Dissenting Bodies

Corporealities in Early New England

Martha L. Finch

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231511384
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early American History

For the Puritan separatists of seventeenth-century New England, "godliness," as manifested by the body, was the sign of election, and the body, with its material demands and metaphorical significance, became the axis upon which all colonial activity and religious meaning turned.

Drawing on literature, documents, and critical studies of embodiment as practiced in the New England colonies, Martha L. Finch launches a fascinating investigation into the scientific, theological, and cultural conceptions of corporeality at a pivotal moment in Anglo-Protestant history. Not only were settlers forced to interact bodily with native populations and other "new world" communities, they also fought starvation and illness; were whipped, branded, hanged, and murdered; sang, prayed, and preached; engaged in sexual relations; and were baptized according to their faith. All these activities shaped the colonists' understanding of their existence and the godly principles of their young society.

Finch focuses specifically on Plymouth Colony and those who endeavored to make visible what they believed to be God's divine will. Quakers, Indians, and others challenged these beliefs, and the constant struggle to survive, build cohesive communities, and regulate behavior forced further adjustments. Merging theological, medical, and other positions on corporeality with testimonies on colonial life, Finch brilliantly complicates our encounter with early Puritan New England.

CHAPTER 1

Massasoit’s Stool and Wituwamat’s Head

Body Encounters

EXCREMENT, SICKNESS, HEALING, MURDER, HANGINGS, beheading, theft, whipping, starvation, sex—such was the visceral stuff of encounters among English settlers and New England native people in March of 1623 near the young village of New Plymouth. Three interrelated incidents—the curing of an Indian leader’s illness, the physical and moral disintegration of an English settlement to the north of Plymouth, and the killing of another Indian leader and the impaling of his head on Plymouth’s meetinghouse-fort—and their attendant details evoke central themes in meanings of embodiment early in the colony’s history. The company of saints who arrived in New England in 1620 to establish Plymouth plantation brought with them complex and nuanced perspectives on human corporeality, weaving together secular and religious understandings of medicine, sexuality, violence, and moral discipline. They drew their understandings from a number of interrelated early modern models of the human body—particular philosophical, theological, scientific, and aesthetic understandings of its constitution and function—which provided the basic tools for orienting themselves in the unfamiliar wilderness environment and conducting social relations.

Encountering others—in this case Indians and “ungodly” English men—pushed the saints’ experiences far beyond the familiar, however, challenging their preconceived ideas about their own and others’ corporeality. Focusing on a single set of incidents occurring within a discrete historical moment does not afford a synchronically or diachronically broad view of corporeality in Plymouth, but it does offer an entry into the central themes that motivated the colonists across time and space, which later chapters pursue in further detail. The events of 1623 highlight several fundamental issues of material existence that have confronted human beings everywhere and at all times, issues regarding body and soul, individual and society, health and illness, life and death, sex and gender, self and other, wholeness and dismemberment, human and animal. The colonists offer to us their unique struggles with these issues, demonstrating how this particular group of people defined their bodies and embodied their lives within the crucible of colonial encounters.

Plymouth Colony, March 1623

During a difficult spring, when colonists were still unsure whether their plantation would be a providential success or a miserable failure, Governor William Bradford received word that Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags and important ally of the colonists, was very ill, perhaps already dead. Three men from the plantation—Edward Winslow, a gentleman visiting from London named John Hamden, and Hobbamock, a Wampanoag who frequently traveled with the colonists as interpreter and negotiator—journeyed forty miles west on foot to visit Massasoit in his village, Sowams.¹ When they arrived, they discovered the sachem’s house crowded with people “in the midst of their charms for him, making … a hellish noise,” Winslow described, while several women were gathered around Massasoit, rubbing his body. Winslow pushed his way to Massasoit’s side and greeted the sachem, who could no longer see and scarcely speak but grasped Winslow’s hand, expressing his pleasure that the Englishman had come to visit him. Massasoit had not eaten or drunk anything in two days but was able to swallow a bit of fruit preserves Winslow fed him on the tip of a knife, although he “could scarce get [it] through his teeth.” Looking into the sachem’s mouth, Winslow saw that it was “exceedingly furred” and his tongue was “swelled in such a manner, as it was not possible for him to eat such meat as they had, his passage being stopped up.” So Winslow washed his mouth and scraped his tongue, removing an “abundance of corruption.” Feeling a bit better, Massasoit ate some more preserves, which brought on a great improvement, and his sight returned. Winslow inquired “how he slept, and when he went to stool” and learned that Massasoit had not slept in two days and “had not had a stool in five.”

