by Jill Lepore
Yet, in spite of the colonists’ insistence that leaders like Philip had the authority to submit “their people” to the king of England, this was most likely a misperception, and, as such, part of a broader misunderstanding of native political culture. Nowhere is this misunderstanding better illustrated than in the colonists’ fears of an Indian conspiracy. New England colonists feared, above all else, that Philip headed a “generall (if not universall)” plot whose full extent was ultimately unknowable—“how far his tribes may spread is with the Lord our God to order.”59 Most colonists claimed to have “Great Reason to beleeve that there is an universall Combination of the indians,” even if evidence of a conspiracy was lacking, and nearly all were convinced that “the confederacy of the indians is larger than yet we see.”60 Samuel Gorton, who concluded that such fears were unfounded, was, as usual, of a different mind than his fellow colonists. “There is a rumour as though all the Indians were in combination and confederacie to exterpate and root out the English,” Gorton observed. “For my own part,” he boasted, “I fear no such thing.”61
Gorton was almost certainly right, but it is easy enough to see why the English were prone to suspect such a conspiracy. They believed, after all, that the Indians would behave as they themselves had and ally with their “countrymen.” Meanwhile, most Indians expected the English to behave as they themselves did, loyal largely to a single tribe, and failed to understand why the colonists were obligated to what must have seemed to them a distant and weak authority. When a group of Narragansett Indians asked Roger Williams “why the Massachusets and Rode Island rose, and joynd with Plymmouth against Phillip and left not Phillip and Plymmouth to fight it out,” Williams found it necessary to give them a lesson in English political culture. “All the Colonies were Subject to one King Charls,” Williams explained, “and it was his pleasure and our Dutie and Engagement for one English man to stand to the death by Each other in all parts of the world.”62 A few weeks earlier John Easton had considered it necessary to issue a similar warning to the Wampanoags. If “blud was spilt” in a war against the English, Easton cautioned, “that ingadged all Englishmen for we wear to be all under one king.”63
When both the Narragansetts and Wampanoags fought against English colonists, the colonists assumed that the two tribes (and possibly others, some as far away as Maryland and Virginia) had formed a powerful alliance, but when colonists from both Plymouth and Massachusetts allied, the Indians assumed that each colony must have a separate grievance.64 These twin reactions—the colonists’ fear of a widespread Indian conspiracy, and the Indians’ perplexity at the ties that bound all colonists to a distant monarch—suggest just how poorly the two peoples understood each others political cultures and systems of government. For the Indians, the colonists’ (perhaps willful) misunderstanding of the nature of Indian political authority had far-reaching consequences, the most important of which was the denial of Indian sovereignty, a perception that formed the underpinnings of the legality of their enslavement.
Exactly because the enslavement of Indians gave few New England colonists pause, it must be considered as a critical step in the evolution toward an increasingly racialized ideology of the differences between Europeans and Indians. Unlike the sixteenth-century Spanish, seventeenth-century English colonists in New England failed to articulate an elaborate or cohesive philosophy of racial difference. Yet a growing perception of difference, however poorly stated or unelaborated, had begun to pervade the colonists’ thinking. Much as New England’s colonists might seem to borrow bits and pieces of moral or political philosophy articulated during the debate about the Spanish conquest (Leverett drawing, implicitly, from Vitoria, or Eliot explicitly citing Las Casas), most of these borrowings were uncredited. Even as the specter of “Spanish Cruelties” haunted Englishmen and-women in New England, its moral underpinnings had become largely incorporated into their own world-view. There was no need for the Massachusetts Council to debate the legality and morality of enslaving captured Indians; the 1641 Body of Liberties answered any legal arguments, and the sneaking though widespread suspicion that Indians were in fact less than human (and thus satisfied Aristotle’s conditions for what constituted natural slaves) answered any moral complaints. Most important, a public response to Eliot’s petition was unnecessary, at least in part, because that question had already been settled, in a sense, in Valladolid more than a century earlier.
In every measurable way King Philip’s War was a harsher conflict than any Indian-English conflict that preceded it. It took place on a grander scale; it lasted longer; the methods both sides employed were more severe; and the language the English adopted to justify and document it was more dismissive of Indian culture—Indian religious beliefs; Indian warfare; Indians’ use of the land; and, ultimately, Indian sovereignty—than it had ever been before. In some important ways King Philip’s War was a defining moment, when any lingering, though slight, possibility for Algonquian political and cultural autonomy was lost and when the English moved one giant step closer to the worldview that would create, a century and a half later, the Indian removal policy adopted by Andrew Jackson.
