| Pequot War |
Website Links For Pequot |
Information AboutPequot War |
|
BACKGROUND In the 1630s , the Connecticut River Valley was in turmoil. The Dutch and the English were each striving to extend the reach of their trade into the interior in order to achieve dominance in the lush, fertile region. The Pequot , a related Algonkian people called the Mohegan , the Wampanoag , and the Narragansett , all confederacies of respectively allied polities contended with one another as well for dominance and control of the European trade. The Native population had been devastated by a series of Smallpox epidemics over the course of the previous three decades that severely reduced their populations. Moreover, the depletion of Native numbers had left a power vacuum in the region. By 1636 , the Dutch had fortified their trading post, and the English had built a trading fort at Saybrook . Farmers and crafters from Massachusetts had settled at the new river towns of Windsor , Hartford and Wethersfield . The word ''Pequot'' is derived from an Algonquian language phrase meaning ''"the destroyers"''. They had moved into southeastern Connecticut in the area around the Pequot River and the Mystic River some time before European contact and dominated or eliminated the tribes there. They were aggressively working to extend their area of control in all directions, at the expense of the Wampanoag to the north, the Narragansett to the east, the Connecticut Valley tribes to the west, and the Long Island tribes to the south. Participants As with all histories, any single narrative will fail to reveal the whole of a given historical event. The combatants in the Pequot War were represented by different polities, different leaders, with different interests. From a distance of several hundred years, many of the polities involved may be unrecognizable to those of us today. In the embryonic colonial world of the early seventeenth century, there were several semi-independent colonies ensconsed in what is today called southern New England , and each colony was administered by its own leadership. Of course, in the same way that Native peoples belonged to independent village-states that oftentimes allied with one another to form confederacies long before the arrival of the English, there were numerous Native Algonkian peoples, defined by the polities to which they belonged, who oversaw the administration of their traditional territories. These disparate polities and their leadership included:
CAUSES FOR WAR Before the war formally began, efforts to control fur trade access resulted in a series of escalating incidents and attacks and increased tensions on both sides. The split between the Pequot and Mohegan widened as they aligned with different trade sources, the Mohegan with the English and the Pequot with the Dutch. The Pequots attacked a group of Mattabesic Indians who attempted to trade at Hartford. Tension also increased as Massachusetts began to manufacture Wampum , the supply of which the Pequots had formerly controlled. In 1634 a trader, John Stone , and his crew were killed by a tribe that was a client of the Pequots. Stone had sailed from Boston and they protested his killing, but the Pequot Sachem , Sassacus , refused any demands. While this increased tensions, there was no other action. Stone was actually from the West Indies and had been banished from Boston for his behavior. Then on July 20 , 1636 a respected trader named John Oldham was attacked on a trading voyage to Block Island . He and several of his crew were killed and his ship looted. The Massachusetts Bay colony's retaliation is viewed as the start of actual war. BATTLES News of Oldham's death became the subject of sermons in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In August, Governor Vane sent Captain John Endicott to exact punishment on the Indians of Block Island. Endicott's party of about 90 men sailed to Block Island and attacked the Niantic village. Most of the natives escaped, but 14 were killed, while two of Endicott's men were injured. Seeing this as unsuccessful, the English burned the village and what crops they could not carry away. He then went on to Fort Saybrook. The men at Saybrook were not happy about the raid, but agreed that some of them would accompany Endicott as guides. He sailed back up the coast to a Pequot village, where he repeated last year's demand of payment for the death of Stone and more for Oldham. After some discussion he concluded that they were stalling and attacked. But the stall had worked, and all the residents escaped into the woods. He had to content himself with again burning the village and crops before sailing for home. Pequot raiders The Massachusetts force had gone home, but the Connecticut settlers were left to deal with the Pequot anger. The Pequots sent war messages to their allies, but even though they claimed 36 tributary villages, this was only partly effective. The Western Niantic joined them, but the Eastern Niantic remained neutral. The Mohegan and Narragansett openly sided with the English. The Narragansett had warred with and lost territory to the Pequots in 1622. Now their friend Roger Williams urged them to take the English side. Through the fall and winter, Fort Saybrook was effectively besieged. Any who ventured outside were killed. As spring arrived in 1637 the Pequot stepped up their raids on the Connecticut towns. On April 12 a raid at Weathersfield killed nine men and women, a number of cattle and horses, and took two girls as hostages. In all, the towns lost about 30 settlers in these raids. In May, the river towns met in Hartford ''(see History Of Connecticut )''. They raised a militia and put Captain John Mason in command. He set out with 90 militia and 70 Mohegan warriors under Uncas to repay the Pequots. At Fort Saybrook, he was joined by Captain Underhill and another 20 men. They proceeded to the principal Pequot village, near modern Groton , but the Pequot chose to simply defend their fortified village and Capt. Mason did not have the forces to take it, so he sailed east. He stopped at the village of Misistuck ( Mystic ), but the scene was repeated. The Mystic Massacre Believing that the English had returned to Boston, the Pequot sachem Sassacus took several hundred of his warriors to make another raid on Hartford. But Mason had only gone to visit the Narragansett, who joined him with several hundred warriors. He also picked up some Niantic braves. With his force up to about 400, on May 26 , 1637 they attacked the Pequot palisade at Mystic by surprise, having come overland. Some of Mystic's warriors had accompanied Sassacus, and the fort contained over 500 Pequots, including women and children. Surrounding it, they set it afire, and Mason ordered any who escaped the flames killed. Only a handful made it to the woods, and in an hour all the rest were dead. Believing the mission accomplished, they all set out for home. The militia became temporarily