Rustic Warriors
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Rustic Warriors

Warfare and the Provincial Soldier on the New England Frontier, 1689-1748

Steven Eames

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Rustic Warriors

Warfare and the Provincial Soldier on the New England Frontier, 1689-1748

Steven Eames

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About This Book

The early French Wars (1689-1748) in North America saw provincial soldiers, or British white settlers, in Massachusetts and New Hampshire fight against New France and her Native American allies with minimal involvement from England. Most British officers and government officials viewed the colonial soldiers as ill-disciplined, unprofessional, and incompetent: General John Forbes called them “a gathering from the scum of the worst people.” Taking issue with historians who have criticized provincial soldiers’ battlefield style, strategy, and conduct, Steven Eames demonstrates that what developed in early New England was in fact a unique way of war that selectively blended elements of European military strategy, frontier fighting, and native American warfare. This new form of warfare responded to and influenced the particular challenges, terrain, and demography of early New England. Drawing upon a wealth of primary materials on King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, Dummer’s War, and King George’s War, Eames offers a bottom-up view of how war was conducted and how war was experienced in this particular period and place. Throughout Rustic Warriors, he uses early New England culture as a staging ground from which to better understand the ways in which New Englanders waged war, as well as to provide a fuller picture of the differences between provincial, French, and Native American approaches to war.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2011
ISBN
9780814722879