What the colonists moved toward (but never fully embraced) in their writing about King Philip’s War was the idea that Indians were not, in fact, truly human, or else were humans of such a vastly different race as to be considered essentially, and biologically, inferior to Europeans. Europeans had contemplated this possibility from their first encounters with America, but, as many historians have pointed out, a rigid system of racial classification would be centuries in development. Although the excessive concern about Indian and English identities and the reinforcement of boundaries between the two peoples are arguably the most salient features of King Philip’s War, colonists rarely expressed this concern in explicitly racial terms. For the most part this concern can be better understood as part of a set of anxieties about cultural or even ethnic identities and, for the English to a limited extent, about an emerging sense of national identity (as English men and women, not as Americans). Nevertheless, signposts pointing toward racial taxonomies can be spotted at occasional moments of intense cultural conflict. A sense of racial identity emerges by the English, for instance, when the colonists persistently make ideological, if not necessarily always linguistic, distinctions between “slaves” and “captives”; only because Indians are somehow less than human can they be fully enslaved in a way Europeans never could.
III
WHEN NATHANIEL SALTONSTALL’S Continuation of the State of New-England was printed in early 1676, it appeared, as advertised on the title page, Together with an Account of the Intended Rebellion of the Negroes in the Barbadoes. To readers in London, King Philip’s War and the Barbadian rebellion must have seemed bound together even more tightly than the stitching in the book’s binding. In the summer of 1675, while King Philip’s War raged in New England, hundreds of African slaves in Barbados had allegedly contrived a massive rebellion that, had it not been discovered, might have forced the English colonists to flee the island. Terrified English colonists in Barbados believed that the Africans had “intended to Murther all the White People there,” just as panicked English colonists in New England feared that the Indians had “risen almost round the countrey.”65 The parallels between the two uprisings were uncanny and profoundly disquieting. Barbados and New England, Saltonstall suggested, had “tasted of the same Cup.”66
Meanwhile, in Virginia, still more terror loomed. In the winter of 1676, bands of Indians began attacking outlying English settlements, and William Berkeley, the colony’s governor, was not inclined to see this series of events as mere coincidence, either. If Barbados and New England tasted of the same cup, so did Virginia. “The infection of the Indianes in New-England,” Berkeley maintained, “has dilated it selfe to the Merilanders and the Northern parts of Virginia.”67 Jonathan Atkins, governor of Barbados, agreed. In November 1675 Atkins warned London officials that “the ships from New England still bring advice of burni
ng, killing, and destroying daily done by the Indians, and the infection extends as far as Maryland and Virginia.”68 Fearful of a similar “infection,” Atkins must have resolved that ships from New England might bring bad news to Barbados, but they would not be allowed to bring bad Indians. In June 1676 the Barbadian legislature passed an act “to prevent the bringing of Indian slaves, and as well to send away and transport those already brought to this island from New England and adjacent colonies, being thought a people of too subtle, bloody and dangerous inclination to be and remain here.”69 Now, New Englanders’ vicious words of war, calling Indians “subtle, bloody and dangerous,” came back to haunt them, making one of their most valuable wartime commodities, Indian slaves, almost entirely unmarketable.
Jonathan Atkins and the Barbadian legislature no doubt learned of the abominableness of New England’s Indians through letters or informal reports or by reading any one of the printed pamphlets, gazettes, or books about the war brought by ship to ports throughout the English-speaking world. Yet they need not have looked so far. When New England authorities shipped captured Indians to the nether parts of the English empire to be sold as slaves, they literally advertised the odiousness of their cargo. As Leverett and Winslow’s slave certificates declared, these were “heathen Malefactors” capable of “notorious barbarous and execrable murthers, villanies and outrages.”
No one knows what happened to most of the men, women, and children sold out of New England as slaves. Captain Thomas Smith’s Seaflower arrived in Jamaica in early November 1676, but whether he was able to unload his cargo there is unclear. The ship itself was seized by the French at Jamaica in 1690, and Smith seems to have died in Boston in 1688. We do know a bit more about Smith himself, however. Thomas Smith was more than a mariner; he was also a painter. His remarkable self-portrait (perhaps the earliest self-portrait in the English colonies) tells us a good deal about the man. He painted himself with a seascape in the window to mark his seafaring and with his right hand resting on a skull, a paperweight holding down a page on which is written Smiths versified philosophy of life and death, and of the “wiles” of war:
Why why should I the world be minding
therein a World of Evils Finding
Then Farwell World: Farwell thy Jarres thy joies thy Toies thy wiles thy Warrs
Truth Sounds Retreat: I am not sorye.
