The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  Chapter 6

  A DANGEROUS MERCHANDISE

  On August 2, 1676, a party of English and Indian soldiers led by Captain Benjamin Church captured Philip’s wife, Wootonekanuske, and his nine-year-old son (whose name has not survived).1 That day, Philip himself escaped, but as even the viciously unsympathetic Increase Mather observed, “It must needs be bitter as death to him, to loose his Wife and only Son (for the Indians are marvellous fond and affectionate towards their Children).”2 Ten days later, Church’s forces caught up with Philip at Mount Hope and executed him on the spot. Meanwhile, Wootonekanuske and her son were sent to a prison in Plymouth, where they lingered for weeks that stretched into months. In small, dark cells, despised by their jailers, they must have suffered an especially horrible captivity.

  What eventually befell Wootonekanuske was never recorded, but the fate of Philip’s son was greatly debated. The young boy (sadly for him) posed a theological conundrum. On the one hand, vengeful colonists were eager to see him executed. On the other hand, the most obviously relevant scriptural passage, Deuteronomy 24:16, specifically argued against such a punishment: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”

  While the Puritan clergy debated over whether to abide by Deuteronomy, Captain Thomas Smith’s sturdy ship, the Seaflower, sailed from Boston Harbor. In the cramped cargo hold, at least 180 “heathen Malefactors men, women, and Children”—and probably more—groaned under the weight of their own misery. Seventy had been sold into slavery by the authority of Massachusetts Bay; no came from Plymouth. In the captain’s cabin, documents ensuring the legality of the venture were safely stowed away: two certificates bearing official colony seals, one from John Leverett, governor of Massachusetts Bay, and one from Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth. Leverett’s letter was addressed “To all people,” Winslow’s “To all Christian People”; Leverett called Philip “an heathen Sachem,” Winslow called him “an heathen Prince.”3 But with these and other minor exceptions, the two certificates were nearly identical. Both promised prospective buyers that “by due & Legal procedure the said heathen Mallifactors … have beene sentenced & cndemned to Perpetuall Servitude & slavery.”4 With these words the fates of 180 Algonquian men, women, and children were sealed.

  Philip’s son did not sail on the Seaflower. Instead, New England’s leading theologians continued agonizing over what to do with him. Samuel Arnold and John Cotton were called on to reflect upon the matter, and on September 7 they issued an opinion that seemed, at first, cut and dry:

  The question being propounded to us by our honored rulers, whether Philip’s son bee a child of death! our Answer hereunto is: That we do acknowledge that Rule, Deut. 24.16 to be Morall and therefore perpetually binding, viz. that in a particular act of wickedness, though capital, the crime of the parent doth not render his child a subject of punishment by the civil magistrates.

  Clearly not satisfied with this scriptural precedent, Arnold and Cotton had apparently pored over their Bibles for an answer more to their liking. “Yet, upon serious consideration,” they continued (adding, and then crossing out, the phrase “6c mature deliberation”),

  we humbly conceive, that the children of notorious traitors, rebels and mur-therers, especially of such as have been principall leaders and actors in such horrid villanies, (and that against a whole country, yea the whole people of God,) may bee involved in the guilt of their parents, and may, salva republica, be adjudged to death, as to us seems evident, by the Scripture instances of Saul, Achan, Haman, the Children of whom were cut off by the sword of justice for the transgressions of their Parents, although concerning some of those Children it be manifest that they were not capable of being co-actors therein.5

  Even a young boy like Philip’s son, then, could have been “involved” in his father’s perfidious treason and hence subject to execution.

  Philip’s son, however, was not then executed. Perhaps the prospect of hanging a nine-year-old child was simply too grisly, even for those intent on his death. Instead, he remained in prison while the debate continued. On October 20 Increase Mather wrote to John Cotton, offering his own opinion about what should be done with the boy:

  It is necessary that some effectual course be taken with him. This makes me think of hadad, who was a little child when his Father, Chief Sachem of the edomites, was killed by Joab, & had not others fled away with him, I am apt to think that David would have taken a Course that Hadad should never have proved a scourge to the next Generation.6

