The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  4Noah Newman to John Cotton, April 19, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS. John Kingsley to Connecticut War Council, May 5, 1676, CCR 2:445. Noah Newman to John Cotton, April 19, 1676. On Rehoboth’s fate see also Hubbard, Narrative, 1:180, and Mather, Brief History, 131.

  5Walker, “Captan Perse,” 91. Wharton, New-England’s Present Sufferings, 7. Wharton was clearly borrowing from Isaiah 30:22: “Ye shall defile also the covering of thy graven images of silver, and the ornament of thy molten images of gold: thou shalt cast them away as a menstrous cloth; thou shallt say unto it, Get thee hence.”

  6Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 226-27. On this common poetic device see Mary Tom Osborne, Advice-to-a-Painter Poems, 1633-1856: An Annotated List (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1949). On Tompson’s use of this device see Jane Donahue Eberwein, “‘Harvardine Quil’: Benjamin Tompson’s Poems on King Philip’s War,” EAL 28 (1993): 1-20; Robert L. Pincus, “Pictures of New England’s Apocalypse: Benjamin Tompson’s Transfermation of the British Advice-to-a-Painter Poem,” EAL 19 (1984-85): 268-78; and Peter White, “Cannibals and Turks: Benjamin Tompson’s Image of the Native American” in Peter White, ed., Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), 198-209. White argues that Tompson’s “advice to a painter” may really be advice to the Boston printer and engraver John Foster (“Cannibals and Turks,” 204-5). White also argues that Tompson’s Indians bear a greater resemblance to those depicted in John White’s paintings of Virginian Indians than New England’s natives. For a complete survey of Tompson’s work see Peter White, Benjamin Tompson: Colonial Bard (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).

  7Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 324.

  8Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 227-28.

  9Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 113-14.

  10Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 115. Douglas’s work on the body is often cited, appropriately, with Norbert Elias’s work on the civilizing process and Pierre Bourdieu on the body. Recent scholarship that draws on these three influential works and especially explores the idea of culture being inscribed on the body includes Catherine B. Burroughs and Jeffrey David Ehrenreich, Reading the Social Body (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Mike Featherstone et al., eds., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991); Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds., Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Francis E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, eds., Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Sue Scott and David Morgan, eds., Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body (London: The Falmer Press, 1993); Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993); Anthony Synnott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (London: Routledge, 1993); and Katharine Young, Bodylore (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993).

  11“Wee know that a Chirugion in dressing a wound, puts a man oft to greater paine, then the assassinate did who gave it,” Ashcam continued. Still, “we know no evill which can bee cur’d, but by another” (Anthony Ashcam, A Discourse wherein is examined, what is particularly lawfull during the confusions and revolutions of government [London, 1648], 101).

  12Mass. Arch. 68:174-76, quoted in Frederick Jackson Turner, “The First Official Frontier of the Massachusetts Bay,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1920), 40.

  13George Ingersol to Leif Augur, September 10, 1675, NEHGR 8 (1854): 239. See also Hubbard, Narrative, 2:103. Major Richard Waldron also mentions this attack in a letter to Daniel Denison, September 25, 1675: “On Saturday and Sabbath day last at Scarborough they killed an old man and woman and burnt their house” (NEHGR 23 [1869]: 325-27).

  14For more on Wakely and for the attack on Purchase see Hubbard, Narrative, 2:100-104, and Mather, Brief History, 89.

  15As Eric Cheyfitz has argued, “property became identity” in the West sometime in sixteenth-century England, when “the social recognition of kinship was losing ground rapidly to the recognition of property in the social sphere” (The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 50-58).

  16John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690).

  17Robert Cushman, “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing Out of England Into the Parts of America,” in Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, From 1602 to 1625, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1844), 243. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952). Francis Higginson, New-England’s Plantation (London, 1630); reprinted in Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1846), 256. Allyn B. Forbes et al., eds., Winthrop Papers, 1498-1649, 5 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929-47), 2:120. John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, Made during the Years 1638, 1663 (London, 1675; reprinted Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988), 91. The best discussion of the colonists’ ideas about land and its uses can be found in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); but see also Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900—1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially 188-89; John H. Elliott, “Colonial Identity in the Adantic World,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1300-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 9-11; Zuckerman, “Identity in British America,” 138-39; David Grayson Allen, “Vacuum Domicilium: The Social and Cultural Landscape of Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Fairbanks, ed., New England Begins, 1:1-10; and, on King Philip’s War, Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,” WMQ 51 (1994): 601-24.

  18Thomas More, The Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia (1516), in Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, eds., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 4:137.

  19Quoted in Cary Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies,” in Material Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 135. On the arrangement of the English domestic landscape see Robert Blair St. George, “‘Set Thine House in Order.’”

  20Brief and True Narration, 3. “A Wilderness,” according to Thomas Shepard, “is not hedged in, nor fenced about” (quoted in Steven D. Neuwirth, “The Images of Place: Puritans, Indians, and the Religious Significance of the New England Frontier,” The American Art Journal 18 [1986]: 51).

