The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  2William Ames, Conscience, with the Power and Cases Thereof (London, 1643), 184. Ames also warned against the excesses of vengeance: “Those that are guilty, are not to bee hurt any further then the compassing the just end of the Warre doth require, that is so farre, that they make a faire restitution of the thing taken away, or that the injury bee sufficiently revenged, or a peace established” (190-91).

  3Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part 3, question 159, article 2.

  4Michael Zuckerman has argued that “descendants of the original pioneers did their best to recover the culture their parents had left behind, but the pioneers themselves often embarked upon the ocean passage in a willful rejection of the emerging English modes” (“Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987], 115). While I agree that the yearning for English ways intensified with each generation, I am arguing here that even the pioneering colonists, while they rejected much in England, never fundamentally rejected an English cultural identity.

  5Edward Winslow, in Hypocrisie Unmasked (1646), as quoted in John Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 58. Or, as William Bradford reported, “they heard a strange and uncouth language, and beheld the different manners and customs of the people, with their strange fashions and attires; all so far differing from that of their plain country villages, wherein they were bred and born and had so long lived, as it seemed they were come into a new world” (Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, ed. Alexander Young [Boston, 1841], 33).

  6David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 192; see also ch. 8.

  7Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed. John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 85.

  8Daniel Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians of New England,” MHSC, 3rd ser., 1:223.

  9Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 60-64; Zuckerman, “Identity in British America,” 137-38. Zuckerman, summarizing the paradox articulated by Michael Kammen, writes, “The colonists emphasized the heathenism of other races in the New World in order to reassure themselves of their own Christian character in the wilderness. But their Christian identity constrained them to convert the heathen and risk eradicating the very contrast on which they had predicated their religious conception of themselves” (153). See Michael Kammen, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), and also earlier scholarship on the construction of American “savages,” e.g., Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967; rev. ed., 1973), especially ch. 2; Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); and Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), especially 4-7, 19-35.

  10Increase Mather, The Day of Trouble is Near (Cambridge, Mass., 1674), 21-23.

  11Samuel Danforth, The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into (Cambridge, Mass., 1674), 5.

  12Quoted in James Muldoon, “The Indian as Irishman,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 11 (1975): 275-76.

  13James Axtell, “The White Indians,” in The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 302-27. On the similarities between English ideas about the Irish and about Indians, see Muldoon, “The Indian as Irishman,” 267-89; David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); and Nicholas Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” WMQ 30 (1973): 575-98.

  14Gabriel Sagard-Théodat, Histoire du Canada et Voyages que les frères Mineurs Recollects y ont faicts pour la Conversion des Infidèlles depuis Van 1615 (Paris: Sonnius, 1636), 166. Quoted in Olive Patricia Dickason, “From ‘One Nation’ in the Northeast to ‘New Nation in the Northwest: A Look at the Emergence of the Metis,” in Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds., The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Metis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 23.

  15And, as Michael Zuckerman has argued, “The more the colonists fell short of their own standards of civility, the more vehemently they inveighed against the savagery of others” (“Identity in British America,” 152).

  16Quoted in William Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 63.

  17Easton, “Relacion,” 10.

  18Increase Mather, The Necessity of Reformation (Boston, 1679), 5.

  19The colonists were unconcerned about sparing their Indian allies because these were either members of very weakened tribes or individuals who had already subjected themselves politically to the English. Also, according to English Puritan thought, Christians could enlist the aid of infidels in war, since “as it is lawfull to use the helpe of beasts, as of Elephants, Horses, &c. So also is it lawfull to use the aid of beastlike men” (Ames, Conscience, 188-89).

  20The full stanza reads: “Wee Came to wild America / whos native brood to divels pray / a savig race for blud that thirst / off all the nations most acurst / ffrom ffamin, scurvi, feare they past / and yit for all god did at last / as he in wisdom most devine / purg ther dros from purer Coyne” (Walker, “Captan Perse,” 86).

  21Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 47-49. Peter Furtado has argued that “the later seventeenth century was the time when the language of patriotism became firmly established in the repertoire of English political rhetoric” (“National Pride in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, vol. 1: History and Politics [London: Routledge, 1989], 44).

  22John Eliot to the Massachusetts governor and Council in Boston, August 13, 1675, PCR 10:451-52.

  23As Myron Gilmore has argued, “The literature on the New World furnished material for religious and national polemics: condemnation of Spanish colonialism and of forced conversion, praise for French and English motives and for their treatment of Indians” (“The New World in French and English Historians of the Sixteenth Century,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976], 525).

  24Richard Hakluyt, “Discourse on Western Planting” (1584), in Jack P. Greene, ed., Settlements to Society, 1607-1763: A Documentary History of Colonial America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 7-8.

