The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  Here English valor most illustrious shone,

  Finding their numbers ten times ten to one.

  A shower of leaden hail our captains feel

  Which made the bravest blades among us reel.

  Sundry the flames arrest and some the blade

  By bullets heaps on heaps of Indians laid.

  The flames like lightning in their narrow streets

  Dart in the face of everyone it meets.

  Here might be heard an hideous Indian cry,

  Of wounded ones who in the wigwams fry.

  Bravery and valor thus overwhelmed the “hideous Indian cry,” but even Tompson paused to recognize the extent of the slaughter: “Had we been cannibals here might we feast.”75

  IV

  WHAT THE Reverend Noah Newman would have thought of the Great Swamp fight remains a mystery, but what he saw and heard in the town of Medfield horrified him. “The sight of this poore people was very astonishing,” Newman recalled, and “the cry of terrifyed persons, very dreadfull.” More dreadful still were the yells of the enemy, “shouting so as the earth seemed to tremble.” Newman probably shivered to remember that day, when more than three hundred Indians attacked the town, but since his friend John Cotton had asked him for “the Hystory of the medfield tragedy,” Newman was determined to give “the best account I can.” Still, Newman could not recall the day without pain. “Oh what an Indian calamity was this,” he said with a bitter sigh.76

  A party of Nipmucks had infiltrated Medfield during the night of February 20, hiding in trees and barns, with the intention, Noah Newman surmised, “to take persons at their first Looking out at their doors in the morning.” “Which,” Newman admitted tersely, “accordingly they did.” Thomas Wight’s son, apparently an early riser, was “one of the first that was killed in that manner.” Then the Indians threw pellets at Timothy Dwight’s house “to provoke him to Looke out & when he did Looke out shot him through the shoulder.” Soon Joshua Fisher’s grandson, “going out at the door was shot att, the bullet passing through some flesh about his chollar bone.” And when Henry Adams “stept but over the threshold,” he “was shot through the windpipe & fell downe dead.” So it continued throughout the morning. In listing the casualties, Newman soon dispensed with his description of the wounds and wrote, simply, “Goodman Bowers & his son was killed. Thomas Mason & his son kild.”77 All those who looked out, or, worse still, stepped out, were bound to be met with a volley of bullets and arrows. All of these, like Thomas Wakely, died in their doorways. The boundaries separating English from Indian had been breached.

  The people of Medfield did not expect this tragedy. As Reverend Newman remarked, “few when they lay downe” the night before had “thought of such a dolefull morning.” The town, after all, was occupied by more than a hundred colony soldiers and as many local militiamen. The nearby town of Lancaster (where Mary Rowlandson lived) had been destroyed a week before Medfield was attacked, and John Wilson, fearful of his town’s meeting a similar fate, had written to the Massachusetts Council begging for help. “Now the rode from Nipmuck is fair for these caniballs, be pleased for God’s sake to remember us, and let some considerable sufficient force be sent to us for our speedy releife, before it be to late, by the soonest, by the soonest that possibly can be, lest Medfield be turned into ashes and the smoke of it amaze such that shall behold it.”78 These, as it turned out, had been prophetic words. Although the council quickly sent in two companies, twenty horsemen and eighty foot, to add to Medfield’s militia, the troops were scattered about town on the night of February 20. When morning came “they could not get together into a body to repel the enemy” (John Wilson estimated there were as many as a thousand), who showered arrows “into the bosome of the Town.”79

  Medfield had been particularly vulnerable to Indian attack because it was a frontier town, close to Indian “wilderness” and not yet fully “improved.” As William Hubbard would later write, “Most of those inland Plantations being over run with young Wood (the Inhabitants being every where apt to engross more Land into their Hands than they were able to subdue) as if they were seated amidst of a Heap of Bushes.”80 John Foster’s map suggests the extreme vulnerability of such frontier settlements. (Each number on the map corresponds to the site of an Indian attack.) On Foster’s map, Medfield stands perilously close to ominous-looking trees. Other frontier towns also suffered for their woodsiness. At Scarborough, Major Philip’s was trapped in his house because “the bushes being thick within shott of his house could not at ffirst See an Indian.” “Our woods,” Edmund Browne wrote from Sudbury, “are pestered with Indians.” In Rehoboth, the townspeople were similarly trapped: “Wee are shut up in our garisones,” John Kingsley reported, “8c dare not goe abroad far to our outlandes.” “They are like wild Deare in the Wilderness,” John Hull complained, who “will Never stand to maintaine any fight but come upon some of our out plantations & burne some of the remote houses & kill one or two & take there scalps & get away that our souldiers can rarely find any of them.”81

