The Name of War
Page 12
Here is a family murdered: a pregnant woman scalped, her children mauled, their grandparents burned alive. Everyone died badly. Only the young man was shot, but even his corpse is in disarray, “his head dashed in pieces.” All of the bodies have been mutilated, their physical integrity spoiled by the seepage of blood and brains. A tableau worthy of Benjamin Tompson’s painting. Here, too, is a house destroyed, its beams and floorboards charred and crumbling. The house, built to shelter this family, has become, in a sense, its coffin. The two small children have been pressed underneath “an Oake planke laid upon their backs” while their grandparents are “halfe in, and halfe out of the house,” their bodies “neer halfe burnt.”
This house, whose ashes cover the old couple and whose torn planks entomb the children, is a crucial element in George Ingersol’s account. More than the state of the corpses, the house, in a sense, explains the scene. Ingersol would have been confused to come upon these six bodies in the middle of the woods, but the house supplies the context for him to understand that this is an English family, killed by marauding Indians while seeking protection within their house. Ingersol is careful to note which bodies are inside the house and which are outside, since these details help him reconstruct the events that took place there. One imagines, for instance, that when the Indians first arrived the young man stepped outside to fend them off, only to be shot dead. Next, the Indians set the house on fire, forcing the pregnant woman and her children to run out to escape the smoke and flames. There they were quickly killed or taken captive. Meanwhile, the old man and his wife stayed inside almost until the very end, when finally, burning, they crawled halfway through the doorway and died.
If the house explains this scene, it also gives it its particular pathos—its utter failure to protect the family. Thomas Wakely, the old man, might have saved himself and his family if he had been willing to leave his house much earlier. He had been criticized for settling too far from his neighbors, too far away to get their help, and, when the war began, they must have urged him to seek protection in a nearby garrison. Surely Wakely himself must have considered leaving in early September when Thomas Purchases house was plundered just a few miles away. But Wakely refused to abandon his homestead, perhaps thinking he and his son could defend it. He may have clung to this belief even as the Indians approached, when it was already too late for escape. Even at the very end, Wakely was too attached to his property to abandon it.14Still, this kind of attachment was not at all uncommon.
Thomas Wakely’s “neer halfe burnt” corpse and his “burnt downe” house have a complicated relationship. The notion of property, of things that could be owned, was central to seventeenth-century Anglo-American culture. Property was, in a sense, foundational to culture, since English political economy rested on the private ownership of land, and the political economy, in turn, largely structured social relations. With the development of capitalist markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, private property had become increasingly important, and revolts against this change, like the Digger protests of the 1640s and 1650s, were met with violent censure. Gradually property became the defining character of social relations, the defining character, even, of an individual’s identity.15 By 1689 John Locke would be able to elaborate a theory of government based on the idea that “every man has a property in his own person.”16 If, at the level of political theory, identity would soon be defined as ownership of one’s self, property had already become identity at the level of popular belief—what one owned defined who one was. As England moved away from a feudal land system and kinship-based social relations, this idea provided the basis of class relations in the emerging capitalist economy. In New England it would eventually play the same role, but in the decades of settlement leading up to King Philip’s War, the idea of property as identity had much more to do with distinguishing an Indian from an Englishman than a merchant from a servant.
