by Jill Lepore
If we intend at any time to make War upon you, we will let you know of it, and the Reasons why we make War with you; and if you make us satisfaction for the Injury done us, for which the War is intended, then we will not make War on you. And if you intend at any time to make War on us, we would have you let us know of it, and the Reasons for which you make War on us, and then if we do not make satisfaction for the Injury done unto you, then you may make War on us, otherwise you ought not to do it.112
Anthropologists used to say that there are two kinds of warfare, “primitive” and “civilized.” Today the terms have changed—“nonstate” is usually used instead of “primitive,” and “state” for “civilized”—but, in large part, the categories themselves have remained intact.113 Primitive or nonstate warfare has been understood to be limited, not especially lethal, and usually immediately motivated by prestige, revenge, or sport, but ultimately driven by resource scarcity or the need to regulate the population; civilized or state warfare, by contrast, has been understood to last longer, to be both better organized and more fatal, and usually to be motivated by economic, territorial, or political concerns.”114 This view has its origins in Europeans’ earliest New World encounters and was commonly expressed in early-seventeenth-century New England in the decades before King Philip’s War. During the Pequot War in 1637, Captain John Mason said the Pequots’ “feeble Manner … did hardly deserve the name of fighting” and in 1643 Roger Williams observed that Indian conflicts were “farre less bloudy and devouring than the cruell Warres of Europe.”115
This view, however, has recently been questioned. In arguing that Indian assaults, far from being too “feeble” to deserve the name of fighting, were too brutal to deserve the name of war, William Hubbard anticipated an important late twentieth-century anthropological revision. With the critical work of anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, the notion that war in nonstate societies is less frequent and less deadly than war in state societies has come under focused attack. As Keeley argues, nonstate warfare is actually both more frequent and more fatal than state warfare.”116 While King Philip’s War can be understood as a war between a nonstate society and an encroaching state, war was a serious and deadly matter in both cultures. Those Narragansetts, Nipmucks, Pocumtucks, and Wampanoags who chose to fight against the English and their Mohegan, Pequot, and Christian Indian allies had complicated reasons, reasons that extended beyond mourning or retributive war. They were fighting to protect their territory and to preserve their way of life.
If the English had examined Algonquian actions not as signs from God but as signs from Indians, they might have seen a great deal about Algonquian motives. Still, some few recognized that such acts of “cruelty” were also a form of communication, not from God, but from the Indians themselves. Philip Walker, after all, complained of Philip “drawing his own reportt in blud not Ink.”117 Much as most colonists denied it, Algonquian attacks and Algonquian tortures were not random or arbitrary. On the contrary, they were deliberate and deeply symbolic.”118 This is not surprising, since ritual behavior increases in times of uncertainty. And ritual, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas reminds us, “is pre-eminently a form of communication.”119
Ritual cruelty is a symbolic language that can be “read” and then “translated” into spoken or written language. Algonquians in New England often provided this translation themselves, leaving notes explaining their actions, or sending letters, or, most often, mocking and taunting the English verbally while they assaulted them. And as the acts themselves make clear, New England’s Algonquians were attempting, in small, physical dramas, to turn the English world inside out and upside down. (Remember the Indians burying English captives alive and taunting them, “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.”120) That fighting Algonquians sought to cultivate chaos is demonstrated again and again in the piquancy of their ridiculing of English values. “Ritual,” according to Douglas, “recognises the potency of disorder,” and in these ritualistic acts of cruelty, the Indians disordered English society.121 Or, taken another way, Algonquians sought to restore their world to a balance, to recover it from the chaos into which it had been falling ever since the English first arrived.
Nevertheless, English colonists were either unwilling or unable to place such practices within the broader context of Algonquian culture and to read them as partial explanations for what had provoked the Indians to wage war (English incursions on Indian land, English attempts at converting the Indians to Christianity). Since “there can be no War just on both sides,” it was critical that the English deny the possibility that the Indians might have had grounds to wage war against the settlers—and that the colonists elaborate on the justness of their own cause in the war.122 The language of “provocation” and “cause” was applied not to the Indians but to God.123 If the English had sinned, they had “rebelled greatly rebelled” against the Lord, not against their Algonquian neighbors.124 Those who considered the Indians God’s messengers knew that the Bible commanded God’s people to “mind what the Messengers of God speak in his name” (Amos 3:7).125 But, busily interpreting Indian actions as messages from God, New England’s colonists utterly failed to see Indian actions as messages from Indians, or even simply to pay attention to Indian explanations for the war.126
Ultimately, of course, all Indian explanations for or interpretations of the war were dismissed—“these Heathenish Stories are consonant to their Barbarous Crueltie, and ought to be valued accordingly”—because they compromised the justness of the colonists’ own cause.127 Meanwhile, the English labeled all Indian assaults “barbarous” violations of English ideas of just conduct in war, thereby masking their own violations. Quaker John Easton believed that “new England prists … ar so blinded by the spiret of persecution” that they failed to see that they themselves had violated “the law of nations and the law of arems.”128 In looking at Indian actions, English colonists most often “read” and “translated” Indian cruelties either as random acts of savagery or as messages from God. What they utterly failed to consider was that the war might not only be an obscure message from a distant but reproachful God but also a loud shout from extremely disgruntled but very nearby neighbors, communicating a complex set of ideas about why they were waging war.
