunately, this romanticized distinction between the “thoughtworlds” of contemporary white historians and historical Native Americans takes us back to the “great divide” theories all over again. As a result, many scholars continue to labor under the assumption that the acquisition of literacy inevitably leads to the recording of history or, if it doesn’t, that this is the result of the persistent power of myth for non-Western peoples.26 Clearly, this assumption is often correct, which partly explains its great staying power. Still, it occasionally obscures a much more complicated relationship between a people’s literacy and their ability to pass down rich sources to eager historians—a relationship that is always mediated by culture, and by the conditions under which literacy is acquired and the uses to which it is put. In late-seventeenth-century New England a great number of Indians were literate—yet none of them wrote an account of King Philip’s War, even though many English colonists thought fit to do so. Several of those literate Indians were ministers, like John Sassamon, and at least one, James Printer, worked as a printer for the press in Cambridge. And still none of them left a written, much less a printed, account.
Clearly, literacy is not an uncomplicated tool, like a pen or a printing press. Instead literacy is bound, as it was for New England’s Indians, by the conditions under which it is acquired; in this case, at great cost. To become literate, seventeenth-century Indians had first to make a graduated succession of cultural concessions—adopting English ways and English dress, living in towns, learning to speak English, converting to Christianity. But these very concessions made them vulnerable. Neither English nor Indian, assimilated Indians were scorned by both groups and even were subject to attack. Because the acquisition of literacy, and especially English-language literacy, was one of the last steps on the road to assimilation, Indians who could read and write placed themselves in a particularly perilous, if at the same time a powerful, position, caught between two worlds but fully accepted by neither.
The predicament of literate Algonquians in seventeenth-century New England suggests that there may be a few more questions to be asked about the “consequences” and “uses” of literacy and its relationship to the recording of history. If literacy is employed as an agent of assimilation, can one of its uses be the devastation of a society’s political autonomy and the loss of its native language and culture? Can literacy destroy? And, in the context of a broader cultural conflict, can one of the consequences of literacy be the death of those who acquire it? Can literacy kill? Perhaps most important, if literacy can be wielded as a weapon of conquest and can effectively compromise a native culture, what then of that culture’s history and who is left to tell it? If the very people most likely to record their story, those who are so assimilated as to have become literate, are also the most vulnerable, does it then make sense to explain that culture’s lack of written history by simply pointing to its attachment to mythical thinking?
To address these questions we must take a few more steps back and start at the very beginning of the story of John Sassamon’s life. This will, unfortunately, prove a difficult task, since Sassamon, like the infamous Archduke Ferdinand, is best remembered for his death. Before that fateful day in the winter of 1675 when he sat uncomfortably in the governor’s house and quietly whispered that “Philip was undoubtedly indeavouring to Raise new troubles,” John Sassamon had entered the historical record only a handful of times—and most of these were brief appearances indeed.27 Yet, however speculative, the story of Sassamon’s life bears telling.
III
WHEN THE FIRST English settlers arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1630, John Sassamon’s parents might have welcomed the newcomers warmly. Among the few survivors of epidemics that plagued coastal Algonquians between 1616 and 1618, Sassamon’s family perhaps looked to the English for protection against hostile inland neighbors.28 Sassamon’s parents saw fit, at any rate, to remain among the English in Dorchester and eventually to convert to Christianity, possibly during a devastating smallpox outbreak in 1633.29 Interpreting the disease as supernatural evidence of the power of the Puritans’ God, many Algonquians converted to Christianity on their deathbeds, leaving their orphaned children in the care of English families. “But now I must die,” said one man, “yet my Child shall live with the English, and learne to know their God when I am dead.” A Puritan promotional tract written in 1643 boasted that such children were “long since civilized, and in subjection to us,” their civility and subjection measured by their literacy and their piety: many “can speak our language familiarly; divers of whom can read English, and begin to understand in their measure, the grounds of Christian Religion.”30
As an orphaned Indian raised in an English home, John Sassamon would have learned to speak and even to read and write English at a relatively young age (he was probably in his early teens when his parents died). By 1637 Sassamon had evidently demonstrated his civility and subjection well enough to serve as an interpreter and to fight on the colonists’ side during the war against the Pequot Indians.31 “Sosomon, the Indian” served with Sergeant Richard Callicott of Dorchester and may have been the interpreter Captain John Underbill described in his account of the war. “We had an Indian with us that was an interpreter,” Underhill wrote. One day, a group of Pequots noticed this man, who was “in English clothes, and a gun in his hand,” and called out to him, “What are you, an Indian or an Englishman?” “Come hither,” he shouted back, “and I will tell you.” As soon as the curious Pequots came within range, the interpreter “pulls up his cock and let fly at one of them, and without question was the death of him.”32 When confronted with a question about his identity, the young Sassamon, if indeed it was he, answered with startling violence.
