by Jill Lepore
17Josiah Winslow to John Winthrop, Jr., July 29, 1675, MHSC, 5th ser., 1 (1871): 429. Cotton Mather wrote that “though they were all successively turned off the ladder at the gallows, utterly denying the fact, yet the last of them happening to break or slip the rope, did, before his going off the ladder again, confess that the other Indians did really murder John Sausaman, and that he himself, though no actor in it, yet a looker on” (Magnalia, 560). In any event, Wampapaquan was “afterwards shott to death within the said month” (PCR 5:167).
18Saltonstall, Continuation, 54-55. Mather, Brief History, 49. Easton, “Relacion,” 8. This version of the story is by far the most common; see, for example, Brief and True Narration, 4.
19Mather, Brief History, 48. Saltonstall, Present State, 24-25. Philip Walker also voiced this interpretation: “To send a ffelow of so low degree / that woss subservil as wee know wos hee / put ffrom his master upon Ielose / To prate & preach give lawes & teach / to men above his spher & reach” (“Captan Perse,” 90).
20Easton, “Relacion,” 7. This “will,” if it existed, was more likely a land deed; Sassamon served as scribe for many.
21The Indian interpreter, or “cultural broker,” has been the subject of considerable recent scholarship. See, for example, Nancy L. Hagedorn, “‘A Friend to Go Between Them’: The Interpreter as Cultural Broker during Anglo-Iroquois Councils, 1740-70,” Ethnohistory 35 (1988): 60-80; and Margaret Connell Szasz, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
22Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons; reprint, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905), 486.
23Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 34; also M. I. Finley, “Myth, Memory, and History,” History and Theory 4 (1965): 281-302; and Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).
24Anthropological works on notions of time and history in oral cultures include Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and Robert Borofsky, Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Constructions of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On the disappearing line between history and fiction see Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). And on popular perceptions of history see David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a discussion of this convergence of anthropological and historical theory see Rappaport, The Politics of Memory, 10-14.
25As Brian Street has argued, “faith in the power and qualities of literacy is itself socially learnt and is not an adequate tool with which to embark on a description of its practice” (Literacy in Theory and Practice [London: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 1). See also Harvey Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), and Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
26Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3-26, 27-34. Martin identifies the “problem” as Western-bred historians’ failure to fully understand Native Americans’ intriguing “metaphysics,” “their astounding ability to annul time, their remarkable capacity to repudiate systematically time and history.” According to Martin, white historians writing Indian history have underestimated the importance of myth in Indian societies and have imposed their own Western perceptions of historical reality onto their Indian subjects.
27PCR 10:362.
28On such epidemics and their consequences see Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1300-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), especially 176 on the English settlers’ reception at Dorchester.
29Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 191. While later chroniclers, such as Cotton Mather, would casually note that Sassamon “was the son of Christian Indians,” earlier observers, such as Cotton’s father, Increase, specified that Sassamon’s “father and mother liv[ed] in Dorchester, and they both died Christians.” (C. Mather, Magnalia, 559-60; Mather, Relation, 74 [emphasis mine]). This may seem a minor distinction, but it provides an important clue: the elder Mather’s implication is that Sassamon’s parents converted only at the time of their deaths.
30[John Eliot?], New England’s First Fruits (London, 1643); reprinted in Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 423.
31My guess is that Sassamon was in his mid-teens when he participated in the Pequot War. In 1673 Sassamon had at least one daughter who was grown and married, and I would estimate he was in his mid-fifties the year he died. This estimate is not inconsistent with Samuel Eliot Morison’s claim that Sassamon was “a man of forty-five to fifty years old” by 1670 (Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century [Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936], 353).
32John Underhill, News from America; or, a New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638); reprinted in MHSC, 3rd ser., 6 (1837): 9.
33Describing the Indian captives he was sending to Massachusetts, Captain Israel Stoughton wrote to the governor of the colony in 1637, “there is one … that is the fairest and largest that I saw amongst [the group of some fifty captives], to whom I have given a coate to cloathe her. It is my desire to have her for a servant…. There is a little squaw that steward Culacut desireth, to whom he hath given a coate…. Sosomon, the Indian, desireth a young little squaw, which I know not” (Samuel Gardner Drake, Book of the Indians [Boston, 1841], 2:107). Later Eliot would recall that Cockenoe was “a pregnant witted young man, who had been a servant in an English house, who pretty well understood his own language, and hath a clear pronunciation: Him I made my interpreter” (John Eliot, The Indian Grammar Begun [Cambridge, Mass., 1666], 66). See also William Wallace Tooker, John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher and Interpreter, Cockenoe-de-Long Island (New York: F. P. Harper, 1896), 11; and Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 111-13. Roger Williams, who negotiated with Callicott for Pequot captives, briefly hosted Sassamon at his house in Providence in August 1637 (Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Sr., August 20, 1637, and Williams to Winthrop, June 30, 1637, and September 9 and 12, 1637, Correspondence of Roger Williams, 113, 88, 119, 121). Although the editors claim that “it is doubtful that this Indian was John Sassamon,” I have found no evidence to contradict my theory about Sassamon’s age (see note 31, above). And in the 1870s, John Sassamon’s descendants claimed that “it is handed down traditionally that the Indian Sosomon, who aided the English in the Pequot War, was identical with John Sassamon, the educated and praying Indian, and that the young little squaw’ he desired and was permitted from among the female captives to take, was a daughter of the Pequot chief Sasscus, which daughter, Sassamon made his wife” (Ebenezer W. Peirce, Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy [1878; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972], 215). On Williams hosting Stoughton and his troops, see Roger Williams to Major John Mason, June 22, 1670, in MHSC, 1st series, 1 (1792): 277. Sassamon may later have been present at a treaty signing in Boston in 1645 when “Serjeant Callicutt & an Indian his man being present” (PCR 9:49).
