by Jill Lepore
Almost without exception, the English interpreted Algonquian assaults, and the taunts that accompanied them, as expressions of mindless savagery or as divine retribution rather than as calculated assaults on the English way of life. Indian attacks on English livestock, for instance, appalled the colonists, who frequently reported finding the enemy driving away or “killing off Cattle.”105 (Edward Randolph later reported that the English had lost “eight thousand head of Cattle” during the war.106) On occasion Algonquians might even “torture” English livestock: “They took a Cow, knocked off one of her horns, cut out her tongue, and so left the poor creature in great misery. They put an horse, ox &c. into an hovil, and then set it on fire only to shew how they are delighted in excercising cruelty.” As the English perceived it, the Indians did so only to “to shew what barbarous creatures they are.”107 But clearly, attacks on English livestock were attacks on the English practice of keeping livestock, animals who often ruined Indian crops and took over Indian hunting grounds.108 When Joshua Tift was taken captive and brought to the Great Swamp, the Narragansetts who captured him brought along “5 of his Cattell and killd them before his face.” Tift was “forc’t to be Silent,” but he nonetheless “praid the Sachim to Spare the rest,” to which the sachem answered, “What will Cattell now doe you good?” The next day, the Narragansetts sent for the rest of Tift’s cattle and killed them all before his eyes, symbolically suggesting that Tift, as a captive, must now turn his back on English ways and accept Indian ones.109 Interpreted in this light, the reasons for killing Tift’s cattle are clear enough, but not, it seems, clear enough for the colonists. As their voluminous writing about the war demonstrates, most colonists were either unwilling or unable to place Indian “cruelties” within the broader context of Algonquian culture, instead labeling them “barbarous” violations of English ideas of just conduct in war, or understanding them only, and somewhat ironically, as messages from a brutal and furious God.
Chapter 4
WHERE IS YOUR O GOD?
In late April 1676, a party of Nipmucks near Mount Wachusett prepared for battle. Forming a circle, they gathered around two figures: a powwaw, or shaman, who knelt on a deerskin, and a standing man who held a gun. Those in the circle fell to their knees, beat on the ground with sticks, and made a noise that sounded to Mary Rowlandson, who witnessed the scene, like “muttering or humming.” The powwaw spoke, and all assented to what he said. A tightly orchestrated series of actions followed: The standing man who held the gun was made to leave the circle and then asked to return. He was given a second gun, and asked to leave once more.
Then they called him in again, but he made a stand; so they called him with greater earnestness; but he stood reeling and wavering as if he knew not whither he should stand or fall, or which way to go. Then they called him with exceeding great vehemency, all of them, one and another: after a little while he turned in, staggering as he went, with his arms stretched out, in either hand a gun.
Those in the circle rejoiced, again the powwaw spoke, all assented, and “so they ended their business, and forthwith went to Sudbury-fight.”1
To Rowlandson, the ritual of the circle seemed satanic. “When they went, they acted as if the devil had told them that they should gain the victory,” and when they returned, the powwaw looked “as black as the devil.”2 But to the Nipmucks, the circle was sacred. In listening to the powwaw and in at first rejecting but ultimately arming and rousing the standing man, they expressed their resolve to fight, called upon the power of animal and other spirits, or manitou, to aid them in battle, and sought, from the powwaw, prophecy of victory.3
Meanwhile, in Boston, a day of humiliation was declared. At the old Meeting House, three ministers dressed in black stood on a raised platform, reading from a large printed book and preaching to hundreds of men and women assembled before them in long rows of wooden benches. They knelt in humility before God; they stood and sang His praise. Increase Mather preached that day, no doubt reflecting on the causes and course of the war and praying for God’s help. Preparing for an earlier day of humiliation, Mather had prayed to God “That Hee would sanctify these awfull Judgments on the Countrey. And Reverse them in due Time.” After the April 20 day of humiliation, Mather wrote in his diary, as he did on many days, that he had been “graciously assisted in [the] Lords worke.” Perhaps he expected that the day of humiliation would turn the tide in the war and bring the colonists greater victories. Surely it would bring the people of Boston closer to God. But as Mather later wrote in his history, “The next day sad tidings came to us.”4 A party of Nipmucks had destroyed Sudbury.
