God, War, and Providence

The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England

James A. Warren

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501180439
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The tragic and fascinating history of the first epic struggle between white settlers and Native Americans in the early seventeenth century: "a riveting historical validation of emancipatory impulses frustrated in their own time" ( Booklist, starred review) as determined Narragansett Indians refused to back down and accept English authority. A devout Puritan minister in seventeenth-century New England, Roger Williams was also a social critic, diplomat, theologian, and politician who fervently believed in tolerance. Yet his orthodox brethren were convinced tolerance fostered anarchy and courted God's wrath. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace.As the seventeenth century wore on, a steadily deepening antagonism developed between an expansionist, aggressive Puritan culture and an increasingly vulnerable, politically divided Indian population. Indian tribes that had been at the center of the New England communities found themselves shunted off to the margins of the region. By the 1660s, all the major Indian peoples in southern New England had come to accept English authority, either tacitly or explicitly. All, except one: the Narragansetts.In God, War, and Providence "James A. Warren transforms what could have been merely a Pilgrim version of cowboys and Indians into a sharp study of cultural contrast…a well-researched cameo of early America" ( The Wall Street Journal ). He explores the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams's Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment. Deeply researched, "Warren's well-written monograph contains a great deal of insight into the tactics of war on the frontier" ( Library Journal ) and serves as a telling precedent for white-Native American encounters along the North American frontier for the next 250 years.

Chapter 1

1635: Indians and Puritans, Separate and Together

The early seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Indian importunes the settlers to “come over and help us.” Civilizing and Christianizing the Indians was one of the major rationales for the Bay Colony, but many of the funds designated for Indian instruction were diverted to other projects.

By 1635, two colonies of English Puritans, Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay Colony, were firmly established along the coast of southern New England. A third colony, made up of perhaps a hundred recent émigrés from Massachusetts and a handful of Plymouth Colony traders, had begun to take shape on the banks of the Connecticut River near the modern city of Hartford, where the Dutch had earlier established a bustling trading post.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth had first arrived in November 1620 aboard the Mayflower. After an extremely hard first winter, during which almost half of the initial one hundred settlers had perished, the plantation—a common seventeenth-century synonym for colony—had grown slowly but steadily to self-sufficiency, thanks in large measure to the able assistance of local native inhabitants, especially Squanto, an English-speaking Indian from the deserted Patuxet village upon which Plymouth was settled, and Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoag confederation. By 1635, Plymouth’s population stood at six hundred.

Squanto had been captured by English explorers around 1614 and taken to Spain to be sold as a slave. He somehow escaped to England and learned the language before being brought back to New England by the merchant Thomas Dermer. All his fellow Patuxets had either died in the epidemic of 1616–19 or fled in its wake. In 1621, Governor William Bradford signed an alliance with Massasoit, granting the tribe exclusive trading rights with the colony, and providing for mutual defense in the not unlikely event of attack from one of the many other Indian tribes in the region.

Massachusetts Bay colonists first settled in the town of Salem, sixty miles north of Plymouth, in 1628, but by the early 1630s, Boston, with its excellent natural harbor, had become the center of colony government and the most populous English town in New England. The contemporary English chronicler William Wood described Boston as “a peninsula hemmed in on the south side with the Bay of Roxbury, on the north side with the Charles River,” and “not troubled with the great annoyances of wolves, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes.”¹ Seven years after its founding, Massachusetts Bay Colony was home to six thousand English people, a good number in Boston itself, the rest dispersed in a handful of small towns ringing Boston proper.

Before the end of the decade, another five thousand English people would brave the Atlantic to settle in New England. Most settled in Massachusetts, which by 1640 had firmly established itself as the dominant and most dynamic of four New England Puritan colonies: Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and tiny New Haven, along the Quinnipiac River, destined to fold into Connecticut in 1662.

Like Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay had been settled on lands cleared and formerly inhabited by Indians—in this case, Massachusetts Indians under the sachem Cutshamakin, and the Pawtuckets under Sagamores John and James. By 1635, the Wampanoags numbered no more than five hundred; the Pawtucket and Massachusetts less than half that number. The great epidemic of 1616–19 had reduced the population of both tribes by as much as 90 percent, and then an outbreak of smallpox in 1633 further reduced their numbers. All these tribes welcomed the newcomers as trading partners, neighbors, and allies who could aid them in turning back raiding parties of the fierce Micmac tribe from northern New England.

The first English settlements of southern New England were surrounded by many other independent Indian bands and several confederations of bands—a grand total, it seems, of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Indians. The natives spoke slightly different dialects of the same eastern Algonquian language and possessed similar cultures and patterns of subsistence and settlement.

To the west of the traditional lands of the Massachusetts and extending into contemporary northwest Rhode Island were the Nipmucks. Farther west, in the northern Connecticut River valley, dwelled about a thousand Pocumtucks. South of the Pocumtucks, in the Connecticut River valley, lived the Podunks, Sequins, Wangunks, and several other small but strategically significant bands, referred to collectively as River Indians by the English.