IV
ON MARCH 29, 1676, a party of Narragansetts attacked Providence, destroying the town. To Roger Williams, who considered himself a friend of the Narragansetts (and who had hoped that, as a result, Rhode Island would be spared in the war), the attack was a profound betrayal. With a rage fueled by distress, Williams walked to the outskirts of town to meet with the Narragansetts and force them to answer for their perfidy. Pointing to his own house, which, he said, “hath Lodged kindly Some Thousands of You these Ten years,” but which was then burning to ashes behind him, Williams asked “Why they assaulted us With burning and Killing who ever were kind Neighbours to them.” In a heated discussion, the Narragansetts offered three answers:
[firstly] they Confessed they were in A Strang Way.
2ly we had forced them to it.
3ly that God was [with] them and Had forsaken us for they had so prospered in Killing and Burning us far beyond What we did against them.
Enraged by this reply, Williams let his fury fly, insisting that, far from taking the Indians’ side in the war, God favored the English. “God had prospered us so that wee had driven the Wampanoogs with Phillip out of his Countrie and the Nahigonsiks out of their Countre, and had destroyed Multitudes of them in Fighting and Flying, In Hungr and Cold etc.: and that God would help us to Consume them.”129
This is indeed a startling encounter. Its attempt at dialogue is, to say the least, unusual. And, as a record of Indian motives in the war, it is, sadly, unparalleled. Compare, now, this list to another. In a sermon delivered before the Artillery Election Company on June 3, 1678, Samuel Nowell, who had served to minister to the
colonial army during King Philip’s War, attempted to explain the colonists’ reasons for waging war. “There are commonly reckoned three causes of War,” he declared:
For defence of ourselves.
To recover what hath been taken away.
To punish for injuries done.130
While the Narragansetts’ list combined secular reasons (“we had forced them to it”) with religious ones (“God was [with] them and Had forsaken us”), Nowell’s list of the possible causes of war is entirely secular. (Although Nowell made no explicit reference to it, his list was derived from Grotius’ own list of the three causes of just war—“defence, recovery of property, and punishment”—a list that Nowell, a half-century later, would reproduce exactly.) Yet, preaching before the Artillery Election Company four years earlier, Joshua Moodey had exhorted New Englanders to “take, kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption, &C which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.”131 Samuel Nowell may have believed he had fought a just war, fair, legal, and limited, but Joshua Moodey was ready for holy war, divinely ordained and unrestrained.
The Narragansetts’ explanation for why they burned Providence provided Roger Williams with precious little comfort as he watched his house become a heap of ashes. But their words, like those of Nowell and Moody, suggest that both sides in King Philip’s War believed they were fighting to save their lives—and their religions. And perhaps both peoples knew that, in the chaos and excess of a cruel war, they were “in A Strang Way,” disoriented by loss, fear, and gods who had forsaken them.
Chapter 5
COME GO ALONG WITH US
On February 10, 1676, Nipmuck Indians attacked the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, and took several colonists captive, among them Mary Rowlandson. For the next three months, Rowlandson, the wife of a prominent Puritan minister, lived among the Indians; she ate Indian food, slept in Indian wigwams, learned Indian ways. And always, she prayed. In long treks through the bitter winter, on foot and on horseback, across rivers and through swamps, she accompanied a group of Nipmucks and their captives as they traveled westward and then, in early spring, turned eastward again. Finally, on May 2, Mary Rowlandson was “redeemed” when a twenty-pound ransom was paid for her release. The following day she arrived in Boston, where she remained until April 1677, when she and her husband, Joseph, resettled in Wethersfield, Connecticut.1 Sometime during the year and a half between her move to Wethersfield and her husbands death in November 1678, Mary Rowlandson wrote an account of her captivity among the Indians.2 In March 1682 that account, piously titled The Soveraignty [sic] and Goodness of God, was printed in Boston. Within months, second and third editions were printed in Cambridge, and by November 1682 the first London edition of Rowlandson’s narrative was advertised in a catalog of English booksellers. It would become Americas first best-seller. Today, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God is considered a foundational work in American literature; it is better remembered than any other account of King Philip’s War and is more widely read than any other Indian captivity narrative.3
Yet within Mary Rowlandson’s captivating tale—quite literally in the very ink on its pages—lies another story: the story of James Printer. Printer, himself a Nipmuck Indian, was converted to Christianity by John Eliot and, in the years before King Philip’s War, he worked with Eliot at the Cambridge Press, translating manuscripts and setting type (hence, James Printer). At the start of the war, Printer was living in the “praying town” of Hassanemesit (present-day Grafton, Massachusetts). In early November 1675 Nipmucks allied with Philip came to Hassanemesit and carried away its townspeople. For the next several months, Printer, the brother of a prominent Indian minister, trekked through the woods of New England with the enemy Nipmucks. When Rowlandson was taken captive by the same group little more than three months later, Printer realized that his future lay with her (and hers with him). In the coming weeks Printer served as scribe during negotiations for Mary Rowlandson’s redemption. Then, when amnesty was offered to Christian Indians who had joined the enemy, Printer turned himself in to colonial authorities, bringing with him, as required by special instruction, the heads of two enemy Indians—testaments to his fidelity. Eventually Printer returned to his work at the press in Cambridge and, in 1682, in one of the most sublime ironies of King Philip’s War, James Printer set the type for The Soveraignty and Goodness of God.4
Mary Rowlandson and James Printer are indeed a curious pair. Their intricately linked stories are at once uncannily similar and crucially divergent. Before the war, Mary’s husband, Joseph Rowlandson, was the minister of her town, while James’ brother, Joseph Tukapewillin, was the minister of his. Both Rowlandson and Printer spent the winter of 1675-76 with enemy Nipmucks. Both returned to Boston months later to live, again, among the English. But while Rowlandson came to terms with her time among enemy Indians by writing a book, Printer supplied body parts. In the end, the divergences tell us more than the similarities, and together they suggest that the most important legacy of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative is not its coherent statement of Puritan typology, its poignant psychological portrait of terror, or even its paradoxically defiant yet submissive female voice. The lasting legacy of Mary Rowlandson’s dramatic, eloquent, and fantastically popular narrative of captivity and redemption is the nearly complete veil it has unwittingly placed over the experiences of bondage endured by Algonquian Indians during King Philip’s War.
