Pequot War

10 Key excerpts on "Pequot War"

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  Encyclopedia of American Indian History

  [4 volumes]

  • Bruce E. Johansen, Barry M. Pritzker, Bruce E. Johansen, Barry M. Pritzker(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  5. He should send to his neighbor confederates, to certify them of this, that they might not wrong us, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace. 6. That when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them, as we should do our pieces when we came to them. Lastly, that doing thus, King James would esteem of him as his friend and ally. John Mason: A Brief History of the Pequot War The Pequot War of 1636 was the first and one of the most brutal of the American Indian wars. The result of fighting among the tribes and their shifting alliances with the American colonists, the war ended with the complete anni- hilation of the Pequot tribe, particularly after the gruesome Indian massacre at Fort Mystic. When the war ended in 1637, the few surviving Pequots were sold off into slavery. The Pequot War cleared the path for white expansion in southern New England and was generally regarded as a great triumph by the colonists. Major John Mason served as commander of the Con- necticut forces. He wrote this history of the war around 1670, although it did not appear in print until 1736, when Boston minister and historian Thomas Prince published it with his own introduction and explanatory notes. In the Beginning of May 1637 there were sent out by Connecticut Colony Ninety Men under the Com- mand of Capt.

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  The Military-State-Society Symbiosis

  • Peter Karsten(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  62 Such appraisals miss the war’s deeper cultural significance: From the standpoint of military acculturation, it was a watershed. The final period assayed in this study, 1637-1676, illustrates how initial cultural contact in the Pequot War left its imprint on the region’s subsequent military affairs.

  In one sense, the meeting of military cultures in the Pequot War was progressive in character: It facilitated the exchange of knowledge necessary for informed dealings between New England’s native ana colonial societies. Impolicies born of cultural ignorance — such as the settlers’ decision to dispatch the Endicott expedition and the Pequots’ decision to retaliate within traditional limits — therefore promised to be transient phenomena, irreversible in the event but incapable of repetition once cultural contact had disabused policy makers of their misperceptions.

  Puritan settlers may have been a stubborn lot, but they would not close their eyes to stark reality. Having discovered in 1636 that precipitous military action against Indians could easily provoke hostilities, colonial leaders relied thereafter on other, safer vehicles of statecraft. Like most lessons learned through bitter experience, this was a dictum that John Winthrop took to heart. When the Connecticut Council in 1642 urged Winthrop, then governor of Massachusetts, to join in a preemptive strike against allegedly disloyal Indians, the suggestion opened an old wound. Winthrop responded that

  Our beginning with them could not secure us against them; we might destroy some part of their corn and wigwams, and force them to fly into the woods, etc., but the men would be still remaining to do us mischief, for they will never fight us in the open field.

  That hard-earned wisdom prevailed.63

  Nor were the settlers alone in their appreciation of the Pequot War’s harsh lessons. Native leaders proved quick studies, and their military policies after 1637 stood shorn of the naivete so strikingly evident during the conflict. Even before the war erupted, Indians had shaken off their exaggerated fear of English firearms. And after the dust had settled in 1637, they understood all too well that conflict with the settlers meant war to the death. New England’s native governments refrained from challenging their colonial neighbors for the next thirty-eight years, and al though the Wampanoags’ decision to launch King Philip’s War in 1675 was certainly a reckless (or desperate) act. it was not an ignorant one. Philip fully comprehended that “he could expect no mercy” in the event of failure. His eventual defeat stemmed from the hopelessness of his cause, not from paucity of effort. That was one indiscretion the Wampanoags refused to repeat.64

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  Daily Life during the Indian Wars

  • Clarissa Confer(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  And so the Narragansett made the fateful decision to reject a pan-Indian alli- ance in favor of a European affiliation. The Pequot would face the English alone. In 1636, 90 men from Massachusetts set out on a punitive expedi- tion against the Indians of Block Island with orders to kill the men of the tribe, enslave the women and children, and take possession of the island. Unable to find any combatants, the English contented themselves with burning a village and returning to the mainland. Once there they marched into Pequot territory. The Pequot leaders saw little point in engaging this well-armed force and so slipped away without combat. This frustrated the Massachusetts men who had been looking for a fight, but as they returned to the safety of Massachusetts Bay they left the Connecticut settlers at the mercy of Pequot wrath. Warriors quickly converged on Fort Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. They held the small garrison under siege for nine months. A siege produced relatively few casualties for the Indian forces; however, it did disrupt the flow of native life. Early Colonial Wars 21 While warriors trapped the English in the fort they could not be on hunting or fishing forays or moving with their families among resource sites. The increased frequency of warfare in southern New England affected all native peoples, disrupting their normal patterns and reducing their overall strength. Pequot Warriors sought revenge where they could. In April 1637, a group attacked the English village of Wethersfield, killing nine people and taking two girls as prisoners. The young girls were quickly traded away when it was realized they could not make gunpowder. This incident reveals the rationale of Pequot leaders. After only a few decades of contact with Europeans their men had already become dependent on firearms to wage any type of successful warfare.