The next day, although he felt inadequate to the task (“being somewhat unaccustomed and unacquainted in such businesses” of medicine), Winslow and a Wampanoag woman boiled up a broth of cornmeal, a handful of strawberry leaves, and a sliced sassafras root, which they strained through a handkerchief. Upon drinking the tonic, the sachem’s sight further improved and “he had three moderate stools, and took some rest.” After a temporary setback of vomiting and nosebleeds, caused by his ingesting (against Winslow’s advice) a large portion of greasy duck broth, Massasoit slept for several hours and awakened cured, “his body so much altered” for the better since the colonists’ arrival. Winslow “washed his face, and bathed and suppled his beard and nose with a linen cloth”; the sachem was so pleased with the results of Winslow’s ministrations that he implored him to do the same for others in the village who were ill. So the Englishman willingly washed out the mouths of the sick, though the “poisonous savours” rather disgusted him.² Massasoit rewarded Winslow for his generosity by quietly warning him, through Hobbamock, of a plot afoot among the Massachusetts, a native group to the northeast of the Wampanoags. The Massachusetts apparently were planning an attack on English settlers at the fledgling Wessagusset colony in the Massachusetts Bay area, about twenty-seven miles north of Plymouth.³ The sixty or so “lusty” men who lived at Wessagusset (or “Weston’s colony”) had arrived in New England ten months earlier to establish a fishing and trading post. Plymouth’s leaders described them as an “unruly company [with] no good government over them.” As would Thomas Morton and his men a few years later, the first of Weston’s men to arrive immediately “set up a maypole & weare very merry.” Fearing nearby Indians, however, they moved to Plymouth where they were “housed” and “victualled” and their sick members cared for until the end of summer. By then, the rest of Weston’s company had arrived from England and they returned to the Bay area to establish their settlement at Wessagusset.⁴

Weston’s “unjust and dishonest” men were far from being godly saints. While staying in Plymouth they had stolen from the plantation’s crucial corn supply when it was still green in the fields—for which they had been admonished and “well-whipped,” to no avail. Once settled at Wessagusset they refused to plant crops; instead, complained Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who had helped Thomas Weston obtain the patent for his colony, “they couzen [cheat; defraud] and abuse the Savages in trading and trafficking, selling them Salt covered with Butter in stead of so much Butter, and the like couzenages and deceipts.” After “wasting” all their supplies in trading with the nearby Massachusetts, the men “fell to plain stealing, both night and day, from the Indians,” at one point thinking it possible to take the Indians’ corn by force, which Plymouth quickly admonished they not do, fearing the Massachusetts would attack Plymouth in revenge. Hoping to appease the natives, the Weston men hanged one of their own who had stolen corn. Even worse, Bradford heard rumors that they “kept Indian women,” which Gorges confirmed: “They … impudently and openly l[ie] with their women.” Investors in England had warned Plymouth that one of the men, Andrew Weston, brother of Thomas who had commissioned the colony, was a “heady young man and violent” and the rest of them were “unreasonable men.” Another warned, “As for Mr. Weston’s company, I think them so base in condition (for the most part) as in all appearance not fit for an honest man’s company.” They “are no men for us,” a third wrote. “I fear these people will hardly deal so well with the savages as they should. I pray you therefore signify to Squanto [Tisquantum, a Patuxet who, like Hobbamock, served as Plymouth’s interpreter and intermediary with local natives] that they are a distinct body from us, and we have nothing to do with them, neither must [we] be blamed [by the Indians] for their faults, much less can [we] warrant their fidelity.” Thomas Weston himself admitted his men were “rude fellows,” but he hoped to “reclaim them from that profaneness … and by degrees draw them to God.”⁵