Despite the powwaw’s prophecy, the assault on Sudbury was a mixed success. On April 21 five hundred Nipmucks attacked the town (less than twenty miles west of Boston), killing more than thirty of the enemy but losing a half dozen of their own men.5 In a letter later printed in London, one death was described in detail:
an elderly English man endeavouring an Escape from the Indians by running into a Swamp, was overtaken by an Indian, and being Destitute of Weapons to Defend himself or Offend him, the Indian insulted over him with that Blasphemous Expression (Come Lord Jesus, save this poor Englishman if thou canst, whom I am now about to Kill).
The Nipmuck’s taunt “was heard by another Englishman, who was Hid in a Bush close by” and who watched “that Bloody Wretch … Knock [the elderly man] down and leave him Dead.” The shocked chronicler of this scene concluded weakly, “We hope the Lord is Arisen to Avenge those blasphemies.”6
At Sudbury, a Nipmuck warrior who, the day before, had called upon his own manitou to fight with him in battle, now mocked the colonists’ god. And an elderly Englishman who had likely once prayed to his Savior for strength in adversity (and whose Boston neighbors had spent the previous day humiliating themselves before God) found himself dying at the hands of a man he considered a heathen uttering words he considered blasphemous: Come Lord Jesus, save this poor Englishman if thou canst.
Taunts, prayers, prophecies. All raise an intriguing question: Was King Philip’s War a holy war? And if so, whose?
I
APPALLED BY their astounding losses during the war, many colonists in New England believed that God was punishing them for their sins, not least among them their failure to convert the Indians to Christianity. “Betwixt God & us,” John Eliot confided to the governor, “I think that our sins have ripened us for so seveare a scourge as the warre hath, & is likely to prove.” War, Increase Mather maintained, is “the greatest of all outward Judgements”; or, as John Kingsley put it, “general sin cales useley for generall plague; which is now.”7 After describing an Indian attack, Philip Walker wondered “what god in such a scrug Intends”:
in this owr great Advercitee
let us Consider what may bee
the Ca[u]se owr glorious angry god
so hevi on us Lays his rod
shure wee ow Arant have forgott
that makes us ffeele the hethens shot.8
The English had always looked for supernatural messages in the natural world—in the skies, in “monstrous” births, in diseases, in bad crops.9 During the war they strained their eyes to see messages within the devastation around them. As Mary Pray wrote, “we … know not what to do; but our eyes are upward.”10 Everywhere the English found God writing his judgment onto New England’s landscape or onto English bodies. He had made New England into “a looking glasse” whose ravages reflected the colonists’ own spiritual corruption. He had filled the colonists’ “cup of sorrow,” He had made his hand “heavie upon the land.” He had taken away the churches of those who were unfaithful, the houses of those who were greedy, the clothes of those who were proud, and the lives of those who sinned.
In the colonists’ eyes, all of the devastation around them, the destruction of their world, carried with it a message from God, often through the world of the occult. Houses burning, dead bodies piling up, and blood spilling everywhere: images like these pervaded the colonist
s’ descriptions of the war, and each had a special significance. Blood that flowed uncontrollably, for instance, signaled filth and chaos. Blood, the colonists believed, ought to be contained within the body, where it regulated all the vital forces. Blood might be “let” to cure “plethora,” but carefully, and, one hoped, by someone who could stop it. Within Galenic physiology, the prevailing physiology of the day, all bodily fluids were thought to be reducible to blood. Three of the bodily “humors”—phlegm, choler, and melancholy—were simply imperfect forms of the fourth and perfect humor, blood. To upset the balance of these humors, and especially to lose too much blood, would not only put one’s life in danger but would also fundamentally alter one’s disposition, since humoral balance dictated temperament. Indians, after all, were considered “prone to injurious violence and slaughter, by reason of their bloud dryed up.”11 Uncontrollable bleeding was also akin to menstruation, and, as such, was cause for shame.12While expelling menstrual blood was thought to purify women, the blood itself was considered an excrement.13 With such a great loss of blood, then, the colonists themselves might become as “dryed up” and vicious as the Indians or, at the very least, as filthy as menstruous women.