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  New England Nation

  The Country the Puritans Built

  • B. Daniels(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  New England Puritans had knowledge of all these wars and their experi- ences may explain their ferocity against the Pequot. By the mid-1630s, the English had begun to think of themselves as providing the legitimate gov- ernment for the region of modern-day southern New England. When the Pequot tribe of eastern and central Connecticut refused to be subordinate to the Puritan governments, they were treated not as a foreign nation but as rebels against a duly constituted state. Their status as traitors when coupled with their lack of Christianity placed the natives outside of the bounds of the rules of war in the minds of Puritans. In the year leading up to the formal declaration of war in 1637, Puritan soldiers conducted campaigns of reprisal against the Pequot that would certainly be considered war crimes today. The following are orders given by Massachusetts to an army of ninety men under the command of John Endecott which it dispatched to avenge the alleged murder of a ship captain: [T]o put to death the men of Block Island but to spare the women & children, & to bring them away [as slaves], & to take possession of the land ... [Go] to the Pequot to demand the murderers of Capt. Stone and other English, & 1000 fathoms of wampum for damages, etc. & some of their chil- dren as hostages: which if they should refuse they were to obtain it by force. As the fleet of soldiers sailed along the shore of the Pequot (Thames) River, the terrified natives tried to ascertain the expedition’s intention and assured the army that they did not want to fight. What cheer Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? Are you hoggerie [angry], will you cram us? That is, are you angry, will you kill us, and do you come to fight? S U B D U I N G T H E I N D I A N S 179 Endecott described his response in his report to the Connecticut General Assembly.

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  Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America

  What Archaeology, History, and Indigenous Oral Traditions Teach Us about Their Intercultural Relationships

  • Lucianne Lavin(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  In response, the English declared an Offensive War against the Pequot on May 1, 1637 and made plans to attack the Pequot fortified village at Mystic with a force of seventy-seven English soldiers and 250 Mohegan, Narragansett, Eastern Niantic, and Wangunk allies. The surprise dawn attack took place on May 26, 1637 and resulted in the deaths of four hundred Pequot men, women, and children, half of whom burned to death. The Battle of the English Withdrawal began a few hours later and consisted of a 4.5-mile, ten-hour fighting retreat against hundreds of Pequot fighting men who had mobilized after the Mistick Fort Battle in one of the longest and most intense battles of the Pequot War. 2 Pequot Expansion, 1620–1631 Within a decade after the arrival of Dutch traders in 1611, the Pequot positioned themselves to control the fur and wampum trade over much of Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River Valley. Pequot hegemony was achieved through warfare, coercion, subjugation, and alliance building to dominate key territory and resources. Wampum (purple and white shell beads made from hard shell clam and northern whelk) from eastern Long Island Sound quickly became the most important component of the fur trade, as it was in great demand by tribes in the fur-rich interior areas of the Hudson and upper Connecticut River drainages. By the mid-1620s the Dutch acquired at least 150,000–200,000 wampum beads a year from tribes living along Long Island Sound for the northern fur trade. 3 The wampum-producing regions of eastern Long Island Sound between the Connecticut River and Narragansett Bay were the first areas to fall under Pequot control in the 1620s, followed by the middle Connecticut River Valley in the early 1630s

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  The Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775

  A Political, Social, and Military History [3 volumes]