PART I
Warfare on the New England Frontier

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Frontier Towns, 1698

1
The Initiation of War and the New England Military System

On the evening of Tuesday, September 29, 1691, Henry Dow, a member of the Committee of Militia for the town of Hampton, New Hampshire, wrote a few hasty lines to Major Robert Pike, the commander of the militia for the county of Norfolk, to inform him that war, with its death and destruction, had descended again upon the coastal communities of New Hampshire. At approximately noon that same day a force of about forty Indians attacked homes on the outskirts of Sandy Beach, burned one or two buildings, and killed or carried away at least sixteen people belonging to the Brackitt and Rand families. Messengers had slipped away from the garrisons in Sandy Beach to alert the neighboring towns, including Hampton. When two of the messengers returned to Sandy Beach that evening they saw the Indian party, with canoes over their heads, apparently heading toward Hampton, and so the messengers quickly ran back to raise the alarm. As Hampton prepared to defend itself against this imminent assault, Dow sent a messenger to alert higher authorities concerning the depredations at Sandy Beach and the “sad condition” of Hampton now threatened by an “inemy so violent.”1
Dow’s letter reached the home of Robert Pike in Salisbury, Massachusetts, around eleven that same night. Awakened from his sick bed, Pike added his own postscript concerning another attack in Berwick, Maine, resealed the letter, and gave instructions that it be carried to Captain John March. March sent the message to a Captain Mosely, ordering him to forward it to “the Magistrate at Ipswich cort.” The magistrate, Nathaniel Saltonstall, awakened “neere to break of day” by the messenger, penned his own postscript, and forwarded the letter to the “Governor & Councill In Boston Haste post hast.” Sometime that morning, Wednesday, September 30, as a party of Hampton men left to succor their neighbors in Sandy Beach, the government of Massachusetts finally received word that once more the French and Indian enemy had infested the northern frontier.2
Stretching from the Kennebec River in Maine, through New Hampshire and the Massachusetts counties of Essex and Middlesex, and terminating in the Connecticut River Valley, the northern frontier of New England in 1689 was a thin line of settlements separating the English colonies from their adversaries to the north and east.3 A list of Massachusetts frontier towns drawn up in 1698 included Wells, York, Kittery, and Saco in Maine; Salisbury, Amesbury, Haverhill, Andover, Billerica, Chelmsford, Dunstable, Groton, Lancaster, and Stow in eastern Massachusetts; and Deerfield, Brookfield, Hatfield, Northampton, Hadley, and Westfield in the west. To this list we can add the New Hampshire towns of Dover, Rochester, Durham (Oyster River), Exeter, Portsmouth, Rye (Sandy Beach), and Hampton. At the beginning of King William’s War the frontier in Maine also included Pemaquid, North Yarmouth, and Casco, but they were abandoned or destroyed in the opening attacks of that war. During the years of peace these areas would be reoccupied and the frontier pushed out everywhere with the founding of new communities, especially in the period between Dummer’s War and King George’s War.
War came to this frontier on two levels: the commencement of hostilities between governments or people and the actual intrusion of that war on the local level. The first was formal in nature, involving the people of Massachusetts and New Hampshire as a whole, and lasted several years before peace treaties could be affirmed. The second brought war in a very personal way to communities on the frontier. It was sudden and lasted only a few brutal hours. But both triggered activity or a response from the New England military system.
New England fought New France as the result of a formal declaration of war between their mother countries in Europe. The notification of such a declaration took about a month to reach the colonies—any longer could possibly leave them unprepared for attack. When William of Orange brought his new kingdom into his quarrel with Louis XIV in May 1689, Boston did not learn of the declaration of war until the following month, and when war was declared by the government of Queen Anne against France and Spain on May 4, 1702, the news arrived in Boston on June 19.4 However, notification of the formal commencement of what later became known as King George’s War in March 1744 did not reach Boston for two months, a delay that enabled the French at Louisbourg to launch a surprise attack against the fishing station at Canso, Nova Scotia.5
The formal declaration of war against hostile Indian tribes usually occurred after a gradual buildup of tension and even bloodshed. Disputed boundaries between the settlements in Maine and the Eastern Indian tribes came to be the root cause of these conflicts, exacerbated by the greater Anglo-French rivalry. In 1688 the variance centered on North Yarmouth and illustrates the gradual escalation that led to formal declaration of war against the Eastern Indians. Irritated by the plundering of Baron St. Castine’s trading post by Governor Sir Edmund Andros, the destruction of crops by cattle, and the continued building on disputed lands by the English, the Indians began to kill cattle around North Yarmouth. Judge Benjamin Black-man took sixteen Indians into custody at Saco to intimidate the tribes from further mischief, but the infuriated Indians seized English hostages of their own. When Governor Andros attempted to quiet the situation by arranging a conference, the Indians failed to appear. Prompted by the heightened tension, the settlers at North Yarmouth began the construction of several garrison houses. After the Indians abducted a few of the workmen and held them overnight, the people of North Yarmouth asked for the protection of soldiers while they completed the garrisons. In September the Indians snatched two more workmen, and an attempt to free them led to an all-day battle in which several were killed on both sides. Further attacks and seizures of English settlers led Andros to issue a proclamation on October 20, demanding that the Indians return their prisoners and surrender anyone who had participated in the murder of an Englishman. Although Andros released all Indian prisoners in English custody as a gesture of goodwill, the Indians made no reply to his proclamation. The governor raised a force of 700 men and marched into Maine to wage war on the Eastern tribes.6
