The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  58Christopher Levett, A Voyage into New England, begun in 1623, and ended in 1624 (London, 1628; reprinted in Collections of the Maine Historical Society 2 [1847]), 96.

  59Commissioners of the United Colonies to unknown, November 12, 1675, Mass. Arch. 68:55. Alden Vaughan has argued that rumors of Indian conspiracy date from the end of the Pequot War in 1637 and in fact encouraged the establishment of the confederation of New England colonies in 1645 (New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965; revised ed., 1979], 157). At the start of King Philip’s War, colonists, fearful that the “adjasent pettie Kings or sachems” were “too prone” to join with Philip, sent representatives to negotiate alliances (Josiah Winslow to Weetamo and her husband, July 15, 1675, Winslow Papers, MHS). See also Massachusetts Council to Ninigret and Squaw Sachem, undated, Mass. Arch. 67:201. Benjamin Batten to Sir Thomas Allin, July 29, 1675, Gay Transcripts, MHS; also printed in The London Gazette, August 19, 1675.

  60Daniel Witherell to John Winthrop, Jr., July 30, 1675, MHSC, 3rd ser., 10 (1849): 119; Massachusetts Council to John Winthrop, Jr., July 28, 1675, Mass. Arch. 67:209. See also Easton, “Relacion,” 14; Benjamin Batten to Sir Thomas Allin, July 29, 1675; and Richard Wharton to John Winsley, February 10, 1676, Gay Transcripts, MHS.

  61Samuel Gorton to John Winthrop, Jr., September 11, 1675, MHSC, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 627.

  62Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Jr., June 25, 1675, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn LaFantasie (Providence: Brown University Press, 1988), 2:693.

  63Easton, “Relacion,” 10.

  64As Easton wrote, “the English wear jelous that ther was a genarall plot of all indians against English and the indieans wear in like maner jelous of the english” (“Relacion,” 14).

  65Anon., Great News from the Barbadoes. Or, a True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes against the English. And the Happy Discovery of the same with the number of those that were burned alive, Beheaded, and otherwise Executed for their Horrid Crimes (London, for L. Curtis, 1676), 10. Samuel Green, ed., Diary of Increase Mather, March, 1675-December, 1676 (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1900), 18.

  66Saltonstall, Continuation, 71-74 (emphasis mine). Saltonstall also recounted the recent violent storms in Boston (and implicitly compared the damage of such storms to the damage of the war), noting that “such another Blow will bring Barbadoes near the Horizon” (ibid., 74).

  67Governor Sir William Berkeley to [Thomas Luddwell?], February 16, 1676, quoted in Washburn, “Governor Berkeley and King Philip’s War,” NEQ 30 (1957): 366. In a letter to Williamson, Berkeley conveyed news both of New England and Virginia’s troubles, hoping “it wil not be impertinent to give you the relation of our Neighbours as wel as of our selves and the more because their Troubles were the cause and beginning of ours” (Governor Sir William Berkeley to Secretary Sir Joseph Williamson, April 1, 1676, quoted in Washburn, “Governor Berkeley and King Philip’s War,” 374).

  68Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins to Secretary Sir Joseph Williamson, November 4, 1675, CSP 9:301. Peter Beckford of Jamaica received similar news from ships arriving from New England (Peter Beckford to Secretary Sir Joseph Williamson, CSP 9:411).

  69Quoted in Jerome S. Handler, “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 8 (1969): 57. Handler also notes that some Barbadian Indian slaves may have been shipped out to New England (including Tituba, of Salem witch trial fame). By 1688 a law was passed again that “all Persons whatsoever are prohibited to bring, sell and dispose of any Indians to this Island, upon pain of forfeiting the same unto his Majesty” (William Rawlin, The Laws of Barbados Collected in One Volume [London, for William Rawlin, 1699], 171). See Richard Hall, Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados from 1643 to 1762 (London, for Richard Hall, 1764), appendix. Winthrop Jordan has argued that the practice of chattel slavery emigrated from the West Indies to New England, making it ironic that New England’s slaves were subsequently turned away from the West Indies (“The Influence of the West Indies on the Origins of New England Slavery,” WMQ 18 [1961]: 243-50).