  • Spencer C. Tucker, James R. Arnold, Roberta Wiener, Spencer C. Tucker, James R. Arnold, Roberta Wiener(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  . . (London, 1638). (Mason: Reprint, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966.) 45. Engraving of the Attack on the Pequot Fort, 1638 Introduction A series of violent confrontations between New England colonists and the Pequots led to the colonists’ decision to make war on the Pequots, who stood in the way of their expansion. An English war party from Massachusetts raided and looted Pequot villages, and the Pequots attacked the English fort at Saybrook and settlers at Contemporary engraving of the colonial attack on the Pequot village of Mystic Fort in May 1637. Of approximately 400– 700 Pequot inhabitants of the village, only 7 were taken alive. Reportedly another 7 escaped. (Library of Congress) Page 976 Wethersfield. In May 1637, Connecticut—joined by the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, along with the Narragansetts and the Mohegans—planned its revenge for the attack on Saybrook. Captain John Mason of Connecticut and Captain John Underhill of Massachusetts led English troops in a surprise predawn attack against the main Pequot village. They surrounded the sleeping village set it on fire, and then killed everyone who tried to flee from the flames. No one knows for certain, but probably more than 400 Pequot men, women, and children died in just 30 minutes. Underhill’s eyewitness account, published in 1638, included this stylized diagram of the action, showing English soldiers and Indian warriors surrounding the fort. So brutal was the episode that even the Pequots’ enemies, English and Indian alike, protested in horror. However, the New England Puritans believed that they had God on their side, and Underhill’s account articulates this view. Underhill later fell afoul of Puritan authority and moved to New Netherland, where he also led attacks on the Indians. 46. Lion Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Wars, 1660 Introduction The Pequots were the most powerful Indians in Connecticut and were feared by the other native peoples.

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  God, War, and Providence

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

  • James A. Warren(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Scribner

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4

  Troubles on the Frontier: The Pequot War

  This extraordinarily detailed drawing of the attack on the Pequots’ fort at Mystic first appeared in John Underhill’s Newes from America , published in London in 1638. English troops are shown shooting unarmed Indians as Pequots struggle to escape beyond the English lines. The English way of war was far more destructive of human life than traditional Indian warfare, and it shocked and frightened the natives.

  I n the early 1630s, the Narragansetts found themselves engaged in on-again, off-again warfare with their perennial enemies to the west, the Pequots, for the loyalty and tribute of the small bands of Indians who lived on the Connecticut River, and for control over the land between the Pawcatuck and Thames Rivers. These Narragansett-Pequot clashes were part of a larger, regional conflict that drew in a small number of Dutchmen hunkered down at a trading post near modern Hartford, English traders from Plymouth Plantation, several hundred settlers from Massachusetts Bay intent on establishing a new colony on the Connecticut River, and the Pequots’ disaffected kindred tribe, the Mohegans, led by Uncas. That wily sachem was then busily poaching bands from the Pequot sachem Tatobem’s orbit, having failed to gain the Pequot sachemship for himself, despite several spirited attempts.

  The Pequots’ attacks on the river tribes that had formerly been their tributaries forced those Indians to seek protection from either the Narragansetts or the Mohegans, both of whom took to the warpath against the Pequots. In early 1634, the Pequots killed several members of a Narragansett party attempting to trade with the Dutch at their trading post. Eager to preserve their highly profitable trade relationship with the Narragansetts, the Dutch responded swiftly. They captured Tabotem and held him for ransom. A ransom was paid by the Pequots, but a bit too late: the Dutch handed over Tatobem’s corpse rather than the man.

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  European and Native American Warfare 1675-1815

  • Armstrong Starkey(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 The central incident of that conflict had been the massacre of a Pequot village near Mystic, Connecticut by an English force with an overwhelming superiority in firearms. The Pequot War introduced the New England Indians to the full fury of the European way of war and may have influenced the tactics they employed in 1675–6. It also exposed a critical weakness in any Indian attempt to oppose European settlement. Although the New England Indians were all members of the Algonquian language group and shared a common culture, they were deeply divided by political and commercial rivalries. The Pequot dominance over the fur trade in the Connecticut River valley was much resented by their neighbours and their appeals to form a common front against the Europeans fell on deaf ears. When the English military expedition marched into Pequot territory, it was accompanied by a large party of neighbouring Narragansetts. The Narragansetts’ turn would come on 19 December 1675 when, in a battle known as the Great Swamp Fight, a fierce English assault devastated a fortified Narragansett village. Ironically, the Connecticut soldiers participating in this attack were accompanied by a detachment of Pequot Warriors.

