Conceived in Liberty (62 page)

In the polarization of ideology that took place, Roger Williams was pushed even further in a statist direction. He had already shown himself many times to be willing to abandon the principle of freedom of speech and advocacy of political ideas. He now showed himself ready to abandon his most cherished principle: religious liberty. In the summer of 1672 the great founder of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Rhode Island. In August, following the visit, Roger Williams engaged in a four-days long Great Debate first in Newport, and then in Providence, with three of Fox’s leading disciples. The public debate attracted large crowds, and Williams rowed all the way from Providence to Newport to participate. That Williams was bitterly opposed to the Quaker creed was, of course, his privilege, and to be expected. But he also went so far as to call for “moderate” legal penalties against Quaker “uncivilities,” which should be “restrained and punished.” These incivilities, let us note, expressly included such harmless Quaker practices as refusing to take off their hats, and using the forms “thee” and “thou.” All these were examples to Williams of “irreverence to superiors” in office, as was the Quaker refusal “to bend the knee or bow the head” to civil authority out of “pretense... that Christ’s amity, even in civil things, respecteth no man’s person.” Moreover, the Quakers refused to “perform the ordinary civil duties” to the state. Williams also denounced the freedom of trade practiced by Quaker merchants in bootlegging liquor to the Indians. Here Williams betrayed jealousy of his Quaker competitors in trading with the Indians, for he denounced Quakers for selling ammunition and liquor to the Indians more cheaply than their competitors.

All this was far from being a mere exaggeration uttered in the heat of debate, for it was repeated in Williams’ ensuing anti-Quaker pamphlet,
George Fox Digged out of His Burrowes.
Here Williams again called for moderate legal punishment of these crimes of disrespect to “superiors,” and echoed the very argument of Rev. John Cotton against himself three decades before, that such punishment would be “as far from persecution (properly so called) as that is a duty and command of God unto all mankind.” It is no wonder that one of the debaters, William Edmundson, was moved to transgress the bounds of polite debate and rudely cry at Williams, “Old man! Old man!” (for which, by the way, he was reprimanded by Coddington and other leading Quakers present). Perhaps Williams was angered far more by the apt reproof of William Harris, who reminded Williams of “his former large profession of liberty of conscience....” At
any rate Williams’ abandonment of religious liberty had little impact on the citizens of Rhode Island, who were more true to his original principles than was Williams himself. In fact, Quaker conversions in the colony proceeded all the more rapidly after the debate. William Harris was soon converted, and even some of the venerable Samuell Gorton’s followers were converted to the Quaker faith.

And so Rhode Island came to have a Quaker government at the start of King Philip’s War, with the now Quaker William Coddington governor since 1674. It was a government that maintained Rhode Island’s position against Connecticut land claims, but strongly insisted on a policy of neutrality and peace. It was also convinced that King Philip’s War was an unnecessary conflict, caused by the unfair treatment and persecution of the Indians by the other New England colonies.

Now despite the destruction of the great Swamp Fight, Canonchet had managed to escape with 700 of his warriors, and they proceeded to retaliate against Rhode Island, burning and devastating Warwick, Pawtuxet, and Providence. The Coddington administration now risked its own popularity by sticking to Quaker and libertarian principle and refusing to levy taxes on everyone to engage in a costly defense of the mainland towns. The Assembly decided that each town should provide for its own military security, and in March 1676 urged the mainland citizens to take refuge on Aquidneck Island, even promising the settlers land for each new family on the island. The Quakers also refused to repeal the exemption of conscientious objectors from the draft. The Rhode Island Assembly also provided that no Indian in the colony could be made a slave.

Most of the mainlanders took advantage of the proposed refuge, and were joined by many people from Plymouth. A group of purist Quakers refused to nurse wounded confederation soldiers who had been shipped to the island on the grounds that this would be taking part in an unjust war. Governor Coddington, in a most un-Quakerlike reaction, forced them to do so. In a letter to the Massachusetts governor, Coddington noted wryly that Quakers were nursing wounded Massachusetts soldiers at the very same time that Massachusetts was castigating itself for laxity in persecuting the Quakers and was passing new laws of persecution. “We have prepared a hospital for yours,” wrote Coddington, “while you prepare a house of correction for us.”