Weston’s hopes for his colony proved to be unrealistic. During the winter and early spring of 1622–23, as supplies became scarce, the men sold their clothing and bedding to the Massachusetts and were “so base,” in the eyes of Plymouth observers, that they became the Indians’ servants, cutting their wood and “fetch[ing] them water for a capful of corn.” One of them even “turned salvage [sic]” (went native), according to Wessagusset man Phineas Pratt, and the rest thoroughly demeaned themselves, foraging like animals in order to survive, for “at last most of them left their dwellings and scattered up and down in the woods and by the watersides, where they could find ground nuts and clams, here six and there ten.” One man, weakened with hunger, became stuck in the mud while gathering shellfish and died there. The rest “were ready to starve both with cold and hunger also, because they could not endure to get victuals by reason of their nakedness,” the result of trading their clothing to the Indians. Many, “being most swelled, and diseased in their bodies,” died. The Massachusetts, indeed, lost all respect for Weston’s men; the “boldness” of “the Indians’ carriages … increased abundantly.” They “contemned and scorned” the Englishmen and “began greatly to insult over them in a most insolent manner,” snatching their food right out of the cooking pot over the fire and eating it “before their faces,” holding “a knife at their breasts” if they complained, and stealing their “sorry blankets” off them as they lay sleeping, leaving them to “lie all night in the cold, so as their condition was very lamentable.” Bradford attempted to explain why a group of young, strong, able-bodied men, who initially had been well provided for, could have reached such desperate straits: “It must needs be their great disorder, for they spent excessively whilst they had or could get it.” According to Winslow, they “more regarded their bellies than any command or commander.”⁶

Such was the situation at Wessagusset when Massasoit warned Winslow that the Massachusetts, led by their sachem Wituwamat, were planning to attack Weston’s colony, presumably using the very weapons the Englishmen had traded to them. However disgusted they were by the behavior of Weston’s men, the saints at Plymouth were indebted to Thomas Weston, who had been one of their plantation’s London investors. They felt a moral obligation “to reskew the lives of our countrie-men, whom we thought (both by nature, and conscience) we were bound to deliver,” even though it had been the “evill and deboyst [debased; morally corrupt] cariage” of the men at Wessagusset that had “so exasperated the Indians against them.” They also feared the Massachusetts, with their newly acquired firearms, threatened Plymouth as well. So they commissioned their military captain Myles Standish and enough men to take on all the Indians at the Bay with an order to quell the native conspiracy. Standish was to “pretend trade” in order to “trap … that bloody and bold villain” Wituwamat, bringing his head back to Plymouth so “that he might be a warning and terror to all of that [same] disposition.” Standish and his party of about ten men, including Hobbamock, arrived at Wessagusset to find that Weston’s men had, for all intents and purposes, gone native: they “feared not the Indians, but lived and suffered them to lodge with them, not having sword or gun” and claiming they needed no protection or rescuing. Standish warned Wessagusset’s overseer, John Sanders, of their intelligence from Massasoit regarding a Massachusett attack, which seemed further supported when an Indian approached Standish, allegedly for trade purposes, but Standish “saw by his eyes that he was angry in his heart.” Soon Wituwamat himself and some of his men arrived in Wessagusset, where they used “insulting gestures and speeches.” Wituwamat “bragged of the excellency of his knife,” on whose handle a woman’s face was carved, while Pecksuot, Wituwamat’s pniese, or counselor of war, “a man of greater stature than the Captain,” taunted Standish about his short height.⁷

The next day, under the pretense of discussing trade relations between Plymouth and the Massachusetts, Standish conspired to lock himself and his party in a Wessagusset house with Wituwamat, Pecksuot, Wituwamat’s teenage brother, and a fourth Massachusett man. Once they all had gathered in the house, the colonists launched a surprise attack on the four Indians. Standish, piqued by the insulting stabs at his manliness delivered earlier by the pniese, snatched Pecksuot’s needle-sharp knife from his neck, and the two men violently struggled until Standish got the better of the pniese and killed him with his own knife. The English also killed Wituwamat and the fourth Massachusett in the house, captured and hanged Wituwamat’s brother, and quickly hunted down and destroyed three more Indians. Hobbamock admired Standish’s bravado: “Yesterday Pecksuot, bragging of his own strength and stature, said, though you were a great captain, yet you were but a little man; but to-day I see you are big enough to lay him on the ground.” Roused by his success, Standish’s fiery temperament came into play again later in the day. He and his men exchanged musket shots and arrows with an Indian party in the woods, and then Hobbamock, himself a pniese, single-handedly chased the Indians into a swamp, where Standish attempted to “parley” with them but received “nothing but foul language” in return. The captain “dared the sachim to come out and fight like a man, showing how base and womanlike he was in tonguing it as he did.” The Indians, however, quietly escaped.⁸