Although tensions existed before the start of Queen Anne’s War, the commencement of killing and depredations was not gradual but began with a massive coordinated attack on all the communities in Maine on August 10, 1703. However, the pattern of a gradual escalation of tension, and even death, before the formal declaration of war would be repeated in Dummer’s War and King George’s War. Heightened anxiety led the Bay government to send 200 men to Maine to guard the frontier in 1720. Apprehension and anger between the English and the Eastern Indians grew until the summer of 1722. The Indians would launch two major attacks against Fort St. George in Thomaston, Maine, and over fifteen Indians would be ambushed and killed by the English before Governor Samuel Shute formally declared war on July 25.7 Over twenty years later, repeated attacks throughout the summer of 1745 eventually prompted Governor William Shirley to declare war on the Eastern Indians on August 23, two months after the fall of Louisbourg and seventeen months after the declaration of war between England and France.8 In all of these conflicts, the declarations of war against the Indian tribes were separate from the corresponding European struggle and had to be ended by treaties similarly distinct from the European peace treaties. The New England colonies fought two foes from two separate conflicts at the same time, although they are usually lumped together as the “French and Indians.”
The initiation of war on the local level was neither delayed nor formal, but was sudden and always potentially devastating. Often the notification that war had arrived emanated from the noise of the attack itself—the war cry, musket fire, and screams of the victims.9 On other occasions an all-too-brief warning alerted inhabitants to the presence of the enemy. Dogs now and then signaled the approach of a foe by barking or growling.10 The strange behavior of other animals could warn of the proximity of enemy raiding parties. In May 1690 the suspicions of the people of Falmouth, Maine, were correctly aroused when they observed the cattle staring at the woods, refusing to go near the fence that lined the field.11 The warning that a Captain Jones of Oyster River, New Hampshire, received was more explicit and abrupt. Thinking that the barking of his dogs might be caused by the presence of wolves, Jones sat on a flanker at his garrison one evening in July 1694. As he surveyed the surrounding woods his eye caught the flash of powder from the pan of a musket in the woods, and he instinctively threw himself backward just as the ball struck the spot where he had been sitting.12
Warning or not, once an attack began it was necessary to alert other members of the community to their danger and also notify neighboring towns. Again, sometimes the notification came from the noise of the attack itself; the sound of firing or an ominous cloud of smoke usually indicated that the enemy had struck again. Francis Hooke of Kittery heard the sound of firing toward York during the attack on that town in 1692,13 and Charles Frost reported that Wells was alarmed “by the shotting of Many guns in the woods nere the garisons” in September 1695.14
In 1642 Massachusetts Bay stipulated the official method of notification should be the firing of three muskets, sending a messenger, beating a drum, or firing a cannon. Later the law would be amended with the addition of a burning beacon and increasing the first method to four muskets. New Hampshire passed similar laws calling for the firing of four muskets, a cannon and two muskets, or the beating of drums. To prevent the spreading of false alarms, statutes prohibited the firing of muskets after dark, the offense carrying a penalty of a 20-shilling fine or two hours in the stocks.15
Cannons in frontier communities, usually in the form of swivel guns (small cannons mounted on a wall), provided warning and communication more than actual defense. As the French wars began, signal cannons had been used to report a variety of activities and thus the firing of a signal cannon could cause momentary confusion. John Gyles remembered that when the men in the fields heard the report of the signal gun at Pemaquid in the summer of 1689, his father hoped the sound meant the arrival of a ship bearing good news, a hope immediately shattered by the volley of forty Indian muskets.16 As King William’s War progressed, the sound of a cannon shot came to mean one thing: the presence of the enemy and the need to gain the safety of a fort or garrison. In one incident during King William’s War the deliberate firing of a false alarm saved the lives of some stubborn women in Exeter, New Hampshire, who insisted on picking strawberries in the woods. Their frustrated husbands and fathers in the garrison fired the signal cannon to scare them into returning. Later they discovered that Indians had been waiting to ambush the party of berry pickers when the signal gun scared them off as well.17
The sound of the signal cannon, musket fire, or the beating of drums served as signals of immediate danger to inhabitants and as distress calls to neighboring communities. Those neighboring towns would beat drums and fire their cannons to alert other towns and assemble a force to aid the beleaguered community. Francis Hooke in Kittery wrote of “allarams round about us” in 1691, and the distant roll of drums and trumpets probably saved Lancaster in 1704 and Haverhill in 1708 from complete devastation when the enemy forces, hearing that the countryside was aroused, hastily withdrew.18
The most common method of ensuring that other towns received notification, not to mention alerting higher provincial authorities, was to send a messenger, a method obviously hazardous to the individuals who volunteered to leave the safety of a garrison and travel through the woods known to be full of Indians. During the attack on Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, in 1690, William Plaisted “made his Escape from Captain Wincols house which was twice assaulted by the Enemy but they were beaten [off] by six or seaven English men whome he left in possesion of said house when he came away from thence to give this advise.”19 Cotton Mather recounted the story of Ebenezer Babson of Gloucester, which provides a vivid illustration of the hazards of being such a messenger. “Bapson went, to carry the news [of enemy activity] to the Harbour; and being about Half a mile in his way thither, he heard a Gun go off, and heard a Bullet whiss close by his Ear, which Cut off a Pine bush just by him, and the Bullet lodg’d in an Hemlock-tree. Then looking about, he saw Four men Running towards him … so he ran into the bushes, and turning about, shot at them, and then ran away and saw them no more.”20 Though hazardous, the messenger system remained an important method of alarm and a vital source of intelligence that enabled the New England military authorities to form the proper response.
In responding to war, whether a formal declaration or an actual attack, New England governments drew on their inhabitants to perform as soldiers. With the exception of the few Indian forces raised, no thought was given to hiring foreign mercenaries to fight New England’s wars. The well-documented English aversion to standing troops discouraged that option to a certain degree, but more significantly, the cost was prohibitive. The British government’s focus was firmly set on continental Europe and really had no substantial land army until the mid-eighteenth century; thus England would not or could not protect the colonies with professional soldiers.21 Therefore, New Englanders would have to perform that function, and it was the militia system that enabled the colonial governments to put together the military forces necessary to respond to war.
The role of the New England militia in the colonial wars has been the subject of some controversy among historians. The most preval...

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