34William Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1634; reprint, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 109-10. On Wood’s linguistic work see George F. Aubin, “Towards the Linguistic History of an Algonquia
n Dialect: Observations on the Wood Vocabulary,” Papers of the Ninth Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1978), 127-37. On early English-Indian communication see Kathleen Bragdon, “Linguistic Acculturation in Massachusett: 1663-1771,” Papers of the Twelfth Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1981), 121-32; Ives Goddard, “Some Early Examples of American Indian Pidgin English from New England,” IJAL 43 (1977): 37-41; Goddard, “A Further Note on Pidgin English,” IJAL 44 (1978): 73.
35Cotton Mather, The Life and Death of the Renown’d Mr. John Eliot (London, 1691), 76-78. For a powerful examination of European and American attitudes toward native tongues, see Edward Gray, “Indian Language in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1820” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1996).
36John Eliot, “The Day Breaking, if not the Sun-Rising of the gospel with the Indians in New England” (London, 1647), reprint, MHSC, 3rd series, 4 (1834): 5.
37Roger Williams, A Key to the Language of America, or an Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New-England (London, 1643); reprinted in RIHSC 1 (1827): 17-166; on lying, see 63-64.
38Cotton Mather’s Life and Death of… Eliot is only the first in a long hagiographic tradition in which Eliot is revered by evangelicals and linguists alike. See, e.g., Stephen A. Guice, “Early New England Missionary Linguistics,” Papers in the History of Linguistics, ed. Hans Aarsleff, Louis G. Kelly, et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987), 223-32. For a useful evaluation of the contributions of Wood, Williams, and Eliot see William Cowan, “Native Languages of North America: The European Response,” AICRJ 1 (1974): 3-10. Guice, “Early New England Missionary Linguistics,” 223-24, 228-29. James Constance Pilling remains the authority on works published in the Massachusett and other Algonquian languages. See Pilling, Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1891), but two linguists have recently published two extremely important volumes of translated manuscript writings in Massachusett: Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1988), 2 vols. See also J. Hammond Trumbull, “The Indian Tongue and Its Literature as Fashioned by Eliot and Others,” The Memorial History of Boston …, 1630-1880, ed. Justin Winsor (Boston: Ticknor & Company, 1880), 1: 465-80; George Littlefield, Early Boston Booksellers 1642-1711 (Boston: The Club of Odd Volumes, 1900), 72-75. While my emphasis here is primarily on Eliot himself, other English colonists were also involved in missionary work, most notably the Mayhews of Martha’s Vineyard, but also Abraham Peirce in Connecticut and Richard Bourne in Plymouth.
39As James Axtell has shown, the Puritans’ attempts at conversion were slowed because of their efforts to teach Indians to read. By contrast, Jesuits in New France used their own literacy as a magical tool of intimidation to gain converts. As Axtell argues, “The ability to read and write was awe-inspiring to the Indians largely because it duplicated a spiritual feat that only the greatest shamans could perform, namely, that of reading the mind of a person at a distance and thereby, in an oral context, foretelling the future…. every European who could read a handwritten note from a distant correspondent could, in effect, read the writer’s mind. Small wonder that the natives who first witnessed this amazing feat regarded the literate Europeans as greater than all mankind.’ “Puritans failed to capitalize on this mystical “power of print,” according to Axtell, partly because by the time they began their missionary work the novelty of literacy had worn off. Moreover, Axtell argues, Puritan missionaries such as Eliot were “culturally inflexible” and unable to assume the role of shaman. Finally, “the Protestant belief in the priesthood of all believers and the need for each Christian to confront the scriptural message directly led the English missionaries to translate their religious writings into native languages as quickly as possible and to open schools to teach Indian children to read and write. This, of course, diminished the mystery of the foreign language and the exalted status of the priestly caste of literate guardians and interpreters of God’s Word” (After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 86-99).
40Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” WMQ 31 (1974): 43; Szasz, Indian Education, 114-15.
41Hubbard, Narrative, 1:60; Mather, Brief History, 49; Saltonstall, Continuation, 54-55; “Rev. John Eliot’s Records of the First Church in Roxbury, Mass.,” NEHGR 33 (1879): 297.