  70Donnan, Documents on the Slave Trade, 1:415. Ann C. Van Devanter, American Self-Portraits, 1670-1973 (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1974), 16; Jonathan Fairbanks, ed., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 3:474.

  71See Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk, 226. On the possible destinations of Indian slaves see John Hull to Philip French, September 2, 1675, John Hull’s Letterbook, AAS; Lauber, Indian Slavery, 125-31; and Handler, “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados,” 38-64.

  72John Eliot to Robert Boyle, 1683, MHSC, 1st ser., 3 (1794): 183.

  73C. Mather, Magnalia.

  74A family of contemporary Wampanoag Indians, calling themselves the Royal House of Pokanoket, claim that Philip’s son was shipped to Bermuda but that his own son, a man named Simon Simeons, made his way back to New England around the time of the Revolutionary War and became an aide to George Washington (Everett Weedon [Tall Oak], personal communication, February 22, 1995).

  Chapter 7 • THAT BLASPHEMOUS LEVIATHAN

  1Church, Entertaining History, 125-26. See also Hutchinson, Warr in New-England Visibly Ended, 104-5; William Jones to Governor Leete, July 5, 1676, PCR 2:470; and John Leverett to the king of England, September 6, 1676, MCR 5:106.

  2Mather, Brief History, 195.

  3Church, Entertaining History, 125-26. The bucket-of-rum story comes from George Howe, Mount Hope: A New England Chronicle (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), 55. One colonist, giving news of Philip’s death to William Leete, regretted that his informant, James Shore, had not been able to see the decapitated head: “They cut off Philip’s head and hands and brought them away; the said Shore saith that he might have seene the head could he have staid one hour longer there, but was forced to com away” (William Jones to William Leete, September 5, 1676, CCR 2:470).

  4A Dutch soldier named Cornelius captured Philip’s hat early in the war (Saltonstall, Present State, 29). Philip’s belt and bow are owned by the Peabody Museum, Harvard University; bowl, Massachusetts Historical Society; and war club, The Fruitlands Museums. (The war club, which was stolen from the museum in the 1970s, has recently been returned.) Very little direct evidence connects any of these museum objects to Philip.

  5Josiah Winslow to the king of England, June 26, 1677, MHSP 7 (1864): 481-82.

  6W. DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, 1895), 68-77.

  7Church, Entertaining History, 125-26. An early bounty of twenty coats had been offered for Philip’s head, ten times the normal rate for an Indian scalp or head (Saltonstall, Present State, 34). On Church’s pursuit and the removal of Philip’s head to Plymouth see the account in Douglas Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk, 233-36. Philip’s head had been long sought after. In a letter from July 1675 John Freeman reported to Josiah Winslow that he had engaged several Narragansett Indians to attempt to bring in Philip’s “men,” but then crossed out “men” and wrote instead “head and his men” (John Freeman to Josiah Winslow, July 18, 1675, Winslow Papers, MHS).

  8The day of thanksgiving had been appointed before Philip’s death, and, while John Cotton, minister at Plymouth, wrote in his church records that Philip’s head arrived in Plymouth the same day he was killed (and that the day of thanksgiving was observed that day), Mather and Hubbard report that both transpired on August 17. Mather, Brief History, 197; Hubbard, Narrative, 1:267-68; Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days, 201-3. John Cottons Plymouth Church Records, in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 222 (1920): 152-53. News of Philip’s death spread quickly, reaching Newport, Rhode Island, by three o’clock on August 12 (Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 84).

  9C. Mather, Magnalia, 563, 576 (emphasis mine). C. Mather, The Life and Death of the Renown’d Mr. John Eliot (London, 1691), 95.

  10John Foster, An Alm
anack of coelestial motions for … 1676 (Boston, 1676), Watkinson Library copy. John Hull also noted Philip’s death in his diary on August 12: “Sagamore Philip, that began the war, was slain” (“Diary of John Hull,” Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 3 [1857]: 242).