  In Medfield, the fighting probably lasted most of the morning, as more and more Nipmucks jumped out from their overnight hiding places. After the initial shooting, the townspeople tried to hide in their houses, but soon their “dreadful hour” came, as it had come for the Narragansetts at the Great Swamp in December, and for Mary Rowlandson in Lancaster just days before. In Lancaster, Rowlandson and her family had endured two hours of shooting before considering leaving the protection of their house. Finally the Nipmucks succeeded in setting the house on fire. “Now,” wrote Rowlandson, “is the dreadful hour come…. Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head, if we stirred out. Now might we hear mothers and children crying out for themselves, and one another, Lord, What shall we do?” “But,” she resolved, “out we must go, the fire increasing, and coming along behind us, roaring, and the Indians gaping before us with their guns, spears and hatchets to devour us.” (On the first night of her captivity, Mary Rowlandson’s captors camped near a deserted English house. “I asked them whither I might not lodge in the house that night,” Rowlandson recalled. But the Indians replied, mocking her, “What, will you love English men still?” Rising the next morning, Rowlandson recognized her fate: “I must turn my back upon the town, and travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness, I knew not whither.”)82

  Similarly, in Medfield, while some Nipmucks had been shooting down people in their doorways, others had been busy setting fire to the houses and barns they had so recently hidden behind. Driven out by smoke and flames, still more townspeople were killed. In all, some fifty houses were destroyed and thirty inhabitants killed or taken captive. As William Hubbard wrote, “some were killed as they attempted to fly to their Neighbours for Shelter: some were only wounded, and some taken alive and carried Captive; in some Houses the Husband running away with one Child, the Wife with another.”83If doors marked liminal spaces between inside and outside, order and chaos, and houses represented the English body, those same houses also represented the English family—a house destroyed was a family destroyed. To leave the house was to risk tearing the family apart, a husband running in one direction, his wife in another. And a family torn asunder was yet another sign of chaos. As Increase Mather asked rhetorically, “Is it nothing that Widdows and Fatherless have been multiplyed among us? that in a small Plantation we have heard of eight widows, and six and twenty fatherless children in one day? And in another of the Villages of our Judah, of seven Widows an about thirty fatherless children, all at once?” But to stay in a house was to risk being destroyed along with it and learning the gruesome lesson that the family that stays together is slain together. When Indians attacked William Clark’s house in Plymouth, “the Indians destroyed them all, root and branche, the Father, and Mother, and all the Children. So that eleven persons were murdered that day, under one roof.”84

&
nbsp; In Medfield, Thomas Thurston’s wife had been lodging at Seth Smith’s house when the Nipmucks began their attack. She must have left the house early on, for soon she was “stricken dead to the enemys apprehension,” upon which “they stript her & tooke of[f] her head cloths.” Goodwife Thurston, alas, had not quite expired. On the contrary, she soon “came to her selfe, went into the house got a blanket & run to Mr. Wilson.” But, as John Wilson later told a friend, this bloody and nearly naked woman was “a frightfull spectacle.” When she arrived at Wilson’s doorstep, even her closest neighbors failed to recognize her, “they not knowing who she was her hair hanging downe & her face covred with blood.”85 As she stirred to consciousness, Goody Thurston may have come “to her selfe,” but her “selfe,” it seems, was no longer obvious. Stripped, bloodied, and disheveled, she had lost her identity. No doubt she looked like the people Mary Rowlandson encountered on the streets of Lancaster, “Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves. All of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranging and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out.” One of her neighbors, who had been “chopped into the head with a hatchet, and stripped naked,” was still alive, and Rowlandson watched him “crawling up and down” in front of her.86 No longer Englishmen and-women, the townspeople of Lancaster had become deranged sheep.

