The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  54In 1696 Betty deeded her land to her own daughter Mercy (PCR 12: 235). See also Weinstein, “‘We’re Still Living on Our Traditional Homeland,’ “96.

  55On the Mashpees’ limited involvement in the war see Gookin, “Historical Account,” 434.

  56Extracts from the Itineraries … of Ezra Stiles, 115. On Narragansetts in the eighteenth century see William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, eds., Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), xxx-xxxvii. On Narragansett survival see Paul R. Campbell and Glenn W. LaFantasie, “Scattered to the Winds of Heaven—Narragansett Indians 1676-1880,” Rhode Island History 37 (1978): 67-83.

  57Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 2-6. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 9-10.

  58Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 9-14; on early Natick house styles see also Elise Brenner, “Strategies for Autonomy: An Analysis of Ethnic Mobilization in Seventeenth-Century Southern New England” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1984), 127-34. Mandell has argued that “Natick’s postwar material culture was clearly far more aboriginal than English” (38).

  59Kathleen J. Bragdon, “The Material Culture of the Christian Indians in New England, 1650-1775,” in Mary C. Beaudry, ed., Documentary Archaeology in the New World (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 130.

  60Kathleen Bragdon, “Probate Records as a Source for Algonquian Ethnohistory,” in William Cowan, ed., Papers of the Tenth Algonquian Conference (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1979), 136-41; and Bragdon, “Material Culture,” 126-31.

  61Quoted in Bragdon, “Material Culture,” 131.

  62Ann McMullen, “Native Basketry, Basketry Styles, and Changing Group Identity in Southern New England,” in Algonkians of New England: Past and Present, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1993): 76-88.

  63Bragdon, “Material Culture,” 130.

  64Stiles, Extracts, 203.

  65Baron et al., “They Were Here All Along,” 564-67.

  66Anthropologist “Ann McMullen has argued that New England Algonquian culture became covert (McMullen, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” 123-50).

  67Nathan Fiske, Remarkable Providences to be gratefully recollected, religious improved, and carefully transmitted to Posterity. A Sermon Preached at Brookfield On the last Day of the Year 1775 (Boston, New-England: Printed by Thomas and John Fleet, 1776), 25-28.

  68See also Robert Breck, Past Dispensations of Providence called to Mind. In a Sermon, Delivered in the first Parish in Springfield, on the 16th of October 1775. Just one hundred Years from the burning of the Town by the Indians (Hartford, Conn.: Barlow & Babcock, 1784). The war was apparently not so well remembered by redcoats: a soldier’s guide printed by the British War Office during the Revolution said of Bristol that it was famous for “King Philip of Spain having a palace nearby and being killed in it” (quoted in Howe, Mount Hope, 61).

  69These connections have been observed and documented by Captain Greg Sieminski in “The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution,” AQ 42 (1990): 35-56. Church’s history of King Philip’s War was printed many times in Forrest’s lifetime—in 1825, 1827, 1829, 1834, and 1842—but it probably sold in greatest numbers during the 1830s and 1840s, at the height of Metamora’s popularity.

  70For evidence of Boyle’s support for the patriot cause see “Boyle’s Journal of Occurrences in Boston, 1759-1778,” NEHGR 84-85 (1930-31): 142-71, 248-72, 357-82.

  71William Hubbard, A narrative of the Indian wars in New-England … (Boston: Printed and sold by John Boyle, 1775), viii.

  72Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative continued to be reprinted all through the 1780s, 1790s, and well into the nineteenth century. Hubbard, too, remained popular, and most early nineteenth-century editions of his history included the 1775 Boston preface. A “memory book,” printed in Philadelphia in 1795, included fights from King Philip’s War among its lists of important events that form the national heritage (James Hardie, The American Remembrancer, and Universal Tablet of Memory [Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1795], 146, 149). By 1804 one of those fights, at least, had been recast; a schoolbook history of New England that told the story of the Great Swamp fight told it as a tragedy, and expressed sympathy for the Indians who died there (Jedidiah Morse, A Compendious History of New England, designed for Schools and Private Families [Charlestown, Mass.: Samuel Etheridge, 1804], 249-64).

  73Quoted in Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 285-87. See also Calloway, “New England Algonkians in the American Revolution,” in Algonkians of New England, 51-62; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 15-16, 76.

  74J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782; reprint, New York: Duffield & Company, 1908), 54, 148-55. Crèvecoeur was not the first to celebrate the Indian Bible as an American monument. In 1691, in his eulogy for John Eliot, Cotton Mather had written, “Behold ye Americans, the greatest honour that ever you were partakers of! This Bible was printed here at our Cambridge; and it is the only Bible that ever was printed in all America, from the very foundation of the World” (The Life and Death of… Eliot, 87-88).