  25Sir Walter Ralegh, “Of the Voyage for Guiana,” in Robert H. Schomburgk, ed., The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana … by Sir W. Ralegh, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, no. 3 (n.d.; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 143.

  26Mather, Brief History, 41.

  27The one interruption to peaceful relations, the Pequot War of 1637, was given brief treatment as a just and entirely defensive war. See John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War (Boston, 1736; reprinted in MHSC, 2nd ser., 8 [1826]); Philip Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell fought in New-England (London, 1638; reprinted in MHSC, 3rd ser., 6 [1837]); John Underhill, News from America; or, a New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638); reprinted in MHSC, 3rd ser., 6 [1837]). For a recent scholarly history of that conflict see Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

  28Roger Williams to the Commissioners of the United Colonies, October 5, 1654, PCR 10:439-40.

  29Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Tears of the Indians: Being An Historical and true Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People (London, 1656), trans. J. P., Preface.

  30Canup makes a related argument
in Out of the Wilderness, in a chapter aptly titled “The Triumph of Indianism” (149-97).

  31See, e.g., James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London, 1642), and Samuel Clarke, A Generall Martryologie (London, 1651). Germany’s atrocities were publicized most notably in The Lamentations of Germany, printed in London in 1638, after being translated into English by Philip Vincent, probably the same Philip Vincent who had authored an account of the Pequot War. James D. Drake has observed and explored the coincidence of Vincent’s probable authorship of both tracts (“Restraining Atrocity: The Puritan Conduct of King Philip’s War,” paper delivered at the Institute for Early American History and Culture Second Annual Conference, June 1996). This entire propaganda literature is powerfully analyzed in Barbara Donagan, “Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War,” AHR 99 (1994): 1137-66. On the traditions of Protestant martyrdom see John Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  32Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 230.

  33As Stephen J. Greenblatt has written, “the very conception that a culture is alien rests upon the perceived difference of that culture from one’s own behavioral codes, and it is precisely at the points of perceived difference that the individual is conditioned, as a founding principle of personal and group identity, to experience disgust” (“Filthy Rites,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture [New York: Routledge, 1990], 61). See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 191.

  On the necessity of viewing an enemy’s conduct during war as “savage,” see Thomas S. Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Values in War,” Anthropologica 34 (1992): 3-20.

  34Mather, Brief History, 136-38.

  35Nathaniel Knowles, “The Torture of Captives by the Indians of Eastern North America,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings 82 (1940): 151-225; Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 103-7; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 66-71; Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” WMQ 40 (1983): 530-34; and Adam J. Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England,” JAH 74 (1988): 1192. On the cultural differences (and similarities) between European and Indian torture see Jennings, Invasion of America, 161-65.

  36Stonewall John (who was also known as “Stonelayer John” and “John Wall Maker”) was reported killed during the two-day campaign during which this torture/execution took place; others who were captured with him were taken to English towns for trial, public execution, or sale (Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 96; Samuel Gardner Drake, Book of the Indians [Boston, 1841], 3:77-78). As Patrick M. Malone has pointed out, earlier historians, skeptical that an Indian could have considerable construction and craft skills, made the error of believing Stonewall John must have been a renegade colonist (The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians [Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1991], 75).

  37Roger Williams to [Robert Williams?], April 1, 1676, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie (Providence: Brown University Press, 1988), 2:723.

  38Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 76.

  39Hubbard, Narrative, 1:16.

  40Hubbard, Narrative, 1:244. See also Major John Talcott to the Connecticut War Council, Hartford, July 4, 1676, CCR 2:458. Talcott summarized the expedition but did not relate the story of the torture of the captured Narragansett man. On Talcott’s campaign see Douglas Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958; reprint, East Orleans, Mass.: Parnassus Imprints, 1992), 211-12.

  41Connecticut War Council, Hartford, to Governor Andros, New York, August 19, 1676, CCR 2:469. Emphasis mine.

  42Francis Bland, The Souldiers March to Salvation (Yorke, 1647), 30.

  43On this paradox more generally, see Hayden White, “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish,” in First Images of America, 121-35, especially 132.

  44Hubbard, Narrative, 2:64.

  45Church, Entertaining History, 65-67. Church, however, ended up fighting the man whose execution he refused to watch, after the Nipmuck tried to escape. Although the published account was actually written by Benjamin Church’s son Thomas, it followed Church’s own papers and recollections. But because Church’s narrative was written so much later than the others, and secondhand, I rely on it very little in the first three parts of this study On the question of the authorship of Entertaining History (first published under the title Entertaining Passages), see Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, eds., So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676-1677 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 376, and Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 577n.

  46Church, Entertaining History, 147-49.

  47On the perils of writing about cruelty see Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1984), ch. 1: “Putting Cruelty First,” 7-44. On the perilous position the historian occupies in resurrecting and retelling scenes of cruelty see Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse,” in Learning to Curse, 13.