lost, but in doing so they narrowly missed the returning war party. They suffered only two dead and about 20 wounded in the battle. Their allies were not so lucky, and half of them never made it home. The Pequots hunted down The slaughter at Mystic broke the Pequots, and deprived them of their allies. They abandoned their villages and fled mostly in small bands to seek refuge with other tribes. Many were hunted down by the Mohegan and Narragansett warriors. The largest group, led by Sassacus, was denied aid by the Metoac on Long Island , so he led about 400 west along the coast towards the Dutch at New Amsterdam and their Indian allies. When they crossed the Connecticut River, they killed three men encountered near Fort Saybrook. In mid June, John Mason set out from Saybrook with 160 men and 40 Mohegan scouts under Uncas. They caught up with the refugees at Sasqua, a Mattabesic village near modern Fairfield . Surrounded in a nearby swamp, they refused to surrender. Several hundred, mostly women and children, were allowed to leave with the Mattabesic. In the ensuing battle, Sassacus was able to break free with perhaps 80 warriors, but 180 of the Pequot were killed or captured. Sassacus and his followers had hoped to gain refuge among the Mohawk in modern-day New York. However, the Mohawk had seen the display of English power and chose instead to kill Sassacus and his warriors, sending Sassacus' scalp to Hartford as a symbolic offering of Mohawk friendship with the young Connecticut Colony . Remaining bands were hunted down, and the war was over. AFTERMATH In September the victorious tribes met the General Court of Connecticut and agreed on the disposition of the Pequots and their lands. The agreement was known as the first Treaty Of Hartford , and was signed on September 21 , 1638. Prisoners were distributed as slaves to the Mohegan, Narragansett and Metoac tribes. Some of the elderly not wanted by the tribes became household servants in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The colonists gained the Pequot lands, and the Pequot were officially declared not to exist. However, a remnant was later recovered from captivity from the Mohegans and assigned to reservations in Connecticut. This was the first time the New England Indians had encountered the European version of warfare. The idea of a Total War was essentially new to them. After the war, the colonists represented such a power that no tribe or group of tribes would stand against them for a generation. There was a fairly long period of peace until continued population pressure resulted in the general uprising known as King Philip's War in 1675 . HISTORICIZING THE WAR With the advent of Social History in the 1970s, the ways in which ''History'', understood simultaneously as, 1) a series of events, 2) change over time, 3) a narrative of given events that reflect change over time, and 4) the context without which the past as viewed through the filtering lens of the present cannot be understood, was forever changed. Gone was the focus on individual, elite, white, "great men." In its place, came a focus on the ordinary-- ordinary people, ordinary lives-- with an important caveat. If the lion's share of people throughout history were ordinary and led ordinary lives, at least at some point they were caught in the grip of extraordinary events. How ordinary people thought and fought, why they struggled, lived, and died, whether they indeed won or lost, gained significance and relevence in the eyes of a new generation of American historians. For those who, from the early eighteenth century and ever since, call themselves "Americans," how and why "America" as a place and ideal through which "Americans" as a people and ideal came to be has always been an important question. Thus, the earliest events in this nation's history came under just this kind of scrutiny. Moreover, using new methods and equally new ways of talking about how events and people transformed themselves and history itself, historians began to ask how, when, why, and whether or not ordinary people figured significantly, or if at all in the earliest narratives of American history. Some considerations remained, the most critical of which was how the colonial, whether it be ordinary English colonials, or the elite who oversaw the administration of the colonies, their means of subsistance, aspects of English colonial religion, language, law, culture, politics, economics, and their accompanying ideologies, related to the Native peoples of North America . From John Underhill and Increase Mather , who both wrote in the seventeenth century, to Thomas Hutchinson in the eighteenth century, to Francis Parkman and George Bancroft in the nineteenth century, to Francis Jennings and Alfred Cave in the twentieth century, the Pequot War has consistantly been understood as a catalytic, signifying event. Of critical difference since the 1970s at least, is how and why the most contemporary historians have chosen to consider the point of view of Native peoples--from elite to ordinary-- and how Native peoples like the Pequot , caught as well in the grip of extraordinary events, chose to structure themselves socio-politically, the political economies of their polities, aspects of culture, language, religion, law, and their accompanying ideologies. Questions of how and why Native peoples chose to adapt and acculturate to English colonial society have figured largely in the most recent histories, even if comparatively less consideration has been given to questions of how and why the English could or could not, would or would not adapt and or acculturate to Native society. Revisioning the War Critical to note is that when leveling charges of "'s vitriolic hatred of the Pequot , and the ways in which Puritan s chose to deal with, and shortly therafter write about the Pequot , has only recently begun to be fully explored. Overall, revisionist historians have firmly rooted the history of the Pequot War within the larger context of European colonization and the geopolitical ambitions of contending Native peoples during the first half of the seventeenth century. If anything, the Revisionism of the past four decades, or at the very least, the dubiousness with which historians now approach a hegemonic narrative almost four centuries old that valorizes Puritans at the expense of a demonized Native population, can reveal as much as past narratives have obscured. Thus, even Alden T. Vaughan, a recent, rather harsh critic of the Pequot felt the need to say that in fact, the Pequot were not "solely or even primarily responsible" for the war. Vaughan went even further, "The Bay colony's gross escalation of violence . . . made all-out war unavoidable; until then, negotiation was at least conceivable."Alden T. Vaughan, "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," in ''Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.194. NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
|