Roger Williams remained as a captain and as part of a defensive garrison, but Canonchet, though bitter at almost all whites, told Williams that “you have been kind to us for many years. Not a hair of your head shall be touched.” And this in the midst of a desperate, inevitably hopeless war against overwhelming odds!

In June Canonchet, son of Miantonomo, met the same fate as his father. Captured by the white forces, he was turned over to his old Indian enemies and was promptly butchered. For the Narragansetts, the rest was mopping up. By the end of the year, almost all the women, children,
and aged had been slaughtered by the troops; the remaining warriors were fleeing north to Nipmuc territory.

Just as the war was ending, Rhode Island was succumbing to war hysteria. Under pressure, the Quakers began to compromise their principles once again. Governor Coddington, who had already forced purist Quakers to tend wounded confederation soldiers, agreed in April to provide a military garrison at Providence. And Quaker assemblymen led in setting up this garrison. In May Walter Clarke, a compromising Quaker, was elected governor and stepped up military preparations. Roger Williams now provided for the coerced sale into servitude of the Indian prisoners and did the same to the hapless Indian refugees who had found their way to Providence, formerly a town of refuge. Captain Roger Williams, among the handful of others who had remained in devastated Providence during the war, reaped the gains of the sales of the Indians into servitude. Was it for
this
that Canonchet had spared the head of Roger Williams? It should be noted, however, that Williams refused to allow the Indians to be sold into permanent slavery; apparently nine years of involuntary servitude were not so long a term as to offend his libertarian instincts. Finally, Williams and a few other magistrates held a military court-martial in August and executed several of the Indian prisoners. To the last Indian, Roger Williams warmly participated in the populace’s demands for execution, and in the “clearing” of the town of “all the Indians, to the great peace and content of all—the “all” presumably not including the Indians who had been sold into servitude.

The elections of May 1677 demonstrated the political futility of compromise; the war party led by Benedict Arnold swept the Quakers out of office. One of the first acts of the new Assembly was to repeal the exemption of conscientious objectors from military service. While inconsistently protesting devotion to religious liberty, the new act thundered that “some under pretense of conscience” had taken the liberty to void the power of the military, and therefore of the civil power itself. As as result, Rhode Island was now destitute of required military forces—though who the new “enemy” was supposed to be, was not explained.

To return to King Philip’s War, with the destruction of Canonchet and the Narragansetts only fighting to the north remained. There the Wampanoags and their allies fought valiantly on, through the winter and spring of 1676, holding their own in raids and sorties against far superior military odds. But the Indian guerrilla warfare was defeated, in the long run, by the Indians’ shortage of food. They did not have the food supplies to permit them to fight en masse. Throughout the entire war, the Indians could find food only by pillaging settlements, and that source inevitably dried up after a few months. The Indians could not take the route of successful guerrilla fighting by living off a much larger group of peasant supporters.

By April and May the Nipmucs had been largely annihilated, and by
the end of June the remainder of the Narragansetts had gone the way of the fallen Canonchet. The war now began to accelerate toward its end. Only King Philip and his Wampanoags remained and he was deserted by informers and defecting tribesmen. Driven into his old lair at Mt. Hope, Philip was betrayed by an informer. In a white sneak attack on August 12, King Philip was shot. His skull was publicly exhibited on a pole at Plymouth for the next quarter of a century.

King Philip’s War was thus over by the end of August 1676 and New England faced the question of what to do about those scattered Indians who had not been exterminated. Faced with the problem of Indian prisoners, New England did not hesitate: mass deportation into slavery. Most of the Indian captives were shipped to the West Indies to be sold into slavery. But Indians, in contrast to African Negroes, were notoriously unsuited for slave labor and died quickly in slavery. Those slaves for whom the confederation could not find purchasers were set ashore on deserted coasts and abandoned to their fate. There were several objectors to this barbarity, including one of the heroes of the war, Capt. Benjamin Church, and the saintly John Eliot, long-time friend and missionary to the Indians. Eliot warned the confederation commissioners that “to sell souls for money seemeth to me dangerous merchandise.” But more typical was the sentiment of the colony’s leaders concerning what to do with the little nine-year-old son of Philip, now a prisoner of war. The child was finally sold into slavery in the West Indies, but some ministers urged a more severe penalty. One minister insisted that the Bible
did
permit murder of innocent children for the sins of their parents. The eminent Rev. Increase Mather opined that “though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet it might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful.”