  11Mather, Brief History, 195. Earlier in the war, writers had made a clear connection between the war continuing and Philip still living. As the author of Farther Brief and True Narration wrote, “the Rod of Gods Anger is still upon us; For the Pocanaket Sachem Metacom, alias Philip, still lives!” (3).

  12On fatalities due to disease see Mather, Brief History, 205.

  13See Mather, Brief History, 207-8; Church, Entertaining History, 67-68; Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 88-89, 97; Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk, 142; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 314-24. (Jennings also offers an important perspective on New York’s interest in the conflict.) On New England Algonquian traditional enmity with (and fear of) the Mohawks see Daniel Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England [1674],” MHSC, 1st ser., 1 [1792]: 162-68; “Narrative of the Captivity of Quentin Stock-well” in Samuel Gardner Drake, ed., Tragedies of the Wilderness (Boston, 1846), 62. More broadly see Gordon M. Day, “The Ouragie War: A Case History in Iroquois-New England Indian Relations,” in Michael K. Foster et al., eds., Extending the Rafters: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 35-50.

  14Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 18. Francis Jennings has argued that “the Indians never for a moment aspired to drive out all the English or hoped for mastery over them. Their purpose was to salvage some measure of self-government in secure territory. Nor did any of the colonists worry about being driven into the sea” (Jennings, Invasion of America, 300). My reading of the evidence, however, leads me to disagree on both points. Like Harris, many colonists did fear that the war might force them to abandon their settlements in New England, and many Englishmen and-women outside of New England held similar fears (Governor Berkeley, for instance, wrote that “the New-England men are ingaged in a warr with their Indians which in al reasonable conjectures wil end in their utter ruine” [Governor Sir William Berkely to Thomas Ludwell, April 1, 1676, quoted in Washburn, “Governor Berkeley and King Philip’s War,” 371]). And the Indians’ taunts, as well as their actions, suggest that they may have had broader goals in mind in waging war against the colonists. It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the Wampanoags, at least, wished to regain territory they had sold or otherwise lost to the English.

  15Mather, Brief History, 206.

  16Diary of Samuel Sewall, 25-26.

  17Russell Bourne, The Red Kings Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675-1678 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Michael J. Puglisi, Puritans Besieged: The Legacies of King Philip’s War in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991); Richard Melvoin has followed the fate of one New England town, Deerfield, throughout this period (New England Outpost).

  18Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 68, 79.

  19“The English go many of them now to their Old Habitations and Mow down their Ground, and make Hay, and do other Occasions necessary for their resettling” (Hutchinson, Warr in New-England Visibly Ended, 105). When Quentin Stockwell was taken captive in September 1677 he struggled on his march into captivity, made lame by wounds sustained during King Philip’s War (“Narrative of the Captivity of Quentin Stockwell,” 61).

  20The economic repercussions of the war are best detailed in Puglisi, Puritans Besieged; and Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), especially 221-44, 411-12. The memory of the war no doubt contributed to what Jon Butler has called the “sacrilization of the landscape” (Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990]).

  21Mather, Historical Discourse, 1.

  22Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1:23.

  23In the first month of the war a Dutch soldier named Cornellis “pursued Philip so hard, that he got his Cap off his Head, and now weareth it” (Saltonstall, Present State, 29). Nathaniel Knowles, “The Torture of Captives by the Indians of Eastern North America,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings 82 (1940): 152-53; and Jennings, The Invasion of America, 152.

  24Edward Rawson to Josiah Winslow, August 20, 1676, Winslow Papers, MHS.

  25Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 90-91. See also Mather, Brief History, 133-34; Hubbard, Narrative, 1:182-83; Walker, “Captan Perse,” 92; Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports, 47; True Account, 2.

  26CCR 2:262.

  27Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1:18. Hubbard, Narrative, 1:240-41.

  28Wheeler, Thankefull Remembrance, 247.

  29Saltonstall, New and Further Narrative, 99.

  30Hubbard, Narrative, 1:110-11.

  31Mather, Brief History, 180.

  32Brief and True Narration, 5.

  33Geoffrey Abbot, Lords of the Scaffold: A History of the Executioner (London: Robert Hale, 1991), 17.