  21Mather, Exhortation, 171. Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 78. Samuel Symonds to Sir Joseph Williamson, April 6, 676, Gay Transcripts, MHS.

  22Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 97-98. Brief and True Narration, 5. “Diary of Increase Mather,” 43. Saltonstall, Present State, 30. Brief and True Narration, 5. Edmund Randolph’s reckoning of the losses is interesting in that it includes Indians as English losses (in the form of potential labor): “No advantage but many disadvantages have arisen to the English by the warre, for about 600 men have been slaine, and 12 captains, most of them brave and stout persons and of loyal principles, whilest the church members had liberty to stay at home and not hazard their persons in the wildernesse. The losse to the English in the sever-all colonies … is reckoned to amount to 150,000£. there having been about 1200 houses burned, 8000 head of cattle, great and small, killed, and many thousand bushels of wheat, pease, and other grain burned … and upward of 3000 Indians men women and children destroyed, who
if well managed would have been very serviceable to the English, which makes all manner of labour dear” (“Short Narrative”).

  23Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 16.

  24John Pynchon to John Russell, October 5, 1675, The Pynchon Papers, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh and Juliette Tomlinson (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1985), 1:156-57. John Russell to the Massachusetts Council, October 6, 1675, Mass. Arch. 67:288.

  25John Sharpe to Thomas Meekins, April 8, 1676, NEHGR 10 (1856): 65.

  26Samuel Gorton to John Winthrop, Jr., September 11, 1675. Walter Gendle was brought to court to testify that “ther is no place that the Ingins have com on them to fight that they [the soldiers] presently left the field and horses to them to doe what they like which is a sad case thear beinn so many men” (Walter Gendle to the Massachusetts Council, July 27, 1676, Mass. Arch. [MHS photostat file]).

  27Richard Lord to John Winthrop, October 7, 1676, Winthrop Papers, MHS.

  28John Pynchon to John Leverett, October 8, 1675, Pynchon Papers 1:157-60.

  29CCR 2:268. Similarly, one English colonist wrote that the land was “unused and undressed” (quoted in Zuckerman, “Identity in British America,” 154).

  30Mary Rowlandson also described Indians wearing necklaces made of human fingers (Soveraignty, 353).

  31Robert Blair St. George has suggested that a series of related binarisms characterized the colonists’ worldview:

  (St. George, “‘Set Thine House in Order,’” 161). On nakedness see also Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion in “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), especially 562, where he writes, “In the eyes of the Europeans, the Indians were culturally naked.” On the significance of adornment see, for example, Terence S. Turner, “The Social Skin,” in Catherine B. Burroughs and Jeffrey David Ehrenreich, Reading the Social Body (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 15-39. In the Christian West, “naked bodies gathered meanings that ranged from innocence to shame, from vulnerability to culpability, and from present worthlessness to future bliss in the resurrection of the body.” Nakedness has a history of meanings, including the medieval one of proximity to God (in giving up all worldly possessions, including clothes, adopted by ascetics), but to the Puritans it signified immodesty and savagery (Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West [Boston: Beacon Press, 1989], xi-xii). On how the Reformation “desacramentalized” the body see Benedict M. Ashley, O.P, Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (Braintree, Mass.: Pope John Center, 1985), 172-80.

  32On New Englanders’ clothing see John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 52-58. The distinction of the English as clothed and the Indians as naked is a simplification that not all observers subscribed to; some, such as William Wood and Thomas Morton, observed that the Indians did dress; they just dressed differently. See Wood, New England’s Prospect, ed. Alden Vaughan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 84-85; and Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan (Boston: Prince Society, 1833), 141-45.

  33Glenn W. LaFantasie, ed., The Correspondence of Roger Williams (Providence: Brown University Press, 1988), 2:413.

  34Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed. John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 133, 185-88.

  35Eliot told Christian Indians “you should have cloths, houses, cattle, riches as they have, God would give you them” (MHSC, 3rd ser., 4 [1834]: 57-58). Daniel Gookin reported,

  The Indians’ clothing in former times was of the same matter as Adam’s was, viz. skins or beasts, as deer, moose, beaver, otters, rackoons, foxes, and other wild creatures. Also, some had mantles of the feathers of birds, quilled artificially; and sundry of them continue to this day their old kind of clothing. But, for the most part, they sell the skins and furs to the English, Dutch, and French, and buy of them for clothing a kind of cloth, called duffils, or trucking cloth, about a yard and a half wide, and for matter, made of coarse wool, in that form as our ordinary bed blankets are made, only it is put into colours, as blue, red, purple, and some use them white. Of this sort of cloth two yards make a mantle, or coat, for men and women, less for children. This is all the garment they generally use, with this addition of some little pieces of the same, or of ordinary cotton, to cover their seret parts. It is rare to see any among them of the most barbarous, that are remiss or negligent in hiding those parts. But the christian and civilized Indians do endeavour, many of them, to follow the English mode in their habit. Their ornaments are, especially the women’s, bracelets, necklaces, and head bands, of several sorts of beads, especially of black and white wompom, which is of most estteem among them, and is acounted their chief treasure (“Historical Collections of the Indians in New England [1674],” MHSC, 1st ser., 1 [1792], 152).