When the English first arrived in New England, they found the land to be “spacious and void,” a place where the Indians “do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts” and the colonists had not “any houses or much less towns to repair to.” “The country is yet raw,” Robert Cushman wrote in 1621, “the land untilled; the cities not builded; the cattle not settled.” Francis Higginson argued that “The Indians are not able to make use of the one fourth part of the land; neither have they any settled places, as towns, to dwell in; nor any ground as they challenge for their own possession, but change their habitation from place to place.” Or, as John Josselyn observed, “Towns they have none, being always removing from one place to another for conveniency of food.” The Algonquians’ perceived nomadism, and their failure to “improve” the land, formed the basis for English land claims. New England, John Winthrop argued, was a vacuum domicilum, since only land that is fenced in, tilled, and built upon can be owned. Indians could not own the land, “for they inclose no ground, neither have they cattell to maintayne it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion.”17 The English, then, could claim the land simply by improving it. (The concept of improvement even makes an appearance in Thomas More’s sixteenth-century Utopia: “They consider it a most just cause for war when a people which does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste nevertheless forbids the use and possession of it to others who by the rule of nature ought to be maintained by it.”18)
Establishing “plantations” in New England, colonists chopped down trees, built houses, erected fences, and planted crops. When they first settled, English colonists built hurriedly, and usually lived in sparsely furnished wattle-and-daub huts, so similar to the woven-mat buildings Algonquians constructed that they were called “English wigwams.” By the middle of the seventeenth century the colonists rejoiced that such temporary—and to them inferior—dwellings had been largely replaced with more permanent, and more thoroughly English, architecture: “The Lord hath been pleased to turn all the wigwams, huts, and hovels the English dwelt in at their first coming into orderly, fair, and well-built houses, well furnished many of them.”19 By the 1670s at the start of King Philip’s War, the English could boast that “by their great industry,” they had “of a howling Wilderness improved those Lands into Cornfields, Orchards, enclosed Pastures, and Towns inhabited.”20
But during the war it seemed to many colonists that all that had made them English and all that had made the land their own—their clothes, houses, barns, churches, cattle, and crops—were being threatened. For most colonists, the loss of habitations became the central crisis of the war. Horrified by the devastation around him, Increase Mather asked himself, “How are we spoiled?” and could only answer, “We are greatly confounded because our dwelling places have cast us out.” “Certainly,” Nathaniel Saltonstall insisted, “it cannot but deserve both Wonder and Commiseration, that these Parts which were not many Moneths since hardly to be Parrallel’d for Plenty and Security, are now almost destroyed and laid Waste by the savage Cruelties of a Bloody (and sometimes Despicable) Enemy.” Saltonstall no doubt believed that the best way to convey the extent of the devastation of the war, given such astounding losses, was with numbers, and he was not the only colonist to take this approach. “We Judg according to our best Computation,” Samuel Symonds reported to the king’s secretary in April 1676, “that Since the beginning of this Warre there hath been Slaine of his Majesties Subjects above five hundred,” although “the houses burnt [are] not easy to be Numbered.”21Whenever they could, English accountings of the war’s casualties, like Saltonstall’s “True but Brief Account of our Losses,” tallied houses first, then people. (By contrast, Saltonstall’s reckoning of Indian losses tallied people first—six thousand killed, enslaved, or subdued—and only briefly mentioned the loss of “vast Quantities of their Corn, Houses, ammunition, and other Necessaries.”) And so the colonists recorded, for instance, that “at New Dartmouth … they burnt all their houses but one, viz. 29, and slew several persons. In Middlebrough the Indians burnt 21 houses. In Tau
nton they burnt ten houses and killed ten persons.” Or, “the Indians burnt 17 houses & killed one man at Deerfield.” Or again, “they Burnt near thirty Houses in Dartmouth … killing many People after a most Barbarous manner.” Some reckonings also included cattle and crops: “They Burnt Twenty three Houses at Swansey, and killed many people there, and took much Cattle, as also Burnt the hay and Corn in great Quantities.” Some figured in whether the Indians had “pulled down Fences.”22