Although the little heir to Philip was not killed outright, over a dozen leading Indian sachem prisoners were executed. And the mostly friendly “praying” Indians were, during the war, herded into concentration camps, from which they could not go further than a mile unless accompanied by a white man. Violation meant imprisonment or death. Many of these were later conscripted into military service for the whites. And even after the war, the praying Indians, as well as other remaining Indians, were either herded into prescribed and supervised villages and deprived of their arms, or ordered to remain as indentured servants in white families, there to be “taught and inducted in the Christian religion.” Now virtually wards of the white government, the Indians were prevented from assembling. One Indian in each group of ten was appointed by the government to be held “responsible” for all the deeds of the others in his cell.

The hard-line policy of total victory, or the virtual extermination of the Indians of New England, had in little more than a year succeeded in its highly dubious objective. But at what cost? Fully six percent of the men of military age in New England, or about a thousand men, had been killed.
Twenty towns in New England had been totally destroyed. Of the ninety towns in Massachusetts and Plymouth, twelve had been destroyed. And fully half of the towns in New England had been severely damaged. The monetary cost was fearful; a total of 90,000 pounds had been spent by the government to prosecute the war. The war debt of Plymouth alone has been calculated at greater than the total valuation of personal property of the colony at that time.

A direct sequel to King Philip’s War took place in the far north, as soon as the main war had ended. In the fall of 1675 the Tarratine Indians of Maine had ravaged Falmouth and other towns of the Maine coast. With food scarce, the Tarratines concluded a treaty with the whites in December and promised to remain peaceful from then on. The Indians complained, however, of ill treatment at the hands of the whites, and particularly chafed at being prohibited from purchasing ammunition, so necessary for hunting game. The fall of Philip the next August stimulated the Tarratines to go on the warpath again, and the English had to abandon every settlement between Casco Bay and the Penobscot (that is, east of the densest concentration of settlements north of the Piscataqua). Massachusetts organized a military force in the area, headed by Major Richard Waldron, the eminent merchant of Dover. At this point, on September 15, four hundred Indians came peacefully into the white camp to parley for peace, and Major Waldron employed a typical white stratagem to seize them. Convivially, Waldron proposed a mock battle between the two forces. The Indians shot their muskets into the air as part of the war game, but the whites held their fire, surrounded the Indians, and disarmed them. One-half of the Indians, supposedly identified either as “murderers of white colonists or as violators of the old treaty,” were sent as prisoners to Boston. Naturally, the rest of the tribe promptly resumed its attacks, and other Maine settlements were devastated or abandoned. The war continued during all of 1677, with little success for the whites. Finally, the colonial government decided that a peace policy might be wiser after all. In August 1677 the Indians concluded peace with Edmund Andros’ representative in the province of Cornwall, and the following April Massachusetts concluded a treaty of peace with the Indians. This was not unconditional surrender on either side; the Indians agreed to surrender all prisoners without a ransom, and to refrain from molesting the settlers. In return, the white governments were to pay the Indians an annual tribute of a peck of corn for each family settled in Maine.

When King Philip’s War began, Sir Edmund Andros decided to take advantage of New England’s distraction by seizing Connecticut in behalf of New York—or at least the great bulk of Connecticut west of the Connecticut River. Since the Duke of York’s charter was now brand new, cogent legal argument held that the Nicolls treaty of 1664, granting the territory west of the river to Connecticut, was now invalid. In this aggressive design, Andros was encouraged by the Duke of York. In May 1675
Andros informed the Connecticut Assembly of his intention of assuming jurisdiction. To Connecticut’s reminder of the favorable award of the royal commission, Andros again replied that the duke’s charter superseded the commission. Connecticut again refused, and suggested a friendly conference.