42On Long Island, Cockenoe served as an interpreter between the Montauk Indians and the English (Tooker, John Eliot’s First Indian Interpreter, 18). One of Cockenoe’s last entries in the historical record is his signature on a petition during King Philip’s War, as counselor to a Long Island sachem, begging for the English to return guns taken during the war. The request was denied (54).
43Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett, 423.
44[Eliot?], New England’s First Fruits, 423.
45Hubbard, Narrative, 1:60.
46In 1649 Eliot recorded giving five pounds to the schoolmaster of Dorchester, where “the Children of those Indians that lived thereabout went, with a like good successe, if not better, because the children were bigger and more capable.” Eliot himself visited the Dorchester school: “I take my constant course of catechising them every Lecture day.” John Eliot, November 13, 1649, in Edward Winslow, “Glorious Progress of the gospel,” MHSC, 3rd ser., 4(1834): 88.
47Eliot, Indian Grammar, 4, 6.
48While I am here suggesting that Sassamon’s relationship with Eliot was reciprocal, I do not mean to discount the dramatic power imbalance between the two men. On this point see David Murray, who uses Eliot as a case study “to represent a characteristic white approach, which is to emphasize translation as an issue only when whites choose, or are forced, to do it, and to ignore it otherwise.” Meanwhile, Indian converts “are doing something culturally more sophisticated than the whites can manage, but it is being used as evidence of their lack of civilization” (Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts [London: Pinter Publishers, 1991], 7-8).
49On Natick and other praying towns see Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Sarah Jacobs, Nonantum and Natick (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1853); Dane Morrison, A Praying People: Massachusett Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600-1690 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Daniel Mandell,” ‘To Live More Like my Christian English Neighbors’: Natick Indians in the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ 48 (1991): 552-79; Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646-1730,” NEQ 63 (1990): 396-428; Elise Brenner, “Strategies for Autonomy: An Analysis of Ethnic Mobilization in Seventeenth-Century Southern New England” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1984). On praying Indians more generally see Salisbury, “Red Puritans”; James P. Ronda, “Generations of Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” WMQ 38 (1981): 369-94; James P. Ronda, “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” WMQ 34 (1977): 66-82; Robert James Naeher, “Dialogue in the Wilderness: John Eliot and the Indian Exploration of Puritanism as a Source of Meaning, Comfort, and Ethnic Survival,” NEQ 62 (1989): 346-68; Elise M. Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey: That is the Question: Strategies for Cultural Autonomy of Massachusetts Praying Town Indians,” Ethnohistory 27 (1980): 135-52; Kenneth M. Morrison, “‘That Art of Coyning Christians’: John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts,” Ethnohistory 21 (1974): 77-92; William S. Simmons, “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” NEQ 52 (1979): 197-218.
50John Eliot, “Letters of the Rev. John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians,” NEHGR 36 (1882): 298. Eliot, Strength out of Weakness; or a Glorious Manifestation of the further Progress of
the gospel among the Indians in New-England (London, 1652); reprinted in MHSC, 3rd series, 4 (1834): 168. September 15, 1656, accounts of the New England Company in PCR 10:167. According to Daniel Gookin, Indians, rather than Englishmen, served as teachers because “learned English young men do not hitherto incline or endeavour to fit themselves for that service, by learning the Indian language” (Daniel Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England [1674],” MHSC, 1st ser., 1 [1792]: 183). Or, as Eliot himself noted, “I find few English students willing to engage into so dim a work as this is. God hath in mercy raised up sundry among themselves to a competent ability to teach their countrymen” (John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues: A Study in Cultural Interaction [1671], ed. Henry W. Bowden and James P. Ronda [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980], 59).
51Eliot, Strength out of Weakness, 169-70.
52Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison found this troubling indeed and noted that “one would be inclined to discount the story of Sassamon’s Harvard affiliation” were it not for the conclusive records in the college steward’s accounts. In the steward’s accounts for 1653 there is an entry under the debits of John Eliot, Jr., that reads, “By Sasaman” in the amount of “7s 7d 1q” (Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 31 [1935]:150). As Morison derisively writes, “Therein, it was hoped, Indian youths might acquire a university education, which (through some obscure workings of the academic mind) was confidently expected to qualify them as teachers and converters of their pagan brethren. Although the failure of this enterprise was so complete as to raise among modern readers the suspicion that it was merely a blind to get a new building for Harvard College, there is no reason to suppose it to have been anything but straightforward and sincere” (Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 341). Subsequent scholars have disagreed with Morison’s defense of Harvard’s intentions. Szasz has a more positive interpretation of Indian education, but most scholars follow Neal Salisbury’s lead in arguing that Indian education was a last resort of impoverished Indians. Bobby Wright, for example, argues that “only when war and disease had disintegrated tribal integrity and left Indian communities vulnerable to English domination did Indians embrace Christianity and European culture” (Bobby Wright,” Tor the Children of the Infidels?’: American Indian Education in Colonial Colleges,” AICRJ 12 [1988]: 2). See also Szasz, Indian Education, especially 126-28. On Sassamon at Harvard see Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 352-53. On Indian students at Harvard see Walter T. Meserve, “English Works of Seventeenth-Century Indians,” AQ 8 (1956): 264-76.