  75Old Light on Separate Ways, 61-62, 88-89, 91. Fish recorded, for instance: “Octr. 2d. 1769 … The School kept, but poorly attended, by Children—but one Schollar to day, and but About 1/2 Dozn. a Day last Week. The Indians Seem Stupidly to Neglect and Despise the Privilege” (61).

  76For an important and useful discussion of commemoration and public memory see John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), especially the prologue, for its discussion of the debate over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. As Bodnar argues, “The shaping of a past worthy of public commemoration in the present is contested and involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments” (13).

  77Quoted in William Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 141-42.

  Chapter 8 • THE CURSE OF METAMORA

  1John Augustus Stone, “Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags: An Indian Tragedy in Five Acts as played by Edwin Forrest,” in Metamora and Other Plays, ed. Eugene R. Page (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), 40. Mourning Courier and New York Enquirer, December 16, 1829. The opening performance was filled to capacity—even standing room was filled. For other reviews of this performance see New York Evening Journal, December 16, 1829, and the New-York Mirror and Ladies’ Literary Gazette, December 29, 1829.

  2Stone, “Metamora,” 22, 20, 21, 30.

  3Gabriel Harrison, Edwin Forrest: The Actor and the Man (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1889), 39.

  4For the text of Jackson’s address see Andrew Jackson to the Speaker of the House, December 15, 1829, in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, Inc., 1897), 3:1026. On Indian removal see Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975); William McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); and Reginald Horsman, The Origins of Indian Removal: 1815-1824 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970).

  5Other scholars have noticed
the coincidence of Metamora’s debut and Jackson’s endorsement of Indian removal, most importantly B. Donald Grose, “Edwin Forrest, Metamora, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” Theater Journal 37 (1985): 181-91; and Jeffrey D. Mason, “The Politics of Metamora,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Chase and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991).

  6Werner Sollors has argued that the “curses” of dying Indians such as Metamora were ultimately blessings, exonerating white Americans for their treatment of the Indians and urging them forth into a new nation. See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 119-25. As Sollors writes, “Whether it appears as a curse, a blessing, or a projection of pure Christian conduct, the Indian speech functions as the departing chieftain’s last will and testament to his paleface successors and resembles a parent’s last wish for his child” (123). While Sollors’ explanation is suggestive, it fails to adequately consider the complexity of Americans’ attitudes toward Indian removal.

  7Church, Entertaining History, 125-26. Mather, Brief History, 195.

  8Biographies of Forrest include Harrison, Edwin Forrest; Montrose Moses, The Fabulous Forrest: The Record of an American Actor (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1929); William Alger, The Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1877); and, more recently, Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960). Forrest’s scandalous divorce is chronicled in The Forrest Divorce Case (Boston, 1852).

  9Advertised in the Critic, November 28, 1828. On the “search of a national drama” see David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), ch. 7. Forrest’s prize may have been inspired in part by George Custis’s 1827 Indian Prophecy. See Murray H. Nelligan, “American Nationalism on the Stage: The Plays of George Washington Parke Custis (1781-1857),” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 58 (July 1950): 299-324.

  10Beyond the initial prize money, Stone benefited little from the success of his play. He killed himself five years after its debut. Forrest paid for a monument at his graveside that reads, “In memory of the Author of ‘Metamora,’ by His Friend, E. Forrest” (James Rees, Life of Edwin Forrest [Philadelphia, 1874], 98). Stone’s passing was wryly noted by Charles Cong-don, who found his chief work uninspired, to say the least: “Mr. Stone did what he could to atone for the injury he inflicted upon the world by the production of this play … he drowned himself on 1 June 1834, in the Schuylkill River. We will accept his presumptive apology” (quoted in Dennis P. Walsh, “Many Metamoras: An Indian Drama in the Old Northwest,” Old Northwest 12 [1986]: 466).

  11On Forrest’s success with Metamora see Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theater, 1750-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 93, 96; Moody, Edwin Forrest, 99. A twelve-day schedule in St. Louis, for example, brought a record profit of $2, 157.00. Receipts for Forrest’s opening night in Mobile performing Othello were $528.50. Subsequent performances were as follows: Macbeth, $330.50; King Lear, $324.50; Metamora, $656.00; Damon, $319.75; and Richard III, $448.00. (Noah Miller Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It [St. Louis: G. I. Jones, 1880], 559). On the popularity of Shakespeare in America see Lawrence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 11-82. Some scholars have argued that Forrest’s success in Shakespearean roles was largely because they were “extensions of his stage Indian, Metamora transplanted to another time and place, but still the proud, doomed individual” (Grose, “Edwin Forrest,” 185). Finally, see Eugene R. Page, “Introduction,” Metamora, 4.