Spilled blood, however, also signaled God’s judgment. Most colonists would have agreed with the English anatomist who wrote that the body was the very “Book of God.”14 Or, as I Corinthians 6:19 decreed, “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” Among the many symbolic functions of the body was its role as God’s writing tablet, on which He might write with “bloody characters.” And, in seventeenth-century medical parlance, wounds were themselves called “lips.”15 Spilled blood, then, told not only of slaughter but also of judgment. “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us,” Increase Mather had asked, “when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”16
God’s bloody writing may have been in full view, but to many His penmanship was terrible. Reading what God had written, or hearing what He had to say, required both vigilance and diligence. “Ah, the burden that I beare night & day,” Kingsley moaned, “to see the blessed & loving God thus angrey, & wee have not a Profet to tel how longe, & to say this or these are New Englandes sinn.” “The Busines of the Day in N.E.,” Roger Williams commanded, “is not only to keepe our selves & ours from murthering[,] our Howses Barnes & from firinge, to destroy & cut off the Barbarians or subdue & reduce them, but our main & Principall Opus Diei is to listen to what the Eternal speaketh.” The Lord, Williams insisted, “will speake peace to his people,” and, as David had pledged, “I will listen to what Jehovah speaketh.” And there was to be no talking back to Jehovah. “Oh that we may be silent before him,” John Pynchon prayed, “and not open our mouths, but lie at his foot.”17
Just as Puritan ministers interpreted signs from God, so Algonquian powwaws looked for messages from the spirit world. Wampanoags attacking Bridgewater saw a spirit “in the Shape of a Bear walking on his 2 hind feet” and the powwaw Tispaquin ordered a withdrawal. If the omen had taken the form of a deer, “they would have destroyed the whole Town & all the English.” And when a violent seaside storm blew down English houses in August 1675, Nathaniel Saltonstall wrote that “The Indians afterwards reported that they had caused it by their Pawwaw. They farther say, that as many Englishmen shall die, as the Trees have by this wind been blown down in the Woods.”18
Algonquian powwaws, like Puritan ministers, also played an important role in determining whether a war ought to be waged at all. In 1660 the Paw-tucket powwaw Passaconaway had warned his people not to fight the colonists:
I was as much an Enemy to the English at their first coming into these Parts, as any one whatsoever, and did try all Ways and Means possible to have destroyed them, at least to have prevented them sitting down here, but I could in no way effect it; … therefore I advise you never to contend with the English, nor make War with them.19
In the 1670s, powwaws among the Narragansetts, Nipmucks, Pocumtucks, and Wampanoags apparently contradicted Passaconaway’s earlier warning, now commanding that war was the only means available to preserve their way of life.
Predictably, the colonists thought powwaws received their orders straight from Satan. (Indeed, Eliot and other missionaries had long railed against powwaws, believing that all “serve the Devill.”20) Philip Walker believed that Indians adored and served the Devil, who
by ther powas … prescribes t[o them] his Law will & plesur declaring to them he [is] The princ of darknes … he perswads them darknes is Light & [evil] is good.21
Looking back at the war, Cotton Mather considered it inevitable because
these parts were then covered with nations of barbarous indians and infidels, in whom the prince of power of the air did work as a spirit; nor could it be expected that the nations of wretches, whose whole religion was the most explicit sort of devil-worship, should not be acted by the devil to engage in some early and bloody action, for the extinction of a plantation so contrary to his interests, as that of New England was.22
Yet, if the English believed that powwaws served the devil, they found it no contradiction to believe that the Indians were also the instruments of God. By far the most humbling of all the messages of the war was that God did not speak to His chosen people directly. Instead, He used Indians, in a sense, as His translators: He made the Indians a “rod” with which to chastise the colonists for their failure to convert their heathen neighbors. As the Massachusetts government declared,
The Righteous God hath heightned our Calamity and given Commission to the Barbarous Heathen to rise up against us, and to become a smart Rod, and severe Scourge to us, in Burning and Depopulating several hopeful Plantations, Murdering many of our People of all sorts, and seeming as it were to cast us off … hereby speaking aloud to us to search and try our wayes and turn again unto the Lord our God from whom we have departed with a great Backsliding.23
