The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  53John Eliot, July 8, 1649, in Henry Whitfield, The Light appearing more and more towards the perfect Day … (London, 1651); reprinted in MHSC, 3rd ser., 4 (1834): 121.

  54John Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.: Charles William Sever, 1873).

  55Morison, Founding of Harvard College, 161-62, and also Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 342-43.

  56Gookin, “Historical Collections,” 173.

  57A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the gospel amongst the Indians in New England (London, 1655); reprinted in MHSC, 3rd ser., 4 (1834): 274.

  58We can eliminate two other praying Indians who would otherwise seem likely candidates: Cockenoe had abandoned Eliot at least five years earlier, and the Natick schoolmaster Monequassum was ill at the time of examination (and would soon die). Job Nesuton, another Natick schoolmaster, could have participated in the scandal, but he, unlike Sassamon, seems to have been always loyal to Eliot. See A Late and Further Manifestation, 261-87.

  59Johnson was appointed to serve “in the Art of Printer for the printinge of the Bible in the Indian language and such other Books as he shall be directed to print for an duringe the terme of Three yeares” (Mass. Arch. 10:205). The Boston merchant and bookseller Hezekiah Usher traveled to London to secure the necessary fonts and paper for Eliot’s Indian Bible (Littlefield, Early Boston Booksellers, 72). See also Robert F. Roden, The Cambridge Press, 1638-1692 (New York: Burt Franklin, 19), 77-91; James Constance Pilling, A Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages, 127-84; J. Hammond Trumbull, “The Indian Tongue,” 465-80.

  60Drake, Book of the Indians, 1:115.

  61John Eliot, The Indian Primer (Cambridge, Mass., 1669), 14.

  62Hugh Amory, First Impressions: Printing in Cambridge, 1639-1989 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 39.

  63John Eliot, “An Account of Indian Churches in New-England, in a letter written A.D. 1673,” MHSC, 1st ser., 10 (1809): 127.

  64All data are from Daniel Gookin, “Historical Collections,” 195-98. I have not here listed Gookin’s partial data on praying towns in Connecticut, Marthas Vineyard, and Nantucket.

  65This survey of literacy rates can be found in a letter from Richard Bourne to Daniel Gookin dated September 1, 1664, and reprinted in Gookin’s “Historical Collections,” 197-98.

  66Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York, 1974), 13. These English literacy rates are in no way exact; what they measure is “signing literacy,” the proportion of the population that signed documents with a written name rather than a mark. Since reading was taught before writing, some who signed with a mark may have been able to read and, frustratingly, people who sign documents one year may use a mark the next, making such a measure even less reliable.

  67Early Records of the Town of Providence (Providence, 1892), 5:283. Alexander signed here with an “A.”

  68Alexander died while being brought to be interrogated by the English, even though he claimed he was too ill to travel; rumor (reported by Easton, among others) was that he may have been poisoned by the English or treated harshly in the journey. There is no way of knowing whether Sassamon was with Alexander on this fateful journey, though it seems likely.

  69PCR 4:25-26.

  70Hubbard, Narrative, 1:60.

  71“When Philip and Wootonekanuske his wife, sold, in 1664, Mattapoisett to William Brenton, Sassamon was a witness and interpreter. The same year he was Philip’s agent ‘in settling the bounds of Acushenok, Coaksett, and places adjacent.’ Again, in 1665, he witnessed the receipt of £10 paid to Philip on account of settling the bounds the year before” (Drake, Book of the Indians, 3:10). See also PCR 12:237; deed of Philip, June 9, 1665, mss. bound, MHS.

  72C. Mather, Magnalia, 559.

  73Gookin, “Historical Collections,” 200.

  74C. Mather, Magnalia, 514.

  75John Eliot to the Commissioners of the United Colonies, August 25, 1664, PCR 10:383-84.

  76The events of 1671 are well summarized in Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes,” 89-95.

  77“Instructions from the Church at Natick to William and Anthony,” August 1, 1671, MHSC, 1st ser., 6 (1799): 201-3.

  78James Walker to Governor Prince, September 1, 1671, MHSC, 1st ser., 6 (1799): 197-98.

  79Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 61.

  80PCR 12:230. On March 11, 1674, “old Tuspaquin and William Watuspaquin” allotted Felix, John Sassamon’s son-in-law, 581/2 acres in Assawampsett. The same year, “old Watuspaquin” granted “John Sassamon; allies Wussasoman twenty seaven acrees of land for a home lott; att Assowamsett Necke,” which Sassamon in turn deeded to his daughter and son-in-law: “This abovesaid land John Sassamon above Named Gave unto his son in law ffelix, in Marriage with his daughter Bettey, as appeers by a line or two rudely written; by the said John Sassamons owne hand but onely witnessed by the said old Watuspaquen.” In 1673 Tuspaquin and William Tuspaquin had given a (separate?) tract of land to Betty, John Sassamon’s daughter, and Tobias (who was later executed for Sassamon’s murder) signed as a witness to the deed (PCR 12:235). The elder Tuspaquin (also known as the “Black Sachem”) was a shaman (William Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984 [Hanover, N.H.: University of New England Press, 1986], 42-43).