Having tasted the blood of victory in Plymouth’s first major skirmish with New England Indians, Captain Myles Standish and his party returned home in triumph, bearing Wituwamat’s head as instructed. They were “received with joy, the head being brought to the fort, and there set up.”⁹ Six months later Emmanuel Altham visited Plymouth and observed, “[The Indian’s head] is set on the top of our fort, and instead of an ancient [a flag], we have a piece of linen cloth dyed in the same Indian’s blood, which was hung out upon the fort.”¹⁰ However, John Robinson, the separatists’ pastor who had remained in the Netherlands, viewed Standish’s bellicose behavior with a less exuberant eye. In a letter to Governor Bradford, Robinson roundly criticized the plantation’s leaders for their “killing of those poor Indians” and wished that “you had converted some before you had killed any!” Although the Indians may have “deserved it,” they had been provoked by “those heathenish Christians,” Weston’s men. It would have been better to “punish” only one or two of the main instigators, perhaps Wituwamat and Pecksuot, in order to put “the fear into many.” Finally, Robinson was especially concerned about “the disposition of your Captain.” He believed Standish to be “a man humble and meek amongst you” under ordinary conditions, but “if this be merely from an humane spirit”—because Standish was a “civilized” Englishman, rather than impelled by a godly character—“there is cause to fear that by occasion, especially of provocation, there may be wanting that tenderness of the life of man (made after God’s image) which is meet [suitable; proper].” It was obvious to Robinson that Plymouth had intended to establish their superiority over the Indians through the massacre of Wituwamat and his men, and he admonished the plantation’s leaders for such worldly motivations: “It is … a thing more glorious in men’s eyes, than pleasing in God’s or convenient for Christians, to be a terrour to poor barbarous people.” Furthermore, “where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after. … And indeed I am afraid lest, by these occasions, others should be drawn to affect a kind of ruffling course in the world.”¹¹

Robinson’s concerns about whether Standish’s behavior reflected the image of God, Winslow’s treatment of Massasoit’s illness, Plymouth’s complaints that Weston’s men had become savages, Standish’s violent massacre of the Massachusetts, and the saints’ impaling of Wituwamat’s head on the meetinghouse-fort—all of these materialized distinct, though clearly contested, understandings of the human body brought by the separatists to New England. They had “removed” themselves from England and the Netherlands to North America at a critical moment in philosophical and theological developments in the West: the early modern intersection of late Renaissance, Reforming Protestant, not yet Cartesian understandings of human corporeality. The saints at Plymouth attempted to follow the specific teachings of their beloved pastor, John Robinson, but they were also people of a larger historical time and cultural location, their views of this new world and their experiences in it shaped by old world structures of consciousness that were themselves in process of change. In his intellectual history of seventeenth-century New England, Perry Miller brought to light what he regarded as the formative elements in the development of the “New England mind.” However, because he was, after all, interested in minds, not bodies, Miller failed to recognize the ways these and other intellectual developments gave shape to the New England body, indeed the ways they located the human body at the center of dissenting Protestant thought. Of course, just as there was no single “puritan mind,” neither was there a singular “puritan body,” yet divines wove together a number of conceptual threads to produce common understandings of human embodiment, which in turn provided guidelines for the behavior and treatment of living human bodies.¹²

Miller discussed three interrelated strains of early modern thought, which contributed to the Plymouth separatists’ understandings of embodiment and influenced their actions and interpretations of others’ actions during the events of 1623. Galenic medical physiology imagined the body as constituted of humors and faculties and linked the four elements of earth, fire, air, and water with the four bodily humors and four psychological temperaments. John Calvin’s Reformed theology built upon and reworked traditional humoral-faculty principles, weaving them with a biblical anthropology that validated the body and its sensory experiences, yet problematized it as the site of conflict between the spirit and the “flesh.” And logician and rhetorician Petrus Ramus promoted a practical epistemology grounded in the body—its sensory perceptions and appropriate conduct—guided by the rational mind, which English Calvinists adapted for use.¹³ John Robinson conflated humoral, Ramist, and Calvinist conceptions of the body and its relationship to the soul to develop his distinct ideas about lived religious community and moral behavior, advocating a fundamentally embodied theology that located living human bodies as the sites at which critical meanings of God, the world, and self coalesced. At least two other cultural forces also shaped the saints’ views of their own and others’ bodies in Plymouth. The Protestant iconoclastic impulse swept across England from the mid-1500s into the seventeenth century, inciting the violent destruction of Roman Catholic material culture and relocating divine power from religious statues to the living bodies of the godly elect. In part driven by a Protestant ethos, other forces threatened to unravel the immediate connection between soul and ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Embodying Godliness
• Chapter 1. Massasoit’s Stool and Wituwamat’s Head: Body Encounters
• Chapter 2. A Banquet in the Wilderness: Bodies and the Environment
• Chapter 3. As on a Hill: Public Bodies
• Chapter 4. The True and Visible Church: The Body of Christ
• Chapter 5. As in a Mirror: Domestic Bodies
• Notes
• Index