  Chapter 1 • BEWARE OF ANY LINGUIST

  1Winslow and Hinckley, “Narrative,” 362. Mather, Relation, 74-75. Variant spellings of John Sassamon’s last name include Sausiman, Sossiman, Sosoman, Sausimun, Sausaman, Sosoman, Sosaman, Sasamand, Wussasoman, and Wussasamon.

  2Winslow and Hinckley, “Narrative,” 363.

  3PCR 5:167. Variant spellings of Mattashunannamo’s name include Mattashunnamo, Mattashanamo, Mattushamama, and Mattashinnamy. Wampapaquan is also rendered as Wampapaum.

  4Mather, Brief History, 48. Variant spellings of William Nahauton’s last name include Ahaton, Ahatton, Ahawton, Hahaton, and Nahaton.

  5Mather, Relation, 74-75; C. Mather, Magnalia, 559-60. For the official account of the trial see PCR 5:159, 167-68. Contemporary accounts of Sassamon’s death and of the subsequent trial of his alleged murderers also include Hubbard, Narrative, 1:60-64; Mather, Brief History, 47-53; Saltonstall, Present State, 24-25; Saltonstall, Continuation, 54-55. Scholarly discussions of the trial include James Drake, “Symbol of a Failed Strategy: The Sassamon Trial, Political Culture, and the Outbreak of King Philip’s War,” AICRJ 19 (1995): 111-41; James P. and Jeanne Ronda, “The Death of John Sassamon: An Exploration in Writing New England Indian History,” American Indian Quarterly 1 (1974): 91-102; David Bushnell, “The Treatment of the Indians in Plymouth Colony,” NEQ 26 (1953): 214-15; and Yasuhide Kawashima, Puritan Justice and the Indian: White Mans Law in Massachusetts, 1630-1763 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 129, 131, 232-33.

  6PCR 5:167.

  7Saltonstall, Present State, 25.

  8On Philip’s men arming outside Plymouth see John Brown to Josiah Winslow, June 11, 1675, Winslow Papers, MHS. English accounts of the beginning of the war are varied, and some contradict one another, but most concur in dating the outbreak of fighting to June 24 (e.g., Brief and True Narration, 5; Hubbard, Narrative, 1:64-65; Mather, Brief History, 54). John Easton’s “Relacion” differs from most in telling the story of a young English boy firing the first shot on June 23, killing an Indian who was looting English houses (“Relacion,” 8-12). And Nathaniel Saltonstall reported that two colonists were killed at Swansea on June 23 (Present State, 26-29). See also Josiah Winslow to John Leverett, June 21, 1675, Mass. Arch. 67:202. There is some evidence that Philip, while he had intended to wage war against the English, had not wanted the war to begin when it did, and that his preparations were incomplete (see Hubbard, Narrative, 1:48; Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 20-22, 64).

  9Hubbard, Narrative, 1:67-68. On the colonists’ p
enchant for such interpretations see Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760,” AHR 84 (1979): 317-46; and David Hall, Words of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 76-94. On other omens forecasting the course of the war see William Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 271.

  10Roger Williams, June 25, 1675, Roger Williams Papers, AAS. Easton, “Relacion,” 7.

  11PCR 5:167-68. Mather, Relation, 74-75. C. Mather, Magnalia, 559-60.

  12Easton, “Relacion,” 7-8.

  13Massachusetts Council to Josiah Winslow, April 21, 1676, Mass. Arch. 68:200; reprint, NEHGR 41 (1887): 400-401. William Nahauton’s credibility is indeed somewhat compromised by his extraordinary allegiance to the English, a loyalty that will be demonstrated in subsequent chapters; before the war he worked with Eliot at converting Philip, and after the war he petitioned the Massachusetts Council for several favors he believed owed him due to his service. His relationship with John Sassamon was probably a close one; in 1679 he petitioned the authorities of Plymouth Colony for the release of John Sassamon’s sister from servitude (PCR 10:366).

  14Easton, “Relacion,” 7. Just months after Sassamon’s trial the Plymouth court had investigated a similar death, and in that case they did determine that one John Fallowell had indeed been “accessary to his owne death” by drowning himself (PCR 5:182).

  15For example, the contrived basis for the Pequot War in 1637, the best account of which can be found in Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), ch. 3.

  16Since I once nearly drowned after falling through the ice on a frozen pond, I can attest personally to the nature of the injuries sustained in such an accident. For corroboration I checked with a pathologist, who confirmed that injuries and bruises to the neck strongly suggest strangulation and that the neck and throat are extremely unlikely to sustain injuries in a frozen pond drowning since those areas are, relatively speaking, protected; instead, the hands and arms are most vulnerable (James Connolly, M.D., pathologist, Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, personal communication, November 4, 1996).