The Eternall Drawes to him my heart
By Faith (which can thy Force Subvert)
To Crowne me (after Grace) with Glory.70
Thomas Smith’s self-portrait, Boston, 1670—91. Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. Museum purchase
Of Smith’s cargo, and the hundreds of other Algonquians shipped out of the colonies, including Philip’s son, we know precious little. By the time Philip’s son left the colonies, Barbados and Jamaica had both passed legislation preventing the importation of Indians from New England, “being thought a people of too subtle, bloody and dangerous inclination.”71 Turned away at port after port, it is possible that slave ships from New England simply dumped their now valueless cargo somewhere in the Caribbean Sea, or abandoned groups of New England Indians on uninhabited islands. Perhaps some number of them were illegally smuggled into English colonies in the West Indies. Yet one small piece of evidence, a letter from John Eliot to Robert Boyle written in 1683, suggests that at least some New England Indians, after being bounced from port to port, were shipped all the way to Africa. Greatly distressed, Eliot reported that
A vessel carried away a great number of our surprised Indians, in the times of our wars, to sell them for slaves, but the nations, whither she went, would not buy them. Finally, she left them at Tangier; there they be, so many as live, or are born there. An Englishman, a mason, came thence to Boston, he told me they desired I would use some means for their return home. I know not what to do in it; but now it is in my heart to move your honour, so to mediate, that they may have leave to get home, either from thence hither, or from thence to England, and so to get home.72
It is unlikely that Eliot received any assistance from Boyle, or that any Algonquians still alive in Tangier or elsewhere ever made it to England, much less to New England. Twenty years later Cotton Mather found their destination scripturally appropriate:
’tis a Prophesy in Deut. 28, 68. The Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee. Thou shalt see it no more again; and there shall we be sold unto your Enemies, and no Man shall buy you. This did our Eliot imagine accomplished, when the Captives taken by us in our late Wars upon them, were sent to be sold, in the Coasts lying not very remote from Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea, and scarce any Chapmen would offer to take them off.73
Now the New England clergy who had decided to sell Philip’s son into slavery might well cite Jeremiah 22:12: “But he shall die in the place whither they have led him captive, and shall see this land no more.”74
Chapter 7
THAT BLASPHEMOUS LEVIATHAN
On a sultry day in August 1676, in a swamp near Mount Hope neck, Captain Benjamin Church triumphantly announced to his soldiers that Philip had been shot dead, “upon which the whole army gave three loud huzzas.” Church then ordered that the slain sachem “be pulled out of the mire to the upland.” Some Indian soldiers taking “hold of him by his stockings, and some by his small breeches (being otherwise naked),” Philip’s body was dragged along a narrow path, out of the muddy swamp, “and a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast he looked like.” Standing over the corpse, Church announced that since Philip “had caused many an Englishman’s body to be unburied, and to rot above ground, not one of his bones should be buried.” This, however, was not the last indignity the dead man would suffer. Soon Church called an “old Indian executioner,” who briefly eulogized over Philip, saying that “he had been a very great man, and had made many a man afraid of him, but so big as he was, he would now chop his arse for him.”1
Next the executioner beheaded and quartered the body. (In Boston, Increase Mather would later relish the image of Philip being “hewed in pieces before the Lord.”)2 That done, Church had Philip’s four quarters hung from four trees, but he gave one bit of butchered flesh, Philip’s hand, to Alderman, the Indian who had shot him, “to show to such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities upon him.” Alderman earned “many a penny” by this employment (as tradition has it, he preserved the hand in a bucket of rum).3 Other soldiers may have taken other trophies; in the nineteenth century, dozens of objects said to have once belonged to Philip would turn up in New England museum collections—Philips belt, his bow, his bowl, and, most famously, his war club.4In late August 1676, when Church captured one of Philip’s chief advisers, Annawon, he was given “Philip’s royalties,” which, appropriately enough, may have ended up in Windsor Castle. In the spring of 1677 Josiah Winslow sent “the best of the ornaments and treasure of sachem Phillip the grande Rebell” (his “Crowne, his gorge, and two belts”) to the king of England.5 But the biggest prize of all was Philip’s bloody, severed head.
Philip was killed on August 12. On August 17 Plymouth Colony celebrated a day of thanksgiving. Such days of prayerful gratitude, like days of fasting and humiliation, had been observed in the colonies for years. Philip’s father, Massasoit, is best remembered today for having attended the Pilgrims’ “first thanksgiving,” in 1621. That thanksgiving, however, was only an autumn harvest festival, not a declared religious holiday.6 But in 1676, Massasoit’s son Philip—or, rather, his son’s head—made an appearance at a true thanksgiving. On August 17, soon after the Reverend John Cotton finished his thanksgiving day sermon, Captain Benjamin Church and his soldiers arrived in Plymouth, carrying Philip’s head. (Church received thirty shillings for it, which he considered to be “scanty reward, and poor encouragement.”)7 Philip’s head was then staked on a tall pole for public viewing. It must have been the centerpiece of the celebration. To Increase Mather, the timing seemed providential: God had given Philip’s head “to be
meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness … the very day of their solemn Festival.”8 Even after the feasting of thanksgiving had come to an end, Philip’s head remained at its post. For decades. In 1718, when Benjamin Church fell off his horse, died, and was buried, Philip’s decaying, desiccated skull may still have cast a shadow over the town of Plymouth.