  Peace and commerce, however, were characteristics of white-Indian relations during the first half-century of settlement. Indians supplied their English neighbours with food, furs and land in exchange for a variety of European goods including weapons. The integration of the Indian and colonial economies in the decades before 1650, a period one writer refers to as the “golden age of trade”, was symbolized by the appearance of wampum, strings of Indian-produced decorative shells as a fur-backed currency of exchange widely accepted by all of the peoples of New England. The subsequent decline in the demand for beaver pelts and the collapse in the value of wampum seems to have provided an economic context for increasingly strained white—Indian relations in the third quarter of the century.5 Nevertheless, one does not have to be a disciple of the classical economists to conclude that commerce had long exercised a peaceful influence in New England. On the other hand, the primary source of wealth in seventeenth-century New England was agriculture rather then commerce. Massachusetts’ and Connecticut’s designs upon the land occupied by Rhode Island dissenters and Narragansett Indians brought southern New England to the brink of war in the 1640s.6

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  Savagism and Civilization

  A Study of the Indian and the American Mind

  • Roy Harvey Pearce(Author)
  • 1988(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Edward Johnson, for example, equated the Pequot War with the Antinomian disturbance as Puritan trials with Satan. John Mason appended to his history of the Pequot War a list of special providences by means of which the English had won their vic-tory. Nathaniel Saltonstall insisted that however heavily the hand of the Lord lay upon his Puritan sinners, still He had commis-sioned them to destroy the crafty, bestial, diabolical creatures who opposed them. William Hubbard was sure that King Philip's War was nothing less than a Satanic plot against God's Chosen People, and both Mathers took the Indian wars as evidence that Satan was putting up a last fight against his Puritan adversary/ 8 For the Puritan, history was everywhere cosmically and eternally meaningful. A Satanic principle was part of that meaningfulness; and the New England Indians somehow embodied that principle. Out of such an understanding of civilized man in New England arose the Puritan understanding of savage man. There was, at the outset, no difficulty in accounting for the genesis of the savage. Almost universally it was agreed that the Indians were of the in command to Mason at the proceedings at Mystic, in his Newes from America [1638], in Orr, History of the Pequot War, p. 81. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence [1654], ed. J. F< Jameson (New York, 1910), p. 80; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War [1736], in Orr, History of the Pequot War, pp. 1-46; Saltonstall, A Con-tinuation of the State of New-England [1676], in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699, p. 54; Hubbard, Narrative of the Indian Wars in New England [1677] (n. p., 1814), p. 61; Increase Mather, Brief History of the War with the Indians (London, 1676), passim and Relation of the Troubles Which Have Hapned in New England (London, 1677), passim; Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum (London, 1699), passim. This is a mere sampling, of course. Johnson's equation of the Pequot War with the Antinomian troubles is not unique with him: Cf.

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  Subjects unto the Same King

  Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England

  • Jenny Hale Pulsipher(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5

  The “Narragansett War”

  Fall 1675 was a doleful season for the colonists of New England. The Pocumtucks’ and Nipmucks’ flight had been followed by a series of devastating attacks on outlying English towns—Deerfield, Squakeag, Northampton, Stony Brook, Springfield, and Hatfield, several of them more than once—and there was clear evidence both Pocumtucks and Nipmucks had taken part. The defection of these Indians heightened English anxiety about the faithfulness of the Indians remaining in friendship with them. The Narragansetts, in particular, were a source of grave apprehension, not only because they were the largest and most powerful group of Indians in the region but because of their long history of resisting English authority and insisting on a direct relationship to the king—their right as fellow subjects. Since the Pequot War the relationship between English authorities and Narragansett leaders had been a continual failure of expectations on both sides. That enduring conflict made the English less likely to trust Narragansett professions of fidelity during the war. The situation was further complicated by a simultaneous crisis of authority within the Narragansett community, with young and old pulling in opposite directions on whether to join Philip. Obligations of kinship, which crossed tribal lines, created a further conflict with authority because they clashed with English demands that the Narragansetts turn over all hostile refugees. Under threat of war, the Narragansetts’ persistent refusal to recognize English authority as final and to place English demands ahead of their own needs and obligations convinced the English that the Narragansetts were a perilous threat that must be crushed. And the Narragansetts’ insistence on their independence from local English authority—their direct relationship to the king—had spread, nourishing Philip’s and the Wampanoags’ actions as well as their own.

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