  81Mather, Brief History, 49-50. Gookin, “Historical Account,” 440. Saltonstall, Present State, 24-25.

  82Easton, “Relacion,” 10. Easton’s reporting of this complaint is, however, subject to some question, and may have been motivated by his own disagreement with Puritan missionary efforts. Easton’s wording sounds very much like a report made by Quaker leader George Fox when he visited Rhode Island in 1672. Fox wrote in his journal, “In New England there was an Indian king that said he saw that there were many of their people of the Indians turned to the New England professors. He said they were worse since than they were before they left their own religion; and of all religions he said the Quakers were the best” (John L. Nickalls, ed., The Journal of George Fox [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952], 524). Fox may have met with Philip (with Easton along as well), or he may simply have been told about Philip’s rejection of Eliot’s gestures. In either case it’s worth recalling that while Easton’s perspective on Philip’s hostility to Massachusetts’ missionaries and their converts is significantly corroborated, Easton did have his own motives in highlighting this hostility. It was, in effect, a Quaker party line.

  83Easton, “Relacion,” 7. One historian has recently argued that from the natives’ perspective, Christianity was a “new cult” that “created an alternate social structure, essentially a new path to power within and among bands” and that “threatened some of the most basic premises of native society” (Lonkhuyzen, “Reappraisal of the Praying Indians,” 404, 419-21). On Sassamon, more generally, as a “sutl knave,” see Walker, “Captan Perse,” 90.

  84C. Mather, Magnalia, 559.

  85John Allyn to Fitz-John Winthrop, September 20, 1675, MHSC, 6th ser., 3 (1889): 449.

  86Hubbard, Narrative, 1:61.

  87As Neal Salisbury has remarked, “the war brought not only the defeat of the hostile Indians but the end of the missionary program as conceived by Eliot” (Salisbury, “Red Puritans,” 53).

  88“Rev. John Eliot’s Records of the First Church,” 416.

  89Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York, ed. Henry C. Murphy (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Long Island Historical Society, 1867), 383.

  90Edward Gray, on the other hand, has suggested that the English themselves destroyed Eliot’s Indian Bibles (“Who Burned the Eliot Bibles?,” paper presented at the University of Cambridge, July 5, 1997).

  91Quoted in Longkhuzen, “A Reappraisal,” 424.

  92Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett, 10-11, 20.

  93Quoted in Nehemiah Adams, The Life of John Eliot (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1847), 242. The latest manuscript doc
uments written in Massachusett date from the 1760s (Goddard and Ives, Native Writings in Massachusett). In this century Samuel Eliot Morison would call the Indian Library “the most notable—and least useful—production of the press in this period” (Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 345).

  94In 1698 the building was torn down and the press moved to a new location (Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 359).

  95“Rev. John Eliot’s Records of the First Church,” 297, 415.

  96Gookin, “Historical Account,” 55. 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), 151. Gookin’s account was not published until 1836, when it was uncovered by antiquarians (Frederick William Gookin, Daniel Gookin, 1612-1687 [Chicago: privately printed, 1912], 161). On the failure of Gookin’s narrative to be printed see Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 185-86.

  97Gookin, “Historical Account,” 431.

  98Tompson, in Hubbard, Narrative, 1:24.

  99On employing a hermeneutics of suspicion see David Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). On verisimilitude see Tzvetan Todorov, who argues that “when an author is mistaken, or lying, his text is no less significant than when he is speaking the truth; the important thing is that the text be ‘receivable’ by contemporaries, or that it has been regarded as such by its producer” (The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Harper & Row, 1984], 54). On attempting to piece together an Indian-centered narrative see the important work of James Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

  100Cotton Mather, Life and Death of … Eliot, 73.

  101Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts: Or, Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of Christianized Indians at Martha’s Vineyard, in New-England (London, 1727), xxiii. Even those Indians who could read and write were probably less skilled than Englishmen classified as “literate.” Surviving documents in the Massachusett language consist largely of land deeds used to supplement verbal agreements. According to the two linguists who have translated them, these documents are most appropriately understood “as aids to memory, rather than as independent forms of communication” and thus suggest that most native literacy was of a “restricted” type, relying heavily on oral formulas and rhetorical styles (Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings, 18-20). Very few native documents are narrative in a sense that would be familiar to us; a notable exception can be found in Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings, 85, though this account seems to have been dictated to Mayhew rather than written down by a literate Massachusett-speaker.

  102Many literate Indians, like Sassamon, died in the war: Job Nesutan, who had also assisted Eliot in translating the Bible, died in July 1675, fighting alongside the English in the early days of King Philip’s War.

  103Mather, Exhortation, 172.

  104Walker, “Captan Perse,” 91.

  Chapter 2 • THE STORY OF IT PRINTED

  1Samuel Green, ed., Diary of Increase Mather, March 1675—December 1676 (Cambridge: John Wilson & Son, 1900), 43.