  34For example, see Fitz-John Winthrop to unknown, July 26, 1675, MHSC, 6th ser., 3 (1889): 44; John Pynchon to the Connecticut War Council, August 8, 1675, CCR 2:348; Mather, Brief History, 191-92. On the English practice of decapitation and display see Puglisi, Puritans Besieged, 43; Jennings, Invasion of America, 166-68; Thomas S. Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War,” Anthropologica 34 (1992): 6-9.

  35William Scranton Simmons, Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), 54.

  36John Sherman, An Almanac (Cambridge, 1677).

  37Previous to King Philip’s War, anniversaries were not commonly celebrated in almanacs. The Puritans, on the whole, were not enthusiastic celebrators of anniversaries. And when John Foster began recording anniversaries of the war, he didn’t then also include anniversaries of other events. From the 1679 almanac, for instance, only two non-King Philip’s War anniversaries are noted, and both of these are great calamities: from July 10, 1677: “The Vessel arrives at Nantasket which brought that contagious Distemper the Small Pox …” and November 27, 1676: “Bostons greatest fire.”

  38John Foster, An Almanack … 1679 (Boston, 1679).

  39In John Danforth’s 1679 almanac he includes “A Brief Memorial of some few Remarkable Occurrences in the Six Preceding Yeares in N-E.” Of forty-two such “Remarkable Occurrences” from 1673 to 1679, nineteen are from King Philip’s War (the remainder consist mostly of the deaths of eminent colonists). John Danforth, An Almanack (Cambridge, 1679). John Foster’s “Chronology of very memorable things to 1679” lists “The Creation of the World,” “Noah’s Flood,” “The Nativity of Jesus Christ,” “The Most Rare Invention of Printing,” and, not least among these, “The War with the Indians” (Foster, An Almanack … 1679).

  40Foster, An Almanack … 1679; John Foster, An Almanack … 1681 (Boston, 1681).

  41See Samuel Clough, The New-England Almanack, for the year 1701 (Boston, [1700]).

  42Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 113-14.

  43Mather, Exhortation, 168.

  44Urian Oakes, The Soveraign Efficacy of Divine Providence; … As Delivered in a Sermonn Preached in Cambridge on Sept. 10, 1677. Being the Day of artillery Election there (Boston in New-England: Printed for Samuel Sewall, 1682), 26.1.

  45Increase Mather, The Danger of Apostacy (Cambridge, 1679). Emphasis mine.

  46John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 43-44.

  47Quoted in Ronald Takaki, �
�The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” JAH 79 (1992): 909. On the colonists’ less metaphorical fears, fears of real renewed warfare, see Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 213-14.

  48An Act to Prevent Outrages against the Indians, May 4, 1681, Ms. Amer., JCB.

  49At a Council Held in Boston August the thirtieth 1675 (Cambridge, 1675), brs.

  50An Act to Prevent Outrages against the Indians, May 4, 1681.

  51James Axtell, “The Vengeful Women of Marblehead: Robert Roules’s Deposition of 1677,” WMQ 31 (1974): 647-52.

  52John Leverett to the king of England, September 6, 1676. See also Ezra Stiles, who claims that “All the Indian Malecontents retreated from N. Eng. to Skotacook [N.Y.] after 1676” (Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, 1755-1794 [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1916], 136).

  53See Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Laurie Weinstein,” ‘We’re Still Living on Our Traditional Homeland’: The Wampanoag Legacy in New England,” in Strategiesfor Survival: American Indians in the Eastern United States, ed. Frank W. Porter III (West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 85-112; Laura E. Conkey, Ethel Boissevain, and Ives Goddard, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Late Period,” in HNAI 15: 177-89; Frank Speck, “Mythology of the Wampanoags,” El Palacio 25 (1928): 83-86; Donna Keith Baron, J. Edward Hood, and Holly V. Izard, “They Were Here All Along: The Native Presence in Lower-Central New England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” WMQ 53 (July 1996): 561-86; and Ann McMullen, “What’s Wrong with This Picture? Context, Conversion, Survival, and the Development of Regional Native Cultures and Pan-Indianism in Southeastern New England,” in Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England, ed. Laurie Weinstein (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), 123-50; Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistance in Indian New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997); Jean O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1997).