I
“ON THE TENTH of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster.” So begins Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, and so began her captivity, on what she called “the dolefullest day that ever mine eyes saw.” Reckoning the losses, Rowlandson invited her readers to imagine witnessing the scene in Lancaster that day:
Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he has made in the earth. Of thirty seven persons who were in this one house, none escaped either present death, or a bitter captivity, save only one, who might say as he, Job 1:15, And I only am escaped to tell the news. There were twelve killed, some shot, some stabbed with their spears, some knocked down with their hatchets…. There was one who was chopped into the head with a hatchet, and stript naked, and yet was crawling up and down. It is a solemn sight to see so many 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 hellhounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out.5
Rowlandson wrote about her captivity to reflect on “the Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together With the Faithfulness of His Promises”; her narrative was devotional. As a Calvinist, she believed affliction of any kind was cause for spiritual reflection; before the war, she had even prayed that her devotion might be tested by such trials. And, beginning on February 10, her prayers were answered in abundance. “Before I knew what affliction meant, I was ready sometimes to wish for it…. Affliction I wanted, and affliction I had, full measure (I thought) pressed down and running over.”6 Captivity was a special brand of affliction, uniquely suited to increasing; piety, as suggested in a tract published in London in 1675 that promised to help captives everywhere make their captivity “instrumental towards the attainment of an eternal weight of glory.”7 Despite their sufferings or, indeed, because of them, captives were blessed with abundant time for spiritual reflection. It was in this spirit that Rowlandson wrote about her experience:
is good for me that I have been afflicted. … It was but the other day that if I had had the world, I would have given it for my freedom, or to have been a servant to a Christian. I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them, as Moses said, Exodus 14.13. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.8
Yet, within this Calvinist framework, Mary Rowlandson was not only redeemed from captivity, captivity also redeemed her. “Redemption” had, and has, several shades of meaning. In one sense (emancipation through payment), the ransom r
edeemed Rowlandson from physical bondage; in another sense (delivery through spiritual salvation), her bondage itself redeemed her from sin by teaching her to stand still and accept God’s will. Twenty pounds bought her freedom; captivity saved her soul.9
But there is yet another sense of redemption (expiation of guilt) that played a role in Rowlandson’s release. In writing her narrative, Mary Rowlandson was attempting, at least in part, to “redeem” herself from both the horrors—and the complicity—of captivity. Perhaps she believed that, if only she could describe it fully, the “dolefull sight” that had “so daunted” her spirit would free her from the nightmares that continued to haunt her.10 (“I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other wayes with me.”11) Having been “in the midst of those roaring lions, and salvage bears, that feared neither God, nor man, nor the devil,” Mary Rowlandson had journeyed, she believed, into the belly of the beast. Writing an account of that journey was part of her escape. Clearly she wrote, most of all, to testify to Gods wonderful providences, but Mary Rowlandson also wrote to redeem herself, to deliver herself from the demons of memory and to reconcile herself with her first, fateful choice: choosing captivity over death.
Before the war, Mary Rowlandson had pledged to accept death before captivity: “I had often before this said, that if the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than be taken alive.”12 And her sister had done just that: “Seeing those woeful sights, the infidels haling mothers one way, and children another, and some wallowing in their blood … she said, And Lord, let me die with them; which was no sooner said, but she was struck with a bullet, and fell down dead over the threshold.”13 “Those woeful sights” made Mary’s sister wish for death, but they made Mary cling to life. Indeed, the sight of such horrors led her to abandon her pledge: “When it came to the trial my mind changed; their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit, that I chose rather to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous beasts, than that moment to end my days.”14