  On that day in Medfield, Goodwife Thurston was unrecognizable partly because her face was covered with blood and her hair was “hanging down.” Probably her attackers had begun to scalp her but had been unexpectedly interrupted. Stripping the skin off the head, or scalping, was a common practice among New England Indians: “When ever they wound, and their arrow sticks in the body of their enemie, they … follow their arrow, and falling upon the person wounded, and tearing his head a little aside by his Locke, they in the twinckling of an eye fetch off his head though but with a sorry knife.”87 Having stripped Goodwife Thurston and taken off her bonnet, or “head cloths,” her attackers may have been pulling at her hair and cutting away at her forehead when they were unexpectedly attacked or otherwise interrupted in their work. Still, even an unfinished cut to the head would have bloodied Goodwife Thurston’s face considerably. In their haste, or perhaps deliberately, they may have stripped the skin off part of her face; scalping often involved this type of “skinning.” “Such also is their Inhumanity,” Increase Mather commented, “as that they flay off the skin from their Faces and Heads of those they get into their hands.”88

  Either way, Goody Thurston’s face was covered with blood and hair. To her neighbors, she was “a frightfull spectacle,” mostly, no doubt, because of her own panicked aspect and her terrible injuries, but partly also because she had been shorn of all emblems of piety, civility, and Englishness. English faces were especially endowed as markers of English national superiority: as Edward Chamberlayne had written in 1671, “The complexion of the inhabitants … excells all other nations.”89 The idea that English bodies were physically distinct, and somehow purer than other peoples’ bodies, gained considerable favor in the seventeenth century. In the shape of their noses, the fineness of their hair, the suppleness of their skin, Englishmen and-women were encouraged to think of themselves as closer to God’s image, unaltered versions of the model of humankind, while foreign peoples, with their tanned skin, strange body piercings, tattoos, and mutilations, had distorted, artificially altered bodies.90 The face, the English believed, “is a special glass wherein the glory and Image of God doth shine forth and appeare,” and to obscure it in any way was an offense against God. Long hair in men, or wayward hair in women, was considered excessive, “when it is so long, that it covers the eyes, the checks, the countenance, &c God hath ordeined those parts to be visible.” Long hair was considered “a badge of cruelty and effeminacy” and was even vaguely associated with cannibalism.91Long or loose hair also, of course, distinguished Indians in New England from their English neighbors, making it possible, for instance, for short hair to be used as a disguise, as when, late in the war, “Phillip had cutt off his haire to disguise himself.”92

  Not only was Goodwife Thurston’s face covered with blood and hair, but also her body was naked but for a blanket. Still, Goody Thurston’s neighbors, however confused, must have very quickly realized she was an Englishwoman in great need, even if they didn’t know exactly who she was. Two Thurston children died that day, and at least one was taken captive, but their mother is not listed among the casualties. When she arrived at John Wilson’s doorstep, having just recovered consciousness after suffering a brutal attack, Goodwife Thurston probably did not speak clearly. She may have shrieked, or spoken in gibberish, or she may have been unable to speak at all. But, after a moment, she may have begun to speak clearly, and then her neighbors would have recognized that she was speaking English. (She told her neighbors that “all her afflictions was swallowd up in the loss of her poore child gone into Captivity.”93) Speech was somewhat more reliable than appearance, as it could pierce through any darkness or disguise.94 During another skirmish, “at the very instant” that an English soldier was about to start shooting at three Indians, “a child with them in the habit of an Indian papoos” cried out that “he was an English boy” and the soldier held his fire. Immediately, “the child ran to the English and escaped.” On another occasion, fellow Englishmen “were ready to have shot at” Wheeler and his men, “till we discerning they were English by the Majors speaking.”95