  2Mather, Brief History, 35-36.

  3How Mather obtained a copy (or the original) of Easton’s manuscript remains uncertain; Richard LeBaron Bowen has suggested that “Relacion” must have been printed, though no copy survives today (Early Rehoboth, Documented Historical Studies of Families and Events in this Plymouth Colony Township [Rehoboth, Mass.: privately printed, 1945-50], 3:10). That the manuscript is today housed at the New York State Archives suggests that Easton sent his narrative to Governor Andros at the time he wrote it.

  4According to one historian, the annual election sermon was “probably the highest honor which could be bestowed upon a clergyman at any time, but to be thus singled out in the midst of the greatest trial New England had undergone would certainly be recognition of highest order” (Anne Kuesner Nelson, “King Philip’s War and the Hubbard-Mather Rivalry,” WMQ 27 [1976]: 619-20). On the two ministers’ differing interpretations of the war see also Kenneth B. Murdock, “William Hubbard and the Providential Interpretation of History,” AAS Proceedings, new ser., 52 (1942): 34-35; Bowen, Early Rehoboth, 3:1-5; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 182-85; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 30-31; and Richard S. Dunn, “Seventeenth-Century English Historians of America,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 195-225. Dunn argues that Hubbard’s belief in God’s preordination of all events and his explanation of the “cause-and-effect pattern of events by man’s daily actions, rather than by omens and prodigies” explain “why Hubbard’s description of the war is strongly partisan, whereas Increase Mather sees both colonists and Indians as God’s instruments.” In the end, Hubbard’s view of the war seems to have been more acceptable to the magistrates; in 1682 the Massachusetts Court voted to pay him £50 to write a general history of New England (MCR 5:378).

  5Diary of Increase Mather, 29-34. After completing his Brief History and Exhortation, Mather took a well-deserved break from writing about the war, and it was not until October 30 that he began the Relation of the Troubles.

  6Winthrop, Some Meditations, indicates an earlier printing, in 1675. On the publication of Folger’s poem see Florence Bennett Anderson, A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Meador Publishing Company, 1940), 302.

  7For full bibliographic information about all of these chronicles see the Abbreviations.

  8Richard Chiswell to Increase Mather, February 16, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 575-76. On Chiswell’s subsequent role in the New England book trade see Worthington Chauncy Ford, The Boston Book Market, 1679-1700 (Boston: The Club of Odd Volumes, 1917), 17-19.

  9On the printing history of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative see Chapter 5 and also Frank L. Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Bestsellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947); R. W. G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); and Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson’s Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century,” EAL 23 (1988): 239-61.

  10According to David Hall, “The situation in England and New England was one of small press runs and limited circulation for most items. Press runs for quartos and octavos could dip as low as 300 or 400 copies, and rarely went above a maximum of 1,500” (“The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600-1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce et al. [Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1983], 26). A small but significant literature had also emerged in the wake of the Virginia Massacre in 1622. See John Frederick Fausz, “The Powhatan Uprising of 1622: A Historical Study of Ethnocentrism and Cultural Conflict” (Ph.D. diss., The College of William and Mary, 1977), 404-443.

  11Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 225.

  12“Simon Bradstreet’s Journal,” NEHGR 9 (1855): 47-48.

  13John Cotton to Increase Mather, March 19, 1677, Mather Family Papers, AAS. Unfortunately for Cotton, Mather, hoping to discourage the Massachusetts authorities from endorsing Hubbard’s narrative, read Cotton’s letter to two Massachusetts officials, who reported its contents to Hubbard. Enraged, Hubbard complained to Winslow, who, in turn, berated Cotton. Much wounded by Mather’s lack of discretion, Cotton asked in his next letter “how it comes to pass that you, my most intire friend, have endangered my losse of my best friends here.” This time Cotton warned, “I hope my letter you keepe close” (John Cotton to Increase Mather, April 14, 1677, Mather Family Papers, AAS). In reply,
Mather pleaded innocent, telling Cotton he had only shown the original letter to two men and “did not mention your Name, onely that I had received the letter from a minister in Plymouth Colony” (Increase Mather to John Cotton, April 22, 1677, Mather Family Papers, AAS). Still, despite the exposure of their machinations, Cotton and Mather continued to solicit bad reviews of Hubbard’s history. In June Cotton wrote Mather that “Mr Shove was this day at my house … (for your booke he thankes you) & told me that in Mr H’s history, things are strangely falsifyed.” (This time, Cotton emphasized, “I use his own words.”) Shove, he said, “much commends your History, & sayes had Mr H: followed your Narrative he had showed more truth.” “My request to you,” Cotton continued, “is, that you will prudently of your owne accord (unlesse you see weighty reason to the contrary) write a letter to Mr Shove, & desire him to acquaint you with the mistakes he knowes to be in that booke; I doubt not but he will readily grant your desires; for he freely asserts many things to be notorious, & if you had the particulars in writing, I believe it would be of good use” (John Cotton to Increase Mather, June 25, 1677, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 [1868]: 239).