At the end of the war, Sassamon and Callicott returned to Dorchester along with their own Indian captives: Sassamon brought a Pequot woman who may have later become his wife, while Callicott returned with a Montauk slave named Cockenoe, who was to become an interpreter for John Eliot, a minister in the adjacent town of Roxbury who had immigrated to Massachusetts in 1631.33 Eliot had probably known Sassamon before the Pequot War, but by the time he began working with Callicott’s slave in the early 1640s he had probably come to know Sassamon very well. For John Sassamon this would prove to be a fateful, even a fatal connection.
John Eliot was the first Englishman to make a serious effort at learning Massachusett, the Algonquian language spoken by eastern New England Indians in the seventeenth century (and now extinct). From the time of their arrival, English settlers were baffled by the native languages they heard spoken, but few bothered to learn them, relying instead on Indian interpreters such as the famous Squanto. In 1634 William Wood observed that “the language is hard to learn, few of the English being able to speak any of it, or capable of the right pronunciation, which is the chief grace of their tongue.” Although Wood had noticed that the Indians “love any man that can utter his mind in their words,” few colonists
were willing to learn even the most basic Algonquian vocabulary.34 Consistent with European attitudes about native cultures, most colonists considered the local languages barbaric, even satanic, and found in the Indians’ lack of a writing system powerful evidence of the primitiveness of their culture. (Cotton Mather once wryly remarked that Indian words were so long he thought they must have been growing since the confusion at Babel.35) Yet the colonists’ disdain for native illiteracy and the supposed barbarity of native languages was not lost on their Algonquian neighbors, one of whom told a missionary it was no use for an Indian to pray “because Jesus Christ understood not what Indians speake in prayer,” since He had “bin used to heare English man pray” and “was not acquainted with [the Indian language], but was a stranger to it.”36
In the early years, most communication between the two peoples was aided by gestures, native interpreters, and Indians’ use of pidgin English. Matters had not improved much by 1643, when Roger Williams wrote his Key to the Language of America, a pragmatic phrasebook designed to aid travelers and settlers. (Williams had learned a good bit of the Narragansett language, a very close relative of Massachusett.) That distrust and misunderstanding characterized communication between the English and the natives can be seen in Williams’ many translations for phrases such as “I cannot speake your language,” “I lie not,” and “Wee understand not each other.”37 But if Williams attempted to use his ill-fitting key to unlock the Indians’ language, John Eliot hoped to swing the doors wide open.
Eliot, known to hagiographers as the “Aspostle to the Indians,” is widely credited with translating and printing the entire Bible, as well as a host of primers, catechisms, and religious tracts, in the Massachusett language, a set of works collectively known as the “Indian Library.”38 In an effort to fulfill the colonists’ original mission, as documented in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal (“Come Over and Help Us”), Eliot labored for decades to convert Indians to Christianity, always stressing literacy as an absolutely necessary step toward conversion, since true (Protestant) Christians could only encounter God by reading the Scriptures. By translating the Bible and other devotional literature into Massachusett, Eliot hoped to bring the “heathen” Indians into the Christian fold.39
Yet Eliot did not act alone in his linguistic and missionary work; instead, he relied to a great extent on Indian translators, interpreters, and teachers.40Over the course of his lifetime John Sassamon would serve Eliot in each of these capacities; there is an almost uncanny parallel between the careers of the two men. Like Eliot, Sassamon was well known for both his linguistic and his missionary skills. He was typically described as “a very cunning and plausible Indian, well skilled in the English Language.” Increase Mather wrote that “being of very excellent parts,” Sassamon had “translated some part of the bible into the Indian language.” This “Indian Schollar and Minister” might have worked with or known Eliot for forty years or more. Eliot himself noted Sassamon’s death in his diary with sorrow, calling him “a man of eminent parts & wit.”41 John Sassamon seems to have spent some portion of his childhood or adolescence living in or near Dorchester, perhaps in the home of an English family (the Callicotts) and, as all evidence indicates, in close proximity to John Eliot in nearby Roxbury. When Eliot’s interpreter Cockenoe returned to Long Island in the late 1640s, Sassamon must have proved a convenient replacement.42
Yet John Sassamon seems to have been always ambivalent about Puritan society, alternately embracing and rejecting it. The damning discipline of Puritanism was difficult enough for the colonists’ children, and must have been more difficult still for young people raised in another culture. Nowhere is the agony of inadequacy that must have plagued Algonquians engaged in cultural and religious conversion better captured than in notes several wrote in the margins of their own Indian Bibles, perhaps none more poignant than the careful handwriting from a Bible owned by a Christian Indian on Marthas Vineyard: “I am forever a pitiful person in the world. I am not able clearly to read this, this book.”43