  36See, for example, the testimony of Manasses Molasses, who took the coat of an Englishman he had killed and traded it for ground nuts (A Court Martial Held at Newport, Rhode Island, in August and September, 1676 [Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell, 1858]). In Benjamin Tompson’s fictious Philip speech he has Philip tell his people, “Now if you’ll fight I’ll get you English coats” (New England’s Crisis, 218). The English also rewarded Indians in their employ with “coats” (a term that was also used to refer to blankets and cloth) in exchange for enemy heads and scalps (John Allyn to unknown, August 2, 1675, Winthrop Papers, MHS). As Saltonstall reported,

  The English made this Agreement with them, That for every Indians Head-Skin they brought, they should have a Coat, (i.e. two Yards of Trucking Cloth, worth five Shillings per Yard here) and for every one they bring alive two Coats; for King Philip’s Head, twenty Coats, and if taken alive, Forty Coats (Present State, 34).

  37Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 337. Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages, 143.

  38Rowlandson, Soveraignty, 348.

  39Williams, Key into the Language, 185-88.

  40Quoted in Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” JAH 79 (1992): 893-94.

  41Hubbard, Narrative, 1:116-17. Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 76. Saltonstall, Present State, 30. Wharton, New-England’s Present Sufferings, 4, 6. Mather, Brief History, 60-61. Hubbard, Narrative, 1:193-94, 1:117-18.

  42Wood, New England’s Prospect, 27.

  43Helkiah Crooke, Micropocosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1651), 47, 56.

  44Mather, Exhortation, 179.

  45John Allyn to the Massachusetts Council, October 7, 1675, Mass. Arch. 67:285. Massachusetts Council to unknown, undated, Mass. Arch. 18. Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 221.

  46Wheeler, Thankefull Remembrance, 247. Roger Williams to Robert Williams, April 1, 1676, Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2:720. Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 45-46.

  47Another story tells of how “On the Lords Day, the—of July, an Indian came to Dorchester … to the House of Mr. Minor, in Sermon Time, and there were then at Home the Maid Servant and two young Children, she keeping the Door shut for Safety; the Indian when he saw he could not come in at the Door, went about to come in at the Window, she perceiving his Resolution, took two Brass Kettles, under which she put the two Children, she ran up Stairs and charged a Musket and fired at the Indian (he having fired at her, once or twice and mist her, but struck the Top of one Kettle, under which a child was) and shot him into his Shoulder; then he let his Gun fall, and was just coming in at the Window, she made haste and got a Fire-shovel full of live Coles and applied them to his Face, which forced him to flie and escape: But one was found dead within five Miles of that Place afterwards, and was judged to be this by his scalded Face” (Saltonstall, Present State, 31). Still another: “One of the men perceiving a stirring among the leaves Major Phillips looked out of his chamber window that way and from the
nce was immediately shot at” (Richard Waldron to Daniel Denison, September 25, 1675, NEHGR 23 [1869]: 326).

  48Cheyfitz even argues that “not to have ‘propertie’ … is to lose, from a European perspective, a significant part of one’s humanness” (Poetics of Imperialism, 59).

  49Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 226.

  50English readers must have eagerly examined Foster’s map, attempting to make sense of the accounts of the war they had read. Few other maps of New England were available, and as a result, some colonists provided English readers with maps of their own. In Dublin, Ireland, Nathaniel Mather was glad to receive a map of New England made by his nephew Cotton, remarking that “it helps mee much in understanding your & other narratives” (Nathaniel Mather to Increase Mather, February 26, 1678, MHSC, 4th ser., 8 [1868]: 9).

  51Tompson, New England’s Crisis, 226. Tompson was not referring to modest, Edenic loincloths, but to deliberate, strategic camouflage, as when, for example, Major Richard Waldron reported, “no Indians as yet appeared but only creeping decked with fearnes and boughs” (Major Richard Waldron to Daniel Denison, September 25, 1675, NEHGR 23 [1869]: 326). See also Gookin, “Historical Account,” 441.

  52Mary Pray to James Oliver, October 20, 1675, MHSC, 5th ser., 1:105.

  53Foster’s depiction, reducing all that is English to the icons “house” and “church,” and all that is Indian to the icon “tree,” is entirely consistent with the colonists’ perception of their world and its significance. As Richard White has argued, “Perhaps the most important decision Europeans made about American nature in the centuries following Columbus was that they were not part of it, but Indians were” (“Discovering Nature in North America, “JAH 79 [1992], 882). On the colonists’ ideas about the wilderness see Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 1-4, 206-18. See also Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), especially chs. 1 and 2 and pp. 29-38; Steven D. Neuwirth, “The Images of Place: Puritans, Indians, and the Religious Significance of the New England Frontier,” The American Art Journal 18 (1986): 43-53; Zuckerman, “Identity in British America,” 137-38; and John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).