  12Indian plays had been written and performed in America since the late seventeenth century but only became widely popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Metamora is often considered the catalyst for this development, since it led to copycat plays “from which,” as Laurence Hut-ton put it, “theatergoers throughout the country suffered between the years 1830 and 1840” (Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891], 13). On Indian drama see Rosemarie K. Bank, “Staging the ‘Native’: Making History in American Theater Culture, 1828, 1838,” Theater Journal 45 (1993): 461-86; Marilyn J. Anderson, “The Image of the Indian in American Drama During the Jacksonian Era, 1829-1845,” Journal of American Culture 1 (1978): 800-810; Don B. Wilmeth, “Noble or Ruthless Savage?: The American Indian on Stage and in the Drama,” Journal of American Drama and Theater 1 (1989): 39-78; Richard E. Amacher, “Behind the Curtain with the Noble Savage: Stage Management of Indian Plays, 1825-1860,” Theater Survey 7 (1966): 101-14; Moody, America Takes the Stage, 78-109; Eugene H. Jones, Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 1753-1916 (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1988). For a review of this scholarship see Flynn, “Academics on the Trail of the Stage Indian,” Studies in American Literature 2 (1987): 1-16. On Metamoras place in early nineteenth-century melodrama see, for instance, Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 216-18. On Metamora and romanticism see Paul Ronald Cox, “The Characterization of the American Indian in American Indian Plays, 1800-1860 as a Reflection of the American Romantic Movement” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1970).

  13Quoted in Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage, 18.

  14Walsh, “Many Metamoras,” 459. See Frank R. Abate, ed., Omni Gazetteer of the United States of America, 11 vols. (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991).

  15My thanks to Joanne Chaison of the American Antiquarian Society for pointing me to the King Philip nursery rhyme.

  16Quoted in Sherry Sullivan, “Indians in American Fiction, 1820-1850: An Ethnohistorical Perspective,” Clio 15 (1986): 244-45.

  17Joseph Sabin, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Edwin Forrest (Philadelphia, 1863). “Metamora Wardrobe and Properties” is Item #72.

  18Sabin, Catalogue, 52. James Fenimore Cooper, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (Philadelphia, 1829). As Cooper wrote in a letter to Rufus Wilmot Griwsold in 1844, “Wish-ton-Wish appeared in 1829. It did not succeed” (James Franklin Beard, ed., The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-68], 4:461). Nonetheless, the dramatic version of the novel, which bears little relation to it (see The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish. A Drama in Two Acts. From J. Fennimore [sic] Cooper’s Celebrated Novel of the Same Name. As performed at all the Principal Theatres in the United States [New York: Samuel French, n.d.]), was widely performed (e.g., see playbills in the Crawford Theatre Collection, Yale University, Box 12, Folder 70, Box 27, Folder 206). See also Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1931), 114.

  19Forrest owned Irving’s essay in a multivolume edition of his Sketchbook (Sabin, Catalogue, 54).

  20Metamora Clippings File, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University; Edwin Forrest Poster Box, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.

  21Washington Irving, “Philip of Pokanoket,” in The Works of Washington Irving, v. 2. The Sketchbook (New York: George Putnam, 1851), 364, 372. Irving’s Philip was “a patriot attached to his native soil—a prince true to his subjects, and indignant of their wrongs—a soldier, daring in battle, firm in adversity, patient of fatigue, of hunger, of every variety of bodily suffering, and ready to perish in the cause he had espoused” (382-83).

  22William Hubbard, A narrative of the Indian wars in New-England … (Boston: Printed and sold by John Boyle, 1775), viii.

  23Richard Slotkin, however, has argued that “the emergence of the Indian as a model for an American heroism and the tendency of writers to set this American-model hero against the British model” has its roots in the French and Indian War (Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973], 223).

  24Stone, “Metamora,” 36.

  25North
American Review 33 (1831): 407-49.

  26Sabin, Catalogue, 42, 48. See the unfinished poem “Oliver Newman, A New-England Tale” in Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1880), 263-358. See also Albert Keiser, The Indian in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 38-44. It is possible that Southey never finished his King Philip’s War poem because of the bad advance reaction in the States. When rumors spread that the famed British poet laureat was planning to write an epic poem about Philip, at least one American was outraged at the prospect of an Englishman writing on this very American subject. “It would be strange, indeed,” an irate reader wrote to the New York Literary Magazine, “when the people of Great Britain, even those who are the best informed on other important subjects, are so extremely ignorant of this country, of its character, manners, and government, and in many instances even of its geographical divisions, if they should understand the Indian character. We know of no subject that could occupy the attention and talents of a literary stranger, in which he would be less likely to succeed, than that which Mr. Southey is said to have chosen” (Dr. Robert Jarvis, “Southey’s New Poem,” New York Literary Magazine 3 [May 15, 1820]: 54; see also pp. 55-56).

  27James Eastburn [and Robert Charles Sands], Yamoyden, A Tale of the Wars of King Philip: In Six Cantos (New York: Clayton & Kingsland, Printers, 1820), 1.

  28Sabin, Catalogue, 80. Forrest later obtained an 1855 edition of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (ibid., 87).