  (Mather was here referring to I Kings 11:17: “That Hadad fled, he and certain Edomites of his father’s servants with him, to go into Egypt; Hadad being yet a little child.”) Countering the leniency dictated by Deuteronomy, Mather cited a scriptural passage that could be loosely interpreted as an argument for exile and possibly execution: if hanging was too brutal, perhaps it would yet be moral to sell Philip’s son into foreign slavery. But still the boy and his mother lingered in prison. On October 30 James Keith wrote to Cotton, “I long to hear what becomes of Philips’ wife & his son.” Hoping that New England would continue to be “the habitation of justice and the mountain of holiness,” Keith added two more conflicting scriptural references to the debate: Psalms 137:8-9 (“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”), and 2 Chronicles 25:4 (“But he slew not their children, but did as it is written in the law in the book of Moses, where the Lord commanded, saying, The fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin”). Keith wrote,

  I know there is some difficulty in that Psalm 137.8.9 though I think it may be considered whether there be not some specialty and somewhat extraordinary in it, that law Deut. 24.16 compared with the commended example of Amasias 2 Chron.25.4 doth sway much with me in the case under consideration. I hope God will direct those whom it doth concern to a good issue.

  When the Reverend Cotton received Keith’s letter he succinctly summarized the debate in its margin. On the one hand, “Evil doers shall be cut off,” but on the other, “The Children shall not be put to death for the Fathers.”7

  How and when the colonial authorities came to a final decision about what to do with Philip’s son remains a mystery, as does the fate of Wootonekanuske. And, were it not for a seven-word postscript John Cotton appended to a letter to Increase Mather in March 1677, we would have no clues at all. All we do know is that Cotton remarked, rather casually, “Philips boy goes now to be sold.”8 Still, these seven words tell us a great deal. Fully eight months after he and his mother were first imprisoned, Philip’s son was finally released from prison, only to be sold into slavery and shipped, most likely, to the West Indies. (Wootonekanuske probably met the same end, or else died in prison.)

  By the time Philip’s son was sold, hundreds of other captured Algonquians, like those who boarded the Seaflower, had already been sent out of the colonies as slaves. The Puritan clergy may have decided that Philip’s son could neither be killed nor spared, and settled on selling him into slavery as a middle course and, as they believed, a merciful one. Slavery was considered to be just this kind of a compassionate compromise: notorious Indians, like Philip himself, were executed; harmless enemies, mainly women and young children, were forced into servitude for a period of years; and those who were neither notorious enough to be hanged nor harmless enough to remain in New England were routinely sold into foreign slavery.9

  But deciding to sell Philip’s son as a slave was probably not as simple as choosing a middle course between death and service. The surviving correspondence suggests that the decision rested on the nature of Philip’s evil-doing. Deuteronomy 24:16, which dictated leniency, applied only to cases of capital crimes. It was, in this sense, inadequate, since the colonists consider
ed Philip to be more than a murderer, to be, instead, a traitor, a treasonous rebel, who had revolted against “a whole country, yea the whole people of God.” For that reason his son must be punished so as not to become “a scourge to the next Generation.” In other words, it was Philip’s political position, his sachemship (a position the colonists always misunderstood), that meant that his son must suffer for the deeds of the father, since only by wielding authority as a leader of his people could Philip commit the kind of crimes of state that would doom his son. (Mather had made this point by calling Hadad’s father “Chief Sachem of the edomites.”)

  And so Philip’s boy went to be sold. And so, too, did hundreds of other Algonquian men, women, and children. Yet the sad tale of the nameless boy is unlike that of all the others: his fate sparked a debate; theirs did not. With the important exception of an impassioned plea by John Eliot, the mass enslavement of Algonquian Indians proceeded without any delays of conscience. Instead, a precarious legal apparatus was hastily erected by which their bondage could be justified. Certificates legalizing their enslavement were stowed on board the ships that took them across the ocean. But, paradoxically, the slave certificates’ legal justification rested on denying Philip’s political authority—the very authority that, in another context, condemned his son to slavery.

  Surely it should come as no surprise that the colonists’ legal and theological rhetoric was riddled with contradiction, nor that the idea of chattel slavery found easy acceptance in colonies whose population included slaves of another sort: Africans. Still, the story of how English colonists came to sell hundreds of Algonquians into perpetual servitude bears telling, if only because, like the kinds of bondage endured by men like James Printer, it is a story that has been largely overshadowed by Mary Rowlandson’s captivity. And, more than any other story of King Philip’s War, it suggests just how furiously the colonists had come to despise a people they had once hoped to convert.