East of the River Indians, centered on the Thames and Mystic River valleys respectively, were some three thousand Mohegans and the Pequots. To the east of the Pequots lay the Narragansett confederation. Its territory extended over the entire mainland of contemporary Rhode Island except for its northwest corner; the East Bay, inhabited by Wampanoags; and the larger islands in Narragansett Bay. Their confederation was the largest and most prosperous Indian polity in the region, numbering between seventy-five hundred and ten thousand people.

Southern New England, showing locations of major tribes and colonial boundaries, circa 1660.

THE LUSH NARRAGANSETT WORLD

Evidence of habitation near the Bay goes back about thirty-seven hundred years, and the remains of a Narragansett village dating from AD 1100 to 1300 have been uncovered by archaeologists recently. Narragansett Bay and its environs were extraordinarily rich in natural resources at the time of the first English settlements in New England. The Indians who dwelled there were masters of all the skills needed to exploit them. Contemporary English observers describe the Narragansetts as peaceable, industrious, and well led by an older sachem of few words and considerable wisdom called Canonicus, and his nephew Miantonomi, who by 1635 had already established a reputation in the region as a discerning and intelligent diplomat.

The first European to encounter the Narragansetts and record his observations was the great Italian navigator-explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, who sailed the eastern seaboard of America on behalf of the king of France in a futile search for a Northwest Passage. Even in 1524, the Narragansett predilection for industry and trade was evident. Verrazano’s account of his encounter with the tribe is remarkably vivid in detail and bears repeating at length:

We . . . proceeded to another place, fifteen leagues distant from [Block Island], where we found an excellent harbor [Newport]. Before entering it, we saw about twenty small boats full of people, who came about our ship, uttering many cries of astonishment. . . . Stopping, they looked at the structure of our ship, our persons and dress, afterwards they all raised a loud shout, signifying that they were pleased. . . . Among them were two kings more beautiful in form and stature than can possibly be described; one was about forty years old, the other about twenty-four, and they were dressed in the following manner: The oldest had a deer’s skin around his body, artificially wrought in damask figures, his head was without covering, his hair was tied back in various knots; around his neck he wore a large chain ornamented with many stones of different colors. The young man was similar in appearance.

This is the finest looking tribe, and the handsomest in their costumes, we have found in our voyage. They exceed us in size, and they are of a very fair complexion; some of them incline more to a white and others to a tawny color; their faces are sharp; their hair long and black, upon the adorning of which they bestow great pains; their eyes are black and sharp, their expression mild and pleasant. . . .

They are very generous, giving away whatever they have. . . . We often went five or six leagues into the interior, and found country as pleasant as is possible to conceive, adapted to cultivation of every kind, whether of corn, wine, or oil; there are open plains twenty-five or thirty leagues in extent, entire free from trees or other hindrances. . . . The animals, which are in great numbers . . . are taken in snares, and by bows, the latter being their chief implement.²

The word Narragansett as used in this book has two distinct but closely related meanings. It refers in its narrower sense to a core group of some four thousand Indians dispersed in as many as twenty villages throughout the southern half of the Rhode Island mainland, and in a broader sense to a larger political entity known to the English of the seventeenth century as a great sachemdom—a loose confederation of Indian bands and tribes. The Narragansett confederation took in the Narragansetts themselves and a number of tributary tribes, including the Cowesett and Shawomet to the north, some Nipmuck bands to the northwest, and the Eastern Niantic to the south, in the areas we now know as Westerly and Charlestown, Rhode Island. Ties of kinship between the Narragansetts and the Eastern Niantics were especially strong.

All these tribes had close social and commercial ties to the Narragansetts, but each had its own sachem—often called a minor, or local, sachem by the English. He, or, in a handful of cases, she, was responsible for governing the internal affairs of the group. The independence of the local sachems in the Narragansett confederation had begun to diminish somewhat in the 1620s, as trade with the Dutch and the English became an increasingly important source of wealth for the Indians. By the mid-1630s, an emerging Indian-English-Dutch market economy, centered largely on the exchange of furs and foodstuffs for European goods, led to the concentration of political and commercial authority in the hands of Canonicus and Miantonomi.

Algonquian sachems, Narragansett and otherwise, almost always owed their positions to family descent. It fell to the great sachem to make all the critical decisions for his subjects, albeit with the advice of the minor sachems, a council of elders, and one or more powwows—men who presided over various rituals and tended to both the spiritual and bodily health of the people. Indians looked to their great sachem to dispense justice, mediate disputes between bands, allocate farming and hunting lands, conduct diplomacy with outsiders, and organize group activities, especially the seasonal migrations between the coast and the inland forests, and warfare. In exchange for protection and leadership, Miantonomi and Canonicus received allegiance and payments from their tributaries, as well as from their own local bands in the villages of southern Rhode Island.