Eager to encourage wayward colonists to reform their ways, Puritan clergy, especially, interpreted God’s messages as suggestions that He was not on the colonists’ side in the war. Increase Mather told the story of one soldier who, hearing his fellow soldiers use “many profane oaths,” and considering the bad weather and the recent losses against the enemy, took these as signs “that God was against the English; whereupon he immediately ran distracted, and so was returned home a lamentable Spectacle.” And when another soldier accidentally shot and killed an Englishwoman, it was taken as “a sign God is angry, when he turns our Weapons against our selves.” As Mather declared, “the Lord himself seemeth to be against us, to cast us off, and to put us to shame, and goeth not forth with our Armies.”24
Puritan divines were not without their critics. The Quaker Edward Wharton had abundant criticism for the prophecies and preachings of Massachusetts magistrates and ministers:
Our Rulers, Officers, and Councellors are like as men in a maze, not knowing what to do: but the Priests spur them on, telling them the Indians are ordained for destruction; bidding them go forth to Warr, and they will Fast and Pray at home in the mean time: yet their General, with some other Officers, complain and say, with tears, They see not God go along with them.25
(Intriguingly, Wharton’s criticism here sounds very much like the Puritans’ indictment of the pernicious influence of powwaws on the natives.) Yet Wharton, too, saw the war as a message from God. Like many other religious nonconformists, including Peter Folger and Samuel Groome, he understood the war as punishment for the Puritans’ persecution of dissenters. The irony was not lost on Richard Hutchinson, who observed that, however “various are Men’s Thoughts why God hath suffered [the war], all acknowledge it was for Sin.”26
To atone for the sins that had brought them such misery, conforming colonists observed days of fasting, prayer, and humiliation throughout the war. Plymouth declared the war’s first fast on the very day the fighting began, June 24, 1675, and Massachusetts Colony followed suit four days later, printing and posting a broadside to announce it
. In Connecticut, every Wednesday from September 1675 to July 1676 was a day of fasting. Puritan churches in Boston, Plymouth, and other towns marked their own days of religious observation, while colony governments declared dozens more, especially when things were going badly. In December all of the United Colonies observed a general day of fasting and humiliation, in preparation for the attack on the Narragansetts’ Great Swamp. In 1675 Connecticut canceled its annual autumn thanksgiving and in Massachusetts Bay no days of thanksgiving were declared until June 29, 1676 (exactly a year after that colony’s first wartime day of humiliation), when the tide had finally turned in the colonists’ favor.27
Meanwhile, even as English colonists gathered to damn the Algonquians’ religion and to beg God to go to battle with them, the Indians answered them in kind. After decades of learning about the colonists’ religion—visiting their churches, holding their Bibles, meeting their ministers—Algonquians in New England were well prepared to attack the colonists’ spiritual Achilles’ heel: their fear that their God had forsaken them. And attack it they did. As Wharton reported, “The Indians, I hear, insult very much, and tell the English Warriors that God is against them, and for the Indians; and that the English shall (for their Unrighteousness) fall into their hands.” Wharton, as a Quaker, had an ulterior motive in making this point, but we need not take his word for it. Algonquian attacks on Christianity, and especially blasphemies like the one reported at Sudbury (“Come Lord Jesus, save this poor Englishman if thou canst”) were not at all uncommon. When the Nipmucks returned from a fight they typically celebrated by mocking their victims, scoffing that “They had done them a good turn to send them to heaven so soon.” In Groton, Indians destroyed the church and then asked the minister, “What will you do for a house to pray in now we have burnt your Meeting-house?” While under siege in Brookfield, an English captain tried to encourage his soldiers by declaring, “God is with us, and fights for us, and will deliver us out of the hands of these Heathen,” to which the Nipmucks, who had heard this rallying cry, responded by “sending in many shots” and shouting, “now see how your God delivers you.” To provoke the English into leaving their garrisoned house, a group of Nipmucks went into the church next door and “in Contempt made an hideous noise somewhat resembling singing.” Laughing at the Puritans’ solemn practices of piety, the Nipmucks called out to the besieged colonists, “Come and pray, & sing Psalmes.” But the people of Brookfield restrained themselves, “the Lord giving us Courage to resist them.” To the colonists’ great horror, Indians were also especially likely to attack people on the Sabbath, or on a declared day of religious observation, even as colonists were on their way to church: “At Springfield … these devilfish Enemies of Religion seeing a man, woman, and their Children, going but towards a meeting house, Slew them (as they said) because they thought they Intended to go thither.”28