  I

  THE SALE OF Indians into foreign slavery began early in the war, in the summer of 1675, although widespread, systematic enslavement came only a year later, when large numbers of Indians surrendered or were captured. No doubt the colonial authorities hoped the labor provided by Indian servants retained within New England would aid struggling colonists in rebuilding their ravaged towns, while the sale of Indians into foreign slavery would help fill the coffers emptied by wartime expenses.10 In effect, captured Algonquians were the rewards of war, to be punished to the public’s satisfaction or distributed in the same manner as relief funds. The Connecticut Council, for instance, stipulated “that the divission of persons be made proportionably to every County, the quallity of persons allso to be considered, to be as equall as may be, and then to be divided by the committee men to the severall townes in like proportion.”11

  Trading in Indians was lucrative. Between June 25 and September 25, 1676 alone the Massachusetts Bay Colony received £397.13 for 188 “prisoners of war sold.”12 (The going rate for Indian prisoners was about three pounds a head, a rate consistent with Samuel Sewall’s observation, made on July 1, 1676, that “9 Indians sold for 30£,” but somewhat more than James Oliver received when he sold “47 Indians, young and old, for 80£ in money.”13) Given the potential for profit, colonial governments jealously competed over who owned which captured Indians.14 Eager to join this profitable endeavor, independent merchants and privateers also became involved in the trade. In July 1676 Samuel Shrimpton proudly reported to his wife, “I doe verryly thinke that the warr with the Indians draws nigh an End. Wee have lately killed abundance of them & taken as many Captives. I bought 9 the other day to send to Jamaica but thinke to keep 3 of them.”15 (Christian Indian soldiers also profited from Indians they sold into slavery.)16

  Much of the trade was conducted illegally, and even Indians who worked as servants in English households were vulnerable to being stolen and sold as slaves. In October 1675 John Paine, who lived on Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay, wrote to the commissioners of the United Colonies pleading for the release of several Narragansett men who worked and lived with him but who had been taken away under cover of night.17 Since the colonial governments had money at stake in remaining in charge of the sale of Indians, those who sold Indians illegally might be prosecuted. William Waldron was jailed in August 1676 for “Conveighing away a Sagamore Indian and other Indians to the Eastward to fyall [Fayal] or to the lands beyond Sea.”18

  The prosecution of such abuses, however, must have been rare, especially since the sale of Indians was, from the start, a confused and at times arbitrary process. Chief among the confusions was the colonists’ uncertainty—and even unconcern—about which Indians should be sold and which spared. In principle, those who were not too dangerous were to remain in New England as servants for a ten-year term or, if children, until age twenty-four or twenty-five; more villainous Indians were either to be tried and executed or shipped out of the colonies as slaves. Meanwhile, the most notorious Indians were likely to be executed at the time and at the site of their capture. And so in August 1676 Benjamin Church and his soldiers captured an Indian named Sam Barrow and “told him that because of his inhuman murders and barbarities, the Court had allowed him no quarter, but was to be forthwith put to death.”19Some well-known Indians, however, did make it to trial in Plymouth, Boston, Hartford, or Newport.20 Records of such trials are most abundant in Rhode Island, where captured Algonquians were prosecuted as subjects who “trayterously, rebelliously, royetously, and routously arm, weapon, and array themselves with Swords, Guns and Staves, &c., and have killed and bloodely murthered many of his said Majestys good Subjects.” Thus Quinnapin, the Narragansett sachem who had “owned” Mary Rowlandson, was there tried and found guilty and summarily executed (Weetamoo, herself a sachem as well as Rowlandson’s former “mistress” and Wootonekanuske’s sister, drowned in a river while attempting to escape the English and later had her head cut off and placed on a pole).21

  The vast majority of Algonquians, of course, were not so well known to colonial authorities as Quinnapin or Weetamoo. Most were, to the colonists’ eyes, anonymous. And, with masses of surrendering and captured Indians crowding New England capital towns in the summer of 1676, colonial authorities were eager to disperse them as quickly as possible, even if they had little idea about which Indians had surrendered with a promise of amnesty (the offer James Printer responded to) and which had been captured while fighting against the English. Added to this mix were Christian Indians recently released from the islands in the harbor, some of whom had the misfortune to be found among their non-Christian peers.