Allegiance to the great sachem, however, was contingent on his ability to keep the local sachems and their subjects reasonably content through gift-giving and consensus building, and responsive leadership. Disaffected minor chiefs could alter the balance of power between the major Indian tribes by shifting their allegiance from one great sachem to another.

Political and social ties among the Algonquians were protean—which caused no small amount of confusion and frustration for Europeans. When individual Indians in Narragansett territory committed criminal acts or violated Indian-Puritan agreements, the English authorities would customarily go over the heads of the local sachems and seek satisfaction from Canonicus and Miantonomi directly. Much to the frustration of the English authorities, their ability to do so was often circumscribed by the power minor sachems enjoyed over members of their own bands, as well as by the ease with which unattached males, and even on occasion entire nuclear families, could migrate from one band to another.

The Narragansetts, like all southern New England Indians, were farmers and fishermen as well as hunters and gatherers. Each spring men and women worked together to clear new fields close to the coastline, cutting down trees, and breaking up the soil with clamshells and stone hoes. Women planted, nurtured, and harvested the staple crops of squash, beans, and corn, and they gathered fruit, nuts, and plants for both sustenance and medicinal purposes.

Puritans stereotyped Indian men as lazy, yet it’s clear that men took on the hard labor of clearing the fields when new farming plots were needed. Narragansett men were also skilled trappers and hunters of deer, rabbits, beaver, and otter. Deer was by far the most important source of meat for the tribe. In the winter, hunting parties of as many as several hundred men roamed the forest, driving deer in the direction of a large V-shaped, funneled trap leading to a corral, where they could be easily dispatched with bow and arrow. Before the hunt, carefully controlled fires were set to clear away underbrush. While the cleared ground made hunting quite a bit easier, it did no permanent harm to the maple, oak, cedar, and pine trees. In fact, by decreasing the competition for nutrients in the soil, it enhanced the growth of the larger trees.

Pigeons, waterfowl, and turkeys formed a regular part of the Narragansett Indian diet and were found in numbers that astonished the English. Men fished with weirs, nets, and harpoons, both in Narragansett Bay proper and in the many fresh- and saltwater ponds and rivers in their territory. Shellfish, quahogs, and mussels were collected along the shoreline, usually by women, throughout the year.

Seaworthy dugout canoes carved out of the trunks of large hardwood trees were used for open-water fishing and travel between the mainland of Narragansett country and the islands in the Bay. These craft could transport as many as thirty Indians across miles of open ocean, even in blustery seas. The canoes were among the most striking examples of an Indian technology that proved far superior to its English counterpart in the New World environment. Roger Williams reported that the Narragansetts even knew how to rig a sail made of English cloth on a small pole in their canoes to gain speed.

Despite the hunting prowess of Narragansett men, corn was the staple of the tribe’s diet. It was consumed in stews with beans, squash, fish, and meat. Cakes were also made from cornmeal, which was stored for winter consumption in great quantities in baskets buried in the ground.

Among the many groups of Algonquian Indians, the Narragansett distinguished themselves not only as traders, but as manufacturers. Narragansett baskets, woven by women, were highly prized throughout the region. Women prepared furs for both personal clothing and for trade. Men fashioned widely regarded pipes for tobacco they grew for their own consumption, as well as axes, chisels, hoes, and arrows made of stone and, later, European metals.

The coastline of Narragansett country was overrun with quahog and whelk, the raw material used for drilling and minting shell beads called wampum. Wampum had great symbolic and ceremonial value to all Algonquians long before Europeans arrived on the scene. It was given as tribute, to confirm agreements between native peoples, and worn as jewelry by individuals to designate authority and prestige. Shortly after the first English settlements in New England took root, wampum became the chief medium of exchange in the emerging European-Indian trade network. Vast stores of the stuff were traded by Narragansetts to the Indians in the hinterlands to the west and north in exchange for furs; the furs were exchanged with both the Dutch and the English for iron and steel knives, hoes and axes, brass pots, decorative beads and trinkets, cloth, firearms, and liquor. Almost all the metal objects used by Indians in New England in the seventeenth century “were of European origin,” writes scholar Patrick M. Malone, “and they were made of various metals, including cast iron, wrought iron, steel, brass, copper and lead, among others.”³

By entering into the market economy associated with the fur trade, the Narragansetts gained substantial purchasing power, which allowed them to obtain European versions of tools they had previously obtained only through their own labor-intensive manufacturing. Thus, the emerging market economy fostered growing dependency on the English and the Dutch, as well as a gradual decline in traditional subsistence patterns and skills, complicating relationships between Europeans and Indians, and between Indian tribes, in many unforeseen ways.

THE BAY AND ITS ENVIRONS

Geologists call Narragansett Bay an estuary, meaning a partially enclosed body of salty water into which freshwater rivers and streams drain, with a mouth on the o...