John Sassamon’s ambivalence registered itself in rebellion, probably from the start. He may even have been the Indian boy mentioned in an early Puritan tract “who for some misdemeanour that laid him open to publique punishment, ran away; and being gone, God so followed him, that of his owne accord he returned home, rendred himselfe to Justice, and was willing to submit himselfe, though he might have escaped.”44 If so, it may well have been Eliot who received the errant Christian back into the fold: William Hubbard claimed that Sassamon was subject to “the frequent Sollicitations of Mr. Eliot, that had known him from a Child, and instructed him in the Principles of our Religion, who was often laying before him the heinous Sin of his Apostacy.”45
If Eliot had really “known him from a Child,” Eliot himself probably taught Sassamon to read. It is also possible, of course, that Sassamon learned from a member of the English family with whom he lived or that he attended an Indian School in Dorchester.46 In any case, Sassamon was very likely taught with methods similar to those Eliot would later describe: “When I taught our Indians first to lay out a word into syllables, and then according to the sound of every syllable to make it up with the right letters … They quickly apprehended and understood this Epitomie of the art of spelling, and could soon learn to read.” While Sassamon learned to read and write English, Eliot himself was learning the Massachusett language. Eliot’s description of his methods of learning the language are remarkably similar to those he used in teaching Indian students:
Such as desire to learn this language, must be attentive to pronounce right, especially to produce that syllable that is first to be produced; then they must spell by art, and accustom their tongues to pronounce their syllables and words; then learn to read such books as are printed in their language. Legendo, scribendo, Loquendo, are the three means to learn a language.47
In effect, Eliot and Sassamon were engaged in similar projects. Syllable by syllable and word byword, both were mastering new languages, pulling letters apart and pushing them back together again, making familiar meaning out of unfamiliar sounds. Eliot taught Sassamon, but Sassamon also taught Eliot—their relationship would have been in some important ways a reciprocal one.48 Once Eliot’s linguistic apprenticeship ended, however, the power would have shifted dramatically in the Englishman’s favor. Eliot’s mission, after all, was to eradicate native cultural practices and replace them with English ones.
John Eliot had a scholar’s interest in the study of linguistics, but his reigning passion was the conversion of the Indians to Christianity, and it was for this reason, and this reason above all, that he had painstakingly learned the Massachusett language. For the twin purposes of converting and Anglicizing Indians, Eliot established the first “praying town” in Natick in 1650, a place where Christian Indians, he hoped, could live and worship like Englishmen, free of the cultural influences of their non-Christian peers. (Before King Philip’s War, Eliot would organize fourteen praying towns in Massachusetts Bay.)49 Like Eliot, Sassamon was engaged in this project from the start: he literally helped build the town of Natick, and he soon become one of its schoolmasters. In his accounts for the year 1651 Eliot recorded distributing tools to several Indian and English assistants, including two axes to “John Sosoman.” The same year Eliot gave thanks that “whereas I had thought that we must have an Englishman to be their School-Master, I now hope that the Lord will raise up some of themselves, and enable them unto that work, with my care to teach them well in the reason of the sounds of letters and spelling.” Five years later Eliot recorded a payment of £30 to “Sosaman, Monequason, and Job,” identified in his ledger as “three Indian Interpreters & Schoolmasters.”50 In describing the Indian schools at Natick during the time when Sassamon was either becoming a schoolteacher or already teaching, Eliot wrote, “we aspire to no higher learning yet, but to spell, read, and write.”51
Evidently Sassamon was at this time one of Eliot’s favorite and most talented students, because by
1653 Eliot had arranged for the Natick schoolmaster to attend Harvard College.52 As Eliot had written in 1649, “there be sundry prompt, pregnant witted youths, not viciously inclined, but well disposed, which I desire may be wholly sequestred to learning and put to school for that purpose.”53 For at least one semester in 1653, John Sassamon was a classmate of the fortunate sons of Massachusetts Bay, among them Samuel Bradstreet; Thomas Shepard; Samuel Hooker; John Eliot’s son, John, Jr.; and a very young Increase Mather.54
JOHN SASSAMON, JOHN ELIOT, AND THE PATH TO WAR
1631 Eliot immigrates to New England.
1637 Sassamon serves with the English forces in the Pequot War.
1646 Eliot begins preaching in the Massachusett language.
1647 Eliot begins publishing promotional tracts in England.
1650 Natick is settled.