And not just towns but families, too, counted people, possessions, and property when measuring their losses. A grieving William Harris reported, “I have lost a deer son, a dillegent engenious Just man temperate in all things, whome the Indians lay in waite for by the way & kild him, and A negro man.” (It is difficult to know if Harris counted his African slave as a person or a possession.) Not only that, Harris continued, but they “burnt our houses, & drove away aboute fifty head of Cowkind Cattell, and fourscore horse kinde of ours, & carryed away some goods, & burnt more than fifty loade of hay.”23 Seeing a town and its houses destroyed was extraordinarily painful. On finding Springfield burned, John Pynchon wrote to John Russell, “We came to a lamentable and woeful sight. The town in flames, not a house nor barn standing, except old Goodman Branch’s, till we came to my house and then Mr. Glovers, John Hitchcock’s, and Goodman Stewart’s burnt, some with barns, corn, and all they had…. They tell me 32 houses and the barns belonging to them are burnt, and all the livelihood of the owners, and what more may meet with the same stroke the Lord only knows.” The next day Russell reported to the Massachusetts Council that Springfield’s “habitations are now become an heape.”24
Colonists who were spared this fate gave abundant thanks. “Wee are yet in our habitations thro’ Gods marsi,” John Sharpe wrote to Thomas Meekins in April 1676, “but we are in expectation of the enimi everi day if God be not the more marsiful unto us.”25 Meanwhile, soldiers could be punished for abandoning the protection of houses too soon, and many colonists believed that it is not “for the safe gard of a people to forsake their places, but rather to keepe their stations, and listen to Gods calling of them forth to stand together as one man.”26 When families fled from their homes, whole towns were likely to be destroyed. In Springfield, “the Indians being too numerous,” the town’s inhabitants “were forced to Leave their houses & goods to the enemy (or rather) the rage & cruelties of the enemie: soo that towne is almost wholly lost.”27
There were plenty of good reasons for the English to count their cattle, crops, and houses among their losses. Without these, they could not survive, especially during the harsh New England winters. Dismay at losing one’s home is certainly a genuine expression of a very real, very devastating, and very practical loss. But there was more to the colonists’ concern than simple practicality: English possessions were, in a sense, what was at stake in the war, for these—the clothes they wore, the houses they lived in, and the things they owned—were a good part of what differentiated the English from the Indians. These were not simply material differences, they were cultural, for every English frock coat was stitched with threads of civility, each thatched roof rested on a foundation of property rights, and every cupboard housed a universe of ideas.
II
WHEN JOHN PYNCHON returned to Springfield to find the town nearly burned to the ground, his property stripped of its buildings, he felt that he had himself been stripped naked: “Oh, that I may sensibly say with holy Job: naked came I and naked shall I return and blessed be the name of the Lord.”28 The connection between English property and English identity was so strong that many colonists employed a common metaphor for the loss of both, the metaphor of nakedness. All over New England, English bodies were said to have been left to “lye naked, wallowing in their blood,” and English land, too, was left “naked,” stripped of its buildings (as when, for instance, the Connecticut Court ordered towns to build garrison houses to cover “the nakedness of each and every place”).29 In images like Nathaniel Saltonstall’s “True but Brief Account of our Losses,” wartime New England had been stripped of its churches, houses, fences, and barns, while its people had been stripped of their clothes, their skin, even their heads and fingers (these were now “worn” by Indians).30 As the colonists perceived it, their world had been made bare. Left naked, English bodies and English land were no longer recognizable—naked men, after all, were barbarians, and naked land a wilderness. It was, in fact, the “nakedness” of America and of its native peoples—signaling the land’s vacancy and the Indians’ savagery—that had made English colonization possible in the first place.31 To the English who settled there, America had been naked land and, their descendants feared in 1675, it would soon be naked again. In establishing plantations in the wilderness, the English settlers had sought to mark the land as their own, to clothe the ground as they clothed their bodies, but King Philip’s War undid their work, denuding both the landscape and its colonists.
Before the war, “naked Englishman” would have been almost oxymoronic. While the colonists clothed themselves in skirts, bodices, doublets, cloaks, breeches, caps, and boots, they perceived Indians as “wholly naked.”32 This distinction caused Roger Williams to wonder
what should bee the reason of this mighty difference of One mans children that all the Sonnes of men on this side the way (in Europe, Asia and Africa) should have such plenteous clothing for Body, for Soule! and the rest of Adams sonnes and Daughters on the other side, or America … should neither have nor desire clothing for their naked soules, or Bodies.