  Efforts to separate these three groups appear to have been largely unsuccessful. In August 1676 the Massachusetts Council admitted that “the Indians lately come in, & have submitted themselves to the mercy of this Government, are scattered up & downe to the great dissatisfaction of many English.” The Council ordered an English captain to “take the number of the said Indians & call them all together into one place, & see that they be not permitted to scatter up & downe,” but clearly he met with little success.22 A month later, the Council appointed a special committee to decide how “to dispose of such Indians as are peaceable amongst us, and also of such as are come in upon former proclamations or articles, or may come in upon future proclamation, and submitt to mercy.” The committee, in turn, decided that it might be better to kill the worst of the enemy Indians instead of selling them: “Such of them as shall appeare to have imbrued their hands in English blood should suffer death here, and not be transported into forreigne parts.”23 Similarly, the Connecticut Council, faced with the same dilemma, set up regulations “respecting the Indians which have or shall before January next surrender themselves to mercy of this Government”: all those who “cannot be proved mur-therers shall have theire lives and shall not be sould out of the Country for slaves,” while the rest would be put into service among the English.24 But whether anyone in the colonies had the ability to make these determinations remains questio
nable. Meanwhile, the swift and dubious trials of captured Algonquians had an unintended consequence: discouraging surrender. After an Indian named Wotuchpo (possibly an escapee from Deer Island) was hastily tried and executed for the murder of an Englishwoman named Sarah Clarke, the Plymouth authorities nervously announced that this punishment was an exception, and would not be meted out “against such as killed his enimie in the feild in a souldier like way.”25

  Confusing Christian, surrendering, and captured Indians probably only became more common as the war progressed and the need to quickly dispose of Indians in English territory became more pressing. Predictably, the best-documented cases of mistaken identity, miscarried justice, and revoked promises are those involving Christian Indians, men and women who recorded their own harrowing tales.26 That such cases were commonplace is evidenced in the many petitions for the release of relatives made by Indians to whom the colonists owed favors. In July 1676 the ever-supplicating William Nahauton petitioned for the release of a five-year-old Indian girl, “kindred to my wife,” asking that “shee not bee sold away out of the contry.”27 And Anthony and James, Natick Indians who had attempted to convert Philip to Christianity before the war, also petitioned on behalf of imprisoned friends.28Such records further suggest that even Indians who had served the English in a variety of ways—as missionaries, spies, or soldiers—were not necessarily rewarded with their liberty. In August 1676 Daniel Gookin was ordered to send out two Indian spies “to procure all the English captives they can find among them & to bring them away with them” and that if they returned with English captives, the spies “shal have their lives given them & freed from foreign slavery.”29 On their return, however, these Indian spies may have met with considerable difficulty. Peter Jethro, a Christian Indian from Hassanemesit who, with James Printer, had been imprisoned in Boston by Moseley in September 1675, joined the Nipmucks in November 1675, and served as a scribe during negotiations for Mary Rowlandson’s release, apparently believed he, like Printer, had been promised his freedom in exchange for bringing in enemy Indians. Major Richard Waldron, however, denied having made such a pledge. “I Promised neither Peter Jethro nor any other of that company life or liberty it not being in my Power to doe it,” Waldron wrote in November 1676. “All that I promised was to Peter Jethro vizt that … I would acquaint the Governor with what service he had done & Improse my Interest in his behalfe.”30 Similarly, in November 1676, Gookin had to intervene to ensure that Mary Nemasit, the wife of an Indian who had served with the English in the war, might be bought out of slavery. Waldron, who had been unable to protect Peter Jethro, had also mistakenly placed Nemasit with a group of enemy Indians to be sold. “How she came among that company I know not,” Waldron wrote to Gookin, professing ignorance of the arrangement by which she was promised liberty and adding, “twas her own fault in not Acquainting mee with it.” (Waldron, however, agreed to pay back the men who had bought Nemasit and she was eventually released.)31