  Language, in this story, may have been the final marker of Englishness. Like so many chroniclers of the war, Goodwife Thurston may have told her tale both as a way of making sense of her experience and as a way of reclaiming her identity. If the colonists’ Englishness had been compromised before the war by becoming more Indian in their ways, it was further compromised during the war by the loss of their homes and clothes and, most of all, by their killing mercilessly and abandoning the codes of “civil nations.” By telling about the war, and most especially by writing about it, the colonists could reclaim civility, could clothe their naked war with words. The writing itself would “dress” the English back up; it would undo the damage of the war by making clear once again who was English and who Indian, and what made a massacre and what a victory. All of this depended, however, on denying the possibility that the Indians might themselves “dress” the war with their own words. But that, alas, was a mistaken assumption.

  V

  WHILE THE TOWN of Medfield burned and Goodwife Thurston calmed down enough to speak English clearly and tell her neighbors who she was, a retreating Nipmuck, very possibly James Printer, hastily wrote a note and tacked it to a tree probably just a stone’s throw from John Wilson’s house:

  Thou English man hath provoked us to anger & wrath & we care not though we have war with you this 21 years for there are many of us 300 of which hath fought with you at this town[.] we hauve nothing but our lives to loose but thou hast many fair houses cattell & much good things.96

  At the war’s end, William Hubbard would scoff at the threat, remarking only that the Indians “fell short of their Expectation by ninteen [years],” but at the time the people of Medfield must have been terribly shaken by it. In just two short sentences the note offered an analysis that the colonists had failed to consider in any of the hundreds of letters and dozens of accounts they themselves had written about the war: that Indians attacked English towns for reasons other than the pure pleasures of wanton cruelty.

  What the Medfield note suggests is that the Algonquians knowingly directed their attacks against the English acquisition of land and the introduction of livestock (their “fair houses cattell & much good things”), developments that dramatically undermined traditional Algonquian subsistence practices. English livestock strayed onto Indian land, ate Indian crops, dug up Indian clam beds, and always compelled colonists to take more and more Indian land for pasturage.97 As a Narragansett man had explained to Roger Williams: “You have driven us out of our own Cou
ntrie and then pursued us to our Great Miserie, and Your own, and we are Forced to live upon you.”98 (While some Algonquians, including Philip himself, took to keeping livestock themselves, they kept only hogs, the wildest of all English domesticated animals, and retained their animosity toward other kinds of English livestock, especially cattle.99) As Philip and his counselors complained to John Easton, they had “thoft when the English boft land of them that thay wold have kept ther Catell upone ther owne land,” but even if they moved thirty miles from English settlements, “thay Could not kepe ther coren from being spoyled” and “the English Catell and horses still incresed.”100

  Most importantly, the Medfield note called attention to the Nipmucks’ vehement rejection of the English conflation of property and identity: “We hauve nothing but our lives to loose but thou hast many fair houses cattell & much good things.” If this, as Noah Newman feared after reading the note, “is the summe they warr from,” it was not an unwarranted calculus. It was, after all, this “computation” that the English themselves relied on in tallying up the damage of the war, counting burned houses, killed cattle, and toppled fences.101 The precious few notes and letters written by warring Indians prove that the connection between English property and English lives was not lost on their enemies. “You know, and we know,” one Indian wrote in a letter negotiating the release of captives, “you have great sorrowful with crying; for you lost many, many hundred men, and all your house, all your land, and woman, child, and cattle, and all your things that you have lost.”102 Not only notes but also rites of cruelty and the verbal taunts that often accompanied them attacked the English attachment to land. While burying several English captives alive, a group of Algonquians mocked English agriculture (and curiously echoed Samuel Gortons fear that the Indians were trying to “root out the English”): “You English since you came into this Countrey have grown exceedingly above the Ground, let us now see how you will grow when Planted into the Ground.”103 (Meanwhile, Algonquians had always celebrated their detachment from goods and property. The Narragansetts traditionally engaged in a ritual in which participants offered “almost all the riches they have to their gods, as kettles, skins, hatchets, beads, knives, etc.” and threw them “into a great fire.”104)