Like Williams, English colonists perceived bodily nakedness as signaling both cultural and spiritual depravity, marking the Indians as doubly lacking. Thus the move “from Barbarism to Civilitie” could only be accomplished by the Indians’ “forsaking their filthy nakedness.”33
Algonquians, for their part, were keenly aware that the English dressed differently: the Narragansett word for European (English, Dutch, French, or Scotch) is “Wautaconâug” or, literally, “Coatmen,” deriving from “Waútacome,” meaning “one that weares clothes.”34 The distinction seems to have had a metaphoric appeal for both cultures, even if it was not true that Indians were “wholly naked.” Before Europeans arrived, Algonquians in New England commonly wore breechcloths and, especially in winter, leggings and cloaks of skins and furs. By the time of King Philip’s War many had begun to wrap themselves in dyed wool blankets and other European fabrics and even to wear English clothes. Christian Indians, especially, commonly forsook their “nakedness,” replacing traditional apparel with English dress.35 And during the war, Algonquians stripped dead colonists of their clothes to wear them themselves, or to trade them for food and weapons.36 (When Mary Rowlandson was a captive, Philip himself asked her to make a shirt and cap for his son, and before the war, Philip visited Boston wearing a coat, buckskins, beads, and a belt.37)
In other words, the meaning of nakedness as a marker distinguishing civilized men from barbarians or Englishmen from Indians was not entirely stable. Nonetheless, as John Sassamon’s story demonstrates, both peoples considered fully clothed Indians confusing and dangerous. Mary Rowlandson reeled with horror after she mistook a group of clothed Indians for Englishmen:
My heart skipped within me, thinking they had been English men at the first sight of them, for they were dressed in English apparel, with hats, white neckcloths, and sashes about their waists, and ribbons upon their shoulders.: but when they came near, there was a vast difference between the lovely faces of Christians, and the foul looks of these heathens.38
Meanwhile, the idea of a naked Englishman, even one who was only spiritually naked, was always extremely disturbing. As Roger Williams wrote, “the best clad English-man, Not cloth’d with Christ, more naked is: Then naked Indian.”39
In the years before King Philip’s War began, the illusion that these meanings were stable had become increasingly important. (In the sixteenth century, the English in Ireland had been so plagued by this anxiety that they passed a law designed t
o draw a sartorial line between the civilized English and the savage Irish, decreeing that “every Irishman shall be forbidden to wear English apparel … upon pain of death.”40) If the principal cultural anxiety behind King Philip’s War was confusion of identity (would Englishmen degenerate into Indians?), then the colonists must have taken heart that one thing, at least, seemed more clear than others. One boundary, at least, was rarely broached: even if some Indians sometimes wore clothes, Englishmen and-women were never publicly naked. But during the war, of course, all that changed. While still alive, an English colonist attacked or captured by Indians was very likely to be “stript by them of all but his Skin.” If tortured, he or she might not even be left with that, since a common torment involved the slow tearing off of skin and flesh. Many colonists died while Algonquians were “skinning them all over aliv, some only their Heads, cutting off their Hands and Feet.” And if live Englishmen were likely to be stripped, skinned, or scalped, dead Englishmen fared no better. “Many of the English, when the Natives have killed them, they strip them naked, and leave their bodies to rot upon the ground.” After burning Middleborough and Dartmouth, the Indians “barbarously murdered both men and women in those places, stripping the slain, whether Men or Women, and leaving them in the open Field, as naked as in the day wherein they were born.” Naked and damaged bodies were often left to rot in highly visible places. After being slain by Indians attacking Groton, one Englishman was “strip’d naked, his Body mangled, and dragged into the High-way, and laid on his Back in a most shameful Manner.” A dead man might even be stripped of his burial cloth. After destroying Groton, the Indians returned later to finish their business. “They strip’d the Body of him whom they had slain in the first Onset, and then cutting off his Head, fixed it upon a Pole looking towards his own Land. The Corpse of the Man slain the Week before, they dug up out of his Grave, they cut off his Head and one Leg, and set them upon Poles, and strip’d off his Winding-sheet.” Stripping dead Englishmen was so common that Algonquians used English clothing as symbols of their victories. After killing several Englishmen near Deerfield, Indians retreated to the other side of the river, where they displayed “the Garments of the English in